Damascus Gate Read online

  Mr. Ericksen, 36, who came from Superior, Wisconsin, USA, had lived in Jerusalem for three years and was affiliated with the House of the Galilean in New Katamon, a Christian study group. He leaves a wife, Mrs. Linda Ericksen, also of Superior, who is employed with the same organization.

  Police are investigating the death, and a coroner's inquest is scheduled for two weeks time. Meanwhile the Ministry of Tourism has declared the area around the aqueduct tower structurally safe for visitors and plans no new construction in the wake of the tragedy. Mr. Chaim Barak of the Ministry said today that while tourists were encouraged to visit the walls, it is safest to do so during the day and in groups.

  Instead of going out again, he called Obermann.

  "Yes, I saw it," the doctor said. "He felt betrayed."

  "I think that's the word," Lucas said. "Too close to the light, you said."

  "Poetic of me. Well, I'm distressed. He could have had another life."

  "You think he was mugged or something?"

  "He didn't fall accidentally," Obermann said. "He would have had to jump or be pushed."

  Uneasily at first, Lucas went back to the books he had bought at Steimatzsky's or taken from the English stacks of the Hebrew University library to accompany his course there.

  He had Adolphe Franck, Gershom Scholem on the cosmology of Isaac Luria, Daniel Matt's translation of the Zohar and a dozen or so other books. Some were pious, some secular, some antiques, others contemporary. Most were Jewish, some Christian, including a few on Spanish Christian Kabbala and on the work of Pico della Mirandola. He had been riffling through them for weeks and actually read a few.

  Lucas, a collector of obscure lore, discovered several things he had not known before. Having studied with Adler, he was able to comprehend the formulas by which Sabbatai Zevi and Jacob Frank had derived their own divinity through the holy serpent; both men included the ouroboros in their signatures.

  He also learned that by adding the Hebrew letter shin to the Tetragrammaton, one could transform the name of God into the name of Jesus. That the Sephardic Kabbalist Abraham Abulafia had suspected himself of being the Messiah, and he visited the Pope to inform His Holiness of this development and walked out of the Vatican alive. That a number of the monks of San Jerónimo in Castile had been arrested by the Inquisition for conducting a seder during Passover of the jubilee year 1500. And that nearly all the great Spanish mystics were of Jewish origin, including Saint Teresa, Saint John of the Cross and Fray Luis de León.

  Increasingly, the Kabbalist formulations delighted him, even as revised in the ravings of Raziel and De Kuff. At one point in the afternoon, he got up to have a drink, but instead of drinking he returned to Scholem, On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism. How true it was, he thought. As true an explanation for things, psychologically speaking, as he had ever entertained. More sublimely persuasive than the Thomistically encumbered Catholicism that had managed to constrict his nature from the age of seven. Though of course it was never a question of what was or was not true— ludicrous word.

  Then it occurred to him that the notion of some great divine withdrawal, of sacred emanations remaining, all these things were not more true than his mother Christianity but were in their way the same—an essence underlying any form truth might assume.

  He went to his copy of Pascal's Pensées to look up something he half remembered.

  "The universe is such that it bears witness everywhere to a lost God," Pascal had written, "in man and outside him and to a fallen nature."

  Jansenism. The chain led him from Port Royale to Descartes. The proof of God by ontology. Its formula held that if you could well and truly imagine the Old Boy, he must, by Jove, be there. The proof by ontology, in turn, made him feel like having a drink again—brought out the never-to-be-ordained Irish Jesuit in him, or possibly reminded him of sneaking a bottle into church dances. So he filled a glass with Glenlivet and sat watching the stones of the city subtly change their hue in the withdrawing light.

  Descartes by the hot stove, went the story. Here I am—Descartes by the Hot Stove—so there's got to be a God. I'm dreaming it up, so it's got to be there. Freud's method. I think, therefore I am. There's a process, so I've got to be part of it. No question, he thought, ontology went better with a drink, which was probably why so many of the clergy had a problem.

