Damascus Gate Read online

  Three young Scandinavian women with shorn hair were drinking mineral water near the street end of the place. He was surprised to find, tending bar in the back, a middle-aged Palestinian named Charles Habib, who had been his host at the Caravan. He ordered a cold Heineken, and Charles served it to him in a frosted glass.

  "I've just come from church," he told his host. "There was a majnoon."

  Charles was a Greek Catholic from Nazareth. He had come to Jerusalem by way of South Bend, Indiana.

  "Lots of majnoon," he told Lucas. "Plenty."

  "I suppose," Lucas said, "God tells them to come."

  Charles stared at him without sympathy.

  "I mean," Lucas added, "they form that impression."

  "The Protestants are worst," Charles said. "They should stay in America and watch television." He paused and regarded Lucas. "You're Protestant?"

  "No," Lucas said. He felt uneasy under Charles's scrutiny. "Catholic."

  "Every religion has majnoon," Charles observed.

  Surprisingly, this was a somewhat new concept in town, where screaming infants had burned before Moloch and the gutters on many occasions had run with blood. But each year, it seemed, the equinoctial moon inspired stranger and stranger doings, usually vaguely Pentecostal in spirit, the spontaneous outpourings of many lands. Once, to be a Protestant had meant to be a decent Yankee schoolmarm or kindly clerical milord. No longer. There had commenced a regular Easter Parade, replete with odd headgear. Anglophone crazies bearing monster sandwich boards screeched empty-eyed into megaphones. Entire platoons of costumed Latin Cristos, dripping blood both real and simulated, appeared on the Via Dolorosa, while their wives and girlfriends sang in tongues or went into convulsions.

  Locally decorum, in religion as well as devotion, was prized. One Easter an outraged citizen tossed a bottle at some salsa-dancing fugitives from Cecil B. DeMille; the street stirred and the army ended by firing a few tear-gas canisters. At this, insulted heaven opened and there ensued the melancholy penitential drama "Tear Gas in the Rain," familiar to any all-weather student of the twentieth century's hopes and dreams. The Via Dolorosa became a sad place indeed. Its narrow alleys and their inhabitants were soundly poisoned, and many a mournful wet towel went round that night in the city's hospices and hotels.

  "Every religion has," Lucas replied agreeably. His surprise at seeing Charles in such a seedy, possibly druggy joint piqued his curiosity. From time to time, Lucas had thought of recruiting him as a source. In his more daring moods, he imagined writing up a story the other guys had thus far left unexamined.

  There were rumors, as the intifada ran its course, that some of the shebab —the young Palestinian activists who collected taxes for the Front in East Jerusalem—had entered into certain financial arrangements with some hoodlums on the Israeli side. It was a story related to the tales one heard about official corruption in the Occupied Territories. Something of the sort had surfaced in Belfast the previous year, involving connivance between some IRA protection squads and the Protestant underground across town.

  Documenting any projected piece on such a subject sounded like dangerous work, but it was the kind of story that appealed to Lucas. He liked the ones that exposed depravity and duplicity on both sides of supposedly uncompromising sacred struggles. He found such stories reassuring, an affirmation of the universal human spirit. Lucas desperately preferred almost anything to blood and soil, ancient loyalty, timeless creeds.

  Since rashly quitting his comfortable and rather prestigious newspaper job the year before, he had been finding life difficult. It was constantly necessary to explain oneself. His calling cards impressed new acquaintances as somehow incomplete. Sometimes he felt like a dilettante. And as a freelance he had become less thrifty, less disciplined and more ambitious. Without the constraints of the newspaper format, the stories he wrote went on and on—naturally enough, since things tended to, and things knew nothing of formats or of newspapers, and it was only a beautiful pretense that the daily paper's readers could be informed. A noble pretense, honestly and diligently pretended. Still, there were alternatives, as far as a story went. Fortunately, though the whole world attended the place, there continued to be more people in Jerusalem who liked to talk than liked to listen.

  "It's hard to get a drink in town these days," he told Charles.

  Charles made an unpleasant face and opened a beer for himself. Then he glanced toward the street and quickly touched glasses with Lucas.

