Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates (63 page)
Switters’s answers must have pleased
him, for by the time they got to Deir ez-Zur they were conversing agreeably,
and by the time they departed Palmyra they were behaving like schoolyard
buddies.
They entered Damascus (about 7
P.M.
, December
28) on An-Nassirah Avenue, proceeding at a slow, noisy pace to the walled old
city and the Via Recta, mentioned in the Bible as the “Street of Straight,”
though its straightness, like many another biblical reference, could hardly
have been meant to be taken literally. The Via Recta marked the boundary of the
city’s Christian quarter, and it was into that quarter that Toufic drove
Switters after the other passengers and ten crates of dates had been offloaded.
“For your comfort and safety,” he said, reminding Switters that they were in
the middle of Ramadan, the holy month of fasting. Between sunrise and dusk, he
would find nothing to eat outside the Christian quarter, and even there only in
a private home. Moreover, the sacred rigors of Ramadan had intensified
anti-American passions in Syria (the Iraqi bombing raids having occurred only
ten days earlier), and in some parts of Damascus there were blades that would
relish the wicked white butter of a Yankee throat. Luckily, Toufic and his
family had a spare room to let.
With a cough—half leaded exhaust
fumes, half brazier kabob smoke—Switters accepted the offer. He trusted Toufic
but regretted that Mr. Beretta lay unattended in the crocodile valise in the
rear of the truck. The ex-operative was getting a wee careless in his
retirement. He sighed, disgusted but not really surprised that Clinton had
fallen in with the cowboys. It was an all too familiar story.
Toufic stopped the truck, an aging
deuce-and-a-half Mercedes with a canvas canopy, on a coiling side street and
sounded the horn four times. With squeaks and rattles, a rickety corrugated tin
door was raised, and Toufic backed the vehicle into a deep, narrow garage.
Dimly lit by a pair of raw forty-watt bulbs that dangled from the stucco
ceiling like polished anklebones on strings, the space smelled of motor oil,
solvent, sour metals, musky rubber, and burnt gunk. Off to the right, more
brightly illuminated, was a small glassed-in office occupied by three men: two
standing, one seated at a cluttered wooden desk. Toufic had to go to the office
to complete some paperwork. He suggested that Switters wait where he was. “I’ll
be needing my valise,” said Switters, fairly pointedly.
The assistant fetched the bag. Then
he fetched brushes, rags, and a tub of soapy water and began vigorously to wash
the peeling paint of the sand-and-sun-tortured truck. Through the veil of scrub
water that coursed down the windshield, the naked lightbulbs reminded Switters of
the lemons of St. Pachomius. Their yellow blaze aggravated his headache. He
shifted his gaze to the office, where Toufic was now in conversation with the
others: the man at the desk, who was an older, fatter version of Toufic, and
the two standing men, who, Switters noticed, wore suits and ties and European
faces. Something about the pair tightened Switters’s Langley-trained eye. He
squinted through the sudsy stream. He patted his valise.
After nearly a half hour, Toufic
returned, scolding the assistant for killing his truck with cleanliness. “Go
home to your family,” he ordered, shooing the busy washer out the door. “We go,
too,” he told Switters, and he unfolded the chair. Puzzled at how nimbly his
passenger leapt from the cab into the Invacare 9000, he asked, “What did you
say again was the trouble with you?”
“Walking pneumonia.” The phrase did
not translate well into Arabic.
Toufic lived several blocks from the
garage. Switters rolled along beside him through the streets of the oldest
continuously inhabited city on earth. It was in this very neighborhood that the
misogynist, Paul, had taken refuge after his fit on the Damascus road and
formulated the structure and stricture of what would become known as
Christianity. The Street of Straight, indeed. As they bumped along over the
worn paving stones, Toufic, a bit embarrassed, informed Switters that he could
only offer his room until early the following morning. Toufic had been assigned
an unexpected driving job, and, of course, he could not leave Switters alone in
his home with his wife.
