Gospel (95 page)

O'Hanrahan's heart sank further.

Yep, Mordechai's done it. He's called Father Beaufoix at the American University in Cairo. I'm being replaced. I've finally pushed it too far; he's finding another translator. And I probably deserve it, all the misadventures, the bad-boy behavior—

The door opened, two students walked out escorted by the rabbi, rosy-cheeked and chipper. “Where's the goil?” he asked, meaning Lucy.

“She said she'd be here at one,” the professor said glumly.

Lucy had spent another day in the New City, making phone calls, faxing Chicago—the real number, this time—mailing postcards and having breakfast. Making another descent into the Old City had been less joyous with some trouble brewing in East Jerusalem near the bus station. Sirens, ambulances, noise, and she thought she discerned tear gas though the wind was away from her. The Old City, one moment lively and colorful, merchants and barkers calling out their wares and delicious savories, suddenly became grim: shopkeepers hastily closed up in midmorning, cursed and muttered as Israeli soldiers filled the streets.

Before the Fourth Station, Lucy watched the soldiers march in pairs down the Via Dolorosa. The Palestinian children ignored them, kicking a ball back and forth. Lucy watched the ball lodge itself behind a crate, behind a soldier. Kick it back to him, Lucy said inwardly. He's just a kid, what's the harm? But the soldier didn't, and the little Arab boy, his face nestling against the barrel of the Uzi machine gun, poked and manipulated the ball until it dislodged and the game commenced. Not even a
gesture
toward these people, Lucy thought frankly, looking at the immovable soldier, muscular and proud. She supposed darkly that this five-year-old is just the next decade's rock-throwing Intifadist.

After a cab ride to Hebrew University she met the professor and Rabbi Hersch on schedule in the appointed parking lot, both of them cross for some reason.

“I'm not going to discuss every phone call I make with you,” the rabbi was saying. “He called me and I called him back and what business is it of yours. It had to do with the review!”

But the argument ceased when they saw her. The rabbi fumbled with his keys and took them to a standard light-blue sedan with West Bank plates, a university car, he explained. “Ready,” he asked, “for your trip to Mar Saba?”

“I'm not sure I feel up to it,” she moaned, rubbing her shoulder, still store from the typhus shot. “Is it going to be a bumpy road?”

“It's not too bad,” O'Hanrahan muttered. “That is, if Morey isn't going by way of Cairo to pay further homage to this man—”

“Listen to you! You're consumed with jealousy!”

Lucy decided to make peace by announcing, “Mar Saba I'd love to see. Of course, the West Bank between here and there I'm not so sure about.”

The rabbi: “Don't worry. It's just fifteen miles from here.”

As they got in the car, O'Hanrahan asked, “And you're gonna wear that yarmulke, huh?”

Rabbi Hersch patted his head. “You want me to take it off? Maybe I should disguise myself as Yasser Arafat?”

“It's the West Bank, Morey, that's all I meant—”

“I'm not to look like a Jew in the land of the Jews? It's my country after all.”

O'Hanrahan got in the front seat, Lucy in the back. “Try telling the Arabs along the road to Mar Saba that this is your country,” grumbled O'Hanrahan.

The rabbi hopped in and started up the car. “The day I have to take this off in Israel is a day, if it be the will of the Lord, I never see.”

O'Hanrahan hated it when his friend Mordechai went into Superjew mode, Zionist apologist. Most days Rabbi Hersch could be expected to bring his balanced view of things to all Arab-Jewish issues, but this wasn't one of those days, and it was O'Hanrahan's fault for lashing out at him for some perceived betrayal with Father Beaufoix.

“You want me to put on a
galabiyya
perhaps?” Rabbi Hersch mused, without humor.

“Well, why stop there, Morey?” O'Hanrahan said, escalating the matter. “Why not fit out the car in a
tzitzit,
paint the Star of David on the side, phylacteries around the tailpipe. We can paint a big bull's-eye on the windshield for the rocks.”

“I am not going to be intimidated by the rabble,” he said calmly. “These rock-throwing hooligans will be put down, I assure you.”

If your country has to shoot every teenage boy in the occupied territories, thought Lucy to herself, sourly.

The ride progressed silently, everyone wishing an excuse to turn back and go their separate ways would present itself.

