Damascus Gate (37 page)

The attendant was an American black in a blue polyester suit who had what looked like a razor scar on his face. Maybe he had done hard time, Lucas thought, got religion in the slammer. He spoke pleasantly and well, with a southern intonation, reciting the story of the Bab, the history of the faith. Lucas paid more attention to his voice than to his words.

"Peace, brother," the man said when Lucas made his contribution and was leaving.

A fierce dude. Peace was worth nothing to those who had never known war. On this man's lips it sounded green and golden. Nothing was free.

"And to you, peace," Lucas said.

Maybe the Baha'is had some dark, crazy side, he thought, walking down the hill. Intrigues over power and money, cultish connivings. But on such a pleasant morning it was nice to imagine there was nothing like that. He walked the winding residential streets of the upper city to the lower reaches of town and sat at a café to watch the water. In the afternoon, he telephoned the Benedictines to ask if he might have an interview with Father Jonas Herzog. The monk on the phone informed him that Father Jonas no longer gave interviews.

"It wouldn't necessarily be an interview," Lucas said. "I'd just ask him to comment on a recent conference. And," he added, "I have a few personal questions."

The monk, sounding dubious, replied that Friday was a busy day for Father Jonas, who had administrative duties and had in addition to hear confessions. Lucas thanked him and resolved to try confession.

The monastery church stood among poplars, half a mile's distance from the Baha'i shrine but out of sight of it. It was not particularly old: a Neo-Romanesque structure looking a little like St.-Ger-main-des-Prés and representing another concession to the French by the Ottomans. A busy road ran past it, on which traffic slackened only slightly with the advent of Shabbat. Haifa was a mixed and generally secular city.

A Palestinian in a patched cassock, standing just inside the doorway, politely asked Lucas his business.

"Just thought I'd pop in," he said.

That seemed to do it. He had not been able to bring himself to ask the hours of confession, but once inside, he saw he was on time. Lines of Palestinian teenagers in family groups stood against both walls of the church, waiting for their turns in the confessional, boys to the right, girls to the left. Priests were identified by plastic strips on their confessional doors, which stated their names and the languages they commanded: Father Bakenhuis, who received penitents in Dutch, French, German and Arabic; Father Leclerc, who advised in French and Arabic; Father Waqba, who understood French, English, Arabic and Coptic.

Jonas Herzog's booth was halfway to the altar on the right hand side, but none of the kids were waiting for him. There was no strip on his door and the booth was empty. A queue of assorted foreigners stood nearby along the wall. Lucas turned to the sextant.

"What language does Father Jonas speak?" Lucas asked.

"All languages," the sexton replied.

Like the devil himself, Lucas thought, and took a seat in an adjoining pew. Ancient the place might not be, but it had the smell of cool old stone, incense and mortifications.

Then the man entered who must be Herzog. Lucas had read that he was sixty, though he looked even older. Out of the splendor of the Holy Land's light he came, and into the gloom of apostasy, genuflecting before the sacrament, bowing to the cross. He appeared cramped and stooped in his black and white Benedictine habit.

Herzog carried his own strip and hung it on the confessional door. It displayed his name in Hebrew characters, along with the Arabic and roman. Yonah Herzog—Jonas Herzog, OSB.

One waited long for Herzog. When the last penitent had gone and Lucas got to his feet, he was preempted by the sudden arrival of a young European woman. She was simply dressed, a pretty blonde in a white sundress and a cotton sweater that covered her shoulders. She wore a white scarf over her fair hair. German? She appeared somewhat distraught.

She looked married, Lucas decided, a young matron, a vice consul's unfaithful wife or an unfaithful vice consul. There were so many ways to be unfaithful in this place, so many unforgivable couplings and covenants to betray. Sleeping with a married colleague, or a dashing Palestinian guerrilla like Rashid, or her Shin Bet control. She would naturally go to Herzog, who knew the price of betrayal and its fascinations.

Her confession went on for a long time. Lucas could hear it only as a murmur in what sounded like French. Then the young woman came out and walked to the altar to say her penance in the ancient way.

