Messi@ (19 page)

Next morning bright and early, the company met for breakfast. The nuns set before the guests baskets of fresh rolls, cheese, salami, and soft-boiled eggs in egg cups. Black tea and strong, sweet Turkish coffee in small porcelain cups were served. The guests enjoyed this simple Transylvanian repast, though only Earl Smith ate the salami. The rest were vegetarians. Mr. Rabindranath only drank the tea.

“Are you going to eat your salami?” Earl Smith asked Andrea.

“No, please help yourself!” She looked mildly surprised.

Mr. Smith laughed. “You'll never find a Native American vegetarian! Only fake Native Americans are vegetarians in America! Hippies, that is.”

Andrea chortled uneasily. She had been under the impression that American Indians ate corn. But all she knew about Indians came from friends of hers, hippie musicians who had lived in a loft, slept on mattresses on the floor, and called themselves Indians. They wore feathers in their hair and had leather pouches around their necks. Faux natives! Mr. Smith explained that Indians had once hunted bison, called buffalo in North America, and that now they were enamored of filet mignon. They ate plenty of corn, too, and beans, and garnishes and sauces. When they went to the big cities they ate Chinese and Mexican cuisine. Take molé sauce, for instance! Andrea had never heard of molé, so she endured a detailed description of this rich chocolate-and-hot-pepper sauce, which had been used, Mr. Smith claimed, to obscure the rather gamy flavor of human flesh. Mr. Smith smacked his lips to everyone's amusement except Andrea's. Human flesh was not one of her favorite subjects.

The group had to take a series of crowded buses to get to the Damascus Gate. On one, Andrea found herself hanging from an overhead support, pressed against a frowning granny with a large bag clutched to her chest, and flanked by Mr. Smith and Sister Rodica. In addition to lurching, stopping suddenly, and weaving erratically, the bus was full of talk, buzzing like a beehive.

“Thank God for telephones!” a man said emphatically.

“Amen,” came from different quarters of the bus.

“I sat in the basement with my gas mask on and called everyone!” said the woman with the shopping bag, giving both the nun and Andrea a look of contempt. “One Scud fell right next to my daughter's doctor's office.”

Sister Rodica tried not to look at the woman's arms, two sticks of bone clutching the shopping bag. She knew what she'd see: the fading blue numbers. They were everywhere in Israel, ghostly, fading digits of the Holocaust, the phone numbers of hell. But she could feel the woman's eyes on her and the old man's voice—“Thank God for telephones!”—echoing in her ears.

Sister Rodica was offended on behalf of Andrea. She resented the unending lament of the Jews who felt free to broadcast their suffering loudly at every opportunity, especially when she, a sister of the German order, was around. Sure, it was their country, but the horrible fire that had burned those blue numbers on the woman's arm had gone out over a half century ago, more than forty years before Andrea was born. The Iraqi Scud attacks on Israel had long been over. The telephones, which had been lifelines keeping Israelis in touch while they sat in their bomb shelters with gas masks on, had long since turned back into instruments of idle gossip and business. What about all that had happened to Andrea? Her horrors were so fresh she still wouldn't speak of them. The sister had seen the fading scars of cigarette burns on Andrea's thighs and on the underside of her arms. Horrors that most young Israelis thought happened only to their grandparents had happened to this girl. But she had no one's telephone number. Sister Rodica blazed with indignation even as she became Andrea's knight in shining armor. She pressed against the girl, as if to protect her from the old woman's arms and the old man's raspy voice.

Sister Rodica's heavy cloth bag pressed against Andrea's side, filled with what felt like marbles. She leaned into the nun's ear and whispered, “What's in your bag, Sister?”

Even in the buzzing hive of the bus, the nun's blush was noticeable. “Chestnuts,” she whispered back.

Sister Rodica, it turned out, had some business to conduct in the Arab quarter. She sold chestnuts from the convent garden to Arabs in the bazaar. Andrea later noted with some admiration what a tough bargainer the sister was. She rejected indignantly one offer of 25 shekels for a bag and stood her ground for ten minutes before going to the next stall. This was no mean feat; the merchants of Suk Khan ez-Zeit had been bargaining for four thousand years. While their shelves groaned with unsold spices at this unfortunate juncture of history, they had no doubt that long after the world of the twentieth century had evaporated, they would still be here, bargaining with whatever life-forms inhabited the planet. The spice market was too important to end with the world.

