Damascus Gate (54 page)

According to her sense of Cypriot geography, they were headed toward the mountains and the border with Turkish territory.

"Road to Troulli, madame," Dmitri said. "But you will not be going all the way there. Your friends are at the monastery."

Nuala looked into the darkness. The headlights caught tiers of cactus plants in flower along the road.

"A road to no-town, they say in Ireland," she told Rashid.

"They are secretive and they know their business. It's best." If he did not sound completely confident, neither did he sound frightened. Nuala decided to keep a weather eye on Dmitri.

They took a left fork from the main road, and before long there was hardly any road at all. Dmitri stopped the car at a cattle grid. Like a chauffeur, he got out and walked around to her side and opened the door. After a moment's hesitation, the two of them stepped out onto the muddy road, invisible beneath their feet.

"It is
ekklesia. Temenos.
It is
Ayios Yeorios.
"

About a hundred yards up the sloping path, a lamp showed, disappeared, showed again. Nuala turned back and saw Dmitri standing beside his car. The motor still turned; the headlights made two reassuring columns of light. The beams widened bravely in the darkness until their rays scattered among the tiny night-winged creatures that flitted against her cheek. There were cicadas and the smell of cows and manure, a country smell that, except for the piney bitterness of sage and scrub oak, reminded her of home.

"They wait," Dmitri called up to her. "Russki."

"It is OK," Rashid said. "Yes! I see it's OK."

She looked for his face in the darkness and saw his jaw thrust out, his arms raised. When he took her hand, she felt in his touch the show of manhood, the straining of his muscles summoning courage. As they walked on, she suddenly knew that they were going to die in the darkness ahead. For a moment she wanted to run—she could run fast, had learned to run in her dusty boots over the dry ground of the Middle East. Fighting the revolution, living to fight another day. But she did not run.

"Well," she said, "we're together."

"Yes," he said. "See? It is OK."

They closed in on the dark buildings, and the beam of the flashlight probed and withdrew to a red glow where men stood.

"
Salaam aleikum,
" a voice said.

And happily, Rashid replied, "
Wa aleikum salaam.
" He knit his fingers in hers. "Yes. These are Russians."

He seemed so sure. Yet she thought there was something strange about the old familiar greeting coming from Russians, from men who were associates of Stanley's or Party comrades.

"Madame," the same Russian voice said, "come with us please."

Come with us please but there was no church, no
temenos.
It was just a stable. Half hypnotized, she held on to Rashid's hand and followed the glowing translucent shield around the torch in the man's hand that swayed as he walked ahead of them. Then they were under a stone roof and for a moment she saw the stars through a lancet window and mixed with the other smells was a smell of old stone and faint incense so that it might have been a church once, a long time before.

Then Rashid pulled his hand away and she stood alone, not comprehending. Then the sudden sounds of struggle. Yet she stood alone, untouched. And then he shouted and she thought, It shall be rain tonight. Let it come down.

And when the knee went into the small of her back and the hand over her mouth, she still heard his boyish, boastful curses and threats, his posturing. In part, she knew it was for her benefit. A doctor, a Communist, a leader of his people, her life's love and still, in the Arab way, a favored son, a boy who could not, even in extremis, stop performing.

There were several men and they shone the light on her. Her arms were pulled tightly back, and over her head they forced some kind of canvas harness. When she resisted, they twisted her arms without mercy until both were bent at the elbow, paralyzed behind her.

"Nuala!" Rashid shouted. He had never learned to say her name correctly.

"Yes," she said. "Here, my love." And she threw her head back and shouted, "Rashid!"

While they called each other's names she was lifted, with strange gentleness by the elbows. There were two men, one at each arm. They carried her up a flight of stone steps, and through the lancet window she briefly saw the stars again. Then the men in whose hands she was turned her away from the window and she saw that she was on a ledge. There seemed to be hay on its hard stone floor. But perhaps it had been a church, the choir loft.

