Damascus Gate (36 page)

"No, no," she said. "It's exactly like everything else. What the Rev said about us is true. It's impossible."

An icy liquor of despair froze Lucas's heart. He felt at once panic-stricken and childishly disappointed. His childhood disappointments had been painful.

"Ah, baby," he said, "it's just the fuckupedness of things. It doesn't mean anything."

"Yes it does," she said. "It's standing in the way of the Rev's struggle."

"Oh, Christ," Lucas said.

But she would not answer. Finally she said, "It can't happen yet. Maybe it can never happen. I don't know. I shouldn't see you."

"I want to see you," Lucas said. "Any way you want it."

"I don't know," she said. "I just don't."

Lucas went and got the bottle of plum brandy and put it beside him on the floor and drank until the first call to prayer sounded.

L
UCAS WENT HOME
through the early morning markets, by way of Jaffa Gate. In the middle of the morning he called Sonia.

"I don't think we should see each other," she told him. "I think it will turn out the same way every time."

Lucas held the phone against his chest to reject her message. Eight stories below him, an occasional vehicle sped headlong through the half-deserted streets. He felt like crying out in shame and pain. She was out of her mind, in the clutches of lunatics, and he was not man enough to save her.

"I need to know how you are," he said. "And where you are."

"For your book, you mean?"

"Yes," he said bitterly. "For my book."

"Well," she said, "I'll try to keep in touch."

"You should be seeing Obermann," Lucas said.

"No thanks. But maybe you should."

When he did see Obermann, with a selective report of what was happening, Obermann told him she was being manipulated.

"By Melker," the doctor opined. "He's a sly one. He wants her for his acolyte. Don't give up."

"I've got to take a break from them," Lucas said. "I've never felt so wretched in my life."

Obermann gave him a prescription for Prozac. "Keep working," the doctor advised him. It was sound, if self-serving, advice.

So Lucas kept working on the book, read Scholem's history of Sabbatai, read in the
Zohar
and about Jacob Frank's orgiastic rituals. Every few days he left a message on Sonia's answering machine. Then, during the last week of summer, he got a call from an American magazine asking him to report on a conference in Cyprus. The theme of the conference was "Religious Minorities in the Middle East."

He desperately needed a break from Jerusalem and its syndromes, in spite of the fact that the De Kuff story continued to unfold most interestingly. The old man was becoming a well-known figure in the city, and his statements were more and more provocative. The number of his followers was growing.

The police prevented him from holding forth in the Old City now, and he had been banned from the space in front of St. Anne's. He held some meetings in New City parks, billing them as concerts. At each gathering De Kuff and Raziel played Sephardic music.

Walking through Yemin Moshe the night before his departure for Cyprus, Lucas had an English-language flyer for that evening's session pressed into his hand by a young man he had never seen before. The advertisement was accompanied by something like program notes, which Lucas guessed had been written by Raziel Melker.

"If all art aspires to the condition of music," the flyer said, "so all true music aspires to
tikkun
and reverently reflects the process of
tsimtsum
and of
shevirah.
"

The English text rendered the Hebrew words in the original, but Lucas had learned enough to recognize them.
Tsimtsum:
the expansion and contraction of the divine entity, like an anemone in the cosmic tidal pool, or the pool itself.
Shevirah:
the process underlying creation, the breaking of the vessels designed to contain the divine essence, the result of man's failure. And
tikkun:
the righting of things, the end of exile for God and man.

The strange announcement filled him with sadness and longing. It was definitely, he thought, time to leave town for a while.

Instead of flying from Lod to Larnaca, he took the bus to Haifa and then a slow, stinking ferry to Limassol. Amid unwashed backpacking Teutons, he read the conference's handout. It was written in a Gallicized translator's English.

"The opportunity is foreseen," it said, "for interventions and discourses illuminating the actual situations confronting the minorities of the region."

Droll, thought Lucas, and filed the thing away for use in his piece. The night was moonlit, and waves lapped against the rusting bow. The Teutons smoked hash and drank arak, sang, got sick, hallucinated, smoked more.

"Groovy shit," they shouted through their tears.

