Damascus Gate Page 11

But what the soldier truly wanted to do was build a boat and sail across the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, back to the Florida Keys.

  "But not back to the T-shirt business?" Lucas asked.

  "Nah. It was rotten. Boring. Embarrassing. But the sea is what I like."

  Lucas let him out pretty far from the sea, at a command post across from a settlement called Kfar Silber. The old sergeant was silent and somber. Lucas's impulse was to ask where he came from. But Israel was like the Old West, in that such a question was considered bad form and could open a world of grief, horror, compromise.

  At one point, the sergeant took out a pack of Israeli cigarettes and offered one to Lucas. When Lucas declined, he put one in his own mouth.

  "Don't mind?"

  "Not in the least," Lucas said.

  "American?"

  "Yes."

  "Jewish?"

  Lucas hesitated. The sergeant paused in the act of lighting his cigarette.

  "No," said Lucas. Not today, thanks.

  "Correspondent?" the sergeant asked. Lucas remembered the press sign he was displaying. "Where you coming from?"

  "Ein Gedi," Lucas said. "For the waters."

  "Like it?"

  "I do," Lucas said. "I think it's good for me."

  "Sure it's good for you," said the sergeant.

  They drove all the way back to Jerusalem together.

  11

  STANDING under the lights at Mister Stanley's again, Sonia experienced a moment of utter confusion. Who are we? What place is this?

  The place was full of Russians. Her backup was bass and piano, the former late of the Kiev Institute. The piano player, who could play every instrument known to man, was Razz Melker, a former junkie, yeshiva student and Jew for Jesus who was now a Jew for someone similar up in Safed. In any case, he was an old flame from her junkier days and a marvelous accompanist who could read your mind and sound your soul. Everyone on stage was clean and sober for the occasion. The house was noisy and boozy.

  When the lights were as she liked them, she told the piano player, " Alef, Razz, please." So Razz, a mysterian who believed that alef invoked the primal waters and the first ray of light, sounded the key in which it all began. And, wondering if her chops were there, wondering if the aging instrument would kindly engage, she threw her shoulders back and brought it up, an old Fran Landesman song called "Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most."

  It came out fine, quieted them, and the end of the first verse drew a little ooh-aah thing that was nice too. She could feel them settling back to enjoy themselves. Now, she thought, if they would just behave. And the applause was solid and, she hoped, not altogether ignorant. Because they had hipsters in Russia too, and a lot of them had come to Israel. And there were other sorts of people in the crowd, including some of her friends.

  "So while the theme is spring, comrades," she told them—and you always got a laugh with "comrades"—"the next one is called 'Spring Will Be a Little Late This Year.'"

  The title drew applause. Sometimes she sang arcane songs, on the theory that if her shows failed as performance, they might hold up as musicology. But tonight it seemed she was more or less on the money and the room knew what it liked. She gave them "Spring" in homage to the career of Leslie Uggams. It went well.

  Sonia's first gig had been in the Village, at a little place called Dogberry's, working for a share of the bar money. After checking coats all evening for the uptown Frenchmen she would hasten out of the Sheridan Square subway stop and down Grove Street and wriggle into the black thing that hung in her tiny dressing room. There had been an upstairs lounge where she performed and a gay piano bar downstairs, so every time a lounge customer got up to pee and opened the hall door, Ethel Merman imitations would resound from the space below.

  Her Sufi master in New York had been musical and sent her back to singing. It had been years since her training, and she had had to bring it all back as well as she was able. As a child, she had listened to all the singers. The white ones intimidated her less, so she took some of them as models, starting with Marian Harris and Ruth Etting. Then June Christy, Anita O'Day and notably Julie London, with whom she had fallen in love from afar, and above all Annie Ross of Hendricks, Lambert and Ross, doing Basie and "Twisted." The great soul singers were her true idols but she felt them beyond her. Sometimes, though, she tried to sound like Chaka Khan. And every once in a while, if she had a buzz on, if she thought nobody heard, no one much saw, she might have a shot at Miss Sarah Vaughan, which she dared do only in cold, precise imitation, as ceremony and celebration. In time she actually came to think of herself as something of a white singer, lacking the intensity for jazz but funny enough, salty enough, for cabaret.

