On the right, at the top of yet another hill of tombstones, stood the Golden Gate, bricked in and shut down. It was through this gate Jesus first entered the city, and it was said he would return through it. Jews believed that through this same gate the true Messiah would one day come to raise the dead from the stones of the city. God had told Ezekiel: “This gate is to be kept shut, and is not to be opened! No one shall enter by it because the Lord, the God of Israel, has entered by it; therefore it shall remain shut.”
Throughout the centuries many false messiahs had tried to breach it. The Turks were the last to render the gate impassable, though they, too, awaited the coming of Mahdi, the avatar of Islam.
“It is sealed now, but it will burst open with the power of the True One,” Father Hernio commented.
Andrea suddenly felt a surge of anger.
“The True One?” she repeated bitterly. Her tone surprised the priest.
“Why so bitter, dear?”
Andrea decided, because she had grown to trust the priest and all her friends at the convent, to tell them a story from her past.
“Once when they loaded us on a prison truck, I asked the Serb officer overseeing the transport, ‘What’s your name?’ We were forbidden to talk to the Serbs; I don’t know what I was thinking. Before the war, he would have liked me, but I wouldn’t have looked at him. I was from the city, you see, and he was only a peasant! But now he looked back at me like I was a rat, and answered, ‘The True One! I am the True One!’ I knew what he meant. He meant that he was my conqueror, and that made him the only true person. So I said, ‘Maybe I am the True One.’ He hit me with the butt of his rifle, but the blow only landed on my shoulder. It missed my face.”
The scholars listened silently to the girl’s every word. It was the longest speech they’d ever heard her make. After a time, they walked on. Below them was the long row of the tombs of the kings and the prophets, the waterfalls of stone that were the tombs of Absalom and Ezekiel, whose calls for the destruction of Jerusalem had been heeded time after time.
God, keep that gate shut a little longer, Andrea prayed silently to she knew not which God; I am too young for the End.
Finally, Sister Rodica guided the group to the Church of the Tomb of Mary, where the Virgin lay in her crypt, surrounded by icons and jewel-encrusted lamps. The scent of incense and oils so permeated her clothes that for the rest of the day, when Andrea breathed deeply, she felt a painful intoxication.
It was here that Sister Rodica, overcome by emotion, declared in a weak voice that she was done for the day. The tours were never routine for her; no matter how many times she conducted them, the Holy Spirit filled, conquered, and finally exhausted her. Father Hernio kindly offered to take her back to the hospice in a taxi. The rest of the pilgrims continued up the hill to the Western Wall.
The Wailing Wall, Hakotel Hama’aravi, is all that remains of the Temple Mount. The focus of Jewish longing throughout centuries of exile, it is a wall of memory. In her short lifetime, Andrea had witnessed the fall of some mighty walls: the fall of the Berlin Wall and, in ironic counterpoint, the breaching of the walls of Sarajevo. All the hopes that accrued to the fall of the Berlin Wall were scattered savagely, like drops of blood, by the siege of Sarajevo. She had grown to love walls in her childhood, the tufty medieval walls that she climbed with her friends in the summer—and to hate them for keeping her in. Or out. But here was a wall that stretched both horizontally, through the longing of Jews everywhere, and vertically, through their history. It was a big wall, but not as big as the wall that could have been made from all the bones of Jews trying to get back to it.
To reach the wall, tourists and believers passed through metal detectors manned by armed soldiers. Beyond them, women were directed to the right, men to the left. Andrea and Lama Cohen walked slowly toward the wall. On a ledge high above them a cluster of fur-hatted Jews, clumped together like a flock of crows, held a sign that read, PREPARE FOR THE COMING OF THE MESSIAH! Doubtless they had been there since the destruction of the Temple, sometimes visible, sometimes invisible, but always in black, mourning and waiting.
