Requiem (5 page)

Tom
had found David in the kitchen again that morning. To be more precise, by
waiting there, pretending to rinse cups, David had found him. Within moments
he'd offered Tom some decent coffee in place of the mud provided free by the
hotel. Minutes later he insisted on their breakfasting together on fresh
croissants and pastries from a nearby delicatessen. Tom suggested they go together,
but David showed great reluctance to step outside the hotel.

When
Tom got back, David had laid the table. Coffee had brewed. As they ate, the old
man coaxed information from Tom with practised skill: that his wife had died,
that he was thirty-five, that he had travelled a little and that he'd quit
teaching suddenly and for reasons he was not about to divulge.

Tom in turn
learned that David was born in Greece, had lived in Paris, London and French
Algeria and, in addition to the languages of those countries, spoke both Hebrew
and Arabic. He made his living, he said, as a poorly paid translator of
academic papers.

'So how was
your first visit,' David asked, steering the subject elsewhere, 'to the Holy
City?'

'Disappointing.' Tom refilled his coffee
cup.

'From
which remark I take it that your visit to Jerusalem has special significance?'

'You're
asking me if I'm a Christian? Yes, I am. But I keep forgetting.'

'Why were you disappointed?'

'Everywhere
I went I was being ripped off. Christians, Muslims, Jews. I was a target.'

'Why
are you surprised? Is this not the city where your Lord overturned the tables
of the money-changers? It hasn't improved.'

David's
manner made Tom smile. 'But I hoped to feel something. Inside.'

'And you didn't?'

'At
first. I got a big rush when I approached the city. Then it was sullied by the
people. I mean, it doesn't help your faith, does it? If you have any.'

'Faith? Faith is the
bridge,
monsieur,
between hope and a dirty world. If it is to be broken
so easily, with what poor materials did you build it?'

'Do you have faith, as a Jew?'

He let a finger float towards the ceiling and sat back
in his chair. 'On a good day. On a day when I can get good coffee and fresh
pastries and talk like this with intelligent company. What will you do today?'
The conversational game board was being folded away.

Tom told him
about Sharon, mentioning her address. 'Would that be a Jewish area?'

'Of course. Arabs don't live up there.'

'I'm
sorry. Sometimes Jews and Arabs look the same to me. In the street I see
blond-haired, blue-eyed Jews and dark-skinned, brown-eyed Jews. Yet the Jews
are supposed to be a race. How can that be?'

David
threw his hands in the air and closed his eyes. That question, clearly, was
another game of backgammon. Tom changed the subject and told him about his
encounter with the Arab woman. David listened carefully. 'Was this in the
Christian quarter?'

I don't
know. I might have strayed into the Arab quarter. The woman was, I think, an
Arab. She spooked me, but in all probability she was just after a tip for
showing me a bit of archaeology.'

'In all probability,' said David.

Tom was not
about to be intimidated by Jerusalem. He'd hardly done justice to any of it,
and the Old City was a dense catalogue of spiritual and archaeological
interest, a square mile of religious labyrinth. He wanted to swim in its secret
pools and explore its caverns. He wanted to stand at its centre.

Katie always wanted to come here and never
had.

Did this city have a
great secret? Was there a secret? The Crusaders considered Jerusalem the centre
of the world, spawning the great monotheistic faiths that conquered the world
like tidal waves, fought over with the same religious blood-lust since time
unrecorded as it was still being fought over today. Here it stood, still
spinning from the collision of the European, African and Asian continents. The
landmasses of Europe and Africa were like the straddling legs and Asia the head
of a vast nutcracker, bearing in on Jerusalem, the bitter-sweet nut.

There
was
something here in this place, cracking, splintering, oozing. It
seeped between the stone blocks of the venerable buildings and down the runnels
of the ancient streets. It washed under the feet of the city's inhabitants with
their brief lives. It glowed darkly in the excavations under the floors of
their homes. You had to be dead not to feel it! The very dust was alive, like a
radioactive substance. It stuck to your sandals, thought Tom; it got under your
nails, ingrained your skin, dried your throat and made you thirsty.

It does all this.
But it doesn't make you a better person. And it doesn't bring Katie back.

This time he approached
the Old City via another entrance. Outside the wall young men and women of
student age went about in olive army fatigues, Uzi machineguns slung across their
shoulders. To see so many young women militarized intrigued him. Beautiful
girls, armed, strong, confident, somehow unassailable. He was both appalled by
this emancipation-through-arms and strangely energized by the spectacle. The
guns made the girls more desirable.

New
Gate admitted directly on to the Christian quarter. He had taken another map
from the hotel and had bought a guide book. When he reached the Church of the
Holy Sepulchre, a new queue of visitors had formed, alongside a sizeable
gathering of folk in wheelchairs.

He
sat on a flight of stone steps and studied his guide book. Within ten seconds
he was approached by two touts who wanted to guide him. 'Get out of my face!'
he yelled. What was it about this city? You couldn't stay still for a moment.
If you didn't keep moving, you became a target. Stillness was weakness. Keep
circulating, or be bitten. You had to live like a small fish, darting away from
bigger fish that moved in at you from all sides.

He returned
to his guide book. He was dismayed to learn that there was doubt about the
authenticity of the site of the Holy Sepulchre. An alternative site for the
Crucifixion and the Resurrection was proposed just north of Damascus Gate. It
had never occurred to him that the Holy Sepulchre might be bogus. He flipped
the guide book over, checking the name of the author to see if it had been
written by a Jew or an Arab, someone with an axe to grind.