So it went until morning, when they were off Limassol. Aphrodite's maiden landfall was an ugly line of pastel hotels under a whited-out sky. The goddess was still big there; her scallop shell and cestus—not to mention her naked Olympian behind—were featured in many hotel and restaurant motifs. Goons in shades watched the ferry landing, but it was nice to have a break from strict monotheism.

Along the marine parade he saw beet-red, short-haired English youths—airmen from the base outside town. They reminded him of the seconded British junior officers who had commanded Caribbean troops during the Grenada invasion—off the record, of course, and on the sly. The British had not even bothered to deny the reports in his Grenada book, probably because they had never heard of them. By late afternoon, a minibus had conducted him to the hotel near Larnaca where the press was being put up and he was on his tiny, brittle balcony, sniffing iodine and sewage, regarding the wine-dark sea.

The conference had been bruited about for years, its proposed venue forever shifting to accommodate the high-beam scrutiny of eager assassins and nervous secret policemen. Originally planned for Cairo, it had been rescheduled for Malta, then Antalya in Turkey, then Izmir, then finally—to the fury of the Turks—to Greek Cyprus. Its sessions took place in a drab retreat above the Stavrovouni Monastery, overlooking the Larnaca-Limassol road. Still, the pine-and olive-covered slopes were pretty, and it was possible to see the blue ocean far below.

Minorities in the Middle East—the whole notion, Lucas considered, was so fraught with ironies as to render the topic laughable in a ghastly way. The ironies were unsubtle: poison gas, vultures puking on rooftops, car bombs.

Nevertheless, some right-minded hustler had put the unlikely thing together. Everyone loved a junket, and there were airline and hotel kickbacks to be had, and Cyprus afforded a few licks—girls, booze, a break for the God-fearing, though they would have preferred Geneva.

So an assemblage of various savants was scheduled to convene the next day at the Stavrovouni Palace, apparently the only building on the island not dedicated to Aphrodite and convenient to a fragment of the True Cross.

They were predominantly elderly, Frenchified or Anglophilic intellectuals, but some were men of courage. A few actually represented minorities. There would also be mistresses, Lucas assumed, informers, spies and double agents, dealers in pursuit of bland cover and professional government apologists. Some of these latter would have packed suitcases full of hard currency, their life's acquisitions, to be opened only in Switzerland, behind double-locked doors in their suites at the Beau Rivage. There, beside the
lac,
they hoped to shake the sands of the desert from their pointy Italian shoes forever—if only they could make it out of Cyprus alive.

The Stavrovouni had closed its lobby bars in deference to religious sensibilities, but its terrace café served beer and wine. After the first session, Lucas became a regular.

The first meeting was the customary tower of babble—the droning of professors, recitations of Arab poetry, attacks against imperialism and its agents, who were responsible for transforming the peaceable kingdoms of the East into places of distress. Each local tradition was declared to be more tolerant than the next. Perfidious Albion was anathematized, also the Pentagon, along with the Elders of Zion. The translators, more used to corporate negotiations, lost their way in the meaningless courtesies and compliments and tropes.

That evening in the café, above the bright, sour sea, Lucas found himself dining with a scented old professor, representative of some antinomian sect from the Caucasus. Gnostic? Sabean? Hashishian? In any case, the old man drank wine. They shared a bottle of retsina.

"The minority situation in the United States is well known," the old professor declared. "But we in the Middle East, unlike you, have never had slaves."

"Really?"

"Servitude in our part of the world was never opprobrious. Rather, it was benign."

Lucas had been drinking for a while.

"Someone," he said, "once told me that at Darfur there was a house where African children were castrated for service as eunuchs."

The old boy shrugged patiently.

"I mean, not just a lean-to, you understand," Lucas continued, "but a huge fucking warehouse where they processed kids. And for every kid that survived the operation, fifty died. But the place still made money."

"A practice adopted from the Byzantines," said the scholar.

"Maybe, maybe not. Or else adopted like crazy," Lucas said. "Like it was the greatest thing since sliced bread. If you'll pardon the expression. And they worked half of Africa. Coptic monks specialized in the operation. And dervishes. Regional minorities. Probably had to get by somehow, what do you think?"

