Damascus Gate

by Robert Stone

  "Shit too," said the Rose. "That's not likely. I wasn't going to tell you this," she said. "Nuala's running dope into T.V. They get guns in exchange."

  "I know," Sonia said. "And I suppose Shabak does too."

  "They've been doing it for years," the Rose told her. "Shabak will play one faction off against another, and whoever's considered useful at the moment gets guns and money. But to keep the Americans from finding out, they work through dope dealers like Stanley. The IDF has orders not to interfere."

  "I suppose they each think they're getting the best of the deal."

  "Everybody knows. Except us. UNRWA. And even we know, if you see what I mean. The Americans probably know too. Shabak was using Hamas the same way. To screw the Muslim Brotherhood. Until it blew up on them."

  "Where does Linda come in?" Sonia asked.

  "It doesn't make sense. It's all worked out between the Communist faction of the PLO and the Shabak control. Nuala and Rashid handle it from this end. The Israeli Human Rights Coalition would never be involved in something like this."

  "Maybe they're dropping the Communists?"

  "I don't know, Sonia. It's scary."

  Sonia saw black smoke rising over the hovels of Bureij town. Burning rubber.

  They heard amplified voices from the mosques, although it was not the hour of prayer. The voices sounded enraged, almost hysterical, aged voices distorted and shrill. From the shabby precincts of Argentina camp, a pathetic wail of fear—the fear of grown young men who had lost their fighting spirit, their strutting vanity, their feigned self-confidence, their self-respect and finally even their adulthood—ascended like a foul prayer over the filth and stink of their quarters. The Israeli soldiers on guard shouted them down in mocking consolation. Everyone turned to watch the smoke.

  Nuala was questioning John Lautoka.

  "You were supposed to pick up in town," she said. "Who told you to pick up here? Was it Walid?" Walid was the name one of their controls used, though he was an Israeli and not a Palestinian.

  "No. An IDF soldier I never saw before. But he used the right codes."

  From his watchtower, the sentry whistled again and pointed to the horizon.

  "I've got to go," Lenny told Linda. "Will you be all right with them?"

  "I'll be all right," Linda said. "But where will you go, Lenny?"

  "Kfar Gottlieb. I'll get a ride from the camp in the next army jeep," Lenny said. "I've had enough of these people."

  "You should come with us," Linda said. "You'll be seen and you won't be able to work out here again."

  Lenny smiled. "There won't be anyone out here except us, remember?"

  "Ride with the soldier in the PKF truck," Linda suggested. "He can drop you at the checkpoint outside Nuseirat, and there's always someone going to Kfar Gottlieb from there."

  "No," Lenny said, "I don't mind being seen by the Arabs, but I shouldn't be riding with that element. It's all right for you. I'll wait here for an IDF vehicle."

  "For heaven's sake," Linda said, "don't dawdle. Look at all the smoke."

  The fumes were ascending now from every direction, black and unacceptable as Cain's sacrifice.

  Nuala opened the gate for John Lautoka and his truck and called for everyone to leave.

  "Bloody hell," she said, sniffing the stench of rubber. "Here we go again!"

  40

  ON HIS WAY home from the burnt ruin of his car, Lucas went to a police station to report its trashing by fire. The Israeli policemen had not exactly hooted and jeered at him, but their manner had not been overly sympathetic either. It had been a hell of a way to start the day, a most uninspiring climax to a night's vigil.

  There was a cut-rate car rental office near the police station, so he stopped there and filled out the paperwork for the rental of a Ford Taurus. Rental cars were not always readily available, and since he was likely to need one soon, it was just as well to get the process under way.

  Arriving in his apartment, weary and disgusted, he turned on the phone machine and heard Sonia's voice on it. She was going to the Strip. Linda Ericksen had arranged for her to videotape the confessions of Abu Baraka. She had tried to get Ernest to go there with them, but he was out of the country. She was meeting Abu at a place called Argentina camp, near Nuseirat.

  He sat on the bed for a minute or two, pondering Sonia's message. Then he tried calling the offices of the Israeli Human Rights Coalition. Ernest was away, as it turned out, but the North American—sounding young woman he spoke with was familiar with Abu Baraka's pastimes. She felt able to assure him that nothing as newsworthy as a statement from Abu Baraka himself was in the offing. Had it been, Linda Ericksen, a foreign volunteer who had more or less withdrawn her minor services from the organization, would not have been detailed to deal with it. He thought about it for a moment more, then decided to pick up his rental car.

