Damascus Gate

by Robert Stone

  Some visitors had left Raziel's Safed tours edified and inspired. But there had been complaints. Sometimes in his enthusiasm Raziel misjudged his auditors. Conservative customers, expecting heart-warming, twinkly wisdom from the ancient sages—or at least something more traditional—had left offended. The Hasidim, a formidable presence in Safed, had been made aware of Raziel's teachings and were displeased.

  He and De Kuff also gave occasional concerts in which he accompanied De Kuff on the piano. De Kuff played the lute and chitarone as well as the cello and knew Sephardic melodies with a depth beyond silence. Some clerics went so far as to appeal to the police, who declined to intervene. Raziel was sometimes assaulted, but he could take a punch and he knew a little karate.

  Occasionally he would return from one of his tours with one or more guests, who would be given lunch or tea—the price of which they would be politely expected to add to the cost of their tour. Usually the guests were young foreigners, as often Gentile as Jewish. Some stayed for a few days before drifting on. But there were others who stayed weeks.

  A young German who had been to Tibet and taught yoga in London joined Raziel in kundalini meditations. Together they instructed De Kuff in kundalini yoga. Raziel believed that these meditations were a means of kavana, or meditations on the supernal, which might lead toward dvekut, a unity with the Divine Ground.

  Kundalini meditations were demanding and further upset De Kuff's equilibrium. Often in the depths of stillness, pictures formed in De Kuff's mind that frightened him. At other times they were inspiring. Raziel made sure that De Kuff always told him what he had seen.

  In some of De Kuff's reports, Raziel recognized elements of satapatha brahmana, visions of Kali, and Shiva beyond attributes. Raziel assured him it was a good sign, because all these things had their equivalents in the Zohar.

  Once De Kuff reported he had seen in meditation a snake devouring its own tail, and Raziel informed him that this was the ouroboros, which in the Zohar signified bereshit, the opening word of Genesis. Sabbatai Zevi, the self-proclaimed Messiah of Smyrna, had adopted it as his special symbol.

  Thereafter he addressed De Kuff as Rev, which he sometimes made sound slightly ironical, and assured him there was no doubt about his election.

  "Funny," Gigi said, referring to the man from Tibet, "we found this out through a German."

  "No, no," Raziel said. "Appropriate. Because it's all written."

  "A German?" Gigi asked. "But why?"

  "Don't ask me to explain the balance of tikkun. Accept him."

  Gigi looked to De Kuff for guidance, although he had never provided her with much.

  "So be it," he said.

  More people came and went. Some Dutch girls who smoked hashish came briefly, interested only in a place to crash. An American Jewish girl fleeing her violent Palestinian boyfriend and ashamed to go home appeared. Gigi would agree to rent to them if they made themselves scarce and stayed away from the gallery. A Finnish woman who turned out to be a reporter arrived, took her notes and left.

  Once while De Kuff sat weeping, Raziel came up behind him.

  "Feeling sorry for yourself? I should add you to the tour."

  "Sometimes," De Kuff said, "you seem to hate me. You seem to make fun of me. It makes me wonder."

  Raziel hunkered beside him.

  "Forgive me, Rev. I'm impatient. We're both crazy. Isn't it weird the way things work?"

  "I want to go back to Jerusalem," De Kuff declared.

  "Wait for the light," Raziel said.

  That evening De Kuff stayed up late, reading.

  The room was decorated with Gigi's paintings and drawings, art from her Perugian period, which had preceded her time in Santa Fe. Pastoral scenes of Umbria in voluptuous brown and yellow forms, warm and handsome, somewhat like Gigi herself.

  De Kuff, reading, also had an Italian setting. He was examining his own papers and journals, the ones dating from a period when he himself had traveled in Italy. Spread before him in manuscript on the bed was an essay he had written on Hermetic elements in the paintings of Botticelli. His eye fell on what he had written about the painter's Annunciation in the Uffizi:

  "The angel's wings appear virtually atremble, one of the great illustrations of spiritual immanence in Western painting. A winged moment of time is captured here, a 'temporal' moment shading into a 'cosmic' one, time shading into eternity. The numinous transforming matter."

