Darling (3 page)

I grew up in the Age of Existentialism, whereby Man, capital
M,
is alone and free but without recourse to a crucifix that fills the sky. And yet all this café seriousness—you will have noticed—came from the Catholic world, from Europe. I was raised without much sense of trespass. Saint Thérèse easily coexisted with Samuel Beckett. Both spoke French. Both were harrowed by a world empty of God. One reinvented drama to accommodate an absence of meaning. One waited patiently as, in her own simile, a sparrow in a hedge waits for the fog to clear, for the sun to be revealed.

Pius XII, John XXIII, Paul VI, John Paul I . . . it became the habit of John Paul II to address the history of the Roman Catholic Church with contrition. The old man issued over ninety formal apologies—virtually a chronicle of Western civilization. He apologized for the Church's persecution of Galileo. He apologized for the Spanish Inquisition, for the persecution of Jews, for the mistreatment of Martin Luther, for the denigration of women; he apologized for the colonial mistreatment of Native peoples in the Americas; he apologized for violence against Orthodox Christians. John Paul II apologized to the Muslim world for the sacking of Constantinople by the Crusaders in 1204.

The Pope's penitential impulse coincided with a time in the history of the Church when fewer Roman Catholics, particularly in Europe and North America, were availing themselves of the sacrament of Penance. Penance is a sacrament out of line with the postmodern sensibility, for it seeks to alleviate sin—a word we no longer employ. In secular America, the holistic mode of self-forgiveness, self-dispensed, prevails. The pop-psych revivalism of afternoon television involves “owning” one's destructive behaviors; one embarks on a “healing path”; there follows a pledge, many tears, a commercial break. We are a Bathetic Age.

The U.S. government has apologized lately for a number of historical offenses—from slavery to the incarceration of American citizens of Japanese ancestry during World War II. But the truth is that we Americans are too individualistic to huddle together under a collective apology or a collective guilt. We don't understand what it means to apologize for the sins of a past generation. The American disclaimer:
I wasn't even born yet!

As a Roman Catholic, I am prepared to say I am sorry for the Crusades. As an American, I hear some
Jihadist
curse American Crusaders—in English—as he passes in front of a BBC camera, and I am astonished because he implicates me.

As a Roman Catholic, I confess a past I had no part in, a past to which I adhere, a past that is shameful. But as soon as the old man sitting in the yellow plastic chair in the no-man's-room at the airport in Toronto starts going on about Crusader dogs, I think to myself:
Get over it, old man; you weren't even born yet!

•   •   •

The two temples of my youth—of Rome, of America—were not unrelated. The first was my parish church—Sacred Heart Catholic Church, at 39th and J streets, in Sacramento. Sacred Heart Church remains one of the few figments of my dream life that survives and that I am able to revisit without disappointment. Within and without, the architecture is Romanesque—a Roman arch set with mosaic rises above the altar. The Harry Clarke Studio of Dublin City, Ireland, glazed the colored windows in the late 1920s.

My last year of grammar school coincided with the opening (again in the pages of
Life
magazine) of the Second Vatican Council and the desire of the “universal” Church to become, in the Pentecost metaphor of that era, “a Pilgrim Church on earth.” The Church would henceforth speak in all the languages of the earth. My life became less Roman, thereby. The grandeur of the Latin
Mass was lost to me; my rhetorical exception from the naive American novel dissolved. At an early age, therefore, I experienced nostalgia. Nostalgia remains specific in my imagination: the Latin mass, the windows painted by the Harry Clarke Studio in Dublin, the German music favored by Anton Dorndorf, the parish's choir director. My nostalgia was for Europe.

It never occurred to me with any intellectual or emotional force until 2001—odd, because I had seen every Bible movie released between 1951 and 1964—that Christianity, like Judaism, like Islam, is a desert religion, an oriental religion, a Semitic religion, born of sinus-clearing glottal consonants, spit, dust, blinding light.

