Damascus Gate (9 page)

"I'll tell you what," he said. "I'll talk to Ernest and find out what the Human Rights Coalition knows about Abu Baraka. Maybe I can do something about it. But I think it's going to go the other way. I mean, I think the Jerusalem Syndrome is more for me."

"I suppose," she said. "You're religious."

"I am not religious," he said angrily. "It's a good story."

"Oh, rubbish," Nuala told him. "Of course you're religious. You're the biggest Catholic I ever saw. Anyway, the Jerusalem Syndrome is old stuff."

They started walking again, turning their backs to the winds of Talpiot.

"You're wrong, Nuala," Lucas said. "You may find it boring but it's not old stuff. Religion here is something that's happening now, today."

It was true, he thought, although he had said it often before. Other cities had antiquities, but the monuments of Jerusalem did not belong to the past. They were of the moment and even the future.

"What a curse it is," she said. "Religion."

He wondered how it could be that if she so despised religion she could have made herself so at home in this part of the world. Because it was religion and religious identity that gave the place its passions, upon which she battened.

"I guess so," Lucas said. "Why don't you take your atrocity story to Janusz Zimmer. He's good at that stuff."

"I have," she said. "He claims to be interested." She shrugged.

In this city, as in many others, the practice of journalism was made more difficult by the interlacing sexual affairs that consumed the international press. Nuala and Janusz, who was nearly twice her age, had entertained a brief, crazed liaison that seemed to have ended badly and about which neither would speak. Her present interest was in a Palestinian
résistant
in the Strip, where she worked.

He walked her to the bus stop at the bottom of the hill and waited for the bus with her and kissed her goodbye. Then he began to walk toward town. In about an hour, footsore and depressed, he found the offices of the Israeli Human Rights Coalition in Amnon Square. His friend Ernest Gross was behind the desk. Gross was a South African from Durban whose tanned, athletic appearance and open face made him resemble a surfer. At the same time, he was one of those men prey to sudden, barely suppressed rages, and it was strange because his business was, after all, benign assistance and fairness and mediation. Or maybe not so strange.

"Hi, Ernest," Lucas said. "Get any good death threats today?"

The Human Rights Coalition sometimes received death threats and had accumulated a copious outpouring over the previous month. Its officers had recently taken part in a major Peace Now demonstration.

"Not today," Ernest Gross said. "Yesterday I got one from a psychiatrist."

"You got a death threat from a psychiatrist? You're putting me on."

Ernest sorted through the papers on his desk, looking for it in vain.

"Well, the damn thing's vanished. But it said, like, 'I'm a psychiatrist and I can see your pathetic self-hatred and I'm going to kill you.'"

"Jesus," said Lucas. "Did he send you a bill?"

"In no other country, right?" Gross said. "So what can I do for you?"

Lucas explained what Nuala had told him about Abu Baraka and asked him what the Human Rights Coalition had on him.

"Nuala has a lot of chutzpah," Ernest said in his antipodean cockney. "She'd better be careful."

"Is she right about this? Is the guy IDF, do you think? Are they doing what she says they're doing?"

"Ah," Ernest said, "here it is." He had found the threatening note on his desk. He picked it up and stuck it to his bulletin board with a thumbtack, beside the Amnesty International bulletins and the Peace Now handbills. "Is Nuala right? Well, Nuala's strange. I don't always know what side Nuala's on, and I don't know if she does. But she's a valuable man, as it were. And I think she's right on this one."

"She wants me to do a story on him."

"Jolly good," Ernest said. "Do it."

"I hate it down there," Lucas said.

"Everyone does, mate. The Palestinians. The soldiers. Everyone but the settlers, who claim to love it. And Nuala, of course."

"Actually, the beaches look nice."

"Great beaches," Ernest said. "The settlers have a hotel called the Florida Beach Club. Scandinavian lovelies come to frolic, I hear. Gambol like lambs, with seven hundred thousand of the most wretched people on earth a mere stone's throw away. So to speak. The beach is protected by razor wire and machine guns."

"Anybody else working the Gaza story?" Lucas asked. "I told Nuala to take it to Janusz Zimmer."

"She and Janusz broke up, I understand," Ernest said. "But maybe he'll take it on."

"That was a strange romance."

