Damascus Gate (20 page)

"You have to believe," Raziel said. "If you stop believing, we're lost."

The notion that he might be losing De Kuff, losing the Redemption and his place in it, terrified him. Long ago, only a boy, he had prayed for the preservation of his own life with a detachment that made his parents suspect him of being suicidal. They had sent him to a child psychologist, and the psychologist had told him to record his dreams.

Once when Raziel and the psychologist were talking, the subject of the dream journal had come up.

"I don't keep it because you tell me to," young Ralph Melker had exploded in rage.

"Why then?" asked the psychologist.

"To examine them," Melker had declared triumphantly. "To see who I am."

In studying what he had no business studying, and with no more than the most elemental knowledge of Gematria, he had read that the sixteenth-century Kabbalist Hayyim Vital had done the same, hoping to discover in dreams the roots of his soul. Which naturally had floored the shrink: the family, that of a politician, hadn't seemed that religious.

"Will I ever be able to pray?" De Kuff asked Raziel.

"You're too close. Your life is worship."

"I think I would like to go to the Wall, to the Kotel, again."

"One day you will," Raziel said. "And they'll follow you." It was hard to keep the old man's spirits up when he had such desperate trouble with his own. "You'll walk through the gates of gold and I'll be with you."

But Raziel could not picture what it would really be like. The phrases of prophecy were cliched and formulaic. General rejoicing. Music never before heard. The square would become hip and the rough places plain.

At his core Raziel believed. He had labored so hard to work it out. He had endured so much terrible silence, listening for the slightest sound from inside. Once he had been told by a wise Hasid: wait in the worst of times, wait for the whole text, the whole
alef-beit,
wait for the end. The last letter,
tav,
was love. Love was understanding. He had taken over De Kuff's life and given up his own. Now they would have to wait for the
tav.

T
HAT NIGHT
in his new apartment, Lucas stared at his scant notes. He felt shaken, frightened and alone, pursued by unreasonable yearnings. He could imagine they were a part of his nature, inherited and nourished over a vast span of time.

But if he felt personally beset, the
story,
the project, was fine. There would be plenty to write about. If there was a danger, it was in the very size of the thing.

He felt he had a clear line on Ralph Melker. A little too sensitive as a boy, a little too intelligent, religious. He had to sympathize, Lucas did.

A boy of promise, a believer, and he discovers music. But with the music, drugs. And from these he has to make his own return—to be, in a sense, his own messiah.

Lucas knew a few things about junkies from his time at Columbia. He had done some recreational popping; some of his friends had been strung out. Kicking was murder, just getting through the day.

For such terrible days Raziel, like many, had required Grace. And then he'd found her, standing there atop the Twelve Steps, lovely as the poets dared describe her. Grace was by Botticelli, descended from Cora and Persephone, but essentially Christianized. Grace was amazing, ineffable, unmerited, feminine, worshiped smooth by Gentiles until she embodied the quality of mercy that Shakespeare thought had to be explained to uncomprehending Shylock, a slave of the Law. No matter if one beheld her as the Divine Presence, the Shekhinah. The Shekhinah could never be one's very own—unlike Grace, who could be yours alone, like Mom. And dependence was so Christian, so weak and sweet.

Thus grace abounding descended upon young Raziel, got him his music back, picked him up, then estranged him from the tents of Israel. But Raziel always wanted more. To be apostate and messiah and Mingus too. And if any boy from Pontiac Park could do it all, that boy was Ralph Arthur Melker. A terrific musician.

It was strange, Lucas thought, that messiahs would keep showing up among the Jews—of all people—whom ruin, expulsions and sheer annihilations had made so notoriously cautious and critical. (And what about me?) Yet after six thousand years of articulate speculation and competitive humor, in Israel a miracle was still worth more than an aphorism.

And how insightfully sly of Raziel to detect the election of someone else, to choose a lost humble soul, a diffident wounded seeker like De Kuff, and be his John the Baptist.

