Damascus Gate (10 page)

It was just as well to tell him all this then, Raziel said, while they were both bathed in the new light of day, while De Kuff's spirits were high. And if it was really the mountain where Moses had set forth the Law, so much the better.

Together with his name of Adam, Raziel explained, he suggested what was written: "He has set an end to darkness." The secret of the
kuf
was concentrated light. His very name was a channel of perception.

"This is too much for me," De Kuff replied.

Raziel laughed. He told Adam that the letter
kuf
also carried the connotation of monkey, a paradox of another sort. But perhaps, thought Raziel, who was skilled at interpretation, the walker into the place of dead shells, the gatherer of light had to be a kind of clown.

De Kuff's first reaction was anger.

"Why should I trust you?" he asked Raziel. "You say yourself that you used drugs. You take me to the top of a mountain. Beautiful, of course, but rather conventional as the site of inspiration."

He might regret the illusions that had led him to Christian baptism, he told Raziel, that had brought him to stand in the Church of St. Vincent Ferrer, on Lexington Avenue, for the pouring on of water and the laying on of hands. In a room named for a Spanish inquisitor—he, De Kuff, the son of Sephardim! But as a Christian he had become enough of a Jansenist solitary to reject holy places in general as impediments to faith. Like miracles, they suggested people's credulity and trickery.

"You're the monkey," he told Raziel. "You're the one who torments me with notions."

Raziel laughed again. "No, man. You. You're the monkey."

Though it might be too much for him, Adam De Kuff began from that day to believe everything that Raziel told him about himself. Besides terrors, there were raptures. Raziel assured him that his dark world would presently be full of light, an interior morning, brightening by degrees.

De Kuff confessed that he had always wondered about the disorderliness of his own mind, the promiscuity of his thoughts. The doctors to whom he had turned had called his condition bipolar disorder, treated him with psychotropics and even lithium. But he himself had come to speculate more and more on the souls whose essences adhered to his soul—in Jewish mystical terms, his
gil-gulim.
Raziel told him to prepare to face extreme circumstances. Things seemed to point to his being an instrument of redemption.

Once, walking in the cool of the evening in the oasis of Subeita, De Kuff was seized by an antic mood.

"What's my problem?" he had shouted, playing the peddler, some imaginary Tevye-esque immigrant forbear, he whose ancestors were the pale
hidalgos, hombres muy formal.

And Raziel, seeming to joke along at first, had replied, "Your problem is your face is too bright. Your problem is you're too smart to be the one you are. The number of your name could bring down cherubim. You're the Son of David brought back, that's your problem."

That was how Raziel put it to him, finally.

For weeks and weeks they kept moving, as though to illustrate the text that the Son of Man had nowhere to lay his head. De Kuff went without sleep, without rest. He had stopped taking his medication.

Eventually, Raziel moved them in with an old friend, Gigi Prinzer, an artist in Safed. Her house was in the artists' quarter. From it, De Kuff and Raziel would set out each day to wander among the tombs of the sages.

They were hard by the synagogue dedicated to Ari, the Lion, Isaac Luria, on the spot where Elijah had revealed to him the inner meaning of Torah. Not far away was Meron, where Simeon bar Yochai, to whom tradition ascribed the
Zohar,
was buried.

Overcome by the sanctity of the hills, De Kuff would fall prey to fits of weeping. The pious, passing near, glanced at him with approval.

"You'll make me lose my mind," De Kuff told Raziel. "I can't bear the weight of this place."

"If it couldn't be done," Raziel explained, "it wouldn't be asked of you."

"Asked!" De Kuff exploded. "I don't recall being asked. Who asked?"

"I think it's like this," Raziel had said. "Accept it or die. Accept it or go under. And then we wait again. As with Christ. As with Sabbatai."

"But as you know," De Kuff protested, "I can't pray."

"You can't pray. You don't have to. It's all written."

"You're sure?"

Raziel assured him that was why he had been a Catholic for a while. "Moshiach waits at the gates of Rome. Despised. Among lepers. Want to hear the rest?"

"Oh, my," De Kuff said. He took out a handkerchief and wiped his face.

