Damascus Gate

by Robert Stone

  When they passed Migdal, where Mary Magdalene had been a country girl before she went wrong in the big city, a single faint bell was sounding near the lake.

  Dirt roads ran down through rough fields to the water, bordered by tamarisks and eucalyptus. A few miles ahead, Lucas saw the arches of a lakeside church.

  "What is it?" Lucas asked.

  "Someone's church. I forget whose."

  The church and adjoining monastery were the rosy color of Jerusalem stone but they did not seem very old. They were Neo-Romanesque with red roof tiles and a spotless courtyard and fountain out front. He pulled off the highway and guided the car down a dirt road toward the lake. When they reached the water, he saw that they had followed the wrong road; the church and monastery were across a rutted pasture enclosed by wire.

  Bells were sounding, bells of every register, from funereal profundo to a tinkling Eucharistic chime. The sound whirled on the lake wind, singing the bright sky, announcing the slow-moving formations of heavy clouds on the far shore.

  A tall monk in white was closing the wooden church door.

  "Benedictines. I want to go," he announced. "I want to go to Mass."

  "If that's what you want," she said, "I'll go with you."

  Lucas began to struggle with the wire fencing that enclosed the field, cutting his wrists and arms.

  "Hey," Sonia said. "Watch it."

  He fought the wire as though he were engaging serpents, until it was subdued and he could hold up the bottom strand for her to crawl under.

  "Take it easy," she said. She wriggled through on her back with barely an inch to spare. "Hey, maybe we should get in the car and backtrack."

  "No," Lucas said. "We'll never make it." He was growing more and more excited. "We've got to hump cross-country."

  Sonia was brushing herself off. She had cut her knee on the wire. "You really feel the need, Chris?"

  "You don't have to go," he told her. "You stay. Drive back around and I'll meet you at the church."

  "No," she said, "I'll go with you."

  So the two of them scrambled across the field of high tough grass, brambles and clodded red earth that lay between them and the monastery. It was hard going and they both cut themselves further. Lucas was breathing hard.

  "Chris," she said anxiously, "what's wrong with you?"

  "This is the place of the loaves and fishes," he said. "Where the multitude was fed."

  "Oh," she said, "I know that one."

  "I've got to make that Mass," Lucas said. "I've absolutely got to."

  "You look ... you look beside yourself," she said, panting to keep up with him.

  "Maybe I am."

  But when they reached the building, its great wooden door was ponderously secured. Lucas pulled at the great ring handle. Locked. He pulled harder, then pushed. A sign on the door said RUHIG, and under it, GESCHLOSSEN FÜR GOTTESDIENST.

  He went to the other door. It had the same sign.

  "They have to let me in," Lucas said.

  "No they don't, Chris."

  "The hell they don't," he shouted. From inside he could hear faint Gregorian chant. The doors, he thought, must be very thick. He began to pound on them with the side of his fists.

  "Let me in, you German sons of bitches!"

  His eye fell on a date on the cornerstone of the church: 1936.

  "Jesus Christ," he shrieked, "1936! You bastards, let me in! Let me in! Look," he told Sonia, "they're keeping me out. They won't let me in." He pounded until his wrists hurt and his hands were numb.

  "You have no right!" he shouted. "You have no right to keep me out! Look," he said to Sonia, "1936!" He pounded some more, until it was impossible to imagine no one heard him. The faint chanting inside continued. He began to kick the door.

  "Chris," she said, "please stop."

  "The fucking sons of bitches!" His shouts echoed along the tranquil Sea of Galilee.

  "Huns!" he cried. "They should be on their knees every minute in this country. They should live on their knees here. Imagine them not letting me in!"

  He got to his own knees.

  "Because I'm in trouble. I'm in need."

  "Yes," she said, helping him to his feet. "I see. I see you are."

  They stumbled back over the hard ground toward the car. "You can cry if you like," she said. But he only bit his lip and pressed on, wild-eyed.

  They drove to the Franciscan chapel outside Capernaum. A friar was sweeping the steps beside it that led to the ruins, and they nodded to each other. Lucas and Sonia walked along the shore and sat by the remains of the ancient synagogue.

