Godstone

We left the hotel, and I followed Gee down the road to a restaurant that I hadn’t noticed the previous evening. Gee seemed to know the place; the owner greeted her as if she were a long-lost friend. He showed us to a table by the window overlooking the square outside.

“Don’t order,” the owner said in perfect English. “I will make something special for the two of you.”

“Please bring me a beer as well,” I told him. Gee gave me a look that suggested she didn’t approve.

“I see you’ve already made friends with the owner,” I told her with my best smile.

“His name is Hazan. I came here with my father last year,” she answered, again without a smile. “My father tips generously. People tend to remember him.”

“You have given me quite the run-around,” I said after a moment of silence.

“Run-around?” she asked as if she didn’t understand the term.

“Yes, first not showing up in Istanbul and then the letter to meet you here. You know, that really threw me; the waiter said that the letter had been on the café notice board for many years, waiting for me to show up.”

“I put the letter there last week,” Gee replied. “I don’t know what the waiter was talking about.” I looked at her carefully, trying to decide if she was telling the truth. I decided she was and let the subject drop.

“Then I waited for you last night. You had said you would be there last night, but you weren’t. You stood me up again.”

Gee made no comment. Whatever reason she had for being a day late, she was going to keep it to herself. I was going to push the matter, but it suddenly occurred to me that Gee might be very young, an adolescent. I asked her how old she was.

“Twenty-three,” she answered, looking around the restaurant as if making sure that no one was listening. We were the only ones in the place, and her age shouldn’t have been a secret. She was behaving as if she was nervous, anxious about something.

“You look younger,” I replied. I thought she looked no more than sixteen.

Without saying anything, she pulled out an American passport and handed it to me. I opened the passport to the photo page. It was definitely her photo. The date of birth was given as July 10, 1963; that made her twenty-three.

The passport was well used, and I was about to check through it when she took it from my hands. The silence between us was awkward; she was making me feel uncomfortable.

“Your accent,” I said in an attempt to break the silence. “It doesn’t sound American.”

“My mother is English. My father was in the US Army, stationed in the United Kingdom, seconded to NATO. My parents met at RAF Lakenheath in Suffolk. I was born and brought up in Minneapolis, but I have been living in Jerusalem for the past four years. I guess my accent is a mixture of Israeli, English, and American. I speak a little Hebrew, but I am not Jewish. I am multidenominational.” She spoke in a flat, emotionless manner, and her words came out as machine-gun fire.

Hazan brought over an Efes Pilsen and a plate piled high with salad, olives, hummus, and baked aubergine, or eggplant, as Hazan called it. Once he had finished explaining what everything was, I asked Gee what multidenominational meant.

“I am a volunteer in an organisation in Jerusalem,” she explained. “We work to bring together Muslims, Christians, and Jews into one mosque, church, or synagogue—whatever you want to call it. All three religions are religions of the Book. There are many similarities amongst the three of them.”

Gee helped herself to some food before continuing. “But there are also connections with other religions, such as Buddhism,” she said. “Take resurrection, for example.”

I didn’t want to “take resurrection” as an example. Instead I asked her what type of work she did at the foundation.

“Our work is to build trust based on the similarities amongst religions rather than to fight over the differences,” she answered in the same flat, rapid-fire manner that contained no trace of feminine softness.

Her manner of speaking matched her look. When I had lived in New York, I had met a few girls like her—women with nothing to prove and at the same time everything to prove. I had found that the only way to interact with them was to try to be just as tough back. I rarely succeeded.

“And how is this bringing-the-various-religions-together thing working out for you?” I asked. I think I might have snorted at the same time.

Gee looked at me inquisitively. For the first time, I noticed her eyes. They were the same eyes as mine—the same as my uncle’s: one green and one blue. They drilled into me for what seemed like the longest time before I broke eye contact. I sat back in my chair and carefully studied the floral pattern on the plastic table covering. I didn’t want to look into her eyes; they frightened me.

“You don’t believe in God,” Gee stated. Her accent had shifted slightly to Middle Eastern—Israeli perhaps. “You’re not religious,” she added. She had taken a tour of my brain and found it lacking. The matter was settled in her mind.

For as long as I could remember, I had wanted to believe in God. Or at least something that resembled God: a higher being that would give meaning to my life. At school, I had gone regularly to the religious services, and I had even become chapel secretary for my university. I had hoped that I would somehow catch the bug and discover my faith. I never did, no matter how much I tried.

“Agnostic,” I lied. “I don’t have enough evidence to be able to make up my mind one way or another, so I will just have to say that I don’t know and that I will never know.”

Gee looked at me sharply, and I realised that I had been unconsciously mimicking her accent. I looked down at the pattern on the tablecloth again and made a mental note not to mimic her again. Gee had something about her that I didn’t feel comfortable confronting.

“Religion for me is a tribal thing,” I ventured, not wanting the silence to build up again between us. “Different tribes believe in different gods. Each believes that its god is the only one and that its belief system is the right one. But their belief systems are usually so weak that they can’t abide any disagreement. So they kill anyone that doesn’t believe in their god—they kill anyone that believes in a different god.

“Too many wars have been fought over religion,” I continued. “Too many people have died because of it. The world would be a better place without religion: ‘Nothing to kill or die for and no religion too. Imagine all the people, living life in peace…’”

“I was in New York when John Lennon died,” Gee said. “My mother had taken me there for some Christmas shopping. I was sixteen. We were in a taxi two streets away from where he lived on Seventy-Second Street. We had been to see a show, Children of a Lesser God, at the Longacre Theatre and were returning to the apartment that my parents owned in Manhattan. I heard about his death on the taxi radio.”

