Damascus Gate (19 page)

"Yes," said Lucas, astonished. "Thank you very much. I am."

"I suppose her career suffered because of her involvement with the professor. Having to be there and so forth."

Lucas could only nod. "She died young," he managed to say in a moment. "Like Ferrier."

"Did she meet your father's friends?"

"Well," Lucas said, "you know, they were stuffy. Bourgeois. German." Lucas laughed in spite of himself. "Once," he told Raziel, "he took her on a trip to Los Angeles on the Superchief to meet all his pals. The Frankfurt school. Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse and Thomas Mann. At least he took her along when he went to see them."

"How did it go?" Raziel asked.

"She thought Theodor Adorno was the guy who played Charlie Chan in the movies," Lucas said. "She asked him, Does it hurt when they do you up Chinese?"

"Wonder what he made of that."

"I would venture to say he was clueless," said Lucas. "Then I understand she kept trying to get the conversation back to Oriental makeup. How she'd done
Butterfly
with the Lyric in Chicago. She drank a little," he explained. "In fact, she drank a lot. In binges. Made her weight unstable, got her into speed to slim, screwed her voice."

"What did she say about Marcuse?" Raziel asked.

"You mean, what did she think of permissive repression?" Lucas asked. "She thought Marcuse was Otto Kruger."

Raziel looked at him blankly.

"Otto Kruger was one of the actors in the film version of
Murder My Sweet.
"

"You seem to like music," Raziel said to Lucas. "Your mother sang. Why did you never learn to play? Were you afraid of it?"

"I appreciate your having listened so sensitively to my mother's work," Lucas said. "Please don't ask me if I'm afraid of things. By the way, where's Sonia?"

"Sorry," Raziel said. "I think she may be sleeping. She was up meditating with us too." He nodded toward two louvered half-doors.

"Do you think I could see her?"

"Sonia?" Raziel called.

She answered faintly. Lucas went and knocked on the louvered door.

"Come," she said.

"It's me," said Lucas.

"Yes," she said, "I heard you."

She came out wrapped in her djellaba.

"Why are you here?" he asked her softly. "Why did you take them in?"

"Because," she told him, "Berger said I should." Her eyes shone. "Berger knew Kabbala extremely well. He thought of it as Sufic. At the end he called De Kuff el-Arif. That was what he called Abdullah Walter."

"You know what I think?" Lucas said. "I think you're a believer."

She laughed, beautifully he thought. It was pleasing to see her so happy, her sad eyes sparkling.

"I am a believer," she said, "of believers. Because the brotherhood of truth is one in all ages. The sisterhood too."

"Berger say that?"

"Yes, he said it. Raziel and De Kuff say it too. Don't you believe it?"

"Where I come from," Lucas said, "we say, 'Lord, I believe. Help thou mine unbelief.'"

The double doors opened and Raziel came in. Afraid to leave me alone with her, he thought. He felt angry and annoyed.

"So, can I be in your project?" Sonia asked. "Your story?"

"You bet."

"What if I'm boring?"

"I'll risk it," Lucas said. "I'm not easily bored."

"As part of your project, Christopher," Raziel said, "I hope you're studying." Both the familiarity and the admonishing tone annoyed him further.

"Well, I've dropped my Arabic courses at the YMCA. Now I'm at the Hebrew University. Not that it does me much good."

"No?"

"I'm not good at languages."

He was taking classical Hebrew at the university and also a course entitled, with echoes of Broadway, "Tradition." "Tradition" had been recommended to him by Obermann. It was taught by an old Lithuanian Holocaust survivor named Adler and aimed primarily at the young, kids from the United States and Canada taking part in Ulpans and study sessions abroad. There were also a number of Gentiles, some retired clergymen from California, two midwesterners, and a few globetrotting professional students.

The curriculum was partly a review of Jewish beliefs, from the Hasmoneans through Hillel and Philo, Maimonides and Nach-manides, and on to Buber and Heschel. It was informative on the influence of second-century Neoplatonism and on contemporary applications in a rational vein. But Adler's passion, though he attempted to conceal it, was Lurianic Kabbala. In the modernist critical tradition, he ascribed the
Zohar
to Moses de Leon.

