Damascus Gate

by Robert Stone

  He turned and walked as briskly as he could in stocking feet, back into the courtyard he had just left. The tall men in turbans stood exactly where they had been, motionless. Lucas nodded cheerfully as he went by. The men were utterly without expression, simply alert, offering neither menace nor comfort. He went by them into the first courtyard, not troubling to look over his shoulder, and went back into the hall of columns. The street door through which he had come was now closed, and the hallway was in cool semi-darkness. The street outside seemed strangely quiet. Then the call to prayer sounded from the Haram a short distance away, and its amplified verses echoed among the columns.

  Lucas found himself fascinated by the stone vaulting overhead. It was a beautifully fluted half dome, with lacy lines suggesting the metaphysical. He could well imagine it as the work of dervishes; it seemed impossibly old. And how typical of the city, he thought, that it should be tucked away so obscurely, on an unvisited street behind a moldering door.

  Absorbed in the fluting overhead, he was surprised by the slamming of a door. Unshod footsteps sounded from an upper story of the inner court. Out of instinct he moved into the shadow of a column.

  A young Arab woman appeared in the hallway. She was drawing a wrap about herself, disappearing into a whirl of cloth. As he watched, she went to the street door and opened it, bringing the daylight down on herself.

  Her face and hair were still uncovered, and Lucas saw to his surprise that she was wearing a close-cut afro. Her eyes were striking, enhanced with kohl. Leaning against the doorway, she put her sandals on. Flower patterns were traced on her ankles and the brown skin of her feet, and under her djellaba she appeared to be wearing khaki slacks. Lucas pressed himself farther into the column's shadow. He had the feeling that his several weeks of Arabic classes at the Aelia Capitolina YMCA would not support the weight of explanation that might be required for his eccentric concealment.

  Struggling with one sandal, the young woman began to sing.

  "Something cool," she sang, to Lucas's astonishment. "I'd like to order something cool."

  She flatted her fifth very nicely, and Lucas, who happened to know the next verse, was tempted to sing along. Indeed, he could hardly resist. But he watched silently as she put on the second sandal, pulled up the hood of her robe and hurried outside, leaving Lucas in the timeless gloom.

  When he got to the street, she had vanished. He wiped his brow. Who knew to what arcane aspect of the city she might attach? The place was full of secrets.

  2

  THE GYNECOLOGIST'S OFFICE was on Graetz Street, a pleasant street in the German Colony that was lined with carob trees and Norfolk pines. His name was Kleinholz. As a young man he had practiced on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx and been close to the Communist Party. Sonia represented old times for him.

  "I remember your father so vividly," he told her as he wrote out the prescription she desired. "Such a handsome devil."

  "He was always attractive," Sonia agreed. "Mom had to keep an eye on him." She had the feeling Kleinholz might not have called her father a handsome devil so readily had he, her father, been white. But she had given up keeping score, and in the present situation Dr. Kleinholz could do no wrong. She accepted the prescription with a silent show of gratitude, repressing her fierce impulse to read it and see how many of the pain pills he had written her. They were for the discomfort associated with her period, but Sonia occasionally used them to promote inner harmony and self-fulfillment, and also gave them to her friend Berger.

  "Ever go back to the neighborhood?" Dr. Kleinholz asked her. She had only lived in the Bronx for the first year of her life. Thereafter the Barneses had been more or less lamsters, moving from city to city and job to job until the FBI or some local crusaders discovered them and commenced to queer things. They had looked for labor towns: Youngstown, Detroit, Duluth, Oakland, Tacoma. In the course of their travels during the sixties, they had watched the working class disappear while the New Left rose and fell.

  "Once," she told him. "It's mainly Hispanic now. What's left of it."

  "It was lovely," Dr. Kleinholz said, laughing sadly. "I hope you remember."

  She didn't altogether. She did remember being told it was then one of the few neighborhoods outside Greenwich Village where an interracial couple such as her parents might be comfortable. The landlord was a progressive, a friend of the Party. The old Mexican super had been wounded in Spain.

  "Yeah, it was nice," she said.

