Damascus Gate (45 page)

"Christ," Lucas said, "is this it? I mean, is this the one?" He meant the one he had planned to observe on television in Fink's while his French colleague ran to Mecca. No one in the car answered him.

Along the side of the road, a howling ancient was hurried along by veiled youths. He shook his fists and it appeared that the young men might be having trouble keeping pace with him.

From the mosques, from the alleys, from the road: "
Allahu akbar!
"

Linda was crying.

And suddenly they were in a relatively quiet stretch. Piles of tires burned unattended. The army had pulled back to fixed positions while the Palestinian crowds were closer to the town center. A souk, its stacks of produce displayed in place, stood deserted. Nuala braked and they stopped briefly at the mouth of what seemed to be a deserted alley.

Turning into the alley, they were surprised to see men and boys racing among the market stalls. The young men were not shouting slogans, and they appeared very grim. Something about the charge of the scene fascinated Lucas. In the next instant they watched a stall overturn and heard a wordless cry. Then a voice shouted:

"
Itbah al-Yahud!
"

A kind of silence fell. Then it was repeated.

"
Itbah al-Yahud!
"

The phrase was being chanted over and over, roared by men, ululated by unseen women.

Lucas knew immediately what it meant, although he had never heard it said or screamed or sung before. Why had he known? He saw that Sonia knew too. Down in the alley a grinning middle-aged man was jumping up and down in place.

"
Itbah al-Yahud!
"

Kill the Jew!

"They have someone," Sonia said.

Lucas knew that she was right. And that this particular
Yahud
was not an abstraction, not the
Yahud
squatting in the estaminet, blistered in Brussels, patched and peeled in Antwerp. Not the Rootless Cosmopolitan or the International Financier. He was one man alone, run down by a mob, carrying the whole fucking thing by himself. A Jew bastard such as young Lucas had once been.

"
Allahu akbar! Itbah al-Yahud!
"

"It's Len!" Linda shrieked. "It's Lenny!" She might have caught a glimpse of him.

Nuala pulled over to the narrow shoulder. Everyone got out and stood in a milling circle beside the car. Locals, hurrying to the spectacle, paused to regard them with surprise.

"Why would he walk alone in the Strip?" Sonia asked. "Is he out of his mind?"

"He was afraid of getting in trouble!" Linda shrieked.

Lucas and Sonia looked at each other.

"Getting in trouble?" Lucas asked.

"What are these two doing here anyhow?" Nuala asked, apparently meaning Linda and Lenny. "Christ, maybe we can get him loose. Take the car and follow me."

Nuala got out and Lucas drove, with Sonia beside him. The Rose and Linda were in the back.

"Give it the horn," Nuala called to Lucas. "And don't run me over." Lucas began to pummel the car horn. Nuala walked ahead of him with one hand on the fender. After a minute the Rose opened the back door and got out on the road to slog beside Nuala. Slowly, absurdly, they advanced up the alley where an ecstatic crowd was beating an unseen Jew. Finally, Lucas decided he could drive no further.

"We might as well get out too," he said to Sonia. Linda crouched ashen-faced in the back. "Come with us," Lucas told her. But she stayed where she was.

Now he was reluctant to leave the car. The crowd was out of control, and though he took the keys, he knew that it might be gone or ablaze when they got back, and Linda with it.

"Stay together," Nuala told her troops. "We'll try to get him."

And maybe they would, Lucas thought. Nuala was good with crowds; she was a Communist, after all. He was looking about him in unfocused hope of some formless mercy, sanity, forgiveness, understanding. But there was nothing around them except the mass of hovels of cement and hammered tin and dirty plastic, stinking for miles from the desert to the sea.

"
Itbah al-Yahud!
" cried the mob.

Linda locked the car behind them.

"Lenny?" Lucas shouted. He was trying to remember who Lenny was. But it hardly mattered now. He was the Other here, the prey, the pursued. A man like himself, like himself in every important way.

A group of youths approached to intercept their passage. Lucas thought of the Dane he had seen weeks before, standing up for the lives of the cornered Arab kids. He tried to ease forward but the crowd pressed against him. He could still hear the sounds of struggle and pursuit in the next arcade.

Sonia began to speak in Arabic. The youths confronting them shook their heads grimly and avoided her eyes.

