by Robert Stone
"I think a lot about Nuala," Sonia said. "Nuala and Rashid. Could have been me, you know."
"I guess so," Lucas said. "One of the last casualties of the Cold War."
"But they'll never name a street after them," Sonia said. "Or a dorm at Lumumba University. I don't even think they call it Lumumba University anymore."
"We'll remember," Lucas said. "Of course, she could be a terrible pain in the ass."
"That was her job, Chris. Bugging complacent bourgeois types like you."
"She was good at it."
They sat in silence while the tennis match ran with the sound off.
"I have to leave the country for a while," he said. "How about coming with me?"
"Oh, gee," she said. His heart sank then because he could see she was about to keep it light, could see how it would end with them. Nothing, though, could keep him from trying for her. He'd beg, if that would help. But he knew that nothing would. "Where would we go?"
"I thought we might get a place on the Upper West Side. Around Columbia, maybe. You know, I grew up there."
"Yes, I know," she said. "Wouldn't that be nice."
Because he had nothing to lose, he told her everything he had hoped for, dreamed about.
"I thought we might even get married, if we wanted to. And I thought ... we might have these great-looking brown kids like they have in that neighborhood. And I heard they were going to open the Thalia again. And, who knows, the Thalia might play Enfants du Paradis again, like it used to. And we could go and see it." He shrugged and stopped.
"No, Chris." She reached over and took his hand in her gauzecovered palm. "No, baby. I'm staying here. I'm home."
"Well," he said, "we wouldn't, like, not come back. I have work here. We'd come back a lot."
"I'm making aliyah," she said. "I'm going to practice."
"You mean practice..."
"I mean practice my faith. Here. And wherever things take me. And this is where I'll come home to."
"That would be all right," Lucas said. "I could convert. I'm halfway there, right?"
She laughed sadly. "Don't put me on, honey. You'll be a Catholic until your dying day. Regardless of what you say you believe. Or think you believe."
"We've been through so much together," he said. "We know each other so well. And I love you so much. I was hoping so much you'd stay with me."
"I love you too, Christopher. I do. But let me tell you something. When I'm not here trying to be the best Jew I can be, I'm going to be in Liberia. Rwanda. Tanzania. In Sudan. Cambodia. I don't know, man, Chechenya. Every township and barrio and shit town. You don't want that. You want to write your book and then you're going to write another and you want a family. I can't live a family life around cholera and bad water and rage. And that's my life, baby. You like traveling, but you like the Colony Hotel too. You like Fink's. I don't go to those places. They don't let me in."
"You like music."
"Chris, you ever watch people collect corn kernels out of other people's feces?"
"I know the NGO world, Sonia. I'd go for the parties."
"Sweetheart, it is not what you want. Do you think I haven't thought about this? Do you think I don't want you? Don't make it hard for me."
"I should make it easy? Think it's easy for me?"
She got up and sat on the floor beside his chair.
"I love you too. I always will. But in the important ways, brother, our paths diverge here. We'll always be friends."
"I was afraid," Lucas said, "you'd say that. 'She's gonna smile and say,'" he sang, "'Can't we be friends?'" Old song. It was in her repertory, gender reversed.
"Well, we will. We'll see each other again. But if you have to ask me will you be my wife? I have to say no. I don't want that. I want to be free and I want to be here and Jewish and I want to do my little no-account bit for tikkun olam. Even if I use up life that way. I'm sorry, my love. There's no doubt in my mind."
"I guess," Lucas said, "I have to believe you."
"You do," she said. "You have to believe me."
He stood up and helped her back to the sofa.
"So sit," he said. "Get off the floor." Going back to his chair, he looked at the silent television set. "Maybe you want to watch the game. I should really leave."
"Oh, come off it," she said. "I'll tell you what—in three years maybe I'll see you at the Floridita in Havana if they let us in. Don't let me catch you with no hooker."
"I'll tell you what," Lucas said. "If I'm not at the Floridita, I'll be in Phnom Penh. Look for me at the Café No Problem. To find the Café No Problem, you turn left at the Genocide Museum."
"Christopher!"
"I'm not kidding. It is! Would I joke about a thing like that?"
"Seriously," she said. "What's next for you?"
"I don't know. I have to leave. But I'm going to keep working with Obermann on the book. I guess the relevant powers didn't tell you to make yourself scarce."
"No," she said. "They told me to keep my mouth shut in public. Which I'll do. This time, anyway. Then, as far as I'm concerned, they'll owe me."
"You'll be working for Mossad next."
"Yeah? I don't think so. I don't think I'll be asked. I'm gonna give them such a hard time they'll wish they'd never seen my funny-colored nose."
"You know," Lucas said, "I was just talking to Ernest. He said he sympathized in a way with the guys who were going to bomb and build the Temple. Because they wanted the country to mean something and so did he."
He felt that he needed to keep talking to her. He did not want to leave her, neither did he want to see her slip away.
"The Temple is inside," she said. "The Temple is the Law."
