Dreamers of the Day

by Mary Doria Russell

  In my day, the disease frequently attacked the throat and caused the woeful creatures to make a peculiar sound of heartrending sadness. “Baksheesh,” the lepers wailed, as did all the beggars, but more eerily, more hopelessly. “Baksheesh…Baksheesh…”

  I had come to hate the relentless importuning—almost as much as I hated my own revulsion at the sight of ragged children and elderly cripples holding out their hands. Baksheesh is the alpha and omega of travel in the Middle East, the first word one hears upon stepping onto any public street and the last heard as one takes shelter inside a hotel or a shop or café. How to deal with beggars was a lively topic of concern among foreigners. Lillian always carried coins with her and handed them out with the words “The Lord Jesus loves you, dear.” Karl considered baksheesh corrosive to society and deplored the way parents sent their most pitiable offspring out to beg. Even so, he often gave open-handedly. When I asked why, he said, “The sages teach us, ‘Rather than turn away the one who is truly deserving, give to ninety-nine who are unworthy.’”

  Having done a grown man’s work from the time he was nine, Sergeant Thompson had no such compassion, and when we’d chatted the hours away, watching Winston paint, he’d counseled me to harden my heart. “If every traveler made it a rule never to give baksheesh, but only to pay for some service rendered, all this beggary would stop overnight.”

  I could not give to everyone; neither could I could bring myself to refuse them all. When I’d asked his opinion during our long camel ride, Lawrence had first offered me an Arab proverb: “Too soft and you shall be squeezed. Too hard and you shall be broken.” He suggested a diplomatic compromise: that I prepare myself for each foray into public with three piastres to be given to the first three beggars I encountered and afterward, in good conscience, give no more.

  Standing at the entry to Jerusalem, implored by so many for so little, I followed his advice. Remembering the Lord’s words, I gave to “the least of these”—three lepers who sat shrouded in the shadow near the gate. Not even Sergeant Thompson could have argued that they were unworthy; God knows none of them were fit to work.

  With that, I felt ready to place my foot on the Via Dolorosa and begin my pilgrimage. It was a narrow street, roughly paved and in some places picturesque, with arches and quaint stone buildings that appeared convincingly ancient to someone from Ohio. It was lined with shops, but Jerusalem seemed to have only two things on sale: lamb meat and souvenirs. Most of the latter were carved from Holy Land olive wood: rosaries, Nativity scenes, heads of Christ, candlesticks. I walked past without much interest, resolutely ignoring the storekeepers’ children who tugged at my sleeves and reminded me that there was “No charge for looking, madams!”

  Lawrence’s prediction was correct. At every Station of the Cross, a knot of English-speaking tourists listened raptly to their guides, each of whom shouted to be heard above the surrounding hubbub. “Here is the site of the Holy Steps trodden by the feet of Jesus on His way to Pilate’s Hall of Judgment,” cried the nearest. The staircase itself, it turned out, had long since been removed to Rome, but the place from which it had been taken was indicated with great authority.

  A few steps farther along, a modern archway spanned the street. To the right, there was an iron gate and then a wooden door. To one side of that door sat a small altar that incorporated, another pious group was told, the Ecce Homo Arch. “‘Then came Jesus forth,’” this guide recited, “‘wearing a crown of thorns and the purple robe, and Pilate saith unto them: Ecce homo! Behold the man!’”

  “Here is the stone where the Savior sat and rested before taking up His cross,” I heard a few yards away. Craning my neck, I peeked between the shoulders of the paying customers. Sure enough, I saw a stone.

  Descending next into a street that ran north-south and turning left, I worked my way around pilgrims who gazed in reverent contemplation at an impressively shattered granite column, which may well have belonged to some ancient temple. “This is the very spot where the fainting Savior first fell under the weight of His cross,” they were informed. “The heavy cross struck the column such a blow as Christ fell that it broke into pieces, and here they are, to this very day.”

