Damascus Gate (57 page)

"Oh, come on," Raziel said. "I put a little Ex in the tea to stimulate the force. For those of us unfamiliar with Olam Hademut. Our non-Sufis who have never beheld the Alam al-Mithal. The unhip who don't know from
mundus tertius, mundus marginalis.
"

"You gave it to the Rev. You'll kill him."

"Never happen," said Raziel. "I didn't."

"Like hell," she said. "You gave it to him, for Christ's sake. To Chris."

"Well," Raziel said, "a little boost."

"I don't believe you. And what about me?"

"Abulafia said," Raziel informed her, "'Womankind is to herself a world.' But there's nothing in yours either."

"I hate to spoil a nice country prayer meeting," Lucas said. "But it's cold and we're stoned and that's usually time to say, like, adieu. So how about canning it? Because on the whole—"

"It was a drug," Sonia said without expression. "How could you do it to me?" she shouted at Raziel. "You got me fucked up, you prick."

"Sonia, sweetheart, there's nothing in your tea but a little mint. Some people have trouble seeing the middle world. By that," Raziel explained to Lucas coolly, "I mean what exists between the material and the spiritual."

"Lately," Lucas said, "I have trouble
not
seeing it."

"It's unforgivable," Sonia told Raziel. "It destroys everything."

"Only," Raziel said, "because everything needs to be destroyed."

It seemed to Lucas that everyone was getting higher and higher, but he could not really tell if Raziel had taken the drug or not. The stream seemed to be running faster and faster. Was there not a theory about Jesus being a psychedelic mushroom? Or was that only a joke? Or was there a theory
and
a joke?

"Sonia," said Raziel, "who are you to talk? Last year, the year before? Weren't you blowing with me? Don't say you couldn't hear it in the sound. The synergy. You were doping. You were bringing opiates into the five worlds. Your Sufi stuff and your pills."

"I stopped. Things let me."

"A love supreme," Raziel sang to Sonia mockingly. The song she had sung for Lucas the previous night. It told him something he had long suspected. "A love supreme."

"What do you want from us, Raziel?" Sonia asked.

Everyone fell silent.

"I mean, if this is just more getting loaded," she said, "where's it supposed to go?"

"We have to go to the city," Raziel said. "That's next. You'll have to trust me."

"Sorry," Sonia said.

"You know," Lucas said as they climbed, "the last time I got high this way I was listening to Miles Davis.
In a Silent Way.
I wish I could hear it now."

Just below them, Helen Henderson fell to her knees.

"Please," she said, "somebody help me! I'm scared."

"Before Redemption," Raziel told them, "tribulation. How did you expect the Redemption to look?" He raised his voice. "Want to see the chariot? You'll see it. Want to see the temple rise? You'll see that too."

"Do you believe him?" Lucas asked, steadying himself against a dwarf almond tree.

"She believes me," Raziel said, fixing his eyes on Sonia. "She knows everything requires the resolution of opposites. She was raised on the dialectic. The Law does not change but its surface changes, its garment changes."

"Do you?" Lucas asked her again. Sonia kept looking at the river. "Do you believe him?"

"Out of these shells we build," Raziel said. "Trust those who know. Out of this confusion, out of this ugliness, a love supreme, Sonia."

"I wanted it," she said to Lucas. "I want it so much. But it's bullshit. It's
trayf.
"

"Forget it," Lucas told her.

"So you see the angel Sandalfon," Raziel said. "We've studied this. The world of shells, Gentile women, idolatry, the man who's been to Rome. The death of the whore. Violence."

"The death of...? What violence?" Lucas asked. "You sound like the guys at Kfar Gottlieb. Are you?"

"Them?" Raziel laughed. "They have no part in what's to come. No more than the fools at the House of the Galilean. The pre-millenarians, the post-millenarians. But they're necessary and they're going to do what's necessary."

"And what now?" Sonia asked.

"Our king goes to the city, and we go following."

"Almost in time for Christmas," Lucas said. Sonia clung to him.

The river running beside them still seemed at the point of manifesting a great holiness. Something Lucas felt himself unworthy to see. Something dreadful that he required. He was having trouble letting go of it all. He so wanted to believe.

"Don't be afraid," Raziel said to them.

"Oh, that river," Sonia said. "Oh, Jesus! I wish it could take us back."

