Damascus Gate (38 page)

"We're supposed to believe that Christ has gone on to reign in glory," Lucas said.

"No," said Herzog. "Jesus Christ suffers from now until the end. On the cross. He goes on suffering. Until the death of the last human being."

"And that," Lucas said, "brings you here?"

"Yes," said Herzog. "To attend. To keep on waiting."

From the steps of the church, the evening smelled of car exhaust and jasmine.

"I realize that in this kind of world," Lucas said, "I have no business being so unhappy. I realize also that on a religious level I'll always be a child. It's absurd and I regret it."

For the first time Herzog smiled.

"Don't regret it, sir. Perhaps you know Malraux's
Anti-mémoires?
His priest tells us that people are much more unhappy than one might think." He offered Lucas his hand. "And that there is no such thing as a grownup."

A
S HAD BEEN
the case at Safed, various God-struck and otherwise intoxicated drifters came and went at their bungalow in Ein Kerem. One who stayed was a Dutch former nun named Maria van Witte, who in the religious life had been called Sister John Nepomuk. Often about were two long-armed, slack-jawed brothers from Slovakia whose names were Horst and Charlie Walsing. Lucas had thought they were Germans, but they turned out to be Jewish—German-Jewish Hungarians. One was a musician, apparently of some reputation; the other seemed mentally retarded or autistic. In spite of the difference in their cerebral competence they appeared virtually indistinguishable, although no one in De Kuff's circle had any particular reason to distinguish between them. Oddly, Ian Fotheringill, the author of kosher
sauce l'ancienne,
also appeared from time to time. Occasionally Helen Henderson, the Rose of Saskatoon, came with Sonia. Her background had been Pentecostal, but it was entirely devotion to Sonia that brought her.

Veterans of alien abduction, reincarnated priests of Isis, putative pals of the Dalai Lama, all put in an appearance, lounging under the garden tamarisks in Ein Kerem.

Among the more memorable visitors were a father and son named Marshall. The father seemed anywhere between sixty and eighty, the son about the same age. Although Jewish, the elder Marshall knew long passages of the New Testament by heart. When the Marshalls were around, private detectives stopped by the place, inquiring after them. Marshall the younger had taken over all family financial transactions, and indeed all numerical calculations of any kind, since his father, a Kabbalist, was obsessed with numbers. Lucas, who was there almost every other day, heard from Obermann that Marshall Senior was some kind of criminal, wanted in America, who had either gone insane or was pretending to have done so.

De Kuff paid attention to no one except Raziel and Sonia, and Raziel let anyone who showed up at Ein Kerem stay at De Kuff's expense.

One evening, all of these figures and many more gathered in a nearby garden, owned by the Sisters of Notre-Dame-de-Liesse, for what was advertised as a concert.

The afternoon before the concert, Sonia went over from Rehavia and found Raziel meditating behind his dark glasses in the bungalow garden. Not wanting to disturb him, she took a seat in the shade of the wall, under an olive tree.

"Big night," Raziel said after a moment.

"Is it?"

"You're going to sing for us."

"Wait a minute, Jim," Sonia said. "Who says?"

"The Rev says you have to sing."

"Uh-huh. Do I get scale?"

"Take no thought for the morrow," Raziel said, his eyes still closed.

"Standards in order? Rogers and Hart?"

"The Rev wants Ladino songs. He wants 'Meliselda.'"

"Razz," she said, "don't be saying 'the Rev wants.' It's what
you
want. I know that. And I don't speak Ladino."

"So fake it," he said. "Make it olde Spanishee."

"You're bad," she said. "I don't know about you."

"It's a big night," Raziel said, sitting up. "Really it is. Because it's not just a concert. It's the night he preaches the mystery. The fourth one."

"I thought he'd do that in Bethesda."

"It's too dangerous. It'll be dangerous enough here."

"What is the fourth mystery?"

"Come on, Sonia. You know."

"If the first is 'Everything is Torah,' and the second is 'The time to come is at hand,' and the third is 'the Death of the Kiss,' what's the fourth?"

"You know it as well as I do. And he hasn't told me either. Anyway, it's something you already believe."

