Damascus Gate (2 page)

On this conjunction of sacred seasons, the Jews and the Armenians in the crowded street pretended each other's invisibility without colliding. A half-caste apologizing his way through the crush, Lucas was visited by a notion: that only he could see both sects. That where only the unseen mattered, he was reduced to mere utility, to petty observations and staying out of the way.

Passing under an arch where tilesmiths kept shop, he stopped to examine the posters on the wall beside it. They were all in Armenian and many showed the picture of the new president of the Armenian republic. There were also pictures of armed guerrillas with rifles and bandoliers and black-bordered photographs of young martyrs, slain far away in the Azerbaijani war. It was the season of martyrdom in a banner year for martyrs.

In the main street of the Christian Quarter, a promiscuous babble of pilgrims hurried down the sloping cobbled pavement. One group of Japanese followed a sandaled Japanese friar who held a green pennant aloft. There was a party of Central American Indians of uniform size and shape who stared with blissful incomprehension into the unconvincing smiles of merchants offering knickknacks. There were Sicilian villagers and Boston Irish, Filipinos, more Germans, Breton women in native dress, Spaniards, Brazilians, Quebecois.

Palestinian hustlers hissed suggestively, offering guidance. Lucas noticed that the Caravan Bar, his favorite beer joint in the Old City, was shuttered. He had heard something about threats. Cutting through the New Bazaar, he became aware of another closing. Above one of the embroidery shops there had been a loft that once sold not only brass pipes and nargilehs but excellent hashish to smoke in them. Now both shop and loft were derelict. Since the intifada, Lucas had taken to buying his hashish where the thin, handsome German hippies bought theirs, at a kiosk near the Arab bus terminal on Saladin Street. The police never seemed to interfere, Lucas had noticed, probably because the seller was one of their informers.

In the courtyard before the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, he was reunited with the mass of pilgrims. Green-bereted troopers of the Border Police were stationed at every approach to the church and on the adjoining rooftops. Under their guns, the Japanese friar was addressing his flock above the noise of the throng.

The Japanese groups were composed largely of middle-aged women who wore dark jumpers and khaki rain hats of the sort once favored by kibbutzniks. The priest would be telling them, Lucas imagined, the story of Constantine and his mother, Saint Helena—how she had discovered the Holy Sepulchre and the very Rood itself. The Japanese ladies were a motherly lot, and Lucas thought they appeared to like the story. Why not, since it had a pious mother, a dutiful son and a miracle? Then, all at once, he found himself calculating ages again. It had occurred to him that the Franciscan and his party might have come from Nagasaki. Nagasaki had been the most Christian of Japan's cities. All through the war, the Japanese had thought the Americans spared it air raids for that reason.

In the sooty, incensed hollows of the church, he made his way through the rotunda to the undistinguished Catholic chapel in the far corner, moving just ahead of the Japanese. A glum Italian monk stood at the door, snubbing pilgrims who tried to smile at him.

Inside the chapel, some Americans with guitars were plinking unhappily away, accompanying their own sad sing-along of a few socially responsible, with-it numbers from the sacred liturgy of whatever cow college town they called home. Like many visitors, they had been unnerved by the inimitable creepiness of the Holy Sepulchre, a grimly gaudy, theopathical Turkish bathhouse where their childhood saints glared like demented spooks from every moldering wall. Lucas, once born, once baptized, put his hand in the holy water and crossed himself.

"Dark is life, is death," he thought. It was all that came to mind. The text was from Mahler's
Song of the Earth
but he supposed it might be considered a sort of prayer.

"My heart is still and awaits its hour."

He still owned an old record, now nearly unplayable, of his mother singing it in German. In any case, he offered it up to whatever was out there, for whatever purpose. Then he made his way through the press of Japanese and across the gloomy spaces of the Anastasis and up the worn stairs to the Chapel of St. James to hear the Armenian liturgy. Theirs was his favorite.

After a while the Armenians arrived in procession, pausing near the entrance of the church so that their patriarch could kiss the Stone of Unction. Then, preceded by youths carrying candles and monks in pointed hoods, the Armenians of the city trooped up to the chapel and the service began. Lucas, as was his custom, stood off to one side.

