Gospel (93 page)

Wanna bet, thought O'Hanrahan, already well on the way to evolving a complete fantasy, his freckled, aged hand brushing against her lower abdomen, the young girl's natural Middle Eastern modesty as the veils are removed, her breasts presented to her husband vulnerably as she calls upon Allah to make her worthy of the moment!

“Yes, a position, the life of a pasha, as you put it, but more, much more! We have a gospel for you to see as well. One that I think your scholars called ‘Q.'”

O'Hanrahan was again stunned.

The date cookie fell from his hand and the dog scampered under the table to consume it.

“You have heard of it, yes?” asked al-Taki.

The professor almost swooned. It was like a thief before unguarded jewels, a miser before stacks of uncountable gold … Mohammed Baqir al-Taki had mentioned the one scroll for which O'Hanrahan would abandon Matthias! How could they have it? The Ur-Gospel … although attaching “Ur” to anything Judeo-Christian is a bit curious. The original, oldest gospel of significance! Long analyzed in absentia, and now found! No, it must be a fantasy.

“The Nestorians have many old gospels, yes?” Mohammed explained.

Yes, the Nestorians, reflected O'Hanrahan. A Christian sect closed off to us most of this century—all the fruits of 20th-Century philology and textual scholarship had yet to be applied to their vast libraries.

(Our poor Nestorians. Maybe the most persecuted sect of Christianity, having been on the outs since 430 when Nestorius insisted Mary could not be termed the
Theotokos,
the Mother of God. Yet they survive in Iran and in Northern Iraq as the Assyrian Church, though they were almost wiped out viciously by the Kurds in the 1930s, who have since understood what it is to be annihilated.)

Al-Taki: “Nestorius commanded his people keep the earliest of gospels to better argue the status of Mary. Our own Moslem scholars have dated the ‘Q' to your First Century, and they have written much on it, but we are dismissed and have no credibility in the West. No Christian wants to admit a ‘Q' gospel exists beyond hypothesis and conjecture. In our discovery, there is no Resurrection for Jesus. Although, mysteriously, there is no Ascension either.”

O'Hanrahan was relieved to hear “Q” didn't follow Moslem orthodoxy, for if it did it was surely a latter-day fake. “Why didn't the Moslems burn the thing if it disagreed with the Prophet, may peace be upon him—”

“May peace and many blessings be upon him.” The man finished his coffee down to the grounds. “Ah, it is the Christians who burn books, not the Moslems.”

No, thought O'Hanrahan, you guys just issue
fatwas
and kill
authors.
But O'Hanrahan was enchanted: to go to Teheran was folly … but on the chance of “Q”! And the girl, let's not forget the girl! And if their “Q” was for real it would render this double find, “Q” and Matthias, the greatest one-two punch in ecclesiastical history …
and he could be the scholar who would present them
BOTH
to the world!
The unceasing academic glory through the ages unending!

“You must forgive our Iraqi brethren,” said Mohammed, barely concealing distaste, “the al-Mu'tazilah who troubled you in Greece. So crude in their methods—Sunni, of course. What could one expect? Unforgivable. To you we offer a life that is worthy of you. You brought the first Moslem to the University in Chicago, did you not? You have always been a friend of Islam.”

“A most beautiful religion,” he said truthfully, bowing his head. The next minute adding to himself: it's a shame it's been so derailed by you fundamentalist clowns … O'Hanrahan noticed the young tea-boy going over to the growling dog and hitting it with a stick as hard as he could, trying to chase it away. The men in the café laughed, applauding this entertainment.

“I am not a man of the marketplace, professor,” said Mohammed Baqir al-Taki charmingly. “I have made my offer. I shall accompany you to Teheran if you like. I will take you up the Great Minaret and you may look down over the wondrous place—your new home.”

(
Then the devil took him to the holy city and set him on the pinnacle of the temple …
)

Al-Taki assured him, “None of our faculty is as fearsome as you believe! Teheran is not Qom; the university is not under the mullah's thumb.”

Here, thought O'Hanrahan, you overplay your hand.

Of course, he had no intention of taking this academic position, but the thought did occur of going to Teheran, seeing “Q” and making a switch and then escaping …

(And when they catch you, it will be the last time your fingernails are attached to your body.)

