Damascus Gate (55 page)

"Better not drink it," she said. "Never mind who walked on it."

They drove into the hills north of the lake.

"You have to be ready for this to fail you," Lucas counseled her. "When it comes to nothing, you still have to go on living."

"It won't fail us," she said. "But it might be the other way around.
We
might fail. It's hard to make everything be music. But music will always be there."

"Is that what it's like? Making everything be music?"

"Making everything be music
again,
" she said. "The way it was in the beginning."

"You know," Lucas said, "all the grief of the twentieth century has come from trying to turn life into art. Think about it."

"If we try," Sonia said, "we can make things the way they were. The way they were is the way they're supposed to be. That's why we have art. To remind us."

He could not resist the little flutter of mindless hope. In what? In nothing he could remotely conceive. Did it not matter that Raziel was the flake of flakes, De Kuff a dying reed, Sonia so good and smart she turned foolish? That they were at the heart of a Middle Eastern setup devised by deluded masters? It mattered, all right. But he could not resist the little flutter.

That afternoon, they caught up with De Kuff, Raziel, the Rose and their Dodge van at a campsite in the Hula Valley. There were tents to rent, and the Rose helped them put theirs up. She was good with tents, a young outdoorsy woman—which was, Lucas supposed, why Raziel had consented to bring her along.

"I wish he wasn't so unhappy," the Rose said. She meant De Kuff.

"It's chemical," Lucas told her. He watched her ponder this information. "Why did you come?" he asked her.

"To help Sonia. And maybe now to be with him. I think there's a lesson for me. And I want to say I was here."

With darkness had come a slight chill. He had brought a bottle of The Macallan, and he took occasional comfort from it. Their tent was enormous, of canvas, and of an old-fashioned sort that could accommodate camp tables and cots. Sonia furnished it with a rented air mattress and some Bedouin skin rugs and cushions, orphans from Berger's apartment.

He found her lying on one elbow, looking at peace. Dry oak leaves were caught in the curly bush of her hair.

"So here we are again," he said.

"So here we are again. A love supreme."

"So," he asked her, across the glowing Coleman lamp, also rented, that hung between them, "what is this? What are we doing out here?" Peter the Hermit's army, he thought. A long trail of bozos had preceded them.

"You're working," she said. "The working press. You're reporting on religious mania."

"Right," he said. "And this is the real McCoy. Primary process."

"Would you like me to sing 'Michael, Row the Boat Ashore'?"

"So you're actively believing it all? Right now? This minute?"

"Uh-huh. And you—you're amazed. Going around amazed. What's real? What's not? Are you real?"

"I get drunk every night," Lucas said. "I hallucinate Rudolph Steiner's daughter, Diphtheria, who says—"

"What we think, will be," Sonia said helpfully. "Diphtheria's right. She's just a little djinn, just a little demon. But, you know, Theodor Herzl said, 'If you will it, it is no dream.' She's got something there. So repeat after me: The force of human will. Go ahead, repeat it."

"No," Lucas said.

"Where shall wisdom be found?" she asked him. "What is the place of understanding?" She put out her hand.

"You know, do you, Sonia?"

"Yes," she said. "With me."

The tent smelled of apples. The lantern flickered between them.

She had on a djellaba, decorated with stars. Her raiment, he liked to call it. When she took it off, he saw the serpent on the chain around her neck dangling to her breasts. She climbed under one of the skin rugs and held her arms out to him. He sat down next to her.

"Come on, Chris. You're real. I'll help you believe."

"I don't think you will," he said. But he bent beside her until they both lay on the mattress, against the skin—she under it naked, he in his clothes, on top.

"Yes I will," she said. "It's good. It's right."

And, taking off his jacket, glumly unbuttoning his shirt, he had the sensation of playing out an old losing hand. But the Bedouin goatskin blanket, which he had thought would be foul, was soft and sweet-smelling, and the feel of her body beneath it made his mouth go dry. So he continued undressing, in a thrill of despair, and lay naked beside her. Wisdom. The place of understanding.
The depth sayeth, It is not in me; and the sea sayeth, It is not with me.

