Damascus Gate (11 page)

"I worry too," Raziel said. "But the light of the eye is stronger than drugs."

"Remember," De Kuff told them, "we have only each other."

"That's the good news, right?" Raziel said, getting up. "Also the bad," he added.

"What about the tours?" Gigi asked. "What if someone calls?"

"Tell them the tours are at an end," said De Kuff. He got up and went back into his room and shut the door. Gigi sighed; she and Raziel looked at each other.

"What will happen?" she asked him.

"We'll live it out," Raziel said. "Check this out, Gigi." He stood and picked up a pocket-sized New Testament that dated from his Jews-for-Jesus phase. "'Therefore take no thought, saying, What shall we eat? Or, What shall we drink? Or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed? For after all these things do the Gentiles seek.'"

Gigi winced and nibbled her thumbnail. "Funny you should come all this way," she said. "Funny you should come
here
to be a Christian."

"I'm not a Christian, Gigi. I've seen the dark—I've really seen it. I believe in light."

"I was never religious," she said. "I've lost my sanity. Not to mention my business."

The young man laughed. "You became an artist. It wasn't an accident. You don't need a business. To stay here and do
getch
for tourists? And what will sanity get you?"

"The power always fails," she said. "He said it himself. It has always failed."

"It," Raziel said. "What
it?
It's us. We're it." He laughed and frightened her. "It's a game."

"A game," Gigi said. "It's terrible."

When Raziel went upstairs to read, Gigi knocked on De Kuff's door and went inside. He was sitting on the bed.

"He frightens me," Gigi said. "Always laughing. His Christian Bibles."

"People like him don't reassure us," De Kuff said. "They're frightening sometimes."

"I wish I had never met him. Don't you?"

"Too late," said De Kuff.

L
UCAS'S FLATMATE
and occasional lover, Tsililla Sturm, returned early from London. She had been interviewing an American director who was shooting a film at Shepperton. Emerging from the taxi in the rosy stillness of a spring morning, Tsililla looked pale and in pain. Lucas watched her arrival from his balcony window and went to the door to let her in. He had been reading Obermann's notes on the Reverend Theodore Earl Ericksen.

"I couldn't telephone," she told him. "Are you alone? I can go to a hotel."

"Nonsense," Lucas said impatiently. He was somewhat embittered over the flickering out of their affair. "Of course I'm alone. Did you think I would move someone into your flat?"

"I thought you might have an overnight guest. Why not?"

For a year or so, until the previous winter, Lucas and Tsililla had been a couple. It had been an intensely reflective, not to say a tortuously examined, relationship. Tsililla had been raised on a Tolstoyan-Freudian-Socialist kibbutz in the Galilee, equipped from infancy with such a plenitude of answers to life's questions as to leave her awash in useless certainties.

Lucas himself tended toward introspection. They had exhausted each other. As part of their present arrangement, they had set each other free—a freedom that Lucas found particularly oppressive. No sooner had things gone wrong with Tsililla than he began experiencing impotence, which declined to set him free. For the first time in his life, he began to worry about aging and whether his powers would ever come back to him.

On Tsililla's study wall was a picture of a well-known New York novelist with his arm around two fetching young soldier girls. One was the blushing twenty-year-old Tsililla, the second her then closest friend, comrade in arms and fellow kibbutznik, Gigi Prinzer. The touring writer had encountered them at their posting in the Negev and been smitten, whereupon the three of them had managed to parlay a jolly photo opportunity into a ghastly triangle. After an extravaganza of mutual psychic and sexual predation, each against all, the three principals had psychically imploded.

The novelist had gone home, profoundly blocked and in deep midlife crisis, to his wife and the jeers of his cruel psychiatrist. In Gigi and Tsililla's company, he had gathered undreamed-of insights and material but was unable to write a line. Tsililla herself had published a dark novel, which was well received and indifferently translated into French.

The novel had established her career as a full-time writer, although she eventually took up film criticism rather than fiction. Gigi, transformed into Tsililla's bitterest enemy, had gone to the Art Students' League of New York and to the École des Beaux Arts and then become a peace activist and commercially successful painter with a whitewashed studio in Safed. Only Tsililla, Lucas often thought, would preserve such a grisly souvenir as that photograph.