"Rashid!" she shouted. He called back to her. For a moment—maybe she had been encouraged by the gentleness with which they had lifted her—she wanted to address the unseen men who had made her prisoner. Then, when the noose was set around her neck, she knew it had been the gentleness of hangmen, an executioner's discretion. They were roping her ankles together.

It was a dirty, terrifying place to die. One of the men said something to her, but she was too frightened to understand. She heard Rashid call her name again, and he too now sounded afraid.

"Rashid!" she called, hardly able to speak. Her throat was dry, the rope tightened around her neck. She struggled against fear as she had struggled against the harness that held her. Here we are, my love, she thought. She could not tell him it was over. More than anything she wanted him with her, his courage not to fail him in that awful place. Because they were both people of the conquered world, and the gallows that had finally come for them had shadowed all the history of their peoples. "Be brave, my love!"

He called on God.

"Power to the people," she said, although she knew the phrase she had chosen to die uttering had become a joke. "You have been naught," she tried to say, tried to think it. "You shall be all."

Such a dirty, fearsome place. Then she was swinging free and breath was all she cared about, all, it seemed, she had ever cared about, the air of that filthy-smelling place, but there was none to be had. So with her breath all the thoughts of her devotion were expunged while the angry men stood watching her in the beam of their light and she wondered if she would ever ever die and then a deeper darkness, in its mercy, came.

H
IS BED HAD
a comforter, and he woke to the sun through lace curtains and a chorus of warblers in the eucalyptus grove outside.

The bungalow was empty, the other beds in it made up. He found Sonia sitting on a child's swing in the eucalyptus grove, shielding her eyes to see him against the morning sun.

"Want breakfast?" she asked him.

He shook his head. "Where is everyone?"

"Raziel and the Rev left for the Golan with the Rose. She's young and strong and she helps out, and it might keep her out of harm's way. The rest of the gang is staying here. We rented them a couple of bungalows. I'm waiting for you."

"Waiting for me to do what, Sonia?"

"We're going up the mountain."

"Really? And what do we do when we get there?"

"I sing. You listen. You're a reporter, are you not? You protect me. Then, if everything works out, we go to Jerusalem."

He turned away from her and saw Fotheringill, working under the hood of a sixties-era Volvo, talking to himself.

"You seem hesitant," Sonia said, taking Lucas by the hand. "Got any other ideas?"

"I guess not," he said.

When they were on the road in his rental car, Lucas asked, "What does he think he's going to do in the mountains?"

"He has to meditate before he makes the last..."

"Pronouncement?" Lucas suggested. "Revelation?"

"Yes, that's right. And then go back to Jerusalem, because it's written that he pass from out of Dan."

He glanced at her from behind the wheel. There was no irony in what she said; she still believed. Sooner or later it would have to end, he thought. Then, when the lights came on, what would be left of her? As for himself, by now he wanted it not to end. He wanted them both to be subsumed in ongoing mystery.

"Perception is functional," he said. "That's true, isn't it? Things aren't defined by what we see every day, are they? What we see every day could be false consciousness."

"That's the spirit," Sonia said. "Now you're getting it. Anyway, the Rev needs me. He said he did. And I want you to come."

Before long they were passing the shops and hotels of Tiberias. There was a small amusement park along the Lake of Kinneret. Shy Arab families wandered uncertainly among the rides. Lucas noticed that the women wore bandannas and mantillas instead of
chadors.

"Christians," Sonia said.

"That's the South Lebanon Army on R & R. This is where they come."

When they passed Migdal, where Mary Magdalene had been a country girl before she went wrong in the big city, a single faint bell was sounding near the lake.

Dirt roads ran down through rough fields to the water, bordered by tamarisks and eucalyptus. A few miles ahead, Lucas saw the arches of a lakeside church.

"What is it?" Lucas asked.

"Someone's church. I forget whose."

The church and adjoining monastery were the rosy color of Jerusalem stone but they did not seem very old. They were Neo-Romanesque with red roof tiles and a spotless courtyard and fountain out front. He pulled off the highway and guided the car down a dirt road toward the lake. When they reached the water, he saw that they had followed the wrong road; the church and monastery were across a rutted pasture enclosed by wire.

