Heritage of Smoke

by Josip Novakovich

  “If it’s God’s will, I will gladly go,” he thought.

  In the local travel agencies, he saw a sign: seven-day excursion to Jerusalem, 500 euros. Four-star hotel, guided tours, everything included in the price. Alana encouraged him to go. “If we go,” he said, “there’ll be that much less you’ll inherit from me.”

  “Don’t worry about that. All the money you have will be spent on your funeral expenses,” she said. “It’s cheaper if you live than if you die.”

  “I’ve seen budget cremation advertised, basically the same price as the trip for two to the Holy Land. It’s a trip for one to Hell.”

  “No matter what, you take a trip to the Holy Land. But why not try Jerusalem first. I’d like to see it too.”

  “But you’re an atheist.”

  “I was raised a Catholic.”

  “How many times have you been to church in your life?”

  “I think five. Three Christmases and two Easters. Six. Once for Baptism. Missed Confirmation.”

  They landed in Tel Aviv on Purim and spent a night there. The city was a carnival, a Rio—people in masks, dancing, singing. The following day in Jerusalem, Purim continued with people dressed in costumes, wearing masks. But the day after that, cleaning crews collected the remaining debris all over the city.

  Alana and Davor didn’t want to be with the tourist group, so they walked into the Old City to see the tomb of Jesus and the Western Wall on their own.

  “This dry air feels fantastic,” he said. “Sun and dry air, a great combination.”

  They entered through the Damascus gate, descending the stairs past oranges and olives and nuts and sneakers and sunglasses stands. The call to prayer blasted at them from all sides over cranky loudspeakers.

  “In ancient days, they couldn’t do it this loud,” Davor said. “They probably complain about technology, and then use it to complain about it. But what do I know?”

  Walking down Via Dolorosa, Davor was dizzy from all the spices, the sun, the heat. They climbed on huge foot-polished cobbles behind wailing pilgrims from the Philippines. Near the entrance to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, three soldiers in light green fatigues laughed, swaying submachine guns under their arms. Davor and Alana entered the gate and faced the smooth pink-red rock on which the body of Christ had been laid out once he had been torn off the cross. Amazing, thought Davor. He knelt down, as several other people did, and kissed the rock. Thousands of people had kissed the pink marble, why wouldn’t I, he thought. Well, maybe that’s why—all their bacteria frolic on the rock.

  “Can you imagine?” Davor said. “His body was right here, on this rock.”

  “Yes, I’m visualizing it. Was he still bleeding?”

  Deeper in the cathedral, they joined a line coiling around a small ornate chapel. The cathedral contained a chapel, like a Russian doll, which contained the tomb where Jesus resided for three days and three nights.

  “Hm, so much gold,” Davor said. “I wonder what it was like without all the gold before.”

  “Yes, you kind of have to subtract the cathedral, the chapel, the precious metals, and then see the rock for what it is.”

  They climbed the Golgotha, just to the right of the entrance to the cathedral, inside it, elevated some eight meters.

  “All so close?” Davor commented. “I thought they were farther apart, so you’d have to walk a little. And I thought it was a higher hill. But amazing. The crosses are here. I read that the cross of Jesus is the real cross. Empress St. Helena found it down the hill from here. Some durable wood!”

  “The dry air does it.”

  “But it’s moist underground in the cave where she found it. Maybe God protected the wood so it wouldn’t rot.”

  They went down the Golgotha, and beneath it, in stone, was the grave of Adam.

  “Look, the walls are red,” Alana said.

  They overheard a group of German tourists. The tour guide, with a heavy Yiddish accent, said, “Das ist das Blut Jesus Christi”

  “That’s the blood of Jesus, you heard that?” Alana said.

  “Well, how could it still be here two thousand years later?”

  “Why not? If you believe in the resurrection, which is a bigger miracle, why not believe that this is the blood of Christ? It’s the erythrocytes from the blood of Jesus, containing red iron.”

  “It does look impressive,” Davor said.