  "They say there are more drugs in town," Lucas rashly offered. Charles owed Lucas a few minor favors, mainly having to do with the expediting of American visas for his relatives, and they had an understanding that, within the limits of a strict discretion, Lucas might use Charles as a source.

  "Correct," said Charles.

  "I thought there might be some surprises there. I thought I might write about it."

  Charles gave him a long, dark look and glanced from side to side. "You're wrong."

  "I'm wrong?"

  "You're wrong. Because you know and I know what everyone knows, so it's not a surprise."

  "What's not?"

  "One," Charles said, "no surprise. Two, you can't write about it."

  "Well..." Lucas began.

  "You can't. Who you think you are? Who you got behind you?"

  It was a question much to the point, Lucas considered.

  "Tell me," Charles asked, "do you know Woody Allen?"

  "Not personally."

  "Woody is a good guy," Charles declared. "On account of that he suffers."

  "Is that right?"

  "Woody came to Palestine," Charles said, savoring his ice-cold Heineken. "He is himself a Jew. But he saw the occupation and spoke out. He spoke out against the beatings and shootings. So what happened? The American papers slandered him. They took the wife's side."

  Lucas affected to ponder the case of Woody Allen.

  Charles shrugged with the self-evidentness of it all. "So," he told Lucas, "forget it. Write about Woody."

  "Come on," Lucas said. "Woody Allen never came here." The cold beer made his eyebrows ache.

  "He did," Charles insisted. "Many saw him."

  They let the subject drop.

  "Write about majnoon," Charles suggested.

  "Maybe I will. Can I bring them here?"

  "Bring them. Spend money."

  "Maybe I'll just go away somewhere for a while," Lucas said, surprising himself with his own confiding impulse.

  "I won't be here when you get back," Charles said quietly. "Soon I'm the last Nazareth Habib around. Then, goodbye."

  "Au revoir," Lucas said, and went out and wandered on down the Via Dolorosa, past St. Anne's Church by the Bethesda Pool. It was one place he would not go that day; for several reasons, he dared not. Taxis and sheruts waited at the Lions' Gate; he passed them. Across Jericho Road, more pilgrims were descending the Mount of Olives. All at once, Lucas found himself out of energy. The force that had impelled him out into the Easter morning was spent.

  One of the drivers accosted him, and he bargained over the price of a taxi ride to the Intercontinental Hotel up the slope. He had the notion of looking down at the city. When they arrived the hotel seemed closed; its glass surfaces were soapy and dark. He got out anyway and crossed the street and looked across to Jerusalem. From where he stood, he could see down into the Temple Mount and over all the rooftops of the walled town. Bells began to sound again, from every direction, their tolling scattered on the incessant wind.

  The bright onion-domed cluster of St. Mary Magdalen was below him as he went down the steep cobbled road. Turning the corner, he walked along the church's wall and at the next bend found himself surrounded. Worshipers streamed out through the garden gates outside the church. Two small Russian nuns swathed in black were bowing them home. A Russian priest in vestments stood smoking a cigarette beside the church doors, chatting with two Arab men in stiff Sunday suits.

  About half the worshipers were Palestinian, but there was
a strong Russian contingent among them. The Russians were mostly women. Many were done up in the distinctly Central European overdressed look that Israeli women of a certain age sometimes affected for special occasions, with more hat than one was used to seeing and fashion boots and a little fur in spite of the weather. Lucas was sure most of them had Israeli passports. And though they chatted happily on the way down to Jericho Road, there was about them a kind of guilty wariness. One or two of the Russians seemed to sense Lucas's gaze on them as they walked, and turned to see that he was not one of them.

  They would be surprised, Lucas thought, to know how much he and they had in common. Seeds of light scattered in darkness. Whose? Which?

  A young woman not much older than a teenager was walking beside him. Their eyes met and Lucas smiled. She had a haunted look and long, dark eyelashes. Then she spoke to him in Russian, and Lucas could only shake his head and keep smiling. Uneasily, she slowed and let him go on. When everyone levitates, Lucas thought, we'll still be here, looking up Mount Olivet, wondering which way to run.