  Two hours later, he was leaving it at a parking lot on the Israeli side of the Green Line. He crossed into the Strip on his press credentials and hired a sherut to take him to Argentina camp. The driver, a young man who spoke a little English, was torn between his insistence that he knew of no such destination as Argentina camp and his determination not to lose Lucas as a fare. Since there was no such place, the driver made it clear to Lucas, it would be expensive to go there.

  On the way, he entertained Lucas with fragments of Shakespeare: "To be or not to be ... Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow ... Ripeness is all..."

  The horizon before them grew progressively more hazy. Then the haze became smoke, and at first it seemed to be part of the eternally burning trash fires that wafted out of the camps' dumps. Eventually, both Lucas and his driver recognized it as rubber smoke, the kind of smoke that signaled flaming barricades. The driver slowed down.

  Out of the smoke came a sweating, blackened man; he was hurrying along looking straight ahead, swinging his arms in a military fashion. He looked out of place, to say the least.

  The driver turned to Lucas. Lucas, who had been preparing for an argument with him over proceeding further, was surprised to see him smiling unpleasantly.

  "A Jew," he said. For a fraction of a second, Lucas thought the man was talking about him. Then he realized that the Jew in question was the unlikely pedestrian they had passed. They drove for another few minutes, and to his great relief Lucas saw two white vehicles parked behind a barbed-wire gate off the road. Sonia, Nuala, Linda Ericksen and the Rose were gathered beside them.

  "I got your message," he told Sonia.

  "Thanks, Chris," she said. "You probably shouldn't have come."

  "Forget it," he said. He paid the driver and got out. His driver lost no time in hauling ass the way they had come. The departing taxi added its exhaust fumes to the gathering smoke.

  "We're turning back," Nuala told him from the lead car. "We're going the way your driver went. I want to get home to Deir el-Balah."

  "I think it's popping that way too," Lucas said. "Maybe we can get there by the coast road. By the way," he asked Nuala, "who was the guy walking along the road? I think he might be in trouble."

  Linda Ericksen had been sitting on the passenger side of Sonia's Land Rover with the door open. She got to her feet. "Oh," she said, "Lenny!"

  "Who's Lenny?"

  "We don't think we know," Sonia said.

  "You've got to help him," Linda said.

  "If he's not known," Nuala said from the lead car, "he's in trouble."

  They decided to leave the Rose's Laredo to the security of Argentina camp and make for Deir el-Balah in Sonia's UN vehicle. Nuala, for her part, was worried about Rashid.

  They packed themselves into the Land Rover. Nuala drove, with the Rose and Linda beside her. Sonia and Lucas sat in back.

  Nuala was scanning the burning landscape, counting off the towns that seemed to be in flames. Bureij. Maghazi. There was smoke everywhere. They began to hear small-arms fire.

  Linda stammeringly told her story about documenting Abu Baraka's crimes for Sonia's benefit
.

  "They've got to be more careful with their snitches than that," Nuala said to Linda. "I'm sorry, I don't buy it."

  "Why would you?" Linda asked her furiously. "You're with the fedayeen. You're one of them. You too," she told the Rose. "Lenny's a genuinely concerned individual. He's with the Human Rights Coalition."

  "Is he?" Sonia asked Lucas.

  "I don't know," Lucas said. "I don't think so."

  By the time they had gone as far as Bureij, they had not seen a single Israeli vehicle or soldier. The IDF might have concentrated some forces at the approaches to Argentina camp, but they had clearly pulled out of the concrete slums of Bureij, closing down the highway northward, strengthening their checkpoint and waiting for reinforcements before going in. For the moment, the shebab had free rein of the noisome lanes and had even come out on the road.

  Some of the youths were running along it, jogging parallel with the Land Rover. Their faces were veiled in their kaffiyehs; each kaffiyeh's color expressed the wearer's political affiliation, Lucas had been told. The Arafat people wore a black check. The Communists, under Nuala's Rashid, naturally favored red. Hamas wore Islamic green. Green was the prevailing color now, here in Bureij.

