The Haji's Tall Tales

After helping the Bishop settle in to his temporary lodgings with Abbé Musa, the Haji was no longer obliged to dote on the young man. All the same, he decided to remain with us for a good number of months. Shortly afterwards, he befriended the young sisters Chrysanthi Simoglou and Maya. Chrysanthi had just turned seven the previous year. Maya was one of those war orphans, so we did not know how old she was for certain, but she was clearly younger than Chrysanthi. The former had fallen in love with the poor child when she first laid eyes on her. She had vowed to adopt Maya as her own to protect the young one with her own life. This vow manifests itself in running each other down in endless rounds around the dining hall, pulling each other's hair, and falling fast asleep on each other when they finally run out of energy.

The girls now find ample amusement in tormenting our newcomer, the Haji. The man is obviously advanced in age, but it is impossible to tell how old: on one hand, a lifetime spent on the road gave him a lean, sinewy, almost youthful build, with which he is able to weather the elements; on the other hand, his wizened, beaten face perennially radiates desolation, and his eyes have a distant look in them which say: I have seen enough; I have seen way too much. This amuses Chrysanthi to no end, who loves nothing more than to ask him:
"Mister Haji, when will you finally die?"

And the sad man invariably casts his gaze across the lake, heaves a long drawn-out sigh, and croaks:
"Everyone has a day when they are due... As for me, that day has long passed."

Chrysanthi Simoglou thinks the world of the old man, and never fails to recount her litany of praises for him before the rest of the grown-ups. The Haji has been to everywhere, seen all the places, knew all of the people. He knows stories from when the world was first formed, and when people still lived in the South. He knows answers to her toughest questions about the world, the kind which stumped every other adult. He is physically incapable of dying.

One evening, in a regular evening gathering after dinner, the Abbé himself invited the Haji to speak, and asked, "We have heard from some wise men that the Earth is flat as a disc, and from others that the Earth is a giant ball. Which of these stories is the right one?"

The Haji replied, "The Earth is a disc, but sits atop a sphere, which is bigger and grander than any world we have ever imagined." And everyone was amazed at his reply.

The Haji responds only to his title; if he had gone by any other name, then he no longer remembered it, and quite likely forgot it on purpose. By tradition the title of Haji was granted to men who had made a pilgrimage to Mecca, if they were Muslim, or to Jerusalem, if they were Jew or Christian. Once or twice someone voiced the objection that both of these places lie far to the South and are now unreachable, and there could have been no Haji for many centuries, but no one has been able to explain how the old man had earned this title.

One day, the Haji told us the story of a country which was created by God on the eighth day, after even he had gone to rest; as if he had unknowingly left out forming an entire landmass during the first day, and rose again to complete the job haphazardly.

The Haji set the stage at the the place where the Little Ocean joined the Great Ocean, at the very edge of the world where the waters from the little disc drains into the great sphere, between Tunu of the Skrælingjar and Norway. Beneath this oceanic passage here lived two gigantic sea-monsters, Eurasia and America, who were husband and wife. Their relationship, however, was so poisoned by jealousy that the two monsters fought constantly. During one particularly violent altercation they opened the Gates of Hell itself, and dragged out from the chasm huge half-molten boulders to heave at one another.

"And then what happened!" yelped little Maya, who turned out to be following the story very attentively.

And then the fight got so intense that the rest of the world could not be in peace anymore, and so God intervened. He trapped both sea-dragons under a huge pile of the boulders they had dug out so they could no longer fight, and that pile of rock was so massive that it rose above the waters, and became what we now call Iceland. The End.

As an afterthought, the Haji added that when the island was first formed it was devoid of a landscape, like a barren desert, and our Creator Dear took extra pleasure in this opportunity to repeat the act of his Creation in Iceland, sprinkling in the beautiful mountains and valleys as chef sprinkles condiments into a pot of stew. For an amusing side project, he extruded the coastline out west and made it into a dense network of headlands and fjords which were so numerous that they were uncountable. These are what we now know to be the Westfjords. Þormóður (the viking who hunted for his sworn brother up and down the far west, from Kiev in the Ukraine to Nuuk in Greenland) grew up in this strange land, but that would be a story for another day again.

The Bishop knew the Westfjords. "When I was working with the Mitropol at Archangel, we always met traders who were from there." This was a real place and known throughout the Barentines for its fine dried meats and ivory. Nonetheless, we concluded that the story of the sea-dragons was deemed far too fantastic to be for anything beyond keeping the children happy.

Young Nikos, Chrysanthi's brother, was always anxious to steer the conversation to the real problems of the present day, namely the ongoing war between the north and south of Taimiria. He pitched this question to the storyteller: "Haji, you are always talking about things that happened long ago. What can you say about now? Does the North really stand a chance against the princes, who have been ordained by Christ?"

And the Haji drew a long sigh and replied: "In Ancient Armenia, the noble families sought to bolster their stature by claiming the most illustrious lineage that they could, even on the flimsiest evidence. The Bagratids claimed to be sons of King David, the Ardzrouni drew their family tree back to the Emperors of Assyria, and the Mamikonian spun the tale that they were the remnants of the great Han Dynasty of China. What is different now that the Prince of Toyogarov claims to be the saviour of Christianity? He is no more a Christian than the Mamikonians were Chinese."

"There is nothing that the man has not seen before!" exclaimed the people of Amatodate, and everyone was finally convinced of the Haji's sagacity.

Statue of St. Vartan Mamikonian in Yerevan, Armenia (Vladimer Shioshvili/Wikimedia Commons)

Notes
1) The geological history of Iceland (link to a quick overview) is re-told in the Haji's sea-monster story.
2) The story of Þormóður Kolbrúnarskáld Bessason of the Fóstbrœðra Saga, also recounted by Halldór Laxness in Wayward Heroes (1952), is the Haji's "story for another day".
3) Characters Chrysanthi and Nikos Simoglou were first introduced in Parmiakert.
4) The link between the Mamikonian family and the Chinese is explored in this article: Robert Bedrosian, China and the Chinese according to 5-13th Century Classical Armenian Sources. Armenian Review Vol. 34 No.1-133 (1981) pp. 17-24.
5) I have quietly decided that the Haji does not go by any given name, apart from his title.