Death of the Black-Haired Girl (27 page)

The Damascus Gate, with its Ottoman towers and passages and barbarous Crusader revetments, was his favorite place in the city. He took a simple tourist’s pleasure in the crowds and the blaring taped Arab music, in the rush provided by the open sacks of spices that were piled in wheelbarrows beside the vendors’ stalls. To the Palestinians it was the Bab al-Amud, the Gate of the Column, but Lucas rejoiced in the common English name, the suggestion of a route toward mystery, interior light, sudden transformation. He sat for a while over a Sprite, taking in the sensations of the gate, and then set out quixotically in search of something stronger.

Both his regular spot in Christian Quarter Road and the rooftop garden in the souk had inexplicably closed. The one place he found open was a disreputable tourist trap on the edge of the Christian Quarter that catered to
Wandervogel
and other riffraff from the cheap hostels of East Jerusalem. Like many of the bars on the Palestinian side, it displayed pictures of Christian saints lest the Hamas enforcers mistake the management for bad Muslims.

Three young Scandinavian women with shorn hair were drinking mineral water near the street end of the place. He was surprised to find, tending bar in the back, a middle-aged Palestinian named Charles Habib, who had been his host at the Caravan. He ordered a cold Heineken, and Charles served it to him in a frosted glass.

“I’ve just come from church,” he told his host. “There was a
majnoon.
”

Charles was a Greek Catholic from Nazareth. He had come to Jerusalem by way of South Bend, Indiana.

“Lots of
majnoon,
” he told Lucas. “Plenty.”

“I suppose,” Lucas said, “God tells them to come.”

Charles stared at him without sympathy.

“I mean,” Lucas added, “they form that impression.”

“The Protestants are worst,” Charles said. “They should stay in America and watch television.” He paused and regarded Lucas. “You’re Protestant?”

“No,” Lucas said. He felt uneasy under Charles’s scrutiny. “Catholic.”

“Every religion has
majnoon,
” Charles observed.

Surprisingly, this was a somewhat new concept in town, where screaming infants had burned before Moloch and the gutters on many occasions had run with blood. But each year, it seemed, the equinoctial moon inspired stranger and stranger doings, usually vaguely Pentecostal in spirit, the spontaneous outpourings of many lands. Once, to be a Protestant had meant to be a decent Yankee schoolmarm or kindly clerical milord. No longer. There had commenced a regular Easter Parade, replete with odd headgear. Anglophone crazies bearing monster sandwich boards screeched empty-eyed into megaphones. Entire platoons of costumed Latin Cristos, dripping blood both real and simulated, appeared on the Via Dolorosa, while their wives and girlfriends sang in tongues or went into convulsions.

Locally decorum, in religion as well as devotion, was prized. One Easter an outraged citizen tossed a bottle at some salsa-dancing fugitives from Cecil B. DeMille; the street stirred and the army ended by firing a few tear-gas canisters. At this, insulted heaven opened and there ensued the melancholy penitential drama “Tear Gas in the Rain,” familiar to any all-weather student of the twentieth century’s hopes and dreams. The Via Dolorosa became a sad place indeed. Its narrow alleys and their inhabitants were soundly poisoned, and many a mournful wet towel went round that night in the city’s hospices and hotels.

“Every religion has,” Lucas replied agreeably. His surprise at seeing Charles in such a seedy, possibly druggy joint piqued his curiosity. From time to time, Lucas had thought of recruiting him as a source. In his more daring moods, he imagined writing up a story the other guys had thus far left unexamined.

There were rumors, as the intifada ran its course, that some of the
shebab
—the young Palestinian activists who collected taxes for the Front in East Jerusalem—had entered into certain financial arrangements with some hoodlums on the Israeli side. It was a story related to the tales one heard about official corruption in the Occupied Territories. Something of the sort had surfaced in Belfast the previous year, involving connivance between some IRA protection squads and the Protestant underground across town.

Documenting any projected piece on such a subject sounded like dangerous work, but it was the kind of story that appealed to Lucas. He liked the ones that exposed depravity and duplicity on both sides of supposedly uncompromising sacred struggles. He found such stories reassuring, an affirmation of the universal human spirit. Lucas desperately preferred almost anything to blood and soil, ancient loyalty, timeless creeds.

