Damascus Gate

by Robert Stone

  "Do you?" Lucas asked her again. Sonia kept looking at the river. "Do you believe him?"

  "Out of these shells we build," Raziel said. "Trust those who know. Out of this confusion, out of this ugliness, a love supreme, Sonia."

  "I wanted it," she said to Lucas. "I want it so much. But it's bullshit. It's trayf."

  "Forget it," Lucas told her.

  "So you see the angel Sandalfon," Raziel said. "We've studied this. The world of shells, Gentile women, idolatry, the man who's been to Rome. The death of the whore. Violence."

  "The death of...? What violence?" Lucas asked. "You sound like the guys at Kfar Gottlieb. Are you?"

  "Them?" Raziel laughed. "They have no part in what's to come. No more than the fools at the House of the Galilean. The pre-millenarians, the post-millenarians. But they're necessary and they're going to do what's necessary."

  "And what now?" Sonia asked.

  "Our king goes to the city, and we go following."

  "Almost in time for Christmas," Lucas said. Sonia clung to him.

  The river running beside them still seemed at the point of manifesting a great holiness. Something Lucas felt himself unworthy to see. Something dreadful that he required. He was having trouble letting go of it all. He so wanted to believe.

  "Don't be afraid," Raziel said to them.

  "Oh, that river," Sonia said. "Oh, Jesus! I wish it could take us back."

  "It's the Jordan," Lucas said. I see the god coming up out of the earth, he thought. As though Raziel had raised up the prophet Samuel. If he had, he would be punished for it. But Lucas could not shake off his own terror. The fear of holiness.

  When he looked up the bank, he thought he saw a yeshiva boy in payess, shaking a small, pale fist at him, spitting. A Jewish djinn?

  "How dare you come to this battlefield!" the boy shouted down to him.

  "I hear words in the river," Sonia said.

  De Kuff was having trouble climbing now, sliding on the wet earth and sharp rocks of the gully. And Helen Henderson was hanging back, crying, terrified.

  "Was it this bad?" De Kuff asked Raziel. "Was it like this when I came before?"

  "Yes, my king," Raziel told the Rev. "We have to go up now."

  "Once," the old man said with sudden restraint, "I had a breakdown."

  "It's your tea," Lucas said. "Go lie down."

  De Kuff let Raziel help him along the bank. It was getting stormy and also getting late. It rained briefly. Lucas and Sonia still held each other.

  "We wait. Into the night. Maybe until morning," Raziel told them. "Then we go to the city."

  "If we could get the car nearer," Lucas said, "we could get the old guy out." In the light from the gray sky he tried to read the little Avis map. Perhaps, he thought, they had put themselves back on it. "This road," he said, pointing with his finger, "it goes down the next valley. If it's a road. If it's not a river or a dry wadi. We might get the car closer."

  "I need you," Raziel said to Sonia. "I need you to help me get the Rev up to the car. Regardless of what you may think of me now, I need you."

  "Go ahead," Lucas told her. "Go with him. I'll stay with the Rose."

  "It's not going to work," Raziel said. "I've known for a while. It's going to be spoiled again."

  "If we get over the next ridge," Lucas said, still trying to get the lines on his map to stop quivering, "we might come to the road. And get the car and pick everyone up. It looks closer. Of course, on one of these maps," he said, "it's hard to tell."

  "I don't want everyone to leave us," Raziel said.

  "All right, all right," Sonia told him. "I'll help you get him back to the city. Chris can get the Rose out."

  "I'll meet you at the car," Lucas said to Sonia. "Wait for me."

  "No, no, I'll see you back in town," she said. "I want to take care of it."

  De Kuff was muttering to himself. Lucas went down to where the Rose was cringing, naked now, beside the river. "Be careful," he said to Sonia. "I need you too."

  56

  THE ROSE had taken her clothes off, either in preparation for baptism or out of an ecstatic impulse. She was a tall, muscular girl with angel eyes and a strong jaw. Lucas handed her her clothes one by one and she got back into them.

  "I don't think I want to go up the way we came," she told Lucas. "I'd rather go that way. Where it's open."

  Lucas looked at the Avis map again, unsure whether the area he had marked out on it corresponded in any way to the wilderness they found themselves in.

