Damascus Gate

by Robert Stone

  Raziel was looking for a place where they could spend the night without hauling their gear down for a campsite, where they could watch through the night with a section of the river to themselves, with only a fire.

  It did not take him long to find a spot. It was close to the Syrian lines, but at least they had the passive permission of the Druse. The nearby park was indeed closed. Almost any flat spot where there was dry brush for fire, one within the sound of fast water, would do. Also, he would be able to fix comfortably there.

  55

  HAVING DRIVEN off the map, Lucas was trying to make his Ford Taurus behave like a vehicle of adventure.

  "If I'd known we were going in for alpine touring," he told Sonia, "I would have rented a four-wheel drive."

  Nearly all night they drove the frosted wadis, avoiding flooded streams and sandstone precipices. Toward morning, Lucas let Sonia drive, and when he woke up they were on paved highway heading north, under the mass of Mount Hermon.

  "Love these military roads," she told him.

  "We're probably in Syria," Lucas said.

  After an hour and a half, they came to a strange series of kiosks resembling small alpine chalets. In the largest one there was an attended snack bar and a little boarded-up souvenir shop. A few souvenirs had been left out in the weather on the splintering counter: a cheap print of Jesus walking on water, a photograph of the rebbe of a Hasidic sect.

  A cold, unceasing wind blew down from the peak, rattling the fragile buildings. Sonia had brought some bread and the makings of falafel from the kibbutz and they ate some.

  They were just finishing when the inevitable Fotheringill pulled into the desolate parking area in the Dodge van. Sonia saw him first, over Lucas's shoulder. Her mouth full of dry falafel, she pointed to the car.

  Fotheringill was wearing commando fatigues and his hair appeared to have been cut even shorter. He parked the van and sauntered over to them.

  "Where's the Rev?" Sonia asked him.

  "Down the river a mile or two. Follow the path and you'll see him on the near bank."

  Lucas walked over to the shattered wooden railing and looked out on the valley. He saw white smoke rising from a spot a few miles below.

  "You surprise me," Lucas said, turning to Fotheringill. "I didn't think of you as a religious man."

  "It's just him," said Fotheringill. "How he is. Great bloke."

  It seemed a less than inspired endorsement. But who knew?

  "Then it's me protecting him," Fotheringill said. "Such a fine wee man as he is, he needs someone to keep him from harm. From the evildoer, eh? Fucking evildoer, eh? So that's me, see. Makes up for the wrong I've done."

  "Like your fallen soufflés," Lucas suggested.

  "Right. And Angola," said Fotheringill. "By the way, did you ever remember that poem? About rillettes de tours?"

  "No," Lucas said.

  Grasping at reeds and morning glory vines, they descended the muddy path. On the far bank, to their right and below, the slope was covered in vineyards that Lucas thought must belong to one of the Golan kibbutzim. There was a smell of mint along the course of the stream. The stones were slippery with moss and crushed pennygrass. The wind from the mountain never quit.

  They followed the stream for a long time, and as they went the grinding of rapids below them became louder. Finally they came to a falls where the stream crashed precipitously about six feet, into a clear pool more than deep enough to swim in. There was a little meadow beside it, and in the meadow, indifferent to the wind and mud, De Kuff was sitting by himself, his head lolling on one shoulder.

  Raziel rose from the bush ten feet farther down the stream.

  "Like winter camping?" he asked.

  "It's not winter," Sonia said.

  "Well, nearly. But it'll never be winter again."

  They followed him to the next descent of the stream. Beside a second, smaller falls, the Rose was making tea in a blackened pot set over a fire.

  "It takes a long time to boil," she said, "at this altitude."

  When the water had boiled long enough to be served, she poured some into a variety of receptacles that included army mess tins, broken souvenir mugs and fruit jars. It seemed to be some kind of herbal tea.

  They brought their tea upstream and Raziel sat down at a respectful distance from the old man, who was sitting with his head between his knees. The others followed Raziel's example. Lucas could only watch the stream and ask himself what he was doing there. For an answer he looked to Sonia. She eased beside him.

  "What should I do, Chris? Want me to sing to you?"

  Raziel spoke without raising his head. "Sing," he told Sonia. "Sing for him."

