Collected Stories of Reynolds Price

by Reynolds Price

  All the family ate with a hunger to match my own—with frequent sighs of satisfaction and cries of thanks—but no one ever spoke to Sam, not that I saw, not even the grandfather-owner-boss. And while Sam stumped his brisk way round us like a Levantine Tiny Tim at work with no real sign of resentful exclusion, he likewise never smiled or spoke; and he never met a one of our faces, not that I saw.

  So as we neared the end of the food—and I’d exhausted all I could say to kindly people who nonetheless knew broken English or none at all (Jabril had long since donned the fathomless boredom of well-behaved children marooned in adults)—I found myself composing a history and home for Samir. Small as he was and Jame in the leg, I thought past the present and saw him reared in the scapegoat wilderness south of Jericho, camped by white hot ruins or the lunar valleys of the Salt Sea shore (none of which landscape I’d yet seen except in boyhood Bible pictures). I pictured him herding the family goats alone in rain and roaring sunlight, yelling off packs of wild dogs or chased by older boys who stoned him for his withered leg.

  The Scotch by now was kicking in; and when Samir passed my chair next, I beckoned him down and said a brief thanks. I figured that anyone waiting table this near the Old City’s prime tourist route would know the word thanks.

  But Sam drew back like a slapped child and said “Sorry. Sorry, sir.”

  Christ, who was I now? Jabril had someway refused my drawing, and Sam had thoroughly misunderstood a simple thanks. Since he was still balked there beside me, frowning darkly, I tried to correct myself with a grin and a toast from my glass.

  At last Sam managed the ghost of a smile, but his eyes were already back at work in a fury of dread that he might yet fail the high occasion, and through the rest of the meal he plainly shunned my chair.

  We’d started eating awhile past seven. By half past nine the tender lamb was a stripped white carcass staring us down from the midst of the table, Jabril was in his father’s lap almost asleep, the lovely daughter had disappeared, the San Francisco aunt was dozing (even more jet-lagged than me); and Sam was bussing our plates away as if they mattered more than ever in his plan for the night, his feverish design, whatever it was.

  The family had long since asked me to join them for their next round—a midnight mass beyond the Damascus Gate on the north edge of town—but I’d declined on grounds of fatigue. And now as the grandfather stood to organize a departure, I joined in a final round of handshakes, hugs by now, with thanks and vows to see them again “many times” before leaving.

  As I turned, the father said “You can never pay to eat here, sir.”

  When I said “I may not ever eat again,” Jabril’s eyes widened; he raised a hushing finger and said “Now pray that does not come true.”

  Again this adult care from a child“but I took him seriously and nodded. Then I pulled the tablet from his hand. The drawing was better than I’d recalled. I liked it enough to write at the bottom, “Jabril at Christmas guarding his new friend, Bridge Boatner.”

  When the boy read it, he nearly smiled again; but I saw he knew I’d pierced his secret cover and thanked him.

  Then I was out in the square again, bracingly cold and only a little disoriented. The Jaffa Gate was still twenty yards off, still dimly lighted. All shops were shuttered and most lights out—not a moving soul, even uphill by Police Headquarters—but I could see four pitch-black alleys yawning into the core of town. Though my map showed that Old Jerusalem was maybe the size of six square blocks of New York City, it was home to far more crucial deeds of humankind than the fifty states combined and doubled. Within the sound of my calling voice lay tangible traces of David and Solomon, Nebuchadnezzar’s conquering hordes, Alexander the Great and the Maccabees, then lethal Herod and officious Pilate, Jesus, Peter, John and Paul.

  A three-year-old on his first real hike could step from here in a quick half hour past the devastations of the Emperor Titus with the final razing of God’s own Temple and the forced exile of all the Jews, through Byzantine mazes of power and murder to the actual rock from which Mohammed soared to heaven, then past that breach in the northern wall where the First Crusade poured through and turned these howling alleys to gutters of smoking Saracen blood. Not to speak of the scented gold remains of the Ottoman Turk and the swift return of Israel to its old home in pain and death. So, bleared and wobbly as I was and far from any visible home, it came down on me with serious weight—I was here upright and apparently strong in the compact thudding heart of a place as near to being Homo sapiens’ ultimate socket as anywhere else.

