Damascus Gate

by Robert Stone

  "How?" Linda asked. "How will it be done?"

  "That you'll know when the time comes." He laughed. "I've already told you more than you should know."

  "Anything," Linda said, trembling. "Anything you want of me."

  "Yes, I know, my dear," Zimmer said, smoothing her hair. "I expect very much of you, and I have no doubts where you're concerned. But for the rest of the way, we'll do it like we did it in the old days. You'll know the details as required. In the meantime, you can continue your studies."

  "I will. I'll do whatever you want me to," Linda said. "If it's for this land. If it's for you."

  "I assure you," Janusz Zimmer said, "there will be a place for you in what is to come."

  "A place with you," she told him.

  Zimmer laughed. "Well, insofar as these things are up to me, yes."

  Linda, whose sense of humor was not highly developed, glared at him briefly. But she softened. "It's funny that in that time with Pinchas Obermann, a scoffer, a cosmopolitan, I should find faith. I couldn't have done it without you, Jan."

  "Maybe," Zimmer said, lighting a cigarette, "maybe it was meant to be."

  PART TWO

  29

  ON THE MORNING of his trip to Gaza, Lucas decided he should see Yad Vashem. Before setting out, he went to a bakery off Ben Yehuda Street and had coffee and a circular apple concoction whose recipe the management had brought, half remembered, from Mitteleuropa. It was sunny and there were cheerful crowds in the street. He left his car in its garage and went to the memorial by taxi.

  Afterward, Lucas would recall it all in great detail. On that particular morning, certain things stood out immediately. One was the photograph, the largest in the historical section, of the grand mufti of Jerusalem reviewing the befezzed and tasseled Muslim storm troopers of the Bosnian SS. It made a connection with the day's headlines.

  His worst moments were occasioned by the children of the camps. Some of them had tried to make little picture books in bright colors about fairies and princesses, as though they were safe at home and not imprisoned for slaughter by fiends. Above all, he felt simple shock and perplexity, and he was reassured that everyone there seemed as perplexed as he. Strangers avoided eye contact. Earlier, he had asked Sonia to go with him, and she had explained to him the necessity of going there alone. It had not taken him long to understand that she was right. On the pavement outside, he wept.

  At the monument, beside the unhewed stones and the eternal flame, he recited prayers from a book an unkempt man had sold him for six shekels. "O Master of the Universe, creator of these souls, preserve them forever in the memory of thy people."

  There were, inevitably, questions for Lucas. Where might he have been? What might he have done? How might he have behaved and ended up? Was he a mischling of the first or of the second class, and which was which? He could never keep it straight. What had become of his father's family? Carl Lucas had never told him, never referred to it.

  It might be, he thought, that the world divided there, into the race of those somehow responsible and those somehow not. It was a division personally difficult for him. But around it spun a fallen universe of shame. Everyone would always look into its darkness as deeply as they could or dared. Everyone wanted an answer, a guide for the perplexed. Everyone wanted death and suffering to mean something.

  Nuala was at the wheel. Sonia sat in the back with the book she had brought on her lap: Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston. She had managed to procure them a UN minivan after all.

  "So I went," Lucas said.

  "You went to Yad Vashem?" Sonia asked. "You gonna do Yad Vashem and Gaza on the same day? Trying to make yourself tired of living?"

  "I was free. Killing time."

  "So you went," Sonia said. "No surprises, right?"

  "Oh," Lucas said, "I wouldn't say that."

  Nuala, driving, said nothing.

  "I hear there's a good fish restaurant in Gaza," said Lucas.

  "Good fish," Sonia said. "No beer."

  "So what's our agenda?" Lucas asked.

  "The Foundation is working with some local self-help groups in Al-Amal," Nuala told him. "They've established their own school and a clinic and we're helping them out. Bringing them down some toothbrushes. Toothbrushes are hard to get in the Strip. Soap. Everything's overpriced. Israeli made. A little like America and Cuba. Anyway, I thought you might want to have a look. Spend the night."

  "What about this squad of head-breakers you told me about? Are they still active?"

  "Abu and his gang were in Rafah last week. Of course they could turn up anytime. Too bad you decided against that story."

  "You can't do them all."

  "Well, we've got lots down here," Nuala said.

