Damascus Gate

by Robert Stone

  "Shouldn't we get him to a doctor?" Sonia asked in a low voice.

  "He's dead, Sonia," Nuala said.

  Up the street, an enraged voice over the minaret loudspeaker carried on, beside itself, summoning all hell. Competing with its grim measures now was a second amplified voice, a cold, bored police voice in Arabic, reading what Lucas assumed was the riot act.

  Driving on, they lost sight of the fallen boy. The crowd of youths had retreated ahead of them and disappeared in the turns of the road. Smoke and gas were growing thicker, the stones fell closer about Lucas. CS fumes were truly like skunk: if you'd never been dosed there was a brief psychological immunity, but once the stuff took hold you were immobilized. Rifle fire sounded behind them.

  "We're in between the army and the crowd," Sonia said calmly. "How shitty!"

  Suddenly IDF soldiers were all around; an officer stepped out in the road ahead and put out the flat of his hand to halt them. When Lucas slowed, the soldiers flowed around the van from behind, advancing along the reeking, peeling walls, moving cautiously, covering each other's moves, checking the rooftops and their backs. Two soldiers moved directly in front of the van and raised their weapons to fire gas canisters at the withdrawing mass of young men. Taking aim, they posed like archers in an ancient frieze, squinting up at the declining sun. The propelled gas grenades exploded from their launchers with a disastrous thud, like sprung rivets. A few came back, spinning against the blue sky, sputtering and smoking, in the hail of rocks from the shadows at the far end of the street. More soldiers moved in, firing from one knee, discharging what Lucas assumed were rubber bullets—there was no sure way to tell—in the direction of the crowd.

  "We should get out in the square," Nuala said.

  "Right," Sonia said. She took some wads of Kleenex from her bag, wet them with bottled water from the seat beside her and passed them around.

  At the next intersection, an officer crouching against the closed shutters of a café waved at them to halt.

  "Keep going," Nuala said. Lucas speeded up and crossed the intersecting street with angry shouts behind. He also heard more firing close by.

  A rain of fair-sized stones met them halfway down the next block. When he pulled over to the side, the stones stopped coming but the smoke was thicker than ever.

  "Maybe we should turn around," Lucas said.

  Neither Sonia nor Nuala said anything.

  "I'm from out of town," he said, turning in the driver's seat. "That's why I'm asking."

  "We have to go on," Nuala told him.

  "Right," he said, and put the car in gear.

  At the far end of the street, visible through the smoke, was a sight Lucas had some difficulty making sense of. A skirmish line of troops had secured the entrance of an alley, firing gas grenades and whatever ammunition their rifles contained. Behind them, a larger body of soldiers in riot gear were milling about in the time-honored military tradition of hurry up and wait. In front of the Israeli firing line, a small white jeep was parked. Hanging limply from its radio antenna was the blue and white flag of the United Nations. Beside the jeep stood a tall sweating man in a plain, uncamouflaged khaki uniform and blue beret. His shoulder displayed a flag patch with a white cross on a red field. A Dane. He stood, arms folded, legs wide apart, frowning at the ground, lips pursed in an attitude of intransigence.

  The soldiers, in their helmets and flak jackets, contrived to fire around him. Two Israeli officers were shouting at him at once. One seemed reasonable, the other less so.

  "Want to walk home in the desert?" the more reasonable officer asked him. "Fine. Because we'll bulldoze your goddam jeep."

  "A violation!" the other officer shouted, appealing as to heaven.

  "Interference with the security forces!" He swore in Arabic, Hebrew being lacking in obscenities for the occasion.

  The Dane shifted his stance and shrugged.

  "How can you do this?" the unreasonable officer demanded. "How? How?"

  "We're resisting a criminal attack," the reasonable officer explained. "We're resisting criminals, you're creating an international incident. It's not your business, Captain."

  From time to time one of the soldiers in the mass of troops at the rear would also shout at the Dane, but most watched without expression. A few appeared amused. After he had been shouted at for a while the Danish captain condescended to reply quietly. Lucas and the women in the van could not hear what he said. Stones still flew from time to time, coming from somewhere up the alley under siege. The Dane and the officers who were shouting at him ignored them in soldierly fashion. The air reeked of burning rubber.

