Damascus Gate

by Robert Stone

  "So," said Dr. Obermann, "your background is religious?"

  "Well," Lucas said airily, "I was a religion major in college, at Columbia." When this seemed not to satisfy them, he went on. "Catholic. My father was a nonpracticing Jew. My mother was a sentimental Catholic. Not really a religious person but..." He shrugged. "Anyway, I was raised Catholic."

  "And now?" Obermann asked.

  "And now," Lucas said, "nothing. Do you come here often?" he asked the doctor.

  "Everyone comes here," Linda said.

  "Everyone comes here," Dr. Obermann repeated. "Even the eunuchs and abstainers."

  "So," Lucas asked, "should I start coming more often?"

  "You know," Linda said, "you should talk to my ex-husband while he's in country." She was immediately interrupted by a young Ethiopian with an earring who invited her to dance by raising her at the elbow. Out on the floor, swaying to "The Harder They Come," the pair of them looked like a martial young Othello and his bland but distinctly adulterous Desdemona.

  "Her husband was a Christian fundamentalist," Obermann explained. "They both were. Now he works for something called the House of the Galilean. Christian Zionists, good relations with the rightists, something of a moneymaker."

  "And she?"

  "Officially," Zimmer said, "she's at the university. And separated from the husband now."

  "An enthusiast," said Dr. Obermann. "Conversion prone. If she took up Catholicism, crystals, lesbian gardening—one wouldn't be surprised."

  "Is she your patient?"

  "She was never really my patient. Linda isn't suffering from any kind of disturbance. She's a seeker. When her marriage broke up, we became close."

  "Obermann is just cynical," Janusz Zimmer informed Lucas. "He's converted Linda to the cause of himself."

  At this point, a hawk-faced man with a shaven skull leaned down and shouted into Lucas's face.

  "Yoor the foodie! I remember yoo! When do we do our next interview?"

  The hawk-faced man was named Ian Fotheringill. He was an aging Glaswegian skinhead, a former Foreign Legionnaire and African mercenary who had taken up haute cuisine and was employed at one of the big chain hotels. Lucas had once interviewed him for his newspaper. He believed that Fotheringill had formed the impression that he was an internationally renowned food writer who would clear his way to celebrity and the London bistro of his dreams.

  "Oh," said Lucas, "soon."

  Fotheringill had been drinking heavily. He had red, pointy ears and a tiny nose ring. Seemingly displeased at Lucas's relative indifference, he turned to Dr. Obermann.

  "I can make a kosher sauce l'ancienne," he informed the psychiatrist. "I'm the only chef in the land of Israel who can make one."

  "Aha," said Dr. Obermann.

  "They call him," Janusz Zimmer said with a lightning wink, "Ian the Hittite."

  Fotheringill began to tell a story in which an American guest at a resort hotel had accused him of using lard in his strudel.

  "Lard in the strudel!" he protested to heaven. "Where the fook can I find bloody lard in Caesarea?"

  Linda returned from dancing with the Ethiopian. Fotheringill stared at her as though she were a charlotte russe and presently took her back onto the floor.

  "You should talk to her ex-husband," Obermann said to Lucas. "The House of the Galilean is a very interesting place. Pilgrims go. Victims of the Syndrome. They go for the lentil soup."

  "I love lentil soup," Lucas said.

  Obermann gave him an appraising look.

  "So you're interested in this?" Obermann asked him. "At book length?"

  It seemed to Lucas that he could talk his way into an advance without too much difficulty. "I'll think about it," he said.

  "My notes are at your disposal," Obermann said. "Or they will be, when we come to an understanding. Ever written a book before?"

  "As a matter of fact I have," Lucas said. "It was about the American invasion of Grenada."

  "A very different subject."

  "Not entirely," Janusz Zimmer said. "There was a metaphysical dimension in Grenada. Some of the people involved thought they had connections on high."

  "Reagan, you mean?" Lucas asked.

  "I wasn't thinking of Reagan. But I guess it would apply to him and to Nancy."

  "Were you in Grenada during the invasion?" asked Lucas.

  "Just before," Zimmer said. "And soon after."