  Their time on the road drove Lucas to reflect yet again that Nuala Rice would never make him easy company. There was the problem of the keen, unsentimental attraction he felt for her, not untinged with a kind of resentment and rueful perversity. Beyond that, she had the female adventurer's snobbery, with not a grain of mercy for the timid or contemplative or conflicted. She was the walking embodiment of performance anxiety—moral, sexual and professional.

  For reasons unclear, Nuala had them stop south of Ashkelon. They parked in front of a brown, featureless warehouse and Nuala held a quick colloquy with a short, powerfully built man who looked like an Oriental Jew. She handed him something in a manila envelope.

  "Who is that guy?" Lucas asked Sonia as they waited in the van. "He looks like a shtarker."

  Sonia shrugged.

  "Who was that?" he asked Nuala when she was back behind the wheel.

  "Oh," she said, "he's a vegetable wholesaler. He buys from a Palestinian cooperative. We carry messages, help with the barter."

  "Is he a music lover?" Lucas asked. "Because I think I've seen him up at Stanley's."

  "Not likely," Nuala said.

  Lucas glanced back at Sonia and saw her troubled eyes returning his look.

  "Sometimes," Nuala told them, "our cars are all that gets through. The curfews can last weeks. We carry a little of everything."

  Sonia, holding Lucas's gaze, raised her eyebrows. The cargo behind her, in unmarked wooden boxes covered with tarpaulins, was now difficult to imagine as consisting of toothbrushes and aspirin.

  "Of course," Lucas said.

  The border between the State of Israel and the occupied Gaza Strip had always reminded him of the line between Tijuana and greater San Diego. There, too, ragged men the color of earth waited with the mystical patience of the very poor on the pleasure of crisply uniformed, well-nourished officials. Some months before, Lucas had come down for the dawn shape-up at the checkpoint, and he had not forgotten the drawn faces in the half-light, the terrible smiles of the weak, straining to make themselves agreeable to the strong. Unlike Tijuana, none of the niceties of mutual sovereignty concealed the raw dynamics of Gaza. There were automatic rifles, razor wire and hedgehog barricades, the wielders of power, the supplicants and the schemers against it.

  Like most Israeli soldiers, the border guards at the Gaza checkpoint disliked UN vehicles and the people who rode in them. They took their time inspecting Nuala's and Lucas's passports.

  "Johnnie Walker Irish," the soldier who looked at Nuala's passport took occasion to remark. "You like Johnnie Walker?"

  In that ongoing war, a special venom was reserved for attractive women associated with the other side. Pretty Jewish girls drove some Palestinians crazy, even to the point of murder. An Arab construction worker had killed a beautiful teenage woman soldier with a sharpened trowel half a block from Lucas's old apartment. And Israeli soldiers often spat the rage of Jehu on those they considered the Arab-loving, Arab-fucking shiksas of the United Nations and the NGOs.

  "They seem to think Johnnie Walker is an Irish whiskey," Nuala said when they had been passed through the border. "They were on about Johnnie Walker Irish in Lebanon. They had a faceoff with the peacekeeping force there."

  "A few
shells got exchanged, as I remember."

  "An Irishman was killed when they fired on UN positions," Nuala said, "and the IDF said he was drunk. They called the UN Johnnie Walker Irish."

  "How much time did you spend in Lebanon?" Lucas asked. "I've never heard you talk much about it."

  "A few months," she said. "Every day was different, if you know what I mean."

  "I suppose you enjoyed it."

  "I was in the mountains when your battleships were shelling the Druse villages. The USS New Jersey. I didn't enjoy that much."

  Beyond the wire, they crossed into a no man's land of low dry grass and plastic rubbish. Past it on their right were the neat white boxes of an Israeli settlement called Eretz, its approaches overseen by sandbagged emplacements and heralded by the Star of David flag. It was the main road to Gaza City.

  "Do you think you got a line on what was going on there?" Lucas asked.

  "Cold War, wasn't it?" Nuala said brightly. "America defending the Free World against Communism. Israel helping out as usual. The mountains were full of Druse and Muslim Bolsheviks, plotting to nationalize the stock exchange or something. So you sent those battleships."

  "Now I remember," Lucas said. "And the Marines."