  "Let me go out and talk to them," Sonia said. "I think I know the UN guy."

  When she got out, Lucas got out with her.

  "Look," Sonia said, "someone's got to stay with the van. Otherwise the soldiers will just shove it off the road."

  "I'll stay," Nuala said.

  Lucas and Sonia made their way through the smoky street to the alley where the officers stood. The two Israeli officers were not happy to see them. The less reasonable one raised his arms in exasperation.

  "What now?" the reasonable one asked.

  "Hullo," said the Dane to Sonia and Lucas. "Are you my reinforcements?" He appeared to be joking.

  "We were on our way to Al-Amal camp," Sonia said, "but we're stopping at headquarters in town. What's up?"

  "I have explained that I must stay," the Dane said. "But these gentlemen are opposed."

  "None of you have business here," the reasonable officer said. The unreasonable one nodded fierce agreement.

  "What happened?" Lucas asked.

  "This," the Dane said, "is under dispute."

  "Do you want us to stay?" Sonia asked.

  The captain looked at the van in which Nuala sat and then at Lucas and Sonia.

  "No," he said. "I want you off the street. Headquarters knows I'm here."

  "Will you let us pass?" Sonia asked the two Israelis.

  "No!" shouted the unreasonable officer.

  "Certainly," said the reasonable one. With a courtly gesture he offered them the street ahead, smoky and laced with stones. "Pass."

  They got back in the van and drove by the alley unharmed. Some of the Israeli troopers muttered after them.

  "What's going on?" Lucas asked as they drove out of the smoke.

  "They're murdering Palestinians," Nuala declared.

  "What's going on," said Sonia, "is that they've got a bunch of the shebab cornered up that alley and they want to go in and whale on them. So they'd like Captain Angstrom out of there. But Angstrom, God bless him, is being an asshole."

  A kilometer away, the smoke had dissipated and the streets of Gaza City were deserted. Other columns of smoke, more than half a dozen, rose from various points of the landscape.

  The army had concentrated its forces around the university, near UN headquarters, so they had a few more checkpoints to negotiate. They found headquarters on an emergency footing. In the dusty courtyard stood an old Laredo with yellow Israeli plates and a bumper sticker that said STUDY ARSE ME.

  "The Rose is here," Sonia said.

  Inside, Helen Henderson, the Rose of Saskatoon, was in conversation with a Canadian called Owens, who was chief of the Social Services Department of the field office of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine.

  Sonia introduced Lucas and asked them what had happened in Daraj, in the southeast of Gaza City, where the riot was. A radio transmitter carried muffled voices over static, speaking in English.

  "Someone raised a Palestinian flag," the Rose told them. "The army came. The shebab threw rocks. That's as much as we know. Captain Angstrom's up there."

  "We saw him," Sonia said. "I think there was a fatality. We saw a boy who appeared to be dead."

  "More than one," Owens said. "We have reports of three."

  "We have to go to Al-Amal," Nuala told Owens. "Can we get through?"

  "I wouldn't use the inland road. The whol
e Strip's hot and it'll be dark soon. There'll be a curfew and a lot of paranoia. The army might let you through over on the coast. Or they might not."

  "They're supposed to let us through," Nuala said. "They're obliged to."

  "Yes," Owens said, "well, good luck. Do you have a radio?"

  They had no radio. Owens told them to keep their heads down.

  The army did in fact let them pass by the Beach camp checkpoint, and their drive from Gaza to Khan Yunis featured sunset on the sea. A half mile off Deir el-Balah, the searchlight of a helicopter played on shrimp boats, gliding theatrically across the dark swells from vessel to vessel. The sea was smooth and they could hear it gently breaking on the nearby beach. There was another camp close to the shore; darkness somewhat dissolved its squalor and menace, encouraging illusions of tranquility. The evening call to prayer echoing from its loudspeakers sounded tragic and fateful, resigned, remote.