"Please let us pass!" Lucas said. "We have a job to do here."

They stared blankly, leaving Lucas to contemplate his own declaration. He supposed it was pretty meaningless, even had the crowd been able to understand it. As though they were there to pave the street.

Meanwhile, Nuala and the Rose were shouldering their way into the melee, shouting, shoving, ignoring copped feels, slapping impersonally at the hands that clutched their thighs and the hem of their shorts, as though swatting insects. It was Eros and Thanatos in the worst way, the men displaying their virility by grinding their teeth in the women's faces, presenting masks of sweaty, smiling rage, one hand clenched in a fist or brandishing a rock, the other clawing at the women's private places. Lucas and Sonia formed a secondary line, fighting forward. Lucas turned and got a last look at Linda, hysterical in the back seat of the car. Nuala had succeeded in reaching the end of the next alley, and it was clear that she could see what was happening there. She was frowning, tight-lipped. She began to shout and tried to move forward.

"
Itbah al-Yahud!
" the crowd screamed. Just at the moment when it looked as if Nuala would round the last stall and wade through to the action, she went reeling backward, one hand to her eye. Lucas found himself on the weak end of a shoving match with three young men who had put green-checked kaffiyehs over their faces. Someone grabbed him from behind and held him. He saw Nuala coming back through the crowd. This time it parted for her.

Then Lucas saw the things they had taken up: trowels and mallets and scythes, some dripping blood. Everyone was screaming, calling on God. On God, Lucas thought. He was terrified of falling, of being crushed by the angry swarm that was whirling around him. He wanted to pray. "O Lord," he heard himself say. The utterance filled him with loathing, that he was calling on God, on that Great Fucking Thing, the Lord of Sacrifices, the setter of riddles. Out of the eater comes forth meat. The poser of parables and shibboleths. The foreskin collector, connoisseur of humiliations, slayer by proxy of his thousands, his tens of thousands. Not peace but a sword. The Lunatic Spirit of the Near East, the crucified and crucifier, the enemy of all His own creation. Their God-Damned God.

An old man emerged from the crowd. He wore the white cap of the
haji
and leaned on a carved stick. He had a Bedouin face, long and grave. At his approach, the youths released Lucas. Was he the Almighty Beard-Winged Celestial Paperweight's earthly representative?

The old man spoke softly, nodded courteously. And when Nuala remonstrated with him, he raised his chin in the least ambivalent gesture of the place. No hope.

"He says we're in danger," Nuala told them. "He says the Jew is a dead man. If we stay we'll bring the troops, and the troops will kill everyone because of him."

"The Jew is a spy," one of the youths shouted in English. The old man nodded agreement.

"Sorry," Nuala said to her friends. "That's it."

She had a large welt over her eye and a bloody nose and they did not argue with her. To Lucas's profound gratitude, the car and Linda were where they had left them.

"Was it Lenny?" Sonia turned to ask when they were climbing in.

Nuala took a cautious look at Linda and nodded. The Rose was crying, big tears coursing down her milk-fed, tanned cheeks. There was blood on her shirt.

"Was he alive?"

Nuala only gave her a grim look.

As they drove, Linda slumped over into the space between the seats and cried and retched.

"Do it out the window, love," Nuala said. "Better not stop, you know."

Finally Linda said, "We could have saved him. If we'd had a gun."

For a moment, Lucas was afraid Nuala would say something unkind about Americans.

"Who was he?" he asked her.

"Christ," Nuala said, nursing her injured forehead. "They half broke my bloody leg as well, the fucking wogs. Lenny? I don't know who he was. Who was he, darling?" she asked Linda. "You have friends over here? Work for Shabak? For the CIA?"

Linda just kept sobbing.

"You're bleeding," Sonia told Nuala.

"Well," Nuala said, "I'm a bleeder. Thin skin."

"Like a white fighter," Sonia said.

The rough humor of the revolution, Lucas supposed. Meanwhile, he could still half hear it.

"
Itbah al-Yahud!
"

After a few miles they saw an army checkpoint ahead, heavily reinforced. Half-tracks and regular deuce-and-a-half trucks were pulling up and soldiers were fanning out from the road.

"We've got to tell them about Lenny," Linda said.

"Stop!" said Nuala. "Pull over."

