Provenance

Provenance

a novel by

Ronald Florence

Also by Ronald Florence

Fiction

Zeppelin

The Gypsy Man

The Last Season

Family Werth

Nonfiction

Fritz

Marx’s Daughters

The Optimum Sailboat

The Perfect Machine

Blood Libel

Lawrence and Aaronsohn

Emissary of the Doomed

Provenance

Copyright © Ronald Florence, 2012

Smashwords Edition

EPUB ISBN 978-0-9855240-2-9

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only, and may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

For Sasha

Popescu: I see you doing something pretty dangerous … this time. Mixing fact and fiction.

Martins: Should I make it all fact?

Popescu: Why no, Mr. Martins. I’d say stick to fiction. Straight fiction.

—Graham Green, The Third Man

But the disadvantage with sources, however truthful they try to be, is their lack of precision in matters of detail and their impassioned account of events … the proliferation of secondary and tertiary sources, some copied, others carelessly transmitted, some repeated from hearsay, others who changed details in good or bad faith, some freely interpreted, others rectified, some propagated with total indifference, others proclaimed as the one, eternal and irreplaceable truth, the last of these the most suspect of all.

—José Saramago, The History of the Siege of Lisbon

1.The Widow’s Tale II

I woke up to guttural sounds. In the dim light I could just make out penguins huddled close to one another. Keeping warm, I thought. I remembered a documentary I had seen about how they mated for life and shared taking care of the eggs, but I couldn’t remember their sounds. I blinked my eyes open, enough to realize that it was not penguins I was looking at but black chess pieces. The bishop was tall, narrow at the top, substantial in the middle. The knight had a huge head and beard. The king was taller still. The pawns were short and plump. Why were they all black, with no white pieces? And why were they talking? I rubbed my eyes until I was awake enough to recognize Orthodox Jewish men in black suits and fedoras reciting their morning prayers at the front of the first class section.

The man in grey velour in the seat next to me was already awake and hardly rumpled. I remembered how he had looked at me when we first took our seats, our unexpected conversation, his hand grazing mine during the movie. When I sat down his eyes had gone to my ring finger, up to my eyes, down my legs. It had been a long time since a man had looked at me like that, maybe never, and I was instinctively offended—gazes like that belonged in the movies maybe, not in the world I knew—but I had trouble controlling a smile at the attention.

Do you want the aisle? he had asked.

I’m fine here. Thanks.

Order you a drink?

No, thank you. I settled into the seat, and as I stuffed the boarding pass into my purse my passport tumbled onto the cabin sole. He bent down to retrieve it.

New passport, he said. Your first trip abroad?

No. I said it too quickly, and knew the curt answer would peak his curiosity.

First time in Israel?

My instinct was to say none of your business. I wasn’t used to being chatted up or hit on or whatever they called it. My world was different. I, and everyone I knew in the corner of Brooklyn that was our world. We were formal people, courteous toward strangers but we would never ask a personal question of someone we didn’t know. Khedir didn’t go on airplanes often, and he would never have flown on an airplane in a velour jumpsuit with maroon piping that looked like pajamas, with an open collar, white moccasins with no socks, and gold chains around his neck. Khedir would have worn a jacket and tie and polished shoes. I had done the same, and my suit and stockings and proper shoes stood out. It wasn’t just age. Even the older passengers wore sneakers, dungarees, and tee shirts.

I come every other month, same flight, the man in velour said. His smile was engaging. He was handsome, close to my age, maybe a few years younger. His hair was thick, his face and hands were suntanned, he had nice teeth, good skin, friendly eyes.

Sometimes more often, he said. I see friends and do business.

I started to reach for a magazine from the seat pocket, then realized it would be rude. Maybe he was just being nice. Business? I asked.

Candles, he said. "They make them in little workshops. Not the best candles you can buy, but Made in Israel on the package is the key. One of our brands says Made in Safed, Israel. People see that, they picture holy men making the candles, and it’s a mitzvah to buy them. Hanukkah is our big season, but the rest of the year I do OK with Yahrzeit candles and tea candles, little ones in a tin cup. The French call them bougies. He shrugged and smiled. The whole world is electrified for computers and I end up in the candle business. He looked at my suit and stockings, and seemed to take in more than the clothes. You’re on business too?"

Personal, I said.

Personal? Not a tourist? Israel is beautiful. Even if you don’t speak Hebrew, it feels like going home.

Home? The word jumped out: I had never thought of anyplace except Brooklyn and the Jersey Shore as home.