  A few steps farther, and my progress was blocked by several groups whose guides were engaged in a dispute. They agreed, in several accents, that this was the very house where Saint Veronica once lived. They agreed also that when the Savior passed by, Veronica had emerged full of womanly compassion, and she had wiped His weary sweating face with a handkerchief. They agreed as well that the handkerchief had miraculously preserved the imprint of the divine visage. The argument concerned the current location of the handkerchief. It was, according to the guides, now preserved in each of four cathedrals: one in Paris, another in Spain, and two in Italy.

  That may have been when the tautened rope of my credulity began decisively to fray, but turning south, I tarried to watch pilgrim after pilgrim place a reverent hand on an indented stone that made up the corner of a building. “Here, the Lord stumbled, and this stone bears the mark of His shoulder,” their guide called out loudly.

  Nearby, however, a similar indentation was presented for equal veneration to a different group. Of course, the Lord stumbled several times, I could imagine Lillian explaining. To quibble seemed impolite at best and impious at worst. I kept my peace, but somewhere in the crowd an American raised his tenor voice to protest this duplication. Without a moment’s hesitation, his guide amended, “That is the Lord’s shoulder, but here is the mark of His elbow.” At which the American grumbled to the sour-looking lady at his side, “One damn lie after another! Pay ’em enough, these carnies’ll tell the rubes anything they want to hear.”

  In danger of achieving a similar state of disgruntled skepticism, I made a quick assessment. The sun was climbing. Time was running out on the pale eastern light like that which shone upon the Holy Sepulchre on Easter morning long ago. If I wanted to see the shrine before the clerical prizefights broke out, I’d have to move on, and I can’t say as I was reluctant to skip the rest of the Via Dolorosa.

  Nothing is very far from anything else inside the walls of Old Jerusalem, but I hurried to the Christian Quarter, hoping to change my mood by changing my surroundings. The Holy Sepulchre was easy to find. A domed and towered edifice, its austere exterior was severe enough to hush the voices of those who approached. “Here was where our Lord was carried after his sufferings,” Lillie wrote. “Here His body lay for three days. Here He revealed Himself to the women on that glorious spring morn.”

  Many of those who’d greeted Jesus on Palm Sunday had expected the Messiah to be a warrior-king who would drive out the Romans and restore the kingdom of David and Solomon to earthly glory. Instead they had seen Jesus fall as helpless prey to the criminal justice system of an empire that had no prisons and few punishments to choose from between the extremes of a cash fine and death on the cross. I tried to imagine the shock—the stunned disillusionment—of Jesus’ followers, as I neared the Sepulchre. I yearned to feel my eyes prick with unshed tears and my face stiffen with the effort to hold back emotion. What confusion and dismay must have afflicted His disciples! What sorrow the women must have felt as the Master’s broken body was borne through the darkness to the virginal tomb “wherein no man had yet lain.”

  On the threshold of this sacred site, a group of sopranos sang Mrs. Alexander’s lovely hymn with voices as sweet as my sister’s.

  There is a green hill far away, without a city wall,

  Where the dear Lord was crucified, Who died to save us all.

  Humming along, I thought of Scripture, and stumbled. Jesus, we are told in Hebrews, suffered outside the gate. He was taken out to a hill called Golgotha, and laid in a secret place in a garden near at hand. Well! The church is inside the city walls, and you have to walk down stairs to get to it. And then I remembered that the city that Jesus knew was utterly destroyed by the Romans in A.D. 70, and that Jerusalem was sacked repeatedly by Crusaders.

 
; These were just the sort of nagging doubts that plagued me when I was a child. Of course the early Christians would have remembered where such sacred events took place, I told myself. When the city walls were erected sometime later, an effort would have been made to incorporate these holy places. And since Jerusalem was repeatedly rebuilt on ruins, the city had slowly risen higher than Golgotha, which was now below the level of the modern city.

  You see, Agnes? I could imagine Lillie saying. There’s a logical explanation. That’s why you have to walk down to visit the true site of the Lord’s death and resurrection.

  The crowd funneled down to single file in order to enter through a small wooden door. The interior of the church was quite dark, lit only flickeringly by candles. Before us lay a large, thick slice of polished red marble.

  “This is the Stone of Unction,” one of the many guides declared, “where the Lord’s body was prepared for burial.”

  Gigantic candelabra flanked the stone. Over it hung many glass and brass lamps. Around it tearful believers bent to kiss its surface.