For a time, he secretly watched the lustrous-eyed worshipers absorbed in their devotions. The night was always dark in their prayers and everybody far from home. Then—because it was Easter for someone, because the Armenian liturgy was sublime, because it couldn't hurt—he lowered his head in the Jesus Prayer. It was another thing he had picked up around, the mantra of the Oriental Christians, a little like repeating
Nam myoho renge kyo
but with a measure of Berdyayevian soul.

"Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy upon me, a sinner."

Properly prayed, repeated, the gaze fixed upon the heart, the breathing controlled—it was supposed to be good for you.

At the very moment of uttering this vain hesychastic repetition, while reflecting on the fond, silly regard for religion he had come to Jerusalem to cure himself of, he was startled from his mooning by a dreadful bellow from the rotunda. Then a rasping scream, echoing dismally through the blasted caverns, freezing the pilgrims in mid-bliss. Even the Armenians missed a beat, and a few of the children moved to the edge of the loft to see what the matter was. Lucas followed, looking down over the railing.

"
Anti-Christus!
"

Below, in the candle-lit spaces of the Anastasis, a
majnoon,
a madman, was running wild. Potbellied, bespectacled, arms spread wide, hands dangling, the
majnoon
appeared to be a Western visitor. Around the Chapel of the Tomb he ran, in fluttery, short-legged, birdlike steps. Worshipers fled him. Under the Emperor's Arch and along the wall of the Greek Catholicon, the man ran screaming, setting the hanging sacristy lamps to swing and clatter on their chains. He seemed to be flapping in an attempt at flight, as though he might take wing and sail up to the vault like a church owl. His face was red and round. His eyes bulged sickly blue. A few young Greek Orthodox acolytes in black cassocks were chasing him.

With formidable agility, the madman succeeded in doubling back on his pursuers toward the Chapel of the Tomb. A candle stand full of burning tapers overturned and people fought their way back from the flames. Around and around the tomb he ran, leading the Greeks in a comic rondelay. Then he peeled off and headed for the Chapel of St. Mary. The gathered Catholics gasped and screamed. The friar at the chapel door moved to close it.

Then the
majnoon
began to shout at length in German. Something about blasphemy, Lucas thought. Something about heathen and thieves. Then he began to swear mechanically. "
Fick ... Gott in Himmel ... Scheiss ... Jesusmaria.
" Echoes ricocheted crazily through the interconnected vaults that made up the church. When the Greeks caught him, he switched to English.

"A den of thieves," the deranged German shrieked. "Fornication," he shouted at a prim young Catholic woman in a white mantilla. "Strangulation. Blood."

Some of the Greek Orthodox posse stomped out the flaming tapers while the rest hauled their prisoner toward the door and the shafts of spring sunlight. A party of Israeli policemen were waiting there to receive him, looking as though they had seen it all before. Around Lucas, the Armenians prayed harder.

The pilgrims pouring out into the forecourt after the service were abuzz with the untoward incident. The soldiers and border policemen lining the route back toward the Jaffa Gate looked more wary and purposeful than usual. Braced for something more serious, they were hoping to herd the mass of tourists out of the Old City. At the same time, they were under orders to let the Christian pilgrims wander at will, as a demonstration of normalcy and order.

He soon drifted with the crowd into the vaulted souks between the Damascus Gate and the Haram al-Sharif. Lucas had come to move confidently through the Old City, although he sometimes questioned his own confidence. He believed his appearance to be more or less foreign, which, in the Muslim Quarter, was a point in his favor. At a kiosk in the Khan al-Sultan souk, he bought an English-language copy of the PLO newspaper
Al-Jihar.
Displayed in hand, it might be a precaution against attack as well as a way of keeping up with the situation.

The Damascus Gate, with its Ottoman towers and passages and barbarous Crusader revetments, was his favorite place in the city. He took a simple tourist's pleasure in the crowds and the blaring taped Arab music, in the rush provided by the open sacks of spices that were piled in wheelbarrows beside the vendors' stalls. To the Palestinians it was the Bab al-Amud, the Gate of the Column, but Lucas rejoiced in the common English name, the suggestion of a route toward mystery, interior light, sudden transformation. He sat for a while over a Sprite, taking in the sensations of the gate, and then set out quixotically in search of something stronger.