  That much memory left me thinking I’d pray for my skin and trot to my hotel the quickest way. I buttoned my jacket and turned to run. Then a voice cried out. I thought it said “Sir.” And when I looked’God, no—there stood the beggar in the scarlet fez, some thirty yards off beneath a weak streetlight by one of the alleys. I looked behind me—nobody, nothing.

  He had to want me; and when he cried again it was “Sir”—his arm was waving me toward him strongly.

  In brief, I went, telling myself each step of the way that (1)I was tipsy (2) enough so to feel more than normal self-pity and (3) the lioness hotel clerk had assured me that Jerusalem, Old and New, was safer than “Your home on the range”—she’d actually sung a bar of the song which, if I’d thought, might have helped me guess I was in for a night of rules reversed.

  As I got closer the beggar looked worse, a renegade from Rembrandt’s etching of Jesus healing the sick and the poor. But he wasn’t old and plainly not starved—mid to late fifties and reasonably stout with a scruffy beard. Besides the fez he wore a tan cotton smock with stains in all repellent colors. Ending just below his knees, it fully displayed his leather peg and the wound in his left shin. Closer up it looked like an ulcer bound to eat right through the leg soon—invisible parasites were gouging it deeper the nearer I got.

  I moved up anyhow and then I saw a sizable box on the ground by his stump—black wood with an upright brass footrest.

  “I will shine your shoes.” That far at least, his English was clear, almost no accent. But this was surely no American Jew fallen on hard times, no Arab back from years in Detroit.

  I said I doubted the shoes were worth it—old Cordovan loafers I saved for trips. I brought out a fifty-shekel note instead and held it toward him. “Seasons greetings.”

  Gently he refused my hand, never quite touching me but pressing me back with firm politeness. “Sir, I honor the name of your God; but I am not a Nazarene. I only thought to give your shoes a Christmas gift.”

  I thanked him, as much for the crusty words as his free shine offer. Then I set one foot on his box and asked to know his name.

  “Sir, it is George.” The West Bank still was stocked with men who’d learned their English from British officers staffing the Mandate. Despite his lack of detectable accent, George had surely worked for the Brits sometime in his life. In all his dirt and desolation, he’d kept that welcome blue-steel edge of command and no-nonsense. It sat on him like a cool addition to the Arab air of raptor force and the hot intent to do you enormous good or kill you—maybe both.

  It was eerily like the air that hung round young Southern white men in my boyhood two generations past Appomattox, and soon I was feeling strangely at home. So I balanced on one leg in the dark while George spent ten minutes rehabilitating my shoes with only occasional grunts and cackles but no more words. When at last he said “Finished” and set my right foot back on the pavement, I fumbled again for my wallet to pay.

  But his round face clouded, and his black eyes burned—“Never, sir. You did not hear me? I said it is our gift to you.”

  I might have asked who our was; but I offered my hand, half thinking I’d touch a leprous palm and win eternal credit for kindness. But George’s skin was soft as kid-leather, and we shook on the gift.

  Then he said “You come with me.”

  I might have bolted but at that moment the first two other humans I’d seen since dinner passed. They were y
oung men, tall, alarmingly thin and dressed in the stark black suits and hats of Hassidic Jews. In the weak light their pure white faces and forelock curls looked far more vulnerable than any single cell of my body; yet they plowed forward, talking happily in what seemed Yiddish, and vanished down the largest alley. If a pair of humans defenseless as they could brave the night, who I was to balk?

  When I looked to George, he’d slung the box across his shoulder and was waiting for me.

  I said “Where now?”

  He paused long enough to let me know he’d heard the question; then he gave a slow hook of his head and started toward the same black mouth where the Hassids vanished, David Street.

