Damascus Gate (14 page)

It was an odd set of privies that the Mount of Temptation provided. There was a water tank outside, but the building itself, partly ruined, much resembled the main building of the monastery down the slope. Inside, Lucas thought he could make out figures on the walls that seemed older than the Arabic and English graffiti scrawled across them. The pain in his guts seemed to be affecting his imagination. Shapes on the wall appeared to sway.

Some kind of desolate, sinister insight flashed across his mind and was gone. Across the room from where he squatted he saw a winged figure in sienna—scales, he thought, scaled wings and claws. It reminded him of nothing so much as the Duccio
Temptation
he knew from the Frick Collection, a painting situated where it was hard to miss, a painting he associated more with lost love and hangovers and rainy New York afternoons than with anything religious. In it, Christ floated under a gold metaphysical sky, dismissing the scaled demon who offered him the world.

The only light in the privy came through the open door. Washing up afterward, he was stricken again by recall: it was the stinking lavatory of the charity school he had gone to and been scalded as a Jew. His memory was of washing up after his fight with English, washing away the blood from his nose and mouth, the salt taste of it. In that moment he recalled also his pale child's face in the dirty communal mirror. It was a bad and unfamiliar recollection. It upset him. He walked out into the painful daylight, breathing in the sweet desert herbs, laurel, tamarisk.

He turned to look at the building he had been inside and touched the wall. There was no way to tell its age. Colonial frontier kiosks from the 1920s could look biblical after a few decades of weathering if they were made of the old stone. But something about the place filled him with loathing—a devil-haunted cloister jakes out of Luther's or his own nightmares, where defiling solitude, childish self-indulgence and shameless concupiscence lay in wait. But worse, the stench of his own childhood, the image of himself as victim.

He ambled back up the
jebel
and waited to catch Ericksen alone. He kept thinking of the temptations of Christ, the curious text and its mysteries. Jesus challenged to turn stones to bread. Offered Satan's powers. Offered the risk of annihilation at the Temple's pinnacle, provoked to summon angels.

"Satan must have been curious about Jesus," he suggested to the pastor. "Being an angel himself. And Jesus being a man. Getting hungry and falling off things."

Ericksen laughed tolerantly. "The whole world was in Satan's power," he told Lucas. "It was about to be redeemed."

"So," Lucas said, "think Satan was fishing for a deal?"

"Yes. Maybe."

"If the world is redeemed," Lucas asked, "why is it the way it is? The Redemption is as mysterious as the Fall. I mean," he said, surprising himself with his own fervor, as though somehow this small-town smoothie would tell him the meaning of it all, "where is He?"

"Satan knew that they would meet again," Ericksen said. "And they will. Satan," he confided to Lucas, "has many names, and his power has never been greater than it is today. That's why the great contest is near."

"Is it?"

"The Messiah of the Jewish people is coming back. He's going to lead the struggle against evil. Then Satan will be known by his true name, Azazel. His forces will fight those of the Lord. When the struggle is over, everyone living will be converted."

"I hate to ask this question," Lucas said, "but who wins?"

"The Lord wins. Azazel will be bound under earth as he was before."

"Was before?"

"Azazel was imprisoned in the earth," Reverend Ericksen declared. "But he escaped to America and he was waiting for mankind there. We Americans spread his power throughout the world. Now we owe Israel help in its struggle against him."

"I thought everyone was going to turn Christian," Lucas said. "Isn't that how it's supposed to go?"

"After the victory," Ericksen said, "Israel will accept Jesus Christ as the Davidic Messiah. But first there will be war and strife."

"So you bring people here..." Lucas began to speculate.

The reverend completed the message for him: "To show them the scene of a great temptation. The first temptation was when Azazel tried to murder Moses. The second was when he approached Jesus Christ. The third will be soon, when he assembles his forces and the Messiah returns to combat."

"So we Americans," Lucas said, "we have a lot to answer for."

"We'll pay it back here, helping the land of Israel," Ericksen said. "Well, if there's anything more I can do for you personally, let me know. Otherwise, as I say, we have a PR man."

Lucas passed Dr. Lestrade on the way back to his car. He asked Lucas how he had enjoyed the view and the encouragements.

