Damascus Gate Read online

  "Tell him I love him," Melker said.

  "How's Sonia?" the doctor asked. "Off drugs also?"

  "Come on, Doc, she's no junkie. She's a Sufi, a real one. Now and then she dabbles."

  "She shouldn't dabble," the doctor said.

  "You like her, don't you?"

  "I like her very much," said Obermann.

  "I know you do. I told her so." He paused to observe the doctor. "You should hear her sing."

  "Yes," Dr. Obermann said, "no doubt I should. Are you lovers?"

  Razz laughed and shook his head. "No. Want me to fix you up?"

  "Impossible."

  "How's the book going?" Melker persisted. "The religious mania book."

  Obermann wriggled into a disclamatory shrug.

  "Am I in it?" Melker asked. "How about the alter kocker outside? Is he in it? He ought to be."

  "Call me if you have any thought disorders," Obermann said.

  Melker laughed and leaned forward confidentially.

  "But Doc," he said. "Thought itself is disorder. It disturbs the primal rhythm of the universe. With static. Psychic entropy. The sages—"

  "Out!" Dr. Obermann commanded. Melker stood up and took his papers. When he reached the door, the doctor asked him, "How did you know? About that man?"

  Melker turned, unsmiling. "He's a musician too. Isn't he? I bet he's a good one. Looks like a bass player. No. Cello?"

  "You saw something," Obermann said. "He must have calluses on his fingers. Or something."

  "But he doesn't," Melker said. "It's true, isn't it? A musical Christian convert?"

  "Why," Obermann asked him, "should he be in my book?"

  "I see the roots of his soul," Melker said.

  "Nonsense."

  "If you say so."

  Obermann stared at him. "And what, precisely, do you see?"

  "I've explained," Melker said, "what I see and how. I think you understand."

  The doctor drew himself up in a Herr-Professorly stance. "What I may understand," he declared, "and what I am able to believe are—"

  Melker interrupted him. "Tell me his name."

  "I can't," Dr. Obermann said. "I can't do that."

  "Too bad," Raziel said. "What's the diagnosis? Schizo? Manic depression, probably. Keep an eye on him."

  "I will. But why?"

  "Why? He comes from the King, that's why. He rides the Chariot. You know, if you didn't avoid me," Razz Melker said, "if you weren't afraid of me, I might tell you a little about these things."

  "I'm not afraid of you," the doctor said. "Your father doesn't pay me to be your pal."

  Raziel stopped in the lobby outside to watch the table tennis players, standing by the door that led to the plaza outside the high-rise. Homo ludens, he was thinking. God's image in every eye. Their youthful energy and passion for play was nourishing, animating the dead of night. Animating the dead also.

  His presence made quite a few of the players uneasy; he seemed so mocking and godless. They would have been surprised to learn that once he had been one of them, black-suited, sidelocked, wearing tzitzit under his shirt, the fringes a constant reminder of the six hundred and thirteen mitzvot.

  When he got tired of watching, Melker went out into the desert wind and walked across the empty tiled plaza to the Egged bus stop. All the shops in the little suburban mall were closed except for a shwarma stand beside the recreation room. He took out his clarinet and began to play the first notes of Rhapsody in Blue, languorously, then explosively—flawlessly, it seemed to him. For a long time there was no one to hear. The lights of the shwarma stand went out. He stood and played: Raziel, a phantom busker in some stone city of the labyrinth. But before the bus arrived, Dr. Obermann's older patient joined him at the kiosk.

  "Bravo," said the older man shyly. "Wonderful."

  "Really?" Razz asked, putting away his instrument and reed. "Thanks." He could sense the man's unfocused strength of soul.

  "Yes, you're very good." The man seemed to be making an effort to smile. "You must play professionally."

  "How about you?" Melker asked.

  "I?" The man coughed with embarrassment. "Oh, no."

  "In the States," Melker said, "a shrink would have a back door, right? So we lunatics wouldn't encounter each other at the bus stop."

  The man in tweed, the musical Christian convert, appeared to give this observation considerable reflection. He seemed to be still pondering it when the bus drew up.

  "I thought you must be a performer," Melker said to the older man as they rode together. "Doctor Obie keeps his weird hours for entertainment people. I thought you might be a musician like me."

