A Life Without End
Page 11
The light at the foot of the Mount of Olives had the dull white sheen of sacred stones and mausoleums. The steps leading down to the plaza made me feel dizzy. I wasn’t sure whether I had vertigo or whether I had suddenly become an Israelite. I slowly approached the Wall, savouring the moment, waiting for a miracle, and I slipped my little supplication (scribbled on a paper napkin folded in four and, unfortunately, written in French) into a gap between two stones: Dear Yahweh, if You exist, please grant eternal life to Romy, Léonore, Lou, to my mother, my father, and my brother. And to me. Many thanks, toda, shalom, and mazeltov. I felt as foolish as the mugs who attach padlocks to the Pont des Arts. Romy was overwhelmed by the solemnity of the visitors; she was terrified of disturbing them. To me, it was the antiquity of this place that I found overwhelming. To me the ancient stones seemed to be more respectable than the sobs of a few elderly rabbis in Roman sandals. One thing did surprise me: the Al-Aqsa Mosque partially rests on the Wailing Wall. Here in Jerusalem, Islam is shored up by Judaism. Though neither are happy about it, in terms of geology and city planning the Muslims and the Jews are inseparable.
As for the Christians … I couldn’t find the way to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre: the church where Christ rose from the dead is not as well signposted as the Wailing Wall and the Al-Aqsa Mosque, something that would have infuriated my parents. We spent a long time wandering, lost, through the steep alleys and dark passageways of the Holy City. The Way of the Cross has become a shopping centre for tour operators who sell God at rock-bottom prices. Stalls of fake Louis Vuitton handbags, garish sweets, postcards, and Palestinian keffiyehs offered a glimpse of a solution, peace as a trade in tawdry trinkets: gold-plated Hands of Fatima, porcelain plates emblazoned with the Star of David, and fluorescent statues of the Virgin Mary—all Made in China. Jerusalem is both a bazaar and a sanctuary: you pass a bloody butcher’s shop and moments later you are lost among chapels, synagogues, women selling fresh mint, castanets, liquorice; your left ear hums to Arabic melodies, while the right trills to Yiddish songs, and both echo with Orthodox hymns. On this particular day, in the teeming hub of monotheistic gods, the war between the three religions caused no greater damage than this cacophony. Don’t let yourself be overawed by the solemnity of the place: three religions can coexist in a single block of houses that took us half an hour to visit. Thanks to GPS, Romy finally found the Holy Sepulchre. We had no intention of putting all our eggs in one chalice. Romy had prayed near the Wall and over the tomb of Jesus Christ; I explained the word ecumenical to her.
“The thing is, the cats in Jerusalem move between neighbourhoods in a spirit of brotherhood as long as there are scraps of kebab for them to eat.”
“Was Jesus really crucified here?”
“Well, not far from here.”
I sprained my ankle on the flagstones. Romy looked up the Ten Commandments on her iPhone and read them out loud: “Thou Shalt Have No Other Gods Before Me, Thou Shalt Not Kill, Thou Shalt Honour Thy Father and Thy Mother (my personal favourite), Thou Shalt Not Steal, Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery …
“It says here that the tablets of the law are buried somewhere under our feet. But in Indiana Jones, they’re in Egypt. What’s adultery, Papa?”
“Not at all: at the end of the movie the Ark of the Covenant is stored in a warehouse in Washington.”
“Yeah, fine, but what’s adultery?”
“And Indiana Jones is really disappointed.”
“Yeah, fine, but what’s adultery?”
“Adultery is when a man sleeps with a woman other than his wife. Or a woman sleeps with a man who is not her husband.”
“That’s not very nice, why would they do that?”
“How would I know, because they feel like it. Because they fancy a change.”
“No, God’s right; it’s not nice.”
“Hang on a minute, it’s like you having to choose between Mars Bars and Gummi Bears … Why choose if you can have both?”
“Did you do adultery with Maman?”
Romy had stopped and was waiting for me to answer.
“Oh no. No. Never.”
“Papa, I don’t have to remind you that the eighth commandment says not to lie.”
When pitted against the Decalogue, the Sermon of the Libertarian Dad doesn’t count for much. When I think back on this conversation, I realize that I’d just uttered my last words as a puny human. I had to be the only individual in the Holy City defending a principle as outdated as sexual freedom. This was the moment that I became posthuman: when I renounced sin.
We circled back on ourselves a dozen times in these alleyways that reeked of burnt fat. Christ was crucified at the far end of a raucous thoroughfare, between two pirate DVD stalls. After queuing for a long time, we stepped into the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which was aglow with candles and heady with incense. To the right of the main door, an elderly lady was lying on the ground, sobbing.
“Why is that lady crying?” Romy said.
“Shh!” I whispered, as a Greek orthodox priest scowled at us. “That’s the pink stone where Jesus’s body was laid when he was taken down from the cross. She’s crying because she paid a fortune for a guided tour of Calvary and had to spend an hour on a coach with no air conditioning to get here. And, sadly, Jesus doesn’t do selfies.”
