Damascus Gate

by Robert Stone

  "Right," Lucas said. "Can I buy you a drink?"

  "I don't like to drink," Sonia said. "Maybe these ladies would like a drink, though. Ladies?" Suddenly Lucas found himself surrounded by Nordic women who looked as though they could handle their liquor. They hastened to accept. It would be an expensive night.

  Lucas leaned close to Sonia, to speak above the noise of the jukebox. It was playing Count Basie's "Lafayette."

  "You puzzle me," Lucas said. "I mean, what are you doing here?"

  "Why shouldn't I be here? I'm Jewish too."

  "Are you?"

  "What do you mean, am I? You think I'm a little southern fried to be Jewish? Is that what you think?"

  "No. I just think it's odd you would come to Israel to study an Islamic practice. Don't you live in Jerusalem?"

  "That's right."

  "Going back tonight?"

  "I get the two-thirty bus."

  "Don't do that," Lucas said. "Let me drive you."

  She hesitated, then said, "That'd be good. Thank you."

  "The bus station is depressing," Lucas said, "at this hour."

  Outside, the after-midnight crowd had settled in at the sidewalk tables of the Orion Café, across the street from Mister Stanley's. The Orion's late-night crowd might be described as louche. As Lucas and Sonia went by, the sidewalk trade paused in its vivacious, sibilant conversations to check the two of them out. The customers out front favored pastel sheath dresses, and many had large hairy wrists.

  "It's easy to get an extended visa," Sonia said. "And Berger al-Tariq is here."

  "And he's a Sufi master?"

  "He's the last. You should meet him."

  "I'd like to."

  She studied him for a moment. "In fact, I could introduce you to some very interesting people here. If you'd do me a favor."

  "What would that be?"

  "Give me another ride tomorrow. Ride me up to Safed and help me bring some friends down. With their books and stuff."

  "Well," Lucas said, "I could do that. OK," he told her. "Deal."

  "It's like our piano player wants to move to Jerusalem. He belongs to a religious group in Safed. People who might interest you."

  "Good," said Lucas.

  On the ride up to Jerusalem, they hit a jackal crossing the road. Its dying yelps pursued them.

  "I hate doing that," Lucas said. "I'll dream about it."

  "I'm hip," Sonia said. "Me too."

  They rode for a while and Lucas said, "I really meant it when I said I enjoyed your singing. I hope you don't think I was just buttering you up."

  "I gotta believe you," she said. "Don't I?"

  "I don't want my name in the paper," she told him a little later on.

  "Can't I say you're a really good jazz singer?"

  "Nope."

  "Well," he said, "I don't work for the papers."

  She told him more about the East Side Sufi underground—New York's, not Jerusalem's—and about Dogberry's and gigs in New York.

  "Do you believe in God?" he asked her.

  "Jesus," she said, "what a question."

  "Well, I'm sorry," said Lucas. "We were talking religious enthusiasm."

  "This is what I think, Chris. Instead of nothing out here, there's something. It has a nature."

  "That's it?"

  "That's it. And more than enough."

  "Oh," said Lucas, "I like that." It was a familiar enough sentiment, he thought, but she said it nicely. He felt a faint thrill of sympathy.

  "Were your parents religious?" he asked her.

  "My parents were members of the American Communist Party. They were atheists."

  Looking at her, Lucas felt he had suddenly penetrated part of her story. She was biracial, the child of old lefties. The story was on her face to see.

  "But that's belief too," he said.

  "Sure. Communists believe that things have a nature. And that an individual can be part of the process. They believe in a better world."

  "One where they give the orders," Lucas said.

  She gave him an even stare, its rigor subverted by the suggestion of humor at the edges. How intelligent and pretty she is, Lucas thought. He allowed himself to believe she liked him.

  "What about you, Chris? What's your story?"

  "Well, my father was a Columbia professor. Originally from Austria. My mother was a singer. Which is why I like singing, I guess."

  "Your father the Jewish one?"

  "That's right. How about you?"

  "Mom."

  "Well," Lucas said, "you're OK then. But the ancients, in their wisdom, included me out."

