Damascus Gate (47 page)

"
La,
" she trilled at him. "
La, la.
" No entry.

But she seemed ready to take the foreign women in without question, in spite of the trouble outside, the state of siege, the mob in the street. Something about the way the woman acted made Lucas think Nuala, Sonia and the Rose would be safe with her.

"I think you'll be OK here," he said to Nuala.

"What about you?" Sonia asked.

Nuala spoke to the old woman in Arabic. She shook her head in refusal.

"I don't know," Lucas said. "I'll show them my press pass or something."

With a peculiar gentleness, the old woman closed the door on him.

"
Itbah al-Yahud!
" sang the crowd in the distance.

Walk or run? Lucas wondered. He might pretend he was out for a stroll. At a T junction at the end of the alley, he went in the direction he sensed was away from the mob. An old man, collecting water at a communal tap, encountered him in the darkness and shrieked.

"
Masar il kher,
" Lucas said politely.

Suddenly he was very thirsty. He recalled the verse from the Ottoman fountain in the Valley of Hinnom—"All that is created comes of water"—one of the dozen verses of the Koran he knew, one of his tiny store of artifacts of this quarter of the world, where he had chosen to represent himself as such an expert. They were in the desert and he had not taken a drink all day and they had left a thermos in the Land Rover. He doubled back and drank from the tap while the old man whimpered at him.

When the mob sounded close again he began to run; he thought his breathing must sound terribly loud. If they burn you, he wondered, was it better to scream? To start screaming right away, just commence yelling bloody murder even before it hurt? Maybe you could use up energy that way and have a little less left to be converted into pain. Maybe such an unseemly display would shame them. No, they would only be amused by his cowardice.

What about trying to tough it out? Courage was so admirable, so transcendent. He had always admired it in others. Might he have a shot at aplomb? Fuck your necklace, fuck your burning gasoline. Let me show you how a half-Jew dies. With class. A little alienation maybe, but class. Like Cary Grant in
Gunga Din
at the temple of Thuggees.

"
Itbah al-Yahud!
"

At the end of the next alley, he came up against barbed wire. On the far side, beyond a couple of acres of what looked like spinach, burned the lights of a settlement. The camp's wire beside him did not look impossible to negotiate, but he was not inclined to venture onto the settlers' hard-won plantation at the height of an insurrection. They were likely to be aggressive defenders of their turf.

Eventually, though, there was no more to Beit Ajani camp. The last alley came to a dead end, and the rutted streets seemed to turn back to where the armed
majnoon
prowled. So he had no choice but to make a bloody-forearmed crawl under the lowest rung of barbed wire, out of Beit Ajani and into the spinach. The grim discipline of the lights arrayed across from him suggested mine fields. Might people mine their spinach? In Gaza, maybe.

Anyway, he kept running. Avoiding the camp, avoiding the road, avoiding the settlement. When another helicopter swooped overhead, he ducked and buried his head in the vegetation. Insects burrowed in the glare across his closed eyes.

Every once in a while he would pause for breath. If only, he thought, he had brought more water. Several times he thought the mob had given up; he would bend his ear to the landscape and listen hopefully for some kind of silence, a benign silence under the small-arms fire, under the muezzins' exhortations, under the helicopter's roar. A private silence in which no one pursued him. But the chant kept resounding; no matter how far he ran, they seemed always out there behind him, determined to expose him. He began to stop believing in himself as a human being. Who, he thought, would care to be one?

When the copter that had passed him in the spinach field discovered the
majnoon
mob that was chasing him, he ran, laughing to himself. Let the flying ones destroy the ones on foot! Let the ones on foot drag down the others!

Maybe, he thought, he had been imagining the chant for hours; the phrase had been echoing in his head so long. But no, there it was when he stopped again.

"
Itbah al-Yahud!
"

He was so thirsty. How did it go? "Nor let the milky fonts that bathe your thirst be your delay." Milk all the way. The American Dream. Lestrade would be amused.

