Requiem (14 page)

They
drove through the desert with windows open to the hot, humid air. Smells of
warm dust and roadside sage wafted into the car. Tom blinked at the
soft-shouldered mountains, mauve and hazy in the distance beneath the blue sky.

At
Masada
they got out of the car and Sharon pointed to the
summit. A serpentine path climbed to the top of the sphinx-like rock, or there
was a cable car. He surveyed the astonishing spiral path. Two backpackers were
making slow progress along an edge, like two beetles, carapaces winking in the
sun. It was already hot and getting hotter. Behind them the arid desert plain,
wind-sculptured into weird pyramids and cones of sand, shimmered like lime. A
bubble of sweat formed on his brow. 'I hope we're going by cable car,’ he said.

'The
more difficult route offers the best experience,' she said, sibyl-like. 'We'll
need the water.'

She put
three bottles in the rucksack, and they began to climb. She set a steady pace.
After they'd gone a little way, he decided to tell her how he'd come to be
stung. She stopped and took off her sunglasses. She was breathing hard.

'You're
still hallucinating? Is that what you're saying?
¹

'She's as
real as you are. When she comes.' He'd decided he wasn't going to pretend or disguise
or apologize for the truth. They started to walk again. 'Ever since I arrived
in Jerusalem, I've had this buzzing in the back of my mind. Like a bee, now I
come to think about it. Then at some point it changed into a murmuring. And now
it's become a monologue building up in my head. Always just before I fall
asleep.'

'What does it say?'

'It
changes. It's trying to tell me the Crucifixion story. But it's all different.
Mixed up. All the events are jumbled.'

They'd been walking
for about twenty minutes and were a third of the way up the path. He took out a
bottle of water and handed it to her. They both drank greedily.

'I know what you're thinking.'

'I wish you wouldn't keep saying that.
¹

'Yes, I do.
You're fitting it all into your psychologist's text-book. Your counselling
programme. I want to hear it.'

'I won't insult you with it.'

'Just
tell
me
what you're thinking!' he said, his anger startling her. 'Just tell me
straight! And take off your sunglasses. I want to look you in the eye.'

'All right. Ever heard of Jerusalem
Syndrome?'

'Never.
^’

She
sat down on a rock. 'Seems to me,' she said, 'that when Katie died it caused a
crisis for you. There's this affair, and a lot of guilt around it, enough to
make you give up your job and come here. Why here? Well, I'm here, and that's
convenient. But also because at the centre of your difficulty over this
terrible loss is your faith, your Christianity, which is connected with your
guilt. The things that happened back in England jolted your faith, and in a way
you came here to find it again. But it's not that easy. You don't find it in
old bricks and stones: it runs much deeper than that.'

'Go
on.'

'You
start having visions: a woman appears, trying to give you messages. Not so unusual
in Jerusalem, believe me. Tourists of all faiths come here and sometimes, when
their expectations aren't met, they start projecting visions. Or burning down
mosques. Or shooting at people. The Tourist Police and the psychiatric units
call this Jerusalem Syndrome. I've encountered at least three cases in my
current work.

'This
hallucination, this voice: she's actually a part of you, projected on to the
big silver screen of Jerusalem. Oh, she wants to give you messages all right.
You've got that bit right. Important messages, too. But they are messages from
yourself to yourself. From the dark of your unconscious mind.
Up from the
depths.
These messages are dangerous and have to be taken very seriously.
They concern a part of yourself which you block and repress; and unless you
integrate these two competing parts of yourself, your personality is in danger
of fragmenting.

'When
I say fragmenting, I mean that the classic symptoms of this kind of neurosis,
which can even lead to schizophrenia, are the delusional systems you've described
to me: hallucinating people and hearing voices.' She put her sunglasses back
on. 'You asked me, so that's it, in a nutshell.'

'I suppose I
should be grateful for your honesty,' Tom said quietly.

'Well, it
was a bit clinical, but I've never been other than honest with you, have I?
And, anyway, I should add that this is not necessarily what I believe any more.
Only what I've been trained to see. Maybe it's all rationalizing. Maybe Ahmed
is just as right with his
djinn
.''

Tom took a grim swig from a bottle of
water. Sharon offered a hand to pull him to his feet. 'Ready to go higher?'

He was quiet
for a while as they pressed on, pondering over Sharon's text-book analysis. At
the flat top of the sphinx-like rock they stood at the fortress site of the
mass suicide, looking back, breathing hard. A haze had settled over the
sulphurous, sterile waters of the Dead Sea. The arid landscape crouched upon
the water like a scorpion on its prey.

'Here's why I
brought the third bottle said Sharon, emptying it over her head.

Tom laughed,
snatching the bottle and drenching himself. They went inside the ruins of the
fortress. He'd expected resonances, ghosts of the mass suicide, screams against
the Romans, the shadow of the end of militant Judaism, but there was only a
vacuum.

They made their descent by cable car.

Sharon photographed
Tom's Dead Sea Experience. He'd brought along a newspaper for the obligatory
floating-read shot. The dead water was slimy; vapours from the minerals
irritated his eyes. He drifted on his back, eyes closed.

As he
relaxed a vision of the veiled woman in the garden rushed at him, like a shark
in the null water. He scrambled to his feet.

'What is it?’ Sharon laughed.

'Nothing. I'm getting out.'

Sharon
led him to the mud pools. She slapped curative mud on his face and body, and
within moments she had him slaked in black mud. Under the pulsing yellow sun it
quickly dried to a hard, grey crust. He wasn't Tom 'any more. He was a twilight
man, something primal, the
golem.

He
slapped a return pile of oozing mud on her belly, smearing it across her
stomach. She went very quiet. He felt her calming in his hands. He massaged it
into her face and neck and then he smeared her legs.