Both his regular spot in Christian Quarter Road and the rooftop garden in the souk had inexplicably closed. The one place he found open was a disreputable tourist trap on the edge of the Christian Quarter that catered to
Wandervogel
and other riffraff from the cheap hostels of East Jerusalem. Like many of the bars on the Palestinian side, it displayed pictures of Christian saints lest the Hamas enforcers mistake the management for bad Muslims.

Three young Scandinavian women with shorn hair were drinking mineral water near the street end of the place. He was surprised to find, tending bar in the back, a middle-aged Palestinian named Charles Habib, who had been his host at the Caravan. He ordered a cold Heineken, and Charles served it to him in a frosted glass.

"I've just come from church," he told his host. "There was a
majnoon.
"

Charles was a Greek Catholic from Nazareth. He had come to Jerusalem by way of South Bend, Indiana.

"Lots of
majnoon,
" he told Lucas. "Plenty."

"I suppose," Lucas said, "God tells them to come."

Charles stared at him without sympathy.

"I mean," Lucas added, "they form that impression."

"The Protestants are worst," Charles said. "They should stay in America and watch television." He paused and regarded Lucas. "You're Protestant?"

"No," Lucas said. He felt uneasy under Charles's scrutiny. "Catholic."

"Every religion has
majnoon,
" Charles observed.

Surprisingly, this was a somewhat new concept in town, where screaming infants had burned before Moloch and the gutters on many occasions had run with blood. But each year, it seemed, the equinoctial moon inspired stranger and stranger doings, usually vaguely Pentecostal in spirit, the spontaneous outpourings of many lands. Once, to be a Protestant had meant to be a decent Yankee schoolmarm or kindly clerical milord. No longer. There had commenced a regular Easter Parade, replete with odd headgear. Anglophone crazies bearing monster sandwich boards screeched empty-eyed into megaphones. Entire platoons of costumed Latin Cristos, dripping blood both real and simulated, appeared on the Via Dolorosa, while their wives and girlfriends sang in tongues or went into convulsions.

Locally decorum, in religion as well as devotion, was prized. One Easter an outraged citizen tossed a bottle at some salsa-dancing fugitives from Cecil B. DeMille; the street stirred and the army ended by firing a few tear-gas canisters. At this, insulted heaven opened and there ensued the melancholy penitential drama "Tear Gas in the Rain," familiar to any all-weather student of the twentieth century's hopes and dreams. The Via Dolorosa became a sad place indeed. Its narrow alleys and their inhabitants were soundly poisoned, and many a mournful wet towel went round that night in the city's hospices and hotels.

"Every religion has," Lucas replied agreeably. His surprise at seeing Charles in such a seedy, possibly druggy joint piqued his curiosity. From time to time, Lucas had thought of recruiting him as a source. In his more daring moods, he imagined writing up a story the other guys had thus far left unexamined.

There were rumors, as the intifada ran its course, that some of the
shebab
—the young Palestinian activists who collected taxes for the Front in East Jerusalem—had entered into certain financial arrangements with some hoodlums on the Israeli side. It was a story related to the tales one heard about official corruption in the Occupied Territories. Something of the sort had surfaced in Belfast the previous year, involving connivance between some IRA protection squads and the Protestant underground across town.

Documenting any projected piece on such a subject sounded like dangerous work, but it was the kind of story that appealed to Lucas. He liked the ones that exposed depravity and duplicity on both sides of supposedly uncompromising sacred struggles. He found such stories reassuring, an affirmation of the universal human spirit. Lucas desperately preferred almost anything to blood and soil, ancient loyalty, timeless creeds.

Since rashly quitting his comfortable and rather prestigious newspaper job the year before, he had been finding life difficult. It was constantly necessary to explain oneself. His calling cards impressed new acquaintances as somehow incomplete. Sometimes he felt like a dilettante. And as a freelance he had become less thrifty, less disciplined and more ambitious. Without the constraints of the newspaper format, the stories he wrote went on and on—naturally enough, since things tended to, and things knew nothing of formats or of newspapers, and it was only a beautiful pretense that the daily paper's readers could be informed. A noble pretense, honestly and diligently pretended. Still, there were alternatives, as far as a story went. Fortunately, though the whole world attended the place, there continued to be more people in Jerusalem who liked to talk than liked to listen.