Song of Slaves in the Desert - Alan Cheuse [3]
“I should not be telling you this.”
“Yes, sir?”
The jar-maker, a man old enough so that if he were free others would address him with similar respect, gave the bookkeeper his best attention.
“You must pack your bags. You and your family must pack your bags.”
The jar-maker felt the chill and thrill of surprise running in his veins.
“Why do you say this, sir?”
The bookkeeper narrowed his eyes and leaned ever so slightly closer to the jar-maker.
“I should not be saying this at all. But—”
Again, a world in an instant! We’re free! the jar-maker told himself, free before our time! The sheik in his wisdom—
“My master—”
“Yes, sir?” The jar-maker interrupted, and then cursed himself for interrupting.
The bookkeeper did not appear insulted.
“My master, who is your master, has, in his wisdom, arranged…”
“Yes, sir?”
The bookkeeper retreated a step and turned his shoulder to the jar-maker.
“As I said, I should not be speaking of this matter with you. You will hear tomorrow, and you will obey.”
“Hear what, sir?”
The bookkeeper spoke again, and that bubble of the moment in which the jar-maker had stood collapsed suddenly around him, and he listened to the awful news the man delivered, though he was already, in his sudden desperation, backing away from the man, walking out into the outer courtyard, and hurrying along in the direction of the market.
The muezzin called out over the rooftops.
“Time for prayer. Sluggards, hurry along! Time for prayer!”
“Time to pray,” a rough-faced warder told him, standing at a corner, directing men to the mosque with a wave of a pointed stick.
“I am going,” the jar-maker said. His blood felt as though it had turned to water, a precious commodity on a summer day but for now a chilling reminder of what the bookkeeper had told him.
“Go now,” the warder said.
The jar-maker stepped past him, and just as the warder turned away to chastise another soul the jar-maker began to run.
“What a good man,” someone who saw him might have observed. “He cannot wait too soon to pray.”
He ran to his house where he hastily collected some belongings in a small bag and without any explanation ordered his wife to gather up a few necessities of clothing and get the children ready to depart.
“Where are we—?”
“Do not inquire,” he said, through clenched teeth.
He told her that she had only a few minutes and hurried out the door. When he returned with a donkey (for which he had traded the house and all their belongings!) he got the family mounted—one child on her lap, another behind her (the smallest in his own arms)—and riding toward the limits of the town, with him shuffling alongside even as prayers were ending and men began to move about the streets.
For the jar-maker, the trip to the marshes beyond the limits of the city took an eternity, and always at their heels he could hear—did he imagine it?—the approach of mobs of worshipers calling for his head. What was he doing but sundering the holy bond made between his late father and the sheik? Did it matter what condition this bond led him to? No, it did not matter. All important was the meshing of the words of these two men. His life, and the life of his wife and children, took second, third, fourth, fifth place to this pact. What kind of a world was this where such bonds tied people together, in fact, bound them hand and feet with invisible ropes?
They answered the question by the urgency of their flight. Never in his life had he rushed so headlong into a plan, or, perhaps we ought to say, retreated so vigorously from the life he knew. When the family reached the river it was time to stop a moment, and make a decision.
East or west?
To head east would take them deeper into the heart of the old world from which they were fleeing. Even though the river eventually turned south—or so the jar-maker had heard—and led back toward the ocean near which it originally formed, they would meet too much danger, from other sheiks and rulers