She still had on her underpants and the chain. Lying on her side, facing him, she lifted the pendant from around her neck and set it down beside them. Under the skin, she took his hands and led them to the warm smooth silky swellings of her derriere. Each hand found its own way around to her waist and down her belly from the navel. He went down to her and took off the white panties and pressed his mouth against her thighs and groin and pudenda.

Pulling back a moment, he said, "You have to bear with me." He had said the same thing before. It had hurt him so much that it made him sick to hear himself say it again. "I'm slow."

Slow and sometimes so slow you wouldn't know he was there at all.

"A love supreme," she sang. When he had made her wet with his mouth, he bent his knees and rose up against her, on fire, rampant, like the boy with the Shulamite, sick with love.
Return, return, that we may look upon thee.

And she sang and screamed and afterward Lucas cried the tears of a happiness he could not measure or analyze or otherwise molest with self-examination. It was really as though she commanded the depths where wisdom lay.

"You see what I'm saying?" she said.

When she was sleeping he went out to see the stars against the distant mountains. The lamp burned low. The clouds over the Golan had parted to reveal Andromeda, cradling her galaxy in the flawless sky, and her stars Alpheratz, Mirach, Almach. The Arab names sounded of the
Zohar,
jewels of the curtain under the Throne of Glory.

So why not, he thought. And among the stars, her astral correspondence, the star of my lover, my sister, my spouse, in whose depths is the place of wisdom.

The man who believes in nothing ends by believing in everything. So said Chesterton, his abandoned Catholic mentor. Let it be done as she says, he thought. She was the soul of truth; she deserved it. He felt as if he had been near to death and come alive. Yes, let it be as she says. Let me believe. In the washhouse mirror, he saw, for the first time, the serpent pendant around his neck.

In the morning, they started after the Rose had broken camp for Raziel and De Kuff and hurried them on the road north, along the top of the Hula Valley. They saw wild pigs running near the lake, and a soaring osprey. The mountains of the Golan drew closer. Papyrus grew beside the water. Pelicans made their geometric, cardtrick pterodactyl dives.

"The pelican of the desert," Lucas said.

They had reached the edge of the Paz petrol roadmap Lucas had been using to navigate. Its corner sections were worn away and missing.

"Do we have a decent map?" Lucas asked.

"Just this," said Sonia. She handed him the rental car company's map. It was not very detailed.

"This is the kind of map that killed Bishop Pike," Lucas said.

"The one for us," said Sonia.

R
AZIEL AND DE KUFF
stood at the edge of a Druse village. A manure-flecked road led from the stone houses of the village to the black-rock pastures where some goats and thick-wooled sheep grazed. Far below, at nearly a vertical angle down the slope, the Druse had their orchards.

The village headman and his son had come out to speak to them. The vaulting mountain sky furnished a chilly gray dawn.

The elder Druse spoke a little French. His son worked at a concession in the Hula Valley and had some words of Hebrew. Raziel was trying to persuade them not to turn the pilgrim group away. The Golan Druse were caught between their hospitable instincts, their resentment toward Israel and their fear of army and police spies working for Israel, Syria or both.

"Tell them we're scientists," Raziel advised De Kuff, who was speaking French to the older man. "Tell him we've been sent by the Ministry. To study the sources of the Jordan."

"In the Holy City," De Kuff said to the old headman, "we were told that voices spoke from the mountain." He used the Arabic name for Jerusalem, Al-Kuds.

The headman looked at him blankly. "
Privé,
" he said after a moment.

"Only to the river," De Kuff said. "Only to cross."

The older Druse looked at the Dodge van. The Rose was asleep in the back seat.

"Friends will move our car across the mountain," De Kuff said. He took out his wallet. "We'll pay."

Father and son looked at the wallet in his hand. The older man said something to his son, and the youth turned and started walking toward the village. Raziel leaned against the van, a hand shading his wraparound sunglasses from the sky's gray glare. De Kuff stood in the attitude of Muslim prayer, facing the slopes of Mount Hermon. After a few minutes the headman's son returned with three other men about his father's age.

"We can offer them as much as we have," De Kuff said breathlessly. "What does it matter?"

