by Robert Stone
Maybe she was smart and funny. Certainly always on the lookout for the right guy to take her out of the life. Like a lot of whores, she tended toward religion. So along comes Jesus Christ, Mr. Right with a Vengeance, Mr. All Right Now! Fixes on her his hot, crazy eyes and she's all, Anything, I'll do anything. I'll wash your feet with my hair. You don't even have to fuck me.
You had to wonder what she'd make of her picture on the wall times seven. Amusing to show her around the place. What do you think, kid? Like it? Everybody remembers you and your old gang. We talk about you all the time.
And all the time, the rosaries resounded nearby.
"Contemplez-vous, mes frères et mes soeurs, les mystères glo-rieux. Le premier mystère: la Résurrection de Notre Seigneur."
They were to meditate, s'il vous plait, on the resurrection. The rosary, school, the Magdalen. It got him thinking about his mother. She would surely have been delighted by a resurrection.
She had died on the young side, still in her fifties, of what was, to her, an unmentionable cancer. She had winced to talk about it, not because it was fatal—she had never believed in death—but because it was breast cancer, and her combination of superstition, prudery and vanity had kept her from doctors and eventually killed her. She was the type for the disease: unmarried, with only one child, and not that much of a sexual history. A nonsmoker, because she had been a professional singer from her teens, but a bit of a lush, favoring rare brandies and champagne, though except for the breasts she kept her figure to the end.
She had studied in Europe, she liked European men, blossomed under their compliments. Her musical sense of measure rendered her at ease in the presence of formality; she liked a formal occasion and liked the undoing of it that made it fun in the first place. She was a wonderful dancer.
Herr Professor Doctor Lucas, of Mainz and the Humboldt University in Berlin and Columbia, was the man for her. Of course he was married. It was wrong, but she refused to worry and she had wanted a child so much. So voilà sits that homunculus himself, still intact, if a bit conflicted, in the Magdalen chapel in the middle of the world. He was neither a musician like his mother nor a scholar like his father. He believed, though, that he had inherited a number of their separate qualities. Self-doubt, impatience, bad judgment, a sumptuary nature, a drinking problem, a bald spot.
I should say a prayer for her, he thought. She had been a great one for prayer, drunk or sober.
A free spirit, a fun-lover full of dire predictions and grim proverbs she used as expletives in times of stress. "A moment's mirth to wail a week." She had liked that one. And, more folksily, "Sing before breakfast, weep before dinner."
But she also said, seeming very pleased with herself, "Smart men often like to cook." The professor doctor was no mean hand in the kitchen. His wife never cooked. Sometimes he took Lucas's mother to Voisin. Sometimes he came and cooked for them.
And never songs so sweet as the songs with which she sung him to sleep, everything from Gaelic ditties to lieder to Don Carlos. The two of them, Lucas and his mother, Gail Hynes, a not unknown mezzo-soprano, lying in the dark, she singing and he swooning, yes swooning, on her breast. And his only rival the professor doctor, whose tread might sound on the stair, come to lure her away with the honey of Lucas's own generation. And later, in the fourth grade, the bad school and the Jew business.
He could remember the last of her, encoffined. Very happy she looked, rosy as life under the cross Father Herzog served, on all that satin, amid all those flowers in the gold dress the professor doctor liked. As though she had died without a mark on her, her skin as milky white as the princess Isolde's, her fine high cheekbones emphasized and just a hint of the boozy swelling under her chin.
Only to be conveyed to St. Raymond's Cemetery and buried in that hateful, mean, black ground stinking of consumption and Irish spite, surrounded by the dwellings of cops and grafting school janitors, beside her parents, Grace and Charlie, and her alcoholic little brother, James John. How could anyone imagine the professor doctor in such a place, among those dead? But he went, while the family eyed him. Her rich Jewish lover, a bloody tycoon, a mogul, a banker, a merchant prince. Cocked their gray eyes on him—her eyes, the eyes Lucas had brought to see Jerusalem—and smiled the sympathetic smile of a conquered race, and went home and moaned of their humiliation.
