Damascus Gate (53 page)

"Yo, Sonia," he said, finding her sad at the window. "Wassup, home?"

"You tired, Razz?" she said.

"We're almost there, kid."

"I hope so," she said. She looked at him. "I still believe. Am I thinking straight?"

"Sonia," Raziel said, "don't worry. Very shortly the world will be unrecognizable. The world as we know it will pass from history."

She closed her eyes and opened them again.

"Must be the child in me," she said. "I have to believe you."

Then he left her to go in to the old man. De Kuff lay on a sofa bed, in his stocking feet, his overcoat draped over his frame. Under the coat, his arms were crossed at his chest.

"How are you, Adam?" Raziel asked.

"Losing my strength," De Kuff said. "I think I may be dying. I think I might like to die."

"I understand," Raziel said. "Better than you think. But we have a ways to walk. We have one final mystery to impart."

"Do you really believe?" De Kuff asked him. "Don't you think we might have been wrong?"

Raziel smiled. "We've given our lives over to it, Adam. We have nothing else."

"That doesn't mean we were right," De Kuff said. "Only that we ourselves are lost."

"Don't give up, Rev. Wait for the time of the final mystery. Remember, wait for the
tav.
"

"How I wish we could have been spared," the old man said.

Raziel went over and took his hand.

"Do you wish it for me, too? You're kind, Adam. But we weren't spared, and you really are who you are. Wait yet a while."

De Kuff closed his eyes and nodded.

The doorbell rang and the people scattered about the suite froze and looked at one another. Raziel went and opened the door. Ian Fotheringill stood in the hall, in his white chef's tunic and toque. Raziel left the door ajar and stepped out into the hall to join him.

"You have it?" he asked the Scot.

Fotheringill handed him a package wrapped in butcher paper and Raziel put it in his pocket. Then the two of them stepped into the suite.

"We'll only be staying a few hours," Raziel announced. "Anyone want to wait here while we go up the mountain?"

No one did. Each of them wanted to go as far up as they could manage.

Raziel approached Sonia. "He needs somebody. He needs you for a change. Tell him what he has to hear."

"I wish I knew what that was."

"You do, Sonia. You always have."

Sonia got up and went into the room where De Kuff was resting. He was lying on his side, weeping.

"Are you suffering?" she asked, taking his old, cold hand as Raziel had.

"Very much," he said.

"This is the struggle without weapons," she told him.

"I may fail. If I fail, I'll die. But it's all right." He turned onto his back and looked anxiously up at her. "You have to take care of all these children." It really seemed, she thought, that there was not much life left in him.

"Sure," she said. She sat down on the bed beside him.

"Among Sufis," Sonia said, "the struggle without weapons is called
jihad.
It's not the
jihad
of Hamas or what the
shebab
call
jihad.
But it's
jihad
all the same."

She saw his eyes come alight.

"Is there anything we can do for you?"

"We have to go," he said with sudden urgency. "To Galilee, to the mountain. And then to Jerusalem. You see, I'll do everything that is required. If it doesn't happen..."

"If it doesn't happen, it doesn't," she said. "One day it will."

In his own room, Raziel locked his door, cooked up the heroin Fotheringill had brought him, tied off and found a vein. He felt a childlike rush of gratitude; creation in that instant became again a place of comfort, and he had found some quarter of a caring, providing world.

The necessities of his task had brought him back to drugs. Every day he lived in fear that De Kuff would be lost to him, that he would have no place in the process that he had made himself believe in. The process, his perfectionism, had brought him to drugs for relief again, just as, once, music had.

He had not been able to take the contradictions, the intersections he had been compelled to negotiate, connecting the pious routines of orthodoxy to conspiracy with swindlers and men of violence. Unaided, he had not had the strength.

Every day he had been casting formulaic prayers into the void of the unknowable. Every minute of each day had been shadowed in paradox. He had sought out forbidden Sabbataian texts that reversed the meanings of Torah, to force it from its traditional interpretations. He had traced the memory palaces of the ancient
min
and meditated on the sidereal tables and astral metaphors of Elisha ben Abouya, the accursed Gnostic Pharisee. He had consulted tarot and the
I Ching
in search of Kabbalist parallels. His motto, alibi, guiding text, had been the words written on a scroll of Qumran, the words of the Teacher of Righteousness: Depravity is the mystery of creation. To liberate into the world the ultimate goodness of God and man, it was necessary to walk deep into the labyrinth.