For us, it feels like home, he said. Trust me. His fingers grazed my arm.

I was surprised by the us, as if we were somehow connected. Even if it was only his way of acknowledging that we were both Jewish, it seemed too intimate. I was even more surprised by his touch. Khedir never touched me to make a point, and we had been married for 38 years. How small my world had been, I thought.

We, mostly he, talked about his children, the candle business, other travels, favorite movies. I don’t know why, but I looked at him instead of averting my eyes, and noticed how carefully he groomed himself. He was closely shaved, there were no tufts of hair in his ears, his hair was cut well, and his cologne was not too heavy or sweet. A tinge of grey at his temples made him seem distinguished, except for the velour. When the steward came around with dinner he ordered wine for both of us. My No thanks, was half-hearted.

Everyone complains about the food on planes, he said. But at least it’s predictable. With good company and a glass of wine it doesn’t matter. He clicked his glass against mine.

I didn’t know what to answer. I didn’t know how to speak to a strange man except to ask for something in a store.

Try a sip, he said, looking over his glass. It will help you sleep.

He asked questions while we ate, and I told him I had a son and daughter, Michel and Hala. It was so easy to talk to him that I found myself almost ready to tell him much more, even why I needed to make this journey, which was in its way the most intimate details of my marriage, things I had never told anyone. There had never been anyone I could tell real secrets. Who would understand the way we lived, our lives together always formal, forever on the edge of a community, looking in but not really belonging. Talking to the man in velour seemed so unthreatening, and sitting side by side meant neither of us had to avert our eyes or guard against an unintended expression or gesture that might send the wrong signal. And yet as easy as talk would have been I said little about Michel and Hala and nothing about myself, and before I knew it the trays were cleared and he showed me photos of his children. He was surprised that I didn’t have photos of Michel and Hala, and I was embarrassed to say that I was never far enough away from home or with strangers and had never needed to carry photos of them. I never mentioned Khedir, or that I was a widow.

When the cabin lights dimmed he asked if I wanted help with the earphones. Before I could answer he unpacked and plugged in my earphones, handed me a pillow, and with a querying gesture opened my blanket. The movie was a romantic comedy but I didn’t concentrate enough to follow it. I kept thinking about where I was going and the incredible strangeness of talking to a man to whom I had never even been introduced, a man from outside our world. He probably knew no one I knew. I was absentmindedly watching the screen when I felt his hand next to mine on the armrest, not quite touching, but close enough for me to be aware of him, to feel the heat or an electricity of his presence. When I realized how long his hand had been there I was embarrassed to pull my hand away. It was harmless, I told myself. Maybe he’s already asleep. I fell asleep with the movie playing and his hand next to mine, and didn’t awaken until I heard voices in the front of the plane.

The prayers from the front of the first class section grew louder. Rumpled passengers adjusted themselves in their seats, tucking blankets around themselves, tugging on the window shades, repositioning eyeshades and earplugs, and glancing disapprovingly at the praying men and the blocked aisles as more men in black suits pushed their way forward. The men in black had phylacteries wrapped around their arms and on their foreheads. I had occasionally seen the black leather boxes and straps in the chapel of the synagogue, where men who prayed regularly stored them in cubbyholes. They had always seemed strange to me, and looked very out-of-place on an airplane.

My mouth was dry, my legs were stiff, and I felt like I had been in the same clothes for days. I remembered that I had drifted in and out of intense dreams but could recall none of them. I wanted to wash my face and brush my teeth, but I was not willing to walk past the praying men. I knew they would recoil if a woman came too close, and their praying was so intense and focused that I couldn’t imagine disturbing them. I was also embarrassed to talk to or climb over the man in velour. I couldn’t shake a strange feeling of intimacy. No man other than Khedir had been that close to me or looked at me that way for more than twenty-eight years. Ten hours before, the idea that I would fall asleep with the hand of a strange man almost touching mine, and that I would be tempted to tell him secrets I had shared with no one, would have appalled me. I could see from the corner of my eye that he was not asleep. I wondered what either of us would say.

