Damascus Gate Read online

  "It's all right, Stan," she said. "I have to go."

  In fact there was nothing but the empty street outside, no buses or sheruts for Jerusalem until five or so. He disappeared into a back room, leaving her dithering in Maria Clara's company.

  "You're beautiful," said the cool, sad Colombian. She had the gravity of a tango artist. "You mustn't go so soon."

  "Well," said Sonia, "thank you."

  "You remind me of Cuba. You look like a Cuban. And when you speak, you sound Cuban."

  "I'm flattered," Sonia said. "But I'm too clumsy to be Cuban."

  Sonia was more or less used to Stanley, but Maria Clara gave her sudden stark chills.

  "You know what?" Stanley asked. "We got call from your old boyfriend. The clarinet."

  "Ray Melker? How's he doing?" She was about to ask whether he was off drugs, but that might be an awkward question in present company.

  "He's in Safed. He gives tours. Now he wants to work. Come down and blow for us."

  "Better grab him, Stan. He's a baby Sidney Bechet. He'll be famous someday." She was wondering what it would be like to see Raziel again. Temptations.

  Stanley agreed. "You want work, I tell him, you got it."

  She left without calling a taxi and walked around the hotel to Hayarkon Street and followed the patterned pavement south along the beach. The turbulent light of day was gathering on the ocean horizon, a mass of twisted clouds and pale gray light. The cold colors of sea and sky confused her sense of place.

  A mile or so down the seafront, she encountered a troop of elderly men in bathing suits hurrying toward the ocean. They called to her, thrusting out their hoary hairy chests, puffing themselves up in macho array. One man waved a bottle of Israeli vodka. She stopped and watched them jog together toward the water's edge for their morning constitutional, outlined against the sunrise.

  Sonia had a weakness for the old-timers. She had once spent an evening in a bar on Trumpeldor Street where they went in for old Zionist war songs, the "Internationale," Piaf and Polish waltzes; it had reminded her of her parents' world. One bounded by hope. She had begun to think of hope as belonging to the past.

  There was a free taxi parked along Herbert Samuel Street, so she took it to the bus station. She caught the first morning bus, filled with civil servants on their way to work. As it climbed into the red and brown Judean Hills, she felt a sense of relief like homecoming.

  Who knew, she had to wonder, which was the real world? The plastic town on the make, a city ironically like any other, or the city on the hill where she had settled. In any case, she knew where she belonged.

  5

  ONE EVENING Lucas had a meeting with a man who called himself Basil Thomas, who claimed to be a former officer of the KGB. He worked in Israel as a kind of journalist's runner, occasionally doing pieces himself under a variety of names, in several languages, but generally providing leads and guidance to other freelancers. Lucas owed his acquaintance with Thomas to a Polish journalist named Janusz Zimmer, who knew everyone and had been everywhere and worked thousands of sources worldwide. The appointment with Basil Thomas took place at Fink's. They shared a table in the tiny space, and Thomas, wearing an outsized leather overcoat despite the mild weather, drank Scotch as quickly as the Hungarian waiter could bring it to them.

  The waiter was one of the things Lucas liked best about Fink's. He seemed to have stepped whole out of a wartime Warner Bros. movie and closely resembled at least three of Warners' Mitteleuropean bit players of the period. In the course of being served by him, Lucas had rejoiced in being addressed in a dazzling variety of honorifics: Mister, Monsieur, Mein Herr, Gospodin and Effendi.

  What Lucas liked least about Fink's was the extremely close quarters its size compelled. He had found, however, that the place tended to expand or contract according to one's mood and in proportion to the amount of liquor consumed.

  Basil Thomas, whistle wetted, was explaining his unparalleled access to the most secret archives of Soviet Intelligence.

  "When I say anything you want, I mean anything you want. Hiss. The Rosenbergs. Did they or didn't they, know what I mean?" A salesman, he seemed to hint at some delicious unspeakable aspect of the case.

  Yet Basil was a disappointment to Lucas. In setting up the interview, he had imagined a man possessed of some totalitarian chic.

  "You have files on Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs?"

  "Not only that. I got files on what's desinformatsiya, what's not. I got the Masaryk story. The Slansky story. The story on Noel Field. I got Raoul Wallenberg. I got Whittaker Chambers. I got the basis of your next book."