Lucas rose, his stomach in a knot as though he were a child again, and went into the darkness and knelt alone with the crucifix. Then Father Herzog's sliding window opened. He could see the man's keen profile and the glint of steel-rimmed glasses in the semi-darkness. Suddenly he had no idea where to begin. Although he had no intention of confessing, he tried to remember the formula for confession in French.

"It is twenty-five years since my last confession," he heard himself say.

"Twenty-five years?" asked Father Herzog, with only the faintest surprise. "And you want to confess now?"

Lucas had to try and puzzle out the French and then the nature of the question.

"Are you guilty of a crime?" the priest asked.

Un crime.
It made him think of Balzac.

"No, Father. No great crime. As they go."

"Preparing to receive the sacraments?"

To which the only right answer was yes. But instead Lucas said, in English, "No. But I wanted to talk with you."

"I, in my person, am not at your service," the priest said in English. "I'm here as a priest."

"I have questions of a religious nature."

"I have only the sacraments to offer you," the priest said. "And only if you are a baptized person."

"I am," Lucas said, "and also ... like yourself ... of mixed background."

Herzog sighed.

"If you could give a few minutes," Lucas said, "I think it would help me. I could wait. We could make an appointment."

"Are you a journalist?"

"I happen to be a journalist," Lucas said. "Yes."

"And your topic is religion?"

"War, mainly."

"Since the court's decision, I no longer give interviews."

"Then I won't ask you for one," Lucas said. "Only for advice. In private. Off the record."

"Do you want to hurt me?" Herzog asked, almost humorously.

"No."

"I see. Well, I have to ask. If you can wait, I can see you after confessions."

"Yes," Lucas said, "I'll wait."

So he left the booth, like a good child, and sat in the same pew he had occupied before. The process was infantile, but there was no way around it.

The young blond woman was still at the rail saying her penance, and he envied her the prayers. When she went out, crossing herself, he wanted to follow her. He wanted her faith and her secrets, her life. He felt altogether alone.

No one else went to Father Herzog for confession. Lucas fell asleep in the pew and awoke in an empty church with the priest in the aisle looking down at him. The light in the doorway had faded.

"Sorry," Lucas said.

"
Bien.
"

"Should we go somewhere?"

The priest sat down beside him.

"Here will do. If it's all right."

He seemed very French, courtly, ironic.

"Sure," said Lucas, and moved away slightly.

"You mentioned a mixed background. Is this a problem for you?"

"I was Catholic," Lucas said. "I believed. I should understand faith but I can't remember it."

Herzog gave the faintest shrug. "One day it may occur to you."

"I feel tempted by it," Lucas said. "But I can't quite recall how it goes."

It was not at all what he had intended to say. He had cornered himself with his own interviewing strategy. Sometimes, an editor had told him once, you have to tell them the story of your life. But this was beyond that, out of control again.

"Then you have to pray."

"I find prayer absurd," Lucas said. "Don't you?"

"It's childish to pray like a child," Herzog said, "if you're not one."

"Tell me about being Jewish," Lucas demanded. "Does it have a spiritual dimension?"

"'There is neither Jew nor Greek,' " Father Herzog quoted for him, "'there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female; for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.'"

"I know that," Lucas said. "But Jewishness must mean something. It's always been the conduit between humanity and God."

"What Paul is telling us," Herzog said, "is that we are alone with God. Which does not mean we have no responsibility to man. Our moral landscape is human. But finally we are all individual men and women, waiting for grace.

"We cannot make our condition less lonely. You ask me why God revealed himself through the Jews? I suppose we could find social and historical reasons. But the fact is, we don't know why."

"Do you feel as though you were a Jew?" Lucas asked.

"Yes," said the priest. "And you?"

Lucas thought about it at length. "I don't think so."

"Good," said Herzog, "because you aren't one. You're an American, are you not?"

Lucas felt dismissed. Being an American, he felt like telling Herzog, does not necessarily make my condition more trivial. "But I feel," he said, "that part of me has lived before."

After a moment, Herzog said, "Not everything we feel is revelation."

