Dreamers of the Day (26 page)

“Did you see Godfrey de Bouillon’s sword?” Lawrence asked. “I think it’s genuine, although I’m not certain he ‘cleaved in twain’ a
giant
Saracen with it. Might have been an ordinary-sized Saracen…”

“My favorite, though, was the chapel of the Division of the Vestments—”

“‘And when they had crucified Him,’” Lawrence recited, “‘they parted His garments, casting lots upon them.’”

“What a disappointment that was! What? No dice? Every other little detail in the Passion has some sham relic!”

“Not quite,” Lawrence pointed out judiciously. “There could have been a chapel for the Holy Hammer That Drove the Nails into the True Cross.”

“Helena probably bought it,” I said sarcastically. “It’s under an altar in some Barcelona basilica.”

I went on fulminating and Lawrence listened, nodding sometimes or commenting briefly. Now and then, he sipped water from his glass. It’s not true that he never drank anything else, by the way. His time in the desert had taught him to appreciate water, but he was not above a glass of wine at dinner.

“You’re right, of course,” he said when I finally slowed down. “When they started excavations at the northeast wall of the Temple, archaeologists had to dig through something like a hundred and twenty-five feet of debris before they got to the level of Herod’s city. My field was Hittite, but I think this Jerusalem is probably the eighth.” He sat back in his chair, looking rather weary but comfortable in the role of scholar. “The city of David sat on an even earlier settlement. Then there’s Solomon’s Jerusalem, which lasted about four hundred years. Nehemiah’s—three hundred for that one, I believe. Herod’s Jerusalem was magnificent, by all accounts. That’s what everyone expects to see when they come here, but Titus destroyed it. Later on, a small Roman city was built on the ruins. Since then, Muslims and Crusaders traded the place repeatedly, and burned it down occasionally. And yet…the pilgrims come.”

“But it’s all a fraud!” I cried, feeling triumphant. “It’s a house of cards. For centuries, the stories have been sold to pilgrims who pay handsomely to be deceived. That’s what makes me angry! How can sensible people be such fools?”

“Was your sister a fool?” Lawrence asked, his blond brows lifted.

It stopped me cold, that question, because that’s exactly what I feared: that Lillie had dedicated her precious, short life to a nineteen-hundred-year-old scam. Now, without warning, my eyes began to sting with tears I had hoped to shed for Jesus.

“If it’s any comfort,” Lawrence said, “I don’t believe that she was.”

He glanced at his watch and stood. Lawrence rarely gave a reason or said good-bye when he left. I had gotten used to the way he’d simply disappear. He was dressed in his brown suit; the evening’s appointment must have involved Jews or Christians, not Arabs. Thinking I was alone again in the courtyard, I allowed myself a single sob, then wiped my eyes.

“Look at it this way,” Lawrence said, startling me. He was slouched at the edge of the courtyard, head down, thinking as he spoke. “Jerusalem has always been important strategically. It’s been one war after another for millennia. But if you can convince enough people that this place is sacred…?”

He let me consider this until I could admit I’d understood his point: “Then maybe the next army won’t destroy it.”

The corners of his long mouth turned up, but the real smile was in those tired eyes, already lined at thirty-two. “The present city has survived six hundred years,” he said. “That’s the longest stretch on record.”

The morning after that conversation in the courtyard, I rose from the wreckage of my illusions and returned to Jerusalem. I was determined to experience the city with the tolerance Lawrence demonstrated to me, and even now, I am glad I accepted his challenge.

On second sight, the Via Dolorosa did indeed seem sanctified—if not by the footsteps of the Savior then by those of generations of pilgrims who, according to their many faiths, strove to follow in the way of their Lord.

I returned as well to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. That Jesus rose, I dared not doubt; that He did so
there,
I could not believe. Even so, decoration that had seemed tawdry and preposterous the day before now charmed me as exuberantly imaginative. Instead of pointless geegaws, I saw the devotion of long-dead craftsmen. I did not even begrudge the modern laborers the hashish that made their employment merry.