  She closed the first set with "How Long Has This Been Going On?" after the manner of Miss Sarah and drew a rather rousing ovation.

  "Thank you, comrades. Thanks for the prolonged stormy applause."

  Then there was a multicultural outpouring of appreciation: some people threw shekels or American bills or flowers. The odd sport even occasionally tossed a low-grade diamond in a cotton handkerchief. She only picked up a couple of roses and kissed her hand to them. She was on her way to her friends' table when a man intercepted her. He had dark eyes and a tanned, open face and he seemed to contain some peculiar excitement.

  "That's the greatest Sarah Vaughan I've ever seen," he told her. "Since I saw Sarah Vaughan."

  She gave him a sweet professional smile and said, "Thank you so much."

  "My name is Chris Lucas," Lucas said. "I got your name from Janusz Zimmer. You were recommended to me as a student of Sufism, and I wondered if we could chat for a bit." When she failed to answer he added, "You know, it's interesting. Working here. And studying faith."

  Sonia was in no hurry to talk to friends of Janusz's. "Sorry," she said sweetly, "I'm joining friends."

  "I just meant for a minute or two."

  She gave him a little routine that read: Funny, I can't hear you, and you seem not to be able to hear me—and walked delicately around him. She was going to sit with her NGOnik friends.

  One of the reasons Stanley favored Sonia's performances at his club was that they tended to attract Sonia's colleagues from the nongovernmental organizations engaged in good works in the area. These were a coven of conspicuously foreign girls from the nicer countries of the world; Sonia had worked with most of them in Somalia and the Sudan. These girls might be Danish or Swedish or Finnish, Canadian or Irish—fair, boreal creatures whose grannies and great-aunts had been missionaries to the hot world and who labored on in the same vineyard, chastened and rigorously nonjudgmental, demystified but no less intense.

  This evening, two of the NGOniks were at Sonia's table: a middle-aged Danish woman named Inge Rikker and a toothy, towheaded young rodeo queen named Helen Henderson. Young Henderson was a former serving Rose of Saskatoon, so they all called her the Rose. They both worked for the United Nations in the Gaza Strip. Sonia had been expecting a third, her Irish chum Nuala Rice, who was with an outfit known as the International Children's Foundation.

  Inge and the Rose applauded rowdily. Sonia bent and hugged them.

  "Hi, guys. Where's Nuala?"

  "Back with Stanley," Helen said.

  Sonia sat down and poured herself a long glass of mineral water from the bottle on the table.

  "Having any adventures?" she asked Inge and Helen. They were both working out of the Khan Yunis camp in the Gaza Strip.

  "We're still chasing Abu Baraka," Inge said.

  "Abu and his band of merry pranksters," said Helen. "We almost nailed him the other night."

  "Who's that?" Sonia asked.

  Helen looked at her with a faint frown of disapproval. "You haven't heard of Abu Baraka? I guess you've been meditating, huh?"

  "Give me a break," Sonia said. "I haven't been down there in months."

  So they told her the story of Abu Baraka, the avenger of Gaza.

  "The Father of Mercy, he calls himself. And ther
e's nothing about him in the Jerusalem Post." Inge showed them the bleak smile in which her twenty years of recent African history remained unresolved. "Or in the American papers."

  Sonia began to feel they were ganging up on her. "Did you complain to the army?" she asked.

  "The army says they don't know who he is," said Inge. "Officially."

  "And unofficially?"

  "Unofficially," said the Rose, "they don't give a shit. They say, 'Give us evidence.'"

  "Has he killed anyone?"

  "We don't know. If he has, it's gone unreported. He's a crippler. He cripples."

  "The attacks are made to appear intracommunal," Inge said. "But our Palestinian lawyer says they make no sense that way. In any case, we have no proof."

  "So what if you had? What can you do?"

  "Confront the bastard," declared the Rose. "That's my strategy."