  "Janusz is a bird of ill omen," Dr. Obermann said. "Where he appears, newsworthiness follows."

  "There were cults, as I remember," Zimmer said. "On the island."

  "Yes, there were," Lucas said.

  "Here also there are cults," said Dr. Obermann. "Not merely a few lost souls, but organized and powerful groups."

  "All the better," Lucas said. "For the story, I mean."

  Zimmer leaned closer and spoke above the noise of the band.

  "Care should be taken," he said.

  Lucas was considering the Pole's caution when his attention was diverted by a young woman on the dance floor who was dancing with the Ethiopian. She had the café au lait skin of the Spanish Main and black hair cut in a close afro, partly covered with a Java cloth scarf. Her dress was maroon and she wore a Coptic cross around her neck. She had long legs and Birkenstock sandals and her feet and ankles were decorated with purple geometric designs. Lucas recalled hearing somewhere that Bedouin women wore such designs but he had never seen them. He thought at once of the preternaturally hip young Arab woman in the madrasah the month before. He was certain it must be she.

  "Who is she?" he asked Obermann. "Do you know her?"

  "Sonia Barnes," the doctor said. After a quick, irritable glance he did look at her. "She used to go out with one of my patients."

  "I've seen her around town," Lucas said.

  "She's a dervish," Janusz Zimmer told Lucas. "She belongs in your story."

  "True," Obermann said.

  The girl called Sonia, and Linda Ericksen, the only two women on the dance floor, encountered each other and touched hands in greeting. Linda's greeting was without warmth. Sonia's smile seemed a bit sad and sardonic.

  "She whirls very nicely," said Lucas. "Is she really a dervish?"

  "Would I make it up?" Zimmer asked. "She's a practicing Sufi."

  "Mrs. Ericksen seems to know her."

  "Everyone knows everyone," Janusz Zimmer said. "Sonia sings in a place called Mister Stanley's in Tel Aviv. Go and see her. She can tell you about the Abdullah Walter cult. And Heinz Berger."

  Lucas wrote it down.

  "Dance with her," Obermann suggested.

  "I can't. She's too good."

  "Wait until you hear her sing," Zimmer said. "Like an angel."

  Suddenly Fotheringill noticed Lucas again. His impatient mug interposed itself over Lucas's field of vision.

  "What about the poem!" the north Briton demanded. Lucas stared at him in incomprehension.

  "The poem about rillons!" Fotheringill insisted. "The poem about rillettes!" Dimly, Lucas recalled an attempt he had drunkenly made to impress Fotheringill with his credentials as a foodie by quoting a comic poem by Richard Wilbur about rillons and rillettes de Tours. Lucas had once been a man with a poem for all occasions.

  "Oh," said Lucas. "Let's see."

  Fotheringill's persistence was unsettling. It was easy to picture him on some blasted moor, slicing off the limbs of fallen cavaliers for their armor while crows overhead sang a ghastly lament.

  "'Rillettes, Rillons,'" Lucas attempted. "No: 'Rillons, Rillettes, they taste the same ... and yet...'"

  Memory failed him.

  "And yet?" Fotheringill demanded. "And yet what?"

  "I guess I've forgotten."

  "Drat! I don't like the 'and yet' part. Because they're completely different things, understand!"

  Movement by tiny movement, Lucas succeeded in extricating himself from the table while Fotheringill began an embittered discourse on the subject of pastry. He had the necessary numbers in his
notebook. Sonia was dancing again as he made his way out the door.

  He got a taxi on Ben Yehuda Street and rode it home. Fumbling into his apartment, he turned on the answering machine. It was filled with messages in Hebrew and French for his flatmate and sometime lover, Tsililla Sturm, but the last was for him, and it was Nuala.

  "Hello, Christopher," Nuala's brisk Dublin voice declaimed. "I've some news for you about Abu, and I think we may have found the cure for him. So call me in the morning like a good lad."

  "Goddam it, Nuala," Lucas told the machine. "What do I have to do? Who do I have to be?"

  He suspected that she found him tame and overcivilized, too pale and Catholic. Her taste ran to militants, dark, hot-eyed enragés, cabrones.

  Muttering unhappily, he turned the machine off and went to bed.