"Wouldn't have missed it," Lucas told him. "Definitely glad I came."

Dr. Lestrade seemed puzzled but said nothing more.

Driving back to Jerusalem, Lucas stopped at an army shelter to pick up two armed soldiers looking for a ride toward town. One was a fair youth who seemed no older than a teenager, the second was a hard-faced, graying sergeant.

It turned out that the fair soldier had worked in his uncle's T-shirt shop in Islamorada, Florida.

"You could print anything on a T-shirt there. 'Shit.' 'Fuck.' Anything. Then they had to pay. For dirty words, more."

But what the soldier truly wanted to do was build a boat and sail across the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, back to the Florida Keys.

"But not back to the T-shirt business?" Lucas asked.

"Nah. It was rotten. Boring. Embarrassing. But the sea is what I like."

Lucas let him out pretty far from the sea, at a command post across from a settlement called Kfar Silber. The old sergeant was silent and somber. Lucas's impulse was to ask where he came from. But Israel was like the Old West, in that such a question was considered bad form and could open a world of grief, horror, compromise.

At one point, the sergeant took out a pack of Israeli cigarettes and offered one to Lucas. When Lucas declined, he put one in his own mouth.

"Don't mind?"

"Not in the least," Lucas said.

"American?"

"Yes."

"Jewish?"

Lucas hesitated. The sergeant paused in the act of lighting his cigarette.

"No," said Lucas. Not today, thanks.

"Correspondent?" the sergeant asked. Lucas remembered the press sign he was displaying. "Where you coming from?"

"Ein Gedi," Lucas said. "For the waters."

"Like it?"

"I do," Lucas said. "I think it's good for me."

"Sure it's good for you," said the sergeant.

They drove all the way back to Jerusalem together.

S
TANDING
under the lights at Mister Stanley's again, Sonia experienced a moment of utter confusion. Who are we? What place is this?

The place was full of Russians. Her backup was bass and piano, the former late of the Kiev Institute. The piano player, who could play every instrument known to man, was Razz Melker, a former junkie, yeshiva student and Jew for Jesus who was now a Jew for someone similar up in Safed. In any case, he was an old flame from her junkier days and a marvelous accompanist who could read your mind and sound your soul. Everyone on stage was clean and sober for the occasion. The house was noisy and boozy.

When the lights were as she liked them, she told the piano player, "
Alef,
Razz, please." So Razz, a mysterian who believed that
alef
invoked the primal waters and the first ray of light, sounded the key in which it all began. And, wondering if her chops were there, wondering if the aging instrument would kindly engage, she threw her shoulders back and brought it up, an old Fran Landesman song called "Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most."

It came out fine, quieted them, and the end of the first verse drew a little ooh-aah thing that was nice too. She could feel them settling back to enjoy themselves. Now, she thought, if they would just behave. And the applause was solid and, she hoped, not altogether ignorant. Because they had hipsters in Russia too, and a lot of them had come to Israel. And there were other sorts of people in the crowd, including some of her friends.

"So while the theme is spring, comrades," she told them—and you always got a laugh with "comrades"—"the next one is called 'Spring Will Be a Little Late This Year.'"

The title drew applause. Sometimes she sang arcane songs, on the theory that if her shows failed as performance, they might hold up as musicology. But tonight it seemed she was more or less on the money and the room knew what it liked. She gave them "Spring" in homage to the career of Leslie Uggams. It went well.

Sonia's first gig had been in the Village, at a little place called Dogberry's, working for a share of the bar money. After checking coats all evening for the uptown Frenchmen she would hasten out of the Sheridan Square subway stop and down Grove Street and wriggle into the black thing that hung in her tiny dressing room. There had been an upstairs lounge where she performed and a gay piano bar downstairs, so every time a lounge customer got up to pee and opened the hall door, Ethel Merman imitations would resound from the space below.