"It's the Jordan," Lucas said. I see the god coming up out of the earth, he thought. As though Raziel had raised up the prophet Samuel. If he had, he would be punished for it. But Lucas could not shake off his own terror. The fear of holiness.

When he looked up the bank, he thought he saw a yeshiva boy in
payess,
shaking a small, pale fist at him, spitting. A Jewish djinn?

"How dare you come to this battlefield!" the boy shouted down to him.

"I hear words in the river," Sonia said.

De Kuff was having trouble climbing now, sliding on the wet earth and sharp rocks of the gully. And Helen Henderson was hanging back, crying, terrified.

"Was it this bad?" De Kuff asked Raziel. "Was it like this when I came before?"

"Yes, my king," Raziel told the Rev. "We have to go up now."

"Once," the old man said with sudden restraint, "I had a breakdown."

"It's your tea," Lucas said. "Go lie down."

De Kuff let Raziel help him along the bank. It was getting stormy and also getting late. It rained briefly. Lucas and Sonia still held each other.

"We wait. Into the night. Maybe until morning," Raziel told them. "Then we go to the city."

"If we could get the car nearer," Lucas said, "we could get the old guy out." In the light from the gray sky he tried to read the little Avis map. Perhaps, he thought, they had put themselves back on it. "This road," he said, pointing with his finger, "it goes down the next valley. If it's a road. If it's not a river or a dry wadi. We might get the car closer."

"I need you," Raziel said to Sonia. "I need you to help me get the Rev up to the car. Regardless of what you may think of me now, I need you."

"Go ahead," Lucas told her. "Go with him. I'll stay with the Rose."

"It's not going to work," Raziel said. "I've known for a while. It's going to be spoiled again."

"If we get over the next ridge," Lucas said, still trying to get the lines on his map to stop quivering, "we might come to the road. And get the car and pick everyone up. It looks closer. Of course, on one of these maps," he said, "it's hard to tell."

"I don't want everyone to leave us," Raziel said.

"All right, all right," Sonia told him. "I'll help you get him back to the city. Chris can get the Rose out."

"I'll meet you at the car," Lucas said to Sonia. "Wait for me."

"No, no, I'll see you back in town," she said. "I want to take care of it."

De Kuff was muttering to himself. Lucas went down to where the Rose was cringing, naked now, beside the river. "Be careful," he said to Sonia. "I need you too."

T
HE ROSE
had taken her clothes off, either in preparation for baptism or out of an ecstatic impulse. She was a tall, muscular girl with angel eyes and a strong jaw. Lucas handed her her clothes one by one and she got back into them.

"I don't think I want to go up the way we came," she told Lucas. "I'd rather go that way. Where it's open."

Lucas looked at the Avis map again, unsure whether the area he had marked out on it corresponded in any way to the wilderness they found themselves in.

"All right," he said. "There might be a road out there. It's bound to go up to the park entrance."

They spotted a series of partly dry rocks on which to ford the river and teetered across. The Rose, though under the influence of Raziel's tea, was naturally agile and sure-footed. Once across, they hopped from tussock to tussock over a swampy depression until they gained dry ground. Then it was easy going to the top of a ridge—easier for the Rose than for Lucas.

Below them stood a valley of bones—rocks, really, in mossy granite clusters that looked like dolmens in fairy rings. There was a distant line of struggling trees, olive and tamarisk, below the face of a cliff that marked a spur of the mountains.

"There are altars in the rock," the Rose told Lucas. "And a waterfall."

At first he thought she was hallucinating. But when he looked at the rock faces it seemed that he saw niches there, patches of marble against the darker stone.

"It's supposed to be the birthplace of Pan," he told her. "And the source of the Jordan."

"Oh, no!" said Helen Henderson. "How far out!"

He was delighted to have news that improved her spirits. The Banyas spring was on his map and was reassuring—it indicated that they were still in Israel, rather than in Lebanon or Syria.

"Do you mean," the Rose asked, "that these are the altars of Pan?
The
Pan?"

"Yes," Lucas said. "Idolatry and sudden fear. So close to the river Jordan."

There were, in fact, a great many goats about.

"Long ago," Lucas said by way of stoned conversation, "a late Latin poet tells us, a mighty voice was heard round the world: 'Great Pan is dead!' it said. Or words to that effect."

