Damascus Gate

by Robert Stone

  "Would you stay right here, George? See, you're just in the light of that lantern, so if I find you, I can find my way out of here. Will that be cool?"

  George hastened to accept this assignment.

  Soon the passage divided again, and again she bore right. Then it triplicated, and after few more paces doubled again. This time the right-hand passage led to what at first looked like a false chamber. But there was, she saw, an aperture low on the wall that seemed to lead back to the enclosure from which she had just come. Probing it with her beam, she saw that it was on an incline that subvented the adjoining chamber. The whole surface had a slight downward tilt, so anyone advancing along the system of corridors moved gradually deeper beneath the street.

  Getting prone on the floor, Sonia began to elbow her way into the passage she had found. In a short time she was aware that it contracted around her, growing narrower as she went along. There was something organic about its structure, as though it replicated a kind of living creature.

  After a while the narrowing was too much for her claustrophobic instincts; she started backtracking, digging in her knees for leverage, wiggling her behind, shoving backward with the palms of her hands. Back in the chamber from which she had started crawling, she breathed dust that savored of centuries. But when she shined her light on the floor, she saw that there were fresh footprints in it, the tracks of walking shoes or army boots, but also those of plain street shoes.

  She found no one at the dimly lighted intersection where she thought she had left her assistant. The passageways were an intentional maze. She hesitated a moment before calling out to him; she did not relish hearing the sound of her own voice in that buried place.

  "George?"

  His answer, when it came, seemed so distant and atremble with echoes that it chilled her heart. It was an acoustical trick of the place.

  "Can you turn up the light?" she called.

  She could not make out what he said in reply, but the light burned no brighter. Her flashlight was losing its power, the beam fading and yellowing before her eyes. And in the passageways, the ones through which she thought—but was no longer sure—she had come, she could not find her way at all.

  63

  TWO GUERRILLAS took hold of Lestrade and thrust him toward the door.

  "See here," Lestrade said, "what about my luggage?"

  "His luggage," the North American who led the squad repeated tonelessly. "What about my grandfather's luggage, you prick," he said. "Worried about your luggage? It'll be held for you. We're like your German friends. Very honest."

  "Bring a toothbrush," one of the other English-speaking men said. "And warm clothes. And we'll give you a postcard. You can write home."

  "Look, I'm a reporter," Lucas said. He nearly said, I'm Jewish. He had been very close to saying it, trying to remember the Shema.

  The leader looked at Fotheringill.

  "Take them both," Fotheringill told the man in charge. "Let's get the hell out of here."

  Being shoved down the wooden stairs inside the ancient stone tower, Lucas had a picture of himself as he might be somewhere in Europe, circa 1942, being shoved down an old flight of stairs by soldiers.

  I'm not Jewish, he would be saying. They would pay no attention.

  Lestrade had an exculpatory formula as well.

  "Listen here," he told everyone. His inflection now was humorous, as though he were inviting everyone to join him in merry laughter at the absurdity of it all. "I don't know a thing about any bomb, you know."

  The street, which before had been crowded with young fighters shouting out for martyrdom, was deserted. But close by there was more shooting and the noise of sirens, chanting soldiers, chanting rioters. A holy war, Lucas thought. And he had gotten himself in it.

  All at once, Dr. Lestrade began to shout in Arabic. Two young men holding lanterns appeared at the mouth of an alley. And suddenly Boutros, who had seemed so put upon and sleepy moments before, came charging out of the hospice at them, wild-eyed, beside himself.

  "Itbah al-Yahud!" he shouted at the top of his voice.

  One of the Israelis fired at him. The burst was high because Fotheringill had knocked the barrel of the rifle upward with his forearm. The spent cartridges rattled on cobblestone. Then Fotheringill swung the butt of his Galil into the porter's jaw. Boutros groaned and sank to the pavement of the Via Dolorosa. Another Israeli began shooting into the alley where the two other Palestinians had appeared. They withdrew, apparently unhit.