That night, his father, who was merely a spendthrift Columbia professor, took Lucas to his club.
"We have both suffered a terrible loss. I loved her very much. I don't know if you can know, at your age, how it was. She was more to me than I thought possible."
How much did you think possible? Lucas had wanted to ask. But he had only met his father's gaze with affirming gravity.
"I hope that you feel affection for me. You are my son. I have always loved you."
Then Lucas, drunk on the club's martinis, had answered with the words he thought the moment demanded.
"I love you too, Carl."
It sounded like the movies, only worse. So embarrassing and inappropriate. Had the waiter heard? Yet it was strange. His father so solicitous and behaving just as he had behaved with Lucas's mother. But Lucas loved his father, who was obtuse but, all in all, sort of lovable.
"I'm all right," Lucas had said. "I mean, I'm an adult." Thinking: Want to play Claudius to my Hamlet, Carl?
At their next meeting they talked about Shakespeare, which Carl adored but which Lucas believed his father imperfectly understood. Lucas had a secret theory that Carl sometimes missed the point of things, owing to his latter-day English. Carl believed he spoke better English than anyone in America.
"Do you think Claudius might have been Hamlet's father all the time?"
"I like it," said Carl, "and the ghost from hell, yes? But Shakespeare would have told us. Anyway, don't ask me, dear boy—it's a young man's play."
Funny, Lucas now thought in the Holy Sepulchre. Hamlet's father's ghost from hell? It was like the serpent preaching liberation in the Garden.
Lucas's father, late in life, was only gradually giving up the notion of a homosexual conspiracy—whose original founder was Senator Joseph McCarthy—to rule the world. Lee Harvey Oswald had been involved.
"I always assume you're not homosexual," his father had said. "Is it so?"
Lucas had laughed at him. "Jesus Christ, if I was gay, don't you think you'd know it? Hey, what is it, Carl? My show-tune records? My walk?"
Then later, the girl Lucas was sleeping with, a Barnard student who waited tables at Mikal's, had told him, "You know, your father made like a serious pass at me?"
"That prick! Report him."
"What? Are you kidding?"
"I'm kidding," Lucas had said. "He's a great old dude. Only don't sleep with him."
At the memorial for Gail Hynes, they had put up a photograph of her lifted from a Town Hall poster twenty years old. In it she appeared not only beautiful but radiant, eyes high, as though she were beholding the spheres and about to sing their music. Seeing the picture on its tripod at the front of the hall, Lucas knew at once the quality of the moment it captured. In a second, she would dissolve in giggles. She always looked at her most spiritual at the point of breaking up. Onstage giggles had been a problem with her. And at the same service, they played her rendering of The Song of the Earth. Abschied. The dying fall, her sad reluctant surrender of life. Echoing, as over some still, melancholy alpine lake. Abschied. Abschied. Rapture. Only the dying Kathleen Ferrier had done it better. Carl had rashly insisted on having it played. Whereupon, needless to say, everyone present had totally lost his or her shit. Orgiastic weeping had ensued. A few pure fans had mixed with the mourners; people were fond of her.
Resurrection, he thought among the flickering tapers of Christ's Tomb, how it would surprise and delight her. How well she would carry it off, with a formal bearing and a delighted smile, in the gold dress, completely concealing her distress at discovering herself in Queens. It would please her so much to be alive again.
&nbs
p; Then, above the cadences of the rosary, he heard the echoing report of a sliding bolt and the crash of wood against stone. The main door had been opened and the vigil was over. He walked toward the gray morning light. Spilling across the stone floor, it caught columns of whirling dust and smoke. Instead of going out, he stopped by the Stone of Unction and looked toward the chapels of Calvary.
The believers liked to think that Christ had been crucified there and that Calvary was the tomb of Adam.
"Since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead.... And so it is written, The first man Adam was made a living soul; the last Adam was made a quickening spirit." It sounded a bit like De Kuff.
He went into the street, where the air was fresh and dewy, the chill mountain air of Jerusalem as yet unsullied by exhaust fumes. From the Haram just up the street, the call to prayer resounded, and he thought, I will never get out of this crazy place.