  Inge and Sonia exchanged looks. The Rose was twenty-five years old. She had worked in the Caribbean, and she liked to drive the back roads of the Occupied Territories in a Jeep Laredo whose bumper sticker read STUDY ARSE ME, an injunction in which neither the Palestinian shebab nor the IDF troopers needed encouragement. She understood it to be a Jamaican phrase of defiance. The sentiment had been underlined on her arrival by the extremely tight, faded denim shorts she had planned to wear on the job, until advised of their ungodliness. Muslims in Jamaica, she had explained, never seemed to mind.

  Presently a scented French-sounding young man with a gold chain at his neck arrived to conduct the Rose to the floor, where the two of them began dancing to Abba. Inge watched her go with motherly forbearance.

  "Fearless," she said.

  "You gotta love her," said Sonia, who had her doubts.

  "The father's a general, so they say. A war hero."

  "No fooling?" Sonia said.

  "But not your father," Inge said, and Sonia realized she had been drinking.

  "My daddy was not a general," she told her friend. "Not even a colonel."

  "What then?"

  "A poet," she told Inge. "Really cool but sort of unsung."

  Inge kept smiling. "About Abu Baraka," she said. "The Rose would be unwise to confront him. He hit Nuala good and hard last week. At night, his face blacked up. Him or one of his boys."

  "I suppose," Sonia said, "some night he's going to kill someone."

  "We're working with the Israeli Human Rights Coalition," said Inge.

  "One thing you can depend on," Sonia told her. "When the killing comes, the wrong people always get it. It's the first principle of race riots. The wrong people, either side. Well," she said, looking at her watch, "I'm almost on again. I want to say hi to Nuala."

  Inge reached out and took hold of her arm.

  "But if we found this man," she said, "these men—we could build a case. You and I and the Israeli civil rights groups. I'm Danish, you're Jewish. People might pay attention to us."

  "I don't know, Inge."

  "As someone said," Inge declared, "to work down there you have to have a center. If you don't, you can't."

  "I think that was me," Sonia said. "I said that."

  "It sounds like you," Inge said.

  Sonia disengaged herself and went into the backstage area to one side of the room. In a small, brightly lit room she found Nuala and Stanley. Stanley was sitting astride a folding chair with his holy fool's smile. Nuala, looking flushed and manic, was sitting on the makeup table with her back to the long mirror. She opened her arms for Sonia.

  "Hurrah," she said. "You wonderful girl. I was watching."

  They embraced; Sonia thought she seemed preoccupied. Nuala was tall and lithe, with black hair and pale freckled skin. Her eyes were very blue and the sort called piercing. In her early thirties, she had a few wrinkles beside them from a life under equatorial skies. That night she displayed the remnants of a shiner, still slightly swollen and empurpled above her delicate dead-white cheek.

  "Hurrah, hurrah," said Stanley, beaming at Sonia.

  "What are you two up to?" She winced at the sight of Nuala's eye.

  "I thought it was a rifle butt. But I guess it was his fist."

  "Maria Clara sends her love," Stanley told Sonia. "She'll be back from South America tomorrow."

  Sonia, who wanted nothing to do with Maria Clara, ignored him. "Come and gossip with me after this set," she said to Nuala. "I want to hear about everything."

  "Have you missed us, Sonia?" Nuala asked. "We've missed you. But I can't come out, you see. There's a chap in the audience I don't want to run into."

  "Who?"

  "Oh, the man who just spoke to you. An American reporter. Nice, but I don't want him to see me here."

  "Well," Sonia said. "Of course I've missed you." After a moment she asked, "What's he after, the reporter?"

  "He doesn't know what he's after. Bit of a lost soul, really. He wants to write about religion. We'd like him to write about what's happening in the Strip."

  "He looked interesting." Sonia laughed. "But I stiffed him."

  "Well, he's sweet," Nuala said with a laugh and a shrug. "I bet you'd like him. And I think he speaks your language."

  Back out under the lights, Sonia thought, What about my center? Nobody home there. Jerusalem was high and dry, no place to tread water; you needed either a job to do or some fancy illusions.

