Travelling to Infinity (58 page)

Before our departure for the Middle East, there was just time to see Lucy performing in the lively spectacle of
The Heart of a Dog
, a staged adaptation of the political satire written
in the 1920s by the Russian writer Mikhail Bulgakov. The novella, in which Bulgakov voiced his concerns at the take-over of Russian society by the proletariat, was considered too abrasive for
publication at the time and was not published in the Soviet Union until 1987, the year of our most recent visit. On the following Sunday, leaving my parents in charge of the home, we left for
Israel.

Although there were delays at Heathrow, the main stretch of the flight passed without incident. Jonathan, who was away on tour with the Cam-bridge Baroque Camerata, had given me a Walkman and
tapes of Bach’s
Mass in B Minor
for my birthday, and with that I whiled away the time, occasionally peering out of the window down to the distant blue depths of the Mediterranean. As
night fell and the sky and the sea darkened, a strip of neon lights appeared far below clearly marking the coastline, and we were told to fasten our seat belts for landing in Tel Aviv. The plane
began its descent, and I watched as we skimmed lit buildings and roadways. I heard the rumble of the undercarriage being lowered and waited for the jolt of the landing on the runway. The bump never
came. Instead the plane lumbered its way back up into the night sky. To my own surprise, I was fascinated, not frightened. There were no announcements. A hush descended on the cabin, and I sensed
that the same questions were passing through the minds of all the passengers: had we been highjacked and were we heading for Lebanon?

Ten minutes later the captain’s voice came over the address system. We had not been able to land in Tel Aviv because of sudden fog, he explained, and had been diverted to the only other
available runway, a landing strip at a military airbase in the Negev desert, the neck of Israeli territory narrowing down to the Red Sea between Egypt and Jordan. The plane droned through the night
to the desert, where it made an abrupt and bumpy landing on a short runway, not built to accommodate 747s – and there we stayed. By the time the fog had cleared in Tel Aviv, the period of
duty for our crew had expired, so we – and they – had to wait for another crew to come out from Tel Aviv to collect us. I pulled down the blind, curled up and went to sleep.
Stephen’s assistant, Nick Phillips, nudged me the next morning just as the engines were beginning to turn. I drew up the blind and looked out on a perfect introduction to the Holy Land.
Outside was a scene of timeless peace and beauty: golden sands, silken dunes and barren, purple hills, all tinged with the soft pinkish hue of dawn.

The focal point of the official visit was the presentation of the Wolf Prize in the Knesset against the backdrop of Chagall’s immense tapestry of the history of the Israeli people. The
ceremony took place in the presence both of the highly respected, liberal-minded President of Israel, Chaim Herzog, and the notoriously hard-line, right-wing Prime Minister, Yitzhak Shamir. They
epitomized the two ends of the political spectrum in a country where good sense and fanaticism coexisted in equal measures. After the completion of the ceremonials, Stephen and Roger Penrose were
so much occupied in scientific meetings, lectures and seminars with their Israeli colleagues that I was often left to wander and explore at will through Jerusalem. “Go into the Jewish quarter
of the Old City, by all means,” I was advised, “but don’t go into the Arab quarter: it’s too dangerous because of the
Intifada.
” In my impatience to be
independent of the official party, I shrugged off such caution with indifference, happy to find that the hotel, a modern block, was within easy walking distance of the Jaffa Gate of the Old City.
Like a magnet, the grey walls on the opposite hill, as austere and forbidding as the walls of the Alhambra in Granada, drew me to them. Unprepared for the bustling, noisy mass of colourful humanity
which ebbed and flowed in and out of the gate beneath David’s Tower, I paused, looking about me and wondering which way to go, to the right or to the left. I was tempted to let myself be
pulled along with the crowds and be sucked down the narrow street on my left, but mindful of the advice to keep out of the Arab quarter I set off to my right, past the grey-stone Anglican cathedral
into a street which ran along the inside of the city walls. It was disappointingly dull and quiet. Hammering came from the occasional workshop, a few people going about their daily business hurried
down the street, the sounds of a piano wafted from an upper window, otherwise there was little to claim my interest. It was pleasant but unremarkable. I carried on walking and came to a new housing
development which was even more disappointing. However, an alleyway between the new houses on the left gave onto a steep flight of steps which descended to a leafy little square where I stopped for
a drink, before carrying on down the next long flight. At the bottom was a broad open expanse, enclosed on the far side by a high wall of mellow, sunburnt stone. Black-coated men were praying and
kissing the wall and bridal parties were being photographed against it. I had reached the Wailing Wall. I ambled across the open space, watching the crowds, some earnest and devout, others laughing
and talking.