It was an overcast and windy day—Sister Rodica could smell snow on the blades of cold wind that agitated her habit. She loved this smell, the smell of her childhood. In her village, snow came down for weeks in winter, until only the round roofs of the houses were visible. Her father and the other men would clear paths through the snow to the church and to the tavern. During the long winter nights she listened to the singing of the men in the tavern drifting up to the icy pinpoints of the stars. The girls and women sat at home, weaving at their looms and telling scary stories. Smoke from their wood stoves hung in the air above the houses like question marks.

Of the convent's guests, only Earl Smith, Lama Cohen, and Andrea truly knew snow. For Earl Smith, the silence of the Second Mesa after a snowstorm represented the sum of all that was good in the universe. He had often mounted his horse and gone a mile or so out of his native village of Old Oraibi, just so that he could be alone in the vast whiteness of the mesa. This was the center of the world, as foretold in the Hopi prophecies. At no time was the truth of this more apparent than after a snowstorm, when creation was fully awake. If he looked hard enough, he could see the great Wheel of the Cosmos, composed of stars, turn above him. The message he waited for had always been partially hidden. But on the Second Mesa, part of it was visible. One snowy night, an elder of the Spider clan had come to him in a dream and said, “Go to Jerusalem!”

“The place of the Christians?” he asked, bewildered.

“And of the Jews, the Moslems, and Israeli television,” the dream elder had replied.

As for Andrea, the less snow she saw, the better.

The Damascus Gate was crowded, as usual, with Arab money changers, idle Palestinian boys, and religious Jews handing out pamphlets. Sister Rodica went ahead of the group and cut resolutely through the jeering youth like the prow of a Christian ship. The Arabs glared at her, their faces masks of scorn. A small group of young Orthodox Jews with machine guns over their left shoulders made kissy noises in her direction.

“Sometimes the Orthodox Jews throw stones at the sisters,” Father Zahan told Andrea, “and shout after them, ‘Go to heaven, you like it so much!' But the sisters just forge ahead.”

Sister Rodica turned, her round face filled with happiness. “There is nothing better than suffering for the Lord!” she said.

“Maybe!” Mr. Rabindranath said, “but there is an art to it!”

“There surely is an art to throwing stones in Jerusalem!” Father Hernio said ironically. “Here we are, a stone's throw away from the first Station of the Cross.”

“And the Intifada,” said Mr. Smith

“And the tombs of Absalom and Ezekiel, both of whom threatened, if I am not mistaken, to leave no stone standing in Jerusalem!”

“Better not talk of stones in Jerusalem!” said Lama Cohen. “I'm superstitious.”

Everyone laughed. In the narrow streets of the Old City bazaar, stones took on personalities. Every one of them had been thrown at least once, soaked in blood many times, kissed and worshiped, washed, touched, rounded, spoken to. The stones of Jerusalem! There were as many of them as there were words in all the languages of the world, or maybe more. And they had lasted longer, cried louder, and seen more history than just about any stones on earth.

While Sister Rodica disappeared briefly into a dimly lit vault of the Suk Khan ez-Zeit to bargain, Andrea and Father Zahan inspected the wares of a shriveled little man whose stall stood below the seventh Station of the Cross. Among the walnut icons of Mother Mary and her son, which opened like little books, and Moslem prayer cards, and hand-carved Crusader chess sets, and silver icons of Saint George, there was a round black box full of white bone dice inscribed with characters the father had never seen. They looked cuneiform, Phoenician perhaps. His curiosity was piqued.

“Oh, it's only a game,” the merchant said, waving his hand to signify that it was of little consequence. “Perhaps I can interest you in a tea set.”

“I believe I once saw something like this in Australia,” Father Zahan persisted. “It is a divination game of some sort, is it not?”

The merchant admitted that it was but claimed that he had no idea what language it was or what the characters meant. “Why bother? Why not buy a nice silver rosary? Or the best coffee
ibric
in all of Jerusalem? My very own
ibric
, from my ancestors!”

“Your ancestors, the Turks?” laughed Father Zahan. The brass coffeepot was of Turkish design.

“Anything you want; forget these … these dominoes!”