  "What do you care?" she asked. "Are you religious?"

  "I was raised a Catholic."

  "Then you're still one, right?"

  Lucas shrugged.

  "I'll tell you what," said Sonia. She began to write an address down on a half sheet of UNRWA stationery. "You pick me up here tomorrow and we'll drive up to Safed and we'll meet someone who might interest you. We'll be helping him move down to Jerusalem. On the way, you can ask anything you want."

  "OK," Lucas said.

  "I hope you don't mind a little light lifting. Ever been to Safed?"

  "Never."

  "You'll like it. Just wait."

  There was already activity in the souks of the eastern city when she made her way to Berger's. Near the Damascus Gate, men with wheelbarrows were offloading sheep carcasses from a refrigerator truck. They stared after Sonia as she went by. She wore the billowing djellaba over her performance clothes. Normally, she would have made arrangements to stay in Tel Aviv with friends of her mother's, but Berger was lonely and dying and needed her.

  She climbed the stone steps to Berger's apartment and fished for her keys. Berger was awake when she went inside. The place smelled of his sickness. He watched her around the curtain that enclosed his bed.

  "You're seeing the boy from America." His painkiller had loosened his tongue.

  "Raziel? Yes, I saw Razz today. We're playing the same gig. He lives in Safed now."

  "Safed," Berger repeated dreamily.

  Buzz, buzz, she thought. He was really dying. Flies hummed and bounced against the tiles of the inlaid table beside his bed.

  "Lean on me," she told him. "I won't let you die alone."

  "I think I want to go home," Berger said. "I want to hear German spoken. German without tears."

  "We'll get you home, Berger. Don't you worry now."

  He relaxed as the pain diminished. When he smiled, she could see the skull inside.

  "I think of the lakes. Things like that. What I want to see again. Hail and farewell."

  "Yes, my dear," she said. It occurred to her that she had seen a great many creatures die. It must be all right, she thought. It came for everyone. In Baidoa she had watched the babies fade like little stars.

  "When I go," Berger said with sudden stoned animation, "someone will come."

  "Who will it be?" she asked. "The Mahdi?"

  "Don't joke about such things," Berger said.

  "But what else is there?" she asked.

  Then he himself grinned, like a joker. But the grin drained away.

  "When I'm gone," Berger said, "you also should go to Safed."

  "I thought you didn't want me seeing Raziel. Anyway, I don't like it in Safed."

  "You should be among Jews."

  She laughed. "Should I? Well, I probably always will be. One way or another."

  Later, when it was light, she moved her chair to the open Moorish door and watched the shadows shorten across the court below. The slim fronds of the olive tree shuddered on a faint breeze. An hour or more passed. When the court was completely in shadow, she got up and brewed some coffee. Berger had only Israeli Nescafé.

  His supply of painkillers, stashed in a cedar box on the dresser in the sleeping alcove, was ample. Sonia suspected that he would soon require something stronger. She filled a glass with powdered orange drink and poured in some cold water from a pitcher in the
pocket refrigerator. Then she sat on the bed beside him with the drink and another tablet. Sleeping, Berger fidgeted and ground his teeth. When he woke up, he looked at her dully and tried to speak through the rictus of his rigid lower jaw. She got him to open his mouth to take the pill and held the glass to his lips. He drank and began to pant as though he were short of breath.

  "Go back to sleep. Go on."

  Just before he turned over, he whispered something to her. "Kundry," she thought he had said. She would have to ask him about that, to see if that was what he had said and if he remembered saying it.

  "Is that me, Berger? Am I Kundry?"

  That would make them Kundry and Amfortas. What a surprise, she thought. How German was the skull beneath the Sufi skin. Thinking of herself as Kundry made her recall Lincoln Center, Good Friday. Her date had been an alcoholic ex-Maoist Swedish publisher. James Levine had conducted. The Swede had alternately slept and wept. He had apparently forgotten the Chairman's thoughts and become a complete moldy fig, a relapsed, sniffling Wagnerian.