  But there was a process, was there not? There were things rather than nothing. And if the process did not end with one, as plainly it did not, where did it end? Was all this rage for ultimates utterly damned, all this longing without hope of rest, the thirst unrequited? The notion of thirst called for another drink.

  Then it came to him that the idea of a great absconded Creator must reflect, had to reflect, some actual state of things. That the emanations of crown and holy wisdom and mother understanding, of greatness, power and love, of dread judgment, beauty, mercy and endurance, of majesty, the kingdom of God and its foundation were perfectly and obviously present, simply were. And were even in him, in his base darkness. Drink in hand, he thought: What fun to entertain such beliefs, how lovely and satisfying.

  Moreover, he asked himself how much of a stretch it would be to imagine all this as his by right of birth. As a Jew, which, he decided, he might well choose to be. But even if he chose not, how nice to have it all. To inherit on both sides of the street, the Shekhinah along with Mother Church and Irish oatmeal, the blessing and the porridge.

  Walking home from church on Sunday once, he and his mother had encountered his father's wife. The two of them had been coming from St. Joseph's on La Salle Street, amid the projects of Harlem, where his mother took him in spite of the fact that her snobbery might otherwise have inclined her to go to St. Paul's Chapel, Columbia. And there on the sidewalk, Mother in her white straw hat and performance-standard gloves, and he in his suit and bow tie, like a wee pale replica of the little black kids going to storefront churches, had been accosted by Mrs. Lucas, the esteemed professor's crazy wife. She had been darkly handsome, in manner Teutonic, resembling the actress Lilli Palmer, as even his mother admitted.

  The encounter had been bitter and included words unsuitable for Sunday. He would always remember the phrase that unfortunate child. Something something my husband something something that unfortunate child. Him. Inconveniently, they all lived in the same neighborhood. Slice of life. Upper West Side.

  Loneliness settled on him as the light of day receded, and after a while he went out. Every night he felt the same crepuscular restlessness. There were no sunset rituals for him, only a desperate necessity to hurry darkness. He had become impotent sexually, intellectually. Eve be sudden, dawn be soon. But there he was, the professor-doctor-father's son. And it was Jerusalem, the place of the thing itself, the home of Uncreated Light. Walking a little dazedly through the twilight city, he had reached the Ottoman fountain in the Hinnom Valley before he realized that he was headed for the Western Wall.

  In the lighted plaza before the Kotel, Sabbath crowds had gathered. Lucas, who had not thought to bring a hat, took a paper kippa from the gray-bearded army chaplain who stood by the guard post at the top of the stone stairs leading down to the plaza.

  Pale Hasidic men were dancing in a ring in the area between the south end of the Wall and the Dung Gate. At the base of the Wall, the worshipers stood four deep. All around the lights were warm and welcoming, Shabbat arriving, so the song went, like a bride. Lucas wandered among the rejoicers in his paper yarmulke, feeling he must be invisible to them. In his heart he belonged to what the Kabbalists called the other side, the dark shell of things.

  At the center of the plaza, he faced the Wall across the reverently covered heads of the crowd. It was easy to see it as shimmering, its sacred geometry ascending toward the darkness that separated the upper from the lower worlds. Lucas let his eye follow it toward the void. According to the faithful, the Shekhinah, the Divine Presence, hovered there.

  "We are incapable of not desiring truth and happiness," Pascal had written, "and a
re incapable of possessing them." And if it was easy to imagine the soul's longing, the exile shared and mitigated by the spirit of God, it was equally easy to imagine terror before Otherness, the bright wings of the Lord of hosts.

  "Woe to the wicked," proclaimed the Zohar he had read the same day, "their desire and attachment is far removed from Him. Not only do they separate themselves from Him; they cleave to the other side."

  For a long time he stood watching the others pray, and he felt dizzy, reduced. He moved to the mouth of one of the cavernous rooms at the north edge of the plaza. The space was filled with praying old men; their voices echoed off the ancient surfaces.

  He went outside again. A dark young man with thick glasses, wearing a straw cowboy hat, approached him.

  "Excuse me. You're Jewish?"

  Lucas looked at him and shook his head. The young man, one of the worldwide army of Lubavitchers, hurried on to someone else.