The Christian calendar has two “deserts”—Advent and Lent—two penitential preludes to the great feasts of Christmas and Easter. Though Christianity has sojourned so long in Europe that the penitential seasons are now imagined as seasons of gaunt—winters of the soul, rather than deserts. These expanses of cold time are symbolized by an ecclesiastical weather of purple cloth.

Which brings me to the second temple of my youth. The Alhambra Theatre in Sacramento was constructed in 1927 to resemble a tall white Muslim fortress. The Alhambra belonged to the generation of exotically themed movie houses that rivaled the fantasies people gathered to enjoy in them. In midsize towns and county seats across America, alongside the five-and-dimes and the Greco-Roman banks and the two-story department stores, there were neon-lit palaces, many with romantic themes derived from Spanish Arabia—the Alcazar, El Capitan, the Valencia, the Granada. Such palaces featured velvet proscenium curtains, wrought-iron balustrades, frescoes, starlit skies.

Roman days. We entered the Alhambra through a shaded garden. We walked among palms, alongside a reflecting pool, to
reach the box office. On the screen, we saw sandal-shod feet, greaves laced to the bulging calves of Roman soldiers, raised standards of the legions of Caesar. A soundtrack of French horns and kettledrums bellowed like a herd of bullocks as marching troops kicked up the dust of some god-forsaken outback of empire. The camera found the eyes of Consul Stephen Boyd. We were relieved to be provided, at last, with a point of view. Stephen Boyd surveyed the desolation, raised his eyes to the balcony where I sat portioning a small box of Milk Duds to last through a crucifixion. A legend appeared in the center of the screen:

ANNO DOMINI
XXVI

I became a Christian at the Alhambra Theatre. I suppose I became a Crusader as well. On the screen of the Alhambra Theatre we watched Otto Preminger's
Exodus,
starring Paul Newman; we watched the blue eyes of Paul Newman survey the Mediterranean, espy the approach of the Promised Land, rising and falling, from the prow of the ship. It did not occur to me to imagine another point of view. I saw Palestine from the sea. I became a Zionist at the Alhambra Theatre.

The distance of Arabs from the American imagination made the ornate folly of the Alhambra Theatre possible. Before I was born, Rudolf Valentino caused a sensation playing the Sheik. Valentino was America's first exotic movie idol, though he was neither an Arab nor a Muslim. He was born Roman Catholic, of a French mother and an Italian father. But genealogy was not the point, nor was religion. The point was a dusky seducer of powder-white women. The point was a silken tent under the stars. The point was a theme for the junior prom. Like the Alhambra Theatre's architecture, Rudolf Valentino referred the American
imagination to an indistinct kingdom somewhere between
A Thousand and One Nights
and the Old Testament.

For many older Americans, until 2001, Baghdad was a thought inseparable from Douglas Fairbanks.

In the big Bible movies, Arabs were supernumeraries, not yet Muslims. Arabs were sellers at the bazaars, tuggers of camels, blind beggars. Arabs were like the desert—shifty, enduring. Jews and Christians were the main players—buff, brown-nippled visionaries (Victor Mature) who suffered the twisted attentions of stuffed-togas (Peter Ustinov) or gold-sandaled sinners (Virginia Mayo).

Islam had no comparable fraudulent reality for me, not until
Lawrence of Arabia;
not until screenwriter Robert Bolt's desert princes (Omar Sharif, Alec Guinness) stung their camels' necks with batons, uttering exit lines such as “So it is written!” The princes were fatalistic foils to Peter O'Toole's blue-eyed “Nothing is written.”

As an adolescent, I read Sir Richard Burton, the nineteenth-century English explorer, because he was there—a maroon half-leather volume on my favorite shelf at the public library (“Travels in Ancient Lands”). Burton smuggled me into Mecca beneath a filthy cloak—Mecca was forbidden to infidels—and he nearly got us killed by standing to urinate, something only an infidel would do. Burton said he knew that but thought no one was watching.