And he went on about it.

"Who do you think you are?" asked the dignified old man at last.

"Ah," said Lucas, "you got me there, fella."

At the next sessions and in the corridors he was whispered about as a representative of the CIA. He thought it reflected badly on the agency.

On his third night there, with the translator-deconstructed prattle ringing in his ears, he fastened on a piece of wisdom: foolish, drunken, insolent behavior did not play in the Fertile Crescent, and he was out of control. There was even a phone in the room to get him in further trouble. Moreover, he already had what he needed for the piece.

At the airlines office he found the flights to Lod and Haifa booked and decided to endure the ferry once more. In Limassol, he was killing time, strolling the streets of the waterfront, when, rounding a corner near the Lusignan Castle, he encountered Nuala Rice. When he stopped she simply walked around him. Not a glance, instant incognito.

Walking on, he wished he had been cooler and not stopped at all. Even better would have been not to have met her. Turning at the next intersection, past chips shops and signs for Wall's ice cream, he saw that the street ended at the landing where the hydrofoil to Beirut was tied up.

Might Nuala have been coming from Beirut? It was on her map of adventure. An Irish girl, alone, with the right connections would have no reason to stay away. If she had business there.

Then, on the Haifa ferry, he saw Rashid, her friend from Gaza. Nuala was nowhere in sight. He and Rashid avidly avoided each other, but Lucas was puzzled. Shin Bet or Mossad, or both, surely had agents in Limassol, and in Beirut for that matter. Surely the ferry was watched. It was such a small world and there were too many secrets.

Late that night, he got himself into a pocket hotel in the lower city of Haifa and looked over his conference notes until they disgusted him. Then he had recourse to the Bible, idly checking notions. Somewhere in the night, not far from his open window, Deadheads dwelled. He heard "Box of Rain," "Friend of the Devil," "Sugar Magnolia." The album,
American Beauty,
was twenty-two years old now. He had been living on East Fourth Street with a woman who went to graduate school at NYU.

Psalm 102, the one with a sparrow in it, was mournful stuff and even carried a warning preface: "A prayer of the afflicted, when he is overwhelmed, and poureth out his complaint before the Lord."

"I am like a pelican of the wilderness: I am like an owl of the desert.... I watch, and am as a sparrow alone upon the housetop."

Lucas felt suitably afflicted and ready to pour out his complaint, had there been anyone around to drink it with. The hypocrisy and shallowness of his Cyprus encounters throbbed against his nerves like an impending toothache.

During the night, two things occurred to him that could be looked into from Haifa, which might or might not cap the minority story. One was the headquarters of the Baha'i, on the slopes of Mount Carmel, and the other was Father Jonas Herzog, a man of French-Jewish origin who had applied for and been denied Israeli citizenship under the Law of Return. He lived and worked in a Benedictine monastery up above town.

Just after sunrise, Lucas took the funicular railroad to the uppermost level and strolled toward the Persian domes of the Baha'i sanctuary. There was dew on the olive trees and riotous bougainvillea. Doves lowed on the whitewashed walls, and below the sea sparkled.

The world in the morning, he thought. So encouraging. Despair was foolishness. But he was foolish.

There was a touch of self-conscious Orientalism about the Baha'i holy place and the tomb of the Bab. "Orientalism" had been a word much invoked at the Cyprus conference. Obviously this place was meant to suggest the great Shia shrines of Persia. Why not, since just beyond normative Shiism lurked the Aryan speculation, the paradoxical symbols, the universalist urge that had sometimes burst forth in heresy.

The oneness of God and the brotherhood of man—such liberation in that reduction! You had to wonder what it had felt like to be the Bab, to see it all converge. A thousand years before him, the Karaite Jew Abu Issa al-Isfahani, another Persian, had argued for the resolution of monotheism, Moses, Jesus, Muhammad. And with them, of course, al-Isfahani himself. With a little imagination it could all be made to connect with De Kuff.

He took off his shoes and went into the martyr's tomb, accompanied by an attendant. The silence, the dimness, the streaming light—a touch of Isfahan, a touch of Forest Lawn.