  Reading the lines made him shiver with longing for the person he had been. An innocent enthusiast, responsible only for himself. Two years before he had been received into the Catholic Church and he had believed himself at peace. Little enough he had known about the numinous then.

  "An art lover," he said aloud. He put the paper aside and closed his eyes.

  Later, before dawn, he woke up joyful, his room full of light. He went up to the roof and saw the stars. There were meteors on the ridge lines. A sliver of dawn was breaking. At breakfast he declared, "We're going to the city."

  "Yes?" asked Raziel.

  "This is how it has to be. For a space of time that only I will know, we'll stay in the city. Then we go to Mount Hermon so that it will be fulfilled that we walk from Dan to Gilead. Then back to the city. In the space of the events everything will be revealed. Do you require a demonstration from the texts?"

  "No," Raziel said. "I require only your word. You're my world, Rev. I'm not joking. Nunc dimittis."

  "What was it like?" Raziel asked his master later, in Gigi's garden. A fresh mountain wind blew, smelling of the pines.

  "Light," De Kuff said. "I felt a blessed assurance." After a moment he said, "I think we may see manifestations."

  "But what did you see?"

  "Someday," said De Kuff, "I'll tell you."

  "You can't keep it from me," Raziel said. "I recognized you. I have to know what you saw."

  "Get us to the city," De Kuff told him. "Maybe one day you'll know."

  "You have to tell me something," Raziel said. "A part. I also have to believe. I've given you my life, Rev. I also have to believe and go on."

  "Five things are true," De Kuff said. "Five true things define the universe. The first is that everything is Torah. Everything that was and everything that will be. The outer circumstances change, they're of no importance, but everything essential is written in letters of fire. The second is that the time to come is at hand. And for that reason we'll go first to Jerusalem. The world we've waited for is being born."

  Raziel was impressed. He went inside to tell Gigi they would be on the move.

  "It's time," he said. "We're a burden on you. And we're getting static."

  "I can't go," she said. "All my property is here. I have customers come in from overseas. They don't know about..." She waved her hand to indicate De Kuff's theurgical confusions.

  "We'll stay in close touch," Raziel said. "Trust us. You'll always have a part in this."

  She shrugged and looked away from him.

  "Meanwhile," he said, "I guess I'll go down to T.V. and play a couple of gigs. I'll go see Stanley tomorrow. He's usually looking for musicians."

  "When you go to Stanley's," Gigi said, "I always worry for you."

  "I worry too," Raziel said. "But the light of the eye is stronger than drugs."

  "Remember," De Kuff told them, "we have only each other."

  "That's the good news, right?" Raziel said, getting up. "Also the bad," he added.

  "What about the tours?" Gigi asked. "What if someone calls?"

  "Tell them the tours are at an end," said De Kuff. He got up and went back into his room and shut the door. Gigi sighed; she and Raziel looked at each other.

  "What will happen?" she asked him.

  "We'll live it out," Raziel said. "Check this out, Gigi." He stood and picked up a pocket-sized New Testament that dated from his Jews-for-Jesus phase. "'Therefore take no thought, saying, What shall we eat? Or, What shall we drink? Or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed? For after all these things do the Gentil
es seek.'"

  Gigi winced and nibbled her thumbnail. "Funny you should come all this way," she said. "Funny you should come here to be a Christian."

  "I'm not a Christian, Gigi. I've seen the dark—I've really seen it. I believe in light."

  "I was never religious," she said. "I've lost my sanity. Not to mention my business."

  The young man laughed. "You became an artist. It wasn't an accident. You don't need a business. To stay here and do getch for tourists? And what will sanity get you?"

  "The power always fails," she said. "He said it himself. It has always failed."

  "It," Raziel said. "What it? It's us. We're it." He laughed and frightened her. "It's a game."

  "A game," Gigi said. "It's terrible."

  When Raziel went upstairs to read, Gigi knocked on De Kuff's door and went inside. He was sitting on the bed.

  "He frightens me," Gigi said. "Always laughing. His Christian Bibles."