  Sonia sang a Converso's song about the soul ascending like music, the music ascending through the seven spheres of the lower sefirot to its ineffably distant home:

  "Traspasa el aire todo

  Hasta llegar a la más alta esfera,

  Y oye allí otro modo

  De no perecedera

  Música, que es de la fuente y la primera."

  Overhead, clouds drifted just out of reach, turning the day damp and cold.

  "I should have brought my guitar," she said, and shivered.

  "You don't need a guitar," Raziel said, still not raising his head.

  She lay down on her side and let her cheek rest on the grass. Reaching out, she took Lucas's hands in hers. She did not sing then, but recited softly, almost in a whisper:

  " Cuando contemplo el cielo

  De innumerables luces adornado,

  Y miro hacia el suelo

  De noche rodeado,

  En sueño y en olvido sepultado..."

  "You make me almost understand," Lucas said. "But of course I don't really. It's illusion."

  "Sure, baby. I'm a fool and you're another.

  "El amor y la pena,

  Despiertan en mi pecho un ansia ardiente;

  Despiden larga vena

  Los ojos hechos fuente."

  "What's it mean?"

  "Oh, well," she said. "About how love and grief and yearning make you cry. They do, don't they?"

  "Sure. Actually," Lucas said, "I cry a lot. More than I ought to."

  "How can anyone cry too much?"

  "Did you cry in Somalia?" Lucas asked her. "I'll bet you didn't."

  "It isn't a place you cry. But I did later. I mourned them all. And there were so many."

  "But you're not a fucking weeper like me, Sonia. Anything can set me off. Our Town. Madame Butterfly. A good single malt."

  "I thought you were gonna cry when those Germans wouldn't let you in their Mass," she said. "Then you looked ready to kill someone."

  "Fear and rage," Lucas said. "That's all I know."

  "You're a good lover."

  "God bless you. Nobody's ever said that to me."

  "Funny," Sonia said. "My father lived all his life in fear and rage. Real fear and real rage."

  "Mine are real too," Lucas said. "Less deserved, maybe, but real. I'm real. Sort of."

  "I believe you," she said. "You're angry and you're scared. And real."

  Lucas took his bottle out.

  "I'm sure your father's life was a great deal harder than mine," Lucas said. "I'm sure it would have finished me in no time."

  "He cried easily too," she said. "It wasn't different for him. I mean, it wasn't different somehow because he was black."

  "I know," Lucas said, "I think."

  "I wasn't there for my old man," Sonia said. "I was too dumb and vain and shy with him." She held on to Lucas's hand and rolled over on her back. The clouds had parted. "There's a saying from Kabbala: 'To contemplate truth without sorrow is the greatest gift.'"

  Raziel had been listening. "I was going to give that to you," he told them. "Whatever happens, I wanted to make that possible for all of you."

  Looking at him, Lucas realized two things. One was that there was not the remotest chance that this hipster fiddler could provide the contemplation of truth or of its sha
dow to anyone, unless it was in the form of music. The second was that there was something potent, something psychotropic, in his tea.

  Old De Kuff struggled to his feet.

  "A prison," he shouted. "Yes, a prison!" He knelt and ripped handfuls of mint and clover, asters and mushrooms from the place he had been sitting. "Beautiful!" he told them. "But it's nothing."

  He got to his feet. "It's not holy," he shouted at his little band. "No land is holy. All earth is exile. The redemption is in the mind. Tikkun is in the spirit." He walked toward them. "What is it?" He took Raziel's face in his hands and looked into his eyes.

  "What is it in your eyes?" He then went to Sonia and put his fingers under her chin and stared at her. "Don't look away," he said sternly. "And you," he said to Lucas. Lucas let the old man cup his hands around his ears and met his tired eyes. "Sparks," he said, and laughed. "Sparks. The sparks are beautiful. In each of you. Who can deny it? Who, looking into your lovely eyes, can deny it?"

  "Or in yours," Sonia said.

  "It comes from the Almighty," De Kuff said. "Power, wisdom. The sparks, in the humblest of you. It shines." His strength spent, he sat back down in the grass.

  "What is he talking about?" Lucas asked Sonia.

