Damascus Gate Read online

  "Why?" Sonia asked.

  "A lot of reasons," Razz said. "There are guys here I knew in Brooklyn. I spent some time there. They remember me as a dropout. Also, they didn't like the content of our Safed tours."

  "Why not?" Lucas asked.

  "We went to the same places their tours did."

  "What's wrong with that?" Lucas asked.

  Razz showed a humorless smile.

  "We threw in a little comparative religion."

  "Like what?"

  "Like that form is not so different from nothingness," De Kuff said, interrupting.

  "Hindu parallels," Raziel explained.

  "They didn't care for Hindu parallels?" Sonia asked with a laugh.

  "We had complaints," Raziel said. "Someone put the local enforcers on us."

  "The Hasidim say everything is Torah," said De Kuff. "We agree."

  The religiously minded reporter in Lucas inclined him toward asking Adam how everything was Torah. But before he could compose the question politely, they made a turn onto the main road that led down the slope of Mount Canaan, and the terraced hills spread out before him as far as the distant lake.

  "God," he said, "what a view."

  "In Safed," Raziel told them, "they say you can see from Dan to Gilead."

  "Yes," said his fat, melancholy friend. "From one end of the world to the other."

  Beside Lucas in the front seat, Sonia smiled and glanced at him. He felt his heart rise. He was happy to share something with her, even the nonsense of a stranger. At that moment, in that place, it seemed like agreeable nonsense and even possibly more. It was pleasantly evocative, and he thought he would remind himself to ask her sometime what she thought it meant.

  "Is it a blessing?" he asked De Kuff. "To see so much?"

  De Kuff answered him in some language of Scripture.

  "Should I translate?" Razz asked cheerfully. "Or skip it?"

  "Sure," Lucas said. "Translate."

  "It's Aramaic. A commentary on Genesis." The reverent expository words had an odd sound in his slack hipster tones. Razz was junkielike, thought Lucas, who had known a few. "When it was said, 'Let there be light,' the light was the light of the eye. And the first Adam could see the entire universe."

  "But it doesn't really answer my question."

  "So think about it," Raziel said, "when you find the time."

  He glanced at Sonia and saw that Razz's insolence amused her. It made him feel at once jealous and foolish, a disagreeable sensation, appropriate to adolescence.

  "Think about it or not," De Kuff said. Then he seemed to drift into sleep.

  "I never get these religious parables," Lucas said. "All the great profound numbers go right over my head. Buddhist koans. Tales of the Hasidim. It's all fortune cookies to me."

  "I don't believe you," Sonia said. "Then why come here? Why write about religion?"

  "Checking up," Lucas said. "Early warning."

  "Of what?" asked Razz.

  "The End of Days?" Lucas proposed, on a hunch.

  "We're told to look for signs," Raziel said. "See any?"

  "I thought you might see a few things I might not see."

  "It seems likely," Raziel said.

  "What does?" Sonia asked him. "The End?"

  "Christopher missing something we might catch," Raziel said. "It's our business, after all. It's all we do."

  "Good," Lucas said. "Mine is listening. Trying to get it all down."

  "I'll bet you majored in religion," Razz said.

  "Very good," Lucas said.

  "Which one?" De Kuff asked him.

  "It's all right," Raziel Melker explained. "He's joking."

  "I knew that," Lucas replied.

  Driving back, they went by way of Tiberias, descending from the hills to the plain beside Kinneret. At the confluence of the lake and the Jordan, they passed rows of banana trees on the kibbutz where Lucas's friend Tsililla had grown up. Then they were in the desert, past Bet Shean, on the Jericho road.

  "Actually," Lucas told them, "I'm a former Catholic."

  "Interesting," said Melker. "You seem Jewish."

  Attempting to imagine the ways in which he might seem Jewish to Razz only made Lucas angrier. He had been in a perfectly agreeable frame of mind such a short time before.

  "Not altogether," he declared.

  Sonia was watching him out of the corner of her eye. "Just passing through, huh?"

  "Right," said Lucas. "Working press."