Of course not. Toufic may have been
Christian, but he was nonetheless Arabic and thus subject to the sexual
insecurities that among men of the Middle East achieved titanic, even
earth-changing proportions; insecurities that had spawned veils, shaven heads,
clitoridectomies, house arrest, segregation, macho posturing, and three major
religions.
The women hereabouts must have really been something!
thought
Switters. They must have had loins of fire, pussies of gold; their libidos must
have brayed like wild asses and loomed like desert dunes. Inexhaustible,
inextinguishable, inextricable, they had turned the weaker sexual animal inside
out and drove him to build cultural, political, and religious walls in order to
contain their deep, roiling juices; walls so steep and rigid they still stood.
The Levant had no monopoly on penile insecurity: two of the world’s most
magnificent creatures, the tiger and the rhinoceros, were going extinct in 1998
because Asian males believed they needed to consume the body parts of those
beasts to shore their precious peckers up; and dangerously excessive population
growth in many nations was due to a husbandly compulsion to publicly
demonstrate virility by keeping their poor wives pregnant. Yet, it was in the
Middle East that the perception of pussy whippery had manifested itself most
dramatically and with the longest-lasting consequences, and Switters (who had,
himself, experienced a tinge of coital frailty after Sister Fannie bolted his
cot) wished he might have visited the tents of some of those lusty Semitic and
pre-Semitic lasses. Had the men been ego-wounded crybabies and scaredy-cats, or
were the women actually that free, that hot? In any event, you can bet he would
have learned the name for their intimidating treasure in every tribal dialect.
His reverie, his fanciful yearning
for a time machine that might set back his presence on that Damascus street by
five thousand years, was punctured by Toufic’s resumed apologies. Apparently
the driver imagined that his guest was sulking. “I am very sorry, my friend,
but I must drive again come the dawn. I had not thought it so.”
“No problem,” Switters assured him.
“Will you be going anywhere near the Lebanese border? I could use a ride.”
“Oh, no. As a matter of fact”—he
laughed—”I must drive again back to the convent oasis.”
The wheelchair skidded to a stop.
“Why? What do you mean?” The migraine shot out of his ears like squirt from a
clam. He hadn’t felt so alert in months.
Toufic looked worried, as if he were
again offending the American. “Those two foreign gentlemen at the garage. They
wish to be taken there tomorrow.”
Switters remained stationary. “What
for?”
“Why, business of the Church, most
assuredly. One of them is a religious scholar from Lisbon in Portugal, and the
other is a lawyer in the employ of the Vatican.”
“They told you this?”
“They told my boss. I will transport
them in his car with the four-wheel drive. No need for the truck, naturally.
The gentlemen could not hire a car from the airport because the drivers there
are under Ramadan.”
En route to Deir ez-Zur, they’d
discussed Ramadan, and Switters had wondered why, if a people were at one with
the Divine, was not
every
month holy; why this setting apart of dates
and places, shouldn’t Tuesday be as glorious as Sunday or Saturday, shouldn’t
one’s water closet be as sanctified as Mecca, Lourdes, or Benares? If Toufic
imagined such thoughts in his guest’s mind at this moment, however, he was
badly mistaken.
The foreign gentlemen at the garage .
. . The younger, thinner one (late thirties, probably, and lithe as a bean
vine) had a face like the instruction sheet that came with an unassembled toy:
it looked simple at first and ordinary and frank, but the longer you studied it,
the more incomprehensible it became. It was his body language that was
troublesome, however. From his receding ebony hair to the points of his
hand-tooled shoes, the Italian carried himself with the self-conscious grace of
a commercially oriented martial artist. He feigned an attitude of disinterest,
of relaxation, yet every muscle was spring-wound and tense, ready to pop into
furious action. Switters had observed a similar look in many a street-level
operative, in many a hitman. There was a time when he had observed the look in
his own mirror.
The older man (well over sixty) had
wispy gray hair and the ruddy complexion of a whiskey priest. His mouth was
babyish and weak, a mouth meant for sucking a sugar tit; but behind his
gold-rimmed spectacles, his eyes were as hard and unfeeling as petrified scat.