  "All right," he said. "There might be a road out there. It's bound to go up to the park entrance."

  They spotted a series of partly dry rocks on which to ford the river and teetered across. The Rose, though under the influence of Raziel's tea, was naturally agile and sure-footed. Once across, they hopped from tussock to tussock over a swampy depression until they gained dry ground. Then it was easy going to the top of a ridge—easier for the Rose than for Lucas.

  Below them stood a valley of bones—rocks, really, in mossy granite clusters that looked like dolmens in fairy rings. There was a distant line of struggling trees, olive and tamarisk, below the face of a cliff that marked a spur of the mountains.

  "There are altars in the rock," the Rose told Lucas. "And a waterfall."

  At first he thought she was hallucinating. But when he looked at the rock faces it seemed that he saw niches there, patches of marble against the darker stone.

  "It's supposed to be the birthplace of Pan," he told her. "And the source of the Jordan."

  "Oh, no!" said Helen Henderson. "How far out!"

  He was delighted to have news that improved her spirits. The Banyas spring was on his map and was reassuring—it indicated that they were still in Israel, rather than in Lebanon or Syria.

  "Do you mean," the Rose asked, "that these are the altars of Pan? The Pan?"

  "Yes," Lucas said. "Idolatry and sudden fear. So close to the river Jordan."

  There were, in fact, a great many goats about.

  "Long ago," Lucas said by way of stoned conversation, "a late Latin poet tells us, a mighty voice was heard round the world: 'Great Pan is dead!' it said. Or words to that effect."

  "Oh, no!" said the Rose. She seemed to be taking the news badly. So Lucas said, "Of course the gods never die. And this isn't necessarily Great Pan. This is Banyas Pan." Banyas, it seemed to him, was near a road. His Avis map concurred.

  While Helen contemplated the death of Pan, they set out across the valley toward the line on the map. The part of the way that had looked like desert turned out to be wetland—craterlike marshes filled with rushes, sinkholes caused by the runoff of winter snow from the slopes of Hermon. Other parts were grown with aloe and cactus, so dusty dry it seemed they had never been impinged upon by the smallest rain.

  There were sheep grazing in the grassier sections. Their long, starveling antelope faces peered from within abundant folds of dark, dirty wool. The sheep were all horned, and the horns of male and female alike twisted asymmetrically from narrow skulls. Unmatched and unbalanced, their horns made the sheep look even more unkempt and unhusbanded. Vestigial horns, brittle and useless, good only for trapping their possessors in thorn bushes.

  Wearily they made their way across the marshes, the sinks and the stony places.

  "Where did you meet Raziel?" the Rose asked Lucas.

  "I was writing a book. I interviewed him."

  "And do you believe the things he says?"

  "No. How about you?"

  "I liked listening to the Rev," she said. "He seemed wise and kind. I never understood the things he said. But I'm not clever."

  "You'll be forgiven everything, Helen," Lucas said. "Just keep trucking."

  "I have no regrets," she said.

  "Do you know the story of Uzzah and the Ark? Did they teach you that in Sunday school?"

  "The soldier who was struck dead for touching the Ark of the Covenant? Not too much."

  "Do you think," Lucas asked as they eased
through a marsh with earthen pads crowned with brown cottony plants, "that God told Uzzah to try and save the Ark? Do you think he took him aside, appeared to him in a ring of fire and said: 'Uzzah, today on the way to J-town the Ark will start to fall. And you my beloved Uzzah, you my special lamb, have got to keep it from falling. Otherwise terrible shit will happen to the whole world'?"

  "Goodness," the Rose said. "I have no idea. I've never thought about it."

  After about an hour and a half, they were approaching the tree-line at the border of the Hula Valley, within sound of fast-moving water. Climbing in soft, black-ribboned sand, Lucas happened on a goat that was lying, snakebitten, on its side at the top of a hillock. Its tongue lolled despairingly, its eyes were glazed and spectacularly bloodshot, and it watched with indifference as Lucas approached. Drawing closer, he saw that a large camel spider was feeding at a hair-matted wound in one flank. A swarm of bees crawled over it, wings folded against the rain.

