Damascus Gate Read online

  The city had spread far to the east. Neat, ugly blocks of flats extended into the Judean Hills, and it was nearly half an hour before he reached the open desert. Then all at once there were stony ravines where the ravens might have nourished Hagar. Black Bedouin tents clung to shingled hillsides; demonic goats nibbled along the shoulder of the road. The ridge lines were commanded, every few miles, by army strong points with sandbags and razor wire. Rounding one turn, he came in sight of the green oasis of Jericho below and the pale salty blue of the Dead Sea to the south of it. On the far horizon, across the wide water in the Kingdom of Jordan, loomed the limestone mass of Mount Nebo. It was where Moses was supposed to have set eyes on the Promised Land at last, and died. In some ways, Lucas thought, squinting into the haze, an ideal outcome.

  Killing time, he decided to risk a long detour through Jericho, following the main highway into town and pulling off at the compound where the Egged buses stopped and Palestinian vendors sold fruit, soda and gewgaws under the eye of a Border Police post. The breeze was rank and sweet with verdure, and the humidity drew sweat and stirred vague appetites. He bought two large bottles of mineral water and drank one greedily. Even the quality of thirst seemed different in the lowlands. A man in Bedouin robes, dark as an Ashanti, sold him a small bunch of bananas. People of African origin, descendants of slaves it was said, lived in a few nearby villages.

  The town was quiet. He had a cup of coffee in the café at Hi-sham's palace and then drove south, following the straight highway under the cliffs over the Jordan valley. The hotel and spa where the Reverend Mr. Ericksen and his colleagues were conferring had sun-faded flags of the tourist nations on a crescent of flagpoles at the entrance to its driveway. The driveway itself was a desolate sandy track between stands of brush and thorn trees, leading to two beige buildings beside a dun marsh that edged toward the greasy whitecaps of the Dead Sea.

  A surly young man at the front desk provided him information with studied indifference. The spiritual conferees were off on a junket to the Qumran caves and would not return until late afternoon. Lucas left a message for Ericksen. Until then, he would have a choice of several diversions. He might go out to the caves himself and endeavor to commune with ectoplasmic Essenes. He might hop one of the hotel's tourist buses for the midday excursion to Masada, down the road. Or he might book himself into the whole Dead Sea spritz-and-shvitz, endure the mud bath and the sulfurated showers, perform the belly-up wallow along the salty shore. After a little dawdling, thinking of Tsililla, he opted for Masada.

  He read Josephus on the way—the story of Eleazar and the Zealots holding off the Romans to the last, the Roman breach, the self-slaughter of the surviving Jews. For some reason, today the bus to the fortress was filled with Italians, along with a few British and Americans. The guide spoke only English to his charges and on the way told the group about the Allenby Bridge and the Dead Sea kibbutzim and the wildlife park near Ein Gedi. As Lucas had suspected they might, themes of identity emerged early in the expedition. The guide, providing a historical survey in preparation for the fortress, explained the perspective of Herod the Great.

  "Herod was a Jew," the guide explained. He was a lean, crusty man in his mid-fifties who wore a plaid gillie's hat. "But in his heart he was a Gentile."

  Cringing inwardly, Lucas found himself remembering an ancient black-and-white film he had seen on television as a child. In it, the Indian villain had been adopted by the good Indians, allies of the Americans, but had soon reverted in affection to the bad Indians, who in this movie were Hurons.

  "He was born a Huron," the justly suspicious white hero—John Wayne, if he remembered correctly—said of the turncoat Injun. "And unless I miss my guess, he's still a Huron."

  A half-breed scout of dubious loyalty, Lucas frowned up at the great red escarpment that towered above the parking lot. While the tour guide led the bus passengers toward the cable car, he took the map the tour company provided and set out to find the trail called the Snake, which led to the top. He had brought a soft khaki sun hat that he took along, together with the books in his day pack and a few bananas and the remaining bottle of water he had purchased in Jericho.

