Damascus Gate

by Robert Stone

  The watching Palestinians stared as though De Kuff represented a spectacle beyond imagining. All of them were men, and there were more than a hundred. Some were laughing. Others occasionally shouted at him in anger. A few seemed frozen in cold rage.

  From the army line, a policeman with a bullhorn was saying something, amplified in Arabic. Overhead, a helicopter scattered its whirling lights. Because of the angle of the walls of the adjoining madrasah and the smashed gates of the church courtyard, De Kuff in the small plaza was aslant the line of vision of the soldiers and police assembled nearer the city gate.

  Raziel kept trying to force his way closer to the old man. He had the notion of taking him away from there, before the thing failed utterly, before all spells and mercies were suspended, before whatever grace that had touched their pilgrimage was withdrawn and the violence and raw holiness of the place overwhelmed everyone.

  The holiness was in fact gathering to strike. A man with the white turban of the haj, a turban like the one De Kuff's scarf might be thought to mock, came forward, beside himself.

  "Perish the hands of the Father of Flame," cried the haji, in a language neither De Kuff nor Raziel could comprehend. "Perish he!"

  De Kuff himself understood only that he was in the place he knew and loved best, the scene of his successes, the ancient Serapion and Pool of Israel. All that day he had been trying to reach the souls within himself as they weaved in and out of his consciousness. He had begun to think that everything he had ever believed about soul and mind was wrong. There was no way to exercise control.

  But there at the Fountain, his souls were manifest and his heart was full, and in the completeness of his joy he had no choice but to tell about it. It was necessary to tell everyone, anyone, no matter how distressed or distracted they might be by politics or by the illusions of separateness and exile that burdened everyone. He felt elected and protected by God, ready to support the Ark in the holiest of places. He used the metaphors that were employed in this city, although, in a way, it might have been anywhere.

  "Call me as you like," he explained to the angry crowd. "I am the twelfth imam. I am the Bab al-Ulema. I am Jesus, Yeshu, Issa. I am the Mahdi. I am Moshiach. I have come to restore the world. I am all of you. I am no one."

  There were screams of terrible passion. "Perish he! Death! Itbah al-Yahud!"

  Some soldiers had seen him, and a flying squad from the police lines set out, using batons and rifle butts as deemed necessary to rescue him. The squad advanced as far as the plaza gate but was stalled by the crush there and retreated. A few onlookers were left lying on the ground. There were cries of outrage and the men in the crowd closest to De Kuff seemed to blame him. People began to throw stones.

  "Death to the blasphemer!"

  De Kuff opened his arms to them. For a moment those who were advancing on him stopped. Raziel, shouting, shoving, tried to get through.

  "You don't have to listen," Raziel said to the crowd. "It's all over. Rev," he shouted to De Kuff, "it's all over! Another time, man. Another soul. Another street."

  The men who were taking hold of De Kuff, pulling him down as he tottered on his bench, also laid hands on Raziel.

  "Another day!" Raziel told them. "Another mountain!"

  The soldiers near the gate attempted a second charge. Savage as it was, lay about them as they did, they could not break through and penetrate the crowd to extract De Kuff and Raziel.

  Then a few reserve soldiers fired live rounds. Because the area around the Fountain was Christian property, the security forces had stayed away from it at first and it belonged, for the moment, to the crowd.

  "I tell you," De Kuff informed them in his restrained Louisiana drawl. "That all was once One and will be and has always remained so. That God is One. And faith in Him is One. And all belief is One. And all believers in Him, regardless of sect, are One. Only the human heart divides. So it is written.

  "See? Do you see?" De Kuff asked the men who were pulling him down. "Everyone's waiting. And the separateness of things is false."

  He went on declaiming, using the images, the reversals, the metaphors everyone knew, expounding the souls, raising their voices, until the great holiness turned to fire and he lost consciousness.

  70

  ZIMMER WENT to a former kibbutz in the desert for his debriefing, a collection of sand-colored cement rectangles near the nuclear base at Dimona. On the drive down, Fotheringill had asked him, "Who's debriefing who then?"