  It made Lucas think of the Holman Hunt, The Scapegoat. Even the landscape was a bit the same.

  There are no metaphors here, he thought. This was whence it all came home, where things themselves resided and the only symbols were the holy letters of a book. He thought all this must constitute a great difficulty. He wanted to talk to Sonia about it.

  Over the next rise, they found themselves looking down at another stream, brown and swollen. The path beside it looked frequently used—a clear, mainly dry track of hard-packed earth supported by a rocky shoulder and crisscrossed with boot prints. On Lucas's roadmap, the stream was indistinguishable from a nearby road.

  After a minute or so they saw headlights and what looked like a decrepit minivan, perhaps a Druse sherut, climbing the mountain switchbacks, its engine laboring harder with each shift of gears. The cliffs on the far side were over a mile away. On the map, among the line of contours that roughly corresponded to the cliffs, the word Banyas appeared in tiny, quivering antique letters.

  The sun, low on the oppressive horizon, broke through the sodden clouds and lit the cliff face ahead of them to a polychrome shimmer.

  Lucas and the Rose stared in wonder at the lovely mountain. There were indeed altars in the cliff face, their contours outlined in the brief sunlight.

  Suddenly the Rose broke into a run.

  "Hey!" called Lucas. "Hey, it's getting late. It's raining."

  "Oh, please," the Rose shouted without breaking her formidable stride. "I've never been here. I've got to see it."

  "Shit," said Lucas, and took after her, panting, dodging sheer rocks and deadfalls. Occasionally he caught sight of her towheaded figure ahead of him, her bright hair bobbing in the rain. She was going to the god. Lucas watched her vanish in the gloom of the small forest of twisted cypress and tamarisk. Gone. Turned into a tree. But after a minute he heard her again.

  "Oh!"

  She had found a place to stand, a moss-grown root that afforded a clear view of the Panic altars in the cliff.

  "Oh!" she said. "I hear it." She looked terror-stricken.

  "You're really scared," Lucas said. "It's probably just the tea." He himself was becoming increasingly uneasy.

  "'Afraid?'" She cried, and laughed. "'Afraid! Of Him?" And what was in her eyes? he wondered. She appeared thoroughly demented. "'O, never, never! And yet—and yet—O, Mole, I am afraid!'"

  Lucas at once understood. They were in The Wind in the Willows. She thought she was Rat encountering Pan, the Piper at the Gates of Dawn. Why not, he thought. What shone in her radiant cornflower eyes was unutterable love. If he tried, Lucas figured, he might hear elfin music.

  Helen Henderson clasped her hands beneath her chin and recited: "'Lest the awe should dwell—And turn your frolic to fret—You shall look on my power at the helping hour—But then you shall forget!'"

  She turned to Lucas. "'Forget, forget.'"

  "Whatever," said Lucas.

  "We sang that at camp," she explained. "We chanted it at Brownies."

  "Fantastic," said Lucas. "And now you're here."

  Israel had something for everybody.

  As they blundered back up the wooded slope, he was amazed by the rough territory they had run across. It was a miracle neither of them had broken a leg.

  An Egged tour bus was coming down the road. When it pulled to a stop beside them and the door opened, Lucas could see that it was only half full.

  "Can you take us?" Lucas asked the driver. "Just up to the park entrance?"

  "But the park is closed," the driver said, "for the war."

  Eventually, overcoming his bureaucratic instinct toward inutility, the driver let them on. The tourists were mostly elderly Gentiles. One of them, an English speaker, found himself sitting next to Helen Henderson.

  "Out in the rain, were you?" he asked. "Seeing the castles?"

  "We forget," she told him.

  When they left the bus at the park entrance, there was no one in sight. A line of cars stood beside the deserted concession stand, including Lucas's Taurus and Raziel's Dodge van. Lucas was surprised to see the yellow Volvo Fotheringill had been driving that morning.

  When they opened the Dodge to get Helen Henderson's second backpack, Lucas found a few sheets of paper under the seat on the passenger side. In the car's overhead light, the sheets seemed imprinted with a building plan of some kind. A series of tunnels and chambers with dimensions and notes in several languages, like the working guide to an archeological dig. On each side was a single Hebrew word.