I also couldn’t shake my apprehension about where I was going and what I might find. I had heard so much about Israel, for so long, and always contradictory, exuberant praise intertwined with catalogues of frustrations and outbursts of bitterness. I had wanted to travel for a long time and knew I had too much hope invested in this journey. Airplanes and ships had always seemed so exciting, and now I was maybe too old. For twenty-eight years we had gone nowhere farther than the New Jersey shore, to the area around Deal where everyone in the world that was almost ours spent their summers. At first we had gone by train and taxi. Then we drove, and the history of our lives together had chapters for the Ford coupe, the station wagons, and the Oldsmobiles that Khedir said were Cadillacs in all but name. We drove the same route every year, and stopped at the same place to eat. I never liked the restaurant. It was clean, always freshly painted, layer on top of layer, and smelled of strong cleaners, but the tables had paper placemats with advertisements instead of a proper tablecloth, and the food was greasy and never served with rice. We stopped there because it was predictable and familiar. Our lives were built on the predictable and familiar. If the men praying at the front of the plane were a hint of what was coming, Israel would not be predictable or familiar.

Michel and Hala begged me not to make the trip. It’s too far, they said. Since 9/11 travel is difficult, especially the security checks. You won’t know anyone. There could be a bomb attack. Who will help you? What if they don’t understand you and you don’t understand them? It’s not necessary to go. A photograph would be enough. What if you fall down? What if you get lost? They were being responsible and loving, and yet I heard a reproach in their words. Not from them, but from myself. Had I sheltered them so much and so long that they were afraid of travel, or worse, afraid to seek answers? Yes, I told myself, it is far and it will be strange and I might get lost and people might not understand me and from all I’ve heard, the Israelis could be unfriendly. But I still needed an answer.

We arrive quicker than you expect, the man in velour said. His smile was kind. He seemed not to remember what to me had been intimacies the night before, dining and drinking wine together, a movie, his hand touching mine. A moment later there was an announcement about seatbacks and tray tables, and I felt his hand again gently touch mine on the armrest. When I glanced down I noticed how large his hand was, and forced myself not to think about what I had once read in a supermarket magazine about men with large hands. He’s the first man I’ve—met wasn’t the right word and touched was too intimate—since Khedir, I thought. A nice man, and attractive, but I’m not here to meet men.

His fingers gently brushed against the back of my hand as the wheels of the plane touched down on the runway.

Shall I get your bag down? he asked. Some passengers were already in the aisles, even while the announcement told us to remain seated. I remembered warnings people had given me about pushy Israelis.

I assumed he would offer to see me or ask for my phone number, and then wondered if I had seen too many movies. I’ll wait until everyone gets off, I said.

When the plane stopped moving, he smiled, said, Have a wonderful trip, and disappeared up the aisle. It was only then that I realized that I didn’t know his name.

•

When I got to the head of the unruly passport line and then to the assigned window, the officer inside the booth was young, tall, and blond. He glanced at my passport and then stared at me, his gaze direct and unflinching.

Farhedi, he said. Syrian?

American, I answered.

You are visiting friends?

No. I wondered if it was a trick question. Was it a way of asking whether I was Jewish? Whether I liked Israel? I was nervous and not sure why. The young blond man asked more questions—where I was staying, how long I was staying, was I planning to travel around, was there anyone I was planning to visit—and had to repeat some because I was nervous enough to misunderstand his clear but accented English. The interview took a long time, but he seemed to find nothing awry.

A man at the curb pointed me to a taxi. The taxi-driver pushed away the slip of paper I had prepared with the address.

What hotel? he said.

No hotel, I said. Please take me to the Shrine of the Book, at the Israel Museum.

Museum? Too early.

I’ll wait there, I said.

The long ride from the airport climbed through rocky hills, and I watched the fields and orchards change from grapes to olives to lemon trees to crops I didn’t recognize and back to grapes and then again to olive trees as we descended. As we approached Jerusalem the traffic was dense, a rush hour crush of cars and buses like Brooklyn or New Jersey. It jarred the image in my mind of suntanned young men and women working the soil and holy men praying in sacred places.

I had seen photographs of the museum and read about the contest to choose the architect and that the winner had designed it to resemble the tops of the jars where the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered, but I still wasn’t prepared for the appearance. I had seen photographs of the jars, but my impression as we approached wasn’t of a jar. The museum looked like a toilet plunger painted white with the handle cut off. I smiled at the thought, and kept myself from laughing out loud, but I could not get the image of the toilet plunger out of my mind.

You see? the driver said. Closed. No breakfast. Nothing.

He was right. The museum was not scheduled to open for hours. I stood outside and watched as people and groups arrived in coaches and taxis. A shapeless line formed, tourists with guidebooks, Asian groups with bulky cameras, noisy schoolchildren, chaperones announcing that mobile phones were forbidden on the field trip, tour groups led by women waving flags on sticks, walking backward and shouting, We’re walking, people, we’re walking.