"Oh, no!" said the Rose. She seemed to be taking the news badly. So Lucas said, "Of course the gods never die. And this isn't necessarily Great Pan. This is Banyas Pan." Banyas, it seemed to him, was near a road. His Avis map concurred.

While Helen contemplated the death of Pan, they set out across the valley toward the line on the map. The part of the way that had looked like desert turned out to be wetland—craterlike marshes filled with rushes, sinkholes caused by the runoff of winter snow from the slopes of Hermon. Other parts were grown with aloe and cactus, so dusty dry it seemed they had never been impinged upon by the smallest rain.

There were sheep grazing in the grassier sections. Their long, starveling antelope faces peered from within abundant folds of dark, dirty wool. The sheep were all horned, and the horns of male and female alike twisted asymmetrically from narrow skulls. Unmatched and unbalanced, their horns made the sheep look even more unkempt and unhusbanded. Vestigial horns, brittle and useless, good only for trapping their possessors in thorn bushes.

Wearily they made their way across the marshes, the sinks and the stony places.

"Where did you meet Raziel?" the Rose asked Lucas.

"I was writing a book. I interviewed him."

"And do you believe the things he says?"

"No. How about you?"

"I liked listening to the Rev," she said. "He seemed wise and kind. I never understood the things he said. But I'm not clever."

"You'll be forgiven everything, Helen," Lucas said. "Just keep trucking."

"I have no regrets," she said.

"Do you know the story of Uzzah and the Ark? Did they teach you that in Sunday school?"

"The soldier who was struck dead for touching the Ark of the Covenant? Not too much."

"Do you think," Lucas asked as they eased through a marsh with earthen pads crowned with brown cottony plants, "that God told Uzzah to try and save the Ark? Do you think he took him aside, appeared to him in a ring of fire and said: 'Uzzah, today on the way to J-town the Ark will start to fall. And you my beloved Uzzah, you my special lamb, have got to keep it from falling. Otherwise terrible shit will happen to the whole world'?"

"Goodness," the Rose said. "I have no idea. I've never thought about it."

After about an hour and a half, they were approaching the tree-line at the border of the Hula Valley, within sound of fast-moving water. Climbing in soft, black-ribboned sand, Lucas happened on a goat that was lying, snakebitten, on its side at the top of a hillock. Its tongue lolled despairingly, its eyes were glazed and spectacularly bloodshot, and it watched with indifference as Lucas approached. Drawing closer, he saw that a large camel spider was feeding at a hair-matted wound in one flank. A swarm of bees crawled over it, wings folded against the rain.

It made Lucas think of the Holman Hunt,
The Scapegoat.
Even the landscape was a bit the same.

There are no metaphors here, he thought. This was whence it all came home, where things themselves resided and the only symbols were the holy letters of a book. He thought all this must constitute a great difficulty. He wanted to talk to Sonia about it.

Over the next rise, they found themselves looking down at another stream, brown and swollen. The path beside it looked frequently used—a clear, mainly dry track of hard-packed earth supported by a rocky shoulder and crisscrossed with boot prints. On Lucas's roadmap, the stream was indistinguishable from a nearby road.

After a minute or so they saw headlights and what looked like a decrepit minivan, perhaps a Druse
sherut,
climbing the mountain switchbacks, its engine laboring harder with each shift of gears. The cliffs on the far side were over a mile away. On the map, among the line of contours that roughly corresponded to the cliffs, the word
Banyas
appeared in tiny, quivering antique letters.

The sun, low on the oppressive horizon, broke through the sodden clouds and lit the cliff face ahead of them to a polychrome shimmer.

Lucas and the Rose stared in wonder at the lovely mountain. There were indeed altars in the cliff face, their contours outlined in the brief sunlight.

Suddenly the Rose broke into a run.

"Hey!" called Lucas. "Hey, it's getting late. It's raining."

"Oh, please," the Rose shouted without breaking her formidable stride. "I've never been here. I've got to see it."

"Shit," said Lucas, and took after her, panting, dodging sheer rocks and deadfalls. Occasionally he caught sight of her towheaded figure ahead of him, her bright hair bobbing in the rain. She was going to the god. Lucas watched her vanish in the gloom of the small forest of twisted cypress and tamarisk. Gone. Turned into a tree. But after a minute he heard her again.