  "No, no," grumbled the man. "No, hardly."

  "What are you?"

  The older man stared at him, pretending surprise at his effrontery.

  "I'm Adam De Kuff," he said. "And you?"

  "I'm Raziel Melker. They call me Razz." He looked into De Kuff's eyes from behind his shades. "You're from New Orleans."

  De Kuff looked a bit troubled. But he smiled. "How did you know?"

  Melker smiled back. "There's a hospital down in N.O. called De Kuff. A Jewish hospital. And a concert hall, right? De Kuff is a grand old name in the Crescent City. A tip-top name."

  "In any case," the man said stiffly, "it will have to do. It's the only name I own."

  "What is it, Dutch?"

  "It was once Dutch, I'm told. With a K-U-I-F. Before that Spanish, de Cuervo or de Corvo. Then it became Dutch in the West Indies. Or off-Dutch. Then plain De Kuff in Louisiana."

  "When I meet a fellow madman," Razz said by way of explanation, "it makes me a little crazier."

  Adam De Kuff shifted away slightly. But eventually, on the long ride, they fell into conversation again. The bus was almost empty. Its route lay between the Jerusalem airport and the heart of the city, following Ramallah Road, zigzagging to drop and pick up single passengers at new developments like the one where Obermann had his office, stopping at Neveh Yaacov and Pisgat Ze'ev, then skirting French Hill and Ammunition Hill through the Bukharan Quarter and Mea Shearim to Independence Park. The streets it served were nearly deserted at that late hour, bathed in chemical light. Its driver was a surly, sandy-haired Russian.

  "Obermann is really a lot younger than he looks," Razz was explaining to De Kuff. "He has an old man's manner because he has an old soul." He had unconsciously adopted a little of De Kuff's cultivated southern accent.

  De Kuff smiled sadly. "Don't we all?"

  "Has he helped you?" Razz asked. "Pardon my asking, but I think we may have a few things in common."

  "He's very gruff. A typical Israeli, I suppose. But I like him."

  They rode all the way to the end of the line together, and as it turned out, their conversation lasted through the night. In De Kuff's overstuffed hotel suite they talked about tantric Buddhism and the Book of the Dead, kundalini yoga and the writings of Meister Eckhart. When the Muslim call to prayer broke over the city they were watching the sky over Mount Zion, for first light. They sat in upholstered chairs beside the east-facing window. De Kuff's cello, in its case, leaned against a closet door.

  Once, during the small hours, Razz had reached out and taken Adam's hand. Adam had drawn away hastily.

  "What do you think, Adam?" Razz had asked. "Think I'm making a pass at you? Relax. I'll read your palm."

  De Kuff sat tensely and let the divination proceed.

  "Did you go to church yesterday?" Raziel asked when he had seen the man's hand. De Kuff raised his free hand to his forehead. It was as though he had forgotten, at first, to be surprised at Melker's question.

  "I went to a church. Not to church. No longer."

  "They do put on a show," Melker said. Still studying De Kuff's hand, he added, "You must be so lonely."

  The older man had turned bright red and begun to perspire. "Is that there too? Well, I've learned solitude," he said. "Though neither solitude nor fellowship suits me." The muezzin's second call came from across the vall
ey. De Kuff closed his sad elephant's eyes. "I envy them their prayers. Yes, the Arabs. Are you shocked? I envy anyone who can pray."

  "I know why you can't pray," Melker said. "I can imagine what happens when you do."

  "But how?"

  "Have you told Obermann?"

  "Yes. I've tried."

  "Obie's good, you know? But I don't think he's ready for you."

  "But surely," De Kuff said, smiling, "I'm just another unhappy individual." He seemed suddenly in the grip of an elegant gaiety. Then, seeing Raziel's face, his smile faded.

  "How'd you like being a Christian?" Raziel asked.

  "I don't know," De Kuff said. He looked stricken with shame. "I felt I had to do it."

  "I also," Razz said. "I was a Jew for Jesus." He turned in his chair and took hold of his knee and stretched it. "Hey, I'm still for Jesus. You gotta love the guy."

  De Kuff stared at him in confusion.

  "I believe I know the roots of your soul," Raziel told him. "Do you believe me?" The older man looked into his eyes. Now I have you, Raziel thought. "Think because I met you at the shrink's I might be crazy?" Raziel asked.