Would he trade his sanity for faith? Only in Jerusalem. Elsewhere, faith wouldn't get you on the metro, the vaporetto, the IRT. But in Jerusalem, not so. You could walk everywhere, there was plenty of time—eternity, in fact. If he stayed, he thought, he knew what might be coming. He was aware of a certain slide, a slackening of the critical faculties. He had taken to meditating on phenomenology, pursuing phantom temptresses, conversing with German elves. He was drinking too much. Hearing Sonia doing "If you want to hear my song, you have to come with me."
The company in which Lucas walked to the Pool included junkies and lunatics of every age and nation. Half of them had spent the night in the Holy Sepulchre and would spend dawn at Bethesda, meditating on the mysteries of the rosary, the attributes of Allah, the sefirot. Such self-confidence they all had! Such single-mindedness. Lucas was in awe of them as he stood by the doors of St. Anne's to watch them pass. The light in their eyes was not their own.
Then all at once his breath seemed to have been drawn out of his body, sucked up and out, as napalm was said to dissolve its victims' oxygen. He staggered off the cobblestones and leaned against a doorway near the Monastery of the Flagellation. Terror seized him. It was as if he had not found, would never find, his way out of that ghastly church.
How? How could anyone believe that there was a covenant and a redemption to come, that this parched crescent of fundamental desire and loss, this most uneasy bargain of a place, could be called The Holy? Its monster of a God had effortlessly, fondly formed the fleet carnivorous lizard, the eyelids of morning, the submersible, red-eyed rage of Behemoth. His symbol was the crocodile. He was the crocodile.
The place he had wandered into, apostate wayward Christian, wandering Jew. It was lousy with prayers, in the mosques, in the reconstructed Temple to come, in the flickering crackhouse light of the church—all of them, behind their talk of mercy, nursing bloody vindicating covenants. Dominion of the blood and the sepulchre. The first shall be last, the crooked straight, universal revenge.
Land of the dear Lord who favored tornadoes for transport, and you just had to believe in Him, the old charmer, on all those sunless, chirpy mornings with a solid insect horizon. He did it all for the improving terror of the least of his devoted servants, of course. Then he lacked the class even to keep from boasting about it to them in the depths of their despair.
But in the invisible roaring giant of this land we must believe, the dread Ancient One. Blessed be He for being as close as the fucked universe came to love or mercy. This Alice in Wonderland character on the throne of being, a cosmic psychopath in a spinning layered chariot, all we have to love, worship, cherish in the world beyond ourselves, our maws, our own orifices.
And the land itself had to be believed in, famous for its election among the nations, its stone bread and harsh rectitude and the mute stone witnesses that stood in its deserts attesting thereof. But redemption? Worshipful? Holy?
Not me, Lucas thought. Non serviam.
After a while, he felt a little better. He had parked his Renault on Saladin Street, up on the sidewalk, Israeli style. Only a few feet from the car, he saw that his rear window had been smashed and the paint around it was blackened and blistered. Someone had hit it during the night, maybe because of the yellow plates, maybe because someone had seen him park and wanted a relationship.
"Aw, fuck," Lucas said. He looked around but there was no one in sight. "Diphtheria, you little rat." Diphtheria Steiner, Diphtheria von Heilige Land, a wee Nazi djinn.
"Diphtheria, you baby demon moppet, you evil little bitch," he said to the air. "You trashed my car!"
38
DID YOU KNOW the Black Panthers?" Linda asked when they had cleared the Beit Hanoun checkpoint.
"I was still a kid in the days of the Panthers," Sonia said.
"But didn't you admire them?"
Sonia was nervous and unhappy at finding herself in the Gaza Strip with Linda Ericksen, hostage to her own promise to provide safe transportation.
"The Panthers weren't one thing, Linda. It wasn't like you were talking about the CP or the CIA. They were street guys. One man was sometimes very different from another. Different chapters went different ways. A lot of times they'd been infiltrated. There was manipulation and doublecross. But, yeah," she said, breaking into a smile, "I admired them then. They were beautiful. Some of them were very bad."
