Damascus Gate

by Robert Stone

  "I'm sorry," Sonia said. "I don't think you really see it that way. Because then what are you doing here? What are you after?"

  "Writing a book," Lucas said.

  "I don't know how different we are," she said, "you and me. You try to act like you're content not believing anything, and I don't think I buy it. Me, I've spent my life learning to believe. To believe so it matters. You think I'm deluded. I think somebody has to be pretty deluded to be as without faith as you say you are."

  "If I wasn't deluded," Lucas asked, "what would I have faith in?"

  "History, maybe? Your own inner consciousness?"

  "I don't think I have an inner consciousness," he said. "Just an outer one."

  "Really? No inner resources? What do you do when shit gets impossible?"

  "I drink. I go nuts."

  "I understand," she said. "I used to do drugs."

  "Me too."

  "Chris," she said, "listen to me a minute. For all of civilization, Jews have been coming forward to speak for change."

  "Oh, Sonia," he said, laughing, "don't you think I know the spiel?"

  She put up a hand, palm outward, to override his protest. "Sorry. You get the spiel." She went toward him, then shrugged and folded her arms and half turned away, as if to make what she would say not be the spiel. But of course it was. "Because life is shitty, Chris, for most people. So you have Moses, you have Habakkuk, you have Isaiah, Jesus, Sabbatai, Marx, Freud. All these people were saying, Understand and act on it and things will change. What they were saying was true, man. Their lives failed, but they didn't fail.

  "A hundred years before they burned Giordano Bruno in Venice, they burned a Jew named Solomon Molkho in Mantua. He was a Gnostic, a Sufi, a magus. He said when the change came the Dragon would be destroyed without weapons and everything would be changed. So we believe it's going to happen. Happening."

  "'So have I heard,'" Lucas said, "'and do in part believe it.' Except I don't think I do anymore."

  "Are you serious? Or do I just get some Shakespeare for my spiel?"

  "I don't know," Lucas said. "Is it to Raziel you owe all this?"

  "Raziel only speaks for the Rev. It all happens inside him."

  "Inside him?"

  "On the level of emanations. Through the souls inside him. He's the one who does the fighting. With Pharaoh. With the Dragon. Hell," she said, "I wish he'd shut up and not go out and do his numbers. But he's suffering so much he can't stand it."

  "He'll get burned like Molkho."

  "He might. And this stuff doesn't come from Raziel. The Sufis always knew it. And the Jews, in a certain way, always knew it, because that's what Torah is. It's a formula for making things one. For bringing us back where we belong. A lot is concealed in it."

  "How is it that suddenly Raziel and the Rev are party to the big picture?"

  "The way we all know the important things we know," Sonia said. "The old Jews used to say a wise person had a maggid, a spiritual counselor from another world. But a maggid is just something from your subconscious, from collective memory. Telling you something you already know.

  "So poor old De Kuff's learned to recognize the souls inside him. And Raziel recognized him. Adam, the poor lamb, he fought it as hard as he could. It's a terrible fate to stand between the worlds. It's like madness."

  "Don't you think," Lucas asked, "it is madness? No more than that?"

  "No, I don't," she said. "Because I've seen this before. I've studied it half my life. Berger, before he died, recognized him. I recognize him too."

  "All right, all right," Lucas said with a shrug. "So what's up? What's going to happen?"

  Sonia laughed. "I don't know, man. Any more than you. Change. And me, I think it's gonna be beautiful."

  Lucas walked across the room to inspect her collection of Third World photographs. Happy, hopeful faces among the wretched of the earth. On one table she had propped some photographer's proof sheets against a lamp. There were scores of images, hundreds, each one a child, dark, emaciated.

  "Who do you have to be to get your picture in the house of a maggid?"

  "Well," she said, "if you're one of those kids, you have to be dead. Because they all are. During the famine in Baidoa."

  Lucas picked up one of the proof sheets and looked at the long, huge-eyed faces. The lines of a poem came to him, and he said them for her:

  "Go smiling souls, your new built cages break,

  In Heaven you'll learn to sing ere here to speak,

  Nor let the milky fonts that bathe your thirst

  Be your delay;

  The place that calls you hence, is at the worst

  Milk all the way."