Sometimes, he thought—pitying the old man, himself and the ragged circle of believers—it was so hard to believe that there had ever been or would ever be anything resembling redemption or reconciliation under Jerusalem's heaven. Anything at all but that rich, indifferent blue, the first and holiest of unresponding skies. But behind it the sages had discovered the
ayin,
the substance wherein holiness itself was concealed and that Raziel, for all his confusion, believed in absolutely, joyfully.

But in the end, he had needed drugs again to realize it and to believe—to be at once Jew and Christian, Muslim and Zoroastrian, Gnostic and Manichean. The creed he had worked out was antinomian. He himself, in his heart, was not antinomian enough to be the priest of so contradictory a sacrifice, not depraved enough or magus enough to bring the process to fruition. And he had constantly to conceal the violent aspect of the plan from De Kuff, from Sonia, even from himself in the midnight hours.

Like the fighting Zionists, he had believed in the imminence of the final redemption. The signs had come. Even the charlatans of the House of the Galilean subscribed to that, or pretended to. Raziel did not in fact think that it would come to violence. He had believed there would be intercession, although the forms of violence had to be employed. Now he could feel it all dissipating into illusion.

Finally, he supposed what he worshiped was the butterfly, the sweet blood butterfly that spread its motherly wings against the window of his needle. It was all that could raise his sick, impoverished, tied-off heart. The thing had failed, but he had not the courage to tell them. Above all, he could not face De Kuff. He watched his own blood in the glass.

How lovely, how symmetrical, the lovely language, the Torah, the dreams of the Nazarenes. He had been an athlete of perception. Now, perhaps, it was all almost over.

E
XHAUSTED,
driving the rented Ford Taurus, Lucas overtook them at a campsite run by Kibbutz Nikolayevich Alef. It was one of the oldest kibbutzim in the country, dating from Ottoman times. Until 1967 it had been practically astride the Jordanian border and subject to regular attacks. Once it had been on fire with conflicting ideologies, but it had survived all and become a kind of country town. Part of it still subscribed to the old kibbutz collectivism, part of it functioned on the principle of a moshav.

Nikolayevich Alef was surrounded by orchards and fields of sugar cane and streams beside which papyrus grew. Lucas was glad to leave the Dead Sea road for its shade and birdsong. He found De Kuff and his followers in the dining hall, eating by themselves. A nearby table full of teenage girls watched them in desperately suppressed merriment, exchanging hilarious whispers at the pilgrims' appearance. The girls bit their lips and pressed their faces into the Formica tabletops so as not to be caught laughing.

De Kuff and his followers were definitely a scene, but few others in the huge cafeteria-style place paid them any attention. Most of the residents were commuters, to Tiberias and Jerusalem, professionals and civil servants, men dining alone or married couples, both of whom sat with their briefcases at their side.

The kibbutz did not keep a kosher dining hall, and the special of the day was shrimp. Lucas thought it looked institutionally overcooked and was probably frozen. De Kuff and Raziel ate theirs with enthusiasm. Sonia had salad. The Marshalls also ate shrimp, wearing their hats and looking grim. They ate the fried tails along with the rest.

It might be said now that among the group there was neither Jew nor Gentile, male nor female, bond nor free. A circus. But at Kibbutz Nikolayevich Alef their circus was more comical than scandalous. At one end of their table were Sister van Witte, eating slowly, her hands crippled with arthritis; Helen Henderson, the Rose, blowing her nose in a tissue; the awful Walsing brothers; and the unlikely Fotheringill, who had brought some bread and cheese to share. At the other end sat Sonia, Raziel, old De Kuff and sad Gigi Prinzer, sipping her kibbutz orange drink.

Standing in the doorway of the dining hall, Lucas was moved by the sight of them. He tried to remember how long he had known them all. A few months, no more.

Raziel looked up and saw him. He said something to Sonia. She pushed her plate aside and came to him.

