Roman days. We entered the Alhambra through a shaded garden. We walked among palms, alongside a reflecting pool, to reach the box office. On the screen, we saw sandal-shod feet, greaves laced to the bulging calves of Roman soldiers, raised standards of the legions of Caesar. A soundtrack of French horns and kettledrums bellowed like a herd of bullocks as marching troops kicked up the dust of some god-forsaken outback of empire. The camera found the eyes of Consul Stephen Boyd. We were relieved to be provided, at last, with a point of view. Stephen Boyd surveyed the desolation, raised his eyes to the balcony where I sat portioning a small box of Milk Duds to last through a crucifixion. A legend appeared in the center of the screen:
ANNO DOMINI
XXVI
I became a Christian at the Alhambra Theatre. I suppose I became a Crusader as well. On the screen of the Alhambra Theatre we watched Otto Preminger’s Exodus, starring Paul Newman; we watched the blue eyes of Paul Newman survey the Mediterranean, espy the approach of the Promised Land, rising and falling, from the prow of the ship. It did not occur to me to imagine another point of view. I saw Palestine from the sea. I became a Zionist at the Alhambra Theatre.
The distance of Arabs from the American imagination made the ornate folly of the Alhambra Theatre possible. Before I was born, Rudolf Valentino caused a sensation playing the Sheik. Valentino was America’s first exotic movie idol, though he was neither an Arab nor a Muslim. He was born Roman Catholic, of a French mother and an Italian father. But genealogy was not the point, nor was religion. The point was a dusky seducer of powder-white women. The point was a silken tent under the stars. The point was a theme for the junior prom. Like the Alhambra Theatre’s architecture, Rudolf Valentino referred the American imagination to an indistinct kingdom somewhere between A Thousand and One Nights and the Old Testament.
For many older Americans, until 2001, Baghdad was a thought inseparable from Douglas Fairbanks.
In the big Bible movies, Arabs were supernumeraries, not yet Muslims. Arabs were sellers at the bazaars, tuggers of camels, blind beggars. Arabs were like the desert—shifty, enduring. Jews and Christians were the main players—buff, brown-nippled visionaries (Victor Mature) who suffered the twisted attentions of stuffed-togas (Peter Ustinov) or gold-sandaled sinners (Virginia Mayo).
Islam had no comparable fraudulent reality for me, not until Lawrence of Arabia; not until screenwriter Robert Bolt’s desert princes (Omar Sharif, Alec Guinness) stung their camels’ necks with batons, uttering exit lines such as “So it is written!” The princes were fatalistic foils to Peter O’Toole’s blue-eyed “Nothing is written.”
As an adolescent, I read Sir Richard Burton, the nineteenth-century English explorer, because he was there—a maroon half-leather volume on my favorite shelf at the public library (“Travels in Ancient Lands”). Burton smuggled me into Mecca beneath a filthy cloak—Mecca was forbidden to infidels—and he nearly got us killed by standing to urinate, something only an infidel would do. Burton said he knew that but thought no one was watching.
About the time of my hajj with Sir Richard Burton, two examples of Islam in America became apparent to me. When trickster-poet heavyweight champ Cassius Clay espoused the Nation of Islam, renaming himself Muhammad Ali, his conversion immediately drew the world’s attention.
In parts of American cities, like Harlem, the South Side of Chicago, and East Oakland, the Nation of Islam was gaining notoriety as a Northern, an ultra-unorthodox, chapter of the Negro civil rights movement. Black Muslims dressed modestly—like Sunday school teachers, like Mormons, like nuns—but they preached what America feared more than integration: They preached separatism, puritanism, anti-Semitism, racial supremacy, a faith against other faiths, a faith against the United States. The Nation of Islam’s claim on orthodox Islam was tenuous.
Muhammad Ali was a winner, the heavyweight boxing champion of the world, and, in his own words, a pretty man—a combination of attributes about as choice as anyone can claim in public America. Ali had more attributes still. A sly wit belied his ferocity in the ring. In his run-in with his draft board, Ali spoke with disarming moral authority. Many Americans, especially men of draft age, admired his refusal to fight in Vietnam. We saw in Ali not only a hero of physical culture, but an upstanding man—thoroughly, never obsequiously, an American. (“I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong.”)
