Istanbul, October 8, 1982

Miss Dorothea Kwaszniewska--Cracow

I'm appalled by your selfishness and cruel verdict. You've destroyed Isaac's life and mine. I was always afraid of your science and sensed it would do me harm. I hope you know what happened and what you did.

That morning I went down to breakfast resolved to shoot Muawia as soon as he appeared in the hotel garden, where we eat. I sat down and waited in anticipation. I watched the shadows of the birds overhead tumble down the garden walls. And then everything that there was no way of predicting happened. The man appeared and I immediately knew who he was. He wore a face as dark as bread, and had a head of graying hair, and looked as though he had fishbones in his mustache. But growing through the scar on his temple was a tuft of black hair that cannot turn gray. Dr. Muawia walked straight over to my table and asked if he could sit down. He had a noticeable limp, and one of his eyes was closed, like a small, pursed mouth. I was petrified. I released the safety catch on the revolver in my handbag and was on my guard. Only four-year-old Manuil was with us in the garden; he was playing under a nearby table.

"Certainly," I said, and the man put something on the table that was to change my life forever. It was an ordinary pile of paper.

He knows the subject of my report--he said, sitting down--and wants to ask me something in connection with my field of work. We spoke in English. He was shivering; he was colder than I was, his teeth were chattering, but he did nothing to hide or stop it. He warmed his fingers on his pipe and blew smoke into his sleeves. He quickly explained what it was all about. It was about Cyril's "Khazar Orations."

"I heave read through everything dealing with the 'Khazar Orations'," he said, "and I have found no mention of these texts still being in existence. Is it possible that nobody knows that fragments of Cyril's 'Khazar Orations' were preserved and even printed a few hundred years ago?"

I was flabbergasted. What this man was saying would be the greatest discovery to have been made in my field, in Slavistics, since its inception as a science. If it was true.

"Where did you get such an idea?" I asked in astonishment, giving my own explanation with a strange feeling of uncertainty. "Cyril's 'Khazar Orations' . . . are known to science only through the mention made of them in Cyril's biography, which is how we know that they existed at all. There can be o question of some preserved manuscript or even published text of these speeches."

"That's what I wanted to check," Said Dr. Muawia. "Now it will be known that precisely the opposite is true. . . ."

And he gave me a few of the Xeroxed sheets of paper laying on the table in front of him.

"You needn't ask where I got them. They were found in the 12th century by a fellow tribesman of yours, Judah Halevi the poet, who included them in his book about the Khazars. Describing the famous polemic, he cited the words of the Christian participant in the debate, calling him the Philosopher, which is how the same personage is called by the writer of Cyril's life in connection with the same polemic. Cyril's name, like that of the Arab participant, was omitted by this Jewish source, which gives only the university title of the Christian participant, and that's why nobody ever looked for Cyril's text in Judah Halevi's Khazar chronicle."

I looked at Dr. Muawia as though he were somebody who had nothing to do with that wounded man of the green eyes who had seated himself at my table only a few minutes ago. It was all so convincing, so simple, it all fit in with everything science knows about this question, that it's a wonder nobody had ever thought of looking for the text this way before.

"There's a slight problem here," I finally said to Dr. Muawia. "Halevi's book refers to the 8th century, but Cyril's Khazar missions didn't take place until the 9th century, until the year 861."

"He who knows the right way can also take the shortcut!" observed Dr. Muawia. "We are not interested in dates, but whether Halevi, who lived after Cyril's time, had access to the 'Khazar Orations' when he wrote his book on the Khazars. A whether he used them in his book, there where he cites the words of the Christian participant of the Khazar polemic. Let me say right off that in Halevi's book the Christian sage's speech has unquestionable similarities to the preserved fragments of Cyril's own arguments. I know you've translated Cyril's life into English, so you'll easily recognize these sections. For instance, whose text is this? It speaks of man being midway between angel and animal. . . ."

Naturally, I recognized it and recited by heart:

" 'As the All-Creator, God created man midway between angel and animal--separating him by speech and reason from animals, and by anger and lust from angels, and whichever of these parts he nears, he comes closer to those above or those below. . . .' That," I said, "is from the life of Cyril, in the section on his Agaren mission."

"Correct, but it also appears in the fifth part of Halevi's book, in the polemic with the Philosopher. There are other such similarities. Most important of all is that the speech itself, which in the Khazar polemic Halevi attributes to the Christian participant, dwells on matters which Cyril, according to his biography, raised in that polemic. Both texts talk about the Holy Trinity and the laws that preceded Moses, about eating forbidden kinds of meat, and, lastly, about doctors who heal contrary to the way they should. They give the same argument, that the soul is at its strongest when the body is at its weakest (around the age of fifty), etc.

