by John Updike
They were led past a scintillating fountain, up a few marble stairs, to the Dome of the Rock. Inside an octagon of Persian tile, beneath a dizzingly lavish and symmetrical upward abyss, a spine of rock, the tip of Mount Moriah, showed where Abraham had attempted to sacrifice Isaac and, failing that, had founded three religions. Here also, the professor murmured amid the jostle of the faithful and the touring, Cain and Abel had made their fatally contrasting offerings, and Mohammed had ascended to Heaven on his remarkable horse Burak, whose hoofprints the pious claim to recognize, along with the fingerprints of an angel who restrained the Rock from going to Heaven also. For reasons known best to themselves, the Crusaders had hacked at the Rock. Great hackers, the Crusaders. And Suleiman the Magnificent, who had wrested the Rock back from the (from his standpoint) infidels, had his name set in gold on high, within the marvelous dome. The King of Morocco had donated the green carpets, into which Bea’s stockinged feet dug impatiently, aching to move on from these empty wonders to the Christian sites. Sexy little feet, Bech thought. From boyhood on, spying his mother’s shoeless feet flitting by, he had responded to the dark band of reinforcement that covers half of a woman’s stockinged toes, giving us eight baby cleavages.
“Do you wish to view the hairs from the Beard of the Prophet?” the professor asked, adding, “There is always a great crowd around them.”
Hairs of the Prophet were the kind of sight Bech liked, but he said, “I think my wife wants to push on.”
They were led down from Herod’s temple platform along a peaceable path beside an Arab cemetery. Their guide suddenly chuckled; his teeth were as yellow as his face. He gestured at a bricked-up portal in the Old City wall. “That is the Golden Gate, the gate whereby the Messiah is supposed to come, so the Ommiads walled it solid and, furthermore, put a cemetery there, because the Messiah supposedly is unable to walk across the dead.”
“Hard for him to go anywhere if that’s the rule,” Bech said, glancing sideways to see how Bea was bearing up under these malevolent overlays of superstition. She looked pink, damp, and happy, her Holy Land glow undimmed. At the end of the pleasant path, at the Lion’s Gate, they were passed into the care of the debonair Jesuit and embarked upon the Via Dolorosa.
• • •
Lord, don’t let me suffocate, Bech thought. The priest kept leading them underground, to show them buried Herodian pools, Roman guardrooms that the sinkage of centuries had turned into grottoes, and paving stones scratched by the soldiers as they played a time-killing game—proof, somehow, of the historical Jesus. Père Gibergue knew his way around. He darted into the back room of a bakery, where a dirty pillar of intense archaeological interest stood surrounded by shattered crates. By another detour, Bech and Bea were led onto the roof of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher; here an ancient company of Abyssinian monks maintained an African village of rounded huts and sat smiling in the sun. One of them, standing against a cupola, posed for Bea’s camera. Below the cupola, Père Gibergue zealously explained, was the crypt where Saint Helena, mother of Constantine, discovered in the year 327 the unrotted wood of the True Cross. To the Jesuit’s sorrow, the young Russian Orthodox priest (his face waxen-white, his thin beard tapered to a double point: the very image, as Bech imagined it, of Ivan Karamazov) who answered their ring at the door of the Alexandra Hostel refused to admit them, this being a Sabbath, to the excavated cellar wherein had been found, Père Gibergue excitedly explained, a worn threshold beyond doubt stepped upon by the foot of God Incarnate.
So this is what’s been making the goyim tick all these years. All these levels—roofs coterminous with the street, sacred footsteps buried meters beneath their own—afflicted Bech like a sea of typographical errors. Perhaps this was life: mistake heaped upon mistake, one protein molecule entangled with another until the confusion thrived. Except that it smelled so fearfully dead. The Church of the Holy Sepulcher was so needlessly ugly that Bech said to Bea, “You should have let the Arabs design it for you.”