As the group that had been led by Sister Rodica approached the wall, it began to snow. Lama Cohen lifted her arms to welcome it. For the most part, the lama had achieved a state of equanimity that it was her duty to maintain, but before the remains of the Temple her Jewish soul burst out. She had thought that she was done with the emotional trappings of her birth—when she looked in the mirror she saw only the even silver of her calm. She had burned most of her desires, which rested like fine ash at the bottom of her self. But now, tears, which she hoped Andrea did not see, met the thickly falling snow in this place of memory and lamentation.
The snowfall became a storm. Andrea pressed her head against the cold stones. Tens of thousands of tightly rolled strips of paper containing prayers moldered in the cracks. Andrea pressed hard, as if the wall held something other than cold rock.
Lama Cohen, almost invisible in the blizzard, pressed not just her forehead but her entire body against the wall, and imperceptibly at first, then harder, she began to rock back and forth in the traditional Jewish manner. Only, there was nothing traditional about it: she was a woman and a Buddhist. She smiled through her tears, remembering a story a doctor friend had told her: every day, dozens of people hurt their elbows, heads, and knees at the wall. Overcome by violent emotions, some pilgrims literally bashed themselves against the stone. The doctor called it the Jerusalem syndrome, an imprecise moniker that applied also to an entirely different condition that sometimes afflicted visitors to the Holy City: they believed quite suddenly that they were the Messiah. At that very moment, at Kfar Shaul Psychiatric Hospital, one hundred messiahs suffered their imprisonment without complaint, each one certain that he was the True One.
A trickle of something warm reached Andrea’s lips; she stuck out her tongue and tasted it. It was a drop of her own blood; she had scraped her forehead on the rock. The drop of blood tasted salty and sweet. Seized by a desire to taste more of her own blood, she rubbed her forehead against the stone until another drop, hot and full of life, snaked down her face and found her tongue. She remembered the trickle of her mother’s blood, a squiggly line drawn whimsically in the snow, as if by a child. Andrea tasted snow and blood and felt the coldness of the Jews’ wall—and the bright white flower opened in her again. She looked to her left, where Lama Cohen had wrapped herself in a snowy shroud. The girl reached out and felt for her. The two fell into each other’s arms, their tears mingling. It was an unusual moment for both: for Andrea it was the first time that she had felt a woman’s warmth since her mother’s death. For Lama Iris Cohen it was a breach of the Buddhist practice of detachment, a reversion to the sentimental impetuousity of her race.
Close to her fifteenth birthday, the first winter of the siege, Andrea had been laid out with a fever. She watched the first snowfall of the year through a small circle cut in the black crepe that covered the window. She watched the fat snowflakes float down, hoping that her mother would return soon with firewood. Normally this was Andrea’s job, but she hadn’t been able to get out of bed. She had lain there listening to the soft explosions that punctuated Sarajevo each evening. She had learned to discern certain patterns: if the last volley was rapid small-caliber-arms fire with a cannon boom at the end, everything was going to be all right. If the volley lasted past the boom, she was filled with anxiety. After the first boom, they had to leave their rooms and descend quickly to the basement. Sometimes she spent whole days and nights in the basement, pressed on all sides by the anxious bodies of their neighbors.
But this night the boom didn’t come. The machine-gun volley was followed by nearby shouts. By the time Andrea ran up the stairs to see what the shouting was about, her mother had been covered with a blanket. A trickle of blood seeped from under the blanket onto the snow. Her father, who arrived soon after from a shelter where he was repairing a broken water pipe—even though there was currently no water�
��did not allow her to see her mother. She had been hit in the face by the sniper’s bullet.
Later that night her father went out on a detail to check out shell damage to the streetcar line. He never came back. He and the other men were killed by an exploding mortar.
For the rest of that winter, Andrea lived with neighbors. She stayed indoors, afraid to go out into the snow. The stairs leading down to the basement were the closest she came to breathing the outdoors. The whiteness was a shroud. But it was not her mother’s hastily shrouded body that haunted her. One day months before, she had seen the body of a young woman whose head had been blown apart. A stray dog was eating the brains. No one took notice. Corpses had become as common as broken windows in Sarajevo. Andrea watched the skinny yellow cur eat until he was satisfied.