  "Bloody murder," Nuala said.

  She was definitely not, he felt sure, referring to the massacre of the U.S. Marine peacekeeping force near Beirut airport. The mountain villages of Lebanon had been shelled by the U.S. Navy, as far as Lucas could remember, because their inhabitants had been perceived as allies of the Syrians, who were allies of the Soviet Union, an evil empire then bent on world domination. The battleship New Jersey had done much of the shelling. Later, some Lebanese Shiites had captured a young American sailor on a highjacked airplane and, learning that he was from New Jersey, burned him for hours with cigarettes before killing him. Perhaps they had confused the state with the battleship, as they confounded their enthusiasm for torture with virility. When the boy was finally dead, they had photographed each other in manly postures, flexing their biceps, flashing amphetamine smiles, then left the film behind. It was the sort of disarming behavior that endeared such types to Mossad and the CIA, whose assassins nevertheless managed to murder a few of the wrong Arabs in revenge for the revenges.

  "Find out anything else?" Lucas asked.

  Nuala was testy. "More about naive American meddling? That was enough."

  The villages had been shelled on behalf of a Lebanese faction that at the time had been perceived as "pro-Western." Since then, the term had become totally meaningless; it had doubtless been fairly meaningless at the time. Lucas had once vaguely understood who the "pro-Western" faction were and how they had figured as "pro-Western." Now he could not quite remember, and it wasn't likely many other Americans could either, least of all the former President who had presumably ordered the shelling.

  "What the hell do you mean, 'anything else'?" she persisted.

  "Oh, you know," Lucas said. "Like was Kahlil Gibran really a good poet?"

  "Please," Sonia said.

  "Kahlil Gibran?" Nuala demanded. Though she suspected him of baiting her, she could hardly resist the subject: her empathy with the Third World and its poets. "Well of course he was. A very great poet indeed. And a great man as well."

  "Really? I always thought his stuff was drivel."

  Rounding on him, Nuala nearly ran their van off the shoulderless road. "How can you be so bloody contemptuous? How dare you?"

  "C'mon, kids," Sonia said. "Let's not fight."

  "The Prophet always sounded like drivel to me," Lucas said. "Maybe I'm mistaken."

  "Oh, Christ," Nuala crooned gently. She was not responding to Lucas. They had all seen the tower of black smoke rising from what seemed to be the center of Gaza City.

  "Should we go around?" Lucas asked.

  "Yes, we better," Nuala said. "Maybe we can skirt around Beit Hanoun."

  "Don't you think we should see what's up?" Sonia asked. "That's sort of what we're here for."

  "I have a delivery for Al-Amal," Nuala said. "I've got to get it through."

  "I think we should go through town," Sonia said. "If they close the roads, we're better off at UNRWA's headquarters."

  Nuala sighed and wiped perspiration from under the line of her dark hair.

  "All right," she said, a little despairingly. "Mind driving, Chris?"

  For no reason that he could see, Lucas walked around the car and took the wheel. He did not care for driving in the Strip, but it seemed only right that he should make himself useful.

  When he pulled out, they followed the main road. On their right, across a set of derelict railroad tracks, appalling hovels of mud brick, cement and corrugated iron stretched as far as one was inclined to look, in a welter of cooking fires and strung laundry. Knots of grim children stared at the van.

  "Where are we?" Lucas asked.

  "Jabalia camp," Nuala said.

  "There's gonna be an IDF checkpoint at Jabalia town," Sonia said. "Slow down."

  The checkpoint appeared around a curve and consisted of piled sandbags, razor wire and two jeeps with mounted machine guns. Lucas's sudden braking and its attendant squeal sent the soldiers there into combat mode. When the van had stopped, he saw an armored personnel carrier and another jeep in the dunes some distance off the road, ready with covering fire for the checkpoint. The men in the vehicles were sighting down the guns, a trigger's weight from welding Lucas and his passengers to the upholstery. Behind the wheel, he took a deep breath and closed his eyes.

  For a moment no one advanced from the checkpoint. Then a blond young soldier, hatless but in a flak jacket, moved out, his weapon held chest high. His comrades were covering him, watchful. The young soldier took a quick angry look at the UN logo and the van's passengers.