About the time of my hajj with Sir Richard Burton, two examples of Islam in America became apparent to me. When trickster-poet heavyweight champ Cassius Clay espoused the Nation of Islam, renaming himself Muhammad Ali, his conversion immediately drew the world's attention.

In parts of American cities, like Harlem, the South Side of Chicago, and East Oakland, the Nation of Islam was gaining notoriety
as a Northern, an ultra-unorthodox, chapter of the Negro civil rights movement. Black Muslims dressed modestly—like Sunday school teachers, like Mormons, like nuns—but they preached what America feared more than integration: They preached separatism, puritanism, anti-Semitism, racial supremacy, a faith against other faiths, a faith against the United States. The Nation of Islam's claim on orthodox Islam was tenuous.

Muhammad Ali was a winner, the heavyweight boxing champion of the world, and, in his own words, a pretty man—a combination of attributes about as choice as anyone can claim in public America. Ali had more attributes still. A sly wit belied his ferocity in the ring. In his run-in with his draft board, Ali spoke with disarming moral authority. Many Americans, especially men of draft age, admired his refusal to fight in Vietnam. We saw in Ali not only a hero of physical culture, but an upstanding man—thoroughly, never obsequiously, an American. (
“I ain't got no quarrel with them Viet Cong.”
)

Like many of my generation, I became interested in another Black Muslim. There were no “Sweet-By-and-By” refrains in the testimony of Malcolm X. His voice was the puritan voice of the American North. Malcolm X had a strong story to tell of white racism and of his own degradation, but also of spiritual struggle and change.

I realize now there was always within my mother's
ojalá
the recognition that human lives are doomed to surprise. In 1973 I was a student living in London, a student walking through Hyde Park on a summer evening. My mother wrote in her weekly letter of a neighbor, whose fondest wish was to bring her grandchildren to Sacramento for the state fair, and whose leitmotif in my mother's correspondence was of perpetual reticence—to buy a cake or
to play bingo or to go see
The Sound of Music
—because she was saving all her nickels and dimes to treat her grandchildren, etcetera. . . . Well, our friend did manage to bring most of her grandchildren into single file outside the turnstile one blistering August afternoon. As she waved the children forward with her fistful of tokens, she suddenly clutched at her bosom and fell down dead.

In 1964 Malcolm X separated himself from the Nation of Islam to become a Sunni Muslim. This was already a journey away from American provincialism. He traveled to the holy city of Mecca as a requirement of his faith, and he was astonished to meet all the tribes and kinds of people of the earth gathered there. It was in Mecca that Malcolm X found his spiritual inheritance—a vision larger than grievance, larger than America; a vision of belonging to the world and in the world.

Malcolm X was murdered in New York in 1965 as an apostate Black Muslim.

In the same letter, the fairground letter, as an aside, my mother mentioned that the Alhambra Theatre had closed. The property had been sold to Safeway.

At that time, Americans were daily reading about the Viet Cong and Ho Chi Minh in Hanoi and the labyrinthine Mekong Delta. We were abandoning the old downtowns of Amercian cities and their grandiose movie palaces. The theaters were boarded up or partitioned into two or three screens. In 1975 the last American helicopter lifted off from the besieged U.S. embassy in Saigon. Southeast Asian refugees began to arrive in California. By the time I returned to Sacramento, the Safeway Corporation had pulled down Samson's pillars. All that remained of the Alhambra Theatre was a tiled wall on the edge of a parking lot.

The new American movie theater, in the suburban mall, was a box, or several boxes, joined by a lobby of no romantic implication. Mall theaters did have the advantages of gigantic screens, rocking seats, free parking, and elaborate sound systems that could portray explosions and epic destructions with what we supposed was astonishing verisimilitude.

Among the many things we learned on the morning of September 11 was that epic destruction does not necessarily carry a sound in our memory or in our mind's eye.