  Everyone said that. Almost all the old southpaws were filled with nostalgia. If everything was so nice, she sometimes thought, what were we all revolting against?

  Kleinholz nodded and rose slowly from his desk to shake hands with her. Israel was full of throwbacks, and the doc was clearly one of them. With the spectacles on the end of his nose, the white coat and stethoscope, he looked like the family doctor in a thirties movie.

  "I have to ask," Kleinholz said. "What are the designs on your feet?"

  She laughed. "They're made with henna. When I worked in Baidoa, we sort of picked it up from the Somali women. Just for fun."

  "Good," said Dr. Kleinholz. "I was afraid they were tattoos."

  "No," she said. "Just henna."

  There was a pharmacy on Emek Refaim and she filled the prescription there. He had written her twenty pills. She also bought some colostomy bags, cotton swabs and cans of liquid diet to go visiting with.

  Her apartment was a few blocks beyond, in Rehavia. Once there, she showered and put on the clothes she wore to the Palestinian side of town: shirt and slacks under a Nubian robe and a headscarf. It was a cloak of invisibility across the line. On the Israeli side, Arab workmen sometimes stared at her, wondering what an Arab girl could be doing out and about, alone among the Jews.

  She took a bus to the Jaffa Gate. There were still a great many Easter pilgrims about. Sonia left them behind, passing through the quiet courtyards of the Armenian Convent and into the Tariq al-Zat. In the Khan al-Sultan souk, she bought some sweet rolls, candy and fruit.

  Sonia was headed for Tariq Bab al-Nazir, an ancient narrow street leading to the Nazir Gate, an entrance to the Muslim holy places through which believers and nonbelievers both could pass. Her friend Berger lived in a tiny garden apartment overlooking the courts of the Ribat al-Mansuri, a tarnished palazzo built by an Ayyubid sultan seven hundred years before for Sufi pilgrims. The palazzo had been by turns a prison, a ruin and a tenement block.

  In the years before 1967, a Sufi sheikh, an American of Jewish origin called Abdullah Walter, had lived in the same apartment. As a notable convert, Walter had enjoyed the patronage of al-Husseini, the grand mufti himself.

  The ownership had changed after the Six-Day War. Walter had gone to California and died there, leaving behind Berger al-Tariq, his friend and disciple. The municipality had torn down half the building and sealed the windows overlooking the Haram. The site's present owner was an Armenian Uniate tile maker who kept a shop on the Via Dolorosa.

  Little black children in white watched her heft her basket through the ancient portico and into the courtyard. Once the Haram's Sudanese guards had been quartered in a building across the street, and black people continued to live in the neighborhood. Sonia had a fantasy going in which she imagined that blacks had always lived there, going all the way back, back even to the pharaoh's Cushite soldiers.

  That day she had ballpoint pens for the kiddies.

  "Hey, homes," she said when two boys ran up to her. "Hey, wass hap'nin'?"

  There were four kiddies and each got a pen before she went upstairs.

  The interior of the apartment was dark and perfumed with incense sticks. Berger al-Tariq was on a divan, propped up on cushions. Beside him, face down, was a Simenon, Maigret en Vacances.

  She put her bags in the corner, beside his sink and hot plate.

  "Easter bunny's here," she said. "A few things you might need. Can you eat?"

  "Not for a day or two," Berger said. "And then I don't know." He made a
n unsuccessful effort to rise. "May one ask," he asked primly, "has the Easter bunny brought some colostomy bags?"

  "You bet."

  She watched him light one of the locally made cigarettes he liked. The backs of his long slender hands were freckled and wonderfully lined with outstanding veins.

  "What a paltry conclusion to things," he said gaily. "Fucking disgrace."

  "You have to go where you can be comfortable."

  "I always wanted to die here," he said. "Now I don't think so."

  "Have you money to travel?"

  Not answering, he waved away smoke. She took the cigarette from his hands and took a drag.

  "I can get some," she said. "I have a gig up in Tel Aviv. A standing thing."

  She took out the pills, poured a few for her own reserve and handed the packet to him.

  "Hey, are you suffering? Are you?"