Gee waited for me to say something, but I didn’t know what I was supposed to say. I might have said something like “very sad” or a similar banality. Gee turned her attention to the food on the table, and I sipped at my beer.

“I think you are too hard on religion,” she told me, after serving herself more salad. “It is like everything; it can be a force for good as well as for evil. In the wrong hands, religion can be evil, but in the right hands, it does a lot of good in people’s lives.

“Sometimes religion can be a reason for war, a reason for people to kill one another,” she continued. “But even without religion, humanity is a collection of warring tribes. Religion can be a defining element for a tribe. But it is not the only one.”

The way Gee was speaking had changed slightly; it was no longer the same flat, emotionless monologue. I decided that she had just been nervous when we first met. She was beginning to relax a little. She obviously enjoyed talking about religion; she was practising well-honed arguments on me.

“If religion did not exist,” she continued, “tribes would find some other way to define themselves; a man does not need religion to kill another man. But in any case, in my work, I try to bring religions together, to give a man one less reason to kill another man. But even without religion, men have plenty of reasons to kill one another. And sometimes they don’t even need a reason.”

“That sounds like a pretty pessimistic world outlook,” I told her.

“I do not think I am too pessimistic,” she replied, her face becoming a little flushed. “I am a realist; men kill one another.”

I served myself some salad, hoping that she would let the topic of religion drop. I was disappointed.

“Do you know how many people died in the First World War?” she asked out of nowhere. “You cannot say that that war was a religious war.”

I told her that I didn’t know how many people died in World War I.

“In total, there were over thirty-seven million casualties,” she said as if she were reading. “Seventeen million deaths and twenty million wounded. Not all were killed in battle. A lot died from disease, particularly in the 1918 flu pandemic.

“And in the Second World War?” she asked me, almost angrily. “That wasn’t a religious war either.”

I shook my head.

“America lost slightly more than four hundred thousand soldiers,” she told me. “Almost no civilians. The USSR lost at least eleven million soldiers and nearly twenty million civilians. The two countries’ populations at the start of the war were about the same: a hundred thirty million. So, you see, Russia suffered a lot more than the USA.”

I had had no idea that so many more lives had been lost in the Soviet Union than in the United States. In reality, I didn’t care, but it was obviously a subject she felt strongly about. “Was your father’s family originally from Russia?” I asked her.

“Ukraine,” Gee answered. “And if you want to talk numbers, do you know how many people died in Ukraine in the famine of 1932 to ’33, the famine that Stalin engineered?”

I shook my head again. I wished she would stop asking me all these questions. I took a sip of beer and abandoned the salad. Instead I lit a cigarette. I wasn’t hungry.

“Seven million people,” she continued. “Stalin used famine as a weapon that killed seven million Ukrainians.”

“Is that when your father’s family left?” I asked. “During the famine?”

“Yes,” she answered. “They were the lucky ones.”

I stayed silent, drawing on my cigarette, trying to absorb the scale of all the numbers that she had quoted. She evidently had a head for statistics.

“But you cannot just blame Stalin,” she continued. “Mao was even worse. At least forty-five million people were killed during his Great Leap Forward.”

Gee pushed her plate away, suddenly disgusted, not at the food but at mankind in general. I looked at her, unsure what to say.

She didn’t expect me to say anything; she was on a roll. “And these wars,” she said, “they will never end. Look at the Russian invasion of Afghanistan; they are propping up an unpopular, corrupt, communist government. Communism versus capitalism: it is not a religious war. Afghanistan is just another proxy war between America and the USSR.”

I had gotten her point, but she wasn’t going to stop there.

“Then there is this war now between Iran and Iraq. Iran has a revolution: the people throw out a corrupt government and install a religious one. Iraq takes advantage of the turmoil and invades Iran, hoping to capture some oilfields. Iraq is secular, and Iran is Islamist. This time the Russians and the Americans are on the same side, backing Iraq. Maybe that is a religious war, but it isn’t really.”

She looked at me accusingly as I finished my beer. I had never been any good in an argument. When I tried to argue, I either lost both my temper and the argument, or I ended up agreeing with the person I was arguing with. “You are probably right,” I said weakly.

Gee accepted my defeat; she pulled her plate towards her and began to eat again. For someone so small, she seemed to eat a lot.

“So you have the stone,” Gee said after she had cleared her plate. It was a statement, not a question.

“Yes, I have the stone,” I replied. “How did you know?”

“You would not be here now, in this place, if you did not have the stone,” she answered. I didn’t understand what she meant, but I let it pass.

“May I see it?” she asked.

The stone’s leather box had been too bulky to fit in the pocket of my new jacket, so I had left the box in my rucksack in my room. Instead I kept the stone in its silk covering directly in the Sainsbury’s plastic bag. I pulled the bag from my jacket pocket and slid it across the table to her.

The muscles in Gee’s face tightened, and she furrowed her brow. I saw no excitement, only apprehension. She looked around the room again. We were still the only ones there.

“Please open it for me,” she said. I took the stone out of the Sainsbury’s bag and unwrapped it. Gee drew in a sharp breath.

“Here, take it,” I said, pushing the stone towards her. Gee recoiled backwards.

“I can’t,” she stammered. All her confidence had suddenly left her. “Please put it back in the bag.” I did as she instructed and then put the bag back in my jacket pocket.