  The whirl of light that had momentarily filled the street vanished, and the area was now in deep darkness. Lucas saw Fotheringill take an automatic rifle from one of the less coordinated men of the squad.

  "I'll fire a burst, then you'll go for the gate." He paused. "I hope you know your bloody way."

  "We know," the North American said. "It's not far."

  Fotheringill opened up with the Galil, sending ricochets along the narrowly parted walls, breaking glass, shattering flowerpots and trellises, sending stray cats running.

  "Move out," he commanded.

  Lestrade, disinclined to run, got a rifle butt in the kidneys, which served to jump-start him. Lucas ran out of sheer instinct.

  At the first intersection, it was apparent that something had gone wrong. The two streets met in the kind of crazy quilt of light that had accompanied the rioters. An angry crowd had gathered there, and Fotheringill fired over it. Some of the lights disappeared, others withdrew. There were screams and curses in a variety of languages, several of them European and including English. A number of the other Israelis also fired, some high, some not.

  Lucas hugged the wall, squatting in the confusion of rifle shots.

  "Where are they?" Fotheringill shouted. He meant Lestrade and Lucas. Temporarily, at least, they had slid out of his operational control. Good old fog of battle. Lucas tried to make out Lestrade. Searching for their prisoners, the squad had halted its progress. It was appallingly ready, however, to make do with covering fire.

  "Stop!" a woman screamed. An English voice. "We're press." She was answered by a couple of wild rifle bursts.

  There was enough light for Lucas to make out what had happened. A press pool had sneaked in behind the army and attached itself to a group of rioters. In the unearthly brilliance of a television lamp, Lucas recognized a seventyish Palestinian man who worked as a guide for foreigners, specializing in the Haram. His name was Ibrahim. He was learned, multilingual and shamelessly greedy. He had undertaken to conduct the foreign press through the opening hours of the holy war.

  "Oh, shit," the Englishwoman shouted. "Kill the lights before they shoot the lot of us."

  "Halloo!" Lestrade shouted from somewhere in the blackness that descended. "Are you British? I'm British."

  Sacred identities were being proffered like so many junk bonds in the ancient darkness. They did not seem to trade for much.

  "Yes," said the brave girl at the intersection. "Come over here. You'll be right with us."

  When the last light disappeared, Lucas stood up and bolted for the corner. He ran straight into Lestrade, who was strolling triumphantly in the center of the street while Fotheringill and his Israelis apparently kept trying to kill him in the dark. Bullets rattled and whistled in every direction.

  Colliding, Lucas put both arms around the professor and dragged him down. Like Jack Kerouac, Lucas had briefly played football for Columbia, although he was not very talented. Dragging the professor by the collar, he crawled over the invisible foul stones.

  "Halloo!" Lestrade kept calling. "I'm British!"

  "Shut the fuck up," Lucas advised him.

  Hands came out of the dark and pulled them forward, and in an instant they were around the corner. There were more lights at the end of the street. He could see Palestinian flags under the lights, but no sign of the army.

  "So," said the female reporter, whom Lucas could not see. "Who's British, then?"

  "I am," said Lestrade. "I'm a researcher with a valid visa and w
e've been brutalized and murdered."

  Lucas could sense rather than see the other reporters drawing near. It was what George Bush would have called a feeding flurry.

  "Look," he said. "We've got to get out of here. Those men are not the IDF. They're killers."

  At this intriguing intelligence, the shadowy press corps moved out toward the street Fotheringill was busily shooting to pieces.

  Lucas stood up and grabbed Lestrade.

  "It's us they're after," he told the Englishwoman, who had stayed behind. "We have information they don't want known. They're going to kill us."

  "I beg your pardon," she said.

  "Come on," he said to Lestrade. "If you want to go on living. They know about you and the bomb." He took the man by the arm and began running him toward the Damascus Gate, the direction where the next set of lights burned.

  "What?" Lestrade asked. "Bomb? What?" He sounded genuinely confused but he ran along with Lucas.