To Lucas's surprise, Adler had approached him for conversation. Perhaps because of personal chemistry, perhaps because Adler had heard of Lucas's father and was proud to be the teacher of such a scholar's son, they had gotten on well, and he had suggested to Lucas a number of books not included in the syllabus. One was a Paulist Press translation of sections of the
Zohar,
and the other, by a Hasidic rabbi, was on Gematria and the otherwise sacred significance of the Hebrew letters. It was, Adler had suggested, a good way to remember and internalize the ancient characters.

Raziel smiled. "Adler. A
mitnag.
"

"Not at all," Lucas said.

"But a good man," Raziel added.

In the silence that followed, they heard the house sparrows twittering in the old walls.

"All these Old City houses are full of sparrows," Raziel said, casting his spell. "I like them. Sparrows."

"Why?"

"Because," he said to Lucas, "we're all sparrows here."

Lucas decided it was time to take more notes. He pulled out his notebook and wrote
sparrows.
The word by itself looked unillumi-nating, so he put the notebook away.

"Where's Mr. De Kuff?" he asked finally. "Will I be able to talk to him?"

"He'll spend the day in
kavana,
" Razz said. "Preparing for
dvekut.
" He looked at Lucas with faint amusement. "Want to say it, brother? Hey, say it, don't be shy. You have a right, it's your language.
Kavana.
" He pronounced the word carefully, glottalizing the opening consonant. "
Dvekut.
"

Lucas realized he must have moved his lips in mute imitation. He was annoyed. But he made himself repeat it aloud, guided by Raziel. "
Kavana. Dvekut.
" He could almost see the characters that formed the words.

"Very good, man," Raziel said. "A person might take you for Jewish."

Sonia laughed, delighted.

By way of rejoinder, Lucas said to Raziel, "I understand you had a problem with drugs for a while."

Raziel fell silent for a moment.

"I told him," Sonia admitted. "I told him about myself too."

"I was a common junkie," Raziel said.

"And a Jew for Jesus?"

"What about you?" Raziel asked. "Who were you for? Who are you for now? What if I ask you why you drink?"

Always smiling,
Lucas wrote in his notebook, ignoring the insolent counter-questions as best he could.
Patronizing arrogant but probably sincerely nuts.

"Don't go to Obermann," Raziel said urgently. "Come to us. She knows your
tikkun.
" Lucas saw that he meant Sonia. Lucas wanted to explain that he was not a patient of Obermann's but a collaborator. But he was so amazed at the notion of Sonia's knowing his
tikkun
that he said nothing. Raziel had fixed him with a blazing lover's look, a seducer's.

"She does?" Lucas looked at Sonia. "Really?"

From his courses at the university he knew that
tikkun
referred to a primal accident at the beginning of time. According to the doctrines of the mystic Isaac Luria, the Almighty had absented himself in the first and greatest of mysteries, bequeathing to his exiled, orphaned creation emanations of himself. The force of these emanations was beyond the capacity of existence to contain them. Since the beginning, the goal of the universe had been to restore the divine balance, to restore the
tikkun,
a cosmic harmony and justice, and the task had somehow fallen to mankind to set right. And each person, some Kabbalists believed, labored under his own
tikkun,
a microcosm, a succession of souls, through a process of reincarnation called
partsufim.

"I do," Sonia said. "I think."

Nonsense, Lucas thought. But it made him feel close to her.

"If you know my
tikkun,
" he asked, "what should I do to square it?"

"What should you do to be saved?" Raziel asked, smiling. It was the question the rich young man had asked Jesus, in Luke. Though he had never been wealthy, Lucas had often identified himself with the same rich young man.

"Open your heart," Sonia said. He could not help staring at her. Was she saying this particularly to him? Or was it some New Age formulation? He was falling in love with her.

Absurdly, he wrote it down. The call to prayer sounded.
The brotherhood of truth is one in all ages.
It was in the Koran. He was intensely aware of Raziel's watching them.

"You're quoting from the New Testament," Lucas told him. "Do I assume you're still kind of Christian?"

"Christianity isn't the faith of the Redemption. Maybe it was once. The Talmud says, 'On the eve of Passover they hanged Yeshu.' That's all it says. Yet in Kabbala, we have a thousand clues about him. And he was only one of many."

