Damascus Gate (23 page)

"He takes tourists out on digs. But his main work now is on the Temple Mount. Lestrade claims he can rebuild the Temple on the basis of his research."

"Reconfiguring it?"

"Look," Ericksen said, "rebuilding the Temple is what the House of the Galilean is all about. That's what they claim to be doing."

"I thought you were missionaries."

"If we were looking for converts," Ericksen said with a smile, "the rabbis would drive us out. They don't care for us anyway. And the Muslims would kill us."

"So you never made any converts?"

"We converted a few Christians to our kind of Christianity. And we made a lot of money."

"You sound very disillusioned," Lucas told him. "Have you just had it with the House of the Galilean? Or have you lost faith?"

Ericksen looked at him without expression.

"When Linda and I came here," he said, "we both believed it very much. We came to witness."

"But ... something went wrong."

"There's a power here," Ericksen said. "A terrible power."

"But," Lucas asked humbly, "it's good, is it not? We're all ... supposed to believe in it."

"We're supposed to believe in the power of evil. Most people here do. Most people everywhere. It makes them stronger."

"The power of evil? Do you mean the power of God?"

"Whatever you call it. It makes you stronger until you think about it. It took Linda," he told Lucas. "It took her body as a thing to fuck. Next it's going to kill me."

"Excuse me," Lucas said. "Let me take a little jump. Are you talking about God? The Jewish God?"

"I was wrong when we spoke on the mountain," Ericksen explained. "The Jewish God is Azazel. Always was. I never knew it. Azazel, God, Jehovah, the evil thing—it belongs to them."

The reverend, Lucas thought, resembled his former wife. Their eyes were very similar, with transparent irises through which his passion visibly burned, while hers lay invisible as Azazel.

"I like the people who wear the serpents," Ericksen said. "The black girl and her friends at Bethesda. Do you know them?"

"Yes," Lucas said. "I like them too."

"Do you know why they wear serpents?"

"I guess I don't know. I'd like to hear you tell me."

"Because," Ericksen said, "when the first Adam was destroyed, the serpent came to free us from Azazel. But Azazel set all women against him. Christ was the serpent come again. The serpent, the snake, is our only hope." He dipped his hand under the V of his collar. At the end of a thin chain hung a tiny ouroboros, essentially the same one Raziel and Sonia wore. "See, I have one. Would you like one also?"

Lucas, who was untalented, began to try and draw it in his notebook. Then it occurred to him that he might have many future opportunities to do so.

"I don't know," he said. "I guess I'll have to think about it."

T
HE DAY AFTER
De Kuff's Pauline expedition to the Bethesda Pool, Janusz Zimmer arranged to meet Sonia at her apartment in Rehavia. She had been spending most of her time over in the Muslim Quarter, at Berger's. She and Zimmer were old acquaintances. If she had not taken up with Raziel, if she had not become a Sufi of Berger's, they might have been more than that.

Sonia had no idea what was on Janusz Zimmer's mind. For a while they talked about the places in Africa they had both been. Nairobi. Mogadishu. Khartoum.

"We're both old Reds, aren't we?" Zimmer asked her. He was drinking a bottle of Israeli brandy he had brought, and he seemed to be getting sentimental. It was midafternoon. The light outside grew richer, the shadows under the eucalyptus grew longer.

"I suppose we are," she said. "But not the only ones in town."

"Among the few in Jerusalem," Zimmer corrected her. "Most of our old comrades live in Tel Aviv."

"Tell you the truth," said Sonia, "I always thought you were just faking it. I never believed you were actually a Marxist-Leninist."

"To tell you the truth, Marx and Lenin opened my eyes when I was a youth. Remember, we were still fighting a civil war with reactionaries in Poland when I was a young man. The Americans were parachuting weapons to them. There were pogroms. So, for a period, I called myself a Marxist Leninist."

"And you became disillusioned."

"To make a long story short," Zimmer said, "I became disillusioned. But of course
you
had the good fortune to be in Cuba. Where everything is wonderful."

"Please don't put down Cuba," Sonia said. "It hurts me."

"But the bottom line is, it's a police state, yes?"

Sonia shrugged, declining to argue it.