  "So what was that about?" she asked when he had calmed down.

  "Beats me."

  "You say I need to believe. What about you?"

  "I don't know. I've been drinking too much. I'm out of Prozac. I've got a cold."

  "We'll fix you up, poor guy."

  "It's all an undigested bit of beef," Lucas said.

  "Say what?"

  "An undigested bit of beef," he said. "Like Jacob Marley's ghost."

  "Jacob Marley?"

  "You never heard of Jacob Marley? A Christmas Carol?"

  "Oh," she said. "Him."

  He took an empty water bottle they had brought and filled it from the lake.

  "What is it?" she asked.

  "Water," he said. "'Over whose acres walked those blessed feet which fourteen hundred years ago were nailed for our advantage on the bitter cross.'"

  "Better not drink it," she said. "Never mind who walked on it."

  They drove into the hills north of the lake.

  "You have to be ready for this to fail you," Lucas counseled her. "When it comes to nothing, you still have to go on living."

  "It won't fail us," she said. "But it might be the other way around. We might fail. It's hard to make everything be music. But music will always be there."

  "Is that what it's like? Making everything be music?"

  "Making everything be music again," she said. "The way it was in the beginning."

  "You know," Lucas said, "all the grief of the twentieth century has come from trying to turn life into art. Think about it."

  "If we try," Sonia said, "we can make things the way they were. The way they were is the way they're supposed to be. That's why we have art. To remind us."

  He could not resist the little flutter of mindless hope. In what? In nothing he could remotely conceive. Did it not matter that Raziel was the flake of flakes, De Kuff a dying reed, Sonia so good and smart she turned foolish? That they were at the heart of a Middle Eastern setup devised by deluded masters? It mattered, all right. But he could not resist the little flutter.

  That afternoon, they caught up with De Kuff, Raziel, the Rose and their Dodge van at a campsite in the Hula Valley. There were tents to rent, and the Rose helped them put theirs up. She was good with tents, a young outdoorsy woman—which was, Lucas supposed, why Raziel had consented to bring her along.

  "I wish he wasn't so unhappy," the Rose said. She meant De Kuff.

  "It's chemical," Lucas told her. He watched her ponder this information. "Why did you come?" he asked her.

  "To help Sonia. And maybe now to be with him. I think there's a lesson for me. And I want to say I was here."

  With darkness had come a slight chill. He had brought a bottle of The Macallan, and he took occasional comfort from it. Their tent was enormous, of canvas, and of an old-fashioned sort that could accommodate camp tables and cots. Sonia furnished it with a rented air mattress and some Bedouin skin rugs and cushions, orphans from Berger's apartment.

  He found her lying on one elbow, looking at peace. Dry oak leaves were caught in the curly bush of her hair.

  "So here we are again," he said.

  "So here we are again. A love supreme."

  "So," he asked her, across the glowing Coleman lamp, also rented, that hung between them, "what is this? What are we doing out here?" Peter the Hermit's army, he thought. A long trail of bozos had preceded them.


  "You're working," she said. "The working press. You're reporting on religious mania."

  "Right," he said. "And this is the real McCoy. Primary process."

  "Would you like me to sing 'Michael, Row the Boat Ashore'?"

  "So you're actively believing it all? Right now? This minute?"

  "Uh-huh. And you—you're amazed. Going around amazed. What's real? What's not? Are you real?"

  "I get drunk every night," Lucas said. "I hallucinate Rudolph Steiner's daughter, Diphtheria, who says—"

  "What we think, will be," Sonia said helpfully. "Diphtheria's right. She's just a little djinn, just a little demon. But, you know, Theodor Herzl said, 'If you will it, it is no dream.' She's got something there. So repeat after me: The force of human will. Go ahead, repeat it."

  "No," Lucas said.

  "Where shall wisdom be found?" she asked him. "What is the place of understanding?" She put out her hand.

  "You know, do you, Sonia?"

  "Yes," she said. "With me."

  The tent smelled of apples. The lantern flickered between them.

  She had on a djellaba, decorated with stars. Her raiment, he liked to call it. When she took it off, he saw the serpent on the chain around her neck dangling to her breasts. She climbed under one of the skin rugs and held her arms out to him. He sat down next to her.