Before Bethlehem there was a refugee compound. Lucy had seen them on the news, but seeing them for real behind a two-story fence just yards from her car window was worse: open sewers, streets of mud, children playing in this mixture of sewage water and mud, flies, and garbage, the look of misery on the women's faces hauling water in jugs. Three ragged children pressed their faces against the metal fence and spit indignantly at passing cars, no hope of reaching their targets.

“That's a refugee camp, huh?” asked Lucy, not entirely innocently. She wanted Rabbi Hersch to apprehend the human tragedy in his country's occupied territories.

“There's plenty of the Islamic world for them to go to,” he said. “From Morocco to India, 800 million strong. No, no one wants them, no one among their dear Arab brethren.”

Lucy knew she could up the amperage in the conversation by asking if this is where Palestinian women and children went when the Israeli Army dynamited neighborhoods, bulldozed homes, wiped out blocks of houses because of rumors of misbehavior. In 1967, after the war, the Israelis evicted and destroyed homes of some 4000 Palestinians to “stabilize” the city. With these tactics, where wouldn't there be a home in all of Arab Palestine that didn't harbor sufficient hatred of the Israelis to be torn down?

The rabbi avoided Beit Shair, on the outskirts of Bethlehem, and began the single-lane, winding road across the barren, rocky hills to the mountainous canyons where the Mar Saba Monastery was located.
Where shepherds watched their flocks by night,
it occurred to Lucy, looking at the sparse grazing vegetation outside of David's Royal City.

The largest of the wretched little villages came into view along the ridge that defined the road. Young girls, Lucy surmised, didn't have to wear the veils, young women did; as the car passed, the Palestinian women raised their veils to prevent the strangers from viewing their faces. A dirty, energetic pack of young boys played by the entrance to the village, throwing up cupped handfuls of dust and dodging the mushroom cloud that ensued, laughing. They spotted the car and ran to the roadside scooping up pebbles.

“Delightful little boys,” mumbled the rabbi, as a pebble or two, ineffectively thrown at the car, clinked and clattered against the trunk.

As they slowed through the town, Lucy anxiously looked at the hard, unfriendly faces that stared them down. The older women, who could abandon the veil again, looked fierce in what struck Lucy as war paint, those odd green tattoos of Palestinian women around the eyes and mouth, an earlier generation's beguiling beauty secret. Lucy saw the town's requisite all-male café, the men sitting by the road on stools and chairs, smoking the
sheesha,
and a poster of an idealized Saddam Hussein behind them, a newsprint Iraqi flag draped on the window. Lucy sighed. Saddam Hussein, who had killed more Arabs than Israel would ever have a chance to.

The car passed through the last village with another mob of jeering boys hurling small stones at the back windshield. They came to a junction.

“Do you know which way?” Lucy asked.

“The locals take down the signs,” explained Rabbi Hersch, reaching for the glove compartment and pulling out a detailed map, “so all strangers can be lost and bribe them for directions … that is, the ones they don't rob.” He ran a finger over a road on the map. “Here we go, right turn.”

Immediately, as if from out of nowhere, two teenage Palestinian boys appeared and stood a few yards before the car. They put out their thumb as if for hitchhiking. They looked pleasant enough, their faces beseeching, could they get a lift down the right fork?

“Not on your life,” said the rabbi, waving them off, as he turned the car down the road.

“Mar Saba!” they both cried out.

The rabbi accelerated, stirring up the dust. “Right. These Moslems want to go to a Greek monastery. Like hell they do.”

O'Hanrahan: “Most Arabs around Bethlehem
are
Christian, after all.”

“You want me to pick 'em up?” said the rabbi testily.

The taller one, about sixteen, wearing a green-red-and-white Palestinian flag–inspired T-shirt, ran after the car and banged a fist down on the trunk as he was left in the dust. They yelled something.

“When will,” the rabbi asked, affecting a dainty tone, “the Arab mothers of the world teach their little boys some manners?”

O'Hanrahan was going to say something but didn't. His half-utterance was enough to set the rabbi off again: “What? You
really
want me to pick those guys up? They want our money, for Christ's sake … ehh,
look,
it's downhill all the way—why would anyone need a ride?”

