Damascus Gate (41 page)

"I was the one you left Ericksen for," Pinchas said. "You think I'm going to demean myself?"

"Honestly, you're so weird," she said, "it wouldn't surprise me."

"Linda," Obermann said, "don't worry. You'll enjoy the book. It'll be a souvenir of your youth. Of your quest."

"You are the most cynical individual I've ever encountered."

"You should know me well enough to know I'm not cynical. Maybe you think I wasn't fond of you."

Linda stirred her coffee. "I'm still fond of you, Pinchas. Of course, my life is with Janusz now. But we're not enemies, are we?"

"Enemies? I don't know. I don't write defamatory books. You shan't find yourself mocked or attacked."

"But you're not still fond of me?"

Obermann looked at her. She fixed him with an expectant smile, as though they should both be resigned to her universal appeal.

"No. Not fond."

She smiled stiffly. "Not fond? What then?"

"Not fond," said Obermann.

"Look, Pinchas," Linda said. "I'm not going to give you any trouble. But Janusz is a hothead. He's not young but he's plenty tough. You should be careful."

"You wonder what I know—is that it?"

"I wouldn't want to see you and your friend get in trouble."

"If I didn't know you were so fond of me, Lindaleh, I would be tempted to call this little chance visit a threat."

Linda laughed unpleasantly. "A threat? A threat! Now really."

"What shouldn't we say? What should we conceal?" Obermann asked. "That the characters in the House of the Galilean are con men? That they're in with Moledetniks and worse? Anyway, what's that to Janusz? Or to you?"

"Maybe we think you're turning your back on what the country stands for. And this book that you and that other man are writing is part of that."

"Maybe I think what the country stands for is my right to sit and drink a cup of coffee without religious fanatics breathing down my neck. Like people do in other countries like this one, where religion is practiced and personal freedoms are guaranteed."

"Freedoms," she said, with scorn.

"One thing Israel should guarantee me—I shouldn't have to argue theology with Swedes. Especially ones from Wisconsin. Before noon. By the way," he asked her, "did you know that Vladimir Jabotinsky translated Poe into Hebrew? 'The Pit and the Pendulum'? Have you learned the Hebrew word for 'nevermore'?"

"If you stop being a smartass, Pinchas, we might have a story for you and your friend that will knock this country's enemies on their ear. A purely secular story, I assure you. Involving the UN, the NGOs, arms and dope smuggling. About how these organizations engage in terrorism and blame it on Israel."

"If it's a secular story," Obermann said, "we can't use it. Anyway, what's the point of this stick and carrot? What are you afraid of? Why are you threatening me?"

"This is not," Linda said through clenched teeth, "a threat."

"What then? A greeting? A hello?"

"Goodbye, Pinchas," Linda said.

W
HEN LUCAS AWAKENED
, a little girl was standing in the candlelight of the chapel in which he had gone to sleep. She was honey-haired. Her skin was fair and flushed as though with cold. She had bright blue eyes and a slender, pointed nose that was flushed at the tip. The effect was elfin and not unattractive.

"Did you light all those candles?" Lucas asked her sleepily.

"Yes," she whispered. "Is it good?"

"Very nice," Lucas told her, sitting upright. "Wow," he said, "you lit a lot of them." There were upward of fifty candles burning in the small chapel. Smoke swirled around the uneven ocher ceiling. The roar of the steam-cleaning apparatus which had resounded in his sleep seemed to have stopped.

"There was once a fire," said the girl. "Many died. Standing together."

She wore an odd kind of uniform. It had a high-necked blouse with three buttons on the collar and bouffant sleeves narrowing to tight white cuffs. Over this was a smock that stretched to her ankles with a white apron over it. A wide-brimmed straw hat with a blue band rested on her shoulder blades, attached by a cord around her neck. Stuck in the band was a tiny bouquet of lupines and cornflowers.

"The fire that comes from on high," she said. She had long, thin upper teeth. Pearly white. Her name, she confided to him, was Diphtheria Steiner. She was Rudolph Steiner's daughter.

"Yes," Lucas said. "The Holy Fire of the Greeks. It started a panic. Many, many years ago. In olden days." "Olden days" was the term Lucas's mother had used to refer to the past.

"Many died standing together," the girl repeated. "And many were burned alive. Piled by the gates."