No longer driven from the city by my own outrage, I slowed down enough to visit the Garden Tomb, a quiet and unadorned sepulchre hewn from the living rock some 250 yards north of the Damascus Gate. This was the true site of Calvary and the Tomb, according to some. I withheld judgment, but found the place conducive to and worthy of contemplation. Like Saint Thomas’s, my doubts withstood more evidence than my sister’s happy faith had required. Still, standing there where someone—if not Jesus—had met eternity, I was able to admire those who had not seen and yet believed.

If my mood improved after that second day, poor Sergeant Thompson’s patience was stretched thinner by the hour. We often ate meals together at a little square table off to one side of the courtyard, while the “toffs” dined at a large round one in the middle. Neither of us took offense; we knew our place in this august assembly, and it was peripheral.

Our isolation allowed the sergeant a chance to vent his frustration to a sympathetic ear, for my ambling explorations were in stark contrast to those of Mr. Churchill’s breathless ministerial tour. Sometimes accompanied by his wife, usually interpreted by Lawrence, always guarded by Thompson, Winston was being quick-marched through a series of receptions and ceremonies. His agreed-upon schedule was punctuated by sudden demands for additional appearances and speeches, which Sir Herbert urged him to make and which Thompson argued against without success.

“I’m never given any notice of a change in plans,” the sergeant complained. “There’s no opportunity to inspect the site. Even when I have matters in hand, he’ll hare off on his own.”

Churchill might begin his duties with a public event: laying a wreath at a military cemetery or visiting some dignitary or other. Next he would attend a series of private talks with Arab or Jewish factions, during which he hoped to allay the fears of the former while encouraging settlements by the latter. You can imagine the tension, walking that sort of diplomatic tightrope. Often, while walking between venues, Winston would veer away to get a better look at something that had caught his painter’s fancy. Thompson tried valiantly to keep him in sight, but within seconds his charge might suddenly turn and disappear down an alley, leaving his bodyguard nothing to do but dash after him and fume.

You might think it easy to keep an eye on a person as resplendently British as Churchill in Jerusalem, but that small city teemed with humanity of all kinds. Shrouded Arab women, white-turbaned Muslim mullahs, Greek priests, Italian monks, and robed Bedouin in
kuffiehs
joined fashionable French tourists, ragged water carriers, shouting street vendors, store owners, British soldiers, American businessmen, and earnest pilgrims—all these milling amid the beggars, the lepers, and the blind crying,
“Baksheesh!”

And the streets through which all these people shuffled and pushed and shopped were so narrow! Once I saw a small boy hop across a lane from one second-story window to another; without much effort, he could have doubled the leap and not risked a fall to the pavement. In Thompson’s eyes, every building concealed a sniper and every alley an ambush that would take Churchill’s life. “I will never get that man back to England alive!” he said despairingly.

Though Winston’s wanderlust was a constant worry, my own caused no one such distress. After exploring the nooks and crannies of little Jerusalem, I decided to spend my last day hiking around Suleiman the Magnificent’s sixteenth-century walls. Lawrence’s insight made me glad that this long-dead Muslim had found the city holy and deserving of protection. I was happy as well that Napoleon had decided against an attack centuries later, and pleased that the pasha of Egypt, the sultan of Turkey, and the British Crown had let the last two centuries pass without finding a compelling tactical reason to level the town.

I turned off on the Jericho Road—the way by which David (may have) fled from Absalom—and walked through fields scrubby with thistle but fragrant with wild garlic, thyme, and mint. When I reached the base of the Mount of Olives, I looked back from the place where Titus (assuredly) massed the Tenth Roman Legion for his assault on Jerusalem, and where Flavius Josephus found the words of Lamentations tragically apt:

How solitary doth the city sit, that was so full of people!

How she is become as a widow!

She who was great among the nations,

and a princess among the provinces,

How she has become a tributary,

and weepeth sore in the night.

Sobered, I was in the right frame of mind to visit the Garden of Gethsemane, on the western slope of Olivet. This hillside orchard had escaped the repetitious razing and rebuilding that buried old Jerusalem beneath so much rubble. Of all the places mentioned in the New Testament, it is thought to be the most likely to have been visited by Jesus. It was certainly visited by my sister, Lillian.