"Shall I get my things out of the bedroom?" Lucas offered. The gesture earned him only a dismissive look, but it was one on which he doted. Her long pale face with its high cheekbones and prominent, full-lipped mouth never failed to stir him.

He was sorely tempted to question her about the trip. He suspected she had contrived to fall in love again. Tsililla had a perpetual affair going with the great
beau monde
of mind and spirit and surrendered herself to it readily. In his jaundiced moments, he saw her as a silly little snob and groupie, and he was inclined to be unsympathetic this morning. But weary from the flight and whatever misadventures, she looked especially desirable. Then, to his perplexity, she came over to the chair on which he sprawled and kissed him on the cheek. He touched her hand in spite of himself.

"Go to bed, my love," he said. "And later things will all be different."

Leaving the bedroom door open, she tossed her traveling clothes in the customary heap at the foot of the bed and climbed under the covers. It was not unusual for her to go to bed at dawn.

"What will you do today?" she asked him from beneath the counterpane.

"I have to go down to Ein Gedi, to this conference. Talk to some Christian sky pilot. Religion and so forth."

"You should do the mud," she said. "Put some on your bald spot."

Anywhere else? he thought. He glared at her, but she was huddled under the covers with her back to him.

"It works," she said after a moment.

"Thanks for the tip, Tsililla," said Lucas.

"Go to Masada."

"Should I? Why?"

"You should. I went when I was in school. You've never been."

The ruined mountaintop fortress at Masada was the place where first-century Jewish Zealots, in rebellion against Roman rule, were reported to have committed suicide rather than surrender to Roman troops. It was a major tourist attraction.

"Masada's a lot of baloney," Lucas told her. "Only Boy Scouts believe it."

Piqued or asleep, she did not answer. But then it occurred to him that he might just go, and even spend a night in the valley. Enthusiasm was, after all, his subject.

In the bathroom, he used the accordion-hinged mirror beside Tsililla's sink to locate his bald spot. Without question it was expanding, brightening in the spring sunshine.

He straightened up and had a look at himself in the larger glass above the sink. He supposed Israel was aging him. Recently colleagues had expressed surprise upon hearing that he had been too young to work Vietnam. But the absurdity in Grenada had been his war, for what it was worth. The Gulf War had literally bypassed him. Overhead.

Lucas was a big man, broad-shouldered, thin-lipped, long-jawed. Once one of his girlfriends had laughed at him, laughed at his face, with the explanation that he so often appeared to be at the point of saying something funny. It was hard for him to believe now that his spare mouth and fixed mug suggested incipient humor. Moreover, his hairline was receding, his forehead claiming more of his face, exposing the strategies in his eyes.

He was not a vain man, but his own appearance discouraged him. Lucas had not engaged his own appearance for some time.

Before setting out, he had a last glance at Obermann's Ericksen file. The meeting was not scheduled until late in the day, so there would be plenty of time to prepare.

The file led off with a résumé of the reverend, apparently prepared by the estranged Mrs. Ericksen. Ericksen had started out as a Primitive Baptist in eastern Colorado, gone to Bible school in California and served a few working-class congregations in the industrial suburbs of L.A. Then he had gone to Guatemala as a missionary for three years and married Linda there. Immediately thereafter they had both turned up in Israel. They had worked with a number of Christian institutions here, as evangelical missionaries to Christian Arabs in Ramallah, at a camp for visiting Christian youth groups loosely organized on the kibbutz model, and as tour guides for church trips. Then, finally, at about the time his marriage with Linda began to fail, he had taken over the House of the Galilean and its good lentil soup.

Calling Ericksen, Lucas had proposed that he join him on one of the H of G's excursions to the shores of the Dead Sea, and Ericksen had agreed. Included with his résumé were many inspirational brochures that emphasized Qumran and the Essenes, with references to the Teacher of Righteousness. The line, barely hinted at in the promotional stuff, seemed to Lucas vaguely unorthodox, if not quite in the
majnoon
category. It suggested a variety of New Age Gnosticism more than old-time holy rolling.

Late in the morning, leaving Tsililla asleep, he packed up his notes and went out. He took along some topical reading for the trip down: Josephus's
Jewish War
and a modern history of the same period by a British historian.