When she got home, choked by the horror she had witnessed, her father had met her with a joke.
“Christ,” he said, “is carrying his cross in Sarajevo. Someone stops him and asks, ‘Where did you get the wood?’” Andrea had laughed. She was glad that she had.
“I came to Jerusalem,” she told Lama Cohen, “because they told me that it never snows here. It isn’t true. But I know that Jerusalem has seen more death than even Sarajevo. Maybe, even though it snows here, it’s a wiser place.”
Lama Cohen caressed Andrea’s hand, sweeping the snow from it. “You are right. Each stone was washed in blood. Yet the city endures.”
But she said to herself, This child is complex and strange like an obscured prayer wheel. I cannot yet read her soul.
The sentimentality that had earlier possessed her left her suddenly like a small bird made of snow and tears. The lucidity of the meditator returned, its merciless light revealing and harsh. But she felt for this child with the keenest empathy.
The hospice pilgrims regrouped outside the security checkpoint. They all seemed wearier and older.
“To the Omar Mosque?” suggested Father Zahan.
It was a rhetorical question. The place of Muhammad’s dream of heaven, adjacent to the spot where Abraham had nearly sacrificed his son Isaac, would have to wait for another day.
In the taxi they took back to the convent, Andrea felt as though her body had changed shape. She felt longer and thinner; even her hands and fingers had grown outward, like the branches of a tree. Inside, she felt a mission forming, something bright and full of stories. Above all, she felt affection for everyone in her party, even Mr. Rabindranath and his yucky penis.
Chapter Thirteen
Wherein Felicity meets the poet Ovid and an old friend, Martin Dedette. Reverend Mullin arrives at certain dates crucial for humanity.
I really need to get a good night’s sleep, Felicity told herself as she typed in http://history.love.messiah and logged on to Make Love to People from History. Next day’s meeting with Mullin was crucial. Felicity lay naked on top of her bedspread. It was a mild night; there was a breeze redolent of sap and river mud coming in through the skylight that was always cracked open. The little computer screen shone like the friendly beacon of a lighthouse. I am a little ship, thought Felicity. I am sailing far into the past. I am sailing past all the history I don’t remember from school. Past America, past Europe, past the Civil War, past the Wars of the Roses, past Charlemagne and Attila the Hun.
She found herself floating past a scalloped shoreline dotted with the dark shapes of the tents of Attila’s men. She thought about her loneliness, and the loneliness of everyone who ever lived. Loneliness was at the bottom of everything. Humanity was as lonesome, she thought, as each of its individuals. She looked up at the stars, and anguish pierced her like an arrow. She thought of Ovid, the exiled poet. Something about the author of the Art of Love, the Metamorphoses, and the Tristia—lover, seducer, exile—spoke to the melancholy that had settled unaccountably in her soul. It was a sadness different from her everyday sadness and feeling of loss. It was more primal, a single sad note playing since the birth of the universe. Miles had said, “The sound of the big bang is B-flat.”
Of course, Ovid wasn’t just the sad poet of exile. He had been a lover of the empress, a wit of his day, a courtly and sophisticated man. On meeting someone named Messiah, a concept with which he was likely to be insufficiently acquainted, he might have asked questions she couldn’t answer. Perhaps she should be someone more humble, a temple vestal or a prostitute. But someone like that might not interest the great poet either. Most likely he would prefer someone witty, verbally brilliant. A storyteller. The greatest storyteller of the ancient world, Felicity remembered, was Scheherazade, who had saved her life by telling stories for a thousand and one nights. Yes, that was more like it.
Felicity decided to change her nom de guerre from Messiah to Scheherazade. It was less grandiose, and Ovid would like it. She would tell a story good enough to entertain a great poet. She would make up stories just as she had before going to sleep in her childhood, when she had been inspired by the major’s fantastic tales.
Felicity used the Paintbox more skillfully than last time, creating Scheherazade as a slender waif wrapped in billowing veils. Her eyes were half closed and her heart-shaped mouth slightly open, as if she were already in the middle of a story. She was better looking than the Messiah, more feminine, and, Felicity thought, more like herself.