"You got my note," she said. "You went to Stanley's."

"Yes. We have to talk."

She looked at him with some concern. "You're all fucked up, you know that? You look sick and you look tired."

"Scared," Lucas said.

"Come in and eat something," she said.

"I don't like cafeteria food," Lucas said. "Not since the Belmont closed."

"Where was that?"

"Twenty-eighth Street, I think. It's been a while."

They went out into the sweet-smelling garden. Azaleas bloomed.

"We're in trouble. I've been to see Ernest and I've been to see Sylvia."

"I was afraid we might be," she said. She seemed, to Lucas, more calm and composed than she had any right to be. "Is it over Gaza? Or the Haram story?"

"I still don't really know."

"What do they say?"

"That Nuala and Rashid are in very bad trouble. And that we're better off because we connect with Raziel. By the way," he asked her, "have you by chance asked our young leader if his revelation involves some ... some mishap at the Temple Mount?"

She laughed uncertainly.

"Well, no. But it wouldn't, would it? I mean, Raziel is an ex-junkie and all, but he's a gentle guy. And you don't think the Rev is some kind of bomber, do you?"

"No," Lucas said. "But I thought it might be worth asking. Just on an unlikely notion, sort of."

"You want me to ask him?"

"Yes," Lucas said. "Because it seems to me that ... if history is going to be resolved, the rebuilding of the Temple should figure in it."

"We don't think that way, Chris. That's not our way of seeing things."

"Ask him anyway," Lucas said. He sat down on the mess hall steps. "Is there somewhere I can sleep?"

"I'm in a bungalow with Sister van Witte," she said. "You can sleep with us, I guess."

"OK," Lucas said. When she started back inside, he called her. "Sonia! What did he say to you when I came in?"

"Who, Raziel? When?"

"When I came in, while you were all eating. He said something to you when he saw me."

"Oh," she said. "Well, you know how he is. Always sort of scheming. He said to get you to come with us. Up the mountain."

"Right," said Lucas. "Scheming."

When Lucas had gone to put his gear in the bungalow, Sonia approached Raziel outside the mess hall.

"Razz?"

"Yo," said Brother Raziel.

"Just around like, you haven't heard anything about, well, about some plan for destroying the mosques on the Temple Mount?"

Raziel did not seem surprised. "Did Chris ask you to ask me that?"

"He did, actually. There seems to be some plot like that around."

"There always has been," Raziel said. "Goes back a long way. In Jerusalem people are always tearing something down to build something else in its place. Back to the Babylonians, right? The Ninth of Av. Pull down one temple, put up another. Pull down their guy, put up our guy. Pull down the temple, put up the church. Pull down the church, put up the mosque. Profane the sacred. Sanctify the secular. Goes on and on."

"But we have nothing to do with one, right? These plots have nothing to do with us, do they?"

"Sonia," Raziel said. "We aren't here to destroy anything physical. The change that involves us is spiritual. It's a transformation in kind. A miracle. Regardless of what people may have heard. Or what they think."

"So you're telling me," she said, "that I'm right about that, yes? We have nothing to do with any destruction of the mosques?"

"I give you my word, Sonia. Not one of us will harm a human soul. Not one of us will harm another's property. I swear it. Is that good enough?"

It was getting dark. They heard the teenagers laughing at them from the direction of the communal swimming pool.

"Yes," she said. "Of course it is."

A
T THE AIRPORT
in Cyprus, Nuala and Rashid were picked up by the man they were told would meet them. His name was Dmitri, and because the deal involved Russian friends of Stanley's, they had expected a Russian. But Dmitri was a Greek Cypriot, a small, wrinkled man with a long, comically fluted nose. He was also less cosmopolitan in appearance than they had expected. He was dressed like a village artisan, with a stained old-fashioned English tweed cap.

Dmitri took Rashid's cloth bag; Nuala was wearing her backpack. At first they could get no English out of him, which for a Greek Cypriot was absurd.

When the car weaved its way through town, left the coast road and headed north, then turned off again, she complained.

"Just a mo, Dmitri," she said. "Could we ask you where we're meeting our friends. I thought it would be in Larnaca."