'Turn
over,' he said quietly and heaped piles of chocolate mud on her back,
smoothing it across the backs of her thighs. He felt like a potter.

'Let me do your back,' she said.

The
pressure of her fingertips radiated to his bones, and he flushed hot beneath
the layer of silky mud. She smiled through her mud face, the whites of her eyes
and her white teeth flashing. When she swung a leg across him, gently lowering
herself on to his bottom, he stiffened slightly, then relaxed. He was becoming
erect behind the mud. He wanted to hide it.

They sat on
the beach; the drying mud changing from chocolate to an ash-grey hue. It
contracted as it dried, tightening across their skins. For Tom it was like the
feeling of a penis engorging with blood. He wished he'd taken off his swimming
trunks. He wanted to get closer to the mud.

There were
showers on the beach. Each watched the other wash, carefully and in silence. It
was a mysterious, primitive ritual. He felt clean and renewed and revitalized,
as if he'd pulled on a new skin. Some used, shadowy version of himself had been
discarded on that beach, like an empty wet suit, to be drawn back down under
the mud pool.

In the
afternoon they visited the archaeology at Qumran, but lassitude had taken them
over. He felt vague, floating.

'For years
they thought this place was a scriptorium for the
Essenes
,
somewhere to write all those Dead Sea Scrolls. All because they found one
inkwell. They thought all these cisterns were for ritual washing. Now they've
discovered this was a site for the perfume industry, with the money going to
arm the Zealots who died up there. It was a factory for making expensive
balsam.'

When
she said the word 'balsam', Tom got a rich and heady whiff of that scent. It was
a momentary but intense sensation. Then it was gone. He looked over the
archaeological remains. Heat rippled from the ground. There was only the
aridity of the excavated stones, and a scorching silence, and the smell of warm
dust.

'What is it?' Sharon asked.

'She was here.'

Sharon touched his arm. 'Come on. Let's
go.'

They arrived back in
Jerusalem, exhausted. Sharon made coffee, but they didn't drink it. She kicked
off her shoes and started to fall asleep on the sofa. He joined her. When he
awoke, the room was in darkness, and she was gone. She returned swathed in a
towel robe, having showered, climbed back on the sofa and took his face in her
hands. She kissed him.

'Don't, unless you mean it,' he said.

'I mean it.'

He
opened her bathrobe and slipped it from her shoulders. Her nipples were dark
buds. He pressed his lips to them. She put her hand inside his shorts. His
erection grew to her touch. She weighed it in her long, slim fingers. Her
breath was as hot as the desert, and the musk of her was like a rare spice from
the market streets.

He went to
kiss her belly, but she stopped him and said, 'It's my period. I'm bleeding.'

'It's all
right,' he told her. 'You don't have to take a ritual bath for me.'

'It's not you, it's I who hold back.'

'It's
only healthy blood. Life blood. Those twisted old prophets want you to hate
yourself because you're a woman.' He leaned across her and put his tongue
inside her mouth. Her eyes were like black lakes in the darkness of the room.
He put a finger deep inside her, withdrew it and put it to his lips. The smell
of her sex flowered in the room. He could smell her sex on his hand, saline,
mineral, like the salts and the silts of the Dead Sea. 'All day I've been
falling in love with you.'

'I know.'

She copied him,
inserting a ringer into her vagina, and she anointed his penis with the blood,
drawing a ring of blood around the
glans
with her
fingernail. He kissed her again, and she lay back, opening to him. He slipped
easily inside her, and her heat rolled over him like a ball of fire. His mind
flashed across the heights of
Masada
; lightning
forked over the dry plains and over the Dead Sea. She'd told him it was the
deepest place on Earth. When he ejaculated inside her he felt he was falling
into the deepest place on Earth.

Afterwards
she switched on a lamp. His cock lay on his thigh like a helmeted soldier shot
in the woods. Her blood was already drying on him, flaking, rust-coloured. She
leaned over to inspect it, as if the blood had deposited runes or readable
prophecies.

'What are you doing?'

'Reading the future.'

'I've had my tealeaves read, but this is
new.'

'What's this? Look, it's like a Hebrew
letter.'

He looked. It was a:

'It's a
bet,’
she said. 'The Bible
starts with this letter.'

'Come here,' he said. 'Come here.’

25

'He's a really lovely
man,' Katie said, 'a really lovely man. I'm so glad I agreed to meet him.'

'What did you talk about?' said Tom.

'The Bible.
He hates Paul and loves Mary. He spent the entire afternoon unpicking the Bible
for me. He didn't particularly want to, but I encouraged him.'

'He didn't
need much encouragement. He was mouthing off about it when we first met him.
Will you see him again?'

'No. I
offered to, but he refused. He said if we met again, he'd fall in love with me,
and that would be torture for him. He said he'd be eternally happy with his one
afternoon in the park.'

'What about you? Would you fall in love
with him?'

'No. I made
my choice a while ago. I mean to stick by it.'

Tom sniffed.
It enraged her. She leapt up and crashed a fist into his chest. 'Do you know
what it means to me, our marriage?' she cried. 'Do you know what it represents
to me? Do you know how I feel when I think we're losing it? Do you know how it
makes me feel? Do you know that I can't breathe? I can't breathe, I can't
breathe, I can't breathe!'

26

Well, you let it happen again. Sharon
driving to work that morning wondering, as always, whether she'd done the right
thing. Since Tom's arrival in Jerusalem she'd been imploring herself to avoid
this extra complication. Her emotional life proceeded from one wreckage to another.
She attached herself to the walking wounded. She was drawn to them. She worked
with them. She fell in love with them. And even when she wasn't
exactly
in
love with them, as in Tom's case, she still sometimes ended up sleeping with
them.