  He stopped frequently on the way up; he was out of condition and the sun was high. His skin seemed to wither under the burnished sky. Halfway to the top, he found the shade of an overhang and leaned against the rock to wipe the sweat from his eyes and get his breath. Israeli teenagers in backpacks hurried past him, half jogging up the slope. The wilderness of Moab across the valley shimmered in the near distance.

  Walking out on the mesa at last, he felt a stirring of loneliness and spite. Another fateful mountain, he thought, another celebration of blood and bonding. Following the tourist path, he found himself taking comfort in the ruins of Herod's palace, the secular cheer of the fluted columns, the mosaic tiles in the tepidarium. If there had been a place for him at Masada, Lucas thought, it would have to have been with those who would just as soon take the waters as fight over religion. And if he had had to pick a side, he supposed he might have ended up on either, or with both in turn, like Josephus. He might well have found a home with the Tenth Legion—bastards, scum of the empire, including no doubt a few such confused mischlings, mercenaries and anti-patriots like himself. He belonged to the late-imperial, rootless, cosmopolitan side of things.

  The group with which he had ridden down from Ein Gedi had finished their circuit of the precincts and taken the cable car down. Lucas followed his guidebook from the Herodian synagogue through the Zealot compound to the Byzantine chapel. He walked the walls from lookout point to lookout point, and indeed it was not hard to hear the demotic curses and the cries of butchered families and to picture bloodied spathas raised against the blue sky.

  He found a shaded bench near the eastern wall and sat down to browse the British historian. The learned don turned out to be a skeptic regarding Masada and its grim intransigence. His line on inspiring tales of the legendary Levant was like Ira Gershwin's: it was not necessarily so.

  The historian believed that Josephus, a dramaturge like most classical chroniclers, had invented Eleazar's valedictory to his troops in imitation of Greco-Roman models. In the actual outcome, some Zealots had killed themselves and their families, some had died fighting, others had hauled ass and been cut down or enslaved, or had succeeded in hiding.

  Nor had the Zealots been selfless patriots. They had lapsed into banditry and murder, terrorizing the country, killing more Jews than heathen. Lucas had heard something of the sort before, but reading the professor under the spell of the place afforded him renewed relief. People were people, for what it was worth. The fundamental things remained. And the official Masada story belonged to military pageants and state propaganda and the kind of heroic iconography expressed in Hollywood costume pictures with Kirk Douglas clenching his teeth. Or had that been a different movie? He would have to try it all on Tsililla.

  Are things better, he wondered, because we know the old stories that sustained us are lies? Does it make us freer? Descending in the cable car, caged in sleek-smelling technology, he watched the parking lot rise from the valley floor. Beyond the lines of tour buses were the buildings of the potash plant that had replaced buggery down in Sodom.

  The bus that had brought him from Ein Gedi had left, so he went to wait for the next one. In ten minutes, a local bus came along that was filled with soldiers toting their automatic weapons. Lucas got in and sat across from the driver.

  The soldiers proved to be on their way for a bath at the end of their day's duty, and the bus pulled into the spa's driveway. On one side of it was a lot marked by a sign that said NO COACHES in three languages, and it was for this area that the driver promptly headed. Immediately an attendant, a small man in a straw hat and round sunglasses, ran forward to block the bus's path. To the cheers of the soldiers, the driver drove around him. As the bus was parking, the attendant ran after it and planted himself before the windshield, arms outstretched in an accusatory shrug
of well-nigh-cosmic pathos. It was the gesture of one who, having seen all folly, challenged the world to destroy the last vestige of his belief in reason. The driver simply sneered and steered around him. Then he turned toward Lucas and gestured at the outraged attendant.

  "Sotsialist," he said scornfully.

  9

  TO PASS the rest of the afternoon, Lucas took the waters. There were showers and an indoor saltwater pool and a little jitney that carried bathers to the shore. He was surprised to see signs in German everywhere—over some of the doors and blocks of lockers it was the only language of information. Could there be so many German tourists, he wondered, and could so much effort be expended for their convenience? It was unsettling to see the signs among the disrobing rooms and bathhouses and banks of showers.