This site, it claimed,
had always been within the city wall, whereas tradition dictated that the
Crucifixion had taken place outside the city. He looked over at the rows of
wheelchairs, lined up as if for a race, and hoped they hadn't come to the wrong
place. The present site, the book stated, was chosen by Helena, mother of
Constantine, Emperor of Byzantium, three and a half centuries after the
Crucifixion. Helena had made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem and was disappointed by
the absence of shrines. So she built one here.

Tom
snapped his book shut. He went inside the church again. Guards were still
hurrying people in and out of the chapel inside the church. Around the back the
spider-priest was busy palming plastic crosses to tourists. Tom left.

He
visited the Dome of the Rock, having read that the Golden Dome, its gold melted
down to pay the caliph's debts, was actually rendered in aluminium-bronze
alloy. From there he drifted back through the Muslim quarter towards Damascus
Gate, threading a narrow street of market stalls selling rush matting and
spices and exotic fruits. If he paused to look, the traders plagued him. To
escape he passed beneath a shady, arched passage, which pitched him into a
quiet cul-de-sac. It was familiar.

It was the
site of his encounter with the old Arab woman. He swallowed hard. Just a few
yards away was the terminal arch and the stone on which the old woman had
scratched letters. Today she was gone. Tom inched forward into the shadowy
recess, curious to see what she'd been trying to show him.

There was
no one around. A faint murmur came from the street of market sellers beyond the
arches. He moved closer and at once recognized the cloyingly sweet and
evocative balsam that had characterized the encounter. He could see no markings
of any kind on the wall. Indeed, it was a concrete block, probably no older
than twenty or thirty years. He'd expected to see something of note, perhaps a
brick or stone pillaged from an earlier age. Whatever the woman had been
scratching on the wall, it had left no traces.

Yet he'd
clearly seen her writing on stone which crumbled like powder.

At the foot
of the wall lay the map he'd dropped in his haste. He picked it up. It was
still folded for quick reference to the route back to the hotel. But now the
location of his hotel had been marked by a dark, oval stain.

Tom held the
map up to the available light. What he'd taken to be a stain was actually a
small thumbprint on the page. At first he thought the thumbprint was simply an
impression left by greasy fingers.

Someone
cooed at him softly. He looked up and saw an Arab in headdress staring at him
from the passage. The Arab clicked his tongue and cooed again. He was an aged,
portly man, but his eyes were alert, suggestive. Tom leaped forward and
shouldered his way out. Startled by this deft movement, the Arab shouted something
incomprehensible after him.

Not
until he was through Damascus Gate did he stop to examine the map again. Now,
in the strong sunlight outside the city, he could see that the mark gave the
extraordinary impression of having been branded on to the paper. It was clearly
a thumbprint but scorched on the page as if by a charred hand.

He looked about him,
wanting someone in the crowd at Damascus Gate to offer an explanation. The
tourists and the traders ignored him. He looked at the ramparts of the city
wall. The old stone battlements seemed unpleasantly moist, sweating under the
relentless dry heat.

Tom
put the stained map in his pocket and made his way back to the hotel.

7

'I'm trying to tell you what happened,
but you don't listen. You've stopped listening to me.'

'No, I haven't.'

'Yes, you have,' Katie
had said. 'Do you know how hard it is? When something is slipping away as fast
as this? How hard it is to stop it?' Her voice had fractured. Her blue eyes
were splintered with ice, thawing, refreezing, thawing. 'Don't you know that it
requires work — real work? From the depths. This is from the depths. Do you
know how difficult this is for me? I'm hurting just to speak to you. Every word
is paid for. From the depths.'

8

'Agoraphobia,' said
David. 'I am cursed with a fear of the marketplace.'

This literal
translation of the term was offered with a genial smile and a hitching of
trousers. In the course of his conversations the trousers would work their way
down by degrees from the proximity of his armpits to somewhere below his hips.

'When did you last go out?' Tom wanted to
know.

'Independence Day. 1978.

'You've been
indoors for fifteen years? How do you manage?'

David made a gesture. 'People are kind.'

Tom had
returned from his morning in the Old City looking to take a nap. The June sun
outside was a furnace. The dust of Old Jerusalem and the traffic fumes of New
Jerusalem hung in the heat. Yet the
Hassids
and the
Arab women outside went garbed in stifling black clothes; clearly, it was more
important to suffer in Jerusalem than to awaken unmanageable desires.

After
sleeping he found David at his station in the kitchen, poring over a grizzled
copy of
Reader's Digest.
Recounting his morning, Tom omitted all mention
of the scorched map. He alluded to the signs in the neighbourhood restricting
women's dress.

David seemed to bridle slightly. 'When in
Rome . . .'

‘Is
every man in this city a seething cesspit of uncontrollable lust that women
can't show their elbows?'

'"I
charge you, O ye daughters of Jerusalem, that ye stir not up, nor awake my
love, till he please.’" David pushed his glasses further up the bridge of
his nose. 'Yes, I know the Song of Songs. But it's the women who have to wander
around at boiling point, swathed in blankets, because the glimpse of a
funny-bone is too much to handle.'

At
which point David remarked that to go out at all must be a pleasant experience.
'People are kind,' he repeated, patting into place the loose pages of his
Digest.
Then he got up and shuffled out of the kitchen, making Tom think he'd
either offended or saddened him.

Tom
intended to walk up the Mount of Olives to Gethsemane, taking advantage of the
cool of early evening. To complete his walk before dusk he knew he should leave
immediately. But a sudden impulse propelled him outside, to return with
sculptured ice-creams for himself and David. He didn't know which was David's
room.

With the
ice-cream melting over his fingers, he rang the bell to summon the young hotel
superintendent. The boy with the locks and the bathysphere-glass spectacles
squinted oddly at Tom when asked for David's room number. He seemed not to want
to part with it.