  “That marble is not native to the region,” a tall British gentleman pointed out with pedantic disapproval.

  An explanation was duly provided. “Pilgrims were too much given to chipping pieces off the real stone, so this one conceals it,” his guide replied, and redirected the group’s attention toward a circular railing. “Here is the very place the Virgin stood when the Lord’s body was anointed. Follow me, please!”

  The farther into the shrine we moved, the staler the air became. Around the periphery of the shrine, the morning processions were assembling, and at least two kinds of incense began to waft toward us. The cloying scents mixed with the sort of crowd odor that silently proclaims a variable devotion to the principles of good hygiene. Arab workmen were taking a break from their morning’s task, smoking hashish near a side altar. Eating and joking, they contributed woozy laughter to echoing wails, a rumble of muttered commentary, and the occasional shocking guffaw. Chants, chimes, and clanking metal chains added to a growing cacophony. Prayers and conversations grew louder in response.

  Pushed and shoved from all sides, footsore and increasingly irritable tourists complained indignantly. Pilgrims beat their breasts and wailed. The most devout of these were elderly Italian women dressed all in black, who reminded me of Mrs. Motta. Unlike the tourists, these ladies seemed undismayed by the lack of decorum, lost in their devotion. With their example to guide me, I required of myself the act of will necessary to grasp at some sense of awe.

  And then, I was there: standing a few feet from the most sacred place in Christendom.

  The Byzantine rotunda is some sixty feet in diameter, decorated with mosaics. A central oculus, open to the sky, is supported by riotously embellished columns. Beneath it sits a small, intensely ornamented chapel crowned with a variety of candle-topped towers, wax dripping down their sides. Above, upwards of forty hanging lamps blaze away. Around, dozens of enormous candlesticks bear bedizened tapers as tall as a man. Sentimental paintings of the Lord and the Virgin compete for attention with the statues of angels and disciples that climb the chapel’s outer walls, no inch of which has escaped its burden of decoration. Crenellations, crosses, and medallions provide asymmetrical and unrestrained adornment everywhere the eye could stand to tarry. The interior of the chapel—wherein the Lord lay and rose—is completely clad in figured marble.

  No naked rock—sacred or profane—is anywhere visible, but there, in that exact spot, my sister had stood. “I felt the eternal Love and Presence,” Lillian wrote, “and wept for my sins, redeemed at such cost.”

  “It was an absolute nightmare,” I told Lawrence over mint tea late that afternoon. “You’d find more decorum at the Cuyahoga County Fair! And if there was a genuine sepulchre somewhere under all that claptrap? Well, you certainly couldn’t prove it by me. And the lying! The sheer shameless fakery!” I cried, outraged in recollection. “There was an altar with a stick on it—‘the Rod of Moses.’ It was a stick. You’re told to poke it up through a hole in the marble so it will touch some hidden thing that’s supposedly the Column of Scourging. Then the guides point to another slab of marble and tell you, ‘Here is where the Roman soldiers sat to plait the crown of thorns.’ But both places should be back near Saint Stephen’s Gate—that’s where Pilate condemned Jesus as king of the Jews—so what are those things doing in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre?”

  “Perhaps they were moved,” Lawrence suggested mildly, “when the church was built?”

  “And that’s another thing! The church didn’t exist until two hundred and fifty years after the Romans destroyed the city. I skipped the Chapel of Saint Helena,” I told him heatedly. “Now, there’s a woman who could have done with a bit less faith. The patron saint of chumps, I’d call her! What did she expect? When the mother of a Roman emperor comes looking for the True Cross, somebody is going to make some money by finding it for her! She wants another cross? Why, here’s the one that belonged to the good thief! How about a few thorns from the crown? Step right this way, madams!”

  “Did you see Godfrey de Bouillon’s sword?” Lawrence asked. “I think it’s genuine, although I’m not certain he ‘cleaved in twain’ a giant Saracen with it. Might have been an ordinary-sized Saracen…”

  “My favorite, though, was the chapel of the Division of the Vestments—”

  “‘And when they had crucified Him,’” Lawrence recited, “‘they parted His garments, casting lots upon them.’”