Since rashly quitting his comfortable and rather prestigious newspaper job the year before, he had been finding life difficult. It was constantly necessary to explain oneself. His calling cards impressed new acquaintances as somehow incomplete. Sometimes he felt like a dilettante. And as a freelance he had become less thrifty, less disciplined and more ambitious. Without the constraints of the newspaper format, the stories he wrote went on and on—naturally enough, since things tended to, and things knew nothing of formats or of newspapers, and it was only a beautiful pretense that the daily paper’s readers could be informed. A noble pretense, honestly and diligently pretended. Still, there were alternatives, as far as a story went. Fortunately, though the whole world attended the place, there continued to be more people in Jerusalem who liked to talk than liked to listen.

“It’s hard to get a drink in town these days,” he told Charles.

Charles made an unpleasant face and opened a beer for himself. Then he glanced toward the street and quickly touched glasses with Lucas.

“They say there are more drugs in town,” Lucas rashly offered. Charles owed Lucas a few minor favors, mainly having to do with the expediting of American visas for his relatives, and they had an understanding that, within the limits of a strict discretion, Lucas might use Charles as a source.

“Correct,” said Charles.

“I thought there might be some surprises there. I thought I might write about it.”

Charles gave him a long, dark look and glanced from side to side. “You’re wrong.”

“I’m wrong?”

“You’re wrong. Because you know and I know what everyone knows, so it’s not a surprise.”

“What’s not?”

“One,” Charles said, “no surprise. Two, you can’t write about it.”

“Well . . .” Lucas began.

“You can’t. Who you think you are? Who you got behind you?”

It was a question much to the point, Lucas considered.

“Tell me,” Charles asked, “do you know Woody Allen?”

“Not personally.”

“Woody is a good guy,” Charles declared. “On account of that he suffers.”

“Is that right?”

“Woody came to Palestine,” Charles said, savoring his ice-cold Heineken. “He is himself a Jew. But he saw the occupation and spoke out. He spoke out against the beatings and shootings. So what happened? The American papers slandered him. They took the wife’s side.”

Lucas affected to ponder the case of Woody Allen.

Charles shrugged with the self-evidentness of it all. “So,” he told Lucas, “forget it. Write about Woody.”

“Come on,” Lucas said. “Woody Allen never came here.” The cold beer made his eyebrows ache.

“He did,” Charles insisted. “Many saw him.”

They let the subject drop.

“Write about
majnoon,
” Charles suggested.

“Maybe I will. Can I bring them here?”

“Bring them. Spend money.”

“Maybe I’ll just go away somewhere for a while,” Lucas said, surprising himself with his own confiding impulse.

“I won’t be here when you get back,” Charles said quietly. “Soon I’m the last Nazareth Habib around. Then, goodbye.”

“
Au revoir,
” Lucas said, and went out and wandered on down the Via Dolorosa, past St. Anne’s Church by the Bethesda Pool. It was one place he would not go that day; for several reasons, he dared not. Taxis and
sheruts
waited at the Lions’ Gate; he passed them. Across Jericho Road, more pilgrims were descending the Mount of Olives. All at once, Lucas found himself out of energy. The force that had impelled him out into the Easter morning was spent.

One of the drivers accosted him, and he bargained over the price of a taxi ride to the Intercontinental Hotel up the slope. He had the notion of looking down at the city. When they arrived the hotel seemed closed; its glass surfaces were soapy and dark. He got out anyway and crossed the street and looked across to Jerusalem. From where he stood, he could see down into the Temple Mount and over all the rooftops of the walled town. Bells began to sound again, from every direction, their tolling scattered on the incessant wind.

The bright onion-domed cluster of St. Mary Magdalen was below him as he went down the steep cobbled road. Turning the corner, he walked along the church’s wall and at the next bend found himself surrounded. Worshipers streamed out through the garden gates outside the church. Two small Russian nuns swathed in black were bowing them home. A Russian priest in vestments stood smoking a cigarette beside the church doors, chatting with two Arab men in stiff Sunday suits.

