Balthasar's Odyssey by Amin Maalouf

fact, some important things did happen then — but has there ever been any year in which no important things happened?
    â€œâ€˜In the old days,’ my father says, ‘there was always a period of respite between one calamity and the next, but since that accursed year disasters have followed one another in an uninterrupted stream. We have never experienced such a succession of woes. Isn’t that a sign in itself?’
    â€œOne day I lost patience and said to him, ‘Father, I always thought that was supposed to be the year of the Resurrection. That it would put an end to our sufferings, and that we had to look forward to it with joy and hope!’ He answered: ‘These pains are just birth-pangs; this blood is the blood that goes with deliverance!’
    â€œSo for seventeen years my father has been on the look-out for signs. But not always with the same degree of enthusiasm. Sometimes he’d let months go by without mentioning them once, then something would happen — some trouble in the family, or plague, famine or a visit from an important person — and it would all start up again. These last few years, although he’s had serious health problems, he’s only referred to the Resurrection as a distant hope. But a few months ago he started to get agitated again. The rumours circulating among the Christians about the imminent end of the world have completely upset him. Our community never stops discussing what is going and what is not going to happen, what we should be dreading and what we should be hoping for. Every time a rabbi from Damascus, Jerusalem or Tiberias, Egypt, Gaza or Smyrna passes through Aleppo, everyone crowds round him in a frenzy to find out what he knows or predicts.
    â€œAnd so, a few weeks back, tired of hearing so many contradictory opinions, my father got it into his head to go to Constantinople to seek the opinion of an ancient hakim originating, like us, from Toledo. He is the only person who knows the truth, according to my father. ‘If he tells me the hour is come, I’ll leave everything and spend all my time in prayer and meditation; if he tells me the hour is not come, I’ll go back to my ordinary life.’
    â€œThere could be no question of letting him travel the roads — he’s more than seventy years old and can scarcely stand upright — so I decided I’d go and see the rabbi in Constantinople, to put to him all the questions my father would like to ask and come back with the answers.
    â€œSo that’s how I come to be in this caravan — like you, because of these crazy rumours. Though neither of us can help laughing, deep down inside, at people’s gullibility.”
    It’s very kind of Maïmoun to compare my attitude with his. They’re only superficially alike. He took to the road out of filial piety, without changing his own convictions; whereas I let myself be influenced by the folly around me. But I didn’t say so: why belittle myself in the eyes of someone I respect? And why should I stress the differences between us when he is always pointing out the similarities?
    27 September
    Today’s stage of the journey will have been less arduous than the preceding ones. After four days on the steep paths of the Taurus mountains, with stretches that are often narrow and dangerous, we reached the Anatolian plain. And after ill-kept khans, infested with rough janissaries — who were theoretically supposed to protect us from highwaymen, but whose looks were in fact so far from reassuring that we shut ourselves up in our quarters — we had the good fortune to come upon a respectable inn, patronised by travelling merchants.
    The innkeeper soon took the shine off our satisfaction, however, when he told us of rumours reaching here from Konya, according to which the town has been struck by the plague, and its gates closed to all travellers.
    Disturbing as these tidings were, they had the