  At the shore, Lucas covered himself in vile-smelling mud, careful to rub some of the stuff into his bald spot. Then he edged over the slime into the oily water and bobbed in it for a while. A dip in the Dead Sea, Lucas found, resembled in its chilly, sticky wetness many of life's other mildly unpleasant trophy experiences.

  Rinsing and drying, he found his way to the cafeteria, which was pleasant and had glass walls that commanded a view in all directions. The sun had already passed below the edge of the escarpment to the east, and a lengthening shadow stretched across the fading blue water. He got two beers from the cooler and took a table on the Dead Sea side.

  As the afternoon wore on, the cafeteria began to fill with customers. Halfway through his first beer, Lucas became aware that the people at the tables nearest him were speaking German. But they were not Germans, he realized at once—not really. They were elderly German-speaking Israelis, come for the minerals and hydrotherapy. They sat decorously over their coffee and cake, eyeing the other clientele with icy, condescending smiles, interrupting one another, declaiming self-confidently in a language normally half whispered in this land. Almost all looked over seventy, but they were alert, vigorous and sinewy. The men favored short-sleeved white shirts, the women bohemian net shawls about their shoulders. A number of them were staring at him, trying, he supposed, to gauge his story. Sometimes in Israel, Lucas had found, when people had puzzled long enough over your story, they simply came forward to demand it. No one accosted him this afternoon.

  Hearing their voices reminded him of walks he had taken as a boy in New York from the Upper West Side to the Cloisters. In Fort Tryon Park there had been a stand that sold good grilled frankfurters and hot mustard to go with them. He had always thought of it as the best hot dog stand in New York, and it was patronized in all weathers by German-Jewish refugees from Washington Heights. Lucas remembered it particularly in winter, when the customers would sit outside, facing the pale sunlight over the Jersey Palisades—the men in their rakishly turned fedoras and fur-collared overcoats, the women in boxy felt hats and tweeds. And if they did not actually sport pince-nez, Lucas still remembered them so.

  At nearly six o'clock, he bought himself a third beer and took a table facing east, on the other side of the room, where the view was of the darkening cliffs. In this section were foreigners, Gentiles, and it seemed to Lucas that even with his eyes closed, without discerning the prevailing language of discourse, he would know it. Something guileless and unguarded in the laughter, an absence of irony in the air.

  About the time he learned that there were such things as Jews and Gentiles—a fact he had drawn from his mother in the face of extreme reluctance, since it was a matter of some inconvenience to her—Lucas had played a few highly private games involving who was who. For a period during his childhood—following a painful experience at the Catholic school he attended—the question had become an obsession. Of course he had gotten over it.

  The incident at school had been devastating in its way. One day, in the fourth grade, Lucas had been playing stoopball outside the school in Yorkville when the subject of neighborhoods came up. Neighborhoods, in the circles where Lucas got his early education, were defined by Catholic parishes. When the game ended, Lucas, who had banged three home runs that afternoon, found himself accosted by the chief of the losing team, a boy named Kevin English. English was an ill-spoken lad and Lucas had once teased him for saying "youse."

  "So where do you live?" English had asked young Lucas. "What parish?"

  "St. Joseph's," Lucas had replied. "Morningside Heights."

  "That's Harlem," English had said.

  "No it's not," Lucas had answered. "It's near Columbia University."

  "Then it's all fuckin' Jews, then," English said.

  "My father's Jewish," Lucas had replied.

  English's reaction astonished him.

  "Jewish? A fucking Jew?"

  Lucas never accepted the Freudian doctrine of repression. It seemed to him, for better or worse, that he remembered everything. Still, he could not seem to recall the spirit—humorous? defiant? confiding?—that had impelled him to make that declaration. He did recall that having made it then and there, he realized at once that he had placed himself in some new cold country of the heart from which he would never return.

  The following week, everyone was playing stoopball and Lucas had gotten off a squarely placed hit, smack on the angle, not only high but wide—out of the park, had there been a park. But there were only improvised bases to run—the pointed railing they called "the spears," the manhole at second and, at third, a pair of metal elevator doors level with the schoolyard. So Lucas scored, and so did all three runners on base. As they were exchanging sober handshakes, the custom of the day, English, who had come storming in to cover first, confronted the exhilarated Lucas.