"Take it easy, Rev. If you give them too much, they'll get scared and call the Border Police."

"They're honest men," De Kuff said, looking fondly at the villagers.

"Keep them honest," Raziel said. "Just don't wave money around and make them crazy."

But De Kuff gave a fifty-dollar bill to everyone. Raziel had no idea where he'd gotten the cash. The Druse looked at the bills with hope, dread and suspicion. There were many counterfeit American fifties in the Middle East, and even on Mount Hermon people were aware of it.

When the headman had agreed to let them pass through the fields, De Kuff signaled to Raziel to awaken the sleeping Rose. His gesture was kingly; it was one of his enthusiastic days. She climbed out, blinking prettily, and smelled the mountain air.

They were standing beside the van when Fotheringill drove up in the Volvo. He motioned Raziel to his car. He was holding a sheaf of papers in an open manila envelope that had a disc-and-string seal.

"Some of Lestrade's tunnel maps," the Scotsman told him.

"OK," said Raziel. "You got something else for me?"

Fotheringill gave him another package wrapped in butcher paper. In exchange, Raziel gave Fotheringill his keys.

"Right," said Fotheringill. "There's a park headquarters across the valley. The park's been closed since the Gulf War, but I can leave your car there with some of the maps in the glove box. I'll leave the rest in the Volvo for the cops to find." He got into Raziel's van and gave him a humorless grin. "Be careful of mines, eh? They're mainly marked."

"Good," said Raziel.

When Fotheringill took off up the road, Raziel helped De Kuff ease himself over into the Druse pasture. They started walking toward the line of valonia oaks and oleander that marked a stream. On the higher slopes there were dwarf olive trees and two mighty terebinths, one of which was scarred by lightning.

There was snow on the brow of Mount Hermon. The Golan peaks enclosed the narrow valley in which they walked. Mount Sion and Mount Habetarim loomed to the north, below the shoulders of Hermon, and toward the Syrian lines and Tel Hamina, the mountains called Shezif and Alon.

De Kuff breathed deeply. His face was radiant and his eyes full of tears.

"'Naphtali is a hind let loose,'" he told Raziel. "This is his kingdom."

"I told you, Rev, the time was near. You have to trust me."

They would go to every tribe now, down from the highlands of Naphtali to Dan to as far as Gilead, and what was written would come to pass.

Raziel was thinking that his next name might be Naphtali. It was all the same, he considered. The closing of the circle, the serpent finding itself, the resolution of the noosphere. Things themselves come to consciousness. Faith was easy in the mountains. It required a congenial landscape. But now, for Raziel, faith required an interior landscape too.

"Here it is," De Kuff said. "This is the source of the river."

They both sat down and drank of it from their right hands. Raziel too, although he was left-handed.

"Yes," Raziel said, laughing. "The waters of Merom."

Around them grew waist-high mint and flowering nettles, a wealth of ferns like the carpet of a rain forest, and wild fig.

"We'll go up," De Kuff said, looking at the snow fields high above them. "We'll go up and meet them."

From the next ridge they could see a Syrian observation post at the base of the next mountain. They came to a track that was marked in Hebrew, Arabic and English as a military road. A short way beyond it was a sign lying flat in the brush that warned against mines. The letters on it were so weathered as to be almost illegible.

Raziel was looking for a place where they could spend the night without hauling their gear down for a campsite, where they could watch through the night with a section of the river to themselves, with only a fire.

It did not take him long to find a spot. It was close to the Syrian lines, but at least they had the passive permission of the Druse. The nearby park was indeed closed. Almost any flat spot where there was dry brush for fire, one within the sound of fast water, would do. Also, he would be able to fix comfortably there.

H
AVING DRIVEN
off the map, Lucas was trying to make his Ford Taurus behave like a vehicle of adventure.

"If I'd known we were going in for alpine touring," he told Sonia, "I would have rented a four-wheel drive."

Nearly all night they drove the frosted wadis, avoiding flooded streams and sandstone precipices. Toward morning, Lucas let Sonia drive, and when he woke up they were on paved highway heading north, under the mass of Mount Hermon.

"Love these military roads," she told him.