Like many of my generation, I became interested in another Black Muslim. There were no “Sweet-By-and-By” refrains in the testimony of Malcolm X. His voice was the puritan voice of the American North. Malcolm X had a strong story to tell of white racism and of his own degradation, but also of spiritual struggle and change.
I realize now there was always within my mother’s ojalá the recognition that human lives are doomed to surprise. In 1973 I was a student living in London, a student walking through Hyde Park on a summer evening. My mother wrote in her weekly letter of a neighbor, whose fondest wish was to bring her grandchildren to Sacramento for the state fair, and whose leitmotif in my mother’s correspondence was of perpetual reticence—to buy a cake or to play bingo or to go see The Sound of Music—because she was saving all her nickels and dimes to treat her grandchildren, etcetera. . . . Well, our friend did manage to bring most of her grandchildren into single file outside the turnstile one blistering August afternoon. As she waved the children forward with her fistful of tokens, she suddenly clutched at her bosom and fell down dead.
In 1964 Malcolm X separated himself from the Nation of Islam to become a Sunni Muslim. This was already a journey away from American provincialism. He traveled to the holy city of Mecca as a requirement of his faith, and he was astonished to meet all the tribes and kinds of people of the earth gathered there. It was in Mecca that Malcolm X found his spiritual inheritance—a vision larger than grievance, larger than America; a vision of belonging to the world and in the world.
Malcolm X was murdered in New York in 1965 as an apostate Black Muslim.
In the same letter, the fairground letter, as an aside, my mother mentioned that the Alhambra Theatre had closed. The property had been sold to Safeway.
At that time, Americans were daily reading about the Viet Cong and Ho Chi Minh in Hanoi and the labyrinthine Mekong Delta. We were abandoning the old downtowns of Amercian cities and their grandiose movie palaces. The theaters were boarded up or partitioned into two or three screens. In 1975 the last American helicopter lifted off from the besieged U.S. embassy in Saigon. Southeast Asian refugees began to arrive in California. By the time I returned to Sacramento, the Safeway Corporation had pulled down Samson’s pillars. All that remained of the Alhambra Theatre was a tiled wall on the edge of a parking lot.
The new American movie theater, in the suburban mall, was a box, or several boxes, joined by a lobby of no romantic implication. Mall theaters did have the advantages of gigantic screens, rocking seats, free parking, and elaborate sound systems that could portray explosions and epic destructions with what we supposed was astonishing verisimilitude.
Among the many things we learned on the morning of September 11 was that epic destruction does not necessarily carry a sound in our memory or in our mind’s eye.
two
Jerusalem and the Desert
On the flight from London I sit opposite a rumble seat where the stewardess places herself during takeoff. The stewardess is an Asian woman with a faraway look. I ask how often she makes this flight. Once or twice a month. Does she enjoy Israel? Not much. She stays in a hotel in Tel Aviv. She goes to the beach. She flies back. What about Jerusalem? She has not been there. What is in Jerusalem?
The illustrated guidebook shows a medieval map of the world. The map is round. The sun has a beard of fire. All the rivers of the world spew from the mouth of the moon. At the center of the world is Jerusalem.
Just inside the main doors of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, tourists seem unsure how to respond to a rectangular slab of marble resting
upon the floor. Lamps and censors and trinkets hang suspended above the stone. We watch as an old woman approaches. With some effort, she gets down on her knees. I flip through my book: This marble represents the Stone of Unction where Jesus’s body was anointed. This is not original; this stone dates from 1810. The old woman bends forward to kiss the pale stone.
I have come to the Holy Land because the God of the Jews, the God of the Christians, the God of the Muslims—a common God—revealed Himself in this desert. My curiosity about an ecology that joins three religions dates from September 11, 2001, from prayers enunciated in the sky over America on that day.
