Damascus Gate

by Robert Stone

  Ernest sorted through the papers on his desk, looking for it in vain.

  "Well, the damn thing's vanished. But it said, like, 'I'm a psychiatrist and I can see your pathetic self-hatred and I'm going to kill you.'"

  "Jesus," said Lucas. "Did he send you a bill?"

  "In no other country, right?" Gross said. "So what can I do for you?"

  Lucas explained what Nuala had told him about Abu Baraka and asked him what the Human Rights Coalition had on him.

  "Nuala has a lot of chutzpah," Ernest said in his antipodean cockney. "She'd better be careful."

  "Is she right about this? Is the guy IDF, do you think? Are they doing what she says they're doing?"

  "Ah," Ernest said, "here it is." He had found the threatening note on his desk. He picked it up and stuck it to his bulletin board with a thumbtack, beside the Amnesty International bulletins and the Peace Now handbills. "Is Nuala right? Well, Nuala's strange. I don't always know what side Nuala's on, and I don't know if she does. But she's a valuable man, as it were. And I think she's right on this one."

  "She wants me to do a story on him."

  "Jolly good," Ernest said. "Do it."

  "I hate it down there," Lucas said.

  "Everyone does, mate. The Palestinians. The soldiers. Everyone but the settlers, who claim to love it. And Nuala, of course."

  "Actually, the beaches look nice."

  "Great beaches," Ernest said. "The settlers have a hotel called the Florida Beach Club. Scandinavian lovelies come to frolic, I hear. Gambol like lambs, with seven hundred thousand of the most wretched people on earth a mere stone's throw away. So to speak. The beach is protected by razor wire and machine guns."

  "Anybody else working the Gaza story?" Lucas asked. "I told Nuala to take it to Janusz Zimmer."

  "She and Janusz broke up, I understand," Ernest said. "But maybe he'll take it on."

  "That was a strange romance."

  "All her romances are strange," Ernest said. "Anyway, it would be good if we didn't have to rely on foreigners to do this one. Ha'olam Hazeh is trying to get a line on it." Ha'olam Hazeh was a left-wing magazine in Tel Aviv. "It's nice when one of our papers takes that sort of thing on. So it's not like we need the rest of the world to tell us about it."

  "I think so too," Lucas said.

  "Nuala and her UN friends," said Ernest, "they've all been to Gaza. They've been to Deir Yassein and to everywhere else Jews did the kicking. You wonder if they've ever been to Yad Vashem."

  "Never asked her," Lucas said. There was an American feminist calendar on the wall beside Ernest's desk, with pictures of great international heroines and red-letter dates in female history. Lucas leaned over to inspect the fetching photograph of Amelia Earhart. "I've never been there myself, actually."

  "No?" Ernest asked. "Anyway, we talk to the IDF, and very often they talk back to us. I think I have an idea of how it goes in the territories."

  "How?"

  "There are unwritten laws. The Shin Bet operate there. They mount punitive strikes and conduct interrogations. They've told us unofficially that they feel entitled to use moderate force in those interrogations. That's the term they use, 'moderate force.' Obviously, this can mean different things to different people. It can mean one thing to a kid from Haifa and another to a kid from Iraq."

  "Right."

  "They also feel entitled to kill people they believe have killed Jews. Or who've killed one of their informers. It's a respect thing, see. They have Arabic-speaking agents who have to pass a field test, pretending to be Palestinians, hanging around a market somewhere, chatting it up. If they think one camp or village is ready to explode, they'll sometimes use provocation, set it off themselves and come down hard. For a while last year they were killing six rioters a day, and it was hard to believe this was coincidence. Every day it was six."

  "I see."

  "Shin Bet itself is divided into compartments. Sometimes the left hand isn't acquainted with the right."

  "Sounds a little like Kabbala," Lucas said.

  "Doesn't it? And there are other organizations besides Shabak and Mossad. Sometimes they're in favor, sometimes out."

  "Dangerous work," Lucas said.

  "That's what I tell Nuala," Ernest said. "And her friends."

  "Well," said Lucas, "I hope they'll be careful. She came back from her last encounter with a black eye."

  "I'm sure one of our soldiers roughed her up," Ernest said. "Still, I can't help noticing how often Nuala reports injured. She's always getting hit."