  “What a disappointment that was! What? No dice? Every other little detail in the Passion has some sham relic!”

  “Not quite,” Lawrence pointed out judiciously. “There could have been a chapel for the Holy Hammer That Drove the Nails into the True Cross.”

  “Helena probably bought it,” I said sarcastically. “It’s under an altar in some Barcelona basilica.”

  I went on fulminating and Lawrence listened, nodding sometimes or commenting briefly. Now and then, he sipped water from his glass. It’s not true that he never drank anything else, by the way. His time in the desert had taught him to appreciate water, but he was not above a glass of wine at dinner.

  “You’re right, of course,” he said when I finally slowed down. “When they started excavations at the northeast wall of the Temple, archaeologists had to dig through something like a hundred and twenty-five feet of debris before they got to the level of Herod’s city. My field was Hittite, but I think this Jerusalem is probably the eighth.” He sat back in his chair, looking rather weary but comfortable in the role of scholar. “The city of David sat on an even earlier settlement. Then there’s Solomon’s Jerusalem, which lasted about four hundred years. Nehemiah’s—three hundred for that one, I believe. Herod’s Jerusalem was magnificent, by all accounts. That’s what everyone expects to see when they come here, but Titus destroyed it. Later on, a small Roman city was built on the ruins. Since then, Muslims and Crusaders traded the place repeatedly, and burned it down occasionally. And yet…the pilgrims come.”

  “But it’s all a fraud!” I cried, feeling triumphant. “It’s a house of cards. For centuries, the stories have been sold to pilgrims who pay handsomely to be deceived. That’s what makes me angry! How can sensible people be such fools?”

  “Was your sister a fool?” Lawrence asked, his blond brows lifted.

  It stopped me cold, that question, because that’s exactly what I feared: that Lillie had dedicated her precious, short life to a nineteen-hundred-year-old scam. Now, without warning, my eyes began to sting with tears I had hoped to shed for Jesus.

  “If it’s any comfort,” Lawrence said, “I don’t believe that she was.”

  He glanced at his watch and stood. Lawrence rarely gave a reason or said good-bye when he left. I had gotten used to the way he’d simply disappear. He was dressed in his brown suit; the evening’s appointment must have involved Jews or Christians, not Arabs. Thinking I was alone again in the courtyard, I allowed myself a single sob, then wiped my eyes.


  “Look at it this way,” Lawrence said, startling me. He was slouched at the edge of the courtyard, head down, thinking as he spoke. “Jerusalem has always been important strategically. It’s been one war after another for millennia. But if you can convince enough people that this place is sacred…?”

  He let me consider this until I could admit I’d understood his point: “Then maybe the next army won’t destroy it.”

  The corners of his long mouth turned up, but the real smile was in those tired eyes, already lined at thirty-two. “The present city has survived six hundred years,” he said. “That’s the longest stretch on record.”

  The morning after that conversation in the courtyard, I rose from the wreckage of my illusions and returned to Jerusalem. I was determined to experience the city with the tolerance Lawrence demonstrated to me, and even now, I am glad I accepted his challenge.

  On second sight, the Via Dolorosa did indeed seem sanctified—if not by the footsteps of the Savior then by those of generations of pilgrims who, according to their many faiths, strove to follow in the way of their Lord.

  I returned as well to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. That Jesus rose, I dared not doubt; that He did so there, I could not believe. Even so, decoration that had seemed tawdry and preposterous the day before now charmed me as exuberantly imaginative. Instead of pointless geegaws, I saw the devotion of long-dead craftsmen. I did not even begrudge the modern laborers the hashish that made their employment merry.

  No longer driven from the city by my own outrage, I slowed down enough to visit the Garden Tomb, a quiet and unadorned sepulchre hewn from the living rock some 250 yards north of the Damascus Gate. This was the true site of Calvary and the Tomb, according to some. I withheld judgment, but found the place conducive to and worthy of contemplation. Like Saint Thomas’s, my doubts withstood more evidence than my sister’s happy faith had required. Still, standing there where someone—if not Jesus—had met eternity, I was able to admire those who had not seen and yet believed.