  "Just a minute," called the English reporter behind them. "Just a minute." For a moment it looked as though she would run after them. Lucas then realized that it might be useful to have her around. Possibly fatal to her, but useful.

  When they arrived at the next lighted corner, the woman had not followed. There were no reporters at this corner, and the young men in charge of it looked at Lucas with an unpleasant intensity. He began to wonder if he would actually have to utter his obverse credo: I'm not Jewish. Denying two valid identities in one night was hard even for Lucas. Nevertheless, people did such things during holy wars. It was to counter this kind of ignobility that shibboleths had been invented. Somewhere, a wakeful rooster crowed above the disorder.

  On the positive side, Lestrade spoke Arabic and began to do so, volubly. Unfortunately for Lucas, there was no imagining what manner of fatally offensive absurdities such a man might blabber.

  While he was waiting for the practical effects of Lestrade's narrative, he saw the young woman come up from the street where Fotheringill and his company were shooting it out with themselves in the dark. She was tall, dark-haired and rather pretty.

  With her, brandishing his stick, was Ibrahim, the Palestinian guide, whom she had somehow commandeered. Lucas's first thought was that the old man would cost her employers a fortune. Afterward— if there was an afterward—he would demand at least twice what he had agreed to.

  The woman was checking over her shoulder. Something more was up, at the corner, and there were lights again, lights of the army's sort.

  "Golani," she said. "They're taking that street."

  So Fotheringill and his ersatz troops would have to fade, and he and Lestrade were saved, for the time being. He would really have to do something nice for the Golani. A friendly feature.

  "Thank God," Lucas said. Baruch Hashem.

  The English reporter turned up her nose in a disapproving manner. "Oh, thank God for Golani? You must have seen a side of them I've never. But of course you're American, right?"

  No, I'm not, Lucas thought. He tried to think of something to be that was less disagreeable.

  "There are Israeli terrorists down there killing people," he said. "They tried to murder us. Golani at least is under discipline."

  The young woman looked unconvinced.

  "If you don't believe me, ask your countryman."

  But Lestrade was busy unfolding a tale that held the young Palestinians at the corner rapt. Lestrade, Lucas realized, was either an idiot of transcendent proportions or an extremely slick, if somewhat eccentric, master operator. Either would serve at times, he had come to realize, and it was possible to be both.

  "I'd like very much to talk to him," the young woman said. "Where were you when this all began?"

  "I was interviewing Dr. Lestrade," Lucas said. "I'm also a journalist. My name is Chris Lucas."

  "Sally Conners," said the young woman. They did not shake hands.

  He saw that she was going to ask a question about Lestrade, then saw her decide not to. She seemed reluctant to ask questions of a foreigner—an American admirer of the Golani Regiment, yet—about a fellow countryman. Honorable, Lucas thought, but unprofessional.

  In the meantime, the Palestinian guide was visibly torn between his fear of Lucas as a possible rival and his desire to expand his fees. Yet, Lucas thought, it would be very useful to have a Palestinian around, especially one as well known as Maître Ibrahim. Among other things, the old man was selling the security of his company. For Lucas, it was annoying to have to share the eyewitness aspect of the story, especially with an Englishwoman. On the other hand, his "exclusives" were more trouble than they were worth, and beside the point now. A little collaboration and corroboration were not necessarily a bad thing. The more he thought about it, the more it seemed to him he would never be able to approach the Haram without the Palestinian, and someone would have to pay him off several times over.

  When Dr. Lestrade had finished regaling the assembled Palestinians with his recent adventures, he allowed himself to be interviewed by Sally Conners.

  "Well, I had to pack in a great hurry," he told her. "Then this man appeared"—he indicated Lucas—"and the man who had arranged to drive me turned out to be ... well, I don't know."

  "Dr. Lestrade is an expert on the construction of the Haram and the holy sites beneath it," Lucas told her. "Since so many people feel the Haram's about to be blown up, he must have been leaving to avoid controversy. That was it, wasn't it, Lestrade?"