Jerusalem and the Desert

On the flight from London I sit opposite a rumble seat where the stewardess places herself during takeoff. The stewardess is an Asian woman with a faraway look. I ask how often she makes this flight. Once or twice a month. Does she enjoy Israel? Not much. She stays in a hotel in Tel Aviv. She goes to the beach. She flies back. What about Jerusalem? She has not been there. What is in Jerusalem?

The illustrated guidebook shows a medieval map of the world. The map is round. The sun has a beard of fire. All the rivers of the world spew from the mouth of the moon. At the center of the world is Jerusalem.

Just inside the main doors of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, tourists seem unsure how to respond to a rectangular slab of marble resting upon the floor. Lamps and censors and trinkets hang suspended above the stone. We watch as an old woman approaches. With some effort, she gets down on her knees. I flip through my book:
This marble represents the Stone of Unction where Jesus's body was anointed. This is not original; this stone dates from 1810
. The old woman bends forward to kiss the pale stone.

I have come to the Holy Land because the God of the Jews, the God of the Christians, the God of the Muslims—a common God—revealed Himself in this desert. My curiosity about an ecology that
joins three religions dates from September 11, 2001, from prayers enunciated in the sky over America on that day.

Most occidental Christians are unmindful of the orientalism of Christianity. Over two millennia, the locus of Christianity shifted westward—to Antioch, to Rome, to Geneva, to the pale foreheads of Thomistic philosophers, to Renaissance paintings, to glitter among the frosts of English Christmas cards. Islam, too, in the middle centuries, swept into Europe with the Ottoman carpet, but then receded. (On September 11, 1683, the King of Poland halted the Muslim advance on Europe at the Gates of Vienna.) Only to reflux. Amsterdam, Paris are becoming Islamic cities.

After centuries of Diaspora, after the calamity of the Holocaust in Europe, Jews turned once more toward the desert. Zionists did not romanticize the desolate landscape. Rather, they defined nationhood as an act of planting. The impulse of the kibbutz movement remains the boast of urban Israel: to make the desert bloom.

The theme of Jerusalem is division. Friday. Saturday. Sunday. The city has been conquered, destroyed, rebuilt, garrisoned, halved, quartered, martyred, and exalted—always the object of spiritual desire, always the prize, always the corrupt model of the eventual city of God. The government of Ariel Sharon constructed a wall that separates Jerusalem from the desert, Jerusalem from Bethlehem, Easter from Christmas.

Jerusalem was the spiritual center of the Judean wilderness. It was Jerusalem the desert thought about. It was Jerusalem the prophets addressed. Jerusalem was where Solomon built a temple for the Lord and where God promised to dwell with His people. Jerusalem was where Jesus died and was resurrected. It was from Jerusalem that Muhammad ascended to heaven during his night journey.

My first impression of the city is my own loneliness—oil stains
on the road, rubble from broken traffic barriers, exhaust from buses, the drift of cellophane bags. At the Damascus Gate an old woman sits on the pavement, sorting grape leaves into piles—or some kind of leaves. It is hot. Already it is hot. Late spring. It is early morning. There is a stench of uncollected garbage, and the cats, light and limp as empty purses, slink along the blackened stone walls. Shopkeepers are unrolling their shops.

I turn into the courtyard of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, the site of Christ's burial and resurrection. A few paces away, within the church, is Golgotha, where Jesus was crucified. Golgotha, the Place of the Skull, is also, according to Jerusalem tradition, the grave of Adam. Jerusalem is as condensed, as self-referential, as Rubik's Cube.

I wait in line to enter the sepulcher, a freestanding chapel in the rotunda of the basilica. A mountain was chipped away from the burial cave, leaving only the cave. Later the cave was destroyed. What remains is the interior of the cave, which is nothing. The line advances slowly until, after two thousand years, it is my turn. I must lower my shoulders and bend my head; I must almost crawl to pass under the low opening.

I am inside the idea of the tomb of Christ.