  "Come on, Chris. You're real. I'll help you believe."

  "I don't think you will," he said. But he bent beside her until they both lay on the mattress, against the skin—she under it naked, he in his clothes, on top.

  "Yes I will," she said. "It's good. It's right."

  And, taking off his jacket, glumly unbuttoning his shirt, he had the sensation of playing out an old losing hand. But the Bedouin goatskin blanket, which he had thought would be foul, was soft and sweet-smelling, and the feel of her body beneath it made his mouth go dry. So he continued undressing, in a thrill of despair, and lay naked beside her. Wisdom. The place of understanding. The depth sayeth, It is not in me; and the sea sayeth, It is not with me.

  She still had on her underpants and the chain. Lying on her side, facing him, she lifted the pendant from around her neck and set it down beside them. Under the skin, she took his hands and led them to the warm smooth silky swellings of her derriere. Each hand found its own way around to her waist and down her belly from the navel. He went down to her and took off the white panties and pressed his mouth against her thighs and groin and pudenda.

  Pulling back a moment, he said, "You have to bear with me." He had said the same thing before. It had hurt him so much that it made him sick to hear himself say it again. "I'm slow."

  Slow and sometimes so slow you wouldn't know he was there at all.

  "A love supreme," she sang. When he had made her wet with his mouth, he bent his knees and rose up against her, on fire, rampant, like the boy with the Shulamite, sick with love. Return, return, that we may look upon thee.

  And she sang and screamed and afterward Lucas cried the tears of a happiness he could not measure or analyze or otherwise molest with self-examination. It was really as though she commanded the depths where wisdom lay.

  "You see what I'm saying?" she said.

  When she was sleeping he went out to see the stars against the distant mountains. The lamp burned low. The clouds over the Golan had parted to reveal Andromeda, cradling her galaxy in the flawless sky, and her stars Alpheratz, Mirach, Almach. The Arab names sounded of the Zohar, jewels of the curtain under the Throne of Glory.

  So why not, he thought. And among the stars, her astral correspondence, the star of my lover, my sister, my spouse, in whose depths is the place of wisdom.

  The man who believes in nothing ends by believing in everything. So said Chesterton, his abandoned Catholic mentor. Let it be done as she says, he thought. She was the soul of truth; she deserved it. He felt as if he had been near to death and come alive. Yes, let it be as she says. Let me believe. In the washhouse mirror, he saw, for the first time, the serpent pendant around his neck.

  In the morning, they started after the Rose had broken camp for Raziel and De Kuff and hurried them on the road north, along the top of the Hula Valley. They saw wild pigs running near the lake, and a soaring osprey. The mountains of the Golan drew closer. Papyrus grew beside the water. Pelicans made their geometric, cardtrick pterodactyl dives.

  "The pelican of the desert," Lucas said.

  They had reached the edge of the Paz petrol roadmap Lucas had been using to navigate. Its corner sections were worn away and missing.

  "Do we have a decent map?" Lucas asked.

  "Just this," said Sonia. She handed him the rental car company's map. It was not very detailed.

  "This is the kind of map that killed Bishop Pike," Lucas said.

  "The one for us," said Sonia.

  54

  RAZIEL AND DE KUFF stood at the edge of a Druse village. A manure-flecked road led from the stone houses of the village to the black-rock pastures where some goats and thick-wooled sheep grazed. Far below, at nearly a vertical angle down the slope, the Druse had their orchards.

  The village headman and his son had come out to speak to them. The vaulting mountain sky furnished a chilly gray dawn.

  The elder Druse spoke a little French. His son worked at a concession in the Hula Valley and had some words of Hebrew. Raziel was trying to persuade them not to turn the pilgrim group away. The Golan Druse were caught between their hospitable instincts, their resentment toward Israel and their fear of army and police spies working for Israel, Syria or both.

  "Tell them we're scientists," Raziel advised De Kuff, who was speaking French to the older man. "Tell him we've been sent by the Ministry. To study the sources of the Jordan."

