by Robert Stone
Sometimes, he thought—pitying the old man, himself and the ragged circle of believers—it was so hard to believe that there had ever been or would ever be anything resembling redemption or reconciliation under Jerusalem's heaven. Anything at all but that rich, indifferent blue, the first and holiest of unresponding skies. But behind it the sages had discovered the ayin, the substance wherein holiness itself was concealed and that Raziel, for all his confusion, believed in absolutely, joyfully.
But in the end, he had needed drugs again to realize it and to believe—to be at once Jew and Christian, Muslim and Zoroastrian, Gnostic and Manichean. The creed he had worked out was antinomian. He himself, in his heart, was not antinomian enough to be the priest of so contradictory a sacrifice, not depraved enough or magus enough to bring the process to fruition. And he had constantly to conceal the violent aspect of the plan from De Kuff, from Sonia, even from himself in the midnight hours.
Like the fighting Zionists, he had believed in the imminence of the final redemption. The signs had come. Even the charlatans of the House of the Galilean subscribed to that, or pretended to. Raziel did not in fact think that it would come to violence. He had believed there would be intercession, although the forms of violence had to be employed. Now he could feel it all dissipating into illusion.
Finally, he supposed what he worshiped was the butterfly, the sweet blood butterfly that spread its motherly wings against the window of his needle. It was all that could raise his sick, impoverished, tied-off heart. The thing had failed, but he had not the courage to tell them. Above all, he could not face De Kuff. He watched his own blood in the glass.
How lovely, how symmetrical, the lovely language, the Torah, the dreams of the Nazarenes. He had been an athlete of perception. Now, perhaps, it was all almost over.
51
EXHAUSTED, driving the rented Ford Taurus, Lucas overtook them at a campsite run by Kibbutz Nikolayevich Alef. It was one of the oldest kibbutzim in the country, dating from Ottoman times. Until 1967 it had been practically astride the Jordanian border and subject to regular attacks. Once it had been on fire with conflicting ideologies, but it had survived all and become a kind of country town. Part of it still subscribed to the old kibbutz collectivism, part of it functioned on the principle of a moshav.
Nikolayevich Alef was surrounded by orchards and fields of sugar cane and streams beside which papyrus grew. Lucas was glad to leave the Dead Sea road for its shade and birdsong. He found De Kuff and his followers in the dining hall, eating by themselves. A nearby table full of teenage girls watched them in desperately suppressed merriment, exchanging hilarious whispers at the pilgrims' appearance. The girls bit their lips and pressed their faces into the Formica tabletops so as not to be caught laughing.
De Kuff and his followers were definitely a scene, but few others in the huge cafeteria-style place paid them any attention. Most of the residents were commuters, to Tiberias and Jerusalem, professionals and civil servants, men dining alone or married couples, both of whom sat with their briefcases at their side.
The kibbutz did not keep a kosher dining hall, and the special of the day was shrimp. Lucas thought it looked institutionally overcooked and was probably frozen. De Kuff and Raziel ate theirs with enthusiasm. Sonia had salad. The Marshalls also ate shrimp, wearing their hats and looking grim. They ate the fried tails along with the rest.
It might be said now that among the group there was neither Jew nor Gentile, male nor female, bond nor free. A circus. But at Kibbutz Nikolayevich Alef their circus was more comical than scandalous. At one end of their table were Sister van Witte, eating slowly, her hands crippled with arthritis; Helen Henderson, the Rose, blowing her nose in a tissue; the awful Walsing brothers; and the unlikely Fotheringill, who had brought some bread and cheese to share. At the other end sat Sonia, Raziel, old De Kuff and sad Gigi Prinzer, sipping her kibbutz orange drink.
Standing in the doorway of the dining hall, Lucas was moved by the sight of them. He tried to remember how long he had known them all. A few months, no more.
Raziel looked up and saw him. He said something to Sonia. She pushed her plate aside and came to him.
"You got my note," she said. "You went to Stanley's."
"Yes. We have to talk."
She looked at him with some concern. "You're all fucked up, you know that? You look sick and you look tired."
"Scared," Lucas said.
"Come in and eat something," she said.
"I don't like cafeteria food," Lucas said. "Not since the Belmont closed."
"Where was that?"
"Twenty-eighth Street, I think. It's been a while."
They went out into the sweet-smelling garden. Azaleas bloomed.
"We're in trouble. I've been to see Ernest and I've been to see Sylvia."
"I was afraid we might be," she said. She seemed, to Lucas, more calm and composed than she had any right to be. "Is it over Gaza? Or the Haram story?"
"I still don't really know."
"What do they say?"
"That Nuala and Rashid are in very bad trouble. And that we're better off because we connect with Raziel. By the way," he asked her, "have you by chance asked our young leader if his revelation involves some ... some mishap at the Temple Mount?"
She laughed uncertainly.
"Well, no. But it wouldn't, would it? I mean, Raziel is an ex-junkie and all, but he's a gentle guy. And you don't think the Rev is some kind of bomber, do you?"
"No," Lucas said. "But I thought it might be worth asking. Just on an unlikely notion, sort of."