I will return many times to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher during my stay and form in my mind an accommodation to its clamorous hush, to the musk of male asceticism—indeed, I will form a love for it that was not my first feeling. Though my first impression remains my last: emptiness.

•   •   •

I wait for Haim Berger in the lobby of a hotel in Ein Bokek, one among an oasis of resorts near the Dead Sea. The lobby is a desert of sand-colored marble. The lobby's temperature is oppressively beige; it would be impossible to cool this useless atrium. My cell
phone rings. It is Maya, the director of the travel agency attached to my hotel in Jerusalem. Haim will be late one hour. Look for him at ten o'clock.

I watch a parade of elderly men and women crossing the lobby in bathing suits to catch a shuttle to the sulfur baths. They are so unself-conscious about their bodies they seem to walk in paradise.

I imagine I am waiting for someone in shorts and boots and aviator glasses, driving a Jeep. A Volkswagen pulls up and parks haphazardly.

A man bolts from the car. He is willowy of figure, dressed all in white, sandals, dark curly hair. He disappears into the hotel, reemerges. We wait side by side.

I cannot go to the desert alone. I am unfit for it. The desert requires a Jeep. It requires a hat and sunglasses and plastic liters of warm water it is no pleasure to drink. It requires a guide. It requires a cell phone.

Just now the man dressed in white begins patting his pockets, searching for his chiming cell. “
Ken . . . shalom,
Maya,” I hear him say. Then, turning toward me, “Ah.”

Haim Berger is full of apology. He has taken his wife to an emergency room. Yes, everything is all right. Just a precaution. There is an Evian bottle for me in the car. We will switch to the Jeep later.

Within ten minutes I am standing with Haim on the side of the highway. We look out over a plain, over what once was Sodom and Gomorrah. Haim asks if I know the story. Of course I know the story. Which, nevertheless, does not stop him from telling it. We might be standing near where Abraham stood when “Abraham saw dense smoke over the land, rising like fumes from a furnace.”

I ask Haim if he is religious. He is not.

•   •   •

All three desert religions claim Abraham as father. A recurrent question in my mind concerns the desert: Did Abraham happen upon God or did God happen upon Abraham? The same question: Which is the desert, or who? I came upon a passage in 2 Maccabees. The passage pertains to the holiness of Jerusalem:
The Lord, however, had not chosen the people for the sake of the Place, but the Place for the sake of the people.
So, God happened upon Abraham. Abraham is the desert.

An old man sits at the door of his tent in the heat of the day.

Between that sentence and this—within the drum of the hare's heart, within the dilation of the lizard's eye—God enters his creation. The old man, who is Abraham, becomes aware of three strangers standing nearby. They arrive without the preamble of distance. The nominative grammar of Genesis surpasses itself to reveal that one of these travelers is God or perhaps all three are God, like a song in three octaves. Abraham invites the Three to rest and to refresh themselves. In return, God promises that in a year's time Abraham's wife, who is long past childbearing, will hold in her arms a son.

Abraham's wife, Sarah, in the recesses of the tent, snorts upon hearing the prognostication; says, not quite to herself: Oh, sure!

God immediately turns to Abraham:
Why does Sarah laugh? Is anything too marvelous for God?

Sarah says: I am not laughing.

God says:
Yes, you are.

In 1947 a Bedouin goatherd lost a goat and climbed the side of a mountain to look for it. The boy entered a cave—today the cave is known worldwide among archaeologists as Qumran Cave 1. What the boy found in the cave—probably stumbled upon in the dark—were broken clay jars that contained five sheepskin scrolls.
Four of the scrolls were written in Hebrew, one in Aramaic. More scrolls were subsequently found by other Bedouin and by scholars in adjacent caves. The discovered scrolls—including a complete copy of the Book of Isaiah—are the oldest-known manuscript copies of books of the Bible.

The scrolls date to the second century
BC.
Scholars believe the Jewish sect of Essenes, of the proto-monastic community of Qumran, hid the texts we now know as the Dead Sea Scrolls. No one remembers whether the goatherd found his goat.