And I might stay long enough to be married to a dark and nubile Persian virgin who doesn't speak a word of English …

(The Temptations of O'Hanrahan. What on earth, We wonder, are you going to do now?)

*   *   *

Lucy and Rabbi Hersch walked through Suleiman the Magnificent's Damascus Gate. Outside the Old City walls Arab tradesmen held up chickens ready to behead with a bloody knife, cookies and pastries and the ubiquitous sesame-pretzels were brandished before one, lambs and bleating goats stood tied together at another family's stall. Inside the gate, the passageway curved like an
S,
presumably, thought Lucy, to prevent a straight charge of an invading army. Lucy was taken further back in time by the sight of the Jewish money changers, hawking their exchange rates, shekels for dollars, for francs, for Jordanian pounds—a scene startlingly out of some anti-Semitic 1930s German propaganda film. She thought of Jesus and his angry reaction to this going on in the Temple itself …

“Are we supposed to wait inside the gate or outside?” asked Lucy, concerning their meeting up with O'Hanrahan.

“No idea,” said Rabbi Hersch. “Let's go inside.”

Passing through Damascus Gate, Lucy looked above her to see the guard patrols on the city walls, three soldiers with Uzis, two female, one male, fit and lean, smoking and staring intently at the day's pilgrims, ready to rain down vengeance for any atrocity.

The plaza around Damascus Gate slopes down past several Arab storefronts and splits into three pedestrian avenues; to the right Lucy spied a tea shop, next to a Palestinian pop-music record and CD store. Lucy dragged her older companion to the record shop and tried to communicate the want of a “greatest hits” cassette of contemporary West Bank pop music, and she was sold something amid many flourishes and smiles.

O'Hanrahan, meanwhile, weary and hot, edged toward the tea shop run by friendly Palestinians. “That's smart,” he called out crabbily, “hiding in a shop where I can't find you.”

Lucy scanned him up and down. “Did you make it?”

“Make what?”

“The whole day without a drop.” Suddenly, she wondered if she should have brought up the subject with the rabbi in attendance.

“Of course I did,” O'Hanrahan claimed, guiding them to the plastic lawn chair and tables in front of the tea shop. “My my, how much I would love a good strong cup of mint tea. Yum yum.”

The rabbi and Lucy took their seats, neither apparently convinced of his pledge.

“No, really. This has been my alcohol-free day, Morey,” O'Hanrahan insisted, as he groaningly took a seat at the one of two outdoor tables. “Not as if I have to have it every second…”

Lucy positioned herself to watch the packed, stopped passageways of Jerusalemites and goods and animals, mingled in perfumes and aromas, obscured by smoke from grills, vibrating with the noise of bargaining and the volunteering of advice about how to solve the frequent human traffic jams.

She noticed a peculiar vehicle designed just for the Old City and the Palestinian teenage boys who “rode” them. This vehicle was a cart, sometimes two wheels, sometimes four, and at breakneck speeds the boys would lift their feet and hang on the backs of the carts, careening through the alleyways and slopes of the worn-smooth stair-streets, clocking 30 to 40 m.p.h., screaming a battle-cry warning for all to get out of their way. When it came time to put on the brakes, a worn tire dragging behind the cart was jumped upon and the weight of the driver brought the cart to a screeching, tire-smoking halt. The rabbi, watching the spectacle too, reported that with years of practice on these carts, the only conveyance possible in these narrow streets of Old Jerusalem, the boys became masters, stopping and turning on a dime. Lucy watched a young man with a cart piled high with apples speed through the Damascus Gate and fearlessly part the crowds, who dodged him nonchalantly, without missing a word of their conversations.

It was evening. Lucy observed the orange light settling on the white polished stone of the City Walls, pursuing the tops of alleys into the Moslem Quarter, finding the white sheets of clotheslines. But no surface was as accommodating as the ancient, time-softened stone that seemed to hold the evening glow, hoard it, bask in it nobly.

“The gold dome of the Dome of the Rock really gets the sun nice, and the Mount of Olives behind it,” said the rabbi. “Messiah couldn't pick a better place to return to, though I suspect He'll arrive in the morning.”

“In order,” mumbled O'Hanrahan, having ordered the tea by pantomime, “to take aim on the Golden Gate.”

“Through which Messiah must enter the city,” the rabbi explained, seeing Lucy was confused.

