Damascus Gate

by Robert Stone

  He sat down on a stone step overlooking the Pool and took the tweed jacket off and folded it beside him, with the lining out. Light drifted all around, riffled like water, musically ringing.

  The Pool had once served the Second Temple; then it had been called the Pool of Israel. Each year, it was believed, an angel descended in season to trouble the water with its wing. The water was good and healing. Beside it, Jesus cured a paralytic.

  In a temple of five colonnades, Serapis had been worshiped there, the great syncretic god of the East. Serapis was at once the subsumation of Apis and Osiris and Aesculapius, a son of Apollo. He stood crowned with a wheat measure, attended by Anubis the jackal-headed, wielding the staff with twined snakes.

  De Kuff settled himself cross-legged on the ancient stone. Bathed in the rosy light, he raised his hands above his head and let them rest, palms up, on either side. His arms were short and flabby but his hands extremely delicate, lithe and sensitive. A musician's hands, a physician's.

  As the dawn prayers reached him from the Haram, De Kuff closed his eyes to see the shining sefirot. He and Raziel had been looking for them in the sounds of Muslim prayer since coming to the Old City. This time the sefirot were there for him, the myriads of the Zohar, the Uncreated Light.

  He had no idea how long he stayed in kavana. When he looked about him, over a dozen youths had gathered around the place he sat and were either lost in their own meditations or just watching, as though waiting to hear what he would say. He stood up and smiled at them and picked up his jacket. A solemn young blond woman helped settle it around his shoulders.

  He was dizzy from sitting in meditation and unsteady on his legs, but his heart ached with joy. He felt consumed with love for the motley youths who crowded around him. Had he spoken to them? They were looking at him with concern, stepping back to let him pass.

  Heading toward the street, he saw that the Church of St. Anne had opened, its altar candles lit for the early Mass. St. Anne's was a church of great austerity. Its lack of decoration and massive hewn stones gave it an almost modern aspect. After Jerusalem fell to Saladin it had been used as a mosque, and an inscription from the Koran remained over the lintel. De Kuff went inside the church and stood under its great vault, breathing in the faint traces of incense, the candle smoke and old stone.

  And suddenly, in that church-mosque-temple by the Pool of Israel, he thought he knew what it meant to say that all was Torah. And what it meant to know that the world to come was at hand. The mystery of Torah was far stranger than anyone believed. It was the eternal reason that there was something rather than nothing. It underlay everything, in forms more various than anyone had dared conceive. The knowledge nearly knocked him to the floor.

  As he stood swaying in the center aisle, the young blond woman came up to him again.

  "Please," she said, "you will come later? You will come later and hear us sing?"

  "If you like," he said. She gave him a timid smile. She had watery blue eyes, like Van Eyck's Saint Ursula.

  Her smile vanished as if she were afraid of offending him. He patted her hand and went outside into the plaza. A few of the youths followed after him.

  He had become a Catholic once, received into the Church at St. Vincent Ferrer on Lexington Avenue, a church that strained to evoke what St. Anne's conveyed in every stone. He could still remember the winter afternoon of his baptism and reception—the hysterical confusion, kneeling in a shrine named for a Spanish Dominican inquisitor. It had been unwise, premature, a useless apostatizing. He had been without guidance then. He had thought in those days that it was not possible to have it all—a false economy. In those days he had believed in austerities, mortifications, humiliations. Often, he still found life harder without them.

  Now he could stand anywhere on his own terms and represent in his own soul the obviated differences between Jew and Greek, male and female, bond and free. The world to come was within him, represented in his person, available to all. If they imagined that they had taken hold of the sefirot, bound some in their churches to worship, what matter?

  He began to recite from the Zohar. The young foreigners, at Bethesda for sunrise, began to gather round. The time had come, De Kuff thought, to reveal a part of the truth.

  19

  AT FINK'S one evening Basil Thomas, the go-between and former KGB officer, treated Lucas to a prolonged complaint about life in Jerusalem.

  "One is a secular type of guy," Basil Thomas lamented, "one feels an outcast. One might as well go somewhere and be a Jew, if you see what I mean."

