Damascus Gate (32 page)

"Who would go there?" Lucas wanted to know. "It's so close to the camp."

But there were customers. Long-legged blond women in bikinis and gauzy wraps strolled in the verdant shadows. A man with fair hair to his shoulders carried a young woman to the edge of the pool and dropped her in.

"They're mostly Europeans there," Sonia said, "because that hotel's not religious. Israelis go to the others. They're a good buy."

"But you can see the camps."

"And smell them," Nuala said. "It doesn't bother everyone."

Turning from the young Aryans at play across the wire to the dark mass of the camp, Lucas had to consider what he had seen that morning. Images of Gaza and Yad Vashem would be forever confounded in his mind, although he understood perfectly well that it was a cheap equivalence, already a cliché of the place, trotted out for the record by every aspiring athlete of the sensibility who passed by. But the chain of circumstance connecting the two shaped the underlying reality. Blind champions would forever turn the wheels in endless cycles of outrage and redress, an infinite round of guilt and grief. Instead of justice, a circular darkness.

It occurred to him that Sonia had been right about going to those two places the same day. He had been trying to balance some imaginary scale, and no doubt anyone who saw Yad Vashem might imagine the necessities of Gaza. On the other hand, the two were utterly unconnected, because history was moronically pure, consisting entirely of singularities. Things had no moral. If you had to have a side, it was better to see only one—choose according to your needs and simply ignore or deny the other. Comparisons, attempts at ethical calibration, induced vital fatigue.

"But it must be so strange," he said, "to go to the beach over there. With your back to all this."

"Some people probably like the drama," Sonia said.

"Drama indeed," said Nuala sternly. Lucas and Sonia exchanged a secret glance.

"I'm sure some of them moralize," Sonia said. "Come here and frolic in the surf, then go home and bitch about the cruel Israelis."

"Sounds about right," said Lucas.

"We'd have tourists in Cuba," she told him, "leftists, don't you know.
Gente de la izquierda, socialistas.
You could find them on the Malecón, looking for girls or boys to fuck them for dollars. Then they go home and say, How about me, I spent my vacation in Cuba.
Para solidaridad.
"

"Some of the tourists fall in love with the settlers," Nuala said. "They come back again and again."

"Listen," Sonia said to Lucas, "want to go swimming tomorrow? So you can tell the tale? Maybe we can fix it up."

"It seems frivolous," Lucas said.

"You'll earn it. We'll all go. Right, Nuala?"

"Maybe," Nuala said. "If there's no curfew in Gaza."

"It's not exactly what I came for. Is it permitted?"

"You mean by the Koran?" Sonia asked. "By the Torah? Take your pleasures where you find them, Chris. If someone offers you a swim, swim."

"It's a date," Lucas said.

There was an army checkpoint at the edge of the protected coastal road, and they approached it with great discretion.

The noncom in charge, when he had finished inspecting their passports, addressed them in American English. He was earnestlooking and bespectacled, like a young doctor or a college instructor.

"You shouldn't be on the road at all. I hope you know you're spending the night here."

On the outskirts of Khan Yunis, the army owned the light. Lucas eased the van through narrow alleys, trying not to outrun his own parking lights, steering by the occasional glimpse of a kerosene lamp behind a partition. Helicopters scurried about in the darkness overhead, showering brilliance on the landscape below. The high beams prowled in zigzag patterns over the camp, illuminating columns of smoke, sometimes lighting the flight of a solitary runner. Radios crackled, bullhorns sounded. A parachute flare drifted earthward out in the desert, beyond the southern boundary of the camp. There were shots.

"Turns out to be a big night," Sonia said grimly.

They parked behind a run-down stucco wall that enclosed the ruins of a garden that had been part of a British army hospital during the Second World War. A drooping UN flag hung over its gate, lit by a row of half a dozen bare bulbs, a couple of which were dark and broken. Signs in Arabic and English were pasted around the entrance.

It took them some time to gain entrance; they had to pound on the heavy wooden door and depress a lever that only intermittently rang a little bell. Then the door opened and a young Palestinian in a white doctor's coat peered out at them.

"Rashid," Nuala said.