When the door to the museum finally opened, I let the groups push pass me and waited until the line at the ticket counter disappeared. I had been surprised that I welcomed company on the flight, and admitted to myself that I enjoyed the company of the attractive man in grey velour. But I knew I had to be alone at the museum. I asked for a single ticket. The girl behind the counter looked about twenty, with a lush complexion, thick dark curly hair, and no makeup, not even on her eyes or lips. It was hard not to feel self-conscious in front of her.

Regular or senior? she asked.

How old for a senior? I had never been asked before. I rarely bought tickets.

Sixty.

Not yet, I said. A regular ticket please. Can you tell me how to find the Aleppo Codex?

The girl processed my credit card without looking up. First floor, she said. The exhibit at the end.

Everyone else was going to the second floor. People were butting into or skirting around a disorderly line that led up the stairs. The signs said Dead Sea Scrolls. There was no line for the Codex.

At the top of the stairs, I followed arrows to an exhibit at the end of the long hall. High-school age boys and girls were giggling their way down the stairs, and an elderly man and woman were looking at a book under glass. There was no one in the rest of the exhibit. I walked around, stopping at each panel, reading the labels with their tidbits of history. They said less than the official from the institute had already told me in Brooklyn, or what I had read in the pamphlets he had given me. I felt like an expert. That was unusual for me.

I waited until the elderly man and woman left before I took my place in front of the glass cabinet that held the book. Even after all the articles and the photographs the official had showed me, I had never been quite sure what codex meant, and was surprised that it was really just like a book, with pages bound along one edge. It was bigger than I expected, and the pages were a rich shade between ivory and gold. The veins and texture of the parchment were so vivid I wanted to run my fingertips over the page as if I could read it like Braille. I knew that the Torahs in the synagogue were written on parchment but I had never been close to an open Torah. I had only seen them sealed in their dark wood tikim as the men carried them around the synagogue.

The codex was shaped like an ordinary book, and the letters on the pages were perfectly aligned. I could make out faint horizontal and vertical lines, like the lines on school notebooks when children are taught to write. Even in that prison of bars the letters on the pages seemed alive. It was hard to believe these pages were more than a thousand years old. Looking closely, I saw that the bottom edges of the pages were darkened, as if they had been damaged by smoke or soiled by tiny insects, but other than those blemishes, the pages were shockingly perfect, straight lines of uniform letters, with tiny, precise notes, annotations by a scribe or editor, in the margins and between the columns. The physical heft of the volume, the lush texture of the parchment, and the perfectly scribed letters made the codex seem—I fumbled for a word, tried serene, then stately, and finally settled for majestic. When I finally let my glance stray from the codex up to the sign over the exhibit, I laughed. I couldn’t read the Hebrew, but the English subtitle of he exhibit was The Crown of Aleppo. Crown. Of course it was majestic!

I looked closely at the edges of the book. The texture and color looked like the open page, but something didn’t seem right. I moved to one side so the overhead light accentuated the texture of the parchment, and from that perspective the edges of the rest of the pages looked flat by comparison. I was looking at a few real pages on top of a cardboard display colored and textured to look like parchment. The rest of the book was a fake. Majestic and crown didn’t seem so right after all. I tried different angles and when I stood back from the glass case I spotted a label in small type explaining that the parchment of the codex was so sensitive to light that only a few pages at a time were displayed, turned frequently to avoid overexposure to the light, and rotated with the rest of the pages that were kept in a special protective vault. This crown was majestic enough for a vault.

I glanced around to make sure I was alone, then leaned down as close as I could get to the glass. I couldn’t read the Hebrew, but a note identified the open page and I started to read the translation of the text as if it would somehow matter what this one page said. But the words didn’t matter at all. Once I looked at the page close enough to really see it, not in photographs or under a magnifying glass but close enough so the texture of the parchment and ink were vivid and I could imagine a scribe writing those words, I suddenly understood. The codex in its regal repose radiated confidence, like a learned sage who listens with the hint of a smile as if he already knew everything worth knowing. I smiled at the thought that the codex was smug. It had seen everything, heard everything, knew every answer. Feeling that quiet confidence, I understood Khedir, the husband who had been by my side for twenty-eight years. I understood our lives, the choices we had made, the strangeness of our lives in Brooklyn and on the Jersey shore, the silent pact we had made to live on the edge of the only world we knew. In that instant, everything that had happened to us made sense.