  A group of Coptic monks in brown robes and beards of varying strengths and thicknesses sang in the cave of St. Helen, which being some hundred feet underground was pleasantly cool. They chanted and danced, celebrating the cross. Davor imagined how delightful it must have been for the empress to find the cross and to coat it all in gold and preserve it. But wasn’t the church burnt down to the ground? Did the original cross burn as well? Or maybe the wood was fireproof? Was it cedar?

  Next they went to the Mount of Olives and the Gethsemane garden, and read about the temptations of Christ. Davor knelt in the church, where Christ must have knelt, and repeated his words, “God, if it be thy will…”

  Alana wept as she listened to him. “You know what, I believe in Christ now and in God. This makes so much sense to me. And that you’re suffering like that—that is already saving my soul. All we are is soul.”

  The following day, they passed through the security and walked to the Western Wall. He wore a baseball cap, and that was good enough not to have to rent a yamaka, and she rented a shawl to go to the women’s side of the wall, about one-third of the full length of the wall. Davor came to the wall, nearly blinded by the intense sunlight, and prayed to God. His eyes were sensitive from his illness and medication, and the white stone reflection hurt them.

  “God, if I may address you like that here, I imagine lives don’t matter to you, as we all die. I beg you for a delay of ten years, only ten more years, please, and I will study your scriptures every day that I continue to live.”

  He kissed the sun-warmed rocks. He saw notes written on paper in the cracks. Should I write one? he thought. And in what language? My English is not that good. Should I write in Croatian? Of course, God knows all the languages, but maybe German would be more convincing, being so close to Yiddish. Gott sei Dank fuer meinen Leben.

  On the way back, they walked around the walls to Herod’s gate and, not far from it, Davor saw a sign: the Garden of the Tomb. “What tomb?” he asked when they got close to it.

  “The tomb of Jesus,” the person at the door said. “Would you like the map? In what language?”

  “Croatian.”

  “Yes, we have it. Here you go, God bless you.”

  Inside, he asked a preacher, “How is this possible? We just spent a whole day at the tomb of Jesus, and you say this is it? I don’t remember him being in two tombs.”

  “We believe this is the real one,” the tall Englishman with yellow teeth said. “You know the city was destroyed, so nobody really knows where the original walls were; the Ottomans outlined the city differently when they built the current walls. In the nineteenth century, several British archaeologists figured out that the real tomb was here.”

  Alana and Davor walked around the grounds, admiring their simplicity without massive gold and silver and rubies. The tomb of Jesus had an antechamber and two parallel graves, which were at most five feet long. “Was Jesus five feet tall?” asked Davor. “Otherwise, he would have had to crouch in the grave. That would be something, a five-foot-long God. Well, Beethoven was less than five feet tall.”

  “Look,” Alana said, “the stones here contain streaks of red.”

  “Oh, that’s just iron, don’t worry about it,” said an English preacher. “You don’t need miracles to believe if you are inclined to believe.”

  “How can there be two tombs?” Davor said. “Maybe there’s a third one, like a real biblical number. And what difference does it make when he was in one of them for only three days. It’s like a hotel. It’s like houses in Russia. Here stayed Lenin for three days.”

 
Alana wept. “This is it, it looks so real. This is where he was dead and where he rose from the dead. It’s obvious.”

  “What’s suddenly come over you?” Davor asked.

  A couple of big blind men held hands and prayed in tongues under a canopy, and on the side a Russian group sang gospel in squeaky voices, many out of tune, adding a note of despair. The Golgotha here indeed looked like a skull (overlooking a gas station and an Arab bus terminal with green and white buses), and that was the original meaning of the Golgotha, the Skull, and it was higher than the Golgotha in the church of the Holy Sepulcher. This one appealed to the minimalist and purist protestant aesthetics, and the older Holy Sepulcher appealed to Orthodox and Catholic Baroque tastes.

  “These are just the visual aids for your faith,” the English preacher who kept shadowing them said. “You can choose which one works better for you. For me, this is better. I don’t have to dig through all the gold and the tourist fanfare to get to the image of the tombstone and the stone covering the tomb.”