“You told your uncle that you had lost it,” she said once the stone was out of sight. “You told him that you were mugged, robbed.”

“I was mugged,” I replied. “Someone took my wallet, my passport, and my watch. In exchange they gave me two cracked ribs, a black eye, and a swollen lip. When I got back to my hotel, I found that my room had been searched, but my passport, wallet, and watch had been returned to me. I have no idea why.”

“But the stone was not there?”

“No,” I replied slowly.

“Where was it?”

“I had left it with the waiter in the café next door, to keep it safe.”

Gee looked at me for a moment. I couldn’t work out whether her face was displaying admiration or contempt.

“So you thought something like that would happen…you thought that you might be mugged?” she asked.

I nodded my head to say yes, but in reality I had given the stone to Yigit for safekeeping. I guess I had had no faith in myself not to lose the stone while I was out drinking. And when I came to after the mugging, I had forgotten that I had given it to him. It was only when I went back to the Pudding Shop that Yigit had reminded me. But I didn’t want to tell Gee that.

“But why did you lie to your uncle?” she asked me. “Why did you tell him that you had lost the stone? And why did you make him believe that you were going home rather than coming to see me?”

“Because my uncle was the only person apart from you that knew I had the stone,” I replied. “And perhaps your father.”

Over the past few days, I still hadn’t been able to shake off the thought that my uncle had chosen me to deliver the stone because he had expected me to fail. I had come to the conclusion that he had wanted me to fail. I guessed that he hadn’t wanted to give up the stone to his business partner and that he had had me attacked in Istanbul to get it back. And he had rightly predicted that I would be too drunk to put up much of a fight. He might even have made sure that I would be too drunk to put up any fight. After all, someone had paid for those bottles of raki in the café.

Those were my private guesses. I didn’t want to share them with Gee. She looked at me now, trying to make up her mind about something.

“Your uncle didn’t have you beaten up,” she said eventually, guessing my thoughts. “Contrary to what you think, your uncle trusted you. That’s why he asked you to bring me the stone. He was right to trust you.” Gee’s voice had softened further; it had completely lost its monotony.

Hazan reappeared from the kitchen. I called him over and ordered a second beer. A shadow crossed Gee’s face. She looked as if she was about to say something but didn’t. Hazan bought me my beer, and I offered Gee a cigarette. She refused, and I lit one for myself.

“Given up?” I asked her. I had earlier noticed that her fingers were stained yellow from nicotine.

“Yes,” she replied. I pointed to her fingers. “It’s recent,” she explained. “I stopped the day before yesterday. I am still having trouble with it. I am sure I will start again one day, but for the moment…” Her voice trailed off.

“Now you will have to tell me about this stone,” I said, taking a pull at my cigarette. The beer had given me some Dutch courage.

“Your uncle didn’t tell you?”

“He said some people called it the Godstone but that he preferred to call it the Sea Stone. He said that the stone showed you only what it wanted to show you—or rather that it showed you who you were. He told me that you would tell me the rest.”

“What do you want to know?” Gee asked, eyeing my cigarette jealously.

“Why is it called the Godstone?”

Gee took a deep breath and then let out a long sigh. “According to Greek mythology, Zeus, the father of the gods, released two eagles, one at each end of the earth. The eagles flew towards each other, and Zeus placed a sacred stone at the exact spot where they met. In mythology, the stone is called omphalos. It is a means by which mankind can communicate with the gods.”

“You’re saying that this stone is the omphalos?” I asked. “That’s incredible.” I was being sarcastic. I had never heard of the omphalos. Greek mythology had never been my strong point, and even if it had been, I still didn’t believe a word she was saying. It was too ridiculous.

Gee nodded. “There’s more,” she said slowly. “This stone is also the stone that Moses bought down from Mount Sinai, or at least half the stone. Moses had a hissy fit when he came off the mountain, and he broke the stone in two. This is one half of it.”

I let out a mock whistle that unintentionally blew smoke from my mouth into Gee’s face. She didn’t wave it away.

“You mean that this is the stone of the Ten Commandments?” I asked, hoping that my sarcasm wasn’t too evident in my voice. “But there is nothing written on it. How can it be the stone?”

“There was no written language at the time Moses lived, so there couldn’t have been anything written on the stone except perhaps some Egyptian hieroglyphics.”

“But where did the story of the Ten Commandments come from then?” I asked.

“Moses spent some time—forty days—meditating upon a mountain, and he received the stone and the Ten Commandments from God,” she replied. “Or an entity that he believed was God.”

I stayed silent, not knowing what to say.

“God—or the entity he believed was God— gave Moses some rules, or basic laws, for mankind to follow. He also gave Moses the omphalos as a sign of good faith in the belief that it would help mankind find a righteous path.

“Unfortunately, Moses not only misinterpreted the messages, but he also had a temper tantrum when he came down from the mountain and saw his followers worshipping an idol, a golden statue of a calf. In his rage, he broke the stone in two.

“Moses then instructed his followers to kill anyone who didn’t agree with him. That’s exactly what you were talking about earlier,” she added. “Killing everyone who doesn’t believe in the same god as you.”

“You shall have no other gods than me. You shall not make idols. You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain,” I said, remembering the time I had been chapel secretary at university. “Aren’t those the first three commandments?”

“Yes,” Gee replied. “At least that was what Moses told his followers. It wasn’t what he had been told up the mountain. It wasn’t the right message. That’s where it all started to go wrong.”

“What was the right message?” I asked, humouring her. I still found her whole story ridiculous.