  "Are you implying she likes it?"

  "Of course she likes it," Ernest said. He and Lucas smiled without looking at each other. "Anyway," Ernest told him as he left, "you be careful too."

  He munched on some khat on his walk back to the German Colony. The stuff gave him something of a jolt but failed to lift his spirits. He presumed Nuala used it for sex, and the notion made him feel horny and deprived.

  Once home, he settled down to watch CNN. Christiane Aman-pour was broadcasting from Somalia. Her cool, classless English voice seemed to impart an order and comprehensibility to the events she reported which they inherently lacked.

  The drug had made it impossible to sleep, so he chewed more to ward off black despair, which lurked in the afternoon quiet, in the dove's cooing, the voice of the turtle. Eventually it made him sick. His wheels spun. In a few days Tsililla would be back from London. It was not going well between them, and the break would come soon. His weariness with things was frightening; it smacked of obliteration, a wall of anger and fatigue that felt as though it might sweep him into nothingness. Worst of all was loneliness.

  There were times when Lucas was capable of rejoicing in himself as a singularity—a man without a story, secure from tribal delusion, able to see the many levels. But at other times he felt that he might give anything to be able to explain himself. To call himself Jew or Greek, Gentile or otherwise, the citizen of no mean city. But he had no recourse except to call himself an American and hence the slave of possibility. He was not always up for the necessary degree of self-invention, unprepared, occasionally, to assemble himself.

  And sometimes the entire field of folk seemed alien and hostile, driven by rages he could not comprehend, drunk on hopes he could not imagine. So he could make his way only through questioning, forever inquiring of wild-eyed obsessives the nature of their dreams, their assessment of themselves and their enemies, listening agreeably while they poured scorn on his ignorance and explained the all too obvious. When he wrote, it was for some reader like himself, a bastard, party to no covenants, promised nothing except the certainty of silence overhead, darkness around. Sometimes he had to face the simple fact that he had nothing and no one and try to remember when that had seemed a source of strength and perverse pride. Sometimes it came back for him.

  7

  ADAM DE KUFF and the young man who called himself Raziel set out together from Jerusalem to travel the land. They did everything and went everywhere together. Sometimes De Kuff would lapse into silences that lasted for days. During these silences Raziel would talk gently to him, seeing to it that he carried out the small necessary tasks of travel. De Kuff began to believe that the younger man knew his every thought. Raziel encouraged him to believe it.

  They traveled by bus, they hitched rides or simply walked. They visited holy and mighty places, eating little and heedlessly, paying no attention to what was or was not kosher, not observing Shabbat. They made their way from the Cave of Machpelah to Carmel, from the Kotel to Jezreel. They saw the sites sacred to early Christian martyrs and saw the Tomb of the Kings. They went to Mount Gerizim for the Samaritan Passover and to the Baha'i shrine of the Bab in Haifa.

  If there were long hours when De Kuff remained silent, there were others during which he became indefatigably verbal, talking himself into a state of high excitement that could last all day and all night. Raziel was able to keep pace with him, fueling his volubility, matching him association for association, until De
Kuff subsided in exhaustion and despair. When De Kuff's energy was gone, Raziel remained cool and keen-eyed, ready for more, ready for anything. De Kuff found it frightening. Sometimes, in tears, he ordered Raziel away. But Raziel never left him.

  They talked about music and about history. They told each other the story of their lives. Raziel had been raised in a wealthy midwestern suburb. His father was a corporate lawyer turned diplomat and politician. Raziel had gone to the Berklee College of Music in Boston, then left it for life in Marin County. He became the master of several instruments, composed, played with a rock group that had made a record, then gone in for experimental jazz in San Francisco. He had also been a yeshiva student, a Zen monk at Tassajara, a member of a Hebrew-Christian commune. He confessed his problems with drugs.

  De Kuff had attended St. Paul's School and then Yale. As an undergraduate, he had changed his area of concentration from history to music, then gone on to take his degree in it. He played with the New Orleans Symphony and with several chamber music societies. He had inherited a large fortune from several generations of De Kuffs in New Orleans; he had a house in the Garden District where he lived alone after his mother died. There was a New York apartment and an elegant summer place near Pass Christian, Mississippi.