  “Oh, really?” Davor asked. “So this is like a theater of faith?”

  “If you want to put it that way, yes.”

  Now all that was left was the Dome on the Rock, or the Holy of Holies. Orthodox Jews weren’t allowed to go there, by their own religion. You should not walk into the Holy of Holies.

  At the gate, a guard with a machine gun said to Alana, “You aren’t allowed to go in with your ankles bare. We could get you decent shoes and socks.”

  “You go ahead,” she told Davor. “I’ll wait for you right here.”

  Davor loved the sight of Mt. Moriah and marveled at the sensation of the forbidden and inaccessible. Only between 2:30 and 3:30 in the afternoon were non-Muslims allowed to come in past the Arab-Israeli guards.

  Nobody knew exactly where the Holy of Holies was, but it was somewhere near the Dome on the Rock. Davor read in the tourist guide that the King of Jordan put eighty-five million dollars of gold into the dome and that was when gold was twelve times less expensive than now. In other words, the dome contained one billion dollars worth of gold. But never mind that. The soil contained the blood of more than a million pilgrims, Muslims, and Jews fighting for that square kilometer of arid land. He shivered at the thought, and then imagined what would happen if he stepped right into the Holy of Holies somewhere near the blue-tiled golden mosque. Would he puff into nothing? Many Orthodox Jews feared that, but how many of them could actually believe that? I mean, really, who could?

  “Sir, are you Muslim?” asked a young man at the entrance to the Dome.

  “Yes,” Davor said. He was surprised he so readily lied, but why would he deny himself the foundation rock, the oldest rock on earth, from which the rest of the earth was created? “From Bosnia.”

  “Welcome, brother,” said the man, and Davor took off his shoes and slowly walked in. While his eyes were adjusting in the dark, he smelled lots of socks, socks that had been in shoes in the hot weather for a long time, socks of pilgrims afflicted with athlete’s foot, who had spent days getting here like himself, and he nearly fainted. He turned around, put on his shoes, and walked out.

  How could Holy of Holies be in the fumes of overheated feet? Davor wondered. Now it made sense that Jesus would want his feet washed and oiled, though of course he didn’t walk around in Adidas sneakers.

  At the end of the day, he and Alana were having dinner, Dennis fish, in the garden near the hotel, and he kept looking at the limestone wall. It had the same red streaks as the stone beneath the Golgotha in the Holy Sepulcher. The streaks were common.

  “Look, this is all a bunch of bullshit,” he said. “There are red stains in the rocks here all over the place. It’s not the blood of Jesus, and there’s no foundation rock of the earth here, and it’s all just a bunch of bull.”

  “What’s come over you, why are you angry?” Alana asked.

  “Why wouldn’t I be angry?”

  “You should be happy, we are in the Holy Land. I find it wonderful. I believe in God now.”

  “Guess what? I no longer do.”

  “What?”

  “My faith just evaporated here. It’s a bunch of steam that vanished in the dry air. Nothing’s left in my head but death. Maybe I’ve stepped into the Holy of Holies and this is part of my death, puffing into nothing like cigarette smoke.”

  “If we hadn’t come here, you’d still believe?”

  “Certainly.”

  “But you can’t give up on faith now, now that you really need it.”

  “And that’s another reason why I give up on it. I don’t want to believe out of despair.”

  “Out of hope.”

  “It’s the same thing. If you hope, you also despair. If you despair, you also hope. I feel nothing about the beyond. I don’t fucking care.”

  “Watch your language, you are in the Holy Land.”

  “Oh yeah? How holy is it to herd people behind one tall wall? It’s twice as tall as the wall in Berlin, you’ve seen it below Mt. Olive. And you saw that sign, Ich bin Ein Berliner. What’s holy in ghettoizing poor people? What’s holy in repeating the historical mistakes? Don’t do unto others as.well, as was done unto them? This place is full of lies. Even the stones lie. All three religions lie.”

  “Hey, quiet, calm down.”

