Contributed by Gene Kelly, 2017
Fame and fortune are sought by some with diligence and determination. Others are born to bear it and wonder why. They envy the enjoyment of privacy and anonymity that common folk take for granted. What would make me so content with commonality? Well, sleeping in the same bedroom as a giant in time did it.
First, it was walking through the same doorway as an emperor a century after he did, that set me to wondering. What made him so eccentric? He died some 60 years before I crossed his path, and I just unwittingly did so at the time. But little or nothing was unwitting, about where he went and what he did. It took a desk clerk in what I thought was a simple, antiquated, old dive hotel to wake me up to destiny.
I strolled nonchalantly into the lobby from the informal square, just inside Jaffa Gate, within the walls of Old Jerusalem. I had finished a contractual labor obligation in Saudi Arabia that had disconcerting details. For obvious reasons, my employer was not forthcoming in the recruitment process, about international criminal endeavors.
I had gradually become aware that I was an enabler, for gun running and bootlegging. Proffered wealth for becoming an insider motivated my exit. Being a wealthy insomniac would have put all my motives, from both altruism and self-interest into the tilt mode. I remembered my youthful days, shaking pinball machines into dysfunction. I wanted out and made an orderly exit by way of Egypt, a land of ancient fascinations. Going still and loitering in Cheops tomb, in the heart of his pyramid had rewards.
The whole journey was seat of the pants, my walking into a crossroad with destiny. There are no direct links between most Arab countries and Israel, so I traversed the Sinai Peninsula and entered Israel via Elat. The family feud between Abraham’s descendants endures as predicted, thousands of years ago. The two sides of the Semite coin, Jew and Arab were daily impacting my first foray in the Middle East; an excellent preparation for later time in Mesopotamia. They were giving me, an objective outside outlander, education that introduced me to the haunt of an emperor. Yes, it was a haunt by more than one definition.
When I asked the desk clerk for a room, it was all just a routine transaction until, after presenting my passport and money, she opened up about the setting we were in. She got a firm grip on my attention when she said, “Kaiser Wilhelm slept here. So did General Allenby.”
I was all ears and responded, “Do say on, please. I am fascinated.”
My brevity was rewarded when she continued, “This hotel was named “The New Imperial” when it was built in the mid 1890s. Kaiser Wilhelm stayed here during his diplomatic tour of the Turkish Empire, when it was only two years old.”
I urged her, “Do tell me more. So, I am on the heels of an emperor?”
To my delight she continued, “That big gap in the wall beside Jaffa Gate was made, so he could enter the city on horseback as he had requested.”
I wondered aloud, “So, why didn’t he just come through the gate? It would have saved the effort of tearing down part of the wall.”
And then I got a taste of the bizarre finer points of diplomacy, “Oh no, the Turks wanted to continue good relations with the emperor, so they took steps to grant his request to enter the city on horseback. But in diplomatic protocol of the time, entering through a gate astride a horse was a conqueror’s entrance, and they denied him that. But they did honor his request to the letter.”
I was amused. So the Kaiser, German for Caesar, was thwarted from the appearance of conquest that would have been troubling for other potentates like the Russian Czar, another bearer of the distinguished title, Caesar. How Julius would have been amazed that his name would come down in time two thousand years, and still cause semantic competition and contention. He didn’t end like the English bard scripted, “Et tu, Brute?”
I thanked the clerk for her service, and made it clear I was grateful for her educating me. Over the course of the week I resided there, I bothered the staff, until I was rotated into the suite that the German Caesar had occupied. There I slept where the eldest grandson of Queen Victoria, ruler of the British Empire and Empress of India had slept. There I a common enough globe trotter, true to the wanderlust of my Viking ancestors, resided within the same walls as an emperor for the same purpose, a place to sleep.
Since Wilhelm was born a royal and married a royal, he certainly never knew the relaxed commonality I know. And should I pity him for the constant public expectations he was all his life subjected to? He was noted for being difficult, and came off as eccentric on occasion and why not? He wasn’t asked if he wanted to run an empire. His relatives were rulers of multiple empires competing with his. The entire world had an interest, in what could never be just his domestic concerns. How unbearable it must have been on occasion.
Other complexities were imposed on Wilhelm. During his complicated delivery, the doctor damaged his left arm, leaving it stunted and virtually dysfunctional. The leader of the Second German Reich was handicapped, during the nineteenth century naturalist debate over eugenics. That discussion would in time wreak a nightmare of industrialized murder, during the National Socialist Third Reich. The acronym “Nazi” would aid the Soviet propaganda assignment as a right wing identifier, exactly the opposite of its origin. Orwell was right. After his abdication at the close of WWI, Wilhelm went into exile in the Netherlands. He died in 1941.
On two separate mornings, as I came out of sleep in the modern Caesar’s bedchamber, I heard unearthly hellish howling, on the border of sleep and wakefulness. There in Jerusalem, the capitol of Judaism, across the square from what is guessed to be the remains of Herod’s Palace, a window in time and place contradicting naturalism opened for me, a common fellow but also an uncommon Mr. Mystic. Yes, Julius and Wilhelm both sleep now, and I am left to wonder, how they reckoned themselves when awake, in the world around them.