Messi@ (11 page)

“Did you know,” she said in English, “that Christ came through Sarajevo carrying his cross? A man stopped him in the road and asked, ‘Where did you find the wood?'”

“Poor child,” murmured Father Tuiredh, “to have survived there.”

It was the only mention of her past, and no one asked for more. The hospice's guests were happy just to be near the child. Time seemed somehow to have expanded, allowing them to complete in days research that had been dragging for months. They slept less every night and looked forward to breakfast with Andrea like restless children.

Watching
Gal Gal Hamazal
became a Tuesday evening ritual at the hospice. Television was forbidden to the nuns, but they had their ways. At the hour of the broadcast, Mother Superior was always secluded in prayer in a little-used chapel at the far end of the convent.

As the hour for
Gal Gal Hamazal
neared, the doors to the guest rooms began to open, letting out the motley assortment of residents. There was Father Hernio, a Filipino priest who ministered to six hundred souls in Berlin; Father Zahan, from Australia, a native Yuin, also a Catholic priest, who wrote books on tribal religions; Lama Iris Cohen, a Buddhist nun and the highest-ranked Westerner of the Tantric branch of Tibetan Buddhism; Father Magh Tuiredh, an Irish cleric who wore the embroidered name
Lugh
on his cassock; Dr. Carlos Luna, an Indian from Oaxaca, Mexico, wearing a bright sweater depicting the Aztec calendar; Professor Weng Li, from the University of Beijing; Earl Smith, a Hopi from Arizona; and Mr. Rabindranath, now decently clad in trousers and white sweater, smoking clove tobacco from a meerschaum pipe.

Each guest greeted Andrea and the sisters with varying degrees of effusiveness. Father Zahan smiled most widely and patted Andrea's hair. While the others sat modestly on straight-backed chairs, Lama Cohen made room for Andrea on the small couch by the rain-streaked window. The lama was hoping for snow. She had grown up in Vail, Colorado, and felt oddly nostalgic. Something about the Bosnian girl reminded the lama of a snowflake.

The little television sat on a small dais covered in red cloth.

Although most of the company had never watched
Gal Gal Hamazal
before the previous Tuesday, they anticipated it as if it were a precious ceremony vouchsafed only to a lucky few.

The vivacious hostess of the show, Gala Keria, appeared to wild applause. Green eyed and tall, with dark, shoulder-length hair, dressed in a black leather miniskirt and a long-sleeved white T-shirt poked by nervy nipples, she had a half-knowing, half-sad grin that made men and boys alike a little soft in the head.

The cohost greeted her ironically, announcing that he was, as always, utterly surprised by her wardrobe. He just didn't know what to think. The audience applauded long and hard—whether in support of the host's bafflement or in favor of Gala's wardrobe was hard to say.

“Gala is like mercury,” he effused. “I don't think we can hold her very long. If you are beautiful, intelligent, and aged between eighteen and twenty-five, start thinking about her job now.”

Gala, unlike her American counterpart, did not simply turn letters. When the three contestants were introduced—an engineer from Rishon Le-Zion, a jeweler from Jaffa, and a soldier from Jerusalem—she patted the engineer on the back, hugged the jeweler, and kissed the soldier, who blushed. She then sauntered over to the blank puzzle board, inside which hid the secret letters, and bowed. The category appeared. It was
CREATION AND CREATOR
. This met with approval from both audiences: the studio's and the hospice's.

“What better puzzle?” Father Hernio observed.

“The best!” agreed Lama Cohen.

The engineer spun the wheel; it came to rest on
800 Shekels
.

“
Mem!
” he said. “I would like
mem!
”

The studio audience now began chanting, “
Mem! Mem! Mem! Mem!
”

Sister Maria was astonished to see the otherworldly Mr. Rabindranath begin to rock back and forth, silently mouthing “mem.” All those present, with the exception of Dr. Carlos Luna and Andrea, began to do the same. Why, of course, thought Sister Maria; they are all chanters and vocalizers. Most religious traditions use mantras and chants.