"So you embrace Sufism and whatnot," Zimmer said.

"Well, not much whatnot," Sonia told him. "A lot of Sufism."

"And now you're with these Jewish-Christian, Christian-Jewish Jews, so called. Isn't that right?"

"Are these friendly questions, Jan? Are you asking as a reporter? Or am I supposed to exercise self-criticism?"

"We'll pretend we're back in the Party," Zimmer said.

"Jan, I was never in the Party. My parents were."

"We'll pretend we're back in the Party," Zimmer repeated, as though he knew better than to give weight to such demurrers. "Exercise self-criticism. Why do you have to chase these phantasmagoria?"

"My beliefs are my own business," Sonia said. "These days."

"Is it because it's Jerusalem?" Zimmer asked. "Because what happens here is unlike what happens elsewhere? And sometimes it changes the world?"

She was startled and a little hurt. "Chris Lucas told you I said that."

"Yes," said Zimmer, "Lucas and I keep in touch. But what you say is right, Sonia. What happens here
will
change the world. This time it will."

"What do you mean, Jan?"

"The Party—the Party lost its soul when it lost us. I mean the Jews, because you're as much a Jew as I am. It was our hope, our passion for
tikkun olam,
our courage, our devotion that made the Communist Party everything it was. At least everything good. The Stalinists, the murderers, were all mainly Gentiles. There were Jews among them, yes. But essentially they were all anti-Semites, regardless."

"Jan," Sonia said. "Are you pitching me? Are you hitting on me? Are you asking me to help you bring back the Party or telling me I should be a better Jew or asking me for a date or what?"

"I'm telling you this, Sonia. There are organizations in this country whose work it is to see that this becomes a better place."

"Everybody has different ideas about that."

"We might possibly be of like mind. You might be able to help us. Where there was a Red Orchestra we now have a Jewish Orchestra, a network organized as well as anything that was organized in Europe against the Germans, or here against the British. I want you to join it, or at least to help. I owe it to you to ask."

Sonia looked at him in wonder. "So you haven't given up on the perfect world?"

"I have not," Zimmer said. "I will not. But it won't come from Moscow. Maybe we can do the job here."

"What do you propose to do?"

"If you will commit, you'll learn more. Surely you know how it goes. On the basis of need to know."

"I guess I'm a Jew," Sonia said. "My mother was. She used to say that you didn't have to be Jewish to be a Jew. That a lot of people who weren't Jewish were, as far as she was concerned. So I guess I'm like her. My country's here, sure, but my country's in the heart too. I don't believe in a perfect world, but I believe in a better one."

"My poor baby," Zimmer said. "You've become a liberal."

"Hey, Jan," she said, "I'm a person of color, you know. And sticking up for the Palestinians in this country, who are a despised minority here—that just may be my way of being a good Jew. So if a Jewish underground means what I think it means, no thanks."

"Let me give you one last piece of friendly advice," Zimmer said. "Stay out of the Gaza Strip."

"Jesus," Sonia said. "You're off the deep end, aren't you? I worked there, Jan. I may very well work there again."

"So be it."

"I'll tell you what," said Sonia. "We'll forget this happened—this conversation. I won't mention it. So we can stay pals."

"That would be considerate," Janusz Zimmer said. "And I certainly hope we can stay pals. I'm not sure."

"You know," Sonia said, "they say the truth is one."

"Is that a fact?" Zimmer asked her. "Yours or mine?"

F
OR WEEKS,
on the days that he was well enough, when the spirit upheld his frail body, De Kuff went to the Pool of Bethesda. For years, Bethesda had been a gathering place for a great variety of strange pilgrims and seekers. Anyone passing it in the dawn hours would see scores of foreigners assembled, singly or in groups, most of them appearing to be in the grip of some torment or illumination, watching, mumbling prayers. Some faced toward the medieval church during its early Mass, kneeling as the consecration took place inside. Some of them read their Bibles, either silently or to a small group of companions. A great many simply sat or took the lotus position, palms upturned, listening to the proclamation from the Haram of the oneness, the mercy and compassion of Allah.