Embarrassed, Lucas prepared to risk humiliation. Working press, he thought. He had a card; he could go anywhere, say anything. Their voices echoed off the stone.

"In the Kabbalist rabbis," he told the priest, "I find the greatest interpretations of life and truth I've ever heard. And I find it brings me back to religious feelings I haven't had since..."

"Since childhood?"

"Well, yes. And I wonder if these aren't things I've always known. I mean always."

"First time in Israel? You can choose to be Jewish. It can be arranged. Not by me, unfortunately."

"I understand the one in terms of the other," Lucas said.

"I suggest you not tell a rabbi you're so moved by books you cannot possibly understand in a language you don't read. He'll throw you out of his study."

"Is it true," Lucas asked, "that we have to lose one life to gain another?"

"Unfortunately," said the priest.

"But you claim to go on being Jewish."

"Because I am. That is my condition. My problem, my means of grace."

"What about me?"

"What about you? You're one American in a world of poverty and pain. What more do you want?"

"To believe. Sometimes."

"Look," Herzog said, "all I can tell you honestly is what any priest—the most bigoted, the least enlightened—could tell you. Trust in God. Try to pray. Try to believe and perhaps you will believe. If you seek God, some say, you've found him."

So they sat in silence for a little while and Herzog cleared his throat and was about to go.

"As a journalist," Lucas said, "as something we call background, not for attribution—what did you tell the court?"

The priest put his hands on the bench in front of them. "That in Israel I had the right to Jewish nationality. No more."

"That was ... intrepid. Because you must have known you would disgust them."

"Yes, of course," the old priest said. "A
melamed.
And the Jew turned monk is an old enemy. The bad son, the evil child, the avenger who denounced the Jews and set off public disputations and the burning of the Talmud. Of the Kabbala, for which you have a fondness."

"Wasn't it what you expected?" Or wanted, Lucas thought.

"I failed to make my case."

"When I read about your case," Lucas said, "I thought about Simone Weil. What she would have done."

"Ah, yes," said Herzog.

But, Lucas thought, he knew what Simone Weil would have done. She would have gone to Gaza and lived there, outraging everyone.

"She refused baptism," Lucas said, "so in a way she remained Jewish. Is there a place for her in the world to come?"

"Yes, as a saint," Herzog said. "There was no place for her here."

"Too bad," Lucas said, "we don't have bodhisattvas in our religion. Whatever it is."

Herzog walked with him to the door.

"I'm sorry I can't help you, sir. But as you see, I can't. I can't give you a faith with bodhisattvas and the Kabbala and Our Lord. No doubt in America there is one."

They stood beside the crucifix over the holy-water font beside the door.

"And the Kabbala," Herzog said, "is indeed beautiful. In the end, the Christians took to it themselves. Reuchlin and Pico and the Spaniards, even under the Inquisition. One day, if you have the discipline, you may understand it and it may help you."

"Why did you come here?" Lucas asked the priest. "Why did you go to court?"

"Because it's holy. And to pray for my parents in their own land. Although they were not religious."

"They'd turn over in their graves," Lucas said.

"They have no graves."

"Sorry," said Lucas. "Is it true you were hidden in a Catholic school?"

"In Vence," said Herzog. "My parents left me under a crucifix. And I asked them, my parents, 'What happened to him?' I meant the man on the cross, the Christ figure. I was then ten years of age and had no idea what a crucifix was. We lived in Paris. After the liberation I was not yet fourteen. The prefect told me who I was. That I was a Jew. That my parents, my family, had been delivered to the Germans and murdered by them. And I felt—what can I say—a recognition."

"But you couldn't leave the Church?"

"Oh," Herzog said with a little shrug, "I didn't care much about the Church. The Church was men, people. Some good, some not." He looked at the floor.

"Then why?"

"Because I was waiting," said Herzog. "Waiting where I had been left. At the foot of the cross. Out of spite or devotion, I don't know." He laughed and put a hand on Lucas's shoulder. "Pascal says we understand nothing until we understand the principle from which it proceeds. Don't you agree? So I understand very little."