“I'm glad you didn't pick them up, Rabbi,” said Lucy, who would have had them beside her. “In fact, maybe this was a bad idea to come.”

O'Hanrahan assured her that they'd be safe once they got to the monastic grounds. Lucy reminded herself how rarely one hears about tourists or pilgrims getting killed by Palestinians during the Intifada, not that that equalled assurance in the present day.

The road twisted and curved back on itself as it dropped a thousand feet toward the canyon's rim. There was not a bit of vegetation, not a plant, not a tree in this rocky valley. Lucy soon saw a parking lot of sorts, and a long wall with a single blue door in the middle of it. The three got out and O'Hanrahan went over to ring a bell suspended with a cord hanging down by the door. The rabbi and Lucy went to a slight promontory along a trail to better view the walled fortress.

“The Mar Saba Monastery,” O'Hanrahan explained while waiting for someone to answer the door, “was founded by St. Saba, the father of monasticism in the area, Bishop of Jerusalem in 491.”

(Where Saba kept a lion as a pet, until he ordered it to leave upon continued disobedience. Where dates grow without stones to this day, thanks to a miraculous command of Saba, who didn't care for the sinfully suggestive seeds in fruits. Home of Saba's sainted mother, Sophia, as well as John Damascene, Theodore of Edessa, Cosma of Majuma, Aphrodisius, John the Silent. What could anyone know now of their lost Byzantine world?)

“Curzon,” said O'Hanrahan, hoping to lighten the mood, “the great Victorian explorer, said the Mar Saba Monastery's library was among the best in the Middle East. He saw ancient scrolls that have since disappeared; he talked about them lying on tabletops, texts 1500 years old, as if they were rags and towels. He walked off himself with a 9th-Century Old Testament. Did I tell you about working on the early redaction of
Mark
found here in 1958?”

“Yes,” said Lucy, not meaning to be impolite though it had that effect.

The walled monastery was built for defensive purposes into the side of a cliff, suspended over this dry gulch of a canyon, not a tree or plant of any kind in sight down there either. From the slight rise, Lucy eagerly snapped off a few photographs of the Byzantine domes of the Church of St. Nikolas within.

Again: Damn these men and their exclusivity.

“You can't go in, of course,” said O'Hanrahan to Lucy, seeming concerned about it. In fact, it was obvious after their mildly menacing drive he didn't want to be here, or for Lucy to be here. No curiosity within was bound to be worth the peril. This whole day, O'Hanrahan thought, is an exercise of Israeli macho from his friend Mordechai, who had insisted on demonstrating his
droit de seigneur
in the Occupied Territories. A monk at last came to usher the men inside.

“I suppose we could go in,” said the rabbi, “in shifts.”

“Really,” said Lucy, acting brave for everyone, “you both go in. This is the middle of nowhere. I'll take a few pictures and sit in the car.”

O'Hanrahan agreed. He stopped as if to say something to her, something about locking herself in the car perhaps, but he didn't want to alarm her. “Honk the horn if you need us,” he said simply, then he and the rabbi turned to enter the doorway in search of the ineffably masculine mysteries within.

Lucy amused herself by walking to the brink of the canyon again and took some more scenery shots. Then a few more of Mar Saba perched on the abyss for good measure. Very exotic, this place. What you expect out of a desert monastery. Then she looked back upon the long road they had traveled from and she saw the two teenage boys walking down it. What do you know, she thought uneasily, they really did want to come down here. Then she saw, distantly, two more boys, younger, running along behind. She thought: they've gone back to the village, told about the offensive Jewish man driving the car down this dead end, and now they're coming to cause trouble.

Slowly, Lucy maneuvered the slippery, dusty slope of desert rock, taking the steep shortcut rather than the winding trail to return to the car. She could hear their cries. She went over to the blue door and rang the bell furiously. She stood there, torn between waiting for the door to open or going to the car. Knowing the monks, they wouldn't let her in …

(Get to the car, Lucy.)

She got inside the car and sat in the passenger seat. She locked the front and back doors. This was unnecessary panic perhaps. These guys might be workers at the monastery, sweepers or handymen for the garden; every Arab, after all, she had met so far had been friendly and generous. Suddenly the filthy refugee camp and the boys spitting at the passing cars flashed in her mind …