Damascus Gate (22 page)

And outside, the night!

No prayer or meditation could contain him. He sat wide-eyed, knuckles against his lips. The worst thing about the exhilaration, he had long ago decided, was its loneliness. Once his notebooks had given him an illusion like companionship. No more, after so much suffering.

He dressed haphazardly, his heart swelling. Ecstasy. For a moment he stood outside Raziel's door, wondering if the young man was asleep. They had not exchanged a word for days. But De Kuff's desire was toward the streets.

He jogged over the cobblestones, pulling on his expensive tweed jacket on the run. His face was upturned. Intersecting lines of glowing sky met among the close crowding rooftops. Innumerable stars. He ran across a small courtyard. Luminescence spread overhead. Sheer space was divine, an emanation. Isaac Newton had believed it.

From the shadows at the end of the courtyard, a ragged, angry voice called after him in Arabic. The single voice raised others. Street dogs yapped. Here and there the alleys of the city trapped a smell of hashish.

At a turn in the Tariq al-Wad, he saw the lights of the Border Police post and heard military Hebrew crackling from the post's radio. Under an arcade, two men were sliding open the corrugated shutters of their stall. A young man with Down's syndrome, wearing a white religious cap and standing in the light of a bare bulb, screamed at him and gestured with a broom.

The sky was still blue-black and star-scattered when he approached the Lions' Gate. The morning's first taxis waited there and a half-dozen International Harvester buses, their huge noxious engines running. Palestinian companies operated the buses between West Bank towns and the city they called Al-Kuds, The Holy. De Kuff hung back in the shadows, a few hundred feet from the well of noise and light at the gate.

For the first time since coming to Jerusalem, he had a sense of the Spirit of God close by. The Temple's Holy of Holies had been inside the Haram. He felt himself drawing strength from its otherness and fearfulness. He felt newly elected, called from the depths of that starry night toward Mount Moriah.

From the arching shadows, he watched faint lights burning in the Franciscan Monastery of the Flagellation down the street. The lights made him imagine chanted plainsong. After a few moments he was sure he actually heard it, the "
Regina Coeli
" of Franciscan Matins: "
Ave Maria virgine sanctissima.
"

With its imagined cadence in his ears, he walked to the gate that enclosed the plaza of the Bethesda Pool and the Church of St. Anne. The sky above the Mount of Olives began to glow.

In the quickening light De Kuff saw a row of reclining bodies against the wall of the seminary across the cloister. They were young people, and most appeared to be foreigners. Some of them looked ragged and impoverished; others appeared to be prosperous tourists. They must be an overflow, he thought, from the night services at the Holy Sepulchre and the nearby hostels. Some were asleep, some stared at the sky, a few watched him.

He walked across the stone square in front of the locked church to the edge of the dry ruins that had been the Bethesda Pool. As light gathered over the Mount of Olives, De Kuff felt that he could hear the sunrise, its rhythms and subtleties, the mingling of elements it contained. He thought he might be experiencing the
sefirot,
the divine emanations. Sweat poured from his body. In spite of his confusion he felt grateful.

He sat down on a stone step overlooking the Pool and took the tweed jacket off and folded it beside him, with the lining out. Light drifted all around, riffled like water, musically ringing.

The Pool had once served the Second Temple; then it had been called the Pool of Israel. Each year, it was believed, an angel descended in season to trouble the water with its wing. The water was good and healing. Beside it, Jesus cured a paralytic.

In a temple of five colonnades, Serapis had been worshiped there, the great syncretic god of the East. Serapis was at once the subsumation of Apis and Osiris and Aesculapius, a son of Apollo. He stood crowned with a wheat measure, attended by Anubis the jackal-headed, wielding the staff with twined snakes.

De Kuff settled himself cross-legged on the ancient stone. Bathed in the rosy light, he raised his hands above his head and let them rest, palms up, on either side. His arms were short and flabby but his hands extremely delicate, lithe and sensitive. A musician's hands, a physician's.

As the dawn prayers reached him from the Haram, De Kuff closed his eyes to see the shining
sefirot.
He and Raziel had been looking for them in the sounds of Muslim prayer since coming to the Old City. This time the
sefirot
were there for him, the myriads of the
Zohar,
the Uncreated Light.