"Who told you about it?" Lucas asked. He could see dim figures around him in the adjoining chapels. He heard distant chanting. When he looked at his watch, he saw that it had stopped at ten. It was a thirty-dollar Timex. He wondered if the women he had impulsively followed into the church were also confined by the vigil, or engaged in it.

"God's will," the child said. "God's fire." There was a heraldic device sewn on the breast of her smock on which he read the words
Schmidt
and
Heilige Land.
"Yet it was not from God the fire came."

She seemed to be posing him some sort of riddle, and Lucas felt that he ought to find a moral for her. He was not good at talking to children.

"We always have to be careful," he explained, "with fire. Even in church. Lighting candles."

"The prophets of Baal could not call down fire," she said. "Not one escaped."

"Prophets of Baal?" Lucas asked. "Never mind the prophets of Baal. Just be a good girl and behave yourself."

"And go to heaven when I die."

"Right," said Lucas. "You'll die and then you'll be in heaven." He stood up and stretched. "What are you doing here? Are you with a group?"

"It was a false miracle," the girl said. "Is that right?"

"They're all false miracles," Lucas said. "Well, I don't really mean that. I mean, we don't know what makes things happen."

"God punished the Greeks for the false miracle."

Lucas was annoyed. "Who told you that? It's not very Christian. I mean, you're supposed to be Christians together. We, I mean. Nobody punished anybody."

"Is it not right to punish?"

Lucas began to look about him for another place to wait out the vigil. The kid was tiresome and he felt exhausted, almost as though he could not put one foot in front of another. The fatigue made him sit down near the carved mausoleum beside which he had been resting. The carving on it showed a bound figure. Christ, bound to be scourged, perhaps.

It reminded him of a carving he had seen years before on a parish church in England, traveling with his then fiancée. A bound devil. A very ordinary little devil, almost a stick figure, confined in bonds, licked by little flames. It was a strange thing to put on a sarcophagus, he thought, unless the person entombed had gone to hell.

The child, who was tall, stood a head higher than Lucas when he leaned back against the tomb.

"Well," he said, and closed his eyes wearily. "Is it not right to punish?" He tried hard to make sense of it. "I guess you have to punish people to make them behave. That's human nature. But," he added, "you can't punish people before they do something wrong. Only after. I mean, you can't punish people in advance."

"Not one of the priests of Baal escaped," the girl from Schmidt's declared.

"It's just a story," Lucas said. "People used not to be able to think straight." The child only looked at him with her politely pleasant half-smile. Being presentable for the grownups. "Unlike now," Lucas said. "Now we have it all figured out."

"God wanted to kill Moses," Diphtheria declared. "He wanted to kill him at the inn."

"Ah," Lucas said. "No he didn't."

"But the wife of Moses cut the baby on the little place. And with the blood touched Moses there."

"Come on," said Lucas sleepily, "they don't teach you that in school. What are you doing here, anyway?"

"Blood and fire," said the child. "Ice and oranges for diphtheria. God makes his enemies die."

"God makes everyone die. That's what makes him God."

"In the mind is the source of all," the Schmidt's girl said. "Papa tells us."

"He does?"

"What we think is what shall be," she explained. "In the mind is the future."

"What an awful notion," Lucas said. "I suppose you had diphtheria long ago."

But she was gone. It took him a moment to admit the possibility that she had not really been there. Or perhaps she had been a djinn. She had seemed a malign figure; it was agreeable to believe she did not exist.

His wanderings led him around the wretched little ark and cross some Victorian Englishman had built over what was supposed to be the tomb of Christ. The chanted beads grew louder as he went. Through the arched entrance of the Franciscan choir, he saw half a dozen friars kneeling in front of a group of pilgrims. One of the friars led the prayers in French, with an accent that might have been Spanish or Italian. Lucas went next door to the Magdalen chapel and listened. The chant took him back to boarding school, the fight with the boy named English, the Jew business, his own fervent tearful prayers. He had believed absolutely.

There were icons of the Magdalen on the walls and paintings in the Western manner, all kitsch, trash. Mary M., Lucas thought, half hypnotized by the chanting in the room beside him; Mary Moe, Jane Doe, the girl from Migdal in Galilee turned hooker in the big city. The original whore with the heart of gold. Used to be a nice Jewish girl, and next thing she's fucking the buckos of the Tenth Legion Fratensis, fucking the pilgrims who'd made their sacrifice at the Temple and were ready to party, the odd priest and Levite on the sly.