  "So was Hiss really a spy?" Lucas asked.

  "Excuse me," said Basil gaily. "This is all scheduled information." Lucas imagined he had picked up the quaint postcolonial term in the course of his travels. "This is the stuff of legend. The story of the century."

  Glancing down at his guest's ruddy, hugely knuckled hands, Lucas found it possible to imagine him busting heads in some flaking Balkan capital. An earthy, smiley torturer. On the other hand, he might be nothing more than an amiable trickster.

  "Janusz says you know where the bodies are buried," Lucas told Thomas. "That's his phrase."

  "Janusz," Basil Thomas repeated wearily, "Janusz, Janusz. Between us," he told Lucas confidentially, "sometimes I think Janusz is a charlatan. I have doubts about Janusz."

  "The century's over," Lucas said after a moment. He had gotten drunk through no fault of his own, trying to pace the man, and he was being intentionally unkind. "People may not care about all that."

  "How can you say such a thing?" Thomas seemed genuinely shocked. "This is history." He glanced over his shoulder in a gesture of discretion, although everybody in the place—the aged bartender, the Hungarian waiter and the two middle-aged American women at the next table—was clearly listening to every word. "History," he repeated reverentially. "What do you mean they may not care?"

  "Oh, you know," Lucas said. "Readers are fickle. With time they lose interest."

  "Lose interest?" The possible former agent stared at him as though trying to decide if he was worth persuading. "You're serious?"

  "Everyone overrates the significance of his own era," Lucas said for the sake of argument. "Things change."

  "Listen, mister," Basil Thomas said. "Knowledge is power."

  "Is it?"

  "You never heard this? If I own the past, I own the ground you walk on. I control what your children learn in school."

  Lucas, childless, was nevertheless impressed. He could not tell whether such thoughtfulness spoke for Basil Thomas's authenticity or against it.

  "I guess that's right."

  "You guess correctly. That's what I'm offering."

  "I think," Lucas said, "it's not for me."

  "You don't mind losing the past?"

  "I'm losing the present," Lucas confided. "That's what bothers me."

  "The present?" Basil Thomas sneered at him. "The present is confusion." He turned in his chair and sighed. "Well, I can go elsewhere." And his covert attention was already surveying the room, spying out an elsewhere.

  "Anyway," Lucas said, "I'm not sure I can afford it."

  Basil Thomas had plainly expected to be well paid.

  "What about the real story behind Avram Lind's dismissal from the cabinet?" he suggested, brightening. "How and why Yossi Zhidov replaces him? What he'll do to get back in? I got a special line on this."

  Lucas shrugged. He was not a particularly close observer of domestic Israeli politics.

  "I fear for your place in history," Basil Thomas said. "You have the opportunities to make a name, but no. All right," the big man said when Lucas failed to show further interest. "I got something else. Ever heard of Pinchas Obermann?"

  Lucas had, but could not remember in what connection.

  "The doctor. The doctor who treated the foreigner who tried to burn the mosques. He's a specialist on the Jerusalem Syndrome."

  "Which is?"

&nb
sp; "Which is coming here and God gives you a mission. To Christians like your good self, only crazy ones."

  This time Lucas said, "I don't regard myself as Christian."

  "Anyway," Basil Thomas said, "Obermann thinks he has more big stories. He wants to write a book and he wants a collaborator. Only his English is so-so and he'd like an American. For the market there."

  Dr. Obermann had an office in the northern suburbs, Thomas explained, but he passed many of his evenings at the Bixx Bar in town and was ready to entertain potential collaborators there.

  "Is he connected with Shabak?" Lucas asked. "Shabak" was everybody's pet name for the SB—Shin Bet, the internal security agency.

  Thomas shrugged and smiled. "That I can find out for you," he said, although it figured to be something he already knew.

  "Well," Lucas said, "the millennium is coming. The city's full of majnoon. I'll go look for him at the Bixx."

  "Remember where you got it," Thomas said, and in an instant he was fading into the late-century shadows outside.