Père Gibergue overheard and said, “In fact, an Arab family has been entrusted with the keys for eight hundred years, to circumvent the contention among the Christian sects.” Inside the hideous edifice, the priest, too, seemed overwhelmed; he sat on a bench near some rusting pipe scaffolding and said, “Go. I will pray here while you look.” He hid his face in his hands.
Undaunted, Bea with her guidebook led Bech up a marble staircase to the site of the Crucifixion. This turned out to be a great smoke-besmirched heap or fungus of accreted icons and votive lamps. Six feet from the gold-rimmed hole where Christ’s cross had supposedly been socketed, a fat Greek priest, seated in his black muffin hat at a table peddling candles, was taking a swig from a bottle in a paper bag. At Bech’s side, Bea did a genuflective dip and gazed enthralled at this mass of aesthetic horrors. German tourists were noisily shuffling about, under a barrage of exploding flashbulbs.
“Let’s go,” Bech muttered.
“Oh, Henry, why?”
“This frightens me.” It had that alchemic stink of medieval basements where vapors condensed as demons and pogroms and autos-da-fé. Torquemada, Hitler, the czars—every despot major or minor who had tried to stunt and crush his race had inhaled these Christly vapors. He dragged Bea away, back down to the main floor of the church, which her guidebook itself admitted to be a conglomeration of large and small rooms, impossible to consider as a whole.
Père Gibergue unbowed the tan oval of his head. He asked hopefully, “Enough?”
“More than,” Bech said.
The Jesuit nodded. “A great pity. This should be Chartres. Instead …” He told Bea, “With your camera, you should photograph that, what the Greeks are doing. Without anyone’s permission, they are walling up their sector of the nave. It is barbarous. But not untypical.”
Bea peered through a gilded grate into a sector of holy space crowded with scaffolding and raw pink stone. She did not lift her camera. She had been transported, Bech realized, to a realm beyond distaste. “We cannot go without visiting the Sepulcher of Christ,” she announced.
Père Gibergue said, “I advise against it. The line is always long. There is nothing to see. Believe me.”
Bech echoed, “Believe him.”
Bea said, “I don’t expect to be here ever again,” and got into line to enter a little building that reminded Bech, who joined her, of nothing so much as those mysteriously ornate structures that used to stand in discreet corners of parks in Brooklyn and the Bronx, too grand for lawn mowers but unidentified as latrines; he had always wondered what had existed inside such dignified small buildings—mansions in his imagination for dwarfs. The line moved slowly, and the faces of those returning looked stricken. Impossible to consider as a whole.
There were two chambers. The outer held a case containing a bit of the stone that the Angel is said to have rolled away from the mouth of the tomb; a German woman ahead of Bech in line kissed the cracked glass top of the case and caressed herself in an elaborate spasm of pious gratification, eyeballs rolling, a dovelike moan bubbling from her throat. He was relieved that Bea was better behaved: she glanced down, made a mental note, and passed by. She had pinned up her fine blond hair and hid it under a kerchief like an Arab woman. As she bowed her head he glimpsed the damp nape of her neck as if seeing it for the last time. They were about to be separated by an infamous miracle.
The inner chamber was entered by an opening so small Bech had to crouch, though the author was not tall. Within, as had been foretold, there was “nothing to see.” Smoking lamps hanging thick as bats from the low ceiling. A bleak marble slab. No trace of the original sepulcher hewn from the rock of Golgotha. In the confines of this tiny space, elbow to elbow with Bech, another stocky Greek priest, looking dazed, was waving lighted tapers held cleverly between his spread fingers. The tapers were for sale. The priest looked at Bech. Bech didn’t buy. With a soft grunt of irritation, the priest waved the lighted tapers out. Bech was fascinated by this sad moment of disappointed commerce; h
e imagined how the wax must drip onto the man’s fat fingers, how it must hurt. A hunger artist. The priest eyed Bech again. The whites above his dolefully sagging lower lids were very bloodshot. Smoke gets in your eyes.