“The message that he should have passed on was that there is only one earth, not one God, and you have to look after it. Maybe he just got confused. Maybe he did it on purpose. I think God chose the wrong man,” she added with a nervous laugh. “As for the other commandments,” she continued, “the message was that you should treat people with respect and dignity. And that you should not ‘covet’ what others have—that mankind should not constantly want more and more. Material wealth does not bring happiness.”

Gee finished the food on her plate. “Somehow the message got lost,” she said finally. “But your uncle is right. The stone shows you what it wants to show you; it shows you who you are.

“It showed Moses his cruel side and drove him into killing all those people. He should never have been given the stone. It was too powerful for him. It was still powerful, even after he had broken it into two pieces.

“Have you heard the story of the Arc of the Covenant?” she asked after a moment.

“Vaguely,” I replied. “Wasn’t it a golden trunk that held the two parts of the stone? Didn’t the Jews carry it at the front of their army? It is supposed to have brought down the walls of Jericho.”

“Yes, amongst other destruction,” Gee replied.

“Religion is so destructive,” I said flippantly.

“No, William,” Gee replied seriously, “this isn’t about religion. Admittedly, the Jews used the power of the stone to help them in their battles, but the stone existed for millions of years before that. That’s why you shouldn’t call it the Godstone. I prefer to call it the Earth Stone.”

“As my uncle said, the stone is whatever you want it to be: Earth Stone, Sea Stone, Godstone,” I said thoughtfully. “But what happened to the stone?”

“The two pieces got separated along the way. One of your ancestors somehow got hold of one half of the stone during the early Crusades and took it back to England.”

“And that is this piece?” I asked. Gee nodded. “What about the other piece—what happened to that?”

“Have you read The Travels by Marco Polo?” Gee asked me. I told her that I hadn’t.

“Well, on his travels in the thirteenth century, Marco Polo journeyed through what is now Iran. He passed through the city of Savah, where he visited the tombs of the three Magi—the three priests, who, according to Matthew’s Gospel in the Bible, had visited Jesus in Bethlehem. The Magi gave Jesus gold, frankincense, and myrrh, while Jesus gave them a small, closed box.”

“But I thought Jesus was only a baby,” I said. “How could he have given them anything?”

“The timing is confused,” Gee replied, evidently irritated that I had interrupted her story. “Many people think that the Magi visited Jesus, not when he was a baby but when he was a young adult.

“Anyway, according to Marco Polo, the three Magi left Bethlehem and only opened the box after riding for many days. They were surprised to see that the box contained a stone. As they didn’t understand what the stone was, they threw it into a well. Then, according to Marco Polo, ‘a fire from heaven descended into that well wherein the stone had been cast.’

“Magi is the name given to a priest from the ancient Zoroastrian religion that is still practised today in parts of Iran and India. The word magi, incidentally, is where the English world magic comes from,” Gee added, pleased with herself for that little titbit of information.

“What is a Zoroastrian when it is at home?” I asked. “It sounds like something out of Monty Python.”

“Zoroaster was a prophet who lived in what is now Iran, sometime between five and ten thousand years before Christ,” Gee replied. “Zoroastrians, or Parsees as they are now called in India, see life in terms of a struggle between truth and lies. Humans can choose between truths and lies and can reach the ultimate truth through having good thoughts and good words and practising good deeds.

“Zoroastrians believe that the purpose of life is to make the world progress towards perfection. They believe that you should always do the right thing simply because it is the right thing to do, not because you think you will be rewarded for it. If you do that, then you will be rewarded anyway.”

I thought about this for a while. “That sounds like my kind of religion,” I eventually replied, and I meant it. “Good thoughts, words, and deeds and a free choice between truth and lies, good and evil. It’s what I believe in. Does that make me a Zoroastrian?” I asked. It was a rhetorical question, and she took it as such.

“So you think Jesus gave the other half of the stone to the Zoroastrian priests?” I asked her, getting back on track. “That means it might be in modern-day Iran.”

“I don’t know,” replied Gee truthfully. “What we do know is that if the two halves of the stone are reunited, the person that reunites them will have unstoppable power—absolute power. Depending on the person, that power can be used for good or bad.”

“What you are saying is that the stone can be a force for good or evil, depending on the person who has it?”

Gee nodded.

“Is that why you are afraid of the stone?” I asked her. “Afraid that it will show you something about yourself that you don’t like—that it will reveal you as an evil person?”

Gee paused for a while before answering, apparently trying to make her mind up about something.

“The stone shows you what it wants to show you,” she said eventually. “I have heard so much about it that I can’t help being afraid. But, OK, please show me the stone again.”

I took the stone out of my jacket pocket and unwrapped it for her. I had looked into it every evening since I had had it, and every evening, it had had the same effect. I had had a sensation that I was falling. And when I had looked into the stone, I had always seen the same scene: Mary walking along the shore collecting seashells and pebbles while I swam in the sea. And each time, I had had a feeling of overwhelming love.

I handed the stone to Gee, who took it in her right hand. To steady herself, she immediately grabbed the table with her left hand. It obviously had the same destabilising effect on her as on me.

I watched her as she looked into the stone. Her eyes widened, and her pupils dilated. She shuddered but not from fear. She handed the stone back to me.

“I understand,” she said, “the stone sometimes shows you the past, and sometimes it shows you the future.”

“And what did it show you?” I asked.

“It showed me the future,” she replied with a smile, a genuinely warm smile. “It showed me what is going to happen in the immediate future. It was…nice.”