  In the wake of Basil Thomas, Fink's settled down to its customary quiet. The bartender, a melancholy ancient whose beetling brows and Anglophilic dress made him resemble S. J. Perelman, looked straight ahead and wiped glasses. The waiter stood by with a napkin over his arm and an elfin smirk. Lucas finished his drink, paid for Basil's drinks and went outside. There was a spring smell of jasmine along King George Street and Hasidic buskers on the corner of Ben Yehuda.

  He would have expected to meet a man like Obermann in some quiet institutional study. The Bixx was a haunt of publicans and sinners near the site of the old Mandelbaum Gate, beyond the Russian Compound. The mysteries of Mea Shearim approached it from one direction, the tense, silent Palestinian city from the other. The walk there sobered him somewhat.

  Inside it was reggae night, all smoke, sweat and beer. On the small bandstand, a Rasta quintet was running through the works of Jimmy Cliff. The place was full; there were Viking quasi-maidens, Ethiopians with Malcolm X hats, Romanian pickpockets and American Juniors Abroad in kibbutznik hats. Each boogied according to his covenant. A message board was adorned with calling cards of Moonie missionaries, Player Wanted notices from musical groups, and messages that passing Australians left for each other. Over the bar was a large electric Heineken sign.

  The manager, slightly known to Lucas, was a well-spoken American hipster known as One-Name Michael.

  "I'm looking for Dr. Pinchas Obermann," Lucas told Michael over the din. "Know him?"

  "Sure," Michael said. "Here to get deprogrammed? You don't look like his type."

  "Is that what he does?"

  "Look," Michael said. He pointed to a table near the end of the bar where a red-bearded man was deep in conversation with a young, sweet-faced blond woman. Janusz Zimmer, the ultra-experienced Pole, was with them.

  Lucas made his way to their table and introduced himself to Obermann.

  "Mr. Lucas?" Dr. Obermann extended a chubby hand. He was about Lucas's age, bearish and boyish, with humorous eyebrows and watery blue eyes. Physically, he had a morphology one saw among Hasidim; it was easy to picture him in tzitzit and suits of solemn black, and faintly surprising to see him without a kippa. But he wore an army shirt and sweater with leather patches at the sleeves and cheap glasses. He introduced the woman with him as Linda Ericksen. It turned out that Dr. Obermann knew Lucas's friend Tsililla Sturm, through the Peace Now organization, which made everything friendlier. "Linda," Obermann told Lucas, "disapproves of Gush Shalom. She's embraced the revisionists. Become a Jabotin-skyite."

  "That's a fantasy of Pinchas's," Linda said. "I'm not even Jewish. But I've been researching the settler movements on the West Bank and in Gaza, so it amuses him to tease me." Moreover, she told them, she had recently been working as a volunteer for the Israeli Human Rights Coalition.

  "Thomas send you over?" Janusz Zimmer asked Lucas. "Clever fellow," he said, without waiting for an answer. "He'll expect to be cut in. He got Pinchas and Linda together also. Connections are his living." Zimmer always sounded a bit drunk, although, keeping track, Lucas observed that he actually consumed fairly little. His way of being drunk was very watchful. Though Lucas did not mention it, connections were Zimmer's living as well.

  "Thomas offered me a choice," Lucas told him. "Cabinet intrigue, 'Inside the KGB' or Dr. Obermann and religious mania. I think religious mania is more me." Lucas asked Linda, "Have you had an interesting time with the settlers? They're usually suspicious of the press."

  "And of Americans," Linda said. "Maybe because so many of them are former Americans themselves. But I think I've won their trust."

  "Do they know you work for the Human Rights Coalition?" Lucas asked.

  "The settlers like Linda because she's a midwestern Protestant minister's wife," Dr. Obermann said. "They hope to find a friend in her. And perhaps they have."

  Linda struck Obermann affectionately on the forearm. Either they were lovers, Lucas thought, or Mrs. Ericksen was endeavoring to give that impression.

  "Pinchas enjoys demonizing the settlers. So many Israelis do. But I think they're perfectly decent people."

  Obermann cast a glance heavenward. Linda continued, addressing Lucas. Zimmer watched her.

  "Many of the settlers believe what I believe. While they're here, the rights of the Arabs should be protected."

  "Notice," Dr. Obermann said, "she says 'while they're here.' As though they could be made to vanish." He got up and went to the bar to buy a round of beers.