  "Good question," Zimmer said.

  The kibbutz had been converted into air force housing, equally divided between civilian technicians and their families and quarters for serving officers. The military sentries at the wire perimeter had been instructed to expect them.

  Fotheringill left Zimmer off in front of the largest building and drove on to Dimona for a decent lager. Zimmer braved the fierce afternoon sun in the same shapeless seersucker suit he had worn as a reporter in central Africa, along with a white cotton shirt, a Yucate-can straw hat and dark glasses. He made his way inside the building to a lounge area, air conditioned against the desert heat, a kind of semi-civilian day room that occupants of the building could hire for special occasions, like birthday or promotion parties.

  A security man in the hallway outside it asked Zimmer to remove his sunglasses, looked him over in a brusque manner before letting him pass. Two men were sitting on a sun-faded sofa in the dusty, joyless room. They both stood up when Zimmer entered and shook hands.

  "Something to drink?" one said. He was a bald, squat man with a hard, pitted face. He wore khaki shorts and a short-sleeved shirt of the same color and sandals with beige socks.

  "Water," Zimmer said.

  The man who had asked took a tray from the day room's half-sized refrigerator. On it were two liter bottles of still water and a plastic dish of hummus and another of peppers and cucumbers and some Arab bread.

  "You have to drink water constantly down here," the man observed. "Four gallons a day, according to Shaviv."

  "Six," Shaviv, the second man, said. "Even if you're sedentary like myself."

  Naphtali Shaviv was tall and thin, light-haired, with high cheekbones and a prominent nose, which looked as though he had once broken it boxing. The man who had offered the drink was Avram Lind, the former cabinet minister.

  Janusz Zimmer accepted his glass of water and sat down.

  "So," he asked. "Success?"

  Lind started to answer. Shaviv interrupted him. "Survival. Yossi resigned. We'll hear it on the evening news."

  "I'm delighted," Zimmer said. "I presume this constitutes your return to public life."

  "The PM," Lind said, "has been good enough to ask me to take my former position in the cabinet. He was very sporting, as the English would say. A jolly good sport."

  They all laughed quietly.

  "The old man was sweating, let me tell you," Naphtali Shaviv said. He was wearing a shirt with a slim blue tie, one that he had bought in the early sixties in Stockholm. Zimmer, taking note of it, could imagine him buying six identical ties then and wearing them for the rest of his life. "You could hear him sweat on the telephone."

  "It's possible to hear people sweat," Zimmer said. "Sometimes you can't see any sweat, but you can hear it."

  "I like listening to the PM sweat," Lind said. "I'm not so sporting."

  "I find it distressing," Shaviv said.

  "Yah, well, you're a bureaucrat," Lind told him. "And let me tell you, neither is Yossi Zhidov sporting! He's beside himself, that paskudnyak. Slapping his poor Swiss wife. Brutalizing his little Aryan kiddies. Furious, the shmuck."

  "I'm not being polite when I say I'm delighted," Shaviv told them.

  Zimmer nodded. "No doubt it had to be done. But it was audacious."

  "Well," said Shaviv, " L'audace, toujours. You did well, Pan Zimmer. Hats off to you."

  "Hear, hear!" said Avram Lind.

  Both Avram Lind and Naphtali Shaviv had been fighter pilots before taking up their ca
reers in Mossad. Lind's enemies in the cabinet and in his own ministry had forced his resignation the previous spring, but they had not been able to ditch Shaviv, a permanent undersecretary and Avram Lind's wing man in the Yom Kippur War. So Lind had been able to use the resources of the intelligence liaison force in his former ministry to carry out the operation.

  Thus they had acquired the services of Janusz Zimmer. Yossi Zhidov, who had replaced Lind for such a surprisingly short time, had been warned by his supporters about a Mossad—air force Mafia in the ministry. But he had not been able to do anything about it.

  "The PM is going to practice damage control," Shaviv said. "So we know how this whole thing is going to be presented to the press."