Beaming, Gala turned one of the squares and revealed
mem
. She smiled radiantly. But she was not done. With a generous sweep of her pretty arm she reached farther down the blank board and flipped over another
mem
. The audience went wild. “
Mem! Mem! Mem!
” The little salon of the Saint Hildegard Hospice positively quaked with the unleashed energy of
mem
. And like the goddess Isis surveying one of her ceremonies, Gala whipped up the frenzy, conducting the chant with her arms and her feet, dancing with abandon. Sister Rodica was sure that the surge would never stop but would break into chaos. She imagined the audience might tear out of the studio, spill into the streets, hug strangers, dance, and shout, “
MEM! MEM!
” with tears streaming down their faces, until the whole city was one unleashed hora. But as suddenly as it surged, Gala stilled the wave, and the engineer spun again.

Surprise
, decided the wheel. This was an audience favorite; unlike its counterpart in America, the Israeli
Surprise
was not always a good thing. If the contestant guessed the letter correctly, the surprise would be a car or a refrigerator. But if the contestant failed to guess, the surprise might involve a brief humiliation before the audience—such as a spanking by Gala herself or a verbal lashing by the host, with audience participation. The strongest punishment surprise so far had been a contestant's being forced to crawl on all fours and bark at the audience. Gala had climbed on his back and waved her scarf, driving the audience wild.

“
Lamed!
” said the engineer. “I want
lamed!
”

For a suspended moment, the world plunged into anxious silence. And then, like the sun breaking through clouds, Gala's marmoreal arm traveled graciously toward the board and revealed with the authority that only she possessed the existence of
lamed!

The emotion in the room seemed to Sister Maria quite disproportionate to the activity on the screen. She had seen the show before but had never felt this kind of involvement. But Sister Rodica understood the frenzy;
Gal Gal Hamazal
was her favorite pastime in the whole world, because she was a great believer in wheels. The Carpathian village of Piatra de Moare, where she was born, had been built around a huge round stone that resembled a giant millstone. Consequently, everything in Piatra de Moare was round: the wells, the church, the houses. She missed her village so much she felt like crying every time she saw the symbol for
Gal Gal Hamazal
on TV. Until now she had never felt that anyone else shared her emotion.

To be honest, Sister Maria had always considered
Gal Gal Hamazal
a low-class sort of thing. Secretly she had contempt for what she perceived as Sister Rodica's simplemindedness. Sister Maria didn't tell anyone, but she had read more than the
Lives of the Saints!
And yet here were all these learned scholars as absorbed as four-year-olds in a new set of building blocks! Sister Maria was not a little disappointed.

“
Lamed! Lamed! Lamed!
” The audience on the screen and in the lounge of Saint Hildegard Hospice became one as nuns, mystics, and professors burst out: “
Lamed! Lamed!
” Sister Maria seemed to hear just below their childish voices another sound, a kind of lament:
Mene, Mene, Tekel
. Then other biblical laments surfaced momentarily and vanished like bubbles in a soda. Then, quite distinctly, the crack of a whip. Then more bubbles of sound, muddy, moaning, weeping. Then “
Lamed! Lamed!
” again. She was having odd sensations today. She looked at Mr. Rabindranath, absorbed in the pleasure of chanting the Hebrew letter, and couldn't quite associate him with the naked floater.

“I find it curious,” Sister Maria burst out, unable to control herself any longer, “that distinguished scholars such as yourselves find this game so stimulating.”

This seemed to amuse the company—it was just the kind of remark they expected a smart nun to make.

“It's like this, dear Sister,” Mr. Rabindranath said, accepting her challenge for the rest of the group. “We are all devotees of the wheel. Every one of us lives by a wheel that contains and instructs us. I, for instance, believe in the great Wheel of Karma. Lama Cohen here meditates on the Tantric wheel, a very beautiful wheel with angels and demons on it. Dr. Carlos Luna even wears his wheel on his sweater. Father Zahan has written and meditated on the meaning of circular enclosures for the Yuin and Murring people, and as a Christian he is doubtlessly delighted to be in Jerusalem, the city of a thousand cupolas, circular ceilings, great rotundas—circles and spheres everywhere you look. In Professor Li's China, the circle is the symbol of heaven. The Tao is familiar throughout Asia, including Father Hernio's native Philippines. Father Magh Tuiredh's Celtic ancestors performed their rituals inside circular magic groves. And Mr. Earl Smith, from Arizona, can draw in sand the great Wheel of Creation on its cardinal point axes. Have I left out anyone?”