"All her romances are strange," Ernest said. "Anyway, it would be good if we didn't have to rely on foreigners to do this one.
Ha'olam Hazeh
is trying to get a line on it."
Ha'olam Hazeh
was a left-wing magazine in Tel Aviv. "It's nice when one of our papers takes that sort of thing on. So it's not like we need the rest of the world to tell us about it."

"I think so too," Lucas said.

"Nuala and her UN friends," said Ernest, "they've all been to Gaza. They've been to Deir Yassein and to everywhere else Jews did the kicking. You wonder if they've ever been to Yad Vashem."

"Never asked her," Lucas said. There was an American feminist calendar on the wall beside Ernest's desk, with pictures of great international heroines and red-letter dates in female history. Lucas leaned over to inspect the fetching photograph of Amelia Earhart. "I've never been there myself, actually."

"No?" Ernest asked. "Anyway, we talk to the IDF, and very often they talk back to us. I think I have an idea of how it goes in the territories."

"How?"

"There are unwritten laws. The Shin Bet operate there. They mount punitive strikes and conduct interrogations. They've told us unofficially that they feel entitled to use moderate force in those interrogations. That's the term they use, 'moderate force.' Obviously, this can mean different things to different people. It can mean one thing to a kid from Haifa and another to a kid from Iraq."

"Right."

"They also feel entitled to kill people they believe have killed Jews. Or who've killed one of their informers. It's a respect thing, see. They have Arabic-speaking agents who have to pass a field test, pretending to be Palestinians, hanging around a market somewhere, chatting it up. If they think one camp or village is ready to explode, they'll sometimes use provocation, set it off themselves and come down hard. For a while last year they were killing six rioters a day, and it was hard to believe this was coincidence. Every day it was six."

"I see."

"Shin Bet itself is divided into compartments. Sometimes the left hand isn't acquainted with the right."

"Sounds a little like Kabbala," Lucas said.

"Doesn't it? And there are other organizations besides Shabak and Mossad. Sometimes they're in favor, sometimes out."

"Dangerous work," Lucas said.

"That's what I tell Nuala," Ernest said. "And her friends."

"Well," said Lucas, "I hope they'll be careful. She came back from her last encounter with a black eye."

"I'm sure one of our soldiers roughed her up," Ernest said. "Still, I can't help noticing how often Nuala reports injured. She's always getting hit."

"Are you implying she likes it?"

"Of course she likes it," Ernest said. He and Lucas smiled without looking at each other. "Anyway," Ernest told him as he left, "you be careful too."

He munched on some khat on his walk back to the German Colony. The stuff gave him something of a jolt but failed to lift his spirits. He presumed Nuala used it for sex, and the notion made him feel horny and deprived.

Once home, he settled down to watch CNN. Christiane Aman-pour was broadcasting from Somalia. Her cool, classless English voice seemed to impart an order and comprehensibility to the events she reported which they inherently lacked.

The drug had made it impossible to sleep, so he chewed more to ward off black despair, which lurked in the afternoon quiet, in the dove's cooing, the voice of the turtle. Eventually it made him sick. His wheels spun. In a few days Tsililla would be back from London. It was not going well between them, and the break would come soon. His weariness with things was frightening; it smacked of obliteration, a wall of anger and fatigue that felt as though it might sweep him into nothingness. Worst of all was loneliness.

There were times when Lucas was capable of rejoicing in himself as a singularity—a man without a story, secure from tribal delusion, able to see the many levels. But at other times he felt that he might give anything to be able to explain himself. To call himself Jew or Greek, Gentile or otherwise, the citizen of no mean city. But he had no recourse except to call himself an American and hence the slave of possibility. He was not always up for the necessary degree of self-invention, unprepared, occasionally, to assemble himself.

And sometimes the entire field of folk seemed alien and hostile, driven by rages he could not comprehend, drunk on hopes he could not imagine. So he could make his way only through questioning, forever inquiring of wild-eyed obsessives the nature of their dreams, their assessment of themselves and their enemies, listening agreeably while they poured scorn on his ignorance and explained the all too obvious. When he wrote, it was for some reader like himself, a bastard, party to no covenants, promised nothing except the certainty of silence overhead, darkness around. Sometimes he had to face the simple fact that he had nothing and no one and try to remember when that had seemed a source of strength and perverse pride. Sometimes it came back for him.