Only the garment, he could hear Sonia saying. Yes, the
story,
the project, was going fine. But he had come to understand, listening to Raziel's hot and cool junkie ramblings, that there were problems for him here. Because of who he was. Because it was Jerusalem, where the Judean wind praised the Almighty, every sultry breeze infested with prayer, every crossroads laboring under its own curse. Where the stones were not mere stones but resided in the heart and were wept upon or given in place of bread. Lucas had confidently and wrongly thought himself beyond all that. In fact, it was part of him, his inward man. Raziel was right: it was why he had come. He himself suffered from the Jerusalem Syndrome. There was another Willie Ludlum inside him, another consecrated buffoon. Raziel had called it: he was a sparrow like the rest of them.

Raziel, Lucas realized suddenly, called them all. Sincerely nuts—maybe, but he was a prodigy. There was something second born about him.

Lucas had a drink and looked up "sparrow" in the concordance to his King James Bible. It was the best he could do, since his reference books had been scattered in exile, and unlike his elderly classmates at the Hebrew University, he scarcely knew
tannaim
from
amoraim,
Mishnah from Gemara. On his way home he had noticed for the first time that the city was full of the obnoxious birds.

The Bible spoke specifically of only three sparrows. Two were in the Old Testament, both in Psalms. The first was in Psalm 84, and, lucky creature, it had found a home in the love of the Lord. But the other, in Psalm 102, was forlorn and dreadfully alone. Its heart was smitten and withered like grass. It watched in dread from a rooftop while the owls of the wilderness, the pelicans of the desert, circled overhead, equally unhappy.

Sparrow three was the one in Matthew and Luke, the two-for-a-farthing creature that took the well-known Fall—the one not to worry about, since God had it covered. The one we all hoped stood for us.

Fragments of poetry returned to him, "Cape Ann," by Eliot.

 

O quick quick quick, quick hear the song-sparrow, Swamp-sparrow, fox-sparrow, vesper-sparrow At dawn and dusk...

 

Just the thought of vesper sparrows, the shadow of their name, made him hear chanting from the woods on summer evenings. A sweet summoning, the call to prayer.

Later the same night he went out to Fink's, to get drunk again at close quarters. It was a quiet night, the bartender looked particularly downcast, the waiter sighed often and sang softly in Hungarian.

"Now where does anyone get off," Lucas asked himself, aloud but discreetly, "calling me a fucking sparrow?" People often talked to themselves in Fink's.

The bartender appeared to shrug, more tweedy and Perel-manesque than ever. The waiter muttered and snapped napkins. The Druse anchorman of the evening news was huddled with some colleagues at a corner table.

"'There's a special providence in the fall of a sparrow,'" Lucas recited. Of course that was Shakespeare, not the Bible. "'Not a whit!'" he declared. "'We defy augury.'"

"Jolly well done," said the sad bartender.

O
NE SUMMER MORNING,
Lucas followed Dr. Obermann on rounds at the mental hospital at Shaul Petak, which catered to religious maniacs. It was just outside the western city, a practical-looking building in the Israeli socialist-realist style, an architectural mode that might be expected to banish religious, philosophical, poetical or any other sort of speculation.

They met some famous figures from Scripture. Noah was present, glancing uneasily at the smoggy sky. Samson, unbound but closely supervised in a room of his own, sneered at Lucas's philistine lack of conditioning. There were several John the Baptists, their animal skin bikinis exchanged for hospital gowns. There were returned Jesus Christs, all disappointed at their long-awaited receptions, and some Hebrew messiahs, one of whom had been George Patton in another existence.

"The morning is usually their best time," Obermann explained to Lucas. "Not for them, actually, but for the student of the malady. Of course medication renders them subdued. Samson, for example, is already on a high dosage of Haldol and he's still ready to pull the temple of Dagon down."

"Do you think he saw that movie?" Lucas asked. "With Victor Mature?"

Dr. Obermann treated the question as beneath his notice.

"The thing about crazy people," he told Lucas, "is that they're just like anyone else. Some are naturally interesting, witty, imaginative. Some are pedestrian and tedious—they drone on. I assure you, there is no one on earth more boring than an elaborately deluded paranoid schizophrenic who is also literal-minded, undereducated and stupid."

"Obviously," Lucas said, "you're not sentimental about your patients."

"I?" Obermann asked. "Sentimental? I should say not. I've seen far too many."

"I understand," said Lucas.