"I daresay," Lucas observed, "that that's an unconventional reading."

"You were devout," Raziel said, "as a boy. Wasn't he, Sonia? See, I'm guessing," he told Lucas. "But she knows."

"Yes," she said, "I think he was. He was always close to us."

"You were always close to us. Every soul that inhabits you partakes of us. You're a little like the Rev. The mixture of shells and light makes you confused and unhappy. One side employing the force of the other, merging. You're one of those people who hears the sun come up."

How flattering, Lucas thought. And in spite of oneself, what fun! To be special. To be part of a process that was beautiful and mysterious. To be chosen. In his secret heart he found it congenial, and the child in him somehow wanted to believe it, there in Jerusalem among the timeless stones. So beguiling. And it was surprising what authority the young Raziel could bring to bear.

"Tell me this," Lucas asked. "What is Mr. De Kuff to you? Or," he asked Sonia, "to you?"

"Ever read Marx?" Raziel asked. "
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon?
"

In fact, Lucas had read it. He had thought no one would ever ask. "As it happens," he said, "I've read it. Didn't he say history always repeats itself twice? First as tragedy wasn't it? Then as farce?"

"Life is tragic and absurd," Raziel told him. "The same figures eternally recur. This is a secret of Torah. Maimonides himself says the Messiah comes again and again until faith is strong enough."

"And you're saying that Mr. De Kuff in there...?" he pointed to the other room.

"Who was Yeshu?" Raziel asked. "Who was Sabbatai?"

"They were false messiahs," Lucas said. He felt, against reason, that he was blaspheming.

"They were not false. Man was false. The world was false. So the
tikkun
was not restored. So it was not 'on earth as it is in heaven.'"

"And we always fail our messiahs?"

"Depravity is the mystery of creation," Raziel said, smiling. "We change, we fail, but the Torah remains, never changes under its garment. The chance to restore
tikkun
comes again and again."

"Well," Lucas said, "I guess you could say that Marx was interested in restoring
tikkun,
right?"

"You could," Raziel agreed. "You could also say Einstein was. Or that you are. And we, Sonia and I."

"All in pursuit of
tikkun?
"

"Or maybe," Raziel said, "
tikkun
is in pursuit of us."

Marx, Einstein,
Lucas wrote in his notebook.
Us after tikkun, tikkun after us. Him, me, Sonia B. Always fail our messiahs.

"Don't you know it's true, Chris?" Sonia asked him.

"He sees," Raziel said to her. "And don't be offended," he told Lucas. "We're all mutants here. De Kuff became a Catholic, communion every morning. I was with Jews for Jesus. Sonia is a Sufi, she was a Communist."

"And," Lucas asked, not bothering to write, "is the actual Torah known to us?"

"Only the garment," Sonia said.

"Only the garment," said Raziel after her.

"And me?" Lucas asked. (What about me?) "Am I part of this?"

"Yes," Sonia told him. "You always have been. Since we all stood at Sinai."

Serious mindbending,
Lucas wrote in his notebook. He still wanted to please Sonia.

"Don't be impatient, Chris," she said. "Remember where you are. That it's Jerusalem. What happens here is unlike what happens elsewhere. Sometimes it changes the world."

"Well," he announced, "I better be going. I enjoyed your playing. I enjoyed our talk." And he walked, a little unsteadily, out to the street.

"He's one of us," Raziel told her. "He has a place in what's to come."

She watched Lucas go out of the courtyard.

"Rest awhile," Raziel told her. Obedient, she went to her old room.

He knocked on the door of De Kuff's room and went inside. The old man seemed to be sleeping, but after a moment Raziel realized that he was awake and suffering. Watching him, Raziel considered the depths of the old man's loneliness and desperate desire for prayer. Whenever he detected De Kuff's thoughts, he would speak them and, inevitably, achieve surprise. If it was manipulative, he thought, it could not possibly be in a better cause.

"If only," De Kuff said, wiping tears from his eyes, "there was something I could do." Recently he had subsided into a weepiness over which he had little control. No one could say he was not a man of sorrows.

"You struggle," Raziel told him. "You suffer. The rest is for us." He made a fist and opened it, the gesture he used to denote the universe entirely.

"But I can't," De Kuff said desperately. "So often I can't believe the things you tell me."