  “I have no reason to be quiet. I still have some breath left and some brain, not much, so let me at least vent my belief, my lack of belief. And if I commit sacrilege, what will happen? I will die like a dog. You know what, I’m already dying like a dog. And I don’t want to live in a world where a bloody city like this counts as Holy of Holies. This is the best we can come up with, all this blood?”

  “Oh my God, how can you talk like that? You’re frightening me.”

  “Sorry, I know, it’s not fair. You’ve been so patient with me. Forgive me. But now that you have a friend in Jesus, you’re all set. You’ll never be lonely.”

  “You’re right. I am so happy, and I’ll pray for you.”

  When they returned from Israel to Zagreb, they encountered a cold wave of weather, a slanted rain with a bit of sleet in it. Davor caught a chill and fever just from being out in the rain for a few minutes as they walked to the airport parking lot.

  His condition worsened quickly. He no longer read the Bible or anything, as the letters shifted and swirled in his vision. He only watched soccer, although he repeatedly muttered to himself, “I don’t care who wins, I don’t know these people, they are too rich anyway, how can I want any good to happen to a rich person.” And then he’d fall asleep. Strangely enough, he woke up and couldn’t get out of bed. He could barely lift his head, but not much.

  He moaned in pain. His head hurt, his bones hurt, his chest hurt.

  He was taken to the hospital for an exam, and the findings were that his cancer had progressed, that it was metastasis, and now it affected his bones and his brain. He had a series of small strokes. It was hard to explain, the doctors said. His moaning became louder, and doctors administered high doses of morphine. And he didn’t pray, didn’t even say “Oh God.” He swore like a Turk, like a Croat. And then the ambulance returned him home.

  Upon seeing the red bricks of his home, he laughed. “And whose blood is this in the bricks? Is it mine? Is it the blood of the Serbs killed in the Second World War here?” His dog sniffed him and barked as though he’d become someone else in the meantime.

  Now that he was bedridden, and the doctors determined that another wave of chemo would only be detrimental at this point, the only thing that could help would be hemp oil and morphine. His old friends and relatives began to visit. They all quieted down, unsure of whether he was still conscious, whether he was asleep or awake, and he wasn’t sure whether he was asleep or awake, whether this was part of some methodical nightmare that, although boring, grew more and more dreadful by the hour. Nights were especially harrowing, with hallucinations and wheezing.

  As morning doves began to coo on his roof, announcing the thinning of the nig
ht, dispersing the darkness (where did it all go, where could it hide in this universe that is mostly darkness?), he felt relief and wondered whether his nicotine-stained teeth hurt, and if they did, whether he would notice toothache among the many other shades of ache he suffered. He could not get out of bed, could not lift his head, and Alana tilted him to one side and the other to wipe and wash him as though he were already a corpse, or Jesus taken off the cross. But no, he didn’t want to think of the religious metaphor because he didn’t believe, but the fact that his cessation of belief had precipitated such a swift decline tempted him to believe again. Maybe it was divine retribution, and that it was so effective suggested God’s power at work.

  His cousins came. A doctor who worked as a cardiologist in Zagreb and his younger brother Mirko, a journalist for the Croatian daily, Vecernji list, Abendblatt. Davor suddenly remembered how he’d taught Mirko, who was four years younger, to masturbate in order to make his penis grow when the boy was eleven years old. “Do it every day. If you don’t do it every day, it won’t grow, and trust me, you want to have an above-average penis if you want to be loved by a beautiful woman.”

  Poor shmuck, he thought and smiled, and neither of them have any idea what I am thinking now. He opened one eye and peered at Mirko, who had grown a big beard since he’d last visited a year before, looking like Moses or Karl Marx. Or God. Not Jesus, Jesus didn’t have an impressive beard.

  His wife said, “His mind is going. He called from the hospital and said, ‘I don’t see anything.’ I was scared that he’d lost his sight, but he meant to say, ‘I don’t hear anything.’ The words mix up. Lucky thing he can see.”

  “But he can’t hear?”

  “Usually he can’t. Sometimes he has a phase when he can hear a little.”

  “The brain is a miraculous thing,” said the doctor.