Back in their room at the Mishkenot, he asked Bea, “How’s your faith?”
“Fine. How’s yours?”
“I don’t know much about places of worship, but wasn’t that the most God-forsaken church you ever did see?”
“It’s history, Henry. You have to see through external accidents to the things of the spirit. You weren’t religiously and archaeologically prepared. The guidebook warns people they may be disappointed.”
“Disappointed! Disgusted. Even your poor Jesuit, who’s been there a thousand times, had to hide his face in his hands. Did you hear him complain about what the Greeks were doing to their slice of the pie? Did you hear his story about the Copts swooping down one night and slapping up a chapel that then couldn’t be taken away for some idiotic superstitious reason?”
“They wanted to be close to the Holy Sepulcher,” Bea said, stepping out of her skirt.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Bech said. “It was garbage, of an ultimate sort.”
“It was beautiful to be there, just beautiful,” Bea said, skinning out of her blouse and bra in one motion.
How, Bech asked himself, out of a great materialist nation containing one hundred million fallen-away Christians had he managed to pick this one radiant aberration as a bride? Instinct, he answered himself; his infallible instinct for the distracting. At the height of the lovemaking that the newlyweds squeezed into the dusky hour before they were due to go out to dinner, the bloodshot eyeball of the unsuccessful taper-selling priest reappeared to him, sliding toward Bech as toward a demon brother unexpectedly encountered while robbing the same tomb.
The dinner was with Israeli writers, in a restaurant staffed by Arabs. Arabs, Bech perceived, are the blacks of Israel. Slim young men, they came and went silently, accepting orders and serving while the lively, genial, grizzled, muscular intellectuals talked. The men were an Israeli poet, a novelist, and a professor of English; their wives were also a poet, a novelist, and a professor, though not in matching order. All six had immigrated years ago and therefore were veterans of several wars; Bech knew them by type, fell in with their chatter and chaffing as if back into a party of uncles and cousins. Yet he scented something outdoorsy, an unfamiliar toughness, a readiness to fight that he associated with Gentiles, as part of the psychic kit that included their indiscriminate diet and their bloody, lurid religion. And these Jews had the uneasiness, the slight edge, of those with something to hold on to. The strength of the Wandering Jew had been that, at home nowhere specific, he had been at home in the world. The poet, a man whose face appeared incessantly to smile, broadened as it was by prominent ears and a concentration of wiry hair above the ears, said of the Wailing Wall, “The stones seem smaller now. They looked bigger when you could see them only up close.”
The professor’s wife, a novelist, took fire: “What a reactionary thing to say! I think it is beautiful, what they have done at the Kotel Ha. They have made a sacred space of a slum.”
Bech asked, “There were many Arab homes?”
The poet grimaced, while the shape of his face still smiled. “The people were relocated, and compensated.”
The female novelist told Bech, “Before ’67, when the Old City was theirs, the Jordanians built a hotel upon the Mount of Olives, using the old tombstones for the soldiers’ barracks. It was a vast desecration which they committed in full view. We felt very frustrated.”
The male novelist, whose slender, shy wife was a poetess, offered as a kind of truce, “And yet I feel at peace in the Arab landscape. I do not feel at peace in Tel Aviv, among those Miami Beach hotels. That was not the idea of Israel, to make another Miami Beach.”
“What was the idea, then?” asked the female novelist, teasing—an overweight but still-dynamic flirt. There is a lag, Bech thought, between the fading of an attractive woman’s conception of herself and the fading of the reality.
The male novelist, his tanned skin minutely veined and ponderously loose upon his bones, turned to Bech with a gravity that hushed the table; an Arab waiter, ready to serve, stood there frozen. “The idea,” it was stated to Bech in the halting murmur of an extreme confidence, “is not easy to express. Not Freud and Einstein, but not Auschwitz, either. Something … in between.”
Bech’s eye flicked uneasily to the waiter and noticed the name on his identification badge: SULEIMAN.