At the sound of her voice and the sight of her the young doctor broke into a radiant smile. She stepped forward and stood before him. Neither of them moved for a moment. Then Rashid took a quick glance over his shoulder, as if he were concerned who might see them, and put his hand over his heart. Lucas saw his look change from a formal polite gesture into something fateful and passionate and meant for Nuala alone. He wore a stethoscope around his neck, and the breast pocket of his white smock was filled with ballpoint pens, some of which leaked and had empurpled his white coat. His hands were stained with ink.

"You have come," he said to her.

"Yes," Nuala said. "And brought everything. And friends along with me. Oh," she said when she saw the condition of his coat, "you'll ruin your jacket. Your pen's leaking."

There was something boyish and fond about the way he laughed at her admonition. In his happiness, he welcomed Sonia and Lucas warmly into the dimly lit foyer, trying not to touch them with his ink-stained hands. In one wing of the old building babies were crying. Lucas noticed that two other Palestinian men were standing at a desk on the far side of the room as though reluctant to approach.

"So," Sonia asked Rashid, "are you with the Children's Foundation?"

Rashid, though no less delighted, seemed confused by her question. He turned to Nuala.

"He's a new assistant administrator," she told Sonia. "Sent over from Hebron the other week."

"I have just finished a residency," Rashid told them, "in America. In Louisville, Kentucky."

"That's great, Rashid," Sonia said. "Congratulations. I didn't know you shared space with UNRWA," she said to Nuala.

"Oh, we don't," Nuala said. Her speech was hurried, her eyes averted. "We're just over in Al-Amal."

As they stood awkwardly in the foyer, they heard the engine of the van start up outside.

"Is that our car?" Lucas asked.

Rashid smiled at him in silence. He turned to Nuala.

"Yes, they're moving it out of the road. It'll be safer over at our place. Tomorrow," she said, "I'll show you around our shop."

"Sure," said Sonia. "We should all turn in."

Then Nuala and Rashid, walking stiffly side by side, went back out into the contentious night. From the darkness, young Palestinian women began to unload the UN van.

"They're taking the stuff," Lucas said. "Is it all right?"

"Let them," Sonia said. "It's meant for them."

Sonia said nothing as they walked toward the desk, where a second Palestinian physician waited, an elderly man with a blue blazer on under his white coat. Sonia knew him; he was Dr. Naguib of UNRWA. She introduced Lucas as her friend, a journalist. He and the man exchanged a soft, silent handshake.

"I hope you'll have room for us," Sonia said to Dr. Naguib.

"We have only the office beds for you. Perhaps we can put one in the hallway."

The office beds turned out to be two camp cots with Swedish sleeping bags on them, which were stowed under a desk in the office of the Education Department. Lucas and Sonia sent Dr. Naguib away when he tried to help them wrestle them out.

"The bath is just outside," Naguib said, pointing down the hallway. "But the water there is not good. And you must be careful tonight because of the patrols."

"We have water," Sonia said. "Thank you, Dr. Naguib."

"We don't have to shlep one into the hall," Sonia said. "The doc won't care."

"I should have brought a bottle of Scotch," Lucas said when Naguib was gone.

"Not appropriate," Sonia said.

"Just as well," Lucas said. "It keeps me awake." He lay down on the cot and cradled his head on his hands. Sonia sat down on one of the office chairs.

"Once upon a time," Sonia said, "I would have brought some Percodan."

"Is that what you like?"

"Used to be. I don't use them anymore."

"Why'd you stop?"

"The Rev told me to quit."

"De Kuff? And that's good enough?"

"Good enough for me," Sonia said.

He was at the point of pursuing the question of De Kuff's role in her life when something closer to hand occurred to him. "Tell me," he said, "what's going on with Nuala?"

"I guess she's got something going with young Dr. Rashid."

"Oh."

"Uh-huh," Sonia said, and laughed quietly. "He's cute, too. Clean-cut kid. Good for Nuala."

"She might have told us," he said. "What are we supposed to be, the beards or something?"

"Good question," she said. She stood up and turned out the light in the office. "Who knows?"

