Gospel (82 page)

—“Written in Pencil in the Sealed Freight Car,”
Selected Poems
(1972)
D
AN
P
AGIS

A Hasid asked the Seer of Lublin, “To the words in the Mishnah:
Man should thank God for evil and praise him,
the Gemara adds:
with joy and a tranquil heart.
How can that be?”

    The tzaddik heard that the question sprang from a troubled heart. “You do not understand the Gemara,” he said, “but I don't even understand the Mishnah. For is there really any evil in the world?”

—A tale (early 1800s) of Rabbi J
ACOB
Y
ITZHAK
, The Seer of Lublin

 

 

A
UGUST
3
RD
, 1990

Rabbi Hersch was incredulous when he received a call from O'Hanrahan that he and Lucy had arrived the night before and were registered at the King David, the palatial luxury hotel of Jerusalem. How did they get in from Haifa? They had booked a limousine. And if the phone call was to be believed, the rabbi had just been invited for a deluxe breakfast buffet. With champagne.

Rabbi Hersch made his way through the splendor of the lobby with its jewelry and fashion shops and gave a polite hello to the woman admitting diners into the grand dining room. Beyond the door he could see Jerusalem's businessmen and richer tourist elite helping themselves to sculpted fruit, trays of lox and seasoned fish, cheeses, bagels, pickles, and olives, the bounty of a kosher marketplace arrayed as if for King David himself.

“Shalom,”
the woman said brightly, checking her list, “Mordechai Hersch … Yes, your friends are expecting you.”

“Hmmm. What's it cost, my dear?”

“Your friends have paid so go right in.
Gut shabbes,
Rabbi.”

The rabbi returned her wish for a happy Sabbath and entered the high-ceilinged hall, decorated like a lesser Hasmonean Throne Room, and soon spying Lucy and O'Hanrahan laughing at a corner table, plates of food before them. A silver platter of caviar, the expensive stuff. Champagne cooling in a stand beside the table. Lucy in sunglasses looking tanned and leaner. O'Hanrahan, also tan and decked out in a new navy sportscoat as well, an open shirt in the Israeli style with a scarf instead of a tie tucked in the collar, looking like some Miami Beach homes-of-the-rich tour boat captain. A waiter was standing nearby with a choice of cigars.

“So,” said the rabbi, presenting himself, “who died and left you the mines of Solomon,” reminded of his own hard-earned 200 pounds sterling sacrificed in Oxford.

“Morey!” said O'Hanrahan, springing to his feet. “Sit down, sit down. Some champagne, go get yourself some food!”

“It's 11:30,” said the rabbi. “I had breakfast like the rest of the world at eight.”

“Well, have lunch then.”

One waiter pulled out a chair for the rabbi as O'Hanrahan reclaimed his seat and refocused on the cigar selection. The tobacconist recommended Cuba's finest Davidoff, the Dom Perignon.

Rabbi Hersch asked, “What's going on here, Mr. Rockefeller?”

“We're rich, that's what. You remember me telling you the department sent me a credit card in Ireland that Lucy was kind enough to bring to Italy.” Lucy, serene behind sunglasses, toasted the rabbi with her champagne glass. “Well, as anyone should have been able to guess, the card was not from Chicago, not from my former department, which counts paper clips and rubber bands. It was from a mysterious benefactor.”

O'Hanrahan traced this credit card, through many ruses of conversation with a toll-free operator, faking having lost his VISA then having found it again. The card originated from Merriwether Industries in Detroit, Michigan. The 312 number on the telegram to whom Lucy had been faxing reports was connected to the Medina Corporation, Chicago, Illinois. A trip of the library at Athens University turned up a Charles Merriwether who was the CEO of both operations—oil, shipping, chemical refining, and weapons. After racking up a large phone bill, after attempting to speak to anyone of importance at Merriwether Industries about why he should be issued a credit card, and after a few hostile middlemen declared him a crank and hung up on him, O'Hanrahan decided it was wiser to leave well enough alone and accept this generous funding.