Hazan came back to the table with a third beer and cleared away the dirty plates.

“You drink too much alcohol,” Gee told me. She said it in a way that made it an observation and not a criticism. “Why do you drink so much?” She sounded genuinely curious.

It was a question that no one had ever asked me before. As far as I was concerned, I drank because I liked the taste and the effect that the alcohol had on me. I loved the taste of rum and Coke, of vodka and tonic, of single-malt Scotch, of a gin martini, of the salt around a margarita glass, of that first sip of beer on a hot day. I loved the way that alcohol took the edge off life. It just made life easier to endure.

“I drink because I like the taste,” I replied.

“But you also drink to forget?” she asked. This time it was framed as a question, a genuine question.

“No,” I replied slowly, “I drink to remember.” I poured the ice-cold beer carefully into my glass and watched the foam slowly form. I took a large sip.

“There, for example,” I said. “I am on a riverbank. I am with someone I love, and we have just set out a picnic. My university exams are over. This beer…it brings back all these memories.”

“Your liver,” Gee said, her voice suddenly flat again and her eyes, once again, boring into my brain, “is diseased. Your kidneys are weak. You are twenty-five now, and if you continue to drink like you do, you will be dead in ten years’ time. William, you do not drink to remember. You drink to commit suicide.”

Gee stood up from the table and picked up my glass of beer. “I cannot allow that to happen,” she said. “I cannot allow you to kill yourself.” She walked towards the kitchen and called Hazan. He came out from the kitchen, and she gave him my beer. “No more alcohol,” she told him. “Now we pay. Please bring me the bill.”

I sat at the table, truly gobsmacked. No one had ever done that to me before.

“That is good,” she said, returning to the table. “Now that you have a clear head, we will go back to the hotel.”

“To the hotel?” I asked stupidly.

“Yes, to make love,” she replied. “To have sex. We will go to my room. It is nicer than yours.”

I hadn’t made love since the morning of the Harrods bombing. I had made some attempts at it during the first year that I had spent in New York: drunken pick-ups in one seedy bar or another. Each time had ended in failure. Each time I blamed it on the drink, and each time I never saw the woman again. After a while, I learned how to avoid getting myself into those situations in the first place.

A colleague at work had decided I was gay, and he had dragged me to even seedier bars. But nothing happened. I wasn’t gay. I wasn’t anything.

The thought now of going back to the hotel with Gee suddenly terrified me. I knew that it would only end in an embarrassing failure. As we walked briskly along the pavement, I tried to make excuses, but she ignored them. We got to the hotel and climbed the stairs to her room on the second floor.

Once inside her hotel room, she surprised me by telling me that this was her first time—that she had never made love before. She said she knew I was anxious, but somehow we would work it out together. As she said that, she looked deep into my eyes, and my nervousness left me. It was as if the wheels that had been spinning inside my head for the past few years suddenly stopped spinning. I wondered for a moment whether she was hypnotising me.

In any case, we worked it out. We stayed in bed all afternoon, and in the evening, we went back to Hazan’s restaurant for dinner. We then spent the night together in her room.

5

After breakfast the next day, we walked to a small village about an hour and a half out of Ürgüp. Gee said that she had been there with her father the previous year and that she wanted to show it to me.

The village was called Sogamel. It wasn’t much of a place, a few beaten-up old houses, a café of sorts, and a lot of children and donkeys. We stopped at the café for a tea and then walked across a stream to an area where village women were gathered around a communal oven that had been built into the side of the hill. Some of the women were nursing babies; others were feeding wood into the fire or putting bread into the oven. It was a peaceful scene, one that probably had been repeated every day for hundreds of years.

Gee and I sat for a while at a respectful distance from the villagers. In the middle distance, I could see the men from the village working in the fields. Everyone there was obviously poor, and it made me feel rich in comparison. The watch I was wearing, even if it had stopped working, undoubtedly cost more money than they earned in a year, perhaps two years. But even though they were poor, the women seemed happy, chatting and working together to bake the bread and look after their young children.

“They have nothing, but they have everything,” Gee said quietly.

“Yes, it is a nice scene,” I replied. “They have a community that makes them happy in spite of their poverty. But why have you bought me here?”

Gee pointed to the hillside opposite the village. “That is where your uncle—and my father—are going to build a hotel,” she said.

“But why here?” I asked. “There is nothing here.”

“This village is right in the middle of Cappadocia,” she replied. “The area is full of ancient churches carved into the stone. Christians built them in the Middle Ages as hiding places from the Muslim invaders. The rock here is soft and easy to carve, but when it comes into contact with the air, it hardens.

“In addition to the churches, there are weird rock formations that have come about as the topsoil has eroded. You must have seen them from the bus when you arrived here.”

I hadn’t seen them. I had slept all the way from Ankara. But I didn’t want to tell her that.

“My father believes that this area will become a big tourist attraction in a few years,” Gee continued. “They will start building the hotel next year.”

I told her that I still didn’t understand why she had taken me there. In explanation, she waved her hand at the women around the oven.

“Their way of life is coming to an end,” she told me. “Having a hotel here will mean that the village will finally be connected to the main electricity grid. Some villagers will get jobs in the hotel; others will be able to act as tour guides. Some will open shops and cafés. They will all be financially better off. They will be able to afford televisions, washing machines, and—” she paused a moment, “ovens. They will also be able to sell their donkeys and buy cars.”

“But that is good, isn’t it?” I asked. “You can’t deny these people what we already have. It is what they want. Everyone wants to better their lives.”