I don’t know how long I stood there before I said goodbye to the codex and walked through the crowds in the lobby and found my way outside to a stone bench. The sun was warm. People walking on the plaza were dressed casually, in shorts, sundresses, slacks, everything but my dark suit and stockings. I imagined their thoughts: a woman of a certain age, the sun accents her wrinkles, all dressed up and no place to go. But I was content. For what must have been hours I remembered how Khedir would put his papers and wallet in his pocket, the ritual steps of making sure the billfold went into his jacket pocket, close to his heart, and the money-clip in his right-front trouser pocket. I remembered the quick little prayers he would say, his lips barely moving, so quiet and indistinct that no one could understand a word. Even a lip-reader would not have known what he said.

Once I asked him what he was saying. He answered that it was nothing, and I never asked again, knowing I would get the same answer. I sometimes wondered: Was he speaking to his mother? Remembering his father? Those silent prayers, coming at moments of stress or decisions or tension seemed as strange and futile as the reflex of crossing themselves I had seen so many Catholic men and women do at moments of stress or decision.

But now I understood what went into the breast pocket of his jacket each day, and what he said in those little prayers. The labels of the exhibits surrounding the Codex told the story. The Jews of Aleppo had thought themselves invincible because the famous bible lived in their midst, a part of their community. The Crown, they called it. It seemed a strange and silly belief, but it was a foundation of their world. As long as the Crown was there, they were safe. I remembered seeing a magazine photograph of Iranian women visiting a mosque in Damascus, covered from their heads to toes in shapeless black, their eyes and expressions shielded as they reached their fingers through a brass and wrought iron grillwork around a tomb. The grillwork was wet with their tears. The caption said that they held the bars so tightly and stroked them so ardently the wrought iron and brass were worn away. They did that just to be near the tomb. I thought of little girls playing jacks and chanting, Step on a crack, break my back. They didn’t really mean it, but in their chants a crack in the pavement had the same magic as whatever was behind that grill. The same magic as this bible.

Khedir’s quiet and secret prayers, so many times every day of the twenty-eight years I had known him, were to this book. His countless repetitions didn’t save him and didn’t bridge the gaps that had kept us outside the only world we knew. His prayers had not brought us closer to the people who should have been friends. They had not lifted his business from the bottom of the pile. They had not found a husband for Hala. And the secret of those prayers had kept me apart from Khedir: there was a part of him that I never knew. But at that moment, sitting outside a museum that looked like a toilet plunger, I understood Khedir and all that had happened.

2. The Beadle’s Tale

Every Monday the beadle of the great synagogue in Aleppo walked from his room in a former caravansary at the edge of the souk down al-Masri Street to the synagogue. He usually left after the muezzin’s call to the afternoon prayer, but on the first Monday of December 1947 he was concerned about rumors he had heard on the previous Friday and left for his walk early, right after the call to the noon prayer. The beadle had a clock in his room but like much of Aleppo, including the wealthy merchants and counting room men who wore watches on gold chains over their waistcoats, he measured his day not by the hands on a clock face but by the muezzins’ calls to the daily prayers.

Despite his concern about the rumors, the beadle stopped at the tiny stand where Wahid the orchardman sold fruit, across from the rows of cobblers lined up against the brick and stone wall of the souk. The hammering and the clack-clack of the cobblers’ ancient sewing machines punctuated the shouts of merchants from their stalls in the alleyways, and the fragrance of the pomegranates, oranges, apricots, peaches, and grapes on Wahid’s stand competed with the abattoir odors of sheep organs and whole lambs hanging from iron hooks in the butchers’ stalls in a nearby alleyway. Wahid, with his cropped beard, thinning hair covered by a worn topi, a smile missing two prominent upper teeth, and his ear for street gossip, had been more talkative than usual on the past Friday, reporting that in the Arab cafes they were saying that the sultan in Cairo had given orders that the synagogues were to become mosques, that the Jews would soon emigrate to Palestine or be thrown into the sea, and that there were threats that if Jewish shops were not closed on Sunday there would be trouble. Wahid repeated the rumors with no more emotion than if they had been weather reports, but the beadle put Wahid’s rumors together with what he had heard in the Jewish quarter, where merchants were selling merchandise at one-fourth its value, children were being told to tell strangers that Papa is not home, and whoever could afford the exorbitant fares was hiring taxis to take them to Beirut. Usually the beadle enjoyed Wahid’s stories. He didn’t read the newspapers and those stories from the