  14

  ON A COOL rainy morning a few weeks later, Sonia sat in the small stone showroom of Berger's landlord, Mardikian, the Armenian Uniate tile painter. His shop was off the Via Dolorosa but he lived and worked in a house near the Damascus Gate with a tiny garden and a grape arbor on the roof. Decorative square tiles were hung in rows on the whitewashed brick walls, displaying saints and prophets or the creatures of Eden. The Armenian and his brother painted them in a workshop at the rear, in colors that suggested Persian manuscripts.

  He was a man in his seventies, massively boned, with a bald brown vault of a skull secured above his face by monumental brows. From certain angles, he appeared altogether brutal, although his voice was very gentle. They sipped Turkish coffee. From time to time, Sonia had been able to bring him regards from his old Jewish customers in the western city.

  Sonia had come to inform Mardikian of Berger's death and to receive his condolences. When the formalities were over she expressed her desire to continue the arrangement. She reasoned that De Kuff's ability to pay well over the customary price might influence Mardikian's attitude.

  Her friends, she told the tile maker, were scholars and Sufis like Abdullah Walter. She thought he remembered that Walter had been of Jewish origin but a convert well regarded in the Muslim Quarter.

  "Every stranger is closely watched," Mardikian told her with a discouraging sigh. "They claim every stone."

  "Who does?"

  "All sides. Our property is hardly our own, mademoiselle."

  It pleased Mardikian to address Sonia in this courtly manner. He permitted himself a small smile.

  "I know that in the United States people are what they choose to be," he said. "It's not that way here, mademoiselle. Here in the Old World we have no choice. That which we are, we are."

  "I know what you mean," Sonia said. "Would you rent the place to me? I'm known."

  "Your Jewish friends should find accommodation in the Jewish city." Like most people in Jerusalem, Mr. Mardikian believed in a place for everyone, and everyone in his place.

  "They want to be in Old Jerusalem, and the Jewish Quarter isn't for them. Some of the religious authorities might be unfriendly."

  "But why?" he asked.

  "They have their own interpretation of Torah. Of Scripture."

  "Is it seen as disrespect?"

  "It can be misunderstood," she said.

  Mardikian's instincts were plain. Everyone dreaded misunderstandings.

  "But these are mature, quiet people," she persisted. "They respect all faiths. They follow the tradition of Abdullah Walter." Her problem was to convince him that she had not been brought into some plan by the militant Jews to acquire another site in the city.

  "Monsieur Walter was admired by the Muslims," Mardikian remarked. "But only the older people remember him. And times have changed."

  "I would guarantee their conduct," she said. "You know me. The shebab know me."

  He looked at her thoughtfully until she began to wonder where in fact she stood in the Old City, what people actually made of her.

  In the end, he agreed to rent her the place and to let De Kuff and Raziel stay there for the time being. The price asked was much higher than Berger's rent, but Sonia decided to agree to it without demur. Her understanding was that De Kuff was wealthy and could pay.

  "I'm sorry to hear of Monsieur Berger's death," Mardikian said again. He always pronounced Berger's name in the French fashion, making it suggest the Follies.

  "How complicated it all
is," Sonia said when the bargaining was over. They smiled unhappily at each other and he offered her more coffee. Sonia declined.

  "I think," Mardikian said, "that each generation is harder than the last."

  "We used to think it would be the other way around."

  "I also had hope, mademoiselle," Mardikian said, "when, like you, I was young."

  It was sweet of him to call her young, Sonia thought. She had trouble imagining him as the victim of blasted illusions.

  When he had put the coffee tray away and was at the point of leaving, Sonia found herself in the grip of a sudden impulse.

  "What do you think will happen to the city?" she asked.

  The old man raised his chin and closed his eyes.

  "How is it for you?" she asked. She meant for the Armenians. It was the kind of question her mother would have asked, embarrassingly direct and right-minded. Her mother would have asked after the Armenian people, as she would have referred to the Jewish people or the Negro people or the Soviet people.

  Having uttered the questions, Sonia at once regretted them. In Jerusalem such questions always had a disingenuousness that no amount of sincerity could redeem. They sounded like hypocrisy or spying.

  "I'm well," Mardikian said. He paused for a moment. "We Armenians? We settle old differences and new ones arise. That's life, n'est-ce pas? But it's all right, thank God."