  "Milk all the way," she repeated. "How about that?"

  "It's an old poem. By an old dead white guy. Richard Crashaw. 'To the Infant Martyrs.' About yet another Middle Eastern misunderstanding."

  "I wish I'd known it in Somalia."

  "No you don't, Sonia. Then you'd be like me. And instead of doing things and believing in things, you'd just know poems about them. Well," he said, "I have to go. I have a meet later with the doc."

  "Wait, Chris. Sit down. Go ahead," she insisted when he only stood and looked at her. She spoke to him with the mock sternness of an old-fashioned southern schoolmarm and sat across the room from him, arms around her knees.

  "Why do you hate yourself so much? What do you feel so bad over?"

  "I don't know," he told her. "Maybe I'm dragged because it's a shitty world. As you just pointed out. Want to tell me my tikkun?"

  "It's gonna be changed," she said. "We'll be free. Because where the spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty."

  "I like it," he said.

  "Do you?"

  "Yes," Lucas said. "Of course. I was always religious. I was always feeling sorry for myself, and not even just for myself. So I really like it. I'm weak. I'm sentimental. Gotta have a Santa Claus. Yeah, I could be one psalm-singing fool." He stood up and turned away from her. "Yes, sure, I like it. I really do. And I like you. I like you very much."

  "Yes, I know you do," she said, "because I know your tikkun. I like you too. Will you come back?"

  "Yes, I will," Lucas said. "And I'll taunt and abuse you until I've made sure you've lost your faith."

  "Because misery loves company?"

  "Because you're too hip and beautiful and smart to believe this garbage. It's dangerous. And because misery loves company, and if I can't have all these pretty dreams and illusions, I'm going to take them from you."

  "But, Chris," she said, laughing, "they're my joy. They make me happy."

  "Well, I don't want you happy. You're too good a singer. I want you like me."

  23

  IN THE AFTERNOON he went over to the Atara to see Dr. Pinchas Obermann. There the tables along Ben Yehuda Street were all full, and people had pulled out chairs from the inside parlor to sit in the faint breeze. Obermann was at his usual cramped inside table. Lucas gave him a report on Reverend Ericksen and the returning serpent.

  "Gnostic," Obermann said. "Yahweh is the demiurge who controls the world. The serpent is wisdom. Jesus came to free the world from Yahweh. Basically Greek anti-Semitism."

  "He's not just bitter," Lucas said. "He's lost his mind."

  "Working too close to the light," said Obermann.

  "That," Lucas agreed, "and having his old lady fucked seven ways from sundown."

  Dr. Obermann was not offended. He looked thoughtful. He, after all, was the cuckold now.

  "Apparently," he said, "there really is such a thing as the missionary position."

  "I guess it's how they teach you to fuck in Bible college."

  "Do you mean," Obermann asked, "that American evangelicals are instructed in unrewarding sex techniques?"

  "Just kidding," Lucas said. "But who knows?"

  "Well," said Dr. Obermann, "Linda's learned her way around it. By the way," he told Lucas, "I read your book on Grenada." Lucas saw that he was holding in his hand the book that h
e, Lucas, had thought was long out of print. "Don't be surprised. I looked you up on Nexus. And I use a book service."

  Like the Ministry of Defense? Lucas wondered. Or Mossad? He had spent three months turning out a book of reportage on the United States' invasion of Grenada, Operation Urgent Fury, which event he had covered for the Baltimore Sun. The book had done him little good and attracted scant notice, but he had worked on it honestly and well.

  As a writer, Lucas suffered from a combination of indolence and perfectionism, so it had taken altogether too long to write. By publication time, its revelations of ineptitude and petty corruption among some of the military's special-operations elites had been mainly obviated.

  Lucas was a good listener, a man of his word to whom talkers liked to talk. Unfortunately, within a few months of Urgent Fury the derelictions to which his sources had led him had been either successfully covered up or piously disclosed. For public consumption there had been a few autos-da-fé: designated fall guys had quaveringly owned up to obscure oversights couched in deep military diction. A few manly sobs had been swallowed before sympathetic congressional committees. There had been some undesirable transfers and early retirements. A number of Lucas's sources had been hunted down and covertly punished.