In Safed De Kuff could only sit and cry, as though his borrowed soul aspired to the mountains he could see to the north, as though he wanted to flee the holiness of the sages buried around him, the tyranny of his fate and of the Ancient Holy One. He was always pursued. Now something had seized him again, something unyielding. Jonah.

Gigi Prinzer made her living as a painter of middlebrow religious art, conceived for the bolder among devout spirits, done in desert colors—a little Safed, a little Santa Fe. Gigi had liked Santa Fe and often wished herself there. Now, because she was in love with Raziel, she let them stay.

De Kuff's funds were sufficient to support them, but Raziel could not bear to forgo opportunities to spread knowledge of his recognition, to initiate raps he could dominate. In a tweed sport jacket and an English bookie's cap he accosted tourists at the bus station or the tourist office. His dress and manner promised the alternative tour of Safed, and that was what he provided. Where the competition offered
bubba meisses,
stories of no account, Raziel's strong point was comparative religion. He was soon suspected of being a Mormon or a Jew for Jesus. Interrogators and provocateurs discovered, however, that he could talk Midrash, Mishnah and Gamara with the best of them.

"Who are you?" the
haredim
would demand with customary Israeli tact. "What are you doing here?"

"I am a child of the universe," Raziel would reply. "I have a right to be here."

"You're Jewish?" they would inquire.

"Eskimo," Raziel told them.

On the tours, if he thought the group receptive, he revealed some original notions. The extraordinary Hindu counterparts to Kabbala. How Abulafia's
Light of the Intellect,
with its suggestions for breathing techniques as an aid to meditation, greatly resembled hatha yoga. How the Kabbalistic doctrine of
ayin,
the unknowable element in which the Infinite exists, had its Hindu cognate in the concept Nishkala Shiva, the remote absolute. That there were many more such parallels in Hinduism, and others to be found in Sufic Islam and in the Christian mysticism of Eckhart and Bohme.

Some visitors had left Raziel's Safed tours edified and inspired. But there had been complaints. Sometimes in his enthusiasm Raziel misjudged his auditors. Conservative customers, expecting heart-warming, twinkly wisdom from the ancient sages—or at least something more traditional—had left offended. The Hasidim, a formidable presence in Safed, had been made aware of Raziel's teachings and were displeased.

He and De Kuff also gave occasional concerts in which he accompanied De Kuff on the piano. De Kuff played the lute and chitarone as well as the cello and knew Sephardic melodies with a depth beyond silence. Some clerics went so far as to appeal to the police, who declined to intervene. Raziel was sometimes assaulted, but he could take a punch and he knew a little karate.

Occasionally he would return from one of his tours with one or more guests, who would be given lunch or tea—the price of which they would be politely expected to add to the cost of their tour. Usually the guests were young foreigners, as often Gentile as Jewish. Some stayed for a few days before drifting on. But there were others who stayed weeks.

A young German who had been to Tibet and taught yoga in London joined Raziel in kundalini meditations. Together they instructed De Kuff in kundalini yoga. Raziel believed that these meditations were a means of
kavana,
or meditations on the supernal, which might lead toward
dvekut,
a unity with the Divine Ground.

Kundalini meditations were demanding and further upset De Kuff's equilibrium. Often in the depths of stillness, pictures formed in De Kuff's mind that frightened him. At other times they were inspiring. Raziel made sure that De Kuff always told him what he had seen.

In some of De Kuff's reports, Raziel recognized elements of
satapatha brahmana,
visions of Kali, and Shiva beyond attributes. Raziel assured him it was a good sign, because all these things had their equivalents in the
Zohar.

Once De Kuff reported he had seen in meditation a snake devouring its own tail, and Raziel informed him that this was the ouroboros, which in the
Zohar
signified
bereshit,
the opening word of Genesis. Sabbatai Zevi, the self-proclaimed Messiah of Smyrna, had adopted it as his special symbol.

Thereafter he addressed De Kuff as Rev, which he sometimes made sound slightly ironical, and assured him there was no doubt about his election.

"Funny," Gigi said, referring to the man from Tibet, "we found this out through a German."

"No, no," Raziel said. "Appropriate. Because it's all written."

"A German?" Gigi asked. "But why?"