He had no idea how long he stayed in
kavana.
When he looked about him, over a dozen youths had gathered around the place he sat and were either lost in their own meditations or just watching, as though waiting to hear what he would say. He stood up and smiled at them and picked up his jacket. A solemn young blond woman helped settle it around his shoulders.

He was dizzy from sitting in meditation and unsteady on his legs, but his heart ached with joy. He felt consumed with love for the motley youths who crowded around him. Had he spoken to them? They were looking at him with concern, stepping back to let him pass.

Heading toward the street, he saw that the Church of St. Anne had opened, its altar candles lit for the early Mass. St. Anne's was a church of great austerity. Its lack of decoration and massive hewn stones gave it an almost modern aspect. After Jerusalem fell to Saladin it had been used as a mosque, and an inscription from the Koran remained over the lintel. De Kuff went inside the church and stood under its great vault, breathing in the faint traces of incense, the candle smoke and old stone.

And suddenly, in that church-mosque-temple by the Pool of Israel, he thought he knew what it meant to say that all was Torah. And what it meant to know that the world to come was at hand. The mystery of Torah was far stranger than anyone believed. It was the eternal reason that there was something rather than nothing. It underlay everything, in forms more various than anyone had dared conceive. The knowledge nearly knocked him to the floor.

As he stood swaying in the center aisle, the young blond woman came up to him again.

"Please," she said, "you will come later? You will come later and hear us sing?"

"If you like," he said. She gave him a timid smile. She had watery blue eyes, like Van Eyck's Saint Ursula.

Her smile vanished as if she were afraid of offending him. He patted her hand and went outside into the plaza. A few of the youths followed after him.

He had become a Catholic once, received into the Church at St. Vincent Ferrer on Lexington Avenue, a church that strained to evoke what St. Anne's conveyed in every stone. He could still remember the winter afternoon of his baptism and reception—the hysterical confusion, kneeling in a shrine named for a Spanish Dominican inquisitor. It had been unwise, premature, a useless apostatizing. He had been without guidance then. He had thought in those days that it was not possible to have it all—a false economy. In those days he had believed in austerities, mortifications, humiliations. Often, he still found life harder without them.

Now he could stand anywhere on his own terms and represent in his own soul the obviated differences between Jew and Greek, male and female, bond and free. The world to come was within him, represented in his person, available to all. If they imagined that they had taken hold of the
sefirot,
bound some in their churches to worship, what matter?

He began to recite from the
Zohar.
The young foreigners, at Bethesda for sunrise, began to gather round. The time had come, De Kuff thought, to reveal a part of the truth.

A
T FINK'S
one evening Basil Thomas, the go-between and former KGB officer, treated Lucas to a prolonged complaint about life in Jerusalem.

"One is a secular type of guy," Basil Thomas lamented, "one feels an outcast. One might as well go somewhere and be a Jew, if you see what I mean."

"It doesn't bother me much."

"How," Basil Thomas inquired haughtily, "would it bother
you?
"

Basil Thomas also imparted the information that Dr. Obermann had broken up with the former wife of Reverend Ericksen, the unsuccessful American missionary. Linda Ericksen, according to Basil Thomas, had taken up with Janusz Zimmer.

"What do you make of Zimmer?" Lucas asked after they had talked awhile. "Has he made
aliyah,
or is he just hanging out?" Of course, Lucas thought, one could have asked that about hundreds living here.

"This is an interesting fellow," Basil Thomas admitted. He spoke softly, without his usual bluster. "Very knowledgeable. A gifted journalist." Lucas thought his discretion represented some kind of political caution but asked no further. Then Basil Thomas said, "Ayin."

"What's Ayin?"

"Nothing," said Basil Thomas. "Ask Janusz."

Lucas's next meeting with Obermann took place at the Atara, a café on Ben Yehuda Street. The doctor seemed downcast. During their conversation the subject of the estranged Ericksens did come up.

"If we want a disgruntled Galilean," Obermann said glumly, "you should interview Ericksen. I hear he's leaving the country."

"How about his missus?"