  Moreover, his publishers had felt the book dwelt a shade too heavily on the role of Afro-Caribbean religion in the island's contemporary history. But Lucas had done his best. His life had been largely promise, subverted by false starts, underconfidence and incompleteness. The book was the only thing he had ever really finished. He was quite proud of it.

  "It was just a paperback," he told Dr. Obermann. "Trading on the headlines. Sort of a quickie."

  "It was a smart book," Obermann said. "A wise one. I don't know much about the Caribbean or the American army, but I believed what I read in it."

  Hearing this greatly pleased Lucas.

  "So I'm encouraged," Obermann said. "I picked a good one. And are you ... still enthusiastic about our story?"

  "The people who really interest me are Raziel and De Kuff."

  "And Sonia," Obermann added. "You like the girl." He poured a little schlag in his coffee.

  "Yes," Lucas said, "I do." The summer's parade of young tourists and students wandered past the Atara. The adepts of the café ignored them, except to gaze on the more outstanding of the young women. "I'm inclined to focus on De Kuff and his group to the exclusion of some of the others. They're more interesting."

  "We might do that," Obermann said.

  "But," Lucas said, "you naturally prefer a story that goes somewhere. Something like this ... people drift in and drift out. It trails off into nothing."

  "Where are they?" Obermann asked. "These followers of Raziel and De Kuff."

  "In a hospice at Ein Kerem. De Kuff's paying. He's quite wealthy apparently."

  "Are they still wearing the ouroboros amulets?"

  "Yes, they are. Sonia too. Do you think it relates to what Ericksen's on about?"

  "Yes," Obermann said between bites of coffee cake. "In a way. They're heretics, very radical heretics by the standards of normative Judaism. But of course the ouroboros appears in the Zohar."

  "I'm unclear about their theology. It's obviously messianic. I gather they revere Sabbatai Zevi and Jacob Frank and Jesus."

  "Yes, it follows. They probably see all those figures as a single recurring soul. Reincarnated now in De Kuff."

  "How did that serpent business get in the picture?" Lucas asked. "It's haunting."

  "When the Almighty is rendered ineffable," Obermann said, "and lost to us, some emanating force remains latent. But it can only be quickened by a congruous force—this is basic chemistry."

  "In which I—"

  "In which you did so badly at school. Never mind. To the Hindus, the serpent Kundalini represents Shakti, the consort of Shiva. Through Shakti, the immanent Shiva becomes the life force. Some people worshiped the serpent in Adam's Garden."

  "Not Jews."

  "Certain Jews," Obermann said. "Heretics. Minim. The Gnostic Elisha ben Abouya. But remember this: in Kabbala also the serpent stands for the force that quickens the First Power of God. It brings time around to its conclusion in eternity. A holy serpent signifies the God of Faith. An eternal, eternally renewing serpent that changes the immanent into Primal Will. Like it?"

  "It's neat," said Lucas.

  "In Gematria, the term 'holy serpent' has the same numerical value as 'moshiach.' De Kuff's wearing it—Raziel got him wearing it, maybe not just for himself but for every moshiach past and present. An eternal salvific force. Not just one Jesus. Not one soul. Many."

  "I must have studied this stuff," Lucas said.

  "I don't think so. Maybe you should meditate. Or maybe not. Anyway, that's what you're dealing with here."

  "It doesn't sound like it's going to go away."

  "Not until Jews go away. Or God goes even further away and ignores their schemes and antics to bring him back. So," Obermann said, "even if it trails into nothing, it'll be something."

  "It sounds like a disaster waiting to happen."

  "The universe moves from disaster to disaster. An insight the Marxists owed to Wagner, who owed it to physics."

  "So tell me," Lucas said, "where does all this stuff come from?"

  "What is above? What is below? What was aforetimes? What is to come?" He fixed Lucas with a sidewise interrogative stare. "He who asks those questions—better for him not to have been born. So said the great sages."

  "How do we see it?"

  "Man is formed in a likeness," Obermann said. "He perceives what he resembles. The shapes he sees are determined by his nature." Obermann stared at Lucas. "You're not having second thoughts? You're still committed to the book?"

  "Yes," Lucas said, "I'm still committed."

  Lucas paid, as he had become accustomed to doing, and they walked toward Jaffa Road.