  He laughed and took the pills from her. "I'm suffering. A thing for which I lack talent."

  She took a couple of the pills and swallowed them with a swig from his bottle of mineral water.

  "What next for you, my dear?" he asked. They had not seen each other for several days.

  She inflated her cheeks slightly and puffed. "Don't know, Berger."

  "What would you like most?"

  "Most of all I'd like to go to Cuba again. I've always missed it."

  "Would they take you back?"

  "Maybe. Probably."

  "But it won't last."

  "Actually," she said, "I've thought of working in the Strip. But it's so religious there now. Bothers me a little."

  "I failed you," Berger said.

  "Don't feel sorry for me. Don't feel sorry for yourself. Those are the rules from which everything flows, right?"

  "There's always some kind of blindness."

  "I understand," she said.

  She had met Berger the year before the intifada, when the Old City had been a magic carpet. Cairo had been a cab ride away. Everyone had been pals, or so it had seemed on the surface. It had been East of Suez, an open sesame of funky treasures where the best was like the worst. She had never understood the Kipling line until coming to Jerusalem.

  That had been one of her years of conspicuous underemployment. She had been checking coats in New York, at an Upper East Side restaurant, singing whenever a gig came her way. It had been the shank of the eighties. She had fallen in among Sufis and they had somehow passed her along to Berger. Together they had pursued the Uncreated Light.

  "Yes," Berger told her. "I know you do."

  Everything had to end, and it had all ended badly for Berger. The shebab regarded him as a sodomite; he had once been a wooer of Arab boys. Gush Emunim had an eye for the madrasah; the militant Zionists were leaning on the Armenian, who was thinking of selling out to them and settling with his relations in Fresno. The Gush had discovered Berger, an Austrian, in solitary residence.

  Then he had gotten sick. He had not been able to find the right doctor on the Palestinian side. The idea of an Israeli doctor gave him a feeling he described as "self-consciousness." It was the sort of self-consciousness any compatriot of Eichmann's might feel. Eventually he had gone to the French Hospital in Cairo. Sonia had tried getting some medical names from the American consulates on both sides of town but he had not been reassured.

  "I'll go over to Tel Aviv in a couple of days," she told Berger. "Something may turn up. Will you be all right?"

  "Yes, I think so."

  She gave him a wide-eyed look. "Poor baby," she said slyly. "You'll have to be, huh?"

  They laughed together.

  "You know," he said, "I'm going out by the same door I came in. It's going to cost me everything I've ever learned in life to get it over with."

  "Use it up," she said. "You're lucky to have it."

  Her greatest pleasure in Berger was that she could say whatever occurred to her. He looked at her and shook his head.

  "How does it go?" he asked. "I have talked the talk. And now I must walk the walk."

  "That's the song, Berger."

  He lowered a green curtain to divide his sleeping alcove from the rest of the apartment and set about changing his colostomy bag.

  "Are you still in hope?" he asked. Their little group had developed its private diction.

  She had opened a latticed Moorish door to the small sunny courtyard outside and moved her chair to sit beside it. An olive tree grew from the dry soil in the middle of the court. Two thirsty-looking potted orange trees sat on the loose cobblestones. The sky had a rich blue afternoon light.

  Sonia sighed over the light, the green trees, the sumptuous weather. She was content, for the moment.

  "Yes," she said. "In hope."

  3

  IN THE COMMUNITY center more than a hundred young Orthodox men were playing Ping-Pong, payess and shirttails flying, eyes ablaze with humor, satisfaction or rage. They were all good, and some were very good indeed. Their games were strenuous and violent. Most were speaking English, and from time to time one or another would cry out, "Christ!" or "Yess!" in the style of adolescent American triumph.

  The waiting room of Pinchas Obermann's office could be approached only through the center's table tennis parlor. It was a peculiarity of the complex, located in a new high-rise building in the expanding northern suburbs of Jerusalem.

  Two men sat in the waiting room. One was about thirty, in stonewashed jeans and a black shirt with a beige windbreaker. Although it was after ten at night, he wore Ray-Bans under Dr. Obermann's unsteady fluorescent light. A clarinet case rested by his chair.