  "Good," Sonia said. Baruch Hashem and amen, she thought.

  It occurred to her that she had missed the Armenian commemoration this year, the procession on April 24 that remembered the Turkish slaughter. She usually made it a point to attend, or rather to follow after, lighting an imaginary candle.

  Passing the gate of the Ribat al-Mansuri on her way to Berger's, she heard classical music, baroque or renaissance strings. An African boy in the courtyard heard it too and stood motionless, his face slightly distorted as if he were detecting a peculiar smell. Going upstairs to the apartment, she found Razz and Adam playing a duet on the little terrace that could be opened to the weather. The music did sound baroque, with Oriental ornamentation, De Kuff fingering his cello like an oud. Beside them on the terrace floor was Berger's old violin and antique North African tambourine. Raziel was playing a recorder, gazing down into the courtyard where the black children kicked a soccer ball against one wall. Clouds were gathering in the patch of visible sky. A breeze fluttered the notepad beside him.

  Raziel put the recorder down.

  "I never knew these people were here," he said.

  "Hundreds of years," Sonia told him.

  Instead of picking up the instrument again, he began to sing. He sang very well, in a high tenor that he could ease into exotica as required, countertenor, mock contralto, pseudo-Oriental scat. Then he began a song in what sounded like Spanish, but which Sonia recognized as Ladino, accompanying himself on the tambourine. It was as sweet as nougat.

  "Yo no digo esta canción," it went, "sino a quien conmigo va."

  "If you want to hear my song," she translated it, "you have to come with me." It made her shiver.

  "Do you understand it?" Raziel asked her.

  "Yeah, sort of. I didn't know you spoke Ladino."

  "Only songs."

  "They're beautiful."

  He moved the cushions on which he reclined and made room for her on the terrace.

  "They're Sufi songs. They're the same."

  "The spirit," she said, "seems the same."

  "Sonia," Raziel told her, "faith is like a sponge. You wring the liquid out, the structure remains eternal. Everything is Torah. This man"—he put her hand in De Kuff's—"is a sheikh, as was al-Tariq. Al-Ghazali was called both a Christian and a Jew. Berger al-Tariq is with us now. He passes your spirit to this man's. The Sufi, the Kabbalist, the saddhu, Francis of Assisi—it's all one. They all worshiped Ein-Sof. The Spanish Kabbalists derived the Trinity from Kabbala. Al-Ghazali knew Kabbala. And you were born Jewish, so the message should come to you from your people."

  "I can believe that," she said. "I want to."

  "You do believe. You always have. All the things you have believed in the past are true," he declared to her. "What you believed about human suffering, about justice, about the end of exile—they were all true and they remain true. Do you hear me, Sonia?"

  "I hear you," she said.

  "The things you believed in the past—never stop believing them. You're about to see them come to pass. Do you ask yourself, How can this sick old man here make such things happen?"

  "Of course," she said.

  "Of course you do. The reason is that his coming has changed everything. The world as we know it is going to disappear into history. You will not—I promise you—you will not recognize it. The reason you believed in the world to come, Sonia, was that you really knew it would come."

  "I always felt that," she said.

  "Well, you were right. You knew. Now you're going to see it all take place. Sign by sign. His presence here is enough. And you and I and others will make it happen."

  She turned to De Kuff.

  "Is it true?" she asked him.

  De Kuff leaned over and kissed her gently. "Believe only what you know," he said.

  Lucas and Janusz Zimmer were drinking at the cellar bar of the American Colony Hotel. Zimmer was one of the few Jewish residents of Jerusalem who frequented the American Colony and the cafés of East Jerusalem. His air of foreignness, his self-confidence, or a combination of the two, always seemed to protect him.

  "So you're doing the Jerusalem Syndrome story," Janusz observed. "Excellent choice."

  "You sound like a waiter."

  "Think I haven't been a waiter? I have been, I assure you."

  "And you?" Lucas asked. "What about these IDFs and their lynchings over in the Strip. Gonna cover that?"

  "Well," Zimmer said, "if you won't, why not me?"

  Lucas experienced a pang of guilt at not working the brutality story. "I should, I suppose."