  6

  NUALA MET HIM on a ridge in Talpiot, in a café near S. Y. Agnon's house. Across a valley lay the Hill of Evil Counsel, where the United Nations had its offices. On the southern slope, the brown land descended toward Bethlehem. Lucas arrived first and so could watch his friend trudge up the hill. She kept her head down, hands in the pockets of her cardigan, eyes on the pavement. She was wearing a black top and faded crimson Afghan pants. When she removed the sweater at the top of the climb, she looked for a moment like a fashion model in search of a shoot.

  As she drew nearer, he saw that one of her eyes was blackened and the skin around it darkly bruised. She sat down at his table with a wan smile.

  "Hello, Christopher."

  "Hello, Nuala. What happened to your eye?"

  "Abu socked me. How about that."

  "I'd call it a coup. Did you get a gander at him?"

  "He was wearing a kaffiyeh over his face like the shebab. They all were."

  "Sure he wasn't Palestinian? Because there's always a possibility this is some kind of internecine—"

  "Balls," she said, interrupting him. "I've talked to every faction in the Strip. I went over it with Majoub." Majoub was a human rights lawyer in Gaza City, a Palestinian activist. "He's in the IDF."

  "How do you know he's not just a settler?"

  "You're being tiresome," she said. "Because he turns up far from the settlements late at night. He has the use of desert vehicles, maybe even boats. Anyway, I can tell by the reaction of the IDF people. They think he's one of their own."

  "How'd you get him to hit you?"

  "Oh, my," she said, "thanks very much for the sympathy. He hit me because we caught him. There were stones thrown in Deir el-Balah that day and we expected him there that night. So we lay in wait behind the school. A bright moon there was that night. Sure enough, around eleven a jeep pulls up—a jeep with the serial numbers painted out—and five guys get out. One's a Palestinian teenager in civilian clothes. The other four are in IDF uniforms. They send the Palestinian into the camp and presently he comes back with two young kids. So at that, two of the soldiers crouch and unsling to cover the place and the other two grab the kids. One of the guys has a great billy club. So we broke cover and the Rose took a flashbulb picture."

  "The Rose" was a Canadian UN staffer who worked with Nuala at the International Children's Foundation.

  "Then it's all shouts and grunts and he hit me. Called me a fucking bitch, too. In English. Or American, anyway. They took the Rose's camera. So I told him, 'I'm on your case, chum.' So he hit me again. The other guys had to pull him off me. Then they gunned it out of town and the Palestinian grass is left on the road running after them."

  "And you've reported all this?"

  "That I have," she said. "To the army, to Civil Affairs and to Majoub. Today I went up the hill to UNRWA and to see the Israeli Human Rights Coalition as well."

  "What did they say?"

  "I talked to Ernest at the Human Rights Coalition, and they'll do what they can. Maybe get some questions asked in the Knesset. They'll draft a press release and I've written one for the Children's Foundation. UNRWA can't do much. It takes America, you know."

  "Is that where I come in?"

  "You could get a piece in a magazine. I know you could. The Sunday Times Magazine. You've had things there."

  "There are other representatives of the American press here," Lucas said. "They have more clout and more resources."

  "But not the soul," said Nuala.

  What an odd thing to say, Lucas thought. Can it be she likes me after all? He had never been able to get to first base with her.

  "Also," Nuala added, "they have tight deadlines and more pressing stories. Whereas your time seems to be your own."

  Hearing that was less satisfactory.

  "I don't know," he said. "I've just about resolved to do a piece on the Jerusalem Syndrome. You know, religious mania and so forth."

  "Ah," sighed Nuala, "gimme a break, will ya."

  "It's quite an interesting story," Lucas said. "Sort of timeless."

  "Well, people aren't timeless," Nuala said.

  "Sure people are."

  "I'm not. And neither are you."

  They got up and walked along the muddy ridge. It had been the Green Line once; a rusted half-track marked the place where the Arab Legion's armored column had been stopped in 1948. A cool wind whipped the high ground and Nuala put her sweater back on. Agnon had lived on these heights, Lucas recalled, and his best novel had been called The Winds of Talpiot.

  "Well now," said Nuala, "how's your love life, then?"