  "I guess he's talking about being Jewish," she said.

  "I see."

  And seeing the old man in his transport, tossing the grass of Jordan in the air, Lucas for a moment believed. There was a quality. There was a way in which certain people, even against their will, shared in the light at the source of creation.

  Beside the river, he no longer knew what he believed or denied. Then he remembered the tea. He tried to recall the Shema. It was very short, short and powerful like the Jesus Prayer. He had never been instructed in it, only heard it around: Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord is One.

  De Kuff laughed. Charming, knowing, southern laughter. "Nothing is wasted," he said. "The redemption is unarmed. The battle is with the self. The land is in the heart."

  "Is it time?" Raziel asked. "Here are the mountains." He waved his hand toward the summit of Hermon. "The mountains of Naphtali. Are you ready?"

  With an energy Lucas would not have believed, De Kuff rose and stood to his full height. The river at his feet seemed to gain in force and velocity, the water to sparkle with rainbows.

  "Let them prepare the Temple for sacrifice," he shouted. "To me it is given. Blessed be the Ancient Holy One."

  The Rose of Saskatoon, Sonia and Raziel looked up at him with joy. Lucas, in amazement, watched the river change its form.

  Raziel rose to stand beside his master.

  "He who gives the salvation unto kings and dominion unto princes, whose kingdom is an everlasting kingdom, who delivered his servant David from the destructive sword, who makes a way in the sea and a path in the mighty waters, may he bless, preserve, guard and exalt evermore our Lord and our Messiah, the Anointed of the God of Jacob, the Celestial Stag, the Messiah of Righteousness, the King of Kings. Behold him!"

  "He raised me up to be the Lamb of God returned," De Kuff declared, "as it was foretold of Yeshu. And he has appointed me the Mahdi of the Merciful and Compassionate that the truth be made one! So as the Almighty is One, so also are the believers! The kings are resurrected! The vessels are repaired! The tikkun is restored!"

  "Hallelujah," cried the Rose of Saskatoon.

  Lucas was thinking that he would give anything to believe it all.

  "We'll go now to the city," Raziel said. His voice trembled. "We have no choice. Let them all understand. This man is the Gate, the Bab. He is Moshiach. He is the Second Coming and the Mahdi of the believers."

  "I'm certainly glad I came, then," Lucas said. "But you ought not to let him take on so much. He doesn't look up to it."

  "No?" Raziel said. "All the same."

  "And you?" Lucas asked. "What does this make you?"

  "I was going to ask," Sonia said.

  Raziel laughed and pointed a finger at her, as though he had caught her up in some error of calculation.

  "Me? We'll go up the river and we'll talk. We three."

  Lucas was suddenly reminded of something he had neglected to point out.

  "You put something in the tea," he told Raziel, "didn't you?"

  "Oh my God," Sonia said. "Look at the river!"

  The river, as they stared at it, was reversing itself, forcing its way with the same unnatural speed it had assumed as they came down, upward now toward the high lake at its source. The more they looked at it, the more the thing was undeniably so. It surged backward against itself from the banks outward, until its own main stream turned back with great violence, charging up the falls and toward the mountain.

  "He is mighty," De Kuff declared, raising his voice. "He is the Master of the Universe. He is One. He is the three great sefirot. He speaks continually in the darkness." Then he seemed to lose his way.

  "The meaning of Job," Raziel said, like a prompter.

  Somewhere a lone sheep was bleating.

  "The meaning of Job," De Kuff shouted, "is that the Master of the Universe abandoned Job to Satan's kingdom. And Satan's kingdom is the world of form, the world of things.

  "Because all flesh is grass," De Kuff called out to the mountain, "and all the beauty of the lilies is delusion. The only beauty is invisible. The only true world is the unseen world. This was the world of the first Adam. And the Jordan's turning in its course means the end of illusions."

  "Raziel," Sonia asked softly, "did you put something in the tea?"

  "Don't spoil it," Raziel said. "He needs the nourishment."

  "Raziel?" she asked. "Ralph, what did you put in the tea?"

  "Herbs," said Raziel. "The herbs of the mountain. Of the Jordan."