On one side of the space was a short tunnel, guarded by soldiers, under a mass of buildings. People were coming and going through it quite freely, so I joined them. In passing through that
tunnel, I discovered – without the aid of complex mathematical equations – that time travel is a real possibility. In practical and political terms, that tunnel divided the Jewish and
the Arab quarters of the Old City. In historical terms it divided secular modernity from an ancient past which vibrated with the sounds, the colours and the traditions of biblical times. Pilgrims
and tourists mingled like visitors from another planet with the local inhabitants who, with their children and donkeys, got on with their daily lives as if the twentieth century had not happened. I
walked on alone, pausing now and then on the edge of a group of pilgrims. I listened to the guide’s explanation of each site and I joined in their prayers and hymns at a couple of the
Stations of the Cross on the Via Dolorosa.

It was a strange experience suddenly to be alone, free to make my own discoveries and form my own judgements. I shuddered at the gloomy, repellent sense of intrigue which pervaded the Church of
the Holy Sepulchre with its squabbling, rival sects and its queues of tourists waiting to pass through the inner sanctum. I could not wait to get out of its morbid atmosphere into the bright
daylight. The view from the tower was its one redeeming feature. The panorama of flat, white rooftops was as striking as the view of the red roofs of Venice from the top of the Campanile. Far
below, chickens cackled, cocks crowed and a donkey brayed.

It was with reluctance that I dragged myself away from the Church of St Anne, close by the excavations of the Pool of Bethesda, only a hundred yards from the Lion Gate with its views across to
the Mount of Olives. The Church of St Anne, immense and domed, light and airy, was deserted when I went in. I clicked my fingers – a trick Jonathan had taught me to test the acoustics of a
building – and was surprised to find that the church was even more resonant than King’s Chapel. Emboldened by the silence of the empty church, I hummed a few bars of Purcell’s
Evening Hymn
– “Now, now that the sun has veiled his light and bid the world goodnight...” – I listened in astonishment as the sound of my voice was caught by the
pillars and flung up into the dome. There the song took on a life of its own and whirled in ecstasy before sliding back to earth in a whisper. The friendly Arab guardian of the Church appeared from
a side door. He said that he liked to listen to the pilgrims who came to sing in his Church. Apparently I was lucky to have had it to myself, as usually choirs queued up for their turns. He invited
me to return whenever I liked.

The Arab quarter of the city held no terrors for me; so, another day, I made for the Dome of the Rock, the spectacular holy place of Islam and the site of the stone where Abraham prepared to
sacrifice Isaac. The entrance was closed and guarded by Israeli soldiers. It would be closed, except to worshippers, for the foreseeable future. In disappointment I made my way back up the street
through the Arab bazaar with its motley assortment of tourist goods – Bethlehem blue glass, pottery and leather. I browsed among its antique stalls, which displayed bits of Roman glass,
copper and coins, and its food stalls spilling over with all the delicacies of the eastern Mediterranean, nuts and olives, Turkish delight and halva as well as a cornucopia of fruits and
vegetables. Like the stallholders I had met in Tangiers twenty-five years earlier, the Arabs here were polite and friendly. Having haggled over a pretty Roman glass bead at one of the antique
stalls, a malachite and silver necklace at a ridiculously low price on another then caught my eye. The proprietor came out to talk to me without attempting to pressurize me into a purchase. He
spoke good English and was just telling me about his cousin in Middlesex when he glanced down the street and hastily pushed me into his shop. He then took up a position, arms akimbo, in the
doorway. His alarm was understandable. A troop of armed Israeli soldiers was forcing its way noisily up the alley. They did not seem concerned about respecting any property, barrows or stalls in
their path and, from the stance adopted by my shopkeeper and others nearby, it appeared that they had a reputation for being light-fingered. When the noise of their passage, their boots on the
cobbles and their shouts had died away, the shopkeeper came back inside sighing. He apologized for pushing me through the door and simply said, “You see, we have to be very careful.” I
bought the necklace and a richly decorated, hand-painted plate and said goodbye, promising to return. I did return on the last day only to find everywhere closed: the shops were boarded up and,
apart from stray cats, the streets were deserted. The ancient pageant of light, life, noise and colour had vanished. Everywhere, every street, every corner, every square, was dark, eerie and
intimidating – a ghost city which had closed its doors to time travellers.