  "You got a fucking problem? Going so fast?" He had a slight Slavic accent.

  Another soldier advanced from the barrier—an officer, Lucas thought, but it was hard to tell with the Israelis. While the first soldier backed away, rifle cocked, the officer put out a stiff hand for their papers.

  "Where to?" he asked when he had inspected the documents.

  "Al-Amal," Nuala said.

  The officer looked at her curiously and checked a list secured to his guard belt. It was as though he had been told to expect her. Then he took note of the others.

  "Lukash?" He looked at Lucas's press credentials. "Sonia Barness?"

  "Barnes," she said. They had a brief exchange in Hebrew and he waved them forward to the barrier. The APC rumbled forward to let them pass.

  "Drive slower," Sonia said to Lucas. "Just a suggestion."

  "Good thought," he said. "What did he say to you?"

  "He said have a nice day. More or less."

  "What do you think he meant by that?" Nuala asked.

  "Hard to say," Sonia said. When Lucas turned around she winked at him. How cool she was, he thought. "I think he was wishing us luck."

  Jabalia town was a collection of shapeless stone buildings with a marketplace by the side of the road. At its principal intersection a knot of Muslim women turned toward their van and began to cheer. Lucas was astonished.

  "We appear to be the good guys," he said.

  "Good guys," Nuala said scornfully.

  "It's the car," Sonia told him.

  And indeed, as they drove deeper into Gaza City they passed more people—cloth-swathed women carrying babies, market workers, schoolchildren—who briefly turned from the column of black smoke that increasingly blotted out the desert sky to wave and applaud.

  "The car?" he asked.

  "It's a UN van, remember."

  "Of course," he said.

  Driving through crowds that cheered them, Lucas became exhilarated. Their innocent, earnest van displayed twin pictures of the great world itself, portrayed from its nonconfrontational polar perspective, wreathed in boughs of peace. And people were actually waving. Take up the good guy's burden, he thought. Something new.

  "Slow down," N
uala said, "because we're getting into it." She spoke quite deliberately. "If the army asks you where you're going, tell them Al-Azhar Road."

  There were a great many people in the street as they inched the van forward. No one was cheering any longer. Now Lucas could catch the stench of the burning rubber, and with it another smell, a sweet skunky musk not immediately unpleasant but charged with something dangerous and unreasonable. Tear gas. It reminded him of Easter in the rain.

  "Keep going," Nuala said. "Maybe we can make Al-Azhar."

  "Everyone all right?" Lucas asked.

  "We're fine," the women said together.

  Around the next corner, a shabby concrete mosque thrust its angular minaret from among the rickety shapeless buildings around it. An amplified voice, transcendent with anger, sounded from the tower, echoing in the empty spaces below. Now they could hear shouts and shattering glass and the rattle of stones against pitted walls. From nearby came the explosive thud of launched grenades. Smoke, blended with the bitter gas, drifted before the windshield and Lucas rolled the windows up.

  At an intersection, a crowd of women in blue robes were carrying on, wailing, raising fists to heaven. Some wrapped their headdresses over their mouths, less from piety, it seemed, than because of the fumes. When they saw the UN van, they all ran toward it.

  Lucas slowed to a roll. Outside, the women pounded on the roof of the van, on the hood, the windows.

  "Stop," Sonia said. When he stopped, she and Nuala got out and were engulfed by shrieking women. A few of them went around to the driver's side to shout at Lucas. Out of politeness, although the gas and the smoke were getting bad, he lowered the window. A woman reached in and scratched his face with her nails. Their sheer frenzy set his head spinning and dimmed his vision. He was stunned, vertiginous, stained with their tears.

  "Go," Sonia said as she and Nuala climbed back in the van. "They've shot a kid, I think."

  The heart of the thing itself was a block away. Out of the smoke came a chanting, howling gang of teenagers, boys in ragged hand-me-downs—Purdue sweatshirts, ripped sweaters and khakis. There were three or four dozen. The youngest among them might have been twelve, the oldest around seventeen, and they were straining to support the slender, supine body of a youth like themselves. The young man they carried was fuzzy-lipped and deathly pale, his eyes were milky and unfocused, his teeth bared and set. He was bleeding from the ear.