"A lot of people," Lucas said, "think that's been the way too long. They want the real thing."
"Sure," she said. "And the fulfillment of prophecy. Me, I think they're wrong. Lots of places have temples. Utah has a temple. Amritsar. Kyoto. The Temple has to be in the heart. When everybody builds it there, maybe then they can think about Beautiful Gates and the Holy of Holies."
"You'll have a tough time with that."
"Yeah. Well, I'm here to make trouble. I'm a Third World person. And I'm here and I'm entitled."
"Going back to the Strip?"
"I probably will. Someone should fill in for Nuala. Looking after those kids."
"People will call you a traitor."
"Well, I'm not one. I'm not the traitor." She laughed at him. "Don't forget, I really love you. I have ever since you told me that poem."
"Which poem was that?"
"The one about the children. The ones who'd learn to sing before they learned to speak. The thirsty children."
The call to prayer sounded distantly from Silwan.
"Oh," Lucas said, "those children."
"Right," she said. "Milk all the way."
74
LUCAS TOOK his time about removing. He had little more than books to dispose of, and of these he donated many to the hospices in the Old City. Sadness and anxiety dogged him.
Tracking the English-language press for leaks and significances took up part of his day. He held almost daily conferences with Obermann, who was watching the Hebrew press for the same material. The most interesting speculation appeared in the leftist Tel Aviv magazine Ha'olam Hazeh, but the forces inside the government tended to employ Ma'ariv and the Jerusalem Post for leaks.
As if to confirm what Ernest Gross had suggested, Avram Lind began his rise as a political figure of consequence, often profiled and quoted. Lind was plainly a skilled politician. He managed to subtly connect extremist Jewish forces with the recent disorders while concentrating his attacks on the influence of Christian fundamentalist millenarians in the city. The elements within the establishment who had incorporated the fundamentalists into their schemes could only fume silently. Popular opinion was with Lind.
Old British-mandate laws protecting the security of official secrets and criminal prosecutions were invoked, and there was not much
hard information to be had about arrests.
Dr. Lestrade had been deposed and kicked out of the country. The public became acquainted with some of his anti-Semitic statements and his taste for the music of Orff and Wagner. A Palestinian youth was discovered to whom Lestrade had made an affectionate present of Alfred Rosenberg's Myth of the Twentieth Century.
From time to time, Lucas took walks in the Old City. Sometimes it seemed the place still smelled of burning rubber and tear gas. There was a reinforced, though discreetly deployed, IDF presence. He strolled in the Bab al-Hadid and had a cup of pomegranate juice at the place where the proprietor's handicapped son swept floors. He was kept waiting a long time for his juice and was served grimly. But the retarded youth smiled and shook hands with Lucas, causing his father and brothers to speak sharply to him.
Lucas often passed the former madrasah where the Palestinians of African descent had lived and where Berger kept his apartment. How clearly he could remember his first glimpse of Sonia, in her henna tattoos and mysterious Eritrean burnoose. The black children had returned, and played soccer in the long shadows of the courtyard.
Sally Conners had a translator who rendered the Arabic-language press into English, and she passed copies of her summaries on to Lucas. He went out with her a few times and heard the story of her life, which, given her youth, was brief, though not uneventful. She had gone to York University and worked as an editorial assistant in Toronto and Boston. She liked to go rock climbing in the Lake District and in northern Wales.
A week or two before he left the country, he went with Sally to the Sinai and they dived the Red Sea. To make the wall dive, they had to crawl in their wet suits over a field of bleached coral that was mined with spiny sea urchins. At the end of the bleached field, the great wall began; they slid off the coral heads and into the bottomless turquoise depths, through clouds of wrasse and tangs in columns of cooling sunlight.
As they descended the face of the wall, the violent desert light sparkled on the creatures that inhabited it. There were sea fans and elkhorn and sea pens, bright grouper audibly crunching the coral and giant golden anemones. Lucas suddenly imagined it as some counterpart of the Kotel, the wall of a temple to the Lord of Creation. Occasionally, the plunging shafts of light awoke the dun colors of the hammerheads prowling far, far below. All the creatures were of the Indo-Pacific, to remind you that out across that blue infinity lay the Indian Ocean, the Indies.
After their dive, out of sheer animal spirits, or at least out of Sally's, they made love and became friends. The Sinai town was full of Italians and places that catered to them, so they drank sangiovese.
"Umm," she said, "spaghetti Bolognese!"
They went to St. Catherine's Monastery and climbed Jebel Musa, the putative Mount Sinai. Lucas picked up a handful of the red stones and put them in his pocket.
Sally was a lovely, fearless child, well read and with a vast, untroubled confidence in her own education. She had black hair and eyes as blue as the Indian Ocean. He tried to fall in love with her, but it was Sonia he wanted. Still, when in the last days before his departure Obermann made a pass at her at the Bixx, Lucas was secretly relieved that she shot him down.
One day, outside the Russian Compound, Lucas encountered Mr. Majoub, the lawyer from Gaza.