  "You Jew fuck! You sheeny kike bastard."

  He had known all week it would come back to roost. Only one of English's sycophants joined in. But their attack had been so furious, so venomously joyous, so infernal, that Lucas would remember it always. Then there had been a fight between him and English, and he, Lucas, had gotten the worst. This came as a surprise to him, since he had been in the right.

  The fight had been broken up by Brother Nicholas, prefect of the grammar school, a dour French Canadian, who had come running out into the street. Brother Nicholas assumed the fight was over stoopball and decreed that the issue be settled by a "smoker" at the end of the week. A smoker was a supervised boxing match through which boys who were weekly boarders at the school settled their violent differences.

  He had had a bad feeling about the business all during the day of the smoker. Something had been lost to him somehow, traded for something else unknown.

  The smoker was held in a corner of the gym, surrounded by a rectangle of tape. The antagonists were stripped to the waist and wore boxing gloves. Lucas had summoned all the resources of his imagination to invest the event with the pageantry of sports and movies, tournaments and duels and gunfights. But he was without friends. All of his friends were the day students, and the boarders—English's friends—were a hard lot, drawn from the caseload of social service agencies. Lucas was there because his mother was on tour that season. He'd sensed the match would end badly, and it had. He had learned a few new obscenities, which was useful. There was the ambiguous advantage of having justice on his side. But in the end the beating English gave him, whacking him repeatedly on the ear and actually deafening him for a week, made him feel ashamed and deserving of it.

  Later the same evening, Brother Nicholas had spoken a few kind words in the school infirmary while putting Mercurochrome on his wounds and icing down his swollen face. The brother had put a stop to the Jew-bastard stuff from the crowd and slapped a few heads.

  "So," Brother Nicholas had asked him with Gallic delicacy, "is someone Jewish at home?"

  "My dad," Lucas had replied. "Except he's not really at home."

  Brother Nicholas had grown thoughtful.

  "We must all," he declared, touching the cotton swab to Lucas's eyebrow, "offer up our humiliations." Brother Nicholas believed in offering humiliations to the Holy Ghost, who was apparently gratified or appeased
by them.

  He was on his own until the following weekend, when his mother came home from her tour, exhausted, throatsore, besieged by migraines. He tried for days not to tell her. But they were confidantes and pals, temperamentally alike, communicators, raconteurs. So he did.

  "Why did I say a word?" she demanded of herself. "Why did I have to tell you at your age?" She had told him while waxing philo-sophical over her third highball during one of their visits to the King Cole Bar at the St. Regis, a goodbye treat for him.

  Lucas's mother had then cried so bitterly and lavished such embraces on him that he had rebelled and, out of mischief, pitched her one of the new obscenities he had learned during the bout.

  "That English, he's a cocksucker, Mom."

  It had shocked her right out of her lamentations. For a more or less kept woman, Lucas's mother was a considerable prude.

  A little later on, she set about explaining to him the extreme limitations to which anti-Semites were subject.

  "I mean," she said, "the people who dislike Jews"—"dislike" was the most intense word her well-bred instincts made available—"are the most dimwitted, uneducated, unartistic people. No decent person, no person of breeding, certainly no cultivated person, feels that way. Only the most measly, paltry hoi polloi, the lowest, roughest, coarsest of the low, feel such things."

  And, who, Mom, Lucas had thought at once, do you think I'm locked up in that joint with? Unuttered, it had remained one of his great unreleased zingers. However, this notion had occurred to her.

  "I've got to get you out of that dreadful place," she said.

  Snob though she was, she remained a faithful Irish girl, and there was no putting her off Holy Mother Church when it came to education. His father was prevailed upon to underwrite Lucas's transfer to a Jesuit school, whose teachers were all astronomers and poets and veterans of the Belgian Resistance and whose students were cosmopolitans, discreet and even, sometimes, partly Jewish.