  The name of the Compassionate and Merciful One still hung over the mud-brick hovels when they encountered the first of the settlers' resort hotels. Beyond the sandbags and razor wire, its poolside glow was green and lush, and there were strings of colored lights along the beach.

  "Who would go there?" Lucas wanted to know. "It's so close to the camp."

  But there were customers. Long-legged blond women in bikinis and gauzy wraps strolled in the verdant shadows. A man with fair hair to his shoulders carried a young woman to the edge of the pool and dropped her in.

  "They're mostly Europeans there," Sonia said, "because that hotel's not religious. Israelis go to the others. They're a good buy."

  "But you can see the camps."

  "And smell them," Nuala said. "It doesn't bother everyone."

  Turning from the young Aryans at play across the wire to the dark mass of the camp, Lucas had to consider what he had seen that morning. Images of Gaza and Yad Vashem would be forever confounded in his mind, although he understood perfectly well that it was a cheap equivalence, already a cliché of the place, trotted out for the record by every aspiring athlete of the sensibility who passed by. But the chain of circumstance connecting the two shaped the underlying reality. Blind champions would forever turn the wheels in endless cycles of outrage and redress, an infinite round of guilt and grief. Instead of justice, a circular darkness.

  It occurred to him that Sonia had been right about going to those two places the same day. He had been trying to balance some imaginary scale, and no doubt anyone who saw Yad Vashem might imagine the necessities of Gaza. On the other hand, the two were utterly unconnected, because history was moronically pure, consisting entirely of singularities. Things had no moral. If you had to have a side, it was better to see only one—choose according to your needs and simply ignore or deny the other. Comparisons, attempts at ethical calibration, induced vital fatigue.

  "But it must be so strange," he said, "to go to the beach over there. With your back to all this."

  "Some people probably like the drama," Sonia said.

  "Drama indeed," said Nuala sternly. Lucas and Sonia exchanged a secret glance.

  "I'm sure some of them moralize," Sonia said. "Come here and frolic in the surf, then go home and bitch about the cruel Israelis."

  "Sounds about right," said Lucas.

  "We'd have tourists in Cuba," she told him, "leftists, don't you know. Gente de la izquierda, socialistas. You could find them on the Malecón, looking for girls or boys to fuck them for dollars. Then they go home and say, How about me, I spent my vacation in Cuba. Para solidaridad."

  "Some of the tourists fall in love with the settlers," Nuala said. "They come back again and again."

  "Listen," Sonia said to Lucas, "want to go swimming tomorrow? So you can tell the tale? Maybe we can fix it up."

  "It seems frivolous," Lucas said.

  "You'll earn it. We'll all go. Right, Nuala?"

  "Maybe," Nuala said. "If there's no curfew in Gaza."

  "It's not exactly what I came for. Is it permitted?"

  "You mean by the Koran?" Sonia asked. "By the Torah? Take your pleasures where you find them, Chris. If someone offers you a swim, swim."

  "It's a date," Lucas said.

  There was an army checkpoint at the edge of the protected coastal road, and they approached it with great discretion.

  The noncom in charge, when he had finished inspecting their passports, addressed them in American English. He was earnestlooking and bespectacled, like a young doctor or a college instructor.

  "You shouldn't be on the road at all. I hope you know you're spending the night here."

  On the outskirts of Khan Yunis, the army owned the light. Lucas eased the van through narrow alleys, trying not to outrun his own parking lights, steering by the occasional glimpse of a kerosene lamp behind a partition. Helicopters scurried about in the darkness overhead, showering brilliance on the landscape below. The high beams prowled in zigzag patterns over the camp, illuminating columns of smoke, sometimes lighting the flight of a solitary runner. Radios crackled, bullhorns sounded. A parachute flare drifted earthward out in the desert, beyond the southern boundary of the camp. There were shots.

  "Turns out to be a big night," Sonia said grimly.

  They parked behind a run-down stucco wall that enclosed the ruins of a garden that had been part of a British army hospital during the Second World War. A drooping UN flag hung over its gate, lit by a row of half a dozen bare bulbs, a couple of which were dark and broken. Signs in Arabic and English were pasted around the entrance.