  She adjusted the covers over Berger's shoulders and bent her head low to touch the quilt with her forehead. He had a smell like the smell that came off a pariah dog she had once seen being stoned by children in Jericho.

  "Am I Kundry, Berger. Moi?"

  She laughed to herself. Kundry. She locked the doors and took off her djellaba and the dress she performed in and her performance jewelry. Then she looked out over the Old City and breathed the name of the faraway Holy One, whose name was being proclaimed over the city, and closed her shutters and lay down to sleep.

  13

  LUCAS PICKED her up at the Damascus Gate in the bustle of afternoon. While he waited, the sherut drivers kept demanding that he move his car.

  "Did you get any breakfast?" he asked her.

  "I had coffee. Hot and sweet. That'll keep me buzzing. How are you?"

  "I'm OK. Hung over."

  "Too bad," she said. "I'm not surprised. God knows what Stanley serves out of those bottles."

  He told her once again that he had enjoyed her singing. She brushed the compliment aside.

  "So what's it like," he asked her when they were on the coastal road north, "following the Sufi way in Jerusalem?"

  "There aren't many true Sufis in Jerusalem," she said. "Some Bektashi live in the Strip." She told him about Abdullah Walter and Berger al-Tariq.

  They turned onto an inland road to skirt the three-layered congestion of Haifa, and along it the hills were planted in young forest. From time to time they passed the remnant of an Arab village. There were new towns with ten-story high-rises and central squares surrounded by modern vaulted buildings. In some of the squares, the decorative trees were hung with lights.

  "Why live in Jerusalem, then?" he asked.

  "'Cause it's holy," she said. He thought she might well have been joking. "And I'm allowed to live there. But if Berger had been in Zurich or somewhere, I'd have gone there too."

  "Too expensive. What got you into Sufism?"

  "Fear," she said. "Rage. That sort of thing."

  "Fear and rage," Lucas said, "are all I know."

  After a while she said, "You're half in, half out, aren't you?"

  "Of what?"

  She did not reply.

  "Is that how you feel?" he asked.

  "I feel double in," she said. "Proud and simple. Carry it all."

  It pleased him, and he laughed. "Everyone should be like you."

  "Really?" she asked him coolly. "Like me? Holy cow!"

  "Well," he said, "you know what I mean."

  Soon they began to climb. The fences of kibbutzim divided the landscape. Vistas expanded. Within an hour they were in high green hills where stands of cedar grew. There were peaks in the distance and the sky seemed higher and bluer than along the coast. A fishtail of cirrus clouds stretched out overhead.

  "Beautiful," said Lucas. "I've never been up here."

  "Yes," she said. "The Galilee is beautiful."

  He asked her about her European friends, and she explained that they were women she knew from working for the United Nations in the Sudan, Somalia and the Gaza Strip.

  "I graduated from a Quaker school," she said. "So after college I went to work for the American Friends Service Committee. Then I lived in Cuba for ten years."

  "What was that like?"

  "I was out in the country. It was a good life. It was plain and friendly and useful."

  She said it with such gravity that for a moment Lucas longed for such a life.

  "Why did you leave?"

  She shrugged, declining to get into it. Having decided that he wanted her to like him, he was reluctant to press her. But there was a story, after all.

  "The politics get you down?"

  "I'm not an anti-Communist, you know. Never will be. My parents were good people."

  "But you left Cuba and ... the rest."

  "Eventually I left. I went back to New York."

  And took up religion, Lucas thought, although he said nothing. At that point, he allowed himself to believe that he understood her. She was a person who required the proximity of faith. His understanding, his sense that she was like him in that way, made him feel fond of her. And he had really loved her singing.

  "Is that where you studied music?"

  "I always sang. I took a few courses with Ann Warren in Philadelphia and then at Juilliard. I studied but it was mostly singing for fun."

  Safed stood on two hilltops that commanded the terraced fields of a valley and a view of the mountains of Lebanon. It had narrow streets and cobblestones that sat reverently under the deep blue vault of heaven.

  "Lovely light," Lucas said.

  "Yes, it's special light. Soaks up your fear and rage."