“There’s something I don’t understand,” Romy said sceptically. “God says, ‘Thou shalt not kill,’ but he let them kill his son?”
“It’s complicated. The Messiah gave his life for us … to show us that death is not important.”
“But I thought the reason we came here was to put an end to death.”
“Well, yes, but don’t say that so loud … Actually, thinking about it, you’ve got a point, ‘Thou shalt not kill’ is a bit of a piss-take. If God were all-powerful, He would put an end to death and that would be that.”
“On the other hand, Jesus was resurrected. I mean, that’s how I understood it …”
I invariably melted when Romy put on her thinking expression. I cracked up even more when she looked serious, single-minded, determined. I envied her for being at an age when it’s possible to understand everything.
“What is it, honey?”
“I was thinking, you want to do what Jesus did.”
“That’s what everyone wants, honey. All the people in here would love to be God. And a lot of the people outside, too.”
We walked around the cool, hushed church. Every time I step inside a church, I feel as though a burden has been lifted from me. Memories of catechism lessons, probably. My brief stint as an altar boy at the École Bossuet in 1972 and the short religious retreat to a monastery with my class when I was in fifth grade have forever conditioned my subconscious. The fact that lapsed Catholics often come back to God is not just because they’re scared of death, it’s nostalgia for their childhood. Imminent death makes people religious: last-minute piety is a mixture of fear and memory.
To the right of the main door, a granite staircase ran down towards a dank grotto. Another lady, red-faced, kneeling, had pressed her forehead against the stone and was murmuring prayers in Latin.
Romy whispered, “What about her, what’s she so sad about?”
“She’s not sad, she’s just a drama queen.”
Romy wanted to see everything, to kneel and make the sign of the cross at every side altar, every station of the cross. I bought dozens of candles and we reverently lit them. It was pretty well-organized, this thing they had going, it had been working for two thousand years. Beneath the cupola, a small wooden structure was surrounded by tourists. Orthodox priests were directing traffic around this little kiosk. At first, I assumed it was a confessional box, but no, this was something much more exclusive.
“That’s the tomb of Christ.”
“Wow … Seriously?”
Romy suddenly seemed more impressed by the famous S
on of God than by Robert Pattinson. Sadly for her, no photos were permitted in this sacred place. A monk ushered us to the entrance of the small cabin, lit only by the dim glow of silver oil lamps. It’s best not to be claustrophobic when you have to squeeze into a cramped marble vault with twelve Russian tourists, to kneel in front of a golden chalice set on a stele worn down by the hands of the faithful. The indecipherable inscriptions simply added to the mystery. Romy was inspired, as children often are at Mass. She could not bring herself to leave. In my heart, I reiterated my plea for eternal life to the God of the Christians less than an hour after addressing the same message to Yahweh, slipping a note between the white stones of the Temple in Jerusalem. Oh yes, I was happy to pray to any god that would have me.
“Lord Jesus, grant us eternal life for ever and ever, amen.”
I wasn’t being ironic; I had been chosen. I thought about something Michel Houellebecq had once said on television. On January 6, 2015, on David Pujadas’s current-affairs programme, the author of Atomised (The Elementary Particles) had said, “More and more people can no longer bear to live without God. Consumerism and individual success are no longer enough for them. Personally, as I get older, I feel atheism is difficult to cling to. Atheism is an agonizing position.” This anvil that weighs on us is called death. As I watched Romy genuflect in front of Christ’s tomb, I realized that I could no longer cope with being an atheist. Although I knew, or thought I knew, that God didn’t exist, I needed Him, just to feel at ease. Going back to religion doesn’t mean people are converted, “bathed in tears of joy” as Pascal was during his “night of fire” on November 23, 1654. Going back to religion is simply a crisis of atheism. I was tired of an aimless life. As I watched my daughter make the sign of the cross in front of each Station of the Cross at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, I decided to accept Jesus and all the trappings that went with Him, his symbols, his archaic and preposterous commandments such as “Love thy neighbour as thyself,” his skimpy loincloth, his crown of thorns, his hippie sandals, his Mel Gibson, his Martin Scorsese, I wanted to clasp him to my breast rather than face a meaningless, certain death.
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IF I WAS going to take up Pascal’s wager I might was well go all-in, the way I would in a Monte Carlo casino.* I wasn’t about to do things by halves. I was prepared to go for the triple. So we set off through streets filled with paste jewellery and Arab songs and headed towards the mosque. At the far end of a souk selling dates, olive oil, and sesame cakes, a bearded officer at the door of the Al-Aqsa Mosque turned us away, like a bouncer outside Les Caves du Roy (except that I’ve never been turned away at Les Caves du Roy).
* (Author’s note) Monaco is the country with the longest average life expectancy in the world: 87 years.
“Are you Muslim?”
“No …”
“You can’t enter here. Please turn around.”
I didn’t insist; he looked like a difficult customer.
Later, I found out that certain days were reserved for Muslims. My ecumenism would forever be an unattainable ideal, like that of the Hierosolymitan people.