  It took them some time to gain entrance; they had to pound on the heavy wooden door and depress a lever that only intermittently rang a little bell. Then the door opened and a young Palestinian in a white doctor's coat peered out at them.

  "Rashid," Nuala said.

  At the sound of her voice and the sight of her the young doctor broke into a radiant smile. She stepped forward and stood before him. Neither of them moved for a moment. Then Rashid took a quick glance over his shoulder, as if he were concerned who might see them, and put his hand over his heart. Lucas saw his look change from a formal polite gesture into something fateful and passionate and meant for Nuala alone. He wore a stethoscope around his neck, and the breast pocket of his white smock was filled with ballpoint pens, some of which leaked and had empurpled his white coat. His hands were stained with ink.

  "You have come," he said to her.

  "Yes," Nuala said. "And brought everything. And friends along with me. Oh," she said when she saw the condition of his coat, "you'll ruin your jacket. Your pen's leaking."

  There was something boyish and fond about the way he laughed at her admonition. In his happiness, he welcomed Sonia and Lucas warmly into the dimly lit foyer, trying not to touch them with his ink-stained hands. In one wing of the old building babies were crying. Lucas noticed that two other Palestinian men were standing at a desk on the far side of the room as though reluctant to approach.

  "So," Sonia asked Rashid, "are you with the Children's Foundation?"

  Rashid, though no less delighted, seemed confused by her question. He turned to Nuala.

  "He's a new assistant administrator," she told Sonia. "Sent over from Hebron the other week."

  "I have just finished a residency," Rashid told them, "in America. In Louisville, Kentucky."

  "That's great, Rashid," Sonia said. "Congratulations. I didn't know you shared space with UNRWA," she said to Nuala.

  "Oh, we don't," Nuala said. Her speech was hurried, her eyes averted. "We're just over in Al-Amal."

  As they stood awkwardly in the foyer, they heard the engine of the van start up outside.

  "Is that our car?" Lucas asked.

  Rashid smiled at him in silence. He turned to Nuala.

  "Yes, they're moving it out of the road. It'll be safer over at our place. Tomorrow," she said, "I'll show you around our shop."

  "Sure," said Sonia. "We should all turn in."

  Then Nuala and Rashid, walking stiffly side by side, went back out into the contentiou
s night. From the darkness, young Palestinian women began to unload the UN van.

  "They're taking the stuff," Lucas said. "Is it all right?"

  "Let them," Sonia said. "It's meant for them."

  Sonia said nothing as they walked toward the desk, where a second Palestinian physician waited, an elderly man with a blue blazer on under his white coat. Sonia knew him; he was Dr. Naguib of UNRWA. She introduced Lucas as her friend, a journalist. He and the man exchanged a soft, silent handshake.

  "I hope you'll have room for us," Sonia said to Dr. Naguib.

  "We have only the office beds for you. Perhaps we can put one in the hallway."

  The office beds turned out to be two camp cots with Swedish sleeping bags on them, which were stowed under a desk in the office of the Education Department. Lucas and Sonia sent Dr. Naguib away when he tried to help them wrestle them out.

  "The bath is just outside," Naguib said, pointing down the hallway. "But the water there is not good. And you must be careful tonight because of the patrols."

  "We have water," Sonia said. "Thank you, Dr. Naguib."

  "We don't have to shlep one into the hall," Sonia said. "The doc won't care."

  "I should have brought a bottle of Scotch," Lucas said when Naguib was gone.

  "Not appropriate," Sonia said.

  "Just as well," Lucas said. "It keeps me awake." He lay down on the cot and cradled his head on his hands. Sonia sat down on one of the office chairs.

  "Once upon a time," Sonia said, "I would have brought some Percodan."

  "Is that what you like?"

  "Used to be. I don't use them anymore."

  "Why'd you stop?"

  "The Rev told me to quit."

  "De Kuff? And that's good enough?"

  "Good enough for me," Sonia said.

  He was at the point of pursuing the question of De Kuff's role in her life when something closer to hand occurred to him. "Tell me," he said, "what's going on with Nuala?"