"You want me to ask him?"
"Yes," Lucas said. "Because it seems to me that ... if history is going to be resolved, the rebuilding of the Temple should figure in it."
"We don't think that way, Chris. That's not our way of seeing things."
"Ask him anyway," Lucas said. He sat down on the mess hall steps. "Is there somewhere I can sleep?"
"I'm in a bungalow with Sister van Witte," she said. "You can sleep with us, I guess."
"OK," Lucas said. When she started back inside, he called her. "Sonia! What did he say to you when I came in?"
"Who, Raziel? When?"
"When I came in, while you were all eating. He said something to you when he saw me."
"Oh," she said. "Well, you know how he is. Always sort of scheming. He said to get you to come with us. Up the mountain."
"Right," said Lucas. "Scheming."
When Lucas had gone to put his gear in the bungalow, Sonia approached Raziel outside the mess hall.
"Razz?"
"Yo," said Brother Raziel.
"Just around like, you haven't heard anything about, well, about some plan for destroying the mosques on the Temple Mount?"
Raziel did not seem surprised. "Did Chris ask you to ask me that?"
"He did, actually. There seems to be some plot like that around."
"There always has been," Raziel said. "Goes back a long way. In Jerusalem people are always tearing something down to build something else in its place. Back to the Babylonians, right? The Ninth of Av. Pull down one temple, put up another. Pull down their guy, put up our guy. Pull down the temple, put up the church. Pull down the church, put up the mosque. Profane the sacred. Sanctify the secular. Goes on and on."
"But we have nothing to do with one, right? These plots have nothing to do with us, do they?"
"Sonia," Raziel said. "We aren't here to destroy anything physical. The change that involves us is spiritual. It's a transformation in kind. A miracle. Regardless of what people may have heard. Or what they think."
"So you're telling me," she said, "that I'm right about that, yes? We have nothing to do with any destruction of the mosques?"
"I give you my word, Sonia. Not one of us will harm a human soul. Not one of us will harm another's property. I swear it. Is that good enough?"
It was getting dark. They heard the teenagers laughing at them from the direction of the communal swimming pool.
"Yes," she said. "Of course it is."
52
AT THE AIRPORT in Cyprus, Nuala and Rashid were picked up by the man they were told would meet them. His name was Dmitri, and because the deal involved Russian friends of Stanley's, they had expected a Russian. But Dmitri was a Greek Cypriot, a small, wrinkled man with a long, comically fluted nose. He was also less cosmopolitan in appearance than they had expected. He was dressed like a village artisan, with a stained old-fashioned English tweed cap.
Dmitri took Rashid's cloth bag; Nuala was wearing her backpack. At first they could get no English out of him, which for a Greek Cypriot was absurd.
When the car weaved its way through town, left the coast road and headed north, then turned off again, she complained.
"Just a mo, Dmitri," she said. "Could we ask you where we're meeting our friends. I thought it would be in Larnaca."
According to her sense of Cypriot geography, they were headed toward the mountains and the border with Turkish territory.
"Road to Troulli, madame," Dmitri said. "But you will not be going all the way there. Your friends are at the monastery."
Nuala looked into the darkness. The headlights caught tiers of cactus plants in flower along the road.
"A road to no-town, they say in Ireland," she told Rashid.
"They are secretive and they know their business. It's best." If he did not sound completely confident, neither did he sound frightened. Nuala decided to keep a weather eye on Dmitri.
They took a left fork from the main road, and before long there was hardly any road at all. Dmitri stopped the car at a cattle grid. Like a chauffeur, he got out and walked around to her side and opened the door. After a moment's hesitation, the two of them stepped out onto the muddy road, invisible beneath their feet.
"It is ekklesia. Temenos. It is Ayios Yeorios."
About a hundred yards up the sloping path, a lamp showed, disappeared, showed again. Nuala turned back and saw Dmitri standing beside his car. The motor still turned; the headlights made two reassuring columns of light. The beams widened bravely in the darkness until their rays scattered among the tiny night-winged creatures that flitted against her cheek. There were cicadas and the smell of cows and manure, a country smell that, except for the piney bitterness of sage and scrub oak, reminded her of home.
"They wait," Dmitri called up to her. "Russki."
"It is OK," Rashid said. "Yes! I see it's OK."
She looked for his face in the darkness and saw his jaw thrust out, his arms raised. When he took her hand, she felt in his touch the show of manhood, the straining of his muscles summoning courage. As they walked on, she suddenly knew that they were going to die in the darkness ahead. For a moment she wanted to run—she could run fast, had learned to run in her dusty boots over the dry ground of the Middle East. Fighting the revolution, living to fight another day. But she did not run.
"Well," she said, "we're together."
"Yes," he said. "See? It is OK."
They closed in on the dark buildings, and the beam of the flashlight probed and withdrew to a red glow where men stood.
"Salaam aleikum," a voice said.
And happily, Rashid replied, "Wa aleikum salaam." He knit his fingers in hers. "Yes. These are Russians."
He seemed so sure. Yet she thought there was something strange about the old familiar greeting coming from Russians, from men who were associates of Stanley's or Party comrades.