  25

  IN THE PRAYER AREA near Wilson's Arch, at the corner of the Western Wall, Janusz Zimmer and Raziel Melker stood side by side, holding their prayer books, davening as they spoke. Raziel wore a cloth cap and a black coat; the fringes of tzitzit showed beneath it. Zimmer wore a kippa and a coat like Melker's.

  "I think we've established an identity," Melker told Zimmer. "I'm watched, I know it. I think my father employs a security firm. We fit into the space Berger occupied."

  "It's good that De Kuff is preaching. If you're going to be a cult, you have to start attracting converts. The streets are full of seekers. And foreign nationals are ideal because their governments will want to bail them out after the event."

  "What about the Baptists, or whoever they are? Are they happy?"

  "They aren't Baptists. They aren't even Pentecostals. They're hustlers. If they make money, they're happy. What about Sonia? Is she going to the Strip anytime soon?"

  "As a matter of fact, she's going next week."

  "Good," Zimmer said. "We'll try and see that she goes on a regular basis. With Nuala Rice whenever possible."

  "Why?"

  "Because," Zimmer said, "I have it on good authority that Nuala is bringing in explosives. If Sonia goes, it's going to look like you and your friends. Since you're being so kind as to take the fall when ... it happens."

  "You surprise me," Raziel said. "I wouldn't have thought you would be mixed up in something like this."

  "Good," Zimmer said. "We surprise each other."

  26

  LUCAS HAD TURNED away from the Wall and was headed for the Zion Gate when he ran into Gordon Lestrade, the House of the Galilean's archeologist, just past the military checkpoint at the edge of the plaza. With his slack, colorless hair combed to one side and his flannel slacks and blazer, he looked like a figure from the world between the wars. "Excuse me," he said to Lucas in a cockney whine. "You're Jewish?" He grinned at his own mimicry of the Hasidic proselytizers.

  "I'll do," Lucas told him, "until Jewish comes along." Discovering he was still wearing his paper kippa, he reached up and took it off and crumpled it.

  "What are you doing here? Tracing the faith of your fathers again?"

  "How about you?" Lucas asked him.

  "I often come on Friday night. It's inspiring, up to a point."

  "At what point does it stop being inspiring?"

  "Come," said Lestrade, pulling at Lucas's sleeve, "let me show you something."

  He took Lucas to a corner of the plaza that was under excavation. They climbed over a wooden barrier and onto exposed earth. Lestrade put his face close to the bricks of the wall. On one of them an inscription had been covered with a sheet of plastic.

  "What is it?" Lucas asked. "Hebrew?"

  "Aramaic, actually," Lestrade said. He was a bit wobbly with booze. "It's Isaiah. It says, 'You shall see and your heart shall rejoice and your flesh shall flourish like the grass.'"

  "Is it very old?"

  "Early Byzantine. They're saying it's from the time of the emperor Julian, who favored the Jews and encouraged them to build another Temple. Which apparently was begun and then destroyed at Julian's death, and this may have been part of it. Whoops, here comes Shlomo."

  "Shlomo" was a military policeman, who brusquely waved them away from the excavations. All Israeli soldiers and policemen, it turned out, were called Shlomo by Lestrade.

  "What are you up to? Come have a drink."

  Lestrade's apartment was in one of the Christian hospices of the Old City. His invitation was issued in a faintly contentious spirit, as though he were morally certain Lucas would be reluctant to go there after dark.

  Lucas had a look at him in the floodlights around the Kotel plaza. At first glance, Lestrade gave a portly, forthright, somewhat ho-ish appearance, but his eyes had a drunken slyness.

  "Sure," said Lucas. "Love to."

  At night the streets of the Palestinian Old City, on the anniversary of the intifada, were more dangerous for foreigners—which was not really dangerous enough for Lucas to give Dr. Lestrade the satisfaction of declining his invitation. Passing through the plaza checkpoint, Lestrade showed the Israeli soldiers tending it his usual sarcastic grin. Lucas wasn't sure whether or not the grin was voluntary; either way, it annoyed the Israelis and gave their passage through the checkpoint the slightest edge of potential violence.