The people who oversaw the area or lived or worked in it had become used to the morning and evening assembly. Since the first dawn De Kuff arrived on the scene, proclaiming the truths of the universe, the attention of this group of religious wanderers had come to focus on him. Also, their numbers increased. The larger crowds and the appearance of this new, radiant, ungainly figure attracted attention from several quarters in that city of impossibly delicate balances.

The sheikhs of the nearby Haram, the priests of the adjoining churches, Greek and Latin, all became uncomfortably aware of the transformation taking place around Bethesda. Members of small, militant Jewish congregations asserting the sacred nature of the whole city sometimes wandered, armed, down to the Via Dolorosa for a look at De Kuff. The police took note but did not intervene, as long as De Kuff and his hearers remained off the street itself. If his preaching were to be prevented, it would be up to the various institutions that owned sections of the courtyard to complain collectively. And collective legal action was difficult for the divided sects.

De Kuff became a more and more familiar sight at the Pool, and certain of the eccentric pilgrims became regulars and waited for him every morning.

As the summer went on, De Kuff's crowds grew larger and larger. One morning, he decided to inform his listeners of the third principle of the universe. He had already preached two. Sonia and Lucas were in the crowd. Raziel had stayed back at Berger's apartment, playing his clarinet to the courtyard.

"Why is there something rather than nothing?" De Kuff asked the crowd. It fell silent at his words.

"That which is at the core of the universe utters words," he proclaimed. "The wind takes the words and scatters them. They take a million million forms like snowflakes. But the essential words remain, regardless of their infinity of superficial meanings in a blind world."

"I like that New Orleans accent," Lucas whispered to Sonia. "Sidney Lanier must have sounded like that, you think?"

But Sonia was transfixed.

"If I say everything is Torah," De Kuff declared, "I say that life has myriad forms but only one essence. Its essence is inscribed in imperishable fire. Now the letters, the words, they whirl like leaves. But under the multiple disguise"—he smiled triumphantly—"one essence, one truth."

It seemed to Lucas that the crowd grew closer to him at the words "one truth." As if it were a cold morning, as if they were cold and he and his words warmed them. Especially the words "one truth."

De Kuff had a second principle of which to remind them.

"The varieties and mysteries of the world will now be solved. That which began as imperishable words will become again imperishable words. The End of Days, the world to come, is at hand. In the world to come, the snake sheds its skin, the wool divides from the linen, all things. No more shadows on the wall of a cave. 'For now we see through a glass, darkly,'" he said mischievously, "'but then...'"

He waited for a reply, and someone in the crowd said, "'Face to face.'"

"Face to face!" De Kuff shouted in delight. "When everything is Torah. And the Messiah comes. Or Jesus returns. Or the Mahdi. And all know," he said. "And all partake. And there are no shadows."

"This is far out," Lucas said.

"No," Sonia said, "it's simple."

"Maybe it's simple if you've believed in the dialectic," Lucas said. She was lost to him again.

There were other things, De Kuff said, other things everyone must know. The time was ripe, the fullness of days was come. The pangs of the world being born were being felt.

The crowd grew excited.

"Jesus," said Lucas, under his breath.

And there was more. De Kuff preached Hagar in the desert. When Hagar beheld in the desert the insight at the core of the universe, she could not believe she would not die.

"Can I see the Lord of Seeing, can I see El Roi, and live?" De Kuff had Hagar ask.

Then he talked about the Death of the Kiss. Because the new world was being born, because certain things could not be seen, understood, witnessed, without a kind of death, each person had to embrace the Death of the Kiss. In the Death of the Kiss, each died to the world. A kind of death in life must be practiced. It was a death, but it was life more abundant. It was being more alive to something else.

"In the beginning," De Kuff said, "is the end. In the end is the beginning is the end. In the beginning..."

Lucas saw Sonia fingering the ouroboros at her throat.

"He's exhausted," she said. "He'll never come down."

And indeed, De Kuff, his face glowing with mad enthusiasm and drawn with fatigue, went lurching across the courtyard. Some of the more enthusiastic of his regular following made as though to follow him. An old woman in black. A few weeping Russians. Some young European hippie types. Lucas thought he spotted the German
majnoon
from the previous Easter. Suddenly De Kuff stopped in his tracks.