"You mean baaad," said Linda with merry complicity.
"Well, I mean that," Sonia said, "but I also mean bad. If you ever heard the tape of them torturing Alex Rackley in New Haven, I don't think you'd like it."
"But you can't tolerate informers, can you? You have to be that way to combat infiltration, right?"
The day before, Linda had announced that a few members of Abu Baraka's special squad were ready to speak for the record and she had been delegated to arrange a meet. Sonia had called Ernest Gross, who was away at a conference, and also Lucas, who was not at his apartment; she had succeeded in reaching only machines. But the prospect of a statement from Abu Baraka's men seemed worth the risk, and she could hardly let an innocent like Linda set off to record it. Now, driving by the smoldering garbage of Jabalia, she was having regrets.
"I can't make those decisions. That's why I'm not a revolutionary."
"I thought you were close to the Communists."
"Really? Who told you that?"
"I can't remember," Linda said, shifting in her seat. "I don't know. I inferred it."
"Yeah," said Sonia. "I was born that way."
Slowing to let a knot of children cross the road, Sonia considered her history as a red-diaper baby and suddenly remembered one of her mother's stories. She found herself smiling into the children's hard, curious stares as it came to her. The night of the Rosenbergs' execution, her mother had taken Sonia's older sister, Fran, to Union Square in her carriage. They had arrived just as the cops had turned off the protest rally's sound system. Then there had been a rush, the cops shoving the crowd back toward the Fifteenth Street pillars, and Helen, her mother, had picked Fran up and run with her like a football toward Fourteenth Street, and the carriage had been pushed along by the milling crowd, Odessa-steps style, Fran liked to say. And that was the last they saw of the baby carriage—a fifty-dollar carriage from Macy's, and some Bowery bum had undoubtedly appropriated it to collect his deposit bottles. Later, she could remember coming home from first grade to hear her parents arguing over Khrushchev's secret speech of several years earlier.
When the last kid was across the road, she started up the Land Rover again. For some reason, the UN insignia seemed not to be working its magic. Everyone who passed, even the children, seemed tense and hostile.
"And you were in Cuba," Linda said.
"Yup."
"Didn't they send you to Africa? Didn't they try to use your ... background?"
"How do you mean?"
"Oh, I don't know. Look, I don't mean to be cross-examining you. I think everything you did is wonderful."
"Like what did I do?"
Linda laughed again. "It seems to me that you'
ve spent your life working for people. And you're still doing it."
"People," Sonia repeated. " The people. But I'm not still doing it, Linda. Just trying to get my own head straight." She scanned the distance for any concentration of smoke that might indicate a disturbance. The car was equipped with a radio this time, and she raised UN headquarters in Gaza City for the traffic and riot report. The UN duty officer was a Canadian whose voice she failed to recognize.
"I'm headed for Nuseirat," Sonia told him. "I have Miss Ericksen of the Israeli Human Rights Coalition, a U.S. national. How's my road?"
"Might have a few problems. Nothing up your way as yet. You'll have one checkpoint on the inland road. Check in if you go past Deir el-Balah. Who are you, by the by?"
"I'm Sonia Barnes, U.S. national. I'm a Communist."
Both the Canadian duty officer and Linda got a kick out of that. The Canadian seemed to think it less funny than Linda did. "Eh?" he inquired.
"I hope you know what you're doing," Sonia said to Linda. "I owe folks for the use of this vehicle. I'd hate to see them get in trouble."
"It's all arranged," Linda said.
"I have to tell you, I wish Ernest hadn't been out of town."
"It's a unique opportunity," Linda said. "Our informant said he had pictures and everything else. I brought a video camera."
"You know," Sonia said, "I haven't been very active on this side of things lately. I've been helping friends."
"Yes, that wonderful-looking Mr. De Kuff. He seems so spiritual. That must be inspiring."
Sonia had a quick glance at her passenger. Linda was smiling so enthusiastically, she seemed not to see the cinderblock hovels and the soiled canvas flaps or smell the foul smoke and the pit toilets.