Shadowed against the lights of the settlement and the rising moon, he saw a minaret at the far end of the field. There were faint lights at the base of it, and beyond more lights—aluminum lamps at regular intervals, which he thought might just mark the coast road. If he could just get through the night without falling into the hands of the mob, he thought, some passing UN vehicle might give him a ride.

Then the field in which Lucas stood burst spectacularly into light. The helicopter was overhead again—he could hear its radio crackling coordinates and instructions. Then someone began to shout over a loudspeaker. The shouting was in English, Lucas realized, and directed at him. He stood still and raised both his arms as high as they could be made to stretch, shoulder joints to fingertips.

"Press!" he yelled up at the chopper. Blowing sand got in his eyes. Twigs and small rocks swirled around him in the wash of the rotors. "
Periodista! Journaliste!
"

As he stood, arms outstretched in the whirlwind, a great shout went up from the crowd of Palestinians on the Beit Ajani road. They had lost him in the darkness of the field, he thought. Now they had located him again in the helicopter's searchlight.

For a few seconds the copter spun above him like a fury. He could see the mob's agitation, but the pounding engine drowned out any noise they made.

"Mr. Reporter?" the man said over the loudspeaker. "You're the reporter?"

It sounded like rescue.

"Yes, sir!" he shouted to his heaven-borne new pal. "I'm Lucas." He wanted to explain that they were chasing him, shouting "
Itbah al-Yahud.
" He wanted to explain everything. The helicopter was descending now, and the furious whirl of stinging shards and dirt stirred up by the rotors increased.

"Don't move, Mr. Reporter. Just wait right there!"

"OK," Lucas said, choking. In spite of being half suffocated, he was anxious to be agreeable. Although he could no longer hear the crowd for the engine noise, they appeared ever more agitated.

"Wait right there!" the loudspeaker said. The man sounded a little too earnest and helpful. "We'll pick you up first thing in the morning. Got it? Don't go anywhere, understand?"

"Yes!" Lucas shouted at the top of his voice. Then it was dark again, and he could hear the mob on the road. The helicopter was disappearing over the settlement. Within seconds it was a mile away, and Lucas understood that he had been the subject of some rough, soldierly humor. And the crowd was at the wire now, climbing it, piling under, trying to hack through. Lucas hesitated for a moment, then began running through the spinach. Someone started firing from the line of lights at the settlement's wire. Cries of pain and outrage came from the Arabs.

He ran until his breath was spent, falling, rolling, clambering upright. The spinach field ended at a high brick wall, which enclosed several domed buildings together with the minaret he had seen. Leaning against the brick, Lucas rested, eyes closed, trying to determine whether he was really hearing the chant of the same crowd. When he had taken a few breaths, he crawled along the wall's edge to look back across the field he had skirted. Sure enough, the crowd was still assembled, waving their lanterns and flashlights, banging on what sounded like trash can lids. Now they seemed to be facing the settlement, directing their slogans to it. Every once in a while, a shot would ring out from the lighted perimeter on the far side of the field. Then screams and lamentations would go up from the mob, a waving and flaunting of lights and torches.

Now, at least, he had put to rest the question of what to expect from the army. But with luck, he thought, he might stay where he was, leaving the settlers and the demented villagers to entertain each other. The coast highway was tantalizingly close, but there was not much likelihood of his finding friends there. He had an odd feeling that he had been in the same place before, during one of his earlier expeditions to the Strip. He had done an interview, it seemed to him; it had been the day of the angry Frenchman.

He traced his way along the wall with his hands, trying to step carefully over the talus and litter at its base. In the scattered light, it appeared that the minaret looming above him was surmounted with the metal remnants of a cross, bent and hanging half detached along the stucco wall. A Christian enclave, but not the same one they had stopped by earlier. And this one did not look deserted; he had seen faint lights around it.

The previous year, Lucas recalled, on his outing with the French militant, they had examined the ruins of a Christian ghetto much like the one he had come to. It had been just outside a town called Zawaydah. He leaned back against the wall to rest, trying to remember the details of the place, wishing he had brought the water. There were still shouts and stompings on the road beside the spinach field; the mob seemed still to be out in force. Plainly, he was the event of the year. Listening hard, he realized that there were people right on the other side of the wall from where he rested.