  Kaddosh. Holy.

  "Know what this is?" he asked the Rose.

  "I don't," she said. "That guy Fotheringill brought them."

  It had gotten dark. There were lights on the road that led down the slopes to Katzrin.

  A vehicle approached, a Border Police jeep. The officer in it lectured them about wandering around unescorted. The park had been secured for the emergency, and only a few authorized tour groups were permitted into the area.

  "I don't know how you got in in the first place," the officer said. "There are sensors and machine guns that fire automatically. There are mine fields. We picked you up on the detectors halfway to the Litani."

  One of the policemen shone a red-banded light on their passports and then into their faces. His beam lingered on Helen's eyes, which were wide, the pupils visibly dilated. She put up a hand to shield them.

  They drove the rented Taurus straight down from the pitch-black peak of Mount Hermon. Lucas discovered that he was still more or less stoned. He assumed this was true of Helen as well.

  "Life is a little like a children's story," he wisely advised the young Rose.

  "Oh," she said, "but life is so hard on children."

  And about that, he thought, she probably knew more than he did.

  "Well," Lucas said, "if it's not The Wind in the Willows, maybe it's Alice in Wonderland."

  "But why Alice in Wonderland?"

  "Well, because Alice in Wonderland is funny. It's funny but it has no justice. Or meaning, or mercy."

  "Right," the Rose said. "But it's got logic. There's a chess game behind it."

  She had him there.

  57

  THEY STOPPED for coffee at Kibbutz Nikolayevich Alef. No one was waiting there for them. Gigi Prinzer had apparently taken the rest of the party down to Ein Kerem. The Rose decided that she would ride back with Lucas.

  "Be careful around Jericho," the young woman in charge of the kibbutz's guest facilities warned them. "It's nighttime and you've got the wrong color plates."

  Miles behind them, on the Jordan road, Sonia was driving the Dodge van southward. Raziel sat beside her. Old De Kuff slept in back. Sonia had been for putting him to bed at the kibbutz, but De Kuff had insisted on being brought to the city without delay. Now the strength was ebbing from him.

  "It's almost out of our hands," Raziel told her.

  "What are you telling me? That it was all some fantasy you drew us into?"

  "It is not a fantasy."

  "Let me ask you something aw
ful," Sonia said. "Are you back on the spike?"

  "You got it," he said.

  "Oh, Razz," she said. "How long?"

  "What I want you to do, baby, is I want you not to cry. You'll remind me of my mother."

  "You know what's funny?" she said. "I gave up everything. Reefer. Martinis. Because of him. Because things would change."

  "I did too, Sonia. I was just as clean a week ago as when I saw you in Tel Aviv."

  "You know what I thought when you loaded that tea, Razz?"

  "You thought I was hustling shmeck?"

  "Like it all came to me. You had the Rev, unlimited funds. Then I find out Nuala's moving for Stanley. Then Linda Ericksen gets religion on us."

  "Our own religion too," Raziel said.

  "Our own religion, because she fucks religions like Nuala fucks the ghost of Che Guevara. And then I hear about the bomb and I think, Who's in the middle of this action? My man Razz, and he's been kicking the gong the whole time and we've been a pack of marks."

  "But you thought wrong, Sonia. I had a miracle in my hand. I quit too. Because things would change."

  "So what happened?"

  "Great things, awful things were happening. It was true, baby. All true. Never let them take that from you."

  "So it wasn't just a hustle?"

  "Just a hustle? Maybe the universe is a hustle. What is this thing called love, you know what I'm saying? I'm telling you the doors would be opened. I'm talking about redemption."

  "You said he had five mysteries to preach. Is that still so?"

  "He's revealed all five. Now he has to accept his identity in the city. But we're running out of time."

  "What do you mean?"

  "I mean I set certain events in motion. I didn't think we could fail. But now I see we're like all the others. We're trapped in history. Losers lose, kid. Story of my life. I had the power but not the strength. Know the difference?"

  "The power," she repeated, trying to understand. As though it would help. "The power but not the strength?"

  She picked up one of the diagrams that were lying all over the van—on the seat, plastered to the mat, behind the sunscreen. "This is your friends' diagram of the Temple Mount, right?"