His old Renault was parked at the side of the building's driveway downstairs. As a hopeful precaution, he had equipped the car with two large printed signs that said
PRESS
in English, Russian, Hebrew and Arabic, purchased from a Palestinian street vendor near the Damascus Gate. Why there should be a Russian rendering Lucas had no idea, but he thought it might not hurt to confuse the issue. He was always trying to project the maximum degree of complexity against a landscape whose inhabitants had neither the time nor the inclination for much. The way to Ein Gedi would take him through the most secure part of the Occupied Territories, but there was always a chance of trouble.

The car's yellow Israeli license plate might well draw stones at the Jericho turnoff; the press sign, designed to placate the rock-throwing
shebab,
sometimes enraged the militant settlers. Cars bearing such a sign were occasionally forced to stop by armed men who interrogated and insulted members of the foreign press, whom they tended to see as Arab lovers. The most militant settlers, Lucas had found, always seemed to be Americans, and they reserved their most furious scorn for American reporters.

But the greatest danger of all, Lucas understood, was not
fedayeen
on
jihad
or enraged Jabotinskyites; it would come from ordinary Israeli motorists, who had, as a group, the aggressiveness, fatalism and approximate life expectancy of west Texas bikers. Their random fury could be neither appeased nor sensibly anticipated.

The city had spread far to the east. Neat, ugly blocks of flats extended into the Judean Hills, and it was nearly half an hour before he reached the open desert. Then all at once there were stony ravines where the ravens might have nourished Hagar. Black Bedouin tents clung to shingled hillsides; demonic goats nibbled along the shoulder of the road. The ridge lines were commanded, every few miles, by army strong points with sandbags and razor wire. Rounding one turn, he came in sight of the green oasis of Jericho below and the pale salty blue of the Dead Sea to the south of it. On the far horizon, across the wide water in the Kingdom of Jordan, loomed the limestone mass of Mount Nebo. It was where Moses was supposed to have set eyes on the Promised Land at last, and died. In some ways, Lucas thought, squinting into the haze, an ideal outcome.

Killing time, he decided to risk a long detour through Jericho, following the main highway into town and pulling off at the compound where the Egged buses stopped and Palestinian vendors sold fruit, soda and gewgaws under the eye of a Border Police post. The breeze was rank and sweet with verdure, and the humidity drew sweat and stirred vague appetites. He bought two large bottles of mineral water and drank one greedily. Even the quality of thirst seemed different in the lowlands. A man in Bedouin robes, dark as an Ashanti, sold him a small bunch of bananas. People of African origin, descendants of slaves it was said, lived in a few nearby villages.

The town was quiet. He had a cup of coffee in the café at Hi-sham's palace and then drove south, following the straight highway under the cliffs over the Jordan valley. The hotel and spa where the Reverend Mr. Ericksen and his colleagues were conferring had sun-faded flags of the tourist nations on a crescent of flagpoles at the entrance to its driveway. The driveway itself was a desolate sandy track between stands of brush and thorn trees, leading to two beige buildings beside a dun marsh that edged toward the greasy whitecaps of the Dead Sea.

A surly young man at the front desk provided him information with studied indifference. The spiritual conferees were off on a junket to the Qumran caves and would not return until late afternoon. Lucas left a message for Ericksen. Until then, he would have a choice of several diversions. He might go out to the caves himself and endeavor to commune with ectoplasmic Essenes. He might hop one of the hotel's tourist buses for the midday excursion to Masada, down the road. Or he might book himself into the whole Dead Sea spritz-and-shvitz, endure the mud bath and the sulfurated showers, perform the belly-up wallow along the salty shore. After a little dawdling, thinking of Tsililla, he opted for Masada.

He read Josephus on the way—the story of Eleazar and the Zealots holding off the Romans to the last, the Roman breach, the self-slaughter of the surviving Jews. For some reason, today the bus to the fortress was filled with Italians, along with a few British and Americans. The guide spoke only English to his charges and on the way told the group about the Allenby Bridge and the Dead Sea kibbutzim and the wildlife park near Ein Gedi. As Lucas had suspected they might, themes of identity emerged early in the expedition. The guide, providing a historical survey in preparation for the fortress, explained the perspective of Herod the Great.