"Madame," the same Russian voice said, "come with us please."
Come with us please but there was no church, no temenos. It was just a stable. Half hypnotized, she held on to Rashid's hand and followed the glowing translucent shield around the torch in the man's hand that swayed as he walked ahead of them. Then they were under a stone roof and for a moment she saw the stars through a lancet window and mixed with the other smells was a smell of old stone and faint incense so that it might have been a church once, a long time before.
Then Rashid pulled his hand away and she stood alone, not comprehending. Then the sudden sounds of struggle. Yet she stood alone, untouched. And then he shouted and she thought, It shall be rain tonight. Let it come down.
And when the knee went into the small of her back and the hand over her mouth, she still heard his boyish, boastful curses and threats, his posturing. In part, she knew it was for her benefit. A doctor, a Communist, a leader of his people, her life's love and still, in the Arab way, a favored son, a boy who could not, even in extremis, stop performing.
There were several men and they shone the light on her. Her arms were pulled tightly back, and over her head they forced some kind of canvas harness. When she resisted, they twisted her arms without mercy until both were bent at the elbow, paralyzed behind her.
"Nuala!" Rashid shouted. He had never learned to say her name correctly.
"Yes," she said. "Here, my love." And she threw her head back and shouted, "Rashid!"
While they called each other's names she was lifted, with strange gentleness by the elbows. There were two men, one at each arm. They carried her up a flight of stone steps, and through the lancet window she briefly saw the stars again. Then the men in whose hands she was turned her away from the window and she saw that she was on a ledge. There seemed to be hay on its hard stone floor. But perhaps it had been a church, the choir loft.
"Rashid!" she shouted. He called back to her. For a moment—maybe she had been encouraged by the gentleness with which they had lifted her—she wanted to address the unseen men who had made her prisoner. Then, when the noose was set around her neck, she knew it had been the gentleness of hangmen, an executioner's discretion. They were roping her ankles together.
It was a dirty, terrifying place to die. One of the men said something to her, but she was too frightened to understand. She heard Rashid call her name again, and he too now sounded afraid.
"Rashid!" she called, hardly able to speak. Her throat was dry, the rope tightened around her neck. She struggled against fear as she had struggled against the harness that held her. Here we are, my love, she thought. She could not tell him it was over. More than anything she wanted him with her, his courage not to fail him in that awful place. Because they were both people of the conquered world, and the gallows that had finally come for them had shadowed all the history of their peoples. "Be brave, my love!"
He called on God.
"Power to the people," she said, although she knew the phrase she had chosen to die uttering had become a joke. "You have been naught," she tried to say, tried to think it. "You shall be all."
Such a dirty, fearsome place. Then she was swinging free and breath was all she cared about, all, it seemed, she had ever cared about, the air of that filthy-smelling place, but there was none to be had. So with her breath all the thoughts of her devotion were expunged while the angry men stood watching her in the beam of their light and she wondered if she would ever ever die and then a deeper darkness, in its mercy, came.
PART THREE
53
HIS BED HAD a comforter, and he woke to the sun through lace curtains and a chorus of warblers in the eucalyptus grove outside.
The bungalow was empty, the other beds in it made up. He found Sonia sitting on a child's swing in the eucalyptus grove, shielding her eyes to see him against the morning sun.
"Want breakfast?" she asked him.
He shook his head. "Where is everyone?"
"Raziel and the Rev left for the Golan with the Rose. She's young and strong and she helps out, and it might keep her out of harm's way. The rest of the gang is staying here. We rented them a couple of bungalows. I'm waiting for you."
"Waiting for me to do what, Sonia?"
"We're going up the mountain."
"Really? And what do we do when we get there?"
"I sing. You listen. You're a reporter, are you not? You protect me. Then, if everything works out, we go to Jerusalem."
He turned away from her and saw Fotheringill, working under the hood of a sixties-era Volvo, talkin
g to himself.
"You seem hesitant," Sonia said, taking Lucas by the hand. "Got any other ideas?"
"I guess not," he said.
When they were on the road in his rental car, Lucas asked, "What does he think he's going to do in the mountains?"
"He has to meditate before he makes the last..."
"Pronouncement?" Lucas suggested. "Revelation?"
"Yes, that's right. And then go back to Jerusalem, because it's written that he pass from out of Dan."
He glanced at her from behind the wheel. There was no irony in what she said; she still believed. Sooner or later it would have to end, he thought. Then, when the lights came on, what would be left of her? As for himself, by now he wanted it not to end. He wanted them both to be subsumed in ongoing mystery.
"Perception is functional," he said. "That's true, isn't it? Things aren't defined by what we see every day, are they? What we see every day could be false consciousness."
"That's the spirit," Sonia said. "Now you're getting it. Anyway, the Rev needs me. He said he did. And I want you to come."
Before long they were passing the shops and hotels of Tiberias. There was a small amusement park along the Lake of Kinneret. Shy Arab families wandered uncertainly among the rides. Lucas noticed that the women wore bandannas and mantillas instead of chadors.
"Christians," Sonia said.
"That's the South Lebanon Army on R & R. This is where they come."