“We are trying to spend our sponsor into bankruptcy,” concluded O'Hanrahan, “hoping he will reveal himself and his motives.”

“I see,” said the rabbi, looking down at folded hands.

“So far,” reported O'Hanrahan, “we can't seem to hit the card's limit. We spent a fortune in Rhodes. My new duds for starters.”

Lucy began giggling. “Your clothes were ruined, after all.” She turned to Rabbi Hersch: “Dr. O'Hanrahan fell into the bay and we missed getting back to our ferry and had to call ahead and get them to hold our luggage in Cyprus.”

“… and that's where I got this new coat, in Cyprus,” O'Hanrahan said. “At the chichiest hotel.”

“He thought he was the Colossos of Rhodes,” explained Lucy, pouring herself champagne. “Trying to straddle the harbor.”

“My dear, I
am
a Wonder of the World.”

“A wonder of the
Ancient
World.”

They pointed fingers and oohed at each other, Lucy bragging she really got him that time, O'Hanrahan vowing she'd pay for it!

“I don't suppose,” began Rabbi Hersch drily, “that you should actually have managed to accomplish anything on this Mediterranean pleasure cruise?”

“Lucy was nearly kidnapped by an Islamic group in Greece, Morey…” And O'Hanrahan fondly replayed their Grecian adventures.

“I thought,” said the rabbi, “that we had taken Miss Dantan out of harm's way.”

“Rabbi, sir, I came to my senses. I realized my academic career would be made when Dr. O'Hanrahan translates the scroll and I'm his assistant. Where to? Harvard? Princeton?”

“No,” said O'Hanrahan, “go west, Stanford or Berkeley. That's where I want to go, away from the snows and six-month winters.”

The rabbi crossed his arms. “I see.”

“Or,” suggested O'Hanrahan thickly, “you could always go back to dear old Chicago…”

Lucy gave this a long Bronx cheer, and then O'Hanrahan did one as well and they both collapsed laughing, laughing too hard and sabotaging the effort to produce a Bronx cheer at the same time.

“I'm in a playpen here,” said Rabbi Hersch.

Lucy: “I've been recording our trip with my camera so far. You'll have to let me take your picture, Rabbi, sir, so when
Life
magazine wants a full account of the
Gospel of Matthias
you won't be left out.”

The rabbi stood unhappily, his champagne untouched. “Nu nu nu, I'll leave planning the fame-and-fortune part to you guys, while I will go back to doing what I've been doing without any help from anybody these last few weeks. Working very hard—”

“Would you
sit down
?” insisted O'Hanrahan. “And drink this stuff? This isn't exactly Manischewitz, you know.” He turned to Lucy and suggested she have a puff from his cigar. “Now the thing about a cigar is this…” He fired up the lighter and roasted his Dom Perignon. “You let the smoke roll onto the palate—”

“I know how to smoke a goddam cigar.”

O'Hanrahan withheld the prize. “When the hell did you ever smoke a cigar?”

“We snuck some out of my Uncle Liam's cabinet down at his farm in Kankakee and smoked them in the barn,” she said. “Now give it here and stop wearing me out.”

“Allow the smoke to ruminate on your palate—”

“Just give me the fucking cigar.”

The rabbi said gravely, “Incorruption has put on corruption. To coin a phrase.”

“What do you expect?” said Lucy, letting the smoke drift out of her mouth. “Just two months with the world's oldest living leprechaun, that's all.” Lucy commenced a synopsis of their lost week in the Mediterranean with much embellishment and exaggeration. “To keep him from going ashore in Lanakia, I had to bring a bottle of metaxa to his room—”

Interrupted O'Hanrahan: “She appeared bottle in hand, in this diaphanous nightgown, woven as if by Alcyone for the King of Thessaly's return!”

Lucy almost let champagne come out her nose. “No, no, it wasn't like that!” She affected coyness, which didn't suit her: “It only occurred to me late that night,” she said mock-innocently, “to get him drunk
on board
so he wouldn't go ashore and miss the boat the next morning. So I visited in my bathrobe, but it was hardly … diaphanous.”