About half the worshipers were Palestinian, but there was a strong Russian contingent among them. The Russians were mostly women. Many were done up in the distinctly Central European overdressed look that Israeli women of a certain age sometimes affected for special occasions, with more hat than one was used to seeing and fashion boots and a little fur in spite of the weather. Lucas was sure most of them had Israeli passports. And though they chatted happily on the way down to Jericho Road, there was about them a kind of guilty wariness. One or two of the Russians seemed to sense Lucas’s gaze on them as they walked, and turned to see that he was not one of them.

They would be surprised, Lucas thought, to know how much he and they had in common. Seeds of light scattered in darkness. Whose? Which?

A young woman not much older than a teenager was walking beside him. Their eyes met and Lucas smiled. She had a haunted look and long, dark eyelashes. Then she spoke to him in Russian, and Lucas could only shake his head and keep smiling. Uneasily, she slowed and let him go on. When everyone levitates, Lucas thought, we’ll still be here, looking up Mount Olivet, wondering which way to run.

Lucas had recently had a heated conversation with a fellow journalist on a drive through the Gaza Strip, a Frenchman who was a passionate believer in the Palestinian cause. In the conversation Lucas had tried, as usual, to carry water on both shoulders. The Frenchman had told him off, dismissed him as nothing more than an American. And Israel itself was no better, the Frenchman said, than an American colony, more American than America.

At the time they were deep in the Strip, driving between the unspeakable hovels of the Bureij camp that stretched endlessly toward the desert and those of the Nuseirat camp that were spread out toward the sea. All day they had been seeing angry and despairing faces. They were alone.

“If this place exploded now,” Lucas had challenged the Frenchman, “which way would you run? If the balloon went up?”

The Frenchman had replied haughtily that he chose not to think in such a way. This had made Lucas angry. As if there were any other way to think.

“I suggest you try running toward Mecca,” Lucas had told him. “Me, I’m gonna run for Fink’s.”

Fink’s was a bar on King George Street in Jerusalem where they knew how to make a martini.

Above the Garden of Gethsemane, he left the Russians and turned off toward the vast Jewish cemeteries above Kidron. Among the white tombs stood black-clad figures, some alone, some in knots of two or three. They were religious Jews reciting psalms at the graves of their dead. Lucas found himself following a limestone ridge between the Hellenistic tombs at the top of the ridge and Jericho Road below. Soon he was a dozen rows above one group of three men. Two were elderly, with broad-brimmed fedoras and huge overcoats. The third was younger; he wore dark slacks and a navy-blue windbreaker. A black and gold kippa was pinned in his hair. Slung around his shoulder on a strap was an automatic rifle.

As he watched, the young man with the rifle slowly turned his head as though he had sensed Lucas’s presence behind him. When he saw Lucas there, he turned around to face him. His brow furrowed. The two older men beside him were deep in prayer, their heads bobbing together. Lucas walked on past the young man’s stare. He was at loose ends, he thought, distracted.

He strolled back through the Lions’ Gate the way he had come. Finding himself in the midst of Easter again, he turned left to follow Tariq al-Wad, where things were quieter. Approaching an open juice shop, he had a moment’s craving for something cool and sweet. The old proprietor and his nervous, pockmarked son watched Lucas’s approach with frowning concern.

“
Tamarhindi?
” Lucas asked. He stepped up to the counter and saw that in one corner of the shop, concealed from the street, a
majnoon
sat with an odd smile. The
majnoon
wore a Western-style suit and a buttoned-up white shirt. He bore a slight resemblance to Jerry Lewis and his delusions gave him the look of buoyant dementia peculiar to Jerry Lewis fools.

The younger merchant served Lucas a small paper cup of tamarind juice as the
majnoon
watched cheerfully. Lucas took it and sat in an unpainted straight-backed chair where he could see the vaulted street.

In the next instant, a plump young mullah walked past, a teacher at one of the madrasahs of the Bab al-Nazir, probably a Hamas neighborhood warden. He had a quietly exalted look. When he saw Lucas there, his face changed. Hot eyes, the brow of Jehu, then blankness, nullity. From his chair, Lucas returned the imperception.

He had been lured into Jerusalem poker, the game of mutually hostile invisibility he had seen earlier that morning in the Armenian Quarter. At this game he was hardly a contender; with his lack of faith and vague identity he could easily be made to disappear. As his friend Charles had pointed out, he had no one behind him. He sipped his swallow of sweet nectar and thought it over.