  "Well, no," said Lestrade. He thought about it for a moment. "Well, yes. I mean no one's blowing up the Haram. Sensationalistic nonsense. Native rumors. It's a survey for the American Bible-thumpers."

  "Blowing up?" asked Sally Conners.

  Lucas left her to press Lestrade, who was awkwardly composing a narrative in which he was a marginal figure, brought in arsy-varsy. He found the old guide waiting impatiently, in fear that his clientele would evaporate amid disorder. There was more firing and, over the Armenian Quarter, like some celestial portent, a flare climbed in the sky. Someone must have shot off a flare gun because the someone owned one and the time seemed right. The people on Lucas's corner crouched warily.

  Lucas spoke confidentially to Ibrahim. "All the reporters are looking for Salman Rushdie. Everyone knows he was brought here. But no one knows where he is."

  Ibrahim looked at Lucas without expression; it was impossible to surprise him with any information, however improbable. He immediately appropriated to himself all intelligence of whatever kind, and his primary assessment involved not accuracy but resale value.

  "He was seen at the airport," Lucas continued in his rash, over-confiding manner, "accompanied by Israeli and American bodyguards. Don't you think he must have come to witness the destruction of the holy places?"

  Without doubt, the guide liked it. His faded-flannel blue eyes shone in the mixed light. His next utterance was oracular.

  "He is here," Ibrahim pronounced. "I have seen him."

  "I suppose," Lucas suggested, "the Israelis and the Americans will make him mufti or something. He'll approve a new construction of the Dome and the Aksa in Mecca."

  "This is right," said the learned old fellow. "But more is involved." He raised his voice. "Salman Rushdie!" He shouted. "Rushdie has come!"

  There was a moment of astonished restraint, and the gathered young men began to cry out and rend their garments.

  "Salman Rushdie?" asked the young Sally Conners. She had grown annoyed at having constantly to revise her perception of events. "That's rubbish."

  Her observation was not well received. Her own guide grew angry at her.

  "He is here!" shouted Ibrahim. "He has come!"

  64

  SONIA TRIED following her own sandal prints in the dust. The prints turned out to be ephemeral; there were other tracks and wet spots in the stone. She could no longer remember whether the ground she had covered was of masonry or just rocky earth. She made a slow, careful attempt at retracing her way and then a headlong series of instant intuitive
decisions. Neither got her free. On the contrary, after her two attempts she felt farther away from mad George and his light than she had been when she started.

  "George!"

  Was she hearing laughter? Noises underwent strange distortions as they passed through the walls and passages and grottoes of the place. "George?"

  In some chambers there was hardly any echo at all. In others, whatever she called out was repeated in unnatural multiples that would sometimes stop for a few seconds and then resume at a distance, diminishing as the sound was carried farther and farther away.

  Not one of the cubicles she passed through was large enough for her to stretch her arms out in front of her. She felt a rush of panic in her throat. Her legs went weak; she thought it must be fear. She cried.

  Already her mind was unsteady. She kept thinking that the darkness around her would consume her and turn her into the nothingness it was itself, as though she had come to some ancient order of things where chaos was in the process of being separated from time and event. Chaos was cold.

  As long as the light lasted, she thought, she would probably be all right. With darkness, she imagined she would begin to come apart. The place had the kind of darkness that could get inside you and hide you from yourself.

  Keep moving or stay still? She decided to keep moving, trying to guide herself by the noises she thought must be coming from outside. They were unrecognizable, ugly noises and it was impossible to tell whether their source was even human. But, she thought, they were better than silence in this darkness.

  "George!"

  The answer she got did not come from the Christlike youth. Something about the shape of the walls and ceilings gave it a quality like a voice at a'séance or that of a stage magician. It was a voice she vaguely recognized.

  "What are you doin' down here, Sonia?" the voice wanted to know. "Not looking for us, I hope."

  "I'm lost," she told the voice. The reverberations made it impossible to recognize any voice.

  "Who sent you here, Sonia? Was it Lucas?"

  "No," Sonia said. "Where are you?"