  "It doesn't bother me much."

  "How," Basil Thomas inquired haughtily, "would it bother you?"

  Basil Thomas also imparted the information that Dr. Obermann had broken up with the former wife of Reverend Ericksen, the unsuccessful American missionary. Linda Ericksen, according to Basil Thomas, had taken up with Janusz Zimmer.

  "What do you make of Zimmer?" Lucas asked after they had talked awhile. "Has he made aliyah, or is he just hanging out?" Of course, Lucas thought, one could have asked that about hundreds living here.

  "This is an interesting fellow," Basil Thomas admitted. He spoke softly, without his usual bluster. "Very knowledgeable. A gifted journalist." Lucas thought his discretion represented some kind of political caution but asked no further. Then Basil Thomas said, "Ayin."

  "What's Ayin?"

  "Nothing," said Basil Thomas. "Ask Janusz."

  Lucas's next meeting with Obermann took place at the Atara, a café on Ben Yehuda Street. The doctor seemed downcast. During their conversation the subject of the estranged Ericksens did come up.

  "If we want a disgruntled Galilean," Obermann said glumly, "you should interview Ericksen. I hear he's leaving the country."

  "How about his missus?"

  "Linda's with Jan Zimmer."

  "Oh," Lucas said. "Sorry to hear that. I mean ... I suppose she's a restless soul."

  Obermann raised a hand in dismissal. "With Zimmer," he said, "she'll lead a more adventurous life. In any case, if either of us is going to interview Ericksen, it's got to be you."

  "Think he'll see me?"

  "Try," Obermann said. "He's moved in with the archeologist, Lestrade, down at the Austrian hospice. I have the number."

  Lucas took the number and bought some telephone tokens from the Atara's cashier. No one answered at the hospice.

  "Go anyway," Obermann suggested. "I would. Maybe you can surprise him."

  Lucas walked it, by way of the Damascus Gate. The Austrian hospice was in the Muslim Quarter of the Old City. Passing through the foyer of the hospice, he noticed an enormous plaster crucifix on the wood-paneled wall. He had to wonder if, back in the late thirties, there had not been a portrait of the Führer adjoining it, at a mutually respectful distance.

  Ericksen was sitting among potted thatch palms on the rooftop terrace of the adjoining building. He was not the man he had been on the Mount of Temptation. His tan had paled, and a loss of weight had scaled his features to a death's-head pattern. A newly prominent Adam's apple gave him the look of an unsound American rustic.

  "Dr. Ericksen..." Lucas began, slightly out of breath from the stairs.

  "I'm not a doctor," Ericksen said. "I'm not anything."

  "Sorry," said Lucas. "I tried to telephone but there wasn't an answer. I wanted to talk with you before you left." Ericksen never glanced at him. "Do you remember me? We talked at Jebel Quruntul."

  Finally Ericksen turned, slowly, shielding his eyes.

  "Yes, I remember."

  "Well, I heard you were leaving. I had hoped we could talk."

  "All right," Ericksen said.

  "Got an offer back home?"

  "I don't have any offers. I'm leaving church work."

  Lucas stopped himself at the point of asking Ericksen whether he wanted to talk about that decision. It was always the wrong question.

  "Why?" he asked instead. "Is the decision a result of working at the House of the Galilean?"


  Ericksen looked, at that moment, like a man who had been slapped.

  "You're a reporter," he told Lucas.

  "Well, I'm writing about religious developments here. I thought you might be able to help me."

  "Who," Ericksen asked exhaustedly, "do you represent?"

  "I'm writing a book," Lucas told him. "About religion in the Holy Land." It was not a phrase he commonly used.

  "Are you a Jew?"

  "I'm a lapsed Catholic," Lucas said, "of partly Jewish background. I have no ax to grind." That, he thought, was a good one.

  "What do you want to know about the House?"

  "Well, on leaving, do you believe you've done something worthwhile?"

  "Even if they were honest," Ericksen said, "nothing they do would be worthwhile."

  "Can I quote you?"

  "Sure," Ericksen said. "Why not?"

  "What is it they actually do?"

  "They make a lot of money. A lot of Christians give them money. Jews too, now."