Lucas did as he was told. Nuala and the Rose, who seemed to have recovered, stepped out of the car.

"Sonia," Nuala said. "Tell her."

"Make her understand," the Rose said.

Sonia turned in her seat and spoke to Linda.

"Linda, Lenny has been killed by now. People who work in the Strip can't afford to be seen as informers for the IDF. They can't provide intelligence for the soldiers. Even to be thought of that way."

"You can't!" Linda screamed. "You can't just let those animals kill a Jew!"

"This is tough," Sonia said, looking up at Lucas.

"I see," he said.

"We tried to save Lenny," Sonia said. "We failed. He's dead now. If the soldiers were guys we maybe knew or trusted we might ... I don't know. But these guys"—she nodded toward the checkpoint, where the Border Police and Golani Regiment paras were assembling—"these guys the Golanis are very tough soldiers. Special soldiers. If we told them what happened, they might blame us. They might even, accidentally on purpose, what with the riot, kill one of us." She glanced up at Lucas, in case he failed to understand who that would probably be. "It happens."

"But that's not the point," Lucas said.

"It's not the point," Nuala said, kneeling outside the car. "If we tell them, they will go to that village and they will kill ten for the death of one Jew. They will torture kids to get names out of them, and the names won't always be the right ones. They will kill, and some of the people they kill will be innocent. That's what they do. They think it's justice."

"But we don't think it's justice," Sonia said quietly. "Because we believe in..." She looked at the dun sand and shook her head.

"Human rights?" Lucas suggested helpfully.

"That's it," said Sonia. "Human rights."

"Righto," said Nuala. "That's why we're here, see. So we're going through that checkpoint, God willing, and we're not saying a bloody word."

"You are shits," Linda told them. "I'm reporting you."

"No," the Rose said earnestly. "You don't understand."

"Linda," Nuala said. She beckoned Linda toward a point in the distance that would cause her to put her head outside the car window. "Have a look at that."

When Linda stuck her head out to look, at what she presumably hoped was aid, solace, resolution, Nuala hit her with a solid, considered uppercut. Linda's eyes teared, then glazed over.

"Settle back," Nuala said to her gently. "Settle back, darlin'."

She climbed in beside Linda, and Lucas started the car.

"Make it quick," Nuala said. "She's not unconscious."

"Could of fooled me," Lucas said.

At the checkpoint, a paratrooper captain elbowed the young reserves who were inspecting their identification out of the way.

"What were you doing back there? Where are you coming from?"

"We had a hardship case at Argentina camp," Sonia said. "Bureij is going up. We have two injured people here and our radio's out."

"So where do you think you're going?"

"Back to base," Sonia said, "if we can make it to Gaza."

The officer shook his head in disgust. There was another Golani officer present. Lucas watched him observe that Sonia was American and black, and this moved him to sympathy.

"If they won't let you through Gaza," the other officer said, "you might want to take the coast road to the line. Especially if your people are hurt." He looked into the back seat. "Is it bad?"

The captain barked an order at him and he moved off. Ignored, they drove away. They were almost a mile along when Linda, her jaw swollen, began to scream. She screamed and screamed.

"Hold her," the Rose said.

"Jesus!" cried Nuala, because Linda had succeeded in working her way from Nuala's rough embrace and jumped out of the car. They had been doing about 20 miles per hour on a bad stretch. By the time they were out of the car, Linda had scrambled to her feet.

"Linda, please, baby," Sonia said.

But she flashed them the fierce eyes of a child and brushed her bruised knees and ran, making for the Israeli post as though the devil himself were after her—which, Lucas thought, was just about the way she saw it—while the four infidels milled about ineffectually.

"She's not safe on the road," Sonia said.

"Well, hell," said Nuala, "we can't hold her prisoner. But we're in deep shit now."

"Know any Sufi prayers?" Lucas asked Sonia.

"This is one," she said. But that was all she said, so he concluded that their situation represented some variety of Sufi prayer. Obviously, it was a demanding religion.

 

They were driving among fires. Young men veiled in green-checked kaffiyehs appeared beside the road again. Suddenly an IDF jeep loomed behind them, right out among the racing demonstrators. It nearly forced them off the road. In it, next to the driver, was the kindly Golani officer who showed concern for their injured. The officer leaped out.