  "In the Holy City," De Kuff said to the old headman, "we were told that voices spoke from the mountain." He used the Arabic name for Jerusalem, Al-Kuds.

  The headman looked at him blankly. "Privé," he said after a moment.

  "Only to the river," De Kuff said. "Only to cross."

  The older Druse looked at the Dodge van. The Rose was asleep in the back seat.

  "Friends will move our car across the mountain," De Kuff said. He took out his wallet. "We'll pay."

  Father and son looked at the wallet in his hand. The older man said something to his son, and the youth turned and started walking toward the village. Raziel leaned against the van, a hand shading his wraparound sunglasses from the sky's gray glare. De Kuff stood in the attitude of Muslim prayer, facing the slopes of Mount Hermon. After a few minutes the headman's son returned with three other men about his father's age.

  "We can offer them as much as we have," De Kuff said breathlessly. "What does it matter?"

  "Take it easy, Rev. If you give them too much, they'll get scared and call the Border Police."

  "They're honest men," De Kuff said, looking fondly at the villagers.

  "Keep them honest," Raziel said. "Just don't wave money around and make them crazy."

  But De Kuff gave a fifty-dollar bill to everyone. Raziel had no idea where he'd gotten the cash. The Druse looked at the bills with hope, dread and suspicion. There were many counterfeit American fifties in the Middle East, and even on Mount Hermon people were aware of it.

  When the headman had agreed to let them pass through the fields, De Kuff signaled to Raziel to awaken the sleeping Rose. His gesture was kingly; it was one of his enthusiastic days. She climbed out, blinking prettily, and smelled the mountain air.

  They were standing beside the van when Fotheringill drove up in the Volvo. He motioned Raziel to his car. He was holding a sheaf of papers in an open manila envelope that had a disc-and-string seal.

  "Some of Lestrade's tunnel maps," the Scotsman told him.

  "OK," said Raziel. "You got something else for me?"

  Fotheringill gave him another package wrapped in butcher paper. In exchange, Raziel gave Fotheringill his keys.

  "Right," said Fotheringill. "There's a park headquarters across the v
alley. The park's been closed since the Gulf War, but I can leave your car there with some of the maps in the glove box. I'll leave the rest in the Volvo for the cops to find." He got into Raziel's van and gave him a humorless grin. "Be careful of mines, eh? They're mainly marked."

  "Good," said Raziel.

  When Fotheringill took off up the road, Raziel helped De Kuff ease himself over into the Druse pasture. They started walking toward the line of valonia oaks and oleander that marked a stream. On the higher slopes there were dwarf olive trees and two mighty terebinths, one of which was scarred by lightning.

  There was snow on the brow of Mount Hermon. The Golan peaks enclosed the narrow valley in which they walked. Mount Sion and Mount Habetarim loomed to the north, below the shoulders of Hermon, and toward the Syrian lines and Tel Hamina, the mountains called Shezif and Alon.

  De Kuff breathed deeply. His face was radiant and his eyes full of tears.

  "'Naphtali is a hind let loose,'" he told Raziel. "This is his kingdom."

  "I told you, Rev, the time was near. You have to trust me."

  They would go to every tribe now, down from the highlands of Naphtali to Dan to as far as Gilead, and what was written would come to pass.

  Raziel was thinking that his next name might be Naphtali. It was all the same, he considered. The closing of the circle, the serpent finding itself, the resolution of the noosphere. Things themselves come to consciousness. Faith was easy in the mountains. It required a congenial landscape. But now, for Raziel, faith required an interior landscape too.

  "Here it is," De Kuff said. "This is the source of the river."

  They both sat down and drank of it from their right hands. Raziel too, although he was left-handed.

  "Yes," Raziel said, laughing. "The waters of Merom."

  Around them grew waist-high mint and flowering nettles, a wealth of ferns like the carpet of a rain forest, and wild fig.

  "We'll go up," De Kuff said, looking at the snow fields high above them. "We'll go up and meet them."

  From the next ridge they could see a Syrian observation post at the base of the next mountain. They came to a track that was marked in Hebrew, Arabic and English as a military road. A short way beyond it was a sign lying flat in the brush that warned against mines. The letters on it were so weathered as to be almost illegible.