“I am a little familiar,” Sister Maria said modestly, “with the wheels of some religions.” In truth, she knew only less than a little but made a mental note to study. “Still,
Gal Gal Hamazal
is hardly a sacred wheel on the level of those you have mentioned.”

“Don't be so sure.” Mr. Rabindranath smiled a bit smugly. “It may be a new religion for the masses in our time.”

Sister Maria remembered with distaste the tapered brown flesh of his flaccid penis, and she also wasn't sure what he meant: was TV the religion, or the Wheel of Fortune itself?

“Anyway,” he continued, “the child seems to enjoy the show very much. You are a very pretty girl, Andrea. If Gala Keria were to resign, you could do her job.”

Andrea gave no sign that she heard him. Nonetheless, there was a murmur of assent, and a lightning-quick glance passed between the people in the room, or so it looked to Sister Maria. But the next moment she thought she must have been mistaken. How could so many people exchange a look among themselves so fast? It was physically impossible.

But the conversation distracted Andrea enough so that she never actually found out the answer to the puzzle
CREATION AND CREATOR
. The engineer appeared to have won. She sat in glum silence for the rest of the show, participating in neither the chanting of the Hebrew alphabet nor the childish joy of the spectators. Was she really pretty enough to take Gala's place? Andrea had not the slightest idea. She hadn't thought for ages about her looks. She would have liked to wear glasses, but her vision was perfect. She was always surprised by masculine attention, which, she imagined, was something every girl received. She had always given in quite easily to men's urgent pleas and didn't think much of it. When they began acting like lovesick puppies, she avoided them. She had told Sister Rodica that during the months that she'd been “in transit,” as her jailers had called the time when she'd been in the camp, she had become quite indifferent to what happened to her body. Sister Rodica's heart filled with pity for the girl, not much younger than herself.

The solution to the category
BOOKS
turned out to be
The Bridge over the Drina
, a book Andrea had read in school shortly before her entire world became one of its unwritten chapters. Written by the Bosnian Ivo Andrić during World War I, it was the story of the history of a bridge that linked Bosnia to the world. Andrea had cried when she'd read the book because she'd felt its truth like a bitter seed on her tongue. But for all his knowledge, even Ivo Andrić would have cried in disbelief when his bridge over the Drina was blown up by Serbian nationalists in 1995. That was the year when my life ceased, thought Andrea.

The next category was
SONG
, which turned out to also be one of her favorites, “Your Precious Love.” She had sung along with her fraying cassette of Marvin Gaye's
Motown Hits
until her voice cracked.

For an extra 500 shekels the jeweler was asked to sing the song, and amazingly, he did. “Heaven must have sent your precious love … And you gave me a reason for living … you taught me the meaning of living … Heaven must have sent you from above … Heaven must have sent your precious love.”

The final category was
MOVIES
. The engineer solved the puzzle:
Elmer Gantry
. Andrea had seen this, too, and had found Burt Lancaster riding on his horse over a mountain ridge a frightening image.

The exhausted audience chanted a final “
aleph, lamed, mem, resh
” and watched with bright excitement as a Yamaha motorcycle, a GE refrigerator, and a Subaru pickup truck rotated on stage.

Andrea felt sorry for the soldier, who hadn't won anything. “A refrigerator!” she said contemptously. “What a silly prize.”

“Not silly.” Father Magh Tuiredh spoke up unexpectedly. “The refrigerator is the White Goddess!”

“How is that, Padre?” asked Lama Cohen, amused.

“There she is, large and white and unavoidable, at the center of every household in the modern world. You cannot ignore her; she draws everyone to worship. You open her door and look in long and hard by that little light. Giver of sustenance!”

“How blind are our poets!” exclaimed Professor Weng Li. “Chinese poetry has observed the ignored detail for four thousand years. I do not believe that we can find a single verse dedicated to the new White Goddess, the refrigerator.”

“Not even during the Cultural Revolution?” wondered Dr. Luna. “It is well known that your poets wrote about the Four Modernizations: the modernization of agriculture, industry, culture, and sports.”