  "Poor," said Lucas. "How's yours?"

  "Poor fella," she said. "Mine is all confusion."

  "Tell me about it."

  "Nah. You'd mock and jeer."

  "Not me."

  Lucas, who fancied her keenly, was painfully aware that he had never been able to generate the degree of menace she seemed to require. In Lebanon, she was supposed to have been the mistress of a Druse militia chief. In Eritrea, she had been able to provide food for the starving through the largesse of her good friend, an insurgent colonel. She was associated in popular lore with Golani Regiment commandos, contrabandists and fedayeen. Lucas, who lived a fastidious and anxiously examined life, was not for her.

  "Ah," she said, "I know you wouldn't, Christopher. You're a good and gentle person. You make me feel like telling you my woes."

  "I wish you wouldn't call me a good and gentle person," Lucas said. "It makes me feel epicene." He put his foot on the rusted fender of an Arab Legion armored personnel carrier and leaned on his knee. "Pussylike."

  Her relationship with the State of Israel and its defense forces was singular, he thought. It seemed to give a special resonance to the term "love-hate." But she was good at languages and knew her way around the region like few others.

  Nuala laughed her nice Irish laughter. "I'm sorry, Christopher. I know you're a hell of a fella. The girls all adore you, truly."

  "Thanks, pal."

  "Here," she said, still laughing, "take some of this." She held out a plastic bag full of what appeared to be miniature cedar tips, a dark reddish green. When he failed to take it, she took a pinch from the bag and put it to his lips. "Go ahead, take it. It'll make you even more studly than you already are."

  He took the bag and examined it.

  "It's khat," she said. "The perfect morning chaw. One gobful and you'll never be without it."

  Lucas put the stuff in his pocket.

  "I'll tell you what," he said. "I'll talk to Ernest and find out what the Human Rights Coalition knows about Abu Baraka. Maybe I can do something about it. But I think it's going to go the other way. I mean, I think the Jerusalem Syndrome is more for me."

  "I suppose," she said. "You're religious."

  "I am not religious," he said angrily. "It's a good story."

  "Oh, rubbish," Nuala told him. "Of course you're religious. You're the biggest Catholic I ever saw. Anyway, the Jerusalem Syndrome is old stuff."

  They started walking again, turning their backs to the winds of Talpiot.

  "You're wrong, Nuala," Lucas said. "You may find it boring but it's not
old stuff. Religion here is something that's happening now, today."

  It was true, he thought, although he had said it often before. Other cities had antiquities, but the monuments of Jerusalem did not belong to the past. They were of the moment and even the future.

  "What a curse it is," she said. "Religion."

  He wondered how it could be that if she so despised religion she could have made herself so at home in this part of the world. Because it was religion and religious identity that gave the place its passions, upon which she battened.

  "I guess so," Lucas said. "Why don't you take your atrocity story to Janusz Zimmer. He's good at that stuff."

  "I have," she said. "He claims to be interested." She shrugged.

  In this city, as in many others, the practice of journalism was made more difficult by the interlacing sexual affairs that consumed the international press. Nuala and Janusz, who was nearly twice her age, had entertained a brief, crazed liaison that seemed to have ended badly and about which neither would speak. Her present interest was in a Palestinian résistant in the Strip, where she worked.

  He walked her to the bus stop at the bottom of the hill and waited for the bus with her and kissed her goodbye. Then he began to walk toward town. In about an hour, footsore and depressed, he found the offices of the Israeli Human Rights Coalition in Amnon Square. His friend Ernest Gross was behind the desk. Gross was a South African from Durban whose tanned, athletic appearance and open face made him resemble a surfer. At the same time, he was one of those men prey to sudden, barely suppressed rages, and it was strange because his business was, after all, benign assistance and fairness and mediation. Or maybe not so strange.

  "Hi, Ernest," Lucas said. "Get any good death threats today?"

  The Human Rights Coalition sometimes received death threats and had accumulated a copious outpouring over the previous month. Its officers had recently taken part in a major Peace Now demonstration.

  "Not today," Ernest Gross said. "Yesterday I got one from a psychiatrist."

  "You got a death threat from a psychiatrist? You're putting me on."