  She opened the second set with a Lieber and Stoller song: "Is That All There Is?" It was a favorite of Razz's. Then she did "As Tears Go By" and then her favorite Gershwin songs, finishing with "But Not for Me," in the manner of Miss Vaughan, really getting into it, letting herself go. Her Manhattan adept had suggested that she turn her singing into an exercise, make music her certainty and let it find its tariq, ascending like the metaphorical serpent, transforming herself into a horn and the stuff rising straight up, flourishing in the chamber of resonance, emerging through the mask. Useful pictures. It seemed to go well because the room applauded briskly.

  Nuala was still hiding in the back room. Inge and the Rose were on the floor, being danced about by a couple of Moroccans.

  "Inge says you'll come back," said Nuala.

  "Back where?"

  "The Strip, where else?"

  "Inge may be mistaken."

  "Never," said Nuala Rice. "Inge's always right."

  "I wouldn't be any use," Sonia said.

  "You of all people? Nonsense. Anyway, we need you."

  "Nobody's irreplaceable. Especially not me."

  "Forget your troubles. Get back with us."

  That was the formula, Sonia thought. Some people liked to make their trouble everybody's. Others had to submerge theirs in the great sump of human misery.

  "You know," she said, "I probably will go back eventually."

  12

  SHE HAD A solid last set, sweet and low. Toward the end, to please the Russians, she did two Porgy songs, the Gershwin and a Jimmy McHugh. Just before the closing number, Razz the pianist gave her a wink and a nod, inviting later conversation. She wondered if it meant she had been mistaken about his being clean. Or if he was trying to rekindle old fires. They closed with "My Man," which that particular room would conceive as the essence of soul.

  After the last number, the jukebox came on and people got up to dance. There was a shortage of women, so she hid out backstage with Razz Melker.

  "You all right, Razz?" she asked him. "Got your health back?"

  "I'm clean, Sonia." His smile grew even wider and his amber eyes shone. "Life's a miracle."

  "Better stay away from Stanley," she said.

  When she started away, Razz called after her.

  "Sonia?" he said hesitantly. "Something I wanted to ask. A favor."

  "Sure," she said.

  "We're leaving Safed. We'd like to come to the city."

  "You don't mean here?"

  "I mean the city. J-town."

  "Well," she said, "good."

  "There's a man, Sonia. You have to meet him. I swear you must."

  "Uh-huh," she said
cautiously. "Now, would this be a Christian man, a Jewish man or..."

  "More."

  "Wow," she said lightly. "The man we've been waiting for, right?"

  "Maybe," Razz said. "I'm a gambler."

  "What can I do for you?"

  "We have a few people. He has a lot of books. I wondered if you could help us move."

  "You mean hustle you up a ride? Offer myself?"

  "Hey," Razz said, "nothing sordid. You're my sister."

  She laughed. "I'd love a trip to Safed," she told him. "I'd be glad to drive you if I had a car. I sold it illegally. I still don't know if they'll let me out of the country without it. Where will you stay in the city?"

  He shrugged happily, and she left him there.

  Out in the room a few sports put the moves on her, but since they were all talking at once and getting in each other's way, she managed to pass amiably by. On the way to the table where her NGOnik friends sat, the man who had accosted her earlier appeared once more.

  "You can really help me out," he said with a rueful smile. "And I wish you'd talk to me. I like your style so much."

  He had been drinking. If he had managed to get drunk on booze at Stanley's prices, she thought, he must be a man of means. But he did not seem to be a casual jazz fan. He had the look of someone who could not order his pleasures.

  "Oh, thanks," she said. "Sorry about just now. I was in a rush, see. How's Janusz?"

  "Waiting for the next war, I guess."

  "Yeah," she said, "Jan is a war lover. I met him in Somalia. He was in Vietnam too, reporting from the Vietnamese side. He flew with the Cuban fighter bombers in Eritrea, writing about it. One day he showed up in Baidoa."

  "Interesting guy," Lucas said. "What's he doing here?"

  "He lives here. He's Jewish."

  "Found his roots?"

  "I never thought of Jan as having roots," Sonia said. "What you say you were writing about?"

  "Religious enthusiasm. I was told you were a Sufi."

  "So you're another guy after religious nuts?" she asked him. "That's old, man."

  "I'm not a put-down artist," Lucas said, "and I don't go for the obvious. In fact, I used to be religious myself."

  "That right?"