"Linda's with Jan Zimmer."

"Oh," Lucas said. "Sorry to hear that. I mean ... I suppose she's a restless soul."

Obermann raised a hand in dismissal. "With Zimmer," he said, "she'll lead a more adventurous life. In any case, if either of us is going to interview Ericksen, it's got to be you."

"Think he'll see me?"

"Try," Obermann said. "He's moved in with the archeologist, Lestrade, down at the Austrian hospice. I have the number."

Lucas took the number and bought some telephone tokens from the Atara's cashier. No one answered at the hospice.

"Go anyway," Obermann suggested. "I would. Maybe you can surprise him."

Lucas walked it, by way of the Damascus Gate. The Austrian hospice was in the Muslim Quarter of the Old City. Passing through the foyer of the hospice, he noticed an enormous plaster crucifix on the wood-paneled wall. He had to wonder if, back in the late thirties, there had not been a portrait of the Führer adjoining it, at a mutually respectful distance.

Ericksen was sitting among potted thatch palms on the rooftop terrace of the adjoining building. He was not the man he had been on the Mount of Temptation. His tan had paled, and a loss of weight had scaled his features to a death's-head pattern. A newly prominent Adam's apple gave him the look of an unsound American rustic.

"Dr. Ericksen..." Lucas began, slightly out of breath from the stairs.

"I'm not a doctor," Ericksen said. "I'm not anything."

"Sorry," said Lucas. "I tried to telephone but there wasn't an answer. I wanted to talk with you before you left." Ericksen never glanced at him. "Do you remember me? We talked at Jebel Quruntul."

Finally Ericksen turned, slowly, shielding his eyes.

"Yes, I remember."

"Well, I heard you were leaving. I had hoped we could talk."

"All right," Ericksen said.

"Got an offer back home?"

"I don't have any offers. I'm leaving church work."

Lucas stopped himself at the point of asking Ericksen whether he wanted to talk about that decision. It was always the wrong question.

"Why?" he asked instead. "Is the decision a result of working at the House of the Galilean?"

Ericksen looked, at that moment, like a man who had been slapped.

"You're a reporter," he told Lucas.

"Well, I'm writing about religious developments here. I thought you might be able to help me."

"Who," Ericksen asked exhaustedly, "do you represent?"

"I'm writing a book," Lucas told him. "About religion in the Holy Land." It was not a phrase he commonly used.

"Are you a Jew?"

"I'm a lapsed Catholic," Lucas said, "of partly Jewish background. I have no ax to grind." That, he thought, was a good one.

"What do you want to know about the House?"

"Well, on leaving, do you believe you've done something worthwhile?"

"Even if they were honest," Ericksen said, "nothing they do would be worthwhile."

"Can I quote you?"

"Sure," Ericksen said. "Why not?"

"What is it they actually do?"

"They make a lot of money. A lot of Christians give them money. Jews too, now."

"Did you get any?"

"Yes," Ericksen said.

"What's the money for?"

"Various things. Lately Gordon Lestrade is reconfiguring the Second Temple. Who did you say you represented?"

"The world," Lucas said. "Reconfiguring the Temple?"

"I think you do represent the world," Ericksen said, and laughed. Lucas attempted to laugh along.

"They're trying to reconstruct the Herodian Temple. There's a Jewish effort and a Christian one."

"Why a Christian one?"

Ericksen gave him a look that seemed to express surprise at how little Lucas knew about it.

"American fundamentalists are very interested in Israel and the Temple. The rebuilding of the Temple will be a sign."

"Of what?"

"Oh," Ericksen said with a grim smile, "of things to come."

Lucas tried to remember what he knew about eschatology and millenarian doctrine. He had forgotten a great deal.

"A lot of Christians genuinely believe these things. But the people at the House—Otis and Darletta—they're just promoters. I don't know about the Jews. Perhaps they believe."

"In what?"

"I don't know. The coming of the Messiah, I guess. If they build it, he will come."

"Like in the movie?"

"I suppose," Ericksen said. "I didn't know they still made those religious movies."

"And Lestrade?"

"I don't know what Lestrade believes. He used to be a Catholic like you."

"And he's doing the reconfiguring?"