  "Stop," old De Kuff shouted. He was holding clods and tufts of grass in either hand. "Wait. Are you afraid for me, my boy?" De Kuff asked Lucas. His voice was at its gentlest. He seemed amused and relaxed, a charming, comfortable old man.

  Lucas was thinking that he wanted nothing more than that this old man should be the resolution of life, the healer of his wounds, the resolver of all uncertainties. But it was only the tea.

  "What are you doing?" Sonia asked Raziel. "Who do you think you are?"

  "Come on," Raziel said. He beckoned them to follow him upstream. He put one hand under the old man's arm. They were both smiling.

  In the next meadow up, he turned on Lucas and Sonia.

  "Want to know who I think I am, Sone?"

  "What's he going to do?" Lucas asked Sonia. "Baptize us? Because in my case—"

  "I'll go," the Rose said. She began unbuttoning her shirt. "I'm ready. There's nothing wrong with the tea," she told Sonia. "I made it."

  Sonia turned to Melker. "Why did you put shit in the tea, Raziel?" she demanded. "You a damn fool or what?"

  "Think of me as Din. The Left Hand. The Spoiler."

  "You?" Sonia asked. "You?"

  "Oh, come on," Raziel said. "I put a little Ex in the tea to stimulate the force. For those of us unfamiliar with Olam Hademut. Our non-Sufis who have never beheld the Alam al-Mithal. The unhip who don't know from mundus tertius, mundus marginalis."

  "You gave it to the Rev. You'll kill him."

  "Never happen," said Raziel. "I didn't."

  "Like hell," she said. "You gave it to him, for Christ's sake. To Chris."

  "Well," Raziel said, "a little boost."

  "I don't believe you. And what about me?"

  "Abulafia said," Raziel informed her, "'Womankind is to herself a world.' But there's nothing in yours either."

  "I hate to spoil a nice country prayer meeting," Lucas said. "But it's cold and we're stoned and that's usually time to say, like, adieu. So how about canning it? Because on the whole—"

  "It was a drug," Sonia said without expression. "How could you do it to me?" she shouted at Raziel. "You got me fucked up, you prick."

  "Sonia, sweetheart, there's nothing in your tea but a little mint. Some people have trouble
seeing the middle world. By that," Raziel explained to Lucas coolly, "I mean what exists between the material and the spiritual."

  "Lately," Lucas said, "I have trouble not seeing it."

  "It's unforgivable," Sonia told Raziel. "It destroys everything."

  "Only," Raziel said, "because everything needs to be destroyed."

  It seemed to Lucas that everyone was getting higher and higher, but he could not really tell if Raziel had taken the drug or not. The stream seemed to be running faster and faster. Was there not a theory about Jesus being a psychedelic mushroom? Or was that only a joke? Or was there a theory and a joke?

  "Sonia," said Raziel, "who are you to talk? Last year, the year before? Weren't you blowing with me? Don't say you couldn't hear it in the sound. The synergy. You were doping. You were bringing opiates into the five worlds. Your Sufi stuff and your pills."

  "I stopped. Things let me."

  "A love supreme," Raziel sang to Sonia mockingly. The song she had sung for Lucas the previous night. It told him something he had long suspected. "A love supreme."

  "What do you want from us, Raziel?" Sonia asked.

  Everyone fell silent.

  "I mean, if this is just more getting loaded," she said, "where's it supposed to go?"

  "We have to go to the city," Raziel said. "That's next. You'll have to trust me."

  "Sorry," Sonia said.

  "You know," Lucas said as they climbed, "the last time I got high this way I was listening to Miles Davis. In a Silent Way. I wish I could hear it now."

  Just below them, Helen Henderson fell to her knees.

  "Please," she said, "somebody help me! I'm scared."

  "Before Redemption," Raziel told them, "tribulation. How did you expect the Redemption to look?" He raised his voice. "Want to see the chariot? You'll see it. Want to see the temple rise? You'll see that too."

  "Do you believe him?" Lucas asked, steadying himself against a dwarf almond tree.

  "She believes me," Raziel said, fixing his eyes on Sonia. "She knows everything requires the resolution of opposites. She was raised on the dialectic. The Law does not change but its surface changes, its garment changes."