“John Lennon once said, ‘If everyone demanded peace instead of another television set, then there’d be peace,’” Gee replied. “These people may want their own television sets, but it may not make them any happier than if they continued to watch the television in their communal hall.”

“That’s not for you to judge,” I told her. “Just because you already have something, you can’t dictate to others that they can’t have it. Besides, more wealth will mean better health: longer lives, less deaths during childbirth, et cetera. All that is good, isn’t it?”

Gee sighed. “In theory, yes,” she agreed. “Yes, it is probably good for the villagers; they will get what they want, even if it won’t necessarily make them any happier. But don’t you think sometimes about what would happen if everyone on this planet had our lifestyle? More fridges and more cars will mean more of the earth’s resources used up and more pollution. Planet Earth will not be able to cope.”

“The Tragedy of the Commons,” I said thoughtfully.

“What is that?” Gee asked.

“It is something I studied when I did economics at university,” I explained. “In England, in the Middle Ages, people let their sheep roam on communal land. It was in the interest of each person to have as many sheep on the land as possible, but the end result was that the land was overgrazed and could no longer support any sheep at all.

“It is the same for the earth. It is in our individual interests to have more and more, but collectively it could result in the earth no longer being able to support us at all.”

“You’re right,” Gee answered. “Now there are, what, about five billion people on this earth? By 2012, there will be seven million, and there will be nearly ten billion people by 2050. And every one of us will want a car, a TV set, and air conditioning. The earth will not survive that. The planet is already heating up with all the energy that is being burnt; the skies are getting more and more polluted.

“But you are correct,” she continued. “What right do I have to tell these people that they must stay poor so that I can continue my own consumerist lifestyle?”

I took Gee’s hand in mine. “We humans will just have to strike some sort of balance,” I said. “The Tragedy of the Commons was averted by legislation that came from common sense, education, and, above all, the human instinct for survival. Mankind will not destroy the earth just as they did not destroy the commons. Mankind will find a way where poor people and poor countries can develop without destroying the planet.”

“I used to believe that,” Gee replied. “I used believe that if people could only understand the harm that they are doing to the earth, they would choose a less materialistic way of living. Now I am not so optimistic.”

“Let’s go back to town,” I suggested, unhappy with the way the conversation was going. Quite frankly, I couldn’t care what happened to the earth in fifty years’ time. I wouldn’t be around to see it and I certainly wasn’t planning to have any children. There were already too many people on the planet. I took Gee’s hand. “Let’s go back to our hotel.”

Gee shook her head. “There is no need,” she answered. “Let’s go for a walk. I want to show you the hidden churches, and there is a little café I know where we can have lunch. The food is very good.”

“All you think about is food,” I said, disappointed.

Gee was still thinking about food when we got back to the hotel in the early evening. I was exhausted. I had seen enough rock formations and enough hidden churches to last me a lifetime.

“Let’s go and eat,” Gee suggested. “But not the same place as last night. Let’s go somewhere else.”

She led me to a small café a fifteen-minute walk from the centre of town. It was on a long, straight, dusty road that consisted almost entirely of workshops selling tractor parts and tires. We went into the café; the place was empty. Five or six wooden tables stood on a bare, wooden floor. There was a portrait of Atatürk on one wall and a Cappadocia Tourist Board poster on another. The place was cold and unwelcoming.

We sat at a corner table by the door, and a man, presumably the owner, came out from the kitchen with two glasses of tea. He was grey and unshaven and, despite the cool evening, was in his shirtsleeves. His white shirt was worn at the collar and looked as if it hadn’t been washed for weeks.

Without saying anything to us, or without even looking at us, the man put the teas on our table and returned to the kitchen. I looked quizzically at Gee, but she ignored me. We sat in silence for a few minutes, and the man reappeared carrying a tray with soup, salad, and some sort of fried meat on it. We hadn’t ordered anything, but it must have been a set meal. He put it on the table, again avoiding all eye contact. I tried the soup; it had a metallic taste.

“What are we doing here?” I asked Gee.

She put a finger to her lips and made a “shush” sound, indicating me to be quiet. I sipped at my soup and ate some of the fried meat. It was greasy and tasteless. I tried again to say something, but Gee made the same gesture for me to be quiet. I slurped my soup noisily as a joke, but she didn’t laugh.

Two men came into the restaurant and sat down at a table in the opposite corner of the café, next to a door leading to the kitchen. Big, powerful men, they were both wearing heavy coats that added to their sense of bulk. They didn’t talk but sat with their backs to the wall, looking at us. There was something in the way they sat that was threatening. They wouldn’t have been out of place in an East End gang.

“Do you know who those two men are?” Gee asked me in a soft whisper. She had her back to them.

“I may have seen them somewhere before,” I whispered back, suddenly anxious. “If I did, I guess that it would have had to be in Istanbul. Have they been following me?”

“No,” Gee replied, leaning across the table to me. “It would not have been possible for them to follow you here. But they have been following me since I arrived in Turkey. Look closely at the man nearest us,” Gee instructed. “Describe him to me.”

“Midthirties, slightly bald, with hair combed across his head,” I replied. “Big lad, probably works out with weights. Tough-looking. Not someone that I would like to meet in a dark alley.”

“Or in a dark restaurant,” Gee added unhelpfully. “What about the other man?”

“Older, maybe late forties, also unshaven. His left eye droops lower than his right…half-closed. Maybe got hurt in some fight. He doesn’t look as tough, probably has less to prove than the younger one.”