  The second man was older, round-shouldered, melancholy and overweight. He had on khaki trousers, a white shirt with a plaid tie and a tweed jacket.

  The younger man was watching the older, unashamedly, never taking his eyes away. The older man, pretending to read a copy of Jerusalem Report, fidgeted under the other's scrutiny.

  After the two of them had waited for some time, a summoning voice sounded from Dr. Obermann's inner office.

  "Melker!"

  The voice was peremptory, without any suggestion of healing or solicitude, and projected through the closed door. Dr. Obermann did without a receptionist and a great deal else. The young man gave the elder a last glance and sauntered inside, taking his instrument with him.

  Dr. Obermann was red-bearded, crew-cut and thick-bodied. He wore a turtleneck and slacks and army-issue glasses.

  "Mr. Melker," he said. He stood to shake the young man's hand. "Or should I call you Raziel? Or should I call you Zachariah? What should I call you?"

  "You make me sound like a multiple personality," young Melker said. "Call me Razz."

  "Razz," the doctor repeated tonelessly. "I see you have your clarinet."

  "Like me to play it?"

  "That great pleasure I force myself to postpone," Dr. Obermann said, "until a more appropriate moment. How's the monkey? On or off your back?"

  "I'm as clean as the eyelids of morning," said Razz. "I'm happy."

  Obermann looked at him noncommittally.

  "Take off your sunglasses," he said, "and tell me about your spiritual life."

  "You have a nerve, Obie," Razz Melker said, taking a seat and removing his glasses. "Checking my eyes?" He said it good-naturedly. "If I was popping, you think I'd own these shades? Or these clothes? Want to see my veins?" He shook his head in a tolerant gesture. "By the way, with all those little buchers out there whapping the balls around, it's a little difficult to talk the spiritual life."

  "Think those kids don't have any?"

  "Hey," Raziel hastened to say, "they put us all to shame. No question about it."

  "I'm pleased that you're clean," Dr. Obermann said. "It's important. Happy is good too."

  "Maybe do the odd spliff. That's it." He smiled his pink-edged bad-boy smile and spread his long, jeans-clad legs out in front of him. He wore lizard boots from Africa.

  Obermann watched him in silence.

  "Want to hear about my spiritual life? I
still have one. Is that all right?"

  "Depends," said Dr. Obermann.

  Razz looked contentedly about the office as they listened to the rat-a-tat of Ping-Pong balls. Eyes exposed, he had a blinky, myopic look. The place was decorated with posters from the Palazzo Grassi, the British Museum and the Metropolitan. The show themes were either primitive or ancient art.

  "Your patient out there," Razz said. "The elderly dude. Want me to tell you something about him?"

  "Mind your business," said Obermann.

  "He turned goy on us, right? He's a Christian convert. Or was."

  Obermann held Razz's gaze for a moment, then took his own glasses off and rubbed his eyes.

  "You know him," the doctor insisted. "You've heard about him somewhere."

  "I assure you, man, I never set eyes on him before."

  "Be so kind," Dr. Obermann said, "as to not address me as 'man.'"

  "Sorry," Razz said. "I thought you wanted to know about my spiritual life. I think I'm playing well too."

  "A lot of drugs change hands in those clubs in Tel Aviv," Obermann said.

  "You're not shitting, sir. However, as I told you, I don't indulge."

  "Very well," Obermann said.

  "I'm not about to do that naltrexone treatment again," Razz Melker declared. "Christ, everything Burroughs said about sleep cures is true. They genuinely suck."

  "Your father would like you to go home to Michigan."

  "I know."

  "He's worried about you," Dr. Obermann said. With his glasses resting on his forehead he wrote Melker a prescription for a mild tranquilizer that was part of the follow-up to the naltrexone. Then he dashed off the quick note for the IDF that would assure Melker's continued exemption from military service. "Also, he doesn't think you're making much of a contribution to the Jewish state."

  "Maybe he's mistaken. Anyway, his contributions cover both of us."

  Dr. Obermann looked at him coldly.