“Pity,” Romy said, reading something on her iPhone. “It was from this mosque that the Prophet Muhammad ascended to heaven one night on his horse, Buraq.”
“Oh yeah! A lot of strange stuff has happened in this city.”
I consoled Romy with a bag of pistachios from an elderly Palestinian playing at being a pistachio seller, like the waiter in Sartre’s Being and Nothingness was playing at being a waiter. In general, the whole of the Old City in Jerusalem was playing at being Jerusalem. I decided to do what everyone else was doing: overplay my faith.
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ROMY SPENT THE rest of the day raiding the shelves of Zara, Mango, and Topshop along Mamilla Avenue between Jaffa Gate and the Tower of David. It was a day filled with contrasts, alternating between science and religion, and it ended with pizza in the food court of a shopping mall that had metal detectors outside every shop and patrols of soldiers armed with machine guns. Now and then, the Israeli soldiers would grab a young man, throw him to the ground and drag him off to the police van. A little earlier, I said that I felt relieved that no one recognized me, but when a group of French people spotted me and asked if they could take selfies, I have to confess I was flushed with happiness.
“We didn’t know you were one of us …”
Not wanting to disappoint them, I didn’t explain that I had a foreskin. I even nodded in solidarity, as though I felt the weight of six million dead on the goyish shoulders of this pathological liar. After all, Jesus the Catholic was a Jew, and the Shoah was a crime against humanity. Here, I existed only in the eyes of Romy, I was not famous, I was invisible to others: in my twenty years on television, I had forgotten that I was a transparent person. I rejoiced that I was no longer limited to being myself; thanks to my anonymity I could reinvent myself, I could be reborn. Here, in the Holy Land, I was a blank slate, my destiny uncharted. I could pass for an aging queen, a crooner, or an insurance salesman. I was rediscovering a joy I had forgotten: that of being a pluripotent stem cell. Between two slices of pizza, I made a declaration of love.
“You’re an adorable little girl. Child. Daughter. And, believe me, I know what I’m talking about. I’ve got a present for you: you’re going to live for a thousand years. You’ll be like Voldemort in Harry Potter, except you’ll be nicer, and you’ll have a nose. I’d rather spend the day with you than with any other girl. Any woman or man. But I miss Lou and Léonore.”
“I miss them too.”
“Can I ask you something?”
“Yes.”
“Do you think I’m a bad father?”
“Yes.”
“What was the happiest day of your life?”
“Today. What about you?”
“Today.”
In the shopping street, many of the Hierosolymitan people looked as though they had been cloned: black suits, white shirts, black hats, beard, and sidelocks. Their uniform freed them of having to think about their appearance. Not that I think Orthodox Jews are the epitome of happiness, far from it (it’s simple: they’ve got no freedom). But one thing is certain: they seem oblivious to the dictatorship of the selfie.
The waitress told me that the hippest nightclub in Jerusalem was called Justice: even though I don’t go out anymore, I always need to know the happening places. It’s the knee-jerk reaction of a former party animal, or an old guy who wants to prove he’s still got swag. Then I remembered a night club near Auschwitz called The System. The symbolism was curious: Justice in Jerusalem, The System in Auschwitz. Nightclubs, apparently, send out political messages that are easy to decipher.
Romy ordered carpaccio, but couldn’t eat it because the chef had liberally sprinkled it with chilli. I was like that at her age; it’s only later in life that we come to enjoy food that is painful. She finished off my pizza and we took a taxi back to the King David Hotel. It was glorious, having an early night, sleeping in twin beds like brother and sister. I phoned Léonore to tell her that we’d come away empty-handed, that we were depressed and had rediscovered our faith.
“I miss you so much that I started believing in Jesus.”
“You cheated on me with some beardy guy? The baby has been asking for you.”
“Put her on …”
What follows will disappoint my punk fans. The baby and her papa gurgled only in baby-talk, fingers to lips, burbling, “Beeblbweeblbeeblbeebl!”
This is how you say “I love you” before you learn to talk.
Romy was asleep and I was drinking miniature bottles of Belvedere as I watched her breathing in the dark. My child: I was rooted to the spot by that mixture of idyllic past and inaccessible future. I dozed off gazing out the window at the star-flecked sky, with that exhilarating feeling experienced by night owls when they go to bed early, especially when they have recently encountered Chr
ist at the centre of the universe.
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SOME DIFFERENCES BETWEEN A THIRTYSOMETHING SINGLE GUY AND A FIFTYSOMETHING FATHER
THIRTYSOMETHING
FIFTYSOMETHING
Goes to bed at 7:00 a.m.
Wakes up at 7:00 a.m.
Drinks Vodka Red Bull
Drinks Coke Zero
Subsists on a diet of Doritos
Subsists on organic avocados
Trips over coffee tables
Trips over baby buggies
Listens to Led Zeppelin on his iPod
Listens to Katy Perry in his kid’s bedroom
Eats Haribo Gummi Bears
Steals Gummi Bears from his daughter
Makes love every night
Wanks to YouPorn when his children are asleep
Knows all the latest bands
Knows all the latest TV series
Snorts coke