  Lucas had recently had a heated conversation with a fellow journalist on a drive through the Gaza Strip, a Frenchman who was a passionate believer in the Palestinian cause. In the conversation Lucas had tried, as usual, to carry water on both shoulders. The Frenchman had told him off, dismissed him as nothing more than an American. And Israel itself was no better, the Frenchman said, than an American colony, more American than America.

  At the time they were deep in the Strip, driving between the unspeakable hovels of the Bureij camp that stretched endlessly toward the desert and those of the Nuseirat camp that were spread out toward the sea. All day they had been seeing angry and despairing faces. They were alone.

  "If this place exploded now," Lucas had challenged the Frenchman, "which way would you run? If the balloon went up?"

  The Frenchman had replied haughtily that he chose not to think in such a way. This had made Lucas angry. As if there were any other way to think.

  "I suggest you try running toward Mecca," Lucas had told him. "Me, I'm gonna run for Fink's."

  Fink's was a bar on King George Street in Jerusalem where they knew how to make a martini.

  Above the Garden of Gethsemane, he left the Russians and turned off toward the vast Jewish cemeteries above Kidron. Among the white tombs stood black-clad figures, some alone, some in knots of two or three. They were religious Jews reciting psalms at the graves of their dead. Lucas found himself following a limestone ridge between the Hellenistic tombs at the top of the ridge and Jericho Road below. Soon he was a dozen rows above one group of three men. Two were elderly, with broad-brimmed fedoras and huge overcoats. The third was younger; he wore dark slacks and a navy-blue windbreaker. A black and gold kippa was pinned in his hair. Slung around his shoulder on a strap was an automatic rifle.

  As he watched, the young man with the rifle slowly turned his head as though he had sensed Lucas's presence behind him. When he saw Lucas there, he turned around to face him. His brow furrowed. The two older men beside him were deep in prayer, their heads bobbing together. Lucas walked on past the young man's stare. He was at loose ends, he thought, distracted.

  He strolled back through the Lions' Gate the way he had come. Finding himself in the midst of Easter again, he turned left to follow Tariq al-Wad, where things were quieter. Approaching an open juice shop, he had a moment's craving for something cool and sweet. The old proprietor and his nervous, pockmarked son watched Lucas's approach with frowning concern.

  "Tamarhindi?" Lucas asked. He stepped up to the counter and saw that in one corner of the shop, concealed from the street, a majnoon sat with an odd smile. The majnoon wore a Western-style suit and a buttoned-up white shirt. He bore a slight resemblance to Jerry Lewis and his delusions gave him the look of buoyant dementia peculiar to Jerry Lewis fools.

  The younger merchant served Lucas a small paper cup of tamarind juice as the majnoon watched cheerfully. Lucas took it and sat in an unpainted straight-backed chair where he could see the vaulted street.

  In the next instant, a plump young mullah walked past, a teacher at one of the madrasahs of the Bab al-Nazir, probably a Hamas neighborhood warden. He had a quietly exalted look. When he saw Lucas there, his face changed. Hot eyes, the brow of Jehu, then blankness, nullity. From his chair, Lucas returned the imperception.

  He had been lured into Jerusalem poker, the game of mutually hostile invisibility he had seen earlier that morning in the Armenian Quarter. At this game he was hardly a contender; with his lack of faith and vague identity he could easily be made to disappear. As his friend Charles had pointed out, he had no one behind him. He sipped his swallow of sweet nectar and thought it over.

  If he heeded Charles's warning, Lucas considered, and left the corruption and contraband story alone, he had a different piece in reserve: a human rights number in Gaza. It was a place he liked very little to go. Unlike Judea, it had neither relics nor scenery, and the only antiquities were squalid piles in which, for all the world knew or cared, Samson might still be turning a wheel—blind, in irons, supervised by bored, unhappy young men chain-smoking in their green berets and slung machine guns. Gaza's only resource was bad history on a metaphysical scale; it sat on a joint aslant the beam in the Almighty Eye, attracting retribution in advance, forsaken on credit. Long ago Jeremiah had recommended howling as the most suitable public activity there, and the locals had never been allowed to unlearn it.