Gee looked at me, but her expression revealed nothing. “What was the last thing your uncle told you when he gave you the stone?” she asked.

For a moment, I couldn’t remember, but when I did remember, it sent a shiver down my spine. “He told me to protect it with my life.”

“Do you remember when you were in school?” Gee asked. “There was this question that teachers asked, you know, about Hitler, whether if you had met Hitler as a young man in a bar in Austria and if you knew what he was going to do—”

“Whether I would be morally justified in killing him?” I prompted.

“Yes,” she whispered. “Knowing what he would do, would it have been better to kill Hitler then, before he could kill millions, or to let him live?”

“I know the dilemma,” I replied. “But there is no way of knowing whether, if I killed him, someone else would take his place—someone worse. I read a book about that once, that Hitler had been killed in the First World War and that someone else became chancellor. And unlike Hitler, the new chancellor didn’t kill the Jews but used their skill and intelligence to develop a nuclear bomb before the Americans did. The whole world was worse off.”

“Yes, but if there wasn’t anyone else,” Gee insisted, “and if you knew that killing one or two men would save millions of lives, would you do it?”

I shrugged my shoulders. I didn’t know how to answer that question. I didn’t want to know how to answer it. “Are you suggesting that we kill those two men?” I asked her. I meant it as a joke, but it didn’t come out as one.

“The stone cannot fall into the wrong hands,” Gee continued. She was beginning to scare me.

“And those two men have the wrong hands?” I asked. I said it again half jokingly. I didn’t really believe what she was telling me. Gee nodded. “In that case, I suggest we leave…in a hurry.”

“You have a gift,” Gee said quietly, ignoring my suggestion. “Your uncle told me.”

“I don’t have a gift,” I protested.

Gee held up her hand to silence me. “He told me that you can read the future…that you can predict the future. He said that was why you were such a good trader on the financial markets and why he trusted you with his money.”

“That’s a bit strong,” I replied. “My uncle never trusted me with anything, except for this stone. And I am sorry to disappoint you, but I am not a fortune teller or a reader of tea leaves.”

“Tell me what you see now,” Gee instructed, totally ignoring what I had just told her.

“I see two men sitting in a café. I also see a young lady who isn’t listening to a word that I’m saying.” All this talk of telling the future had begun to annoy me.

“You are going to have to do better than that,” she replied, reaching over the table to take my two hands in hers. “Please tell me what you can see.”

The two men were in my line of vision. I could look at them carefully without their being aware that I was looking at them.

“The man nearest us,” I told Gee. “His jacket is open.”

“Is he carrying a gun?” Gee asked me. Now she had really begun to scare me.

“A gun?” I blurted out. “Of course he isn’t carrying a gun.”

Gee held her hand up to indicate that I should lower my voice. She told me to look again. I did as I was told.

“There is something under his jacket,” I replied carefully. “It could be a gun in a shoulder holster.”

As I said that, the man farthest from us stood up, stepped forward, and pulled out a knife. He leapt across to our table, and before I could react, he was holding Gee by her hair and had the knife at her throat. The older man hadn’t moved from his chair, but he was pointing a gun directly at me.

“The stone,” the older man said as he stood up and walked towards us. “Now you give me the stone.”

I reached my hand towards my jacket pocket. Whatever this stone was and whatever anyone said, I wasn’t going to let Gee, or anyone else, die for it.

At that precise moment, there was an explosion in the kitchen: a white light followed by the yellow of flames. As my eyes readjusted, I saw that Gee was on her feet and the two men were lying motionless on the restaurant floor, their throats neatly cut and thick blood seeping across the dusty wooden floor. It was all over in what seemed like less than a second.

The restaurant owner appeared at the door to his kitchen and then fell forward onto the floor, knocking over a chair and a table. Gee ran over to him and then called me across.

“Help me get him out of here,” she commanded. “This whole place is going to burn down.”

Together we dragged him out onto the street and onto the opposite pavement. Gee sat him upright; his face and chest were smeared with blood.

“Is he dead?” I asked Gee.

She shook her head. “It’s not his blood. It’s the blood of those two hoodlums from when we dragged him across the floor.”

There was another small explosion behind us, perhaps from a gas canister, and the roof of the restaurant caved in. The whole café was engulfed in flames; the heat was almost unbearable, even from the other side of the street.

“Are the other two men dead?” I asked. My legs had begun to shake uncontrollably, and I found it difficult to stand.

“Yes,” Gee replied coldly. “It was necessary. I had no choice. As I said, I could not allow them to get the stone.”

“But the explosion in the kitchen. How did you do that?”

“I didn’t,” she answered. “It was nothing to do with me—a gas leak that had been building for a few hours. But I knew that it was going to happen. That’s why I led the men there. Now let’s get the hell out of here.”

She reached out to take me by the hand. I leaned forward to take it but realised that it was covered in blood. It was then that I threw up, narrowly missing the restaurant owner, who was still half-sprawled across the pavement.

I woke early, just after dawn. Well, I hadn’t really slept at all. Gee had taken me back to my hotel room and had stayed with me for an hour or so. She had seemed in remarkably good spirits—as if murdering two people in cold blood was a normal occurrence for her.

“I didn’t murder them in cold blood,” she had protested when I accused her of it. “It was self-defence. Those men would have taken the stone and then killed us both. They would almost certainly have killed the restaurant owner as well. So I actually net saved one life tonight.”

I didn’t see it that way and couldn’t get the image out of my mind of those two dead men lying on the floor. I also hadn’t been able to get my legs to stop trembling.