Sometime later, he made his way down the hall in the direction Dr. Naguib had pointed and let himself out into the night to find the toilet. He slid a shoe in the doorjamb to keep the outside door from locking on him. He was edging toward the little shed when the noise of a motorbike exploded in the silence. As it passed the naked lights over the main entrance, he saw that there were two riders on the bike: a man up front and a woman riding pillion. Nuala.

Within seconds, with a roar and torrent of wind a helicopter was prowling overhead. The tin roofs of the alley rattled in unison, the street refuse flew in an eye-stinging whirl, dogs howled. A great column of light descended and he saw the running lights of the chopper only a couple of dozen feet above him. Breathless, he huddled in the moist darkness of the washroom, waiting for the big machine to move off.

Back inside the dark Education Department office, he stood outside the cubicle where Sonia lay. Surely, he thought, she must be awake.

"I just saw Nuala taking off with Rashid," he told her.

"She's probably going to Al-Amal to spend the night with him. And tell his people she brought them what they need."

"I hope they make it."

"They will," she said without opening her eyes.

He went and lay down on his cot in silence. After a moment, he got up.

"I think now," he told Sonia, who lay with her eyes closed, "I think I'd like to hold your hand."

"I'd like you to hold it," she said. Her eyes remained closed.

He went over to her and took her hand and kissed it.

"Now I have to tell you," she said, "that we are deep in Islamic territory. And we must do nothing to give scandal." She shifted so that she rested her face against his arm. "So if you have any unseemly impulses, you better forget them."

"And I suppose there are nasty little kids on the lookout for non-Islamic behavior," Lucas said.

"Damn right," she said. "Especially among infidel women. And they sneak up to windows."

"What will we do, then? Will you sing for me?"

"No fucking way, Jim. After hours."

"Then I'll tell you a story," Lucas said. "Would you like that?"

"Uh-huh."

"So one time," Lucas said, "before the Second World War, this tourist goes into Notre-Dame in Paris. Someone's playing Bach's Fantasy and Fugue in G. An angelic rendering. So the tourist goes up into the choir loft to see who's at the keyboard, and who do you think he sees?"

"Fats Waller?"

"Hell," Lucas said. "You knew."

"Damn right," she said.

"So Fats says, 'Just trying their God box, man.'"

Sonia had begun to cry.

"Poor Thomas Waller," she said. "He loved Bach. He loved the organ. After his radio show was over, he played it on his radio station for hours. For free. Uncredited." Tears rolled down her cheeks and she opened her eyes to wipe them.

Lucas patted her shoulder. It had been a strange day. He had gone to Yad Vashem. He had come through the smoke of Gaza. Now he was listening to a woman in God's most ancient wilderness, weeping for Fats Waller.

"I think it's great," he said after a moment, "that you're crying for him."

"I always cry for him," she said. "He was sort of like my daddy. They knew each other when Daddy was young. I cry for them both."

Lucas kissed her gently and went back to his cot and fell asleep at once.

L
ONG BEFORE,
during the years of the British mandate, part of the cellar of the main building of what was now the House of the Galilean had been taken over by one of the Arab merchant's sons as a radio room. The boy had been a ham operator with vast resources, and he had equipped the cellar lavishly, turning it into a cross between an American commercial broadcasting studio and the radio shack of an ocean liner. He had performed live together with his brothers and sisters, singing Arab songs and continental ballads of the day, staging and reading his own radio plays.

The young man's relaying equipment was long gone; his rig had been closed down by the British during one of the emergencies and his expensive gear confiscated in 1939. But the trappings of an old-time studio were still there—baffled walls, curving tweedy sofas, spare modernistic tables and cylindrical lamps.

There was a long horseshoe-shaped table like a newspaper copy desk, and Janusz Zimmer and some of his associates had just held a meeting there.

The representative of the principal organization in attendance was an American rabbi from California who had lost one son to drugs but redeemed the other to militant religious Zionism. His group had committed itself to armed violence against the Palestinians and, if need be, against the Israeli state.

Its sages, consulting the tractates as the youth division trained with modern weapons, had come to the conclusion that only the strict and literal application of the most militant adjurations in the Torah could bring about the return of the Messiah. The return centered, they believed, on the expulsion of idolaters and aliens— according to the letter of Numbers 33:55—and the reestablishment of the Temple and its priesthood.