She typed in: OVID.
Time meant nothing to the author of the Art of Love. He lounged on a crude wooden bench in a tattered toga. Rough-looking sailors were drinking on other benches. A slim-keeled trireme was beached in the middle of the room, filled with Greek amphoras. Scheherazade stepped around it and came face-to-face with the poet. He didn’t seem surprised.
“Greetings, Scheherazade. Some friends and I were sitting here in this café in dusty Tomis. I told them about you, and they all wanted to meet you. These boys have seen the whole world. They’ve sailed their boats to the isles of Hellespontus, the coves of Tunis, the Golden Horn, and known every kind of woman: the sirens of Cyprus, the fish-tailed wenches of the Irish coast, the croc-headed temple whores of Egypt, vestals at Delphi, patrician Roman wives, and also many boys, from the long-limbed lads of Corfu to the snake-muscled porters of Asia Minor.”
“What do they want with me, Ovid?” Felicity decided that modesty was called for, though she looked nothing like a vestal virgin.
“Like I said, they’ve heard tell about you, Scheherazade. They heard that your stories are as strong as snake venom, but they do not kill. They heard that your stories arouse a man’s manhood more than anything else; that the touch of your voice causes men to ejaculate rivers of effluvium, more than any other woman or boy ever could. It is said that following your stories, men are given the sweetest, deepest sleep—close to death and yet not death. These are restless men, Scheherazade—they have traveled the world because they cannot sleep. They have enjoyed and labored at women and girls and boys in the hope of sleep. You’re their last chance, sweet Scheherazade.”
“And you, Ovid, are you still lonely by the shores of the Black Sea, among the savage Gets? Haven’t you sampled their women and boys? Won’t you tell me their customs? I need stories, too, Ovid, like any poet. I do not make my stories out of whole cloth. I weave them from the stories of others. When one is fortunate enough to have for a friend the poet of the Metamorphoses, one should listen.”
“You flatter me, sorceress from the future, and flattery is half of arousal. My manhood already chafes against the rough wool of my Getian breeches. Yes, I have sampled their women. They say that Orpheus himself hails from these parts. I can see why his lyre played such lovely tunes. The Get women of the patrician class wear short tunics like the harlots of Rome. Their legs are long and bronzed, and they wear sandals made from tree bark. Their toes are flexible like fingers—they can pick up things from the floor with their toes. One of the local refinements is for an Alexandra or a Clestea—they give themselves Roman names, the poor monkeys—to wrap her long toes around a man’s phallus while tickling his piss hole with the big toe. I am well made, by
Jove, and I can tell you that I scarcely believed it when the toes of such a wench went all the way around my manhood. Their fingers, though long and supple, cannot do that. The pleasure was doubled when I had two of these lasses, barely sixteen and already refined in pleasure, service me with their toes. It is said that the Gets are descended from wolves, and they are hungry indeed. At their festivals they daub themselves with red paint and run naked in the meadows, shooting their arrows into the sky to irritate their god, Zamolxes. When he is well irritated he sends down lightning, thunder, and rain. It makes their paint run and causes them to become frenzied. Their bacchanalia last for weeks.”
Ovid lay down on the bench, and Scheherazade sat beside him and put his large head on her silken lap. The poet’s head was heavy; his coarse hair scratched her. His forehead was deeply lined, and a faraway light burned like a fever in the black depths of his eyes.
“I was sold into slavery to a barbarian ship, Ovid. The sailors took their pleasure with me for a month at sea. I have learned things I can scarcely describe, they were so painful and—I blush to think it—pleasurable. The barbarians liked to take me in clusters, leaving no part of my body unattended. I lay on deck naked with sore gums, bunghole, and cunt, rubbing salves on all my body. Only my mind was free to soar, and in my mind I saw all the pure things of this world: small babes in arms, fields of flowers, rain on mosaic tiles. One day, one of the barbarians took me for his own and kept me all to himself and to his cabin boy, a young lad of sixteen. I healed, but cannot forget all that happened to me.
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