  Shaviv, in his understated way, refrained from saying that he himself was handling public relations for the prime minister. In handling the matter, he would be able to control what was said or not said publicly about Lind's organizing of the bomb-plot sting and Zimmer's role in it and all the rest.

  "No one believes us anyway," Lind said. "They're all cynical bastards."

  "Yes," said Shaviv, "so they don't deserve too much information. Information corrupts."

  "Speaking of which," Zimmer said, "I have an American friend writing a book. The book is about religious mania in the country and cults and so on, but he was very close to some of the people we..." He stopped and sought an appropriate term for the individuals who had been manipulated.

  "Employed," Shaviv suggested.

  "He was close to some of the people we employed. No doubt his book will deal with these events. We can use him to float a few truths, as it were. In time future."

  "You don't want to discourage him from writing his book?"

  "I respectfully submit," Zimmer said, "that through it we can refer discreetly to our accomplishments. For our friends' benefit. You can tell me which accomplishments, and I'll whisper in his ear."

  "Our accomplishments," Lind said reflectively. " Chaver Shaviv, what would you say were our accomplishments?"

  "Ah," said Shaviv, "well, let us see." He stood up, walked to the window and began counting off on his fingers. His pale eyes reflected the coppery landscape beyond the tinted glass.

  "Accomplishment one: you, Chaver Lind, are restored to the service of the state."

  Lind bowed and interrupted. "Not so important," he said, mocking modesty.

  "Accomplishment two: we set the Jewish undergrounds, the Temple bombers, back five years." He thought about it for a moment. "Well, three years."

  "Two," Zimmer said.

  Shaviv continued enumerating accomplishments.

  "We flushed out the most violent elements in the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas, forced them into a premature move. We provided a reason to legislate against the cults and the Christian missionaries. Which will please certain of the rabbis, whose support we shall need one day.

  "We hurt the elements here who were cooperating with the American religious right. We demonstrated, I think, that such a policy has a downside. We penetrated the Colombian connection and we have a clearer understanding of how Yossi was using the dope smugglers. These are all good things."

  "And the other side of the ledger?" Lind asked. "The losses?"

  "Acceptable," Zimmer said. "We're not responsible for the death of that boy in the Gaza Strip. He was not a casualty of this operation. The terrorists got what they deserved.

  "And the Communists—well, they would understand. We sent them a message that they won't be needed, that their day is over and that the lives of our people are extremely important to us. Whereas I'm sure they realize that ... how does the movie line go? The problems of two little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. They were under their own discipline. Died with their boots on. Line of duty. So forth. And that woman had no business here."

  "As always," Shaviv said, "the American dimension is sensitive."

  "I certainly hope no one holds me responsible for the death of any Americans," Zimmer said. "The police made repeated attempts to get that De Kuff fellow out. We still don't know how he turned up in there. We tried to look out for him."

  "How's young Melker?" Shaviv asked.

  "Still in a coma," Zimmer said. "But he was using heroin that day. So we have concluded that his coma..." He shrugged.

  "Is the result of a drug overdose?" Shaviv suggested.

  "Exactly," said Zimmer. "We're in touch with the U.S. embassy. The parents may be coming over."

  "Sad," said Lind.

  "How does he look?" Shaviv asked.

  "Like he was beaten," Zimmer told him. "The way users often end up looking."

  Shaviv sighed. "It is sad. A life."

  Zimmer said nothing more. He had not cared for Raziel.

  "I suppose," Lind said to him after a while, "you'll want to be getting back to town."

  "Yes," said Janusz Zimmer.

  They had the security man telephone the café in Dimona where Fotheringill had gone and arrange for him to be readmitted. Eventually, they saw the Scotsman and his jeep outside.

  "Where on earth," Shaviv asked, peering through the window, "did you acquire that preposterous person?"

  "Mr. Fotheringill?" Zimmer smiled slightly. "Mr. Fotheringill and I met in Africa. We always work together. Especially when the operation is ... unofficial. The Englishman—you know, Lestrade, the momzer —he was sure Fotheringill was going to kill him."