  It was the first time Lucas had experienced Israeli soldiers as anything like adversaries, and it was not pleasant. The soldiers' English was fluent. When Lestrade addressed them in Arabic, they turned thuggy and insolent.

  "Why did you assume they spoke Arabic?" Lucas asked when they had cleared the barrier.

  "Because they do," Lestrade said cheerfully. "The big one is from Iraq."

  "You're sure?"

  "Oh, I can tell," Lestrade said.

  They followed El-Wad toward the Muslim Quarter through hushed, darkened streets, along which the shops were shuttered. There had been anti-Israeli demonstrations all day.

  Lestrade's small apartment off the Via Dolorosa had belonged to the caretaker of the Austrian hospice. It consisted of two rooms and a small roof garden planted in grapevines, with a potted almond tree. The larger of the two rooms had a domed ceiling. Lestrade had decorated the place with Russian icons, framed verses from the Koran and Circassian daggers. There were a great many books, in several languages.

  They sat in the sandalwood-scented living room. Lestrade threw open the shutters and poured grappa for the two of them.

  "How's tricks, Lukash?" Lucas was rather surprised that Lestrade had remembered his name. He found it impossible not to take the alveolar Magyar pronunciation as a patronizing insult. In any case, his father, a native Viennese, had never employed it. "How's the book coming?"

  "All right, I guess." The comfortable surroundings and the drink rendered him confiding. "How's the reconfiguring of the Temple?"

  "Oh, dear," Lestrade said. "Someone's been talking. Singing. Blabbing."

  "I don't think your work is such a secret in town. A lot of people follow the doings at the House of the Galilean."

  "Yes," Lestrade said. "Like your friend Obermann. The great Jungian. Preposterous fraud."

  "We're doing the book together, actually. We're thinking of putting you in it."

  "Is that a threat, Lukash?"

  "I thought you'd be pleased."

  "I'm not concerned with the American-Jewish press. And I have no problem about working with Brother Otis. I'm an archeologist. If a university doesn't support my work, I have to find someone who will."

  "Why is it," Lucas asked, "that a university won't support your work?"

  "They do," said Lestrade. "They have. However, I don't suffer fools gladly and I tend to separate myself from invincible ignorance. As a result, I take my backing where I find it. Within reason, of course."

  "Within reason?"

  "That's what I said," Lestrade told him.

  "Do you really know the dimensions of the Holy of Holies and its location?"

  "The dimensions are in the
Talmud. An informed archeologist can translate them to modern terms."

  "Has it been done?" Lucas asked.

  "Yes. By me."

  "And the location?"

  "Can now be calculated. Through research of mine which I'm not prepared to share or discuss."

  The Englishman went to his sixties-vintage record player, put on a side of Orff's Carmina Burana and turned the volume up. Then he refilled their glasses.

  "The ordinary observer," Lucas said, "would wonder why you're doing your work under the sponsorship of an American fundamentalist group."

  "Would he?"

  "Sure. Instead of a university or the Ministry of Antiquities. Or even the Vatican."

  He was nearly shouting, not out of aggressiveness but from the necessity to make himself heard above the music. Lestrade would be playing Orff for company, Lucas surmised, because the composer's work was legally forbidden in Israel. Glancing at Lestrade's record collection, Lucas saw that it seemed to lean heavily on similarly problematic music: it featured highlights from Der Rosenkavalier and quite a lot of Wagner.

  "The people at the House of G," Lestrade said, "are quite ready to let me work unobstructed. Being American fundamentalists, they have good relations with the Likud government and they're able to smooth away certain objections. I myself have some connections with the Waqf. I'm provided with whatever I need."

  "The pay is probably competitive too. By the way, I read in the paper where you lost your roommate."

  "My roommate?" asked Lestrade, puzzled.

  "Don't tell me you've forgotten him. The Reverend Mr. Ericksen."

  "Oh," said Lestrade, "Ericksen. Of course I haven't forgotten him. I simply never thought of him as a roommate. He moved in here when that little tart threw him out."

  "Is that why he killed himself?"