  Both of them had concluded that at the base of music lay principles of metaphysics that were hidden by the distractions of everyday life. Before long music fell away as one of their topics of discourse and they returned to the subjects they had collided with on the night of their first meeting, prayer and the promise of deliverance, the end of exile and the root of souls.

  They talked about Zen and Theravada and the Holy Ghost, the bodhisattvas, the sefirot and the Trinity, Pico della Mirandola, Teresa of ûvila, Philo, Abulafia, Adam Kadmon, the Zohar, the sentience of diamonds, the Shekhinah, the meaning of tikkun, Kali and Matronit under the dread designation of the moon.

  They had both tried using Christianity as a bridge between mountains. Raziel offered an image of them both falling, and Jeshu with them, head over heels, his cross reversed and spinning, anti-aerodynamic. Christianity had failed them as Christ had failed, who made his grave among the wicked. Yet, they agreed, his roots extended from the beginning of Creation and the tree would have to grow again. They agreed that each person carried within himself a multiplicity of souls.

  Once they went to St. Catherine's Monastery in the Sinai and followed the Steps of Repentance to the summit of Jebel Musa at sunrise. De Kuff prayed at the mihrab there, making the Ishmaelite shrine his own. Before them in the direction of Mecca spread the Gulf of Eilat, and to the west the Gulf of Suez, two turquoise dazzles against the blood-red mountains. De Kuff charged up the last steps, coughing and gasping for breath while the darkness turned milky around him, trying to outrun impending dawn.

  And because it had seemed a suitable time then, light filling the universe to its far corners, the sun raised up like an offering, Raziel had undertaken to explain to Adam De Kuff the significance of his own name. How the Hebrew letter kuf signified paradox—the zayin descending, the reish hovering above—the soul it represented must experience emptiness and darkness, in the midst of the withdrawing light it struggled always to reach. It stood for holiness descending and contained the secret of Eve. Its value in Gematria was nineteen. How the kuf whose value was nineteen followed the tzadi, which was eighteen and the secret of Adam. The pairing was completed as tzaddik, and this holy term had fallen on De Kuff himself. To the tzaddik, the righteous one, fell the task of redeeming the sparks lost with the fall into exile. Any man so signified was compelled to walk through darkness and death and seek out the Uncreated Light. The kuf was the sign of Life in Death, the paradox of redemption.

  It was just as well to tell him all this then, Raziel said, while they were both bathed in the new light of day, while De Kuff's spirits were high. And if it was really the mountain where Moses had set forth the Law, so much the better.

  Together with his name of Adam, Raziel explained, he suggested what was written: "He has set an end to darkness." The secret of the kuf was concentrated light. His very name was a channel of perception.

  "This is too much for me," De Kuff replied.

  Raziel laughed. He told Adam that the letter kuf also carried the connotation of monkey, a paradox of another sort. But perhaps, thought Raziel, who was skilled at interpretation, the walker into the place of dead shells, the gatherer of light had to be a kind of clown.

  De Kuff's first reaction was anger.

  "Why should I trust you?" he asked Raziel. "You say yourself that you used drugs. You take me to the top of a mountain. Beautiful, of course, but rather conventional as the site of inspiration."

  He might regret the illusions that had led him to Christian baptism, he told Raziel, that had brought him to stand in the Church of St. Vincent Ferrer, on Lexington Avenue, for the pouring on of water and the laying on of hands. In a room named for a Spanish inquisitor—he, De Kuff, the son of Sephardim! But as a Christian he had become enough of a Jansenist solitary to reject holy places in general as impediments to faith. Like miracles, they suggested people's credulity and trickery.

  "You're the monkey," he told Raziel. "You're the one who torments me with notions."

  Raziel laughed again. "No, man. You. You're the monkey."

  Though it might be too much for him, Adam De Kuff began from that day to believe everything that Raziel told him about himself. Besides terrors, there were raptures. Raziel assured him that his dark world would presently be full of light, an interior morning, brightening by degrees.