"Also, the Khazar kaghan reproaches the Arab and Hebrew participants in the polemic, again according to Halevi, because their books of revelation (Koran and Torah) are written in languages that mean nothing to the Khazars, Hindus, or other peoples who do not understand them. This is one of the basic arguments given in the life of Cyril against the Trilinguists (who accept only Greek, Hebrew, and Latin at liturgical languages), and clearly here the kaghan was influences by the Christian participant in the polemic, expressing convictions which we know to have been really Cyril's. Halevi merely conveyed them.

"Finally, there are two last points to be made. First, we do not know everything that was actually said in the lost 'Khazar Orations' of Constantine of Thessalonica (Cyril), and we do not know what Halevi's book has taken from them. In other words, it's reasonable to assume that there is more than I have mentioned here. Second, the section of Halevi's book that deals with the Christian participant in the polemic is damaged. It has not been preserved in the Arabic original, only in its later Hebrew translation, while, as is known, the printed editions of Halevi's book, especially those from the 16th century, were subjected to Christian censorship.

"In short, Halevi's book on the Khazars preserved in part, although we do not know to what extent, Cyril's 'Khazar Orations'. Our conference here in Istanbul," concluded Dr. Muawia, "will be attended by a Dr. Isailo Suk, who is fluent in Arabic and studies Islamic sources on the Khazar Polemic. He told me he had a 17th-century Khazar dictionary published by somebody named Daubmannus, and it shows that Halevi used Cyril's 'Khazar Orations'. I came to ask you whether you would talk to Dr. Suk. He won't talk to me. He says he's only interested in Arabs from a thousand and more years ago. He has no time for others. Would you help me to contact Dr. Suk and clear up this matter?"

Dr. Abu Kabir Muawia finished his speech, and suddenly the various lines of thought in my mind came together like lightning. If you forget the direction time follows, there's always love as a compass. Time always abandons it. After so many years, I was again seized by your cursed thirst for science, and I betrayed Isaac. Instead of firing the gun, I rushed to call Dr. Suk, leaving behind my papers and underneath them, the gun. There was nobody in the lobby; in the kitchen somebody was toasting a slice of bread over the fire and eating. I saw Van der Spaak coming out of one of the rooms and realized that the room was Dr. Suk's. I knocked, but nobody answered. Rapid footsteps were pattering behind me and, and between them could be felt the heat of female flesh. I knocked again, and the door swung ajar. At first, all I saw was a small night table with some kind of egg and a key on a saucer. I pushed the door open a bit father and screamed. Dr. Suk was lying in bed, smothered by a pillow. He was lying there, biting his mustache as though he were racing against the wind. I ran out screaming, and suddenly there was a shot from the garden. It was just one shot, but I heard it with each ear separately. I immediately recognized the sound of my own gun. I flew down into the garden, only to find Dr. Muawia laying on the gravel, his head blown off. . . . At the next table, the gloved boy was sipping his chocolate milk as though nothing had happened. . . .There was nobody else in the garden.

I was taken into custody, the Smith and Wesson on which they found my fingerprints was taken as evidence, and I was accused of the premeditated murder of Dr. Abu Kabir Muawia. I am writing this letter from prison, where I'm being kept in detention, and I still don't understand what happened. In my mouth I have a fresh-water spring and a double-edged sword. . . . Who killed Dr. Muawia? Imagine, the indictment reads: "A Jewess murders and Arab in revenge!" The entire Islamic international, the entire Egyptian and Turkish public, will rise against me. "Your Lord will deliver you to your enemies to be beaten; you will encounter them on one road and flee them on seven. . . ."How do you prove that you didn't do what you had actually intended to do? You have to find a thundering lie, one as fearful and strong as the father of rain, to prove the truth. Horns in place of eyes are needed by anybody who wants to invent such a lie. If I find it, I'll live, and then I'll bring you from Cracow to me in Israel and return to the science of our youth. "We shall be saved by our false victim," said one of our two fathers. . . . It's hard enough to endure His mercy, let alone His anger.

P.S. I'm enclosing the Philosopher's rejoinders from Halevi's book on the Khazars (Liber Corsi), which Dr. Muawia clamed were fragments of the lost "Khazar Orations" of Constantine the Philosopher, St. Cyril.