Maybe she was smart and funny. Certainly always on the lookout for the right guy to take her out of the life. Like a lot of whores, she tended toward religion. So along comes Jesus Christ, Mr. Right with a Vengeance, Mr. All Right Now! Fixes on her his hot, crazy eyes and she's all, Anything, I'll do anything. I'll wash your feet with my hair. You don't even have to fuck me.

You had to wonder what she'd make of her picture on the wall times seven. Amusing to show her around the place. What do you think, kid? Like it? Everybody remembers you and your old gang. We talk about you all the time.

And all the time, the rosaries resounded nearby.

"
Contemplez-vous, mes frères et mes soeurs, les mystères glo-rieux. Le premier mystère: la Résurrection de Notre Seigneur.
"

They were to meditate,
s'il vous plait,
on the resurrection. The rosary, school, the Magdalen. It got him thinking about his mother. She would surely have been delighted by a resurrection.

She had died on the young side, still in her fifties, of what was, to her, an unmentionable cancer. She had winced to talk about it, not because it was fatal—she had never believed in death—but because it was breast cancer, and her combination of superstition, prudery and vanity had kept her from doctors and eventually killed her. She was the type for the disease: unmarried, with only one child, and not that much of a sexual history. A nonsmoker, because she had been a professional singer from her teens, but a bit of a lush, favoring rare brandies and champagne, though except for the breasts she kept her figure to the end.

She had studied in Europe, she liked European men, blossomed under their compliments. Her musical sense of measure rendered her at ease in the presence of formality; she liked a formal occasion and liked the undoing of it that made it fun in the first place. She was a wonderful dancer.

Herr Professor Doctor Lucas, of Mainz and the Humboldt University in Berlin and Columbia, was the man for her. Of course he was married. It was wrong, but she refused to worry and she had wanted a child so much. So
voilà
sits that homunculus himself, still intact, if a bit conflicted, in the Magdalen chapel in the middle of the world. He was neither a musician like his mother nor a scholar like his father. He believed, though, that he had inherited a number of their separate qualities. Self-doubt, impatience, bad judgment, a sumptuary nature, a drinking problem, a bald spot.

I should say a prayer for her, he thought. She had been a great one for prayer, drunk or sober.

A free spirit, a fun-lover full of dire predictions and grim proverbs she used as expletives in times of stress. "A moment's mirth to wail a week." She had liked that one. And, more folksily, "Sing before breakfast, weep before dinner."

But she also said, seeming very pleased with herself, "Smart men often like to cook." The professor doctor was no mean hand in the kitchen. His wife never cooked. Sometimes he took Lucas's mother to Voisin. Sometimes he came and cooked for them.

And never songs so sweet as the songs with which she sung him to sleep, everything from Gaelic ditties to
lieder
to
Don Carlos.
The two of them, Lucas and his mother, Gail Hynes, a not unknown mezzo-soprano, lying in the dark, she singing and he swooning, yes swooning, on her breast. And his only rival the professor doctor, whose tread might sound on the stair, come to lure her away with the honey of Lucas's own generation. And later, in the fourth grade, the bad school and the Jew business.

He could remember the last of her, encoffined. Very happy she looked, rosy as life under the cross Father Herzog served, on all that satin, amid all those flowers in the gold dress the professor doctor liked. As though she had died without a mark on her, her skin as milky white as the princess Isolde's, her fine high cheekbones emphasized and just a hint of the boozy swelling under her chin.

Only to be conveyed to St. Raymond's Cemetery and buried in that hateful, mean, black ground stinking of consumption and Irish spite, surrounded by the dwellings of cops and grafting school janitors, beside her parents, Grace and Charlie, and her alcoholic little brother, James John. How could anyone imagine the professor doctor in such a place, among those dead? But he went, while the family eyed him. Her rich Jewish lover, a bloody tycoon, a mogul, a banker, a merchant prince. Cocked their gray eyes on him—her eyes, the eyes Lucas had brought to see Jerusalem—and smiled the sympathetic smile of a conquered race, and went home and moaned of their humiliation.