  "It does occur to me."

  "You went and had yourself baptized," Raziel informed him. "You were a Catholic. Your mother is part Gentile."

  "I'm afraid I'm very tired," Adam De Kuff said. "I'll say good night."

  "Would you like to sleep?" Raziel asked him.

  De Kuff looked at him in trepidation. Raziel got up and stood behind his chair. He put his hands on the heavy man's neck and twisted. For a moment Adam seemed to lose consciousness. Then he stiffened in the chair and tried to stand.

  Raziel held him down gently but firmly at the shoulders.

  "Learned it from a kundalini yogin. Never fails. Kundalini yogins don't sleep much, but when they do, they're very good at it. Have a bath and you'll sleep until dinner."

  "I do have trouble with sleep," De Kuff said, getting awkwardly to his feet.

  "Of course." Raziel patted his new friend's round shoulders. "Someone woke you. Who knows when?"

  4

  MISTER STANLEY'S was behind the Hotel Best, on the second floor of a concrete building with tinny metal facings and opaque glass windows that presented an art deco curve to the street. It was very late when she finally arrived, a little after three on a weekday morning. The cab driver who brought her from the bus station told her he was from Bukhara. He spoke good English and wanted to know about Los Angeles. L.A. was not a place well known to Sonia. He shook off her questions about Bukhara and the Jewish drummers native to it.

  The street on which Mister Stanley's stood was two blocks long. It was the second street from the beach, lined with the back doors and service entrances of oceanfront hotels and postcard shops and snack bars, all shuttered and dark.

  A mist of small rain dampened the empty, littered street, and getting out of the cab, Sonia shivered in its unfamiliar salt chill. She had become a Jerusalemite, accustomed to the dry hills. For the trip to Tel Aviv she was wearing her bohemian Smithie getup: a denim skirt, sandals, a black top with her turquoise necklace, an expensive black leather jacket. Crossing the street, she heard laughter from the shadows, low laughter of indeterminate gender.

  It was not a meeting she looked forward to. But Stanley settled nothing over the telephone and made it a point of honor to be incommunicado during daylight hours.

  The metal grille at the street door was down and she had to rattle it for some time before anyone came to answer. Then an unshaven young man who looked as though he had been asleep appeared and stood looking at her blankly through the grille. Addressing him in her fractured Hebrew, she understood that he was a Palestinian. After a moment, he lifted the grille without a word and stepped aside to let her pass.

  A rap tape went on suddenly. Climbing the stairs, she saw the spastic flashes of a strobe light playing on the well of darkness at the top. There she found an open doorway to the black and blue dance floor. In the middle of it was Mister Stanley himself, etherealized by the flashing light, performing some kind of Siberian cake walk to Lock N Lode's projectile recitation and grinning at her.

  "Yo, Sonia! Com-rade! Dar-ling."

  Two more young Arabs were sitting on the floor against the wall, watching Stanley perform. They looked agreeably awestruck, like a couple of shoeshine boys in a Fred Astaire movie digging Mister Fred. Sonia raised a hand to shield her eyes from the glare of the strobe. "Someday," she told Stanley, "I'm gonna have a seizure up here."

  He came over to kiss her, shaking his head in comic confusion at the coarse poetry on his sound system.

  "Listen! What means, Sonia? Whatsitsay?"

  There were do-it-yourself prison tattoos on his wrists and the backs of his hands. Links, nets and webs gauged in the mottled, freckling skin. She had to wonder what the officials of ingathering had made of him at Lod. Must have worn his mittens on the flight from Moscow, she thought. He had been rejected for military service because of the tattoos.

  "Sonia? Now? Just then. What he's saying?"

  "'Be chillin', muvvafucka, take off my rhyme,'" Sonia reported. "Something along those lines."

  Stanley repeated it with a good accent. "What means?"

  "A death threat." She had to raise her voice to be heard. "To anyone who steals his rhyme." She shrugged impatiently.

  "Awriiight," said Mister Stanley. "Chillin' muvvafucka!" He spread his arms out, winglike and loose-wristed, to dance a few steps more. "Whatsmatter? You don't like it?"

  "Sure," she said. "I like it fine. Could you chill that light," she added, "because I think it's giving me epilepsy, know what I'm saying?"