  "Did you get any?"

  "Yes," Ericksen said.

  "What's the money for?"

  "Various things. Lately Gordon Lestrade is reconfiguring the Second Temple. Who did you say you represented?"

  "The world," Lucas said. "Reconfiguring the Temple?"

  "I think you do represent the world," Ericksen said, and laughed. Lucas attempted to laugh along.

  "They're trying to reconstruct the Herodian Temple. There's a Jewish effort and a Christian one."

  "Why a Christian one?"

  Ericksen gave him a look that seemed to express surprise at how little Lucas knew about it.

  "American fundamentalists are very interested in Israel and the Temple. The rebuilding of the Temple will be a sign."

  "Of what?"

  "Oh," Ericksen said with a grim smile, "of things to come."

  Lucas tried to remember what he knew about eschatology and millenarian doctrine. He had forgotten a great deal.

  "A lot of Christians genuinely believe these things. But the people at the House—Otis and Darletta—they're just promoters. I don't know about the Jews. Perhaps they believe."

  "In what?"

  "I don't know. The coming of the Messiah, I guess. If they build it, he will come."

  "Like in the movie?"

  "I suppose," Ericksen said. "I didn't know they still made those religious movies."

  "And Lestrade?"

  "I don't know what Lestrade believes. He used to be a Catholic like you."

  "And he's doing the reconfiguring?"

  "He takes tourists out on digs. But his main work now is on the Temple Mount. Lestrade claims he can rebuild the Temple on the basis of his research."

  "Reconfiguring it?"

  "Look," Ericksen said, "rebuilding the Temple is what the House of the Galilean is all about. That's what they claim to be doing."

  "I thought you were missionaries."

  "If we were looking for converts," Ericksen said with a smile, "the rabbis would drive us out. They don't care for us anyway. And the Muslims would kill us."

  "So you never made any converts?"

  "We converted a few Christians to our kind of Christianity. And we made a lot of money."

  "You sound very disillusioned," Lucas told him. "Have you just had it with the House of the Galilean? Or have you lost faith?"

  Ericksen looked at him without expression.

  "When Linda and I came here," he said, "we both believed it very much. We came to witness."

  "But ... something went wrong."

  "There's a power here," Ericksen said. "A terrible power."

  "But," Lucas asked humbly, "it's good, is it not? We're all ... supposed to believe in it."

  "We're supposed to believe in the power of evil. Most people here do. Most people everywhere. It makes them stronger."

  "The power of evil? Do you mean the power of God?"

  "Whatever you call it. It makes you stronger until you think about it. It took Linda," he told Lucas. "It took her body as a thing to fuck. Next it's going to kill me."

  "Excuse me," Lucas said. "Let me take a little jump. Are you talking about God? The Jewish God?"

  "I was wrong when we spoke on the mountain," Ericksen explained. "The Jewish God is Azazel. Always was. I never knew it. Azazel, God, Jehovah, the evil thing—it belongs to them."

  The reverend, Lucas thought, resembled his former wife. Their eyes were very similar, with transparent irises through which his passion visibly burned, while hers lay invisible as Azazel.

  "I like the people who wear the serpents," Ericksen said. "The black girl and her friends at Bethesda. Do you know them?"

  "Yes," Lucas said. "I like them too."

  "Do you know why they wear serpents?"

  "I guess I don't know. I'd like to hear you tell me."

  "Because," Ericksen said, "when the first Adam was destroyed, the serpent came to free us from Azazel. But Azazel set all women against him. Christ was the serpent come again. The serpent, the snake, is our only hope." He dipped his hand under the V of his collar. At the end of a thin chain hung a tiny ouroboros, essentially the same one Raziel and Sonia wore. "See, I have one. Would you like one also?"

  Lucas, who was untalented, began to try and draw it in his notebook. Then it occurred to him that he might have many future opportunities to do so.

  "I don't know," he said. "I guess I'll have to think about it."