"All right," she said. "Let's see the songs you want." That night Lucas went to Ein Kerem with Obermann. He had finished his Cyprus conference piece, writing on khat. He was tired and depressed.

"He's been mixing his message with music lately," Obermann said of De Kuff. They parked on a side street near the concert site. The small Arab village of Ein Kerem had been enveloped by Jerusalem and transformed into a kind of far-flung, dry-land Sausalito. By dusk, the smog sometimes drifted off and the evenings were again herb-scented. "His crowds have grown very numerous. He's an attraction."

"I used to see him at Bethesda," Lucas said. "What does he do now?"

"He casts his spells. His Neoplatonic version of Torah. Kabbalistic mysticism. He has a good voice. And the music can be wonderful."

"Aren't there complaints?"

"Complaints. Hecklers. One day he'll probably go too far. You know, they never seem to pass the hat. I wonder where he gets his financing."

"It's his own money," Lucas said. "Apparently he owns a chunk of Louisiana."

As usual, there was no charge for the concert. In the garden at Notre-Dame-de-Liesse, a makeshift stage and an acoustic shell had been set up among the cedars. Rows of wooden planks lined the opposing slope, on which spectators might seat themselves in reasonable comfort if they brought cushions and were careful of splinters. There were no enclosing walls, so as many people as cared to might gather within sound of the stage.

As the area began to fill up, Lucas wandered in the crowd, sensing the same faint but infuriating aura of bliss that tended to infuse De Kuff—centered events. The people who had turned out were mainly young. Many of them were foreign Gentiles, but there were plenty of youthful Israelis and American Jews. Gathered in one section were some Black Hebrews, from their colony at Dimona, in the Negev.

There was a smell of patchouli oil, a fragrance he had hardly breathed since his own youth. Scattered among the spectators were some older couples, who gave the appearance of being single and on their first date, and even some who looked as though they had come for the music. Under a stand of carob trees beside the stage were a few rowdies in kippot who, Lucas thought, might have come to heckle.

When it was dark, with night birds trilling and stars overhead, Horst and Charlie Walsing, Raziel, De Kuff and Sonia came out on the stage with their instruments. De Kuff was playing bass and oud, Raziel clarinet. Horst Walsing had a violin; his handicapped brother, Charlie, a tambourine.

From the adjoining grove, the religious rowdies began to shout insults in English.

"Go home!"

"Excuse me," a youth with a cockney accent kept shouting. "Excuse me! Excuse me! Any of you lot Jewish? Excuse me!"

They began to play Sephardic music, to which Raziel kept imparting a faint klezmeric flavor. Eventually the hecklers quieted down—all but the cockney boy.

"Excuse me!" he kept shouting.

During the performance, Lucas did his best to resist the music, but afterward he could not get it out of his head. The pieces were settings for words he could not understand. Lucas found the first songs laced with irony, with jokes and comic congruities. Later, some were ineffably sad, as if they were in search of a complementary refrain, like the song of the chanting sparrow. The chanting sparrow's song required an answering call, or else hung over the woods and meadows, incomplete. There were still nightingales in the Jerusalem Forest nearby, and they filled a few of the silences.

Overall, the melodies were mournful and sweet, as sweet and passionate as Bruch's and faintly reminiscent of them, but often ragged, naked, shocking—those were the words that occurred to him. Sometimes symmetrical, but more often unpredictable. Charlie Walsing's beat was arbitrary, though it seemed somehow to work for the music. There was, Lucas thought, an element of madness, a din. It was the sort of music that might subvert a particular cast of mind, uncover its uncertainties, awaken its serpents. His own mind might serve as an example.

Lucas was trying to consider the music as something to write about. But that was hard to do, because it was she, it was Sonia, that it stood for. Whatever its sources were, Raziel had adapted it for performance, presenting the order of the pieces to form the narrative he required, and above all arranging it for Sonia's voice. Lucas could not make it be about anything but her. Thus, for him, it was about believing, about surrender, about angels and fallen stars and wandering spirits. About wild hopes and the mold of dreams. Its melodies replaced her, became her presence and occupied her space until she seemed an instrument played on the edge of control. They forced her to shift the focus of her voice from throat to chest and back within the same passages, trilling, ululating. Watching, he could see how the long songs taxed her physically and how they were working on her emotions. He knew that because of the way they worked on his own.