Most occidental Christians are unmindful of the orientalism of Christianity. Over two millennia, the locus of Christianity shifted westward—to Antioch, to Rome, to Geneva, to the pale foreheads of Thomistic philosophers, to Renaissance paintings, to glitter among the frosts of English Christmas cards. Islam, too, in the middle centuries, swept into Europe with the Ottoman carpet, but then receded. (On September 11, 1683, the King of Poland halted the Muslim advance on Europe at the Gates of Vienna.) Only to reflux. Amsterdam, Paris are becoming Islamic cities.
After centuries of Diaspora, after the calamity of the Holocaust in Europe, Jews turned once more toward the desert. Zionists did not romanticize the desolate landscape. Rather, they defined nationhood as an act of planting. The impulse of the kibbutz movement remains the boast of urban Israel: to make the desert bloom.
The theme of Jerusalem is division. Friday. Saturday. Sunday. The city has been conquered, destroyed, rebuilt, garrisoned, halved, quartered, martyred, and exalted—always the object of spiritual desire, always the prize, always the corrupt model of the eventual city of God. The government of Ariel Sharon constructed a wall that separates Jerusalem from the desert, Jerusalem from Bethlehem, Easter from Christmas.
Jerusalem was the spiritual center of the Judean wilderness. It was Jerusalem the desert thought about. It was Jerusalem the prophets addressed. Jerusalem was where Solomon built a temple for the Lord and where God promised to dwell with His people. Jerusalem was where Jesus died and was resurrected. It was from Jerusalem that Muhammad ascended to heaven during his night journey.
My first impression of the city is my own loneliness—oil stains on the road, rubble from broken traffic barriers, exhaust from buses, the drift of cellophane bags. At the Damascus Gate an old woman sits on the pavement, sorting grape leaves into piles—or some kind of leaves. It is hot. Already it is hot. Late spring. It is early morning. There is a stench of uncollected garbage, and the cats, light and limp as empty purses, slink along the blackened stone walls. Shopkeepers are unrolling their shops.
I turn into the courtyard of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, the site of Christ’s burial and resurrection. A few paces away, within the church, is Golgotha, where Jesus was crucified. Golgotha, the Place of the Skull, is also, according to Jerusalem tradition, the grave of Adam. Jerusalem is as condensed, as self-referential, as Rubik’s Cube.
I wait in line to enter the sepulcher, a freestanding chapel in the rotunda of the basilica. A mountain was chipped away from the burial cave, leaving only the cave. Later the cave was destroyed. What remains is the interior of the cave, which is nothing. The line advances slowly until, after two thousand years, it is my turn. I must lower my shoulders and bend my head; I must almost crawl to pass under the low opening.
I am inside the idea of the tomb of Christ.
I will return many times to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher during my stay and form in my mind an accommodation to its clamorous hush, to the musk of male asceticism—indeed, I will form a love for it that was not my first feeling. Though my first impression remains my last: emptiness.
• • •
I wait for Haim Berger in the lobby of a hotel in Ein Bokek, one among an oasis of resorts near the Dead Sea. The lobby is a desert of sand-colored marble. The lobby’s temperature is oppressively beige; it would be impossible to cool this useless atrium. My cell phone rings. It is Maya, the director of the travel agency attached to my hotel in Jerusalem. Haim will be late one hour. Look for him at ten o’clock.
I watch a parade of elderly men and women crossing the lobby in bathing suits to catch a shuttle to the sulfur baths. They are so unself-conscious about their bodies they seem to walk in paradise.
I imagine I am waiting for someone in shorts and boots and aviator glasses, driving a Jeep. A Volkswagen pulls up and parks haphazardly.
A man bolts from the car. He is willowy of figure, dressed all in white, sandals, dark curly hair. He disappears into the hotel, reemerges. We wait side by side.
I cannot go to the desert alone. I am unfit for it. The desert requires a Jeep. It requires a hat and sunglasses and plastic liters of warm water it is no pleasure to drink. It requires a guide. It requires a cell phone.
Just now the man dressed in white begins patting his pockets, searching for his chiming cell. “Ken . . . shalom, Maya,” I hear him say. Then, turning toward me, “Ah.”