  The reggae band had struck up the Jimmy Cliff number about the Babylonian captors of the children of Israel requiring songs and mirth. The Rasta version closely followed Psalm 137.

  When Obermann brought the beers to the table, Lucas expressed his interest in the doctor's work. He was ready to consider a collaboration. He did not add that he was nearly broke and grossly underemployed. The project seemed interesting, relatively safe and personally congenial. The question—the potential problem—was Obermann himself.

  For Lucas's benefit, the doctor summarized a hypothetical story representative of the annals of the Jerusalem Syndrome.

  "A young man of scant prospects receives a supernatural communication." Obermann's accent had a Germanic tinge. "He must go to Jerusalem at the Almighty's command. Once here, his mission is disclosed. Often he is the Second Coming of Jesus Christ."

  "Are they always foreigners?"

  "The foreigners come to the notice of the police. They end up on the street."

  "How did you get interested in this subject?"

  "I treated Ludlum," Obermann said. "I was doing military service and they assigned me to work with the Border Police. Ever hear of him?"

  Everyone had. Willie Ludlum had once been a shepherd in New Zealand. Watching his flock by night under the Southern Cross, he had received tidings that led him to torch the Al-Aksa Mosque in the Old City, filling the streets from Fez to Zamboanga with outraged believers.

  "He was sad," Linda Ericksen told them mournfully.

  "Willie was quietly insane," said Dr. Obermann. "He was that rare thing, a schizophrenic with manners."

  "Didn't he think he was the key to human history?" Lucas asked. "I thought they all thought that."

  "Willie was in love," Obermann explained, "on top of his religious delusions. He had fallen in love with a girl on the kibbutz where he was staying, and that's probably what made him violent. But he didn't believe he was Jesus or the Messiah. He thought if he burned down the Al-Aksa, the Temple could be rebuilt. This is a common theme, of course."

  "How many such people are there?"

  "Ah," said Dr. Obermann, "this depends. All Christians are supposed to believe in the Second Coming and the New Jerusalem. The advent of the Messiah is a fundamental in religious Zionism. So, in a way, all Christians and religious Zionists have a touch of the Jerusalem Syndrome. From a grimly rationalist point of view. Of course this doesn't make them delusional."

  "Unless they take it personally,"
Lucas suggested.

  "When they think it involves them directly, there's often a problem," said Dr. Obermann. "Especially when they're here."

  "On the other hand," said Lucas, "if they're here—it tends to involve them directly."

  "Are you Jewish, Mr. Lucas?" Linda asked brightly. She herself appeared extremely Gentile, a chirpy suburban soubrette.

  "Yes," said Obermann with a chuckle. "I was going to ask."

  To his horror, Lucas began to stammer. He had not been asked the question for at least a month. Lately his trove of dusty answers and snappy non sequiturs had not been serving him well.

  "On a scale of one to ten?" Linda proposed playfully.

  "Five?" suggested Lucas.

  "How about on a scale of yes and no?" asked Janusz Zimmer.

  "My family is of mixed background," Lucas told them with un-derconfident primness. He thought it might make him sound a little like Wittgenstein. In fact, what mixed had not quite been a family. More of a fuck.

  "Ah," said Obermann. "Well, this is what you have to remember in Jerusalem." He raised his left hand and began to enumerate its chubby fingers with his right thumb and forefinger. "First, real things are actually happening, so you have reality. Second, people's perceptions are profoundly conditioned, so you have psychology. Third, you have the intersection of these things. Fourth, fifth, who knows? Possibly other dimensions. Mysteries."

  "What about you?" Lucas asked Linda. "What brings you out here?"

  "I was a poor preacher's wife when I came here," she replied.

  "An actual missionary," Obermann said drily.

  "Yes, a kind of missionary. But I tended toward comparative religion. I worked on a dissertation at the Hebrew University."

  "On what?" Lucas asked.

  "Oh, on Pauline Christianity and its corruption of Jesus' original teachings. In fact, it touches on the Syndrome as a latter-day parallel. It's called 'Raised in Power.'"

  "Oh," said Lucas. Some old text came nearly to mind, hung suspended in the half-light of his recollection. He gave it a shot: "'It is sown in corruption,'" he began, "'it is raised in incorruption.'" That sounded right. "'It is sown in weakness, it is ... raised in power.'"