  It was all downhill in long stone steps maybe five yards wide, with shuttered shops to left and right and only the occasional glow from living quarters above. No sound at all but my clean shoes, George’s stump and the thud of the shoeshine box on his hip as he led the way. Or was he leading?

  After maybe seventy yards, I paused alone at a cross street with a naked light bulb overhead. Both ways were roofed and plaster-vaulted twenty feet above. This was plainly the heart of a thriving market, and the faded sign said Christian Street. The streets seemed wider in both directions with a thicket of painted placards by the shop doors—jewelery, leather, mother of pearl, olivewood carvings, icons, Yemenite filigree, American jeans and a billion plastic bowls and jugs in every size and exotic shape.

  Then I thought I could see George’s shadow stumping onward to my left, at least the filthy back of his smock and his rolling gait. I took a few breaths to check for fear. In any other city, even this early on Christmas Eve, I’d have known I was crazy to tail a stranger through what by now seemed the stunned body of an endless giant we tunneled in.

  But something new had freed me up. I thought the word courage and guessed this was it. In my past life I’d never been bothered like so many men by questions of my own personal guts—would I turn yellow under fire? I’d more or less always known I wouldn’t, not because I was all that brave but as a direct result of an inborn painter’s eye—I was mainly curious to see everything at whatever price, though except for the sights at my father’s deathbed and once when I rescued my son Xan from the nearly perpendicular roof of an old garage, I’d barely faced a live-or-die test except for those months in Vietnam.

  I’d watched enough Arab-Israeli news in the past forty years to have some sense of what lay round me. I even stood at the crossway long enough to weigh my chances—knives again, bombs, mugging at the hands of George and his friends, a slashed-out tongue or merely some innocent desecration of a Muslim shrine with consequent melee and twelve men shot, including me on tomorrow night’s news for my sons to watch back home by the Yule log, guilty at last.

  No, I felt as normal as if this were downtown Winston-Salem in my childhood, where the possible threats were terminal boredom or a fender bender from a cheerful drunk. In fact I felt a good deal better than at most winter solstices (I crave sunlight). Far from depressed by the Bethlehem failure, I could tell that now I was slightly elated, beyond the rewards of good food and Scotch. And it felt like a well-braced mood, no whim. Maybe I was bound for one of my rare but fruitful spells of easy solitude—those clear-aired plateaus when life seems nothing but fuel for work; and work ignites at the sight of canvas, like a frictionless engine with no upkeep.

  Before I knew I’d made the choice, I was walking left on Christian Street and had gone a long way in the dark again before I thought to look for George. No trace of him ahead or behind; but when I’d walked another few yards, I heard a hoarse bark beyond me, then a long wail and furious claws on a dry wood door.

  At another light bulb fifty yards on, what appeared to be George was waiting upright. His back was to me with one long arm out, bracing his body against a wall.

  I trotted toward him but the closer I came, the more he melted deeper inward—a turn to the right, full dark again but I had the sense of space around me at last, level pavement under my feet. In another step I walked into something broad and warm, someone—George (by then I’d memorized his odor, not foul but high). I called his name, excused myself and took a step back.

  He didn’t speak. He came back toward me, found my right hand and drew me on through the new wide space maybe ten more yards. Then he said “Very slowly—slowly, sir—go down these steps. I will watch from here.”

  I could literally not see my feet, much less George behind me; but I felt a blank stone wall on my right; and I counted wide steps downward beneath me—eight, ten. By now someway I expected noise, the crash of something brass—huge cymbals—or a bass drum. But what came slowly was a feeble light to my left; then more, an actual shine. And then my feet were level again. A small square opened out to my left, the lighted open enormous door of a looming building, one man beside it. I looked back for George and called his name—no sign or answer.