•   •   •

Haim is not religious but he offers to tell me a curious story: Last year he took a group of students into a mountainous part of the desert. He had been there many times. He had previously discovered markings on rocks that seemed to indicate religious observance; he believes the markings are ancient.

On the particular day he describes—it was the winter solstice—as the group approached a mountain, they saw what appeared to be a semicircle of flame emanating from the rock face, rather like the flame from a hoop in the circus. Haim knew it was a trick of the light, or perhaps gases escaping from a fissure in the rock. He walked before the mountain in an arc to observe the phenomenon from every angle. He repeats: He was not alone. They all saw it. He has photographs. He will show me the photographs.

Haim's love for the desert dates from his military service. His Jeep broke down one day. He cursed the engine. He slammed the hood. He took a memorable regard of the distance. Since that day, he has become intimate with the distance; he has come to see the desert as a comprehensible ecosystem that can be protective of humans.

Haim has tied a white kerchief over his hair.

Haim says: “Bedouin know a lot. Bedouin have lived in the
desert thousands of years.” Haim says: “If you are ever stranded in the desert—
Are you listening to me? This may save your life!—
in the early morning, you must look to see in which direction the birds are flying. They will lead you to water.”

Haim stops to speak with admiration of a bush with dry, gray-green leaves. “These leaves are edible.” (Now I must sample them.) “They are salty, like potato chips.” (They are salty.)

Of another bush: “These have water. If you crush them, you will get water. These could save your life.” He crushes a fistful of leaves and tears spill from his hand.

•   •   •

The child of Abraham and Sarah is named Isaac, which means “He Laughs.” Sarah proclaims an earthy Magnificat:
God has made laughter for me, and all who hear of it will laugh for me.
From the loins of these two deserts—Abraham, Sarah—God yanks a wet, an iridescent, caul: a people as numerous as the stars. From the line of Sarah, royal David. From King David's line will come Jesus.

•   •   •

One's sense of elision begins with the map. Many tourist maps include the perimeters of the city at the time of Herod's temple, the time of Christ.
This once was
 . . .
Built over the site
 . . .
All that remains
 . . .
This site resembles
 . . .

This is not the room of the Last Supper; this is a Crusader structure built over the room, later converted to a mosque—note the mihrab, the niche in the wall.

The empty room is white—not white, golden.
Is the air really golden?
As a child in Omaha, my friend Ahuva was ravished by the thought—told her by an old man in a black hat—that the light of Jerusalem is golden. An ultra-Orthodox boy wanders into the room (a few paces from this room is the Tomb of King David, the anteroom to which is dense with the smell of men at prayer;
upstairs is a minaret); the boy is eating something, some kind of bun. He appears transfixed by a small group of evangelical Christian pilgrims who have begun to sing a song, what in America we would call an old song.

•   •   •

I am alone in the early morning at St. Anne's, a Romanesque church built in the twelfth century. The original church was damaged by the Persians; restored in the time of Charlemagne; destroyed, probably by the Caliph al-Hakim, in 1010. The present church was built by the Crusaders. Sultan Salah ad-Din captured the city in 1192 and converted the church to a madrassa. The Ottoman Turks neglected the structure; it fell to ruin. The Turks offered the church to France. The French order of White Fathers now administers St. Anne's. Desert sun pours through a window over the altar.

Not only is the light golden, Ahuva, but I must mention a specific grace. Around four o'clock, the most delightful breeze comes upon Jerusalem, I suppose from the Mediterranean, miles away. It begins at the tops of the tallest trees, the date palm trees; shakes them like feather dusters; rides under the bellies of the lazy red hawks; snaps the flags on the consulate roofs; lifts the curtains of the tall windows of my room at the hotel—sheer curtains embroidered with an arabesque design—lifts them until they are suspended perpendicularly in midair like the veil of a bride tormented by a playful page, who then lets them fall. And then lifts. And then again.