  "People like him don't reassure us," De Kuff said. "They're frightening sometimes."

  "I wish I had never met him. Don't you?"

  "Too late," said De Kuff.

  8

  LUCAS'S FLATMATE and occasional lover, Tsililla Sturm, returned early from London. She had been interviewing an American director who was shooting a film at Shepperton. Emerging from the taxi in the rosy stillness of a spring morning, Tsililla looked pale and in pain. Lucas watched her arrival from his balcony window and went to the door to let her in. He had been reading Obermann's notes on the Reverend Theodore Earl Ericksen.

  "I couldn't telephone," she told him. "Are you alone? I can go to a hotel."

  "Nonsense," Lucas said impatiently. He was somewhat embittered over the flickering out of their affair. "Of course I'm alone. Did you think I would move someone into your flat?"

  "I thought you might have an overnight guest. Why not?"

  For a year or so, until the previous winter, Lucas and Tsililla had been a couple. It had been an intensely reflective, not to say a tortuously examined, relationship. Tsililla had been raised on a Tolstoyan-Freudian-Socialist kibbutz in the Galilee, equipped from infancy with such a plenitude of answers to life's questions as to leave her awash in useless certainties.

  Lucas himself tended toward introspection. They had exhausted each other. As part of their present arrangement, they had set each other free—a freedom that Lucas found particularly oppressive. No sooner had things gone wrong with Tsililla than he began experiencing impotence, which declined to set him free. For the first time in his life, he began to worry about aging and whether his powers would ever come back to him.

  On Tsililla's study wall was a picture of a well-known New York novelist with his arm around two fetching young soldier girls. One was the blushing twenty-year-old Tsililla, the second her then closest friend, comrade in arms and fellow kibbutznik, Gigi Prinzer. The touring writer had encountered them at their posting in the Negev and been smitten, whereupon the three of them had managed to parlay a jolly photo opportunity into a ghastly triangle. After an extravaganza of mutual psychic and sexual predation, each against all, the three principals had psychically imploded.

  The novelist had gone home, profoundly blocked and in deep midlife crisis, to his wife and the jeers of his cruel psychiatrist. In Gigi and Tsililla's company, he had gathered undreamed-of insights and material but was unable to write a line. Tsililla herself had published a dark novel, which was well received and indifferently translated into French.

  The novel had established her career as a full-time writer, although she eventually took up film criticism rather than fiction. Gigi, transformed into Tsililla's bitterest enemy, had gone to the Art Students' League of New York and to the École des Beaux Arts and then become a peace activist and commercially successful painter with a whitewashed studio in Safed. Only Tsililla, Lucas often thought, would preserve such a grisly souvenir as that photograph.

  "Shall I get my things out of the bedroom?" Lucas offered. The gesture earned him only a dismissive look, but it was one on which he doted. Her long pale face with its high cheekbones and prominent, full-lipped mouth never failed to stir him.

  He was sorely tempted to question her about the trip. He suspected she had contrived to fall in love again. Tsililla had a perpetual affair going with the great beau monde of mind and spirit and surrendered herself to it readily. In his jaundiced moments, he saw her as a silly little snob and groupie, and he was inclined to be unsympathetic this morning. But weary from the flight and whatever misadventures, she looked especially desirable. Then, to his perplexity, she came over to the chair on which he sprawled and kissed him on the cheek. He touched her hand in spite of himself.

  "Go to bed, my love," he said. "And later things will all be different."

  Leaving the bedroom door open, she tossed her traveling clothes in the customary heap at the foot of the bed and climbed under the covers. It was not unusual for her to go to bed at dawn.

  "What will you do today?" she asked him from beneath the counterpane.

  "I have to go down to Ein Gedi, to this conference. Talk to some Christian sky pilot. Religion and so forth."

  "You should do the mud," she said. "Put some on your bald spot."

  Anywhere else? he thought. He glared at her, but she was huddled under the covers with her back to him.

  "It works," she said after a moment.

  "Thanks for the tip, Tsililla," said Lucas.

  "Go to Masada."

  "Should I? Why?"

  "You should. I went when I was in school. You've never been."