Although he seemed highly intelligent, Switters could detect that his was an
intellect of the shrewd variety, the kind that grasped facts and figures and
understood virtually nothing of genuine importance; a well-oiled brain
dedicated to the defense, perpetuation, and exploitation of every cliché and
superstition in the saddlebags of institutionalized reality.
This cookie is
the spitting image of John Foster Dulles,
thought Switters, and immediately
he dispatched a sample of his oral fluids to mingle with the dust of the oldest
continuously inhabited city on earth.
Switters turned to the somewhat
bewildered Toufic. “Beginning tomorrow, pal,” he said, “you’re going to have a
new assistant. I hope your employer’s jalopy seats four comfortably.” He fixed
the slack-jawed Syrian with what the unoriginal have described as his fierce,
hypnotic green eyes. “I’ll be going back to the oasis with you.”
He unzipped his valise and, tossing
aside C.R.A.F.T. Club T-shirts and socks with little cartoon squid on them,
went straight for the false bottom. “First,” he said, “you’ve got to help me
install this device in the rear seat of that car we’ll be driving. In English,
we call it a
bug.”
Switters grinned. Toufic looked numb.
Above them, the third-quarter crescent of the Ramadan moon was itself a numb
smile, perfectly suited, perhaps, for the human activities upon which its dry
silvery drool seemed ever destined to fall.
You only live twice:
once after you’re born
and once before you die.
—Bashō
Once upon a time, four nuns
boarded a jetliner bound from
Damascus
to
Rome
.
Alitalia Flight 023 took off to the northeast and flew out over twenty or so
land miles of the arid Syrian plain before banking with an avian grace and
turning back toward the Mediterranean. From the air, the desert appeared a
loose, lumpy weave of red and yellow strands, like a potholder made in the
craft shack at a summer camp for retarded children. The nuns were sweating like
mares, and as they . . .
Sorry. It’s no big deal, really;
nothing major, not anything that wholly justifies this interruption. And yet
despite the fact that the truths in narration are all relative truths (perhaps
the truths in life, as well), despite the sovereign authority of poetic license,
this report, claiming no kinship to Finnegan, has, in the interest of both
clarity and expediency, endeavored never to indulge in the sort of literary
trickery that actively encourages readers to jump to false conclusions. So,
while it may be overreactive in this instance, while it may even smack of the
kind of self-righteous puritanism that is to genuine purity what a two-bit
dictator is to a philosopher king, let us reach into the inkwell jewel box and
withdraw two sets of exquisite superscript signs—
“
for the right ear,
”
for the left—and hang them from the lobes on either side of the word
nuns
.
Like so: “nuns.” This, of course, is not for purposes of ornamentation,
although these apostrophic clusters possess an understated, overlooked beauty
that transcends the merely chic. (Do they not resemble, say, the windblown
teardrops of fairy folk, commas on a trampoline, tadpoles with stomach cramps,
or human fetuses in the first days following conception?) No, a stern word such
as
nuns
is undemanding of decorative trinket. We so adorn it here only
to set it apart from other words in the sentence for reasons of scrupulous
verisimilitude.
It was reported above that once upon
a time in
Damascus
, four nuns boarded an airliner bound for
Rome
. To be absolutely factual, while they may have looked
like ordinary holy sisters to their fellow passengers, three of those “nuns”
had been long-since defrocked and the fourth “nun,” the one rolled aboard in a
wheelchair, was a man.
The part about them sweating,
however, was completely accurate. They perspired because it was a warm day in
May, and they were dressed in dark, heavy winter habits that had been dug out
of a trunk in the abbess’s storeroom, their lighter habits, customary in that
area of the world, having been ceremoniously incinerated approximately one year
before. They also perspired because they were nerve-racked, because their
ability to board the flight had been in question to the very last moment;
because recent history, already somewhat of a trial for them, had really gotten
out of hand after the evening when that “nun” most deserving of apostrophic
disclaimer—the imposter, the man—had reappeared at their convent.