  It was more or less what he had been thinking. He followed the main street as it wound around the principal hill, on which stood the ruins of a Crusader fortress. From the other side of the hill the prospect was even more spectacular. It was possible to see the blue glitter of the Sea of Galilee in the distance, and the peaks beyond it.

  "This will do," she said. "Park here."

  They were at the top of a narrow street leading down into the artists' quarter. It had been the Arab town.

  "Want to come along?" she asked.

  "Sure."

  The cobblestones were clean and the walls freshly whitewashed. It was a pretty street, Lucas thought, that might be improved by a little squalor. On both sides of the passage were galleries displaying inspirational or religious art: brass menorahs, oil paintings of old men in prayer shawls, dancing Hasidim celebrating life in compositions suggestive of Bruegel. The street was so narrow that the galleries had automated lights to display the paintings.

  At the next turn of the alley, a woman stood anxiously waiting, hands clasped at her chest. She was tall and fair, and Lucas thought he recognized her at some remove of time or place.

  "For Mr. De Kuff?" she asked them in English, somewhat fearfully.

  Sonia assured her that it was for De Kuff they had come. All at once Lucas realized that she was the woman in the picture with Tsililla and the American writer, the second soldier girl.

  She led them inside, through a room hung with dark, rich landscapes that seemed to be without religious significance. But in the corner of each, in ocher paint, was a Hebrew letter or series of letters. They were beautifully done. One had gimel, the upper fingers of its vav like the strings of some instrument, the yod at its foot perfectly formed. Another had zayin, a third hei.

  Behind a partition at the end of the gallery, a flight of circular stone stairs led to a windowless room containing a long table and cardboard boxes packed with books.

  Two men stood waiting beside the cartons. One was a dark, sleek young man in sunglasses and a leather jacket, whom Lucas recognized as one of Sonia's backup musicians from the night before. The second man was about sixty, slack and round-shouldered in what had once been an elegant gray flannel suit.

  "Sonia," the you
nger man said, "you're like so great. I'll never forget you for this."

  "Hey, it's all right," she said. "I sort of carjacked this guy. Razz," she told him, "this is Christopher Lucas. He writes about religion. Christopher, Razz."

  "I liked your playing," Lucas said.

  "Good," the young man said, "thanks." He stepped aside with a smile to present the other man. "Christopher, Sonia—this is Adam De Kuff, our teacher."

  Not knowing what custom permitted, Lucas made a small bow and put one hand to his heart in the Muslim manner. It was hardly appropriate in Safed, but he had taken up the habit. He felt it argued for his good intentions.

  "Thank you, both," Adam said to Lucas and Sonia. "It's very kind, very good of you."

  He had a pleasant voice, cultivated, southern American. Lucas, watching Sonia, saw no trace of the reserve, the hauteur with which she had fended him off the night before.

  "As you see, we have many books," the aging man said. "We should like to take as many as possible."

  So Lucas went back up the street and got his car and parked it outside Gigi's gallery on the cobblestone pedestrian walk. It was the sort of thing people did in Israel all the time. But violating even the most grossly secular law in Safed left him with a faintly cosmic sense of delinquency.

  They spent the next half hour carrying down boxes of books, filling the trunk of Lucas's Renault. The last articles to go were three cloth suitcases.

  "Fine," Lucas said. "Who's coming?"

  "Just Mr. De Kuff and myself," said Razz.

  Driving, illegally, back up the cobbled alley, they passed Hasidic women in babushkas on their afternoon stroll. At the corner of Jerusalem Street, one of a group of bearded men in black seemed to recognize them and nudged the others. They turned to stare, unashamed and hostile.

  "They seem not to like us," Lucas observed.

  "That's the posse," Raziel said. "The morality police. They ought to be happy we're leaving."

  But the men Raziel had called a posse did not look happy at all. One or two of them stepped into the street to look after the passing Renault.

  "Why are they on our case?" Sonia asked. "We're chillonim, right?" Chillonim was what the Orthodox called irreligious Jews. "They have nothing to do with us."

  "Of course not," De Kuff said. "And they have nothing against you. It's us they're after. Raziel and me."