“The terrycloth clinging to her beauteous form; Aphrodite's
fine breasts that move the sighs of longing!
”

The rabbi pursed his lips as if he had a mouth full of something sour.

“Nonsense,” Lucy went on, defending her honor. “Do you think I couldn't do better than an old goat like this?”

O'Hanrahan put a hand in his jacket like Napoleon, tipsily. “I could still rise to the occasion, darling girl…”

The rabbi slowly got out of his chair again. “I think tomorrow I'll come back when I should wake up and stop this hallucination.”

“Sit down, sit down,” said O'Hanrahan, tugging at the rabbi's sleeve. “What are you being an old humbug about? Someone, Morey, is underwriting our work!”

“Woik?” he exclaimed in sharp Brooklynese. “Work is in a library, like where I've been for the past three weeks! When you get through with your drinking binge, Paddy—and you, little girl, you I'm ashamed of. You're supposed to keep this … this
shikker
on track! After you get through buying all your $500 tchatchkes and wasting whoever's money, you can call me at Hebrew University. I'm off to the
Christian Science Monitor
before the Sabbath arrives, with my overdue review, if you don't mind.”

O'Hanrahan telepathically knew what this review concerned. “Father Beaufoix's new book?”

“That's right—it's a masterpiece, and I'm saying so. The result of a lifetime of…” He leaned in his friend's face: “… serious, devoted scholarship. The kind that makes for published books!”

As the rabbi stood to leave, O'Hanrahan stood as well, chastened and repentant. “Morey, sit down. Look, on Athos I had my set of photos of
Matthias
stolen so I'll need you to make me another set. What could I do until I got to Jerusalem?”

“I'm not sure you
desoive
another set,” the rabbi said, the New Yorker surfacing as he got upset. “If I print out another copy for you, where's this set gonna end up? In the Gulf of Aqaba?”

The rabbi walked away and O'Hanrahan gave chase, sweet-talking his old friend, answering each rebuff with blandishments. Lucy laughed to herself and put down her champagne glass. She looked at the Davidoff smoking, untouched for minutes, in the ashtray. She then breathed deeply, surveying the diners, the women in furs, the older Jewish-American moneymen with the spoiled daughters … No, this was not the life of serious scholarship.

Lucy rose and turned to the open double doors that led to the balcony of the King David Hotel, a grand balustraded plaza affording one of the great sweeping panoramas of the Middle East, the Old City of Jerusalem, walled and fortified by Suleiman the Magnificent, ancient white bastions protecting the ecclesiastical hoarding within: domes, steeples, bell towers, minarets, the shrines of three great religions with the God of Abraham in common, this source, this staked claim of monotheism, this obsession of Western Civilization clutched firmly by the East. Looking upon these monuments and the pageant of pilgrims from around the globe, the spectacle of earnest scrapings, bowings, ululations, chantings, keenings, wailings, rituals in the service of competing faiths, how easy it is to come up short and wonder
why here,
why this place of all places?

(There is no river, no seaport, no mountain pass, no good farmland, no junction of trade routes, no incentive at all for Our children to put a city here. Except that it is a holy place.)

Lucy, gazing upon the medieval walls, wondered if the sun-baked white of this sacred city of gleaming stone was not the white of bones, the common pit of Judeans, Israelites, Greeks, Babylonians, prophets and libertines, Herodians, Essenes, Romans, Christians, Moslems, Crusaders,
jihad
-makers, and now Zionists, some 17,000 young Israeli soldiers to date, underneath this eternal altar of human sacrifice.

(That is not the worship We would have chosen.)

Lucy closed her eyes in the warm noontime sun and remembered it had been awhile since she had worshiped. Thank you, she meditated, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit for bringing me to this mountaintop, the Jewish and Christian and Islamic Olympus where I myself might walk where the holy walked.

(
I was glad when they said to me, Let us go into the house of the Lord. Our feet shall stand within thy gates, O Jerusalem.
)