  "Why?"

  "Why? Because the Syndrome story is the safer one. And when you start doing the safer one, you're going lame. Time to go home and write travel stories for in-flight magazines."

  "American machismo," Zimmer said. "And don't assume a religious story is safer. You could be unpleasantly surprised."

  "Well, Ernest Gross at the Human Rights Coalition says an Israeli publication should do the story. For the honor of the country."

  "Ah, yes," said Zimmer. "Ernest is a tzaddik."

  Lucas thought he was being contemptuous, but could not be sure.

  "You worked Vietnam, didn't you, Zimmer?"

  "I worked Vietnam. And don't forget I was on the other side. I was under your selective ordnance and your gunships and B-52 bombers."

  "Why were the Vietnamese so good?" Lucas asked. "Why did they fight so hard? Do you think they were believers?"

  "No," Zimmer said. "They just failed to see the funny side. They lacked that American sense of humor. Seriously," he told Lucas, "they were just conscripts. But they never thought of themselves as separate from their army. And they didn't have comfortable American lives to lose. Good soldiers."

  "Been back?"

  "Twice. If you brought the Communist dead back to Saigon today—or even Hanoi—they'd die a second death. The present regime down there is more corrupt than the last."

  "How do you know? Did you see Saigon then?"

  "Sometimes I got to Saigon. Remember, we had Poles for a while on the International Control Commission. They could get me the right documents. So I saw the fleshpots. Also the tunnels out at Cu Chi. Amazing. I suppose that was before your time?"

  "Just," Lucas said.

  "Funny," Janusz Zimmer said, "how we saw the world from different sides. I could never get to the West without a struggle. But wherever what they called 'socialism' prevailed, I was welcome."

  "Miss it?"

  "I traveled all over Africa for the Polish News Service," Zimmer said. "There wasn't an aspect of African socialism I didn't witness." />
  "That's not an answer."

  "Oh, come on," Zimmer said irritably. "It was ghastly beyond description. Supremos, cannibal potentates, thugs in sunglasses pretending they were KGB. Naturally I wrote about it with enthusiasm and approval. Your side didn't have such great humanitarians either. Your side had Mobutu."

  "I wonder what Sonia Barnes would have thought of it," Lucas said.

  "In the worst places she would have been killed immediately. Well, not immediately. Raped and tortured first. But she had the sense to be in Cuba. And Cuba was different."

  "Was it?"

  "Certainly. The most hardened anti-Communists had a soft spot for Cuba. Even me."

  "But, Janusz," Lucas said. "You weren't an anti-Communist. Were you?"

  "Not at first. I was a Party member."

  "And then?"

  Zimmer made no answer.

  "I used to be a Catholic," Lucas said. "I believed. I believed everything."

  Zimmer watched him.

  "It's good, no?"

  "I don't know," Lucas said. "Do you think it's good? Believing?"

  "Depends on what you believe, wouldn't you say?"

  "You're so annoying, Zimmer," Lucas said. "I'm trying to talk philosophy. You're giving me common sense."

  "Well," said Zimmer, "I'm from Poland, where faiths come equipped with tanks and gallows, gas and truncheons. I'm particular about faiths."

  "Fair enough."

  "I'll tell you what," Zimmer said, getting up to leave. "You keep me posted on the Syndrome, I'll keep you posted on the Strip."

  15

  SYLVIA CHIN was a very young, cool and attractive official of the U.S. consulate in West Jerusalem. There were two American consulates in town, and according to journalistic lore they were bitterly divided in terms of Middle East policy. The one on Saladin Street, in what had once been the Kingdom of Jordan, dealt daily with Palestinians and was considered pro-Israeli. The one downtown, which lived with the Israelis, allegedly inclined toward the Palestinians.

  Sylvia was California Chinese, her Valley Girl inflections starched at Stanford, a vice consul whose collateral duties had involved the retrieval of quite a few deluded American nationals from variously unsound spiritual enterprises. She was knowledgeable about the religious enthusiasts in town and about cults in general. She was also cagey, with a lawyerly reluctance to opine. At the same time she was genuinely fond of Lucas, whom she recognized as a true admirer.