Intrigued by the spectacle of a
suk
merchant unwilling to part with his wares, the father insisted. The father and Andrea managed to wrest the game from the distraught dealer for 20 shekels.

“I think it is some sort of story game. The players build a story with the words,” the father remembered. “The players arrange the dice to tell a story.”

Andrea was given the honor of schlepping the box.

At the entrance to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Sister Rodica stopped to introduce the marble column to the left, its Crusader capital incised with knights' crosses. A crack ran through the bottom of it, and graffiti dating back to the eleventh century were carved into the marble. The sister ran her hand lovingly along the crack, and her eyes filled with tears.

“When the heathen first conquered the Holy City, the marble cracked here.” She ignored the Bedouin with the filthy beard who stared at her with fiery eyes. “You can touch an open wound to this crack and it will heal, even a bullet hole. But if you're a heathen and touch it to blaspheme, a wound will open in you and you'll never be able to close it.”

Andrea thought it safer not to touch the crack. But the others lined up like children at a petting zoo, and one after another they stuck their fingers in the miraculous marble, hoping for their spiritual wounds to close. One thing she noticed about her companions was that they were filled with mischievous pleasure and were ready to do any foolishness on a moment's notice. Learned men! snorted Andrea to herself, no better than children! And woman, she added, remembering Lama Cohen. But maybe this was faith, this joyful childishness. Faith wasn't grave and ominous, like the bearded Serbian priest assigned to reeducate camp inmates. In any case, she didn't think that she had any faith, either joyous or grave.

The Church of the Holy Sepulchre, begun by the emperor Constantine's craftsmen in the fourth century, was filled, for Sister Rodica, with miracles. Under the Martyrion, in the crypt known to the Crusaders as the Chapel of Saint Helena, steps led down to the foot of the cross. It was here that Constantine's mother, Helena, was instructed by a dream to dig for the True Cross, on which the Savior had been crucified. The ledge where she had sat throwing shekels to the diggers while she supervised the work was like the vault of heaven itself for the sister. She lifted up her tear-filled eyes and uttered a prayer. They were standing before Mount Golgotha, the hillock of Calvary. Behind glass was the virgin rock on which the crucifixion took place. It was deeply cracked, having given way at the moment of Christ's death. Hanging from an arch above it were oil lamps representing every Christian denomination in the world. Set in the middle of the arch was the representation of a crucified Christ, a Semitic-looking man with a short beard. Below the cracked stone of Golgotha was the cave where the skull of Adam rested.

“The blood of Christ,” said Sister Rodica, sniffling, “washed away the sins of Adam.” She knelt on the Greek altar at the Twelfth Station—ground zero of the crucifixion—and put her hand into a hole in the stone floor. When she stood again, her countenance was beatific.

“Go ahead,” she urged her charges, “put your hand there and feel the redeemed skull of Adam. If you have faith, you will feel the peace of Jesus Christ.”

Andrea kneeled, closed her eyes, and felt with her hand in the dark. Beneath her fingers the smoothly polished stone gave off a cold tremor, a sort of low electrical current. It traveled up her fingers and quickly spread through her shoulders and head and numbed her lips. It felt like the touch of the cattle prod the Serbian guards had used to make the inmates fall in line. Her heart opened like a flower, and sobs flowed involuntarily from her. She tried with all her strength to reverse the current, to send back this energy to the vibrating darkness below the cross, but she could not. She felt sorrow for her mother, her father, Sarajevo, the world, everything she never thought about anymore. She felt sorrow for everything but herself. About herself she felt nothing. Andrea withdrew her hand and lifted her eyes to the Byzantine image of the crucified man. But instead of Christ she saw Gala Keria, the hostess of
Gal Gal Hamazal
, looking down on her with anxious pity.

She straightened up abruptly and her backpack flew open. The divination game spilled out and also a heavy round object that rolled on the marble floor. Conscious of the press of pilgrims behind her, Andrea groped blindly for the boney letters and collected them. The other object, a heavy gold pocket watch, had come to rest at the very edge of the sacred opening leading to the skull below Golgotha. She clutched it and felt its ticking with relief. She had taken a fancy to it the moment she had seen Father Tuiredh withdraw it to study the hour. It had taken quite a bit of work and waiting to separate the watch from the suspicious Irish padre. Now that she'd recovered it, she was gripped by panic. Had any of her companions seen it?