  It was the first time Lucas had ever seen the shebab rampant. Some of the boys spun in ecstasy. Some threw their heads back and screamed at the smoky sky.

  "Allahu akbar!"

  They had not quite the friendliness toward UN vehicles Lucas was used to. Some of the men who had unveiled their faces had terrible smiles. Many wept. How shall it be with kingdoms and with kings, Lucas thought. He forgot the rest. He did not roll up the window, in spite of the smoke. He did not avert his gaze from them.

  "Allahu akbar!"

  The wretched of the earth, the avengers of oppression, the beloved of God, blessed be He. Up ahead he could see the IDF checkpoint beyond smoke and wire, and the soldiers retiring toward it from the town, covering their withdrawal squad by squad. Rocks flew, and gas grenades, and he heard the small whiz of bullets, rubber and the other kind.

  "Allahu akbar!"

  And maybe for these army kids, the undertrained reserve soldiers of the IDF, temporarily outnumbered, it was as it had been for the toughs in the Antonia Fortress of the Old City, in the first flush of the Jewish Revolt, when the Zealots came for them in the name of Sabaoth. The same God inspiring the same strokes. Mercy was His middle name—except on certain occasions, during special enthusiasms.

  "Christ," Lucas said, "is this it? I mean, is this the one?" He meant the one he had planned to observe on television in Fink's while his French colleague ran to Mecca. No one in the car answered him.

  Along the side of the road, a howling ancient was hurried along by veiled youths. He shook his fists and it appeared that the young men might be having trouble keeping pace with him.

  From the mosques, from the alleys, from the road: " Allahu akbar!"

  Linda was crying.

  And suddenly they were in a relatively quiet stretch. Piles of tires burned unattended. The army had pulled back to fixed positions while the Palestinian crowds were closer to the town center. A souk, its stacks of produce displayed in place, stood deserted. Nuala braked and they stopped briefly at the mouth of what seemed to be a deserted alley.

  Turning into the alley, they were surprised to see men and boys racing among the market stalls. The young men were not shouting slogans, and they appeared very grim. Something about the charge of the scene fascinated Lucas. In the next instant they watched a stall overturn and heard a wordless cry. Then a voice shouted:

  "Itbah al-Yahud!"

  A kind of silence fell. Then it was repeated.

  "Itbah al-Yahud!"

  The phrase was being chanted over and over, roared by men, ululated by unseen women.

  Lucas knew immediately what it meant, although he had never heard it said or screamed or sung before. Why had he known? He saw that Sonia knew too. Down in the alley a grinning middle-aged man was jumping up and down in place.

  "Itbah al-Yahud!"

  Kill the Jew!

  "They have someone," Sonia said.

  Lucas knew that she was right. And that this particular Yahud was not an abstraction, not the Yahud squatting in the estaminet, blistered in Brussels, patched and peeled in Antwerp. Not the Rootless Cosmopolitan or the International Financier. He was one man alone, run down by a mob, carrying the whole fucking thing by himself. A Jew bastard such as young Lucas had once been.

  "Allahu akbar! Itbah al-Yahud!"

  "It's Len!" Linda shrieked. "It's Lenny!" She might have caught a glimpse of him.

  Nuala pulled over to the narrow shoulder. Everyone got out and stood in a milling circle beside the car. Locals, hurrying to the spectacle, paused to regard them with surprise.

  "Why would he walk alone in the Strip?" Sonia asked. "Is he out of his mind?"

  "He was afraid of getting in trouble!" Linda shrieked.

  Lucas and Sonia looked at each other.

  "Getting in trouble?" Lucas asked.

  "What are these two doing here anyhow?" Nuala asked, apparently meaning Linda and Lenny. "Christ, maybe we can get him loose. Take the car and follow me."

  Nuala got out and Lucas drove, with Sonia beside him. The Rose and Linda were in the back.

  "Give it the horn," Nuala called to Lucas. "And don't run me over." Lucas began to pummel the car horn. Nuala walked ahead of him with one hand on the fender. After a minute the Rose opened the back door and got out on the road to slog beside Nuala. Slowly, absurdly, they advanced up the alley where an ecstatic crowd was beating an unseen Jew. Finally, Lucas decided he could drive no further.