  De Kuff confessed that he had always wondered about the disorderliness of his own mind, the promiscuity of his thoughts. The doctors to whom he had turned had called his condition bipolar disorder, treated him with psychotropics and even lithium. But he himself had come to speculate more and more on the souls whose essences adhered to his soul—in Jewish mystical terms, his gil-gulim. Raziel told him to prepare to face extreme circumstances. Things seemed to point to his being an instrument of redemption.

  Once, walking in the cool of the evening in the oasis of Subeita, De Kuff was seized by an antic mood.

  "What's my problem?" he had shouted, playing the peddler, some imaginary Tevye-esque immigrant forbear, he whose ancestors were the pale hidalgos, hombres muy formal.

  And Raziel, seeming to joke along at first, had replied, "Your problem is your face is too bright. Your problem is you're too smart to be the one you are. The number of your name could bring down cherubim. You're the Son of David brought back, that's your problem."

  That was how Raziel put it to him, finally.

  For weeks and weeks they kept moving, as though to illustrate the text that the Son of Man had nowhere to lay his head. De Kuff went without sleep, without rest. He had stopped taking his medication.

  Eventually, Raziel moved them in with an old friend, Gigi Prinzer, an artist in Safed. Her house was in the artists' quarter. From it, De Kuff and Raziel would set out each day to wander among the tombs of the sages.

  They were hard by the synagogue dedicated to Ari, the Lion, Isaac Luria, on the spot where Elijah had revealed to him the inner meaning of Torah. Not far away was Meron, where Simeon bar Yochai, to whom tradition ascribed the Zohar, was buried.

  Overcome by the sanctity of the hills, De Kuff would fall prey to fits of weeping. The pious, passing near, glanced at him with approval.

  "You'll make me lose my mind," De Kuff told Raziel. "I can't bear the weight of this place."

  "If it couldn't be done," Raziel explained, "it wouldn't be asked of you."

  "Asked!" De Kuff exploded. "I don't recall being asked. Who asked?"

  "I think it's like this," Raziel had said. "Accept it or die. Accept it or go under. And then we wait again. As with Christ. As with Sabbatai."

  "But as you know," De Kuff protested, "I can't pray."

  "You can't pray. You don't have to. It's all written."

  "You're sure?"

  Raziel assur
ed him that was why he had been a Catholic for a while. "Moshiach waits at the gates of Rome. Despised. Among lepers. Want to hear the rest?"

  "Oh, my," De Kuff said. He took out a handkerchief and wiped his face.

  In Safed De Kuff could only sit and cry, as though his borrowed soul aspired to the mountains he could see to the north, as though he wanted to flee the holiness of the sages buried around him, the tyranny of his fate and of the Ancient Holy One. He was always pursued. Now something had seized him again, something unyielding. Jonah.

  Gigi Prinzer made her living as a painter of middlebrow religious art, conceived for the bolder among devout spirits, done in desert colors—a little Safed, a little Santa Fe. Gigi had liked Santa Fe and often wished herself there. Now, because she was in love with Raziel, she let them stay.

  De Kuff's funds were sufficient to support them, but Raziel could not bear to forgo opportunities to spread knowledge of his recognition, to initiate raps he could dominate. In a tweed sport jacket and an English bookie's cap he accosted tourists at the bus station or the tourist office. His dress and manner promised the alternative tour of Safed, and that was what he provided. Where the competition offered bubba meisses, stories of no account, Raziel's strong point was comparative religion. He was soon suspected of being a Mormon or a Jew for Jesus. Interrogators and provocateurs discovered, however, that he could talk Midrash, Mishnah and Gamara with the best of them.

  "Who are you?" the haredim would demand with customary Israeli tact. "What are you doing here?"

  "I am a child of the universe," Raziel would reply. "I have a right to be here."

  "You're Jewish?" they would inquire.

  "Eskimo," Raziel told them.

  On the tours, if he thought the group receptive, he revealed some original notions. The extraordinary Hindu counterparts to Kabbala. How Abulafia's Light of the Intellect, with its suggestions for breathing techniques as an aid to meditation, greatly resembled hatha yoga. How the Kabbalistic doctrine of ayin, the unknowable element in which the Infinite exists, had its Hindu cognate in the concept Nishkala Shiva, the remote absolute. That there were many more such parallels in Hinduism, and others to be found in Sufic Islam and in the Christian mysticism of Eckhart and Bohme.