He stood up and climbed on some fallen bricks and tried to hear the people beyond the wall. They were speaking softly, almost secretly, as if they, too, were in hiding. The language they spoke sounded like neither Arabic nor Hebrew, although he could not be sure.

Who were they and what did it mean? In the Gaza Strip, it was possible to happen upon almost anything. Most of it, at least in the opinion of those whose business it was, went better unwitnessed. Across the spinach field, the army helicopter had returned and was circling over the lights of the settlement's wire.

Lucas climbed on the brick pile and chinned himself to the top of the wall. What he saw on the other side was the remnant of a church garden that had been converted into an automotive junkyard from the days of Laurel and Hardy. There were barrels of spare parts and engines piled against each other and a dozen cars and buses in various stages of disassembly. An International Harvester truck stood in the center of the space, with its front end hoisted on a block and tackle between two sickly palm trees. At one end of the garden was a covered shed lit by kerosene lamps in which there were rows of workbenches covered with tools.

The yard was full of people who seemed to be camping out. Families lay together in sleeping bags. Men slept in upholstered armchairs with exposed springs, their feet propped on cartons. Women were nursing infants. There was an air of watchful dejection about the place.

As silently as possible, Lucas lowered himself again and tried to decide what use the place might be to him. On his last expedition, he recalled, an old man had been trying to sell him an interview. The old man claimed to be a mukhtar of the Nawar people, the local tribe of gypsies. A self-proclaimed gypsy. Lucas had taken him for a hustler.

Now, with the mob of crazies still prowling the road and a helicopter full of practical jokers overhead, it occurred to Lucas that he might want to find himself a gypsy and purchase an interview after all.

W
HILE THE MOB
ran up and down on the road outside, calling on him to reveal himself, surrender and be disemboweled, Lucas drank strong tea and arak with the mukhtar of the Nawar people, who practiced Bektashi Sufism. Among their useful enterprises was fortunetelling. Lucas readily consented to hear his fortune.

"You must pay," the mukhtar declared. Lucas was briefly alarmed, thinking that retribution was the sum of what life held in store for him. He had always expected to be made accountable. But the mukhtar was only pointing out that his psychic services were a negotiable item, subject to a fee.

"Certainly," Lucas agreed.

"How much will you pay?" asked the mukhtar. His name was Khalif.

Lucas, rather indiscreetly, looked in his wallet. He had a little over two hundred dollars in U.S. currency and shekels.

"Fifty dollars," he proposed.

"You will pay one hundred dollars," the mukhtar announced with the authority of one who saw the future.

"OK," Lucas said.

He put out his hand and the mukhtar felt along his life and fate lines. Then he put his hands on Lucas's temples.

"You will live long," the old man said.

"Good," said Lucas, though the noises close at hand did not seem to diminish.

"You will have unhappiness yet five years. You will wander the world among those who do not love you. But Allah, praised be He, will protect you as he protected others like you. At five years you will embrace Islam. You will be Darwish of the Bektashi."

"I suppose it's possible."

"Yes. You will have a wife. She is Darwish. She will instruct you. A wise woman of great faith."

"What will she look like?"

"Beautiful. Like a woman of the Howitat. Her skin is dark. She lengthens her eyes with kohl."

A bare electric bulb swung in the breeze above them. The mukhtar's kaffiyeh was spotless and his mustache barbered and lacquered like a Hungarian hussar's.

Lucas expressed amazement at the mukhtar's preternatural insights. He admitted that he was acquainted with such a woman.

"Believe," the mukhtar said. "Honor what is holy. Then your unhappiness will stop."

For an additional fee, the mukhtar offered to provide his special, informative feature-length discourse on the Nawar, Darwish of the Bektashi. It was a service he had often provided the visiting press, and it would cost another hundred dollars. Lucas did not take notes, distracted as he was by the nearby disturbances. He assured the mukhtar that his memory was excellent.

"Nawar," Khalif informed him, "is not a good name. It is a dirty name. Truly we are not Nawar. We are al-Firuli."