  "I don't blame him," Shaviv said.

  The route back through the desert lay between two stark reefs of ironspined mountains. As they drove, Zimmer turned his gaze from one range to the other, from the granite massif in the west to the sandstone hills in the east. The vast fateful landscape, which he had seen only once or twice before, inclined him toward recall.

  At sixteen—he might even have been fifteen—he had been a fighter with the Polish Communist irregulars during the time of chaos that followed the war. He could remember arriving in Zielce just after the pogroms of 1947, working with the ex-résistants of the Bricah, the Zionist group that organized displaced persons for the journey to Palestine. In those days, the Joint Distribution Committee and the Bricah men and the Communist fighters were close. Ben Gurion's Socialists had not yet purged Communists from the Jewish intelligence services.

  In the winter of 1947, he had stood guard at the bridge that the Bricah had built over the Oder to carry DPs into Czechoslovakia, and across it into Austria, bound for what would become Israel. But he had never gone along. Wearing his red and white guerrilla armband, he had looked on as columns of weary survivors passed. They had glanced at him, just another Polack as far as they could see, as they hastened to wipe the dust of Central Europe from their shoes.

  He had stayed behind and tried to remake the world, watching his fellow operatives drown their apostasy in vodka. He ended up traveling endlessly, running the kinds of errands the Communists ran for their brutal, corrupt creatures in the Third World, attempting to help them prevail over the corrupt, brutal creatures of the Americans.

  If he had gone to Israel then, of course, his life would have been different. He would have cast off ideology sooner. He might have occupied the space where Lind and Shaviv now thrived. Instead of being what he had always been, a secret agent, a striker behind the scenes, a representative of that Israel which the country preferred the world to know little about. To know just enough about to strike a little caution in the anti-Semitic heart.

  Before long, he thought, despite his best efforts, the underground would succeed in destroying the mosques, in beginning the war that would remove the Arabs. Out of it would come a different Israel. It would be less American. It might just partake of the purity of purpose that had been lost.

  And though it was his job to abort that process, he could not help speculating on what hope such a purifying wind might bring. How it might make the Land the singular place it had been meant to be. And just as he could not keep himself from sympathizing, in a certain way, with the Communists, neither could he
keep from feeling a bit the same about Rabbi Miller and the football coach and the others who were ready to subsume their lives in the Cause.

  Lind and Shaviv and the other politicians in the papers every day—the prime minister, Sharon, Netanyahu—so many of them were like the men who had run Eastern and Central Europe between the wars. The men around Colonel Beck and King Carol and Admiral Horthy—mediocre opportunists, living for their foxes' portion. How difficult it was not to require something more. But, he thought, I am getting old.

  "Everything go all right, squire?" Fotheringill asked. "Did they appreciate us, do ye think?"

  "I don't think they appreciate us, Ian. But I'm sure we'll be paid."

  They would be paid. Fotheringill in Swiss francs, he himself in various complicated ways of his own devising, ways in which money did not necessarily feature. He had enough, he thought.

  He had secreted the hand of Sabazios in the nominal custody of a few museum officials whose fortunes he controlled. In fact, the piece was his to dispose of.

  As a part of the national patrimony, Zimmer thought, it might be pressed into service, both in his own and the state's behalf. For Zimmer, there was no serious conflict of interest.

  For security purposes, he reasoned, the thing to do would be to coat the original with plaster and paint it so that it would resemble a plaster cast. Then it would be possible to produce several actual casts. Properly weighted, they would be superficially indistinguishable from the original. As trade items and objects of desire, such things might prove infinitely useful. The hand and its imitations might touch off a frenzy among collectors from Cairo to California.

  The desert sun began to cast its light aslant the distant mountains. The worst of the day's heat was easing, reluctantly, the glare giving way. Just as the underground would one day destroy the Haram, Zimmer thought, one day the Muslims would assemble a nuclear bomb in America. That particular stork would come home to roost. And who knew what might follow? No doubt, in the long run, the Muslims too might feel their certainty, their sense of purpose, flagging.