“How do you keep some average person from walking through this gate?” she asked.

The rabbi: “Oh, it's sealed up with stone. It'll take a miracle to open it and when that happens, that'll be a good sign we're dealing with the real Messiah. And the Lubovitchers say it's coming soon.”

Lucy rolled her eyes. “Please, not more End Times. You guys have got me spooked enough as it is. Everywhere we've been, they're saying it's the end of the world.”

They fell silent, pursuing ominous thoughts. Would Jerusalem be standing six months from now? Where would the simmering Kuwaiti conflict end—nuclear missiles, biological and chemical exchanges? The Judgment Day?

A pot of mint tea arrived and three glass cups. The proprietor set down a plate of six thick almond cookies with a sprinkling of powdered sugar.

“Like I said,” said Lucy for everyone, taking a cookie, “I'm too young to be judged.”

Rabbi Hersch continued. “There's an amazing 13th-Century prophecy already much discussed here, that says the kings of Media, which would include Baghdad and Saddam Hussein, would turn on the kings of Arabia, which seems to be in the works, and they would bring down a king by the Jordan, which I take it means King Hussein. And that this would throw the world into a war that would begin the End Times and the arrival of Messiah and the triumph of Israel. The Lubavitchers have bumper stickers:
WE WANT MESSIAH NOW.
”

“That ought to get God's attention,” said the professor.

Lucy looked up to see the stone of the Old City had reddened, the sky warm and violet behind the City Walls. Odd, she thought, of anyone wanting to fight in this lovely, blessed place. And yet you saw the films on the news, the fighting in these streets, the tear gas in East Jerusalem. Everywhere amid this bustling, human scene were Israeli soldiers, ruthless and cocky, not loath to use their Uzis. What was the body count? 400-some Palestinians dead in this uprising so far, mostly teenage boys from wretched unimproved environments—environments fostered by this occupation of what used to be Jordan, in a land that in 1917 boasted no more than 90,000 Jews. Yes, wave it away as the rabbi might, there were deep, irremediable differences, true injustices, children killed and homes bulldozed and people who've spent 25 years in horrible refugee camps.

And yet … it was more complicated than any outsider could imagine.

This morning, as Lucy walked around, she saw a souvenir stand full of local T-shirts, one of the many cavernous rooms off an ancient street, a place for wares for the last 3000 years. There was a Star of David and an Uzi with the clever slogan:
UZI DOES IT.
Now, thought Lucy, that's just not funny. 450 Arabs dead and you're poking fun. Here's another T-shirt:
DON'T WORRY AMERICA, ISRAEL IS BEHIND YOU.
A fine piece of irony, that. It manages to appeal to Israeli arrogance, cast aspersions on American fidelity—as if this little Zionist enterprise would have been possible without the $3 billion a year! You think the U.S. doesn't have better things to spend that on: killing Palestinians in their own centuries-held villages? And yet, look who's running the T-shirt shop. A Palestinian man in the Moslem Quarter, no more concerned with the content of what he sells than the alley cats he was shooing from his storefront.

And also last night, Lucy recalled, near the Mehane Yehuda neighborhood when she and the professor were coming back from a delightful Yemeni restaurant, the perfume of Yemeni tea persistent on their palates, there was a rock 'n roll club, which could have been in any Western city. And there outside were a group of Hasidic boys, in their hats and with their side locks and in their dark suits. One boy had his shirt rakishly unbuttoned. One boy, quite clearly stumbling and drunk and laughing loud, had his black suitcoat filled with buttons for rock bands and Zionist slogans. Were these kids sneaking out of Mea Shearim, outraging their parents, leaving at home some hand-wringing mother or some bellowing forbidding father? Somehow she thought not. They were just kids out having a wild post-Sabbath Saturday night. These kids, now dancing to Bon Jovi and Bel Biv Devoe, would grow up to run through the Moslem Quarter, heads covered, eyes on their feet, trying not to breathe the air of the infidel, joyously wiping the dust off when they got to synagogue in the New City. Again: Israel is endlessly more complicated than one's first, second, third, or, God knows, hundredth assessment.

The Moslems who coordinated their
muezzin
and call to prayer at the Mosque of Umar so as not to interfere with the bells across the alley at the Holy Sepulcher, though the Sepulcher is an offense to them.