"But I can tell you this," said the doctor. "We can't blame crazy people for the troubles of the world. It's the nominally sane individuals who cause most of human misery."

With the doctor's wisdom in mind, Lucas betook himself to the House of the Galilean. The House was in New Katamon, where it had been the villa of a wealthy Arab merchant. It had a carved gateway with verses from the Koran and a massive wooden door that opened onto a garden with fruit trees. The original key to the door was undoubtedly displayed on a parlor wall in Abu Dhabi or Detroit, to be brandished on appropriate occasions. Or, if the family had been unlucky or improvident, it hung in some hovel outside Gaza or Beirut.

A row of joined stone cottages ran along the garden wall. Their doors were ajar, and as he made his way across the garden to the organization's offices, he stopped to peer inside one. Surely they were the servants' quarters of the Palestinian merchant's family, and yet all traces of Arab occupation had been removed. What had replaced the Middle Eastern style of furnishings provided an ambiance that was neither Israeli nor American but rather British colonial. The House of G had been in possession of the villa for less than twenty years, yet the occupants had seemingly—and surely without specific intent—assembled every loose piece of the British Raj remaining in the Levant since the days of Ismail Pasha.

The tiny room Lucas saw looked as if it had been inhabited by the proprietor of an imperial summer hill station, homesick for his cottage on Windermere. There was wood paneling and willow-patterned china, comfy overstuffed sofas and oak tables with Irish lace doilies and a day bed with a Welsh bedspread. The prints on the burgundy walls depicted Highland cattle and heroic lighthouse keepers' wives. Facing each other across the dim, single-windowed space were some of Peters's views of Jerusalem and Holman Hunt's
The Scapegoat.

Waiting at the entrance to the main house, Lucas expected an Arab servant to answer his ring; instead, a young, apparently American girl appeared. She was tall, blond and virginally deferential, her prettiness marred only by a mildly eczemic rosiness of complexion. They shook hands and she introduced herself as Jennifer.

Jennifer led him into a thick-walled office lined with beautiful Turkish carpets and appointed with Scandinavian furniture. The room, which must have been the effendi's countinghouse, was short on daylight and so lit by sleek ceiling lights. At one end of the room was a scale model of some ancient edifice, like the Egyptian temples under glass at the Metropolitan Museum in New York.

A man in an ugly brown lightweight suit, wearing a tie the color of faded broccoli pizza, was seated at one end of a long mahogany desk. At the other end, like a consort sharing a throne, was a horse-faced woman in a yellow pantsuit, with short dark hair and prominent teeth.

The man rose. "Hi there, fella."

Lucas thought they must be acquainted, but after a moment he realized that they were not. The woman rose seconds after her partner.

"Welcome to the House of the Galilean," she intoned, somewhat in the manner of a flight attendant. He had a strong feeling she must once have been one.

"I'm Dr. Otis Corey Butler," the man declared. He was barbered and tanned, with a tough, sensible Scotch-Irish face like a North Carolina farmer's. Handsome. It was a shame about his tie. "This is my wife, Darletta, who I'm proud to say is also Dr. Butler."

Lucas introduced himself to the Drs. Butler.

"Dr. Ericksen suggested that I call on you," he said. "I'm researching religious movements in the city."

"Dr. Ericksen isn't with us any longer," Darletta replied. "Whom did you say you represented?"

"I'm working on a story for the
New York Times Magazine.
" And in fact he had had a vague conversation with someone there a few months previously. "I also hope to do a book one day."

"I want you to have a press kit," Dr. Otis Corey Butler said. "You'll find our story and especially the relevant biblical quotations. Some of this material is hot off the press, and you'll find fresh information about our projects that's never seen print before. I'm sure you'll find it a help. In fact," he added, "there's little left out."

He was the kind of hustler, Lucas realized, who was used to having the hacks take his press kits and run with them, or even lift them whole. No doubt, Lucas thought, he imagined himself a literary man.

"Do sit down, Chris," said Darletta, when he had stood thumbing through the pamphlets for a while.

Lucas's eye fell on one project that involved the preservation of Aramaic as a spoken language. It appeared there were some villagers somewhere in the wastes of Iraq who still spoke it.