Bells were sounding, bells of every register, from funereal profundo to a tinkling Eucharistic chime. The sound whirled on the lake wind, singing the bright sky, announcing the slow-moving formations of heavy clouds on the far shore.

A tall monk in white was closing the wooden church door.

"Benedictines. I want to go," he announced. "I want to go to Mass."

"If that's what you want," she said, "I'll go with you."

Lucas began to struggle with the wire fencing that enclosed the field, cutting his wrists and arms.

"Hey," Sonia said. "Watch it."

He fought the wire as though he were engaging serpents, until it was subdued and he could hold up the bottom strand for her to crawl under.

"Take it easy," she said. She wriggled through on her back with barely an inch to spare. "Hey, maybe we should get in the car and backtrack."

"No," Lucas said. "We'll never make it." He was growing more and more excited. "We've got to hump cross-country."

Sonia was brushing herself off. She had cut her knee on the wire. "You really feel the need, Chris?"

"You don't have to go," he told her. "You stay. Drive back around and I'll meet you at the church."

"No," she said, "I'll go with you."

So the two of them scrambled across the field of high tough grass, brambles and clodded red earth that lay between them and the monastery. It was hard going and they both cut themselves further. Lucas was breathing hard.

"Chris," she said anxiously, "what's wrong with you?"

"This is the place of the loaves and fishes," he said. "Where the multitude was fed."

"Oh," she said, "I know that one."

"I've got to make that Mass," Lucas said. "I've absolutely got to."

"You look ... you look beside yourself," she said, panting to keep up with him.

"Maybe I am."

But when they reached the building, its great wooden door was ponderously secured. Lucas pulled at the great ring handle. Locked. He pulled harder, then pushed. A sign on the door said
RUHIG
, and under it,
GESCHLOSSEN FÜR GOTTESDIENST.

He went to the other door. It had the same sign.

"They have to let me in," Lucas said.

"No they don't, Chris."

"The hell they don't," he shouted. From inside he could hear faint Gregorian chant. The doors, he thought, must be very thick. He began to pound on them with the side of his fists.

"Let me in, you German sons of bitches!"

His eye fell on a date on the cornerstone of the church:
1936.

"Jesus Christ," he shrieked, "1936! You bastards, let me in! Let me in! Look," he told Sonia, "they're keeping me out. They won't let me in." He pounded until his wrists hurt and his hands were numb.

"You have no right!" he shouted. "You have no right to keep me out! Look," he said to Sonia, "1936!" He pounded some more, until it was impossible to imagine no one heard him. The faint chanting inside continued. He began to kick the door.

"Chris," she said, "please stop."

"The fucking sons of bitches!" His shouts echoed along the tranquil Sea of Galilee.

"Huns!" he cried. "They should be on their knees every minute in this country. They should live on their knees here. Imagine them not letting me in!"

He got to his own knees.

"Because I'm in trouble. I'm in need."

"Yes," she said, helping him to his feet. "I see. I see you are."

They stumbled back over the hard ground toward the car. "You can cry if you like," she said. But he only bit his lip and pressed on, wild-eyed.

They drove to the Franciscan chapel outside Capernaum. A friar was sweeping the steps beside it that led to the ruins, and they nodded to each other. Lucas and Sonia walked along the shore and sat by the remains of the ancient synagogue.

"So what was that about?" she asked when he had calmed down.

"Beats me."

"You say
I
need to believe. What about you?"

"I don't know. I've been drinking too much. I'm out of Prozac. I've got a cold."

"We'll fix you up, poor guy."

"It's all an undigested bit of beef," Lucas said.

"Say what?"

"An undigested bit of beef," he said. "Like Jacob Marley's ghost."

"Jacob Marley?"

"You never heard of Jacob Marley?
A Christmas Carol?
"

"Oh," she said. "Him."

He took an empty water bottle they had brought and filled it from the lake.

"What is it?" she asked.

"Water," he said. "'Over whose acres walked those blessed feet which fourteen hundred years ago were nailed for our advantage on the bitter cross.'"