  He kissed her indulgently and gave a command in Arabic. When the sound and light were stopped, a tall, dark, strikingly attractive young woman appeared on the dark dance floor, caught by a standing spot overhead. Stanley conducted everyone to a table. One of the two young Arabs brought them a tray with a bottle of Perrier, a bottle of Stolichnaya, and dishes of cucumber slices, olives, Arab bread and what appeared to be caviar.

  The woman's name was Maria Clara. When Sonia tried her in Spanish, she replied in a rather genteel accent that she came from Colombia, from Antioqhia province, not far from Medellin. Her features were patrician and tragic. Sonia assumed that she played a role in Stanley's dealings with the Colombian cocaine trade.

  "You should hear Sonia perform," Stanley said in English to Maria Clara. "Breathtaking. Soon we make a record."

  Stanley's offer was an agreeable fantasy based on his periodic attempts to muscle in on some local record distributorship. Back on the Arbat he had bootlegged American R & B records, and now, as the proprietor of Mister Stanley's, he felt himself an impresario. Stanley and his ambitions had become a troubling constant in Sonia's life. She had not sung in public for twelve years before meeting him. One night the previous spring, she spent an evening in Tel Aviv with an old pal from Friends school and they had gone to Mister Stanley's to try the jazz. The jazz had been sort of east of the Vistula, but Sonia and her friend, a junior officer at the Ankara embassy, were both visibly African American and for this reason had been given the big hello. Stanley had regarded them as an authenticating presence, or at least as atmosphere.

  She had been drunk and merry that night. She had been prevailed upon to sing a few Gershwin songs. "Our Love Is Here to Stay." "How Long Has This Been Going On?" It had been a rush. And after that, Stanley had always wanted her there. Stanley had also always wanted her as a mistress—less in his bed, she suspected, than on his arm. As an authenticating presence, or at least as atmosphere.

  She had a generous glass of Stoli and a slice of Arab bread and caviar. It improved her mood.

  "Really good, Stanley. Appreciate it."

  In reply, Stanley presented a vision of himself as stricken Pierrot. He clasped his tattooed hands across his chest and turned the corners of his mouth down. "Sonia," he said plaintively, "I miss you. Why you don't come around more?"

  His eyes were
bright blue and the skin under them was dark, so that he seemed to be always watching in shadow.

  "I want to come back," she said. "I was hoping you could give me a gig."

  "But of course," he said happily, and took her hand. "Start anytime. Start tonight. This young woman is a wonderful singer," Stanley told his guest. "Great voice. Makes you shiver."

  Maria Clara nodded in somber approval.

  "So I'm free next week," Sonia said, wanting to give herself a few days to work up to it. "When do you want me?"

  "The night you can start, you should start. Next weekend?"

  "All right," she said. "I'd like that. Same deal as before?"

  The deal she had had before entailed Stanley paying her five thousand dollars American for seven nights, two performances a night. When he had first proposed the sum, she had thought he was joking. But he had not been; he commanded large sums and he genuinely liked her singing. The amount made it worthwhile to cope with him, at least for a few weeks.

  "Same deal," Stanley said.

  In addition to large sums of money, he dispensed drugs with vast prodigality, and coping with him meant not accepting any. Sonia's reading was that he would expect nothing beyond minstrelsy for the agreed-upon salary. For free dope, there might be certain expectations, carnal and otherwise. He knew she had worked for the International Children's Foundation in the Strip, that she had UN documents and access to the UN's vehicles.

  "You have a place to stay in Tel Aviv? We can fix it for you."

  "I have a place lined up," she told him. It was not exactly true. She knew a pension near the beach that was owned by two old Berlin Spartacists, acquaintances of her parents.

  "Maybe you'll be going to Gaza soon?" Stanley asked. "In one of their little white cars?"

  She knew he moved drugs there. He claimed to have contacts in the army and in the civil administration, as well as among the local shebab. The blue and white UN vans that shuttled between the Hill of Evil Counsel and the Occupied Territories exercised a practical fascination for him.

  "I don't think so, Stanley. I think I've worn out my welcome there."

  "Well," he said, "if you do, we might work something out. I got friends there." It was as explicit as he had ever gotten. He reached out and took her hand. "Wait, Sonia. One moment. I have something for you."