Haim Berger is full of apology. He has taken his wife to an emergency room. Yes, everything is all right. Just a precaution. There is an Evian bottle for me in the car. We will switch to the Jeep later.
Within ten minutes I am standing with Haim on the side of the highway. We look out over a plain, over what once was Sodom and Gomorrah. Haim asks if I know the story. Of course I know the story. Which, nevertheless, does not stop him from telling it. We might be standing near where Abraham stood when “Abraham saw dense smoke over the land, rising like fumes from a furnace.”
I ask Haim if he is religious. He is not.
• • •
All three desert religions claim Abraham as father. A recurrent question in my mind concerns the desert: Did Abraham happen upon God or did God happen upon Abraham? The same question: Which is the desert, or who? I came upon a passage in 2 Maccabees. The passage pertains to the holiness of Jerusalem: The Lord, however, had not chosen the people for the sake of the Place, but the Place for the sake of the people. So, God happened upon Abraham. Abraham is the desert.
An old man sits at the door of his tent in the heat of the day.
Between that sentence and this—within the drum of the hare’s heart, within the dilation of the lizard’s eye—God enters his creation. The old man, who is Abraham, becomes aware of three strangers standing nearby. They arrive without the preamble of distance. The nominative grammar of Genesis surpasses itself to reveal that one of these travelers is God or perhaps all three are God, like a song in three octaves. Abraham invites the Three to rest and to refresh themselves. In return, God promises that in a year’s time Abraham’s wife, who is long past childbearing, will hold in her arms a son.
Abraham’s wife, Sarah, in the recesses of the tent, snorts upon hearing the prognostication; says, not quite to herself: Oh, sure!
God immediately turns to Abraham: Why does Sarah laugh? Is anything too marvelous for God?
Sarah says: I am not laughing.
God says: Yes, you are.
In 1947 a Bedouin goatherd lost a goat and climbed the side of a mountain to look for it. The boy entered a cave—today the cave is known worldwide among archaeologists as Qumran Cave 1. What the boy found in the cave—probably stumbled upon in the dark—were broken clay jars that contained five sheepskin scrolls. Four of the scrolls were written in Hebrew, one in Aramaic. More scrolls were subsequently found by other Bedouin and by scholars in adjacent caves. The discovered scrolls—including a complete copy of the Book of Isaiah—are the oldest-known manuscript copies of books of the Bible.
The scrolls date to the second century BC. Scholars believe the Jewish sect of Essenes, of the proto-monastic community of Qumran, hid the texts we now know as the Dead Sea Scrolls. No one remembers whether the goatherd found his goat.
• • •
Haim is not religious but he offers to tell me a curious story: Last year he
took a group of students into a mountainous part of the desert. He had been there many times. He had previously discovered markings on rocks that seemed to indicate religious observance; he believes the markings are ancient.
On the particular day he describes—it was the winter solstice—as the group approached a mountain, they saw what appeared to be a semicircle of flame emanating from the rock face, rather like the flame from a hoop in the circus. Haim knew it was a trick of the light, or perhaps gases escaping from a fissure in the rock. He walked before the mountain in an arc to observe the phenomenon from every angle. He repeats: He was not alone. They all saw it. He has photographs. He will show me the photographs.
Haim’s love for the desert dates from his military service. His Jeep broke down one day. He cursed the engine. He slammed the hood. He took a memorable regard of the distance. Since that day, he has become intimate with the distance; he has come to see the desert as a comprehensible ecosystem that can be protective of humans.
Haim has tied a white kerchief over his hair.
Haim says: “Bedouin know a lot. Bedouin have lived in the desert thousands of years.” Haim says: “If you are ever stranded in the desert—Are you listening to me? This may save your life!—in the early morning, you must look to see in which direction the birds are flying. They will lead you to water.”
Haim stops to speak with admiration of a bush with dry, gray-green leaves. “These leaves are edible.” (Now I must sample them.) “They are salty, like potato chips.” (They are salty.)
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