  Ten yards away from the open door, I could see the man was an Arab policeman standing at ease but plainly on duty. The light was strong, though it had the wavering feel of candle light, the thrill of torch light. On the plane I’d browsed through a 1910 British guide to Jerusalem with black-and-white pictures of holy sites and clear directions to the “sanitary fittings.” But nothing here before me now matched any picture in the book. Was it another Arab Christian church?—then where were the people? Was it a mosque and did Muslims somehow mark the night? (Jesus after all remains a Muslim prophet.)

  But then a second policeman approached from behind the door and stood by the first—the new man was younger, a half-head taller. I thought he looked directly my way; he even seemed to meet my eyes and he almost nodded. Then he and his partner lit cigarettes, began to whisper; and in ten more seconds, I caught a red glimpse of what was almost surely George in a ragged vestment, no fez now—the startling body was gone in an instant. But if it was George, the vestment had hung almost to the floor and hid his wound; and he’d shucked his wornout canvas shoes. Whoever, he’d swung what looked like a silver incense pot that poured blue smoke.

  All right then, Christmas. The Arabs, if not quite “co-religionists” (as my guidebook called all Western white folks), were bent on my marking the night somehow; so I went toward the door. The police would stop me if I was trespassing.

  As I neared them though—and then stepped past through the wide doorway three times my height—the younger man only said “Soon now,” then nodded knowingly as if we shared a secret hope, then tapped his watch.

  It was a church, yes. Just inside the door was a high stone wall with several gigantic sooty paintings of Jesus in various quandaries, ringed by the usual helpless disciples. By now apparently all alone in a huge roofed silence, I told myself not to hunt for signs but to roam here mystified till something or someone actually broke in on me crying “Death to the Infidel!” or “Step this way for perpetual bliss.”

  The silence deepened like night on a black plain. To my right I saw a curving set of worn stairs and decided to climb them—eighteen steps that opened on a wide low room maybe twelve yards square with a clutch of candle flames on my left. I moved toward them and was faced by an altar as cluttered as any schoolboy’s room—tapers, modern Greek icons in toxic pastels of Mary and Jesus expertly boned, bloodless and cool. But the altar itself was an honest stone slab like a dining table on yard-high legs, and under the table was a low stone ledge with what looked like a broad disc in polished silver. It had an apparent hole in the midst, six inches across.

  A voice said “Jesus - Christ - crucified - here”—a deep voice creaky with age or misuse and apparently close.

  While my nerves still rattled, I looked round slowly. Behind on my left was a dark alcove.

  An old man sat there robed like an Orthodox priest or monk—full bat-costume in dusty black with the standard Greek-priest mushroom hat, the full white beard with dried remains of recent snacks, the Santa Claus cheeks.

  When I met his milky wandering eye, he gestured hard toward the silver medallion. “Re
ach in there. Stone - where - Jesus - Christ - crucified.” If his voice went deeper, it would trip earthquakes. He held a fistful of narrow candles with a small cashbox on his bellied lap—you apparently bought your candles from him—and on the floor beside his chair was a roll of American toilet paper for his next john-call.

  He’d yet to try to sell me a candle; but I found another fifty shekel note, laid it in his box and took a thin taper. I lit it from one at the side of the altar, set it up in a small tub of sand; then I briskly came as near to prayer as I’d come in years. I asked whatever might hear me for work—for my tired eyes somehow cleaned and strengthened, my right hand steadied, my pictures deepened and taught the old elusive facts again of how the world looks and what it’s for. Then I bent to reach the disc. It ringed an actual hole, jet black; and one last brake in my mind said no.

  But the monk said “Reach.”

  I was half bent over. I put my right hand into the hole up past my wrist. The air inside was decidedly cooler than the odorous room; but when I felt around in the dark, my fingers touched nothing.

  The voice said “Reach.”

  My own mind told me to use my left hand—I must have thought I could spare that easier if the expected unseen jaw ground down. But again my wiggling fingers found nothing, far as they reached. I’d have to kneel to thrust in deeper—why though, for what? I glanced to the monk.

  His hand was huge now and aimed me on.

  So I got to my knees nearer the hole, then reached till my elbow vanished inward.