"Can I buy you a cup of coffee?" Lucas asked.
"Why not?" said Majoub. They went to the Atara.
Lucas ventured the prospect of his consulting Mr. Majoub on a regular basis in the course of writing his book. He felt, he told Mr. Majoub, that there should be a Palestinian perspective. Majoub agreed.
"No doubt you heard," Majoub said, "that during the disturbances the rumor spread that Salman Rushdie was in the city?"
Lucas flushed. "Yes," he said, "I heard something to that effect."
Majoub smiled very slightly.
"The foreign press were amused," he said. "I'm sure the security forces were also."
"Well," Lucas said, "no one on the spot was in a position to be too amused. By anything."
"You were present? At the disturbances?"
"Yes, I was."
"Of course the talk about Rushdie was absurd. There is little hatred for Rushdie here. He is not the enemy."
"I understand that," Lucas said. "I was once told that Woody Allen had come to Jerusalem. It was not," Lucas explained, "a hostile story."
Majoub laughed. "I also have heard this. It was a while ago, no?"
"Yes, a while back."
"When people are powerless," Majoub told him, "when they are very far from power and enraged that their lives are controlled by others—they hang on rumor. The most unlikely stories gain credence among the powerless. We see this every day. Our people in their wretchedness are cut off from the world. For the most part, neither education nor information is available to them. So they become credulous."
"I understand," Lucas said. By now he had claimed to understand anything anyone offered.
The night before he left the country, Lucas had a dream. It began in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, but the venue kept changing. Pinchas Obermann was in it.
"Sonia was only a singer in Tel Aviv," Obermann was explaining. "You never knew her. You imagined the things that happened, out of guilt."
He also said, "Your mother was never your mother."
"What about my father?" Lucas asked. He and Obermann seemed to have been transported to the top of Mount Sinai, where they could see the sparkling ocean in three directions.
Obermann said, "Your father had nothing to do with you. You are the individual. It's a serious wound. Your mother promised God you would die."
He woke up thinking: Lilith. Lilith bore thousands. He was terrified. His first coherent, conscious thought concerned his age. He was getting older and was still alone. The individual. The two-for-a-farthing sparrow, on the roof of the house.
His departing flight left in the morning, and the sherut taking him to Lod passed the tracks of the Tel Aviv train. He saw the field where the old man had been watering kale at Eastertime. The sight stirred his memory and made him recall the dream and this was what he thought about on the way to the airport. The dream and Sonia.
At the airport there was the usual endless, apparently pointless questioning by the young security person. Lucas's examination took longer than most, so long that he was moved out of line in order not to inconvenience the people behind him.
He wondered if he would be taken to a room and questioned directly by Shabak, whether they would ask to see his notes. But no one did. The young woman examining him excused herself for long periods, obviously checking various points with her superiors, but no one else engaged him.
He was walking toward the gate when the young woman he had spoken with called to him.
"Just a moment, sir!"
Security guards, in uniform and in plain clothes, seemed to materialize from every quarter.
"May I ask you what you have in your pocket?"
In no time at all he was being patted down by a person or persons he could not see. He reached into his pocket and came up with the handful of red stones he had picked up on Sinai.
The security woman looked at him questioningly.
"From Sinai," he told her. "To keep."
"Stones?"
"Because they're from here," he said.
She stared at him for a moment and then gave him a smile of such radiance that all the angular suspicion of her features passed away. It made him think again of the Zohar: "The light is the light of the eye."
She passed him again later and he gave her a little thumbs-up sign.
He was flying out business class; he had gotten an upgrade on mileage. He took his aisle seat in the cabin and ordered champagne. Moments after takeoff, the plane was over hazy blue ocean. The brown land fell away aft.
The stones were still in his hand, and when his champagne came he spilled them out onto the tray table. When the flight attendant brought him the drink she asked about them.
&n
bsp; "Just rocks," he said. "From Sinai. Or what's supposed to be Sinai."
"Oh," she said, "were you there?"
He began to stammer. Perhaps it was the prospect of champagne in the morning. Had he stood on Sinai?
"Yes," he said. "I guess so."
When they approached Frankfurt, where he would be changing planes, he had a moment's panic. New York? But he had no life in New York. No one there. Yet that was a ridiculous notion. One always had a life. Whatever you lived, wherever you lived it, was life.
Yet he kept thinking of life lost. A woman lost, a faith, a father lost, all lost. So he had to remind himself of something an American painter whose work he had once seen at the Whitney had offered as a credo, which had been fixed to the wall beside his work, and which Lucas had never forgotten:
"Losing it is as good as having it."
It was a hard text, one of great subtlety. One needed the pilpul, the analytical skills, of a Raziel to interpret it.
It meant, he thought, that a thing is never truly perceived, appreciated or defined except in longing. A land in exile, a God in His absconding, a love in its loss. And that everyone loses everything in the end. But that certain things of their nature cannot be taken away while life lasts. Some things can never be lost utterly that were loved in a certain way.
At Frankfurt airport, between planes, it was a different world.