"Don't ask me to explain the balance of
tikkun.
Accept him."

Gigi looked to De Kuff for guidance, although he had never provided her with much.

"So be it," he said.

More people came and went. Some Dutch girls who smoked hashish came briefly, interested only in a place to crash. An American Jewish girl fleeing her violent Palestinian boyfriend and ashamed to go home appeared. Gigi would agree to rent to them if they made themselves scarce and stayed away from the gallery. A Finnish woman who turned out to be a reporter arrived, took her notes and left.

Once while De Kuff sat weeping, Raziel came up behind him.

"Feeling sorry for yourself? I should add you to the tour."

"Sometimes," De Kuff said, "you seem to hate me. You seem to make fun of me. It makes me wonder."

Raziel hunkered beside him.

"Forgive me, Rev. I'm impatient. We're both crazy. Isn't it weird the way things work?"

"I want to go back to Jerusalem," De Kuff declared.

"Wait for the light," Raziel said.

That evening De Kuff stayed up late, reading.

The room was decorated with Gigi's paintings and drawings, art from her Perugian period, which had preceded her time in Santa Fe. Pastoral scenes of Umbria in voluptuous brown and yellow forms, warm and handsome, somewhat like Gigi herself.

De Kuff, reading, also had an Italian setting. He was examining his own papers and journals, the ones dating from a period when he himself had traveled in Italy. Spread before him in manuscript on the bed was an essay he had written on Hermetic elements in the paintings of Botticelli. His eye fell on what he had written about the painter's
Annunciation
in the Uffizi:

"The angel's wings appear virtually atremble, one of the great illustrations of spiritual immanence in Western painting. A winged moment of time is captured here, a 'temporal' moment shading into a 'cosmic' one, time shading into eternity. The numinous transforming matter."

Reading the lines made him shiver with longing for the person he had been. An innocent enthusiast, responsible only for himself. Two years before he had been received into the Catholic Church and he had believed himself at peace. Little enough he had known about the numinous then.

"An art lover," he said aloud. He put the paper aside and closed his eyes.

Later, before dawn, he woke up joyful, his room full of light. He went up to the roof and saw the stars. There were meteors on the ridge lines. A sliver of dawn was breaking. At breakfast he declared, "We're going to the city."

"Yes?" asked Raziel.

"This is how it has to be. For a space of time that only I will know, we'll stay in the city. Then we go to Mount Hermon so that it will be fulfilled that we walk from Dan to Gilead. Then back to the city. In the space of the events everything will be revealed. Do you require a demonstration from the texts?"

"No," Raziel said. "I require only your word. You're my world, Rev. I'm not joking.
Nunc dimittis.
"

"What was it like?" Raziel asked his master later, in Gigi's garden. A fresh mountain wind blew, smelling of the pines.

"Light," De Kuff said. "I felt a blessed assurance." After a moment he said, "I think we may see manifestations."

"But what did you see?"

"Someday," said De Kuff, "I'll tell you."

"You can't keep it from me," Raziel said. "I recognized you. I have to know what you saw."

"Get us to the city," De Kuff told him. "Maybe one day you'll know."

"You have to tell me something," Raziel said. "A part. I also have to believe. I've given you my life, Rev. I also have to believe and go on."

"Five things are true," De Kuff said. "Five true things define the universe. The first is that everything is Torah. Everything that was and everything that will be. The outer circumstances change, they're of no importance, but everything essential is written in letters of fire. The second is that the time to come is at hand. And for that reason we'll go first to Jerusalem. The world we've waited for is being born."

Raziel was impressed. He went inside to tell Gigi they would be on the move.

"It's time," he said. "We're a burden on you. And we're getting static."

"I can't go," she said. "All my property is here. I have customers come in from overseas. They don't know about..." She waved her hand to indicate De Kuff's theurgical confusions.

"We'll stay in close touch," Raziel said. "Trust us. You'll always have a part in this."

She shrugged and looked away from him.

"Meanwhile," he said, "I guess I'll go down to T.V. and play a couple of gigs. I'll go see Stanley tomorrow. He's usually looking for musicians."

"When you go to Stanley's," Gigi said, "I always worry for you."