Within the garden walls, behind an iron fence, grew eight olive trees of undoubted antiquity. The circumference of their trunks approached thirty-five feet, and after thousands of seasons their branches were fantastically twisted. While I visited, smiling brown-robed Franciscan monks escorted visitors to the (genuine) bedrock where the disciples (might have) slept and to the spot where Judas (reportedly) gave the kiss of betrayal.

In the middle of the garden, however, I was astonished to come across a modern tomb with a wholly unexpected inscription: “Adeline Whelan from Washington was buried here in 1875.” Seeing my surprise, a young monk explained. “That good lady paid to have a well dug and a fountain built. The well supplies water to moisten this holy ground so that we may cultivate flowers.” And as I was leaving, an elderly Franciscan handed me a bouquet, along with some leaves from the ancient olive trees. The leaves I later carried home to Ohio as a remembrance of his faith, if not my own.

From Gethsemane, I walked onward to Bethany. In my time, the town was an unexceptional huddle of dust-ridden houses surrounded by the blue-flowered borage that carpets Mount Olivet. Was this truly where Martha did housework while Mary sat at the feet of Jesus? I have no idea, but I was glad that the Gospels recorded that homely scene. After walking through sand and pebbles, over cobbles, and up stone stairs, I could appreciate how soothing and refreshing it would have been when a woman bathed the Lord’s feet and anointed them with balm. It put me in mind of the way Mrs. Motta ministered to me when I was ill, and I blessed the memory of her kindness.

As I made my way back to the summit and to my room in Government House, Clementine Churchill’s habit of afternoon “siestas” began to seem eminently sensible. I washed away the dust of the road with a quick bath and stretched out on the bed, drowsily wondering what Karl was doing, and how Rosie was. And then it happened: lying in the quiet borderlands between dozing and dream, I heard Lillian speak again, her lovely voice as serene as I remembered it.

I always had faith in you, Agnes,
she said, as clearly as if she sat at my bedside.
I knew you would find your way.

It was such a comfort then, but looking back now, in my present circumstances? I may have lost my way forever in Jerusalem. I certainly haven’t found it yet.

Supper that evening was an informal but semiofficial one, with the London delegation and the top officials of Government House gathered. There were ten men at Churchill’s table. When Clementine joined them, looking rested and cool, the men rose. Well brought up, and the youngest among them, Lawrence pulled out a chair for her. The talk and laughter resumed.

I was ending my stay feeling pleasantly tired but, like everyone who worked with the relentlessly energetic Churchill, Thompson was exhausted. “It’s almost over, isn’t it?” I asked him. “Clementine told me you’re leaving for Aleppo day after tomorrow.”

“And from there, on to Malta and Naples,” Thompson said, rubbing his eyes. “Who knows what fresh hell they’ll present?”

There was a shout of laughter at the big table, where Winston was holding court with Falstaffian humor.

“He’s self-centered. He makes the world revolve around him, and he can be an awful bore, but I’m starting to like the man.” Thompson paused to light one of the Turkish cigarettes Winston had insisted he smoke instead of his pipe. “Maybe he just takes some getting used to. Like these things!” he said, blowing out exotic smoke. “There’s something about him.”

“Yes,” I admitted, “I know what you mean.”

Eventually, of course, the whole world would know what Thompson meant, but that was years in the future. In 1921, Churchill was still a youngish bureaucrat with a shadowed record. Indeed, the conversation that night soon turned to the defeat that almost destroyed his political career, and Thompson sighed. “Here we go again—Gallipoli and the Dardanelles. He just can’t let it go.”

Like most disasters, the decisions leading to it had seemed like good ideas at the time. The jolly little war that was supposed to have ended by Christmas of ’14 had become a ghastly stalemate. With both sides dug into their trenches, there was nothing but horror to show for the mounting casualties of that first winter, Thompson told me, so England’s War Council argued about the way to break the deadlock on land. “Churchill made a case for an attack on Turkey through the Dardanelles Straits,” Thompson whispered, “but Kitchener wouldn’t release any troops from the western front. And the czar’s armies had all they could handle in the Caucasus.”

“When Carden said he thought the straits could be forced by sea power alone,” Winston was telling the others, “the whole atmosphere changed! Fatigue was forgotten! The War Council could see its way clear of the western front.”