As well as my sympathy for the Arabs, I felt a natural affinity with the Jewish people: many of our friends were Jews, highly intelligent, articulate and sensitive, whose families had been
ravaged by the Holocaust. I could not, however, sympathize with the inhuman tactics of the Israeli army that I had witnessed in the Arab quarter of Jerusalem, even less could I sympathize with the
loathsome driver who had been allotted to us. An American Jew of central-European origins, he voiced his opinions loudly and coarsely wherever we went. As he drove down the winding road to the Dead
Sea, he gestured to a row of white houses up on the hills. “See there,” he said proudly, “that’s one of our settlements, we’re building all those homes. The Arabs had
this land for two thousand years and didn’t do anything with it. They’ve had their chance, but now it’s our turn and they want to push us into the sea.” I had heard these
wearying arguments before, delivered in the same Americanized monotone by other immigrant speakers. Further down the road, we came across a simple Bedouin encampment. “What can you do with
people like that? Just look at them!” the driver expostulated, “they haven’t advanced in two thousand years!” I could hardly contain my indignation. “Perhaps they like
their traditional lifestyle,” I retorted. I was saddened that peace was so elusive between two peoples of the same racial stock who had so much to offer each other. The best Jews and the best
Arabs had a lot in common. They could both be intelligent, generous, friendly and amusing. Perhaps the Jews had the edge over the Arabs in rational argument, in science, technology and mathematics,
but the Arabs had superior intuitive poetic and artistic skills. Between them, they held the key to the most successful and gifted culture the world has ever seen.

There were, inevitably, many official expeditions. Television cameras and reporters followed Stephen to all his meetings, eager for his reactions to a wide range of questions. Unfailingly one
question recurred at every interview. I watched and listened from the sidelines and my heart sank as I heard it repeated again and again in some form or other. “Professor Hawking, what does
your research tell you about the existence of God?” or “Is there room for God in the universe you describe?” or, more directly, “Do you believe in God?” Always the
answer was the same. No, Stephen did not believe in God and there was no room for God in his universe. Roger Penrose was more tactful. When asked the same questions, he conceded that there were
different ways to approach God: some people might find God in religious belief, others in music, others conceivably in the beauty of a mathematical equation. Roger’s answers could not,
however, dispel my sadness. My life with Stephen had been built on faith – faith in his courage and genius, faith in our joint efforts and ultimately religious faith – and yet here we
were in the very cradle of the world’s three great religions, preaching some sort of ill-defined atheism, founded on impersonal scientific values with little reference to human experience.
The blank denial of all that I believed in was bitter indeed.

I sat in miserable silence in the back of the van as the driver conducted us round all the holy places of the Old and New Testaments – the dark little cave in Bethlehem, the bleached
stones of Jericho, the parched mountains of the Wilderness, the rippling green flow of the River Jordan and the Sea of Galilee. Dumbly, in my corner of the careering van, I mused that this tragic
land seemed to breed conflict. Against the impenetrable landscape, the sense of conflict was all pervasive and insidious. Even Stephen and I were in danger of succumbing to it, since we rarely
seemed to be of one mind.

However, while Stephen finished his lunch in a lakeside restaurant at Tiberias, I swam alone in the turquoise waters of the sea of Galilee, and for a few precious minutes I felt myself to be at
peace and in harmony with the landscape and its history. The threat of war over the Golan Heights had preserved Galilee from the ravages of the tourist industry, with the result that little could
have changed in two thousand years. Tiberias was possibly even less of a resort in 1988 than it had been in Roman times, and the Lake was as calm and as unspoilt as a Scottish loch. Had it not been
for the heat, Galilee seen from the chapel of the Sermon on the Mount could well have been Loch Lomond. On the final day, we all bathed in the Dead Sea. Encouraged by me and supported by his
entourage and the natural buoyancy of the salt, Stephen lay back, floating in the warm water, briefly reestablishing contact with the reality of nature, long denied him, rather than its theory with
which he was in ceaseless communion. There was silence all around us. The only witnesses of Stephen’s peaceful bathing were the hazy purple mountains of Jordan in the distance, the blue sky
and a solitary bird of prey. It was impossible to drown or even to swim. My attempt to strike out in a breaststroke collapsed in splashing and floundering, and filled my nose with stinging salt. My
swimming sessions would have to be reserved for the hotel pool, up on the roof where I swam a few lengths every evening after each day’s hot, dusty excursion. The novelty of swimming with the
whole of Jerusalem spread out below would have been entirely agreeable, had it not been for the presence of a suspiciously spotty child in the water. I recognized chickenpox, but trusted that I was
well enough protected with antibodies against that virus as a result of my experience in Spain as a student.