The poetess, as if to lighten her husband’s words, asked the American guests, “What have been your impressions so far? I know the question is foolish, you have been here a day.”
“A day or a week,” the female novelist boisterously volunteered, “Henry Bech will go back and write a best-selling book about us. Everyone does.”
The waiter began to serve the food—ample, deracinated, Hilton food—and while Bech was framing a politic answer, Bea spoke up for him. He was as startled as if one of his ribs had suddenly chirped. “Henry’s in raptures,” she said, “and so am I. I can’t believe I’m here, it’s like a dream.”
“A costly dream,” said the professor, the youngest of the men and the only one wearing a beard. “A dream costly to many men.” His beard was as red as a Viking’s; he stroked it a bit preeningly.
“Vision and reality,” the male novelist pronounced. “Here, they come together and clash.”
“The Holy Land,” Bea went on, undeterred, her voice flowing like milk poured from above. “I feel I was born here. Even the air is so right.”
Her strangeness, to her husband at this moment, did verge on the miraculous. At this table of Jews who, wearied of waiting for the Messiah, had altered the world on their own, Bea’s voice with its lilt of hasty good news came as an amazing interruption. Bech answered the poetess as if he had not been interrupted. “It reminds me of southern California. The one time I was there, I felt surrounded by enemies. Not people like you,” he diplomatically amended, “but up in the hills. Sharpshooters. Agents.”
“You were there before Six-Day War,” joked the female professor; until then, she had spoken not a word, merely smiled toward her husband, the smiling poet. It occurred to Bech that perhaps her English was insecure, that these people were under no obligation to know English, that on their ground it was his obligation to speak Hebrew. English, that bastard child of Norman knights and Saxon peasant girls—how had he become wedded to it? There was something diffuse and eclectic about the language that gave him trouble. It ran against his grain; he tended to open books and magazines at the back and read the last pages first.
“What shall we do?” the flamboyant female novelist was urgently asking him, evidently apropos of the state of Israel. “We can scarcely speak of it anymore, we are so weary. We are weary of war, and now we are weary of talk of peace.”
“The tricky thing about peace,” Bech suggested, “is that it doesn’t always come from being peaceable.”
She laughed, sharply, a woman’s challenging laugh. “So you, too, are a reactionary. Myself, I would give them anything—the Sinai, the West Bank. I would even give them back East Jerusalem, to have peace.”
“Not East Jerusalem!” the Christian in their midst exclaimed. “Jerusalem,” Bea said, “belongs to everybody.”
And her face, aglow with confidence in things unseen, became a cause for wonder among the seven others. The slim, shy poetess, whose half-gray hair was parted in the exact center of her slender skull, asked lightly, “You would like to live here?”
“We’d love to,” Bea said.
Bech felt he had to step on this creeping “we” of hers. “My wife speaks for herself,” he said. “Her enthusiasm overwhelmed even the priest who took us up the Via Dolorosa this afternoon. My own impression was that the Christian holy sites are hideously botched. I liked the mosques.”
Bea explained with the patience of a saint, “I
said to myself, I’ve waited for this for thirty-nine years, and I’m not going to let anybody, even my husband, ruin it for me.”
Sunday-school pamphlets, Bech imagined. Bible illustrations protected by a page of tissue paper. Bea had carried those stylized ochre-and-moss-green images up from infancy and, when the moment had at last arrived, had placed them carefully upon the tragic, eroded hills of Jerusalem and pronounced the fit perfect. He loved her for that, for remaining true to the little girl she was. In the lull of silence her pious joy had induced, Suleiman came and offered them dessert, which the sated Israelis refused. Bech had apple pie, Bea had fig sherbet, to the admiration of their hosts. Young in marriage, young in appetite.
“You know,” he told her in the taxi back to the Mishkenot, “the Holy Land isn’t holy to those people tonight the way it is to you.”
“I know that, of course.”