  "We might as well get out too," he said to Sonia. Linda crouched ashen-faced in the back. "Come with us," Lucas told her. But she stayed where she was.

  Now he was reluctant to leave the car. The crowd was out of control, and though he took the keys, he knew that it might be gone or ablaze when they got back, and Linda with it.

  "Stay together," Nuala told her troops. "We'll try to get him."

  And maybe they would, Lucas thought. Nuala was good with crowds; she was a Communist, after all. He was looking about him in unfocused hope of some formless mercy, sanity, forgiveness, understanding. But there was nothing around them except the mass of hovels of cement and hammered tin and dirty plastic, stinking for miles from the desert to the sea.

  "Itbah al-Yahud!" cried the mob.

  Linda locked the car behind them.

  "Lenny?" Lucas shouted. He was trying to remember who Lenny was. But it hardly mattered now. He was the Other here, the prey, the pursued. A man like himself, like himself in every important way.

  A group of youths approached to intercept their passage. Lucas thought of the Dane he had seen weeks before, standing up for the lives of the cornered Arab kids. He tried to ease forward but the crowd pressed against him. He could still hear the sounds of struggle and pursuit in the next arcade.

  Sonia began to speak in Arabic. The youths confronting them shook their heads grimly and avoided her eyes.

  "Please let us pass!" Lucas said. "We have a job to do here."

  They stared blankly, leaving Lucas to contemplate his own declaration. He supposed it was pretty meaningless, even had the crowd been able to understand it. As though they were there to pave the street.

  Meanwhile, Nuala and the Rose were shouldering their way into the melee, shouting, shoving, ignoring copped feels, slapping impersonally at the hands that clutched their thighs and the hem of their shorts, as though swatting insects. It was Eros and Thanatos in the worst way, the men displaying their virility by grinding their teeth in the women's faces, presenting masks of sweaty, smiling rage, one hand clenched in a fist or brandishing a rock, the other clawing at the women's private places. Lucas and Sonia formed a secondary line, fighting forward. Lucas turned and got a last look at Linda, hysterical in the back seat of the car. Nuala had succeeded in reaching the end of the next alley, and it was clear that she could see what w
as happening there. She was frowning, tight-lipped. She began to shout and tried to move forward.

  "Itbah al-Yahud!" the crowd screamed. Just at the moment when it looked as if Nuala would round the last stall and wade through to the action, she went reeling backward, one hand to her eye. Lucas found himself on the weak end of a shoving match with three young men who had put green-checked kaffiyehs over their faces. Someone grabbed him from behind and held him. He saw Nuala coming back through the crowd. This time it parted for her.

  Then Lucas saw the things they had taken up: trowels and mallets and scythes, some dripping blood. Everyone was screaming, calling on God. On God, Lucas thought. He was terrified of falling, of being crushed by the angry swarm that was whirling around him. He wanted to pray. "O Lord," he heard himself say. The utterance filled him with loathing, that he was calling on God, on that Great Fucking Thing, the Lord of Sacrifices, the setter of riddles. Out of the eater comes forth meat. The poser of parables and shibboleths. The foreskin collector, connoisseur of humiliations, slayer by proxy of his thousands, his tens of thousands. Not peace but a sword. The Lunatic Spirit of the Near East, the crucified and crucifier, the enemy of all His own creation. Their God-Damned God.

  An old man emerged from the crowd. He wore the white cap of the haji and leaned on a carved stick. He had a Bedouin face, long and grave. At his approach, the youths released Lucas. Was he the Almighty Beard-Winged Celestial Paperweight's earthly representative?

  The old man spoke softly, nodded courteously. And when Nuala remonstrated with him, he raised his chin in the least ambivalent gesture of the place. No hope.

  "He says we're in danger," Nuala told them. "He says the Jew is a dead man. If we stay we'll bring the troops, and the troops will kill everyone because of him."

  "The Jew is a spy," one of the youths shouted in English. The old man nodded agreement.

  "Sorry," Nuala said to her friends. "That's it."

  She had a large welt over her eye and a bloody nose and they did not argue with her. To Lucas's profound gratitude, the car and Linda were where they had left them.

  "Was it Lenny?" Sonia turned to ask when they were climbing in.