  "Did you know," Lucas asked, "that De Kuff preaches every Sunday in the Muslim Quarter?"

  "In front of St. Anne's? At the Bethesda Pool?"

  "I guess so. We found him right next door."

  Obermann seemed complacent. "It's a hangout. The temple of Aesculapius. More snakes. Also the Pool of Israel."

  He put a hand on Lucas's shoulder, lurching off in the direction of Jaffa Road and his bus home to Kfar Heschel, a new suburb over the Green Line. "Listen, we'll do something good together. Something worthy. By the way, I sent you some books you probably can't get at Steimatzsky's or the university. Oblige me and take care."

  Lucas felt excited going home. It would be something worthy, that would be the thing. Obermann's books were waiting for him at the disagreeable concierge's office.

  "Christ!" the concierge said, as though he had had to carry anything anywhere, which was most unlikely. "What you got here?"

  "Diamonds," Lucas told him.

  All through the afternoon and into evening he sat on the narrow terrace off his kitchen and chewed some of Nuala's khat and read the material Obermann had given him. In it, Jerusalem sounded like a crazed congress of wonders. There were Gentiles like Willie Ludlum, a religious incendiary whose passionately inane musings on the universe filled a police file longer than the Gospels of Mark and Matthew combined. There were the Guardians of the Beauteous Gate, who planned on rebuilding the Temple by selling off memorial wings to prosperous Americans, and the Bearers of the Mark of Cain, a cult of German hippies bent on atonement, who sounded like the Nazis' revenge on themselves. There were the keepers of the House of the Galilean, with whom Lucas was already acquainted, and the Lost-Found Black Oriental Children of Zion, most of whom came from Bakersfield.

  Some took the Great Pyramid as their inspiration, others the True Sepulchre or the Lance. All seemed to rejoice in colorful nomenclature. There were Pyramid cultists from Oregon called the Silent Seekers of the Oak and Vine, and a covey of Panamanians identified as the Most Chaste Athletes of the Holy Grail.

  There were also numerous solos, male and female, wh
o had mistaken themselves for Francis of Assisi or Teresa of ûvila or Peter the Hermit. But among the Jews, who were on the whole conventional, there was no one like De Kuff or Raziel.

  The material was solid. Early the next morning, he called an old girlfriend at a publishing house in New York and talked up the book.

  During their conversation, he surprised himself by singing the project like a garden full of nightingales, raving as confidently as Elijah on Mount Carmel before the four hundred and fifty prophets of Baal, as though he wanted nothing more than to write the stuff.

  "It sounds quite, quite wonderful," said his old girlfriend, who herself sounded more like the Boston Athenaeum each year. "I bet I can sell it."

  "Well," Lucas said, "let's keep in touch."

  It might all be as simple as that, he thought. For his literary skills, such as they were, and his Americanizing sensibility he could have Obermann's trove of demented God-strivings, along with whatever he might turn up on his own.

  24

  THE FOLLOWING DAY, sleepless before first light, he started taking notes on Obermann's material. Then he had some coffee and a roll, and took his after-breakfast walk in the neighborhood around the railroad tracks, among the little gardens of oleander and tamarisk.

  Back home, he made a cup of Turkish coffee and looked at the paper. On the bottom of page four was a story he had overlooked.

  AMERICAN CHRISTIAN CLERGYMAN DIES IN FREAK FALL FROM OLD CITY TOWER

  ***

  The early Byzantine aqueduct tower between the Spafford Hospital and the Bab al-Zahra, or Herod's Gate, in the Old City wall was the scene of an unusual accident early Thursday. A man identified as the Reverend Theodore Earl Ericksen, a minister of the Independent Evangelical Church in North America, apparently fell to his death from the parapet of the tower in spite of a chest-high barrier on the Old City side of the wall. Mr. Ericksen's body was discovered many feet from the base of the wall, at the edge of the Bethesda Pool complex near Herod's Gate, a site frequently visited by Christian and "New Age" visitors to the Old City. Residents of the area reported seeing a man on the parapet at various times during the night. Guards of a nearby madrasah, alerted to the possibility of a rooftop prowler, had searched the roofs and adjoining tower several times, without result.