  The ruined mountaintop fortress at Masada was the place where first-century Jewish Zealots, in rebellion against Roman rule, were reported to have committed suicide rather than surrender to Roman troops. It was a major tourist attraction.

  "Masada's a lot of baloney," Lucas told her. "Only Boy Scouts believe it."

  Piqued or asleep, she did not answer. But then it occurred to him that he might just go, and even spend a night in the valley. Enthusiasm was, after all, his subject.

  In the bathroom, he used the accordion-hinged mirror beside Tsililla's sink to locate his bald spot. Without question it was expanding, brightening in the spring sunshine.

  He straightened up and had a look at himself in the larger glass above the sink. He supposed Israel was aging him. Recently colleagues had expressed surprise upon hearing that he had been too young to work Vietnam. But the absurdity in Grenada had been his war, for what it was worth. The Gulf War had literally bypassed him. Overhead.

  Lucas was a big man, broad-shouldered, thin-lipped, long-jawed. Once one of his girlfriends had laughed at him, laughed at his face, with the explanation that he so often appeared to be at the point of saying something funny. It was hard for him to believe now that his spare mouth and fixed mug suggested incipient humor. Moreover, his hairline was receding, his forehead claiming more of his face, exposing the strategies in his eyes.

  He was not a vain man, but his own appearance discouraged him. Lucas had not engaged his own appearance for some time.

  Before setting out, he had a last glance at Obermann's Ericksen file. The meeting was not scheduled until late in the day, so there would be plenty of time to prepare.

  The file led off with a résumé of the reverend, apparently prepared by the estranged Mrs. Ericksen. Ericksen had started out as a Primitive Baptist in eastern Colorado, gone to Bible school in California and served a few working-class congregations in the industrial suburbs of L.A. Then he had gone to Guatemala as a missionary for three years and married Linda there. Immediately thereafter they had both turned up in Israel. They had worked with a number of Christian institutions here, as evangelical missionaries to Christian Arabs in Ramallah, at a camp for visiting Christian youth groups loosely organized on the kibbutz model, and as tour guides for church trips. Then, finally, at about the time his marriage with Linda began to fail, he had taken over the House of the Galilean and its good lentil soup.

  Calling Ericksen, Lucas had pr
oposed that he join him on one of the H of G's excursions to the shores of the Dead Sea, and Ericksen had agreed. Included with his résumé were many inspirational brochures that emphasized Qumran and the Essenes, with references to the Teacher of Righteousness. The line, barely hinted at in the promotional stuff, seemed to Lucas vaguely unorthodox, if not quite in the majnoon category. It suggested a variety of New Age Gnosticism more than old-time holy rolling.

  Late in the morning, leaving Tsililla asleep, he packed up his notes and went out. He took along some topical reading for the trip down: Josephus's Jewish War and a modern history of the same period by a British historian.

  His old Renault was parked at the side of the building's driveway downstairs. As a hopeful precaution, he had equipped the car with two large printed signs that said PRESS in English, Russian, Hebrew and Arabic, purchased from a Palestinian street vendor near the Damascus Gate. Why there should be a Russian rendering Lucas had no idea, but he thought it might not hurt to confuse the issue. He was always trying to project the maximum degree of complexity against a landscape whose inhabitants had neither the time nor the inclination for much. The way to Ein Gedi would take him through the most secure part of the Occupied Territories, but there was always a chance of trouble.

  The car's yellow Israeli license plate might well draw stones at the Jericho turnoff; the press sign, designed to placate the rock-throwing shebab, sometimes enraged the militant settlers. Cars bearing such a sign were occasionally forced to stop by armed men who interrogated and insulted members of the foreign press, whom they tended to see as Arab lovers. The most militant settlers, Lucas had found, always seemed to be Americans, and they reserved their most furious scorn for American reporters.

  But the greatest danger of all, Lucas understood, was not fedayeen on jihad or enraged Jabotinskyites; it would come from ordinary Israeli motorists, who had, as a group, the aggressiveness, fatalism and approximate life expectancy of west Texas bikers. Their random fury could be neither appeased nor sensibly anticipated.