The same lyric seemed to turn up in every song, whether it was about Meliselda, some metaphorical king, broken vessels or the demands of unyielding love. The two lines of verse he could more or less understand:

 

If you want to hear my song,
You have to come with me.

 

He could not resist imagining her singing it for him. He would never be free of her, he thought. At the same time, she was on the other side of darkness, beyond him, beyond his capacity for believing, beyond anyone like himself, so unequipped for magic. Unready now even for tomorrow, let alone the world to come.

If he walked toward her, he thought, there would be nothing where she stood on which to place his feet. She was the leap he could not make. If the End of Days was at hand, she was the fate he would encounter there, the fall he would be condemned to take from the bridge over Hinnom. Although he could not cross, neither could he go down altogether, only turn in thwarted love, suspended. Half believing, half being. Would she know he was out there in the darkness? Or had she passed, by that music, to some stone heaven of the Jews, the sapphire hall of a presiding angel, where love unmade itself and everything was called by different names? She had left all his messages, from Cyprus, from Haifa, unanswered.

 

Yo no digo esta canción,
Sino a quien conmigo va.

 

Lucas sat transfixed. Even Obermann, next to him on the bench, gave himself over to the music, his round unmusical figure swaying to it.

When he looked around, he could see the power the stuff had over its listeners. Many in the crowd were wearing the ouroboros medallion. Obermann had noticed that as well.

"Some silversmith is getting rich," he said. "Can these people know what it means?"

Lucas was not the man to ask.

"It's in the
Zohar,
" Obermann said. "Among the Hellenized syn-cretists, the snake stood for Serapis. One might go on."

He was prevented from going on by the concertgoers nearest them, who shushed him. The heckling had continued too, blotted out for Lucas by his meditations on Sonia, but persistent.

Then De Kuff and Raziel went downstage together. De Kuff's arms were raised to the crowd. Behind him, Sonia had taken the tambourine from Charlie Walsing and beat it in De Kuff's path.

"The circus!" a heckler shouted. "The clowns!"

De Kuff was chanting verses of poetry, perhaps from the
Zohar.
Whatever it was, it suited his voice beautifully. But hearing him was difficult because the hecklers in the grove, held a bit in check by the music, rallied now against him.

"The words change," De Kuff shouted, his face red and shining with perspiration, "but the song is eternal. The words are a cipher concealing the truth beneath them. A covering for the holy light where it threatens the darkness of this world."

The hecklers began to sing "Onward, Christian Soldiers," to which many knew the words. "Excuse me!" shouted the insistent Londoner.

The crowd gasped, laughed, shushed one another.

"A mystery!" De Kuff shouted.

At the side of the stage, Raziel spoke to Sonia.

"This is where he does it, Sonia. This is number four."

Raziel and Sonia grinned at each other. She rang four beats on the tambourine and rattled it into shards of silver.

"Excuse me!" shouted the youth among the carob trees.

"All mysteries are the same mystery!" De Kuff informed them. "Whether we worship the Holy Ancient One, whether we worship the
sefirot,
we are the same. There is one truth! There is one belief! There is one holiness! And at the birth of things to come, we all, through birth, through
partsufim,
we all stood at Sinai. There is not Israel! There is only Israel! The mystery is one! You are one faith! You are all believers in one heart! Not to believe together is to cease to be!"

At that, even the hecklers stopped teasing and paused to work out the doctrine. When they began to shout again, their rage was multifold.

"This is what comes from under the serpent's skin!" De Kuff said.

Sonia struck her tambourine.

"It was written that I would shock you. I show you Uncreated Light among the wilderness of empty shells. Linen among the wool."

Onstage, Raziel whispered something to the old man. De Kuff turned to Sonia and took her by the hand and presented her to the crowd.

"This is Rachel," he said. "This is Leah."

The wind rose, a sudden force in the surrounding pines. Sonia looked up at the stars.

"Goddam you!" shouted the religious boy from London who had been shouting "Excuse me."