  Gaza was the data that threatened the human reference point, the degree at which informed engagement began its metabolic breakdown. For the journalistic traveler, the big attraction had always been unrequited man, the thing itself. Seven hundred thousand strong, unrequited man could still support a feature.

  A woman Lucas knew in the International Children's Foundation had given him a tip about some Israeli hoodlums who specialized in the beating of teenagers and children whom they suspected of rock throwing near the settlements. The beatings were egregious and outside the rules as generally understood by both sides. Two Foundation workers and a UN Relief and Works Agency employee, trying to protect the kids, had also been attacked.

  In the hours before dawn the hoodlums would turn up at the alleged miscreants' homes and beat them senseless, usually leaving a few broken bones. At least one of the band was Arabic-speaking, and their leader had assumed the nom de guerre Abu Baraka, the Father of Mercy. He was said to be a North American and a serving soldier in the Israel Defense Forces.

  Nuala Rice, the story's source at the Children's Foundation, was an odd number herself. She was Irish, a hard-case aid worker, a veteran of Beirut, Somalia and the Sudan, who seemed to divide her time between good works and various intrigues, erotic and otherwise. Lucas was somewhat smitten with Nuala but their relationship had always proceeded on the understanding that he was not her type.

  Nor, he was discovering, was he necessarily the type for freelancing. It was so hard to get it right, working without the assignment, the rubric, the refuge of a word count. No one behind you. And you represented no one, nothing but your own claim to rectitude in a world of mirages, obsidian mirrors and the mist of battle.

  He was still pondering it when the mullah wandered back along the cobbled street. The majnoon went out from the shop and smiled his Jerry Lewis smile on the young mullah and kissed him. A biblical kiss, Lucas thought. The mullah beamed and glanced at Lucas to see if the foreigner had seen, in turn, the tenderness, the compassion. Life was so self-conscious in Jerusalem, so lived at close quarters, by competing moralizers. Every little blessing demanded immediate record.

  As soon as he stood up, the proprietors of the juice shop commenced to haul their corrugated shutters down. Lucas wandered along the old street in the direction of the Haram. The Bab al-Nazir, the Watchman's Gate, was a treasure trove of Islamic history. He had once been conducted through it by a colleague who knew the Mamluk lintels from the Ottoman, and Umayyad from Ayyubid springing.

  The one structure he remembered f
rom the previous tour was an ancient building with five windows and a wide arch of rosy stone, as dizzying and inviting a doorway as Lucas had seen in the city. It was close by the Haram gate itself and according to his colleague had been a guesthouse for Sufis visiting Jerusalem. Passing, he saw that the doorway was open and, on impulse, he went in. Inside he found a hallway with an ornate vaulted ceiling supported by columns that looked older than the Crusades. Lucas took off his shoes and carried them in his hand.

  The hallway led to a dusty open courtyard in which potted trees grew. It was overlooked by arched windows covered in filigreed screens. Beyond the courtyard was another, even larger one, surrounded by flat, single-story rooftops with trellises and flower boxes planted with marigolds.

  When Lucas turned to retrace his steps, he found a child in his path. The child was about five years old, wearing a gorgeous, velvety flowered dress that looked as though it had once clad the ornament of some faraway cold-weather Christian nursery. She was deeply dark-skinned, as black as a West African, her woolly hair arranged in twin pigtails.

  "Hello," said Lucas to the little girl.

  The child stood motionless and regarded him sternly. Her eyes were huge and profound. Two small wrinkles of disapproval appeared above one eyebrow. When he stepped toward her she fled, padding barefoot across the court, increasing her speed with each stride. Then Lucas saw that lean figures had appeared at the far end of the court. Men in white turbans, tall, black and lean, were staring at him. Some stood in the courtyard he had passed through earlier, and there were others watching from the low roofs where the marigolds grew. From somewhere inside, he heard a trilling female voice.

  It occurred to Lucas that he might have gone where he was unwelcome. He was glad he had taken off his shoes. Ahead of him, the courtyard ended in another doorway that he thought might lead to the street. When he followed it, though, it led nowhere, ending at an ocher wall in which the outline of a sealed doorway still showed faintly.