At around midnight, Gee had put me to bed as if I were a child. “I think it would be better to sleep in separate rooms tonight,” she had said. “Just in case the police catch up with me.”

“What about me?” I had asked her.

“You have done nothing except help me rescue a man from a burning building,” she replied. “Now try to sleep.”

I got dressed in the early light of dawn and climbed the one flight of stairs to Gee’s room. I knocked on her door, but there was no answer. I tried the door. It was unlocked. I opened it and stepped into her room—or at least what had been her room, the room where we had spent the afternoon and night together just two days before.

The room was empty and the bed made. There was no sign of Gee or her small suitcase. The room had been cleaned, and there seemed something different about it. But perhaps that was just the early morning light.

I walked back to my own room and sat on the bed, unsure what to do. I must have sat there awhile, because when I looked at my watch, it showed 7:00 a.m. For some unknown reason, my watch had started to work again, and rather strangely. it was showing what I presumed to be the correct time.

I went down to the hotel lobby. Demir was standing behind the reception desk. He looked fresh, recently shaved, and with a clean, white shirt.

“Hello,” he said with a big smile. “We were worried about you. We thought you had checked out on us without paying.”

“Without paying?” I asked, not understanding what he meant. “But I have been here all the time.”

“Your bed was not slept in, and your things weren’t there. I thought you had done a runner.” Demir said the word runner with another smile; he was pleased with his English. “But you are here now; that is what matters.”

I looked at him blankly; he was making no sense.

“This letter arrived for you yesterday,” he said, taking an envelope from a drawer behind the reception desk. “It is from Israel. Jerusalem, I think.”

“Yesterday,” I repeated stupidly. “Why didn’t you give it to me yesterday?”

“Because you weren’t here,” Demir replied. “As I just told you, I thought you had left without paying.”

“But my things were still in my room.”

“Not yesterday they weren’t,” he replied, irritated that I was continuing to argue with him. “But as I said, you are here now.”

He handed me the letter. I recognised Gee’s handwriting, the same as on the envelope she had left for me in Istanbul. The letter was postmarked Jerusalem, 29th September 1986, the day that I had left Istanbul. I opened and read it.

Dear Will,

Please bring the stone to Israel. I have no choice but to ask you to do this for me. I cannot do it myself. I will meet you in Bethlehem on the silver cross at the Church of the Nativity at noon on your birthday.

You did everything (and more) that was expected of you. Please do not worry about the incident in the café last night. No one will ever make the connection with you.

Thank you for everything.

Gee

PS I am sending someone to keep an eye on you and to keep you safe.

I suddenly felt lightheaded, and I leaned against the reception desk for fear of falling over. How could Gee have known when she wrote the letter about “the incident” in the restaurant? And how come the letter arrived at the hotel the previous day, before “the incident” even occurred? None of it made any sense.

“The girl on the second floor, room six?” I asked Demir, my voice faltering. “Did she check out this morning? Or did she check out last night?”

Demir looked confused. “I am sorry, sir,” he said. “There is no one in that room. It has been empty for a while. It is the off-season now. We don’t have many guests.”

“But the girl that has been staying here—the one I had breakfast with yesterday—she was staying in that room.”

“I am sorry, sir.” Demir had begun to look alarmed. “We have no girl staying here. And I am afraid I haven’t seen you breakfasting with anyone.”

He was obviously lying to me. I decided to take a different tack.

“Have you heard of an accident in the town last night?” I asked. “Of a fire in a restaurant, of people being killed?”

“No,” Demir replied. “But I don’t understand what you mean,” he added. “Are you saying that a girl has been hurt, a tourist? That would be terrible.”

That’s not what I had been saying. I had been talking of the two men that we had left lying on the restaurant floor the previous evening. “But if someone had been killed, you would have heard of it?” I asked him.

“Ürgüp is a small place,” he replied. “Not much happens here. That is why I like it. But, yes, if someone had been killed last night, I am sure I would have heard about it.” He looked at me suspiciously for a moment, probably wondering about my sanity.

“Now,” he said after a while, “why don’t you have some breakfast? I will make you some coffee—some strong, fresh coffee. I always find that helps.”

He came out from behind his desk, led me into the dining room, and sat me down at the table by the window. He was behaving as if I were mentally ill. And perhaps I was. I wondered if I was having some sort of posttraumatic reaction to the fight and the explosion the previous evening.

Demir brought me some coffee, a couple of pastries, and a Turkish croissant. “Eat this,” he said. “It will make you feel better.”

I tried to make sense of it all as I drank my coffee. I couldn’t understand why Gee had left without saying good-bye or why she had chosen to say good-bye in a letter.

What was the weirdest of all was that she had posted that letter before she had left Israel. How did she know when she wrote the letter that I would have, as she had written, “done all that had been expected of me”?

I took out the letter again and reread it. It still made no sense.

What was just as puzzling was this business about meeting her in Bethlehem on my birthday. My birthday was over one month away. I couldn’t imagine hanging around on my own in Turkey till then, especially if the police were looking for me in connection with the restaurant fire.

It was then that I decided I had to get out of Turkey and go back to London. Once I was home, I could talk to my uncle, and together we could decide whether I should take the stone to Israel or let someone else do it.

If someone else took it, I would just stay on in London, sell the flat, find another job, and start again.

Yes, that was what I would do; I would go home. I would catch a bus back to Ankara that afternoon and then the overnight train back to Istanbul and hopefully a plane to London the following day.

But in the meantime, I needed a drink.