  20

  THE DAY AFTER De Kuff's Pauline expedition to the Bethesda Pool, Janusz Zimmer arranged to meet Sonia at her apartment in Rehavia. She had been spending most of her time over in the Muslim Quarter, at Berger's. She and Zimmer were old acquaintances. If she had not taken up with Raziel, if she had not become a Sufi of Berger's, they might have been more than that.

  Sonia had no idea what was on Janusz Zimmer's mind. For a while they talked about the places in Africa they had both been. Nairobi. Mogadishu. Khartoum.

  "We're both old Reds, aren't we?" Zimmer asked her. He was drinking a bottle of Israeli brandy he had brought, and he seemed to be getting sentimental. It was midafternoon. The light outside grew richer, the shadows under the eucalyptus grew longer.

  "I suppose we are," she said. "But not the only ones in town."

  "Among the few in Jerusalem," Zimmer corrected her. "Most of our old comrades live in Tel Aviv."

  "Tell you the truth," said Sonia, "I always thought you were just faking it. I never believed you were actually a Marxist-Leninist."

  "To tell you the truth, Marx and Lenin opened my eyes when I was a youth. Remember, we were still fighting a civil war with reactionaries in Poland when I was a young man. The Americans were parachuting weapons to them. There were pogroms. So, for a period, I called myself a Marxist Leninist."

  "And you became disillusioned."

  "To make a long story short," Zimmer said, "I became disillusioned. But of course you had the good fortune to be in Cuba. Where everything is wonderful."

  "Please don't put down Cuba," Sonia said. "It hurts me."

  "But the bottom line is, it's a police state, yes?"

  Sonia shrugged, declining to argue it.

  "So you embrace Sufism and whatnot," Zimmer said.

  "Well, not much whatnot," Sonia told him. "A lot of Sufism."

  "And now you're with these Jewish-Christian, Christian-Jewish Jews, so called. Isn't that right?"

  "Are these friendly questions, Jan? Are you asking as a reporter? Or am I supposed to exercise self-criticism?"

  "We'll pretend we're back in the Party," Zimmer said.

  "Jan, I was never in the Party. My parents were."

  "We'll pretend we're back in the Party," Zimmer repeated, as though he knew better than to give weight to such demurrers. "Exercise self-criticism. Why do you have to chase these phantasmagoria?"

  "My beliefs are my own business," Sonia said. "These days."

  "Is it because it's Jerusalem?" Zimmer asked. "Because what happens here is unlike what happens elsewhere? And
sometimes it changes the world?"

  She was startled and a little hurt. "Chris Lucas told you I said that."

  "Yes," said Zimmer, "Lucas and I keep in touch. But what you say is right, Sonia. What happens here will change the world. This time it will."

  "What do you mean, Jan?"

  "The Party—the Party lost its soul when it lost us. I mean the Jews, because you're as much a Jew as I am. It was our hope, our passion for tikkun olam, our courage, our devotion that made the Communist Party everything it was. At least everything good. The Stalinists, the murderers, were all mainly Gentiles. There were Jews among them, yes. But essentially they were all anti-Semites, regardless."

  "Jan," Sonia said. "Are you pitching me? Are you hitting on me? Are you asking me to help you bring back the Party or telling me I should be a better Jew or asking me for a date or what?"

  "I'm telling you this, Sonia. There are organizations in this country whose work it is to see that this becomes a better place."

  "Everybody has different ideas about that."

  "We might possibly be of like mind. You might be able to help us. Where there was a Red Orchestra we now have a Jewish Orchestra, a network organized as well as anything that was organized in Europe against the Germans, or here against the British. I want you to join it, or at least to help. I owe it to you to ask."

  Sonia looked at him in wonder. "So you haven't given up on the perfect world?"

  "I have not," Zimmer said. "I will not. But it won't come from Moscow. Maybe we can do the job here."

  "What do you propose to do?"

  "If you will commit, you'll learn more. Surely you know how it goes. On the basis of need to know."

  "I guess I'm a Jew," Sonia said. "My mother was. She used to say that you didn't have to be Jewish to be a Jew. That a lot of people who weren't Jewish were, as far as she was concerned. So I guess I'm like her. My country's here, sure, but my country's in the heart too. I don't believe in a perfect world, but I believe in a better one."