Her Sufi master in New York had been musical and sent her back to singing. It had been years since her training, and she had had to bring it all back as well as she was able. As a child, she had listened to all the singers. The white ones intimidated her less, so she took some of them as models, starting with Marian Harris and Ruth Etting. Then June Christy, Anita O'Day and notably Julie London, with whom she had fallen in love from afar, and above all Annie Ross of Hendricks, Lambert and Ross, doing Basie and "Twisted." The great soul singers were her true idols but she felt them beyond her. Sometimes, though, she tried to sound like Chaka Khan. And every once in a while, if she had a buzz on, if she thought nobody heard, no one much saw, she might have a shot at Miss Sarah Vaughan, which she dared do only in cold, precise imitation, as ceremony and celebration. In time she actually came to think of herself as something of a white singer, lacking the intensity for jazz but funny enough, salty enough, for cabaret.

She closed the first set with "How Long Has This Been Going On?" after the manner of Miss Sarah and drew a rather rousing ovation.

"Thank you, comrades. Thanks for the prolonged stormy applause."

Then there was a multicultural outpouring of appreciation: some people threw shekels or American bills or flowers. The odd sport even occasionally tossed a low-grade diamond in a cotton handkerchief. She only picked up a couple of roses and kissed her hand to them. She was on her way to her friends' table when a man intercepted her. He had dark eyes and a tanned, open face and he seemed to contain some peculiar excitement.

"That's the greatest Sarah Vaughan I've ever seen," he told her. "Since I saw Sarah Vaughan."

She gave him a sweet professional smile and said, "Thank you so much."

"My name is Chris Lucas," Lucas said. "I got your name from Janusz Zimmer. You were recommended to me as a student of Sufism, and I wondered if we could chat for a bit." When she failed to answer he added, "You know, it's interesting. Working here. And studying faith."

Sonia was in no hurry to talk to friends of Janusz's. "Sorry," she said sweetly, "I'm joining friends."

"I just meant for a minute or two."

She gave him a little routine that read: Funny, I can't hear you, and you seem not to be able to hear me—and walked delicately around him. She was going to sit with her NGOnik friends.

One of the reasons Stanley favored Sonia's performances at his club was that they tended to attract Sonia's colleagues from the nongovernmental organizations engaged in good works in the area. These were a coven of conspicuously foreign girls from the nicer countries of the world; Sonia had worked with most of them in Somalia and the Sudan. These girls might be Danish or Swedish or Finnish, Canadian or Irish—fair, boreal creatures whose grannies and great-aunts had been missionaries to the hot world and who labored on in the same vineyard, chastened and rigorously nonjudgmental, demystified but no less intense.

This evening, two of the NGOniks were at Sonia's table: a middle-aged Danish woman named Inge Rikker and a toothy, towheaded young rodeo queen named Helen Henderson. Young Henderson was a former serving Rose of Saskatoon, so they all called her the Rose. They both worked for the United Nations in the Gaza Strip. Sonia had been expecting a third, her Irish chum Nuala Rice, who was with an outfit known as the International Children's Foundation.

Inge and the Rose applauded rowdily. Sonia bent and hugged them.

"Hi, guys. Where's Nuala?"

"Back with Stanley," Helen said.

Sonia sat down and poured herself a long glass of mineral water from the bottle on the table.

"Having any adventures?" she asked Inge and Helen. They were both working out of the Khan Yunis camp in the Gaza Strip.

"We're still chasing Abu Baraka," Inge said.

"Abu and his band of merry pranksters," said Helen. "We almost nailed him the other night."

"Who's that?" Sonia asked.

Helen looked at her with a faint frown of disapproval. "You haven't heard of Abu Baraka? I guess you've been meditating, huh?"

"Give me a break," Sonia said. "I haven't been down there in months."

So they told her the story of Abu Baraka, the avenger of Gaza.

"The Father of Mercy, he calls himself. And there's nothing about him in the
Jerusalem Post.
" Inge showed them the bleak smile in which her twenty years of recent African history remained unresolved. "Or in the American papers."

Sonia began to feel they were ganging up on her. "Did you complain to the army?" she asked.

"The army says they don't know who he is," said Inge. "Officially."

"And unofficially?"

"Unofficially," said the Rose, "they don't give a shit. They say, 'Give us evidence.'"

"Has he killed anyone?"

"We don't know. If he has, it's gone unreported. He's a crippler. He cripples."