A
DAM DE KUFF
and the young man who called himself Raziel set out together from Jerusalem to travel the land. They did everything and went everywhere together. Sometimes De Kuff would lapse into silences that lasted for days. During these silences Raziel would talk gently to him, seeing to it that he carried out the small necessary tasks of travel. De Kuff began to believe that the younger man knew his every thought. Raziel encouraged him to believe it.

They traveled by bus, they hitched rides or simply walked. They visited holy and mighty places, eating little and heedlessly, paying no attention to what was or was not kosher, not observing Shabbat. They made their way from the Cave of Machpelah to Carmel, from the Kotel to Jezreel. They saw the sites sacred to early Christian martyrs and saw the Tomb of the Kings. They went to Mount Gerizim for the Samaritan Passover and to the Baha'i shrine of the Bab in Haifa.

If there were long hours when De Kuff remained silent, there were others during which he became indefatigably verbal, talking himself into a state of high excitement that could last all day and all night. Raziel was able to keep pace with him, fueling his volubility, matching him association for association, until De Kuff subsided in exhaustion and despair. When De Kuff's energy was gone, Raziel remained cool and keen-eyed, ready for more, ready for anything. De Kuff found it frightening. Sometimes, in tears, he ordered Raziel away. But Raziel never left him.

They talked about music and about history. They told each other the story of their lives. Raziel had been raised in a wealthy midwestern suburb. His father was a corporate lawyer turned diplomat and politician. Raziel had gone to the Berklee College of Music in Boston, then left it for life in Marin County. He became the master of several instruments, composed, played with a rock group that had made a record, then gone in for experimental jazz in San Francisco. He had also been a yeshiva student, a Zen monk at Tassajara, a member of a Hebrew-Christian commune. He confessed his problems with drugs.

De Kuff had attended St. Paul's School and then Yale. As an undergraduate, he had changed his area of concentration from history to music, then gone on to take his degree in it. He played with the New Orleans Symphony and with several chamber music societies. He had inherited a large fortune from several generations of De Kuffs in New Orleans; he had a house in the Garden District where he lived alone after his mother died. There was a New York apartment and an elegant summer place near Pass Christian, Mississippi.

Both of them had concluded that at the base of music lay principles of metaphysics that were hidden by the distractions of everyday life. Before long music fell away as one of their topics of discourse and they returned to the subjects they had collided with on the night of their first meeting, prayer and the promise of deliverance, the end of exile and the root of souls.

They talked about Zen and Theravada and the Holy Ghost, the bodhisattvas, the
sefirot
and the Trinity, Pico della Mirandola, Teresa of ûvila, Philo, Abulafia, Adam Kadmon, the
Zohar,
the sentience of diamonds, the Shekhinah, the meaning of
tikkun,
Kali and Matronit under the dread designation of the moon.

They had both tried using Christianity as a bridge between mountains. Raziel offered an image of them both falling, and Jeshu with them, head over heels, his cross reversed and spinning, anti-aerodynamic. Christianity had failed them as Christ had failed, who made his grave among the wicked. Yet, they agreed, his roots extended from the beginning of Creation and the tree would have to grow again. They agreed that each person carried within himself a multiplicity of souls.

Once they went to St. Catherine's Monastery in the Sinai and followed the Steps of Repentance to the summit of Jebel Musa at sunrise. De Kuff prayed at the
mihrab
there, making the Ishmaelite shrine his own. Before them in the direction of Mecca spread the Gulf of Eilat, and to the west the Gulf of Suez, two turquoise dazzles against the blood-red mountains. De Kuff charged up the last steps, coughing and gasping for breath while the darkness turned milky around him, trying to outrun impending dawn.

And because it had seemed a suitable time then, light filling the universe to its far corners, the sun raised up like an offering, Raziel had undertaken to explain to Adam De Kuff the significance of his own name. How the Hebrew letter
kuf
signified paradox—the
zayin
descending, the
reish
hovering above—the soul it represented must experience emptiness and darkness, in the midst of the withdrawing light it struggled always to reach. It stood for holiness descending and contained the secret of Eve. Its value in Gematria was nineteen. How the
kuf
whose value was nineteen followed the
tzadi,
which was eighteen and the secret of Adam. The pairing was completed as
tzaddik,
and this holy term had fallen on De Kuff himself. To the
tzaddik,
the righteous one, fell the task of redeeming the sparks lost with the fall into exile. Any man so signified was compelled to walk through darkness and death and seek out the Uncreated Light. The
kuf
was the sign of Life in Death, the paradox of redemption.