Gospel (108 page)

“What will the Hilton be? $100 a night?”

O'Hanrahan talked as if in a trance, hypnotically. “Who cares if it's $500 a night. To touch the first world, even for a moment, is worth anything. Everything!”

Fifty miles from Khartoum:

Dr. O'Hanrahan: “I will sell myself on Khartoum's main street into white slavery for some ice cream and chocolate sauce, chocolate of any variety…”

Rusted signs probably erected by the British a century ago announced that Omdurman was in 10 miles, and Lucy saw the beginnings of shacks and village sprawl. Omdurman was a bustling, dirty city in its own right, though everything in this valley was termed a suburb of Khartoum, spread about the junction of the White Nile and the Blue Nile.

Their new driver, also named Mohammed, pointed out a beige mosque with a metallic dome that resembled an upside-down cocktail shaker, home of the whirling dervishes. Their driver, translated by O'Hanrahan, told of the humor of watching the novices without proper practice spin round and round until they collapsed sick from dizziness, vomiting and retching. Mohammed in recounting this laughed and laughed … Lucy found the concept of whirling until an otherworldly trance was achieved foreign and a little terrifying.

(Your country, My child, was settled by Quakers, Stompers, Ranters, and Shakers dancing up a storm.)

The metallic dome they passed was the tomb of al-Mahdi, O'Hanrahan explained, the Ayatollah Khomeini of his day, a messianic figure rising up to make
jihad
with the West. The British in the 1870s had acquired the Sudan by way of mercenaries; the hope was an East Africa to offset the French West, solidly British from the Suez down the Nile to Kenya and finally to Johannesburg. They would have gotten by with it if so many Christian missionaries hadn't streamed in to convert the heathen Moslem. The Islamic Sudanese rose up. They killed the governor of Sudan, General Gordon. Their hero, the Mahdi and his successor the Khalifa, fought the Egyptians and the Ottomans, Italians, Belgians, Ethiopians, the Dafur Sultanate. Brimming with affronted dignity for the rejected Queen Victoria, the British under Kitchener steamed up the Nile and made short work of the Mahdists, tearing down the Mahdi's shrine where far too many miracles and healings had already occurred.

But now the truck crossed the Nile again—Lucy had actually missed seeing it! Children swam along one of the shores, naked and uninhibited. Lucy was ready to join them.

Then at last the Hilton.

Thanking Mohammed and impatiently dispensing blessings and thanks, O'Hanrahan gathered his suitcase and satchel with the gospel, and Lucy her carpetbag and suitcase, and they intemperately ran at a trot across the air-conditioned lobby.

“Two rooms, please,” said O'Hanrahan, discovering sand in the inside of his wallet. He extracted his own MasterCard and put down his passport by its side.

“Maybe I'll just order one of everything from room service,” Lucy said. “I don't think I can sit down in a restaurant. I don't think I'll sit ever again. I want to soak my butt in a bathtub.”

The receptionist asked for O'Hanrahan's MasterCard in proper British-accented English. Lucy blanched, realizing her “butt” comment was perfectly understood.

“It will take a minute to confirm, Mr. O'Hanrahan,” said the plum-black Sudanese deskman, impeccably attired in a white suit. Nearby, to assure calm, there was a muscular, compact soldier also taking an interest in them.

Lucy examined a sample menu with color photos showing the delights of the restaurant, the buffet worthy of a sultan … and below that was a menu listing Western delicacies. The hamburger, the pizza, the ice cream sundae—

“I'm sorry, sir,” said the receptionist, “but the card has been refused.”

“But that's impossible,” said the professor. “Will you try again?”

The clerk did patiently, with the same result.

“Does it say why?” O'Hanrahan asked feebly.

“Sir, we have no way of knowing.”

Lucy and O'Hanrahan took a step back from the desk and conferred. Should they use Merriwether Industries' VISA card after all? It would just give their position away and they could expect more secret visitors. And this was a fairly lawless society anyway—maybe the goons-for-hire would just shoot them and take their time hunting for the scroll.

“No,” conceded Lucy, “don't use the Merriwether card.”

O'Hanrahan said they could use his wad of money but the Hilton meant Western rates and that would eat up his capital pretty quick.

Lucy's will was ice-cold. She knew what she must do. It was something she wouldn't have suggested anywhere under any other conditions but being stranded in Khartoum, the Sudan, in the middle of summer when she wanted a shower. “I have, Dr. O'Hanrahan…” She found her voice with difficulty. “… I have my sister's MasterCard.”

O'Hanrahan was agog.

“Yes, it's true.”

“You … you…”

“I got money for you back in Oxford on it, and I haven't mentioned it since.”

The minaret microphone hissed into action and it was the afternoon call to prayer. O'Hanrahan continued to stare at her, emboldened by the
muezzin's
call to face God and judgment.

“Oh, stop looking at me like that,” Lucy said, walking out of the air-conditioned lobby ahead of him into the furnace. “If I'd told you sooner, you'd have used it. No, worse, stolen it from me, abandoned me, gone through all the money!”

“I am … am hurt, Miss Dantan, that you would think that I—”

“Save it, old man. I want a shower. I want the shower I have wanted for the last 800 miles of desert. We'll use your Sudanese pounds for a taxi and we'll go downtown, somewhere, where it's cheaper and this credit card can go further. Don't know how much credit we have left.”

That “somewhere” was the more downscale Hotel El Qasr on the boulevard of the same name. A simple mansion built in the days of colonialism and now a bit seedy. The unctuous proprietor, bowing and scraping, showed them around; the rooms of the El Qasr were spacious, the ceilings tall, the windows wide open but closable with shutters, and there were ceiling fans and sinks in each room. Lucy made a grim reconnaissance of the toilet situation: there was one for each floor, sharing its room with a rusted bathtub under a dripping cold shower. The toilet stank but was better than usual, a seatless bowl with a little fountain-device to allow the Sudanese to wipe with their left hand while enjoying a plash of water upon their backside. As for the shower, there was no hot water anywhere in the Sudan, the proprietor swore.

“I don't
want
any hot water,” she said tiredly.

“So you take two rooms?”

O'Hanrahan said yes, he and his daughter wanted adjoining rooms. He reached into his wallet for his rejected MasterCard again, all innocence. “You take this, sir?”

“Yes, MasterCard, yes!”

The proprietor didn't check O'Hanrahan's canceled card. They watched the proprietor take out an American Express imprinting-device and put the MasterCard upside down in it, the carboned receipt wrong way around, slide the thing feebly over the card, then fill out the bill in Arabic, non-Western numbers.

Then, at long last, under a fan, O'Hanrahan with loosened collar, shoes kicked in a corner, sank into the stiff, stuffingless mattress. It hardly mattered—this was the Ritz compared to Delgo and sleeping through the night in the front seat of Mohammed's truck. The hotel had an aged retainer, an old man content to occupy himself in the service of customers between prayertimes. He tried to communicate in some nonlanguage, and then O'Hanrahan assured him by speaking Arabic.

The retainer asked, “Would the good sir like a beer?”

Allah is most good, assented O'Hanrahan.

A
UGUST
20
TH

O'Hanrahan lay groaning, sweating under the light covers, still wearing his short-sleeved blue shirt, his jacket lying across a chair, his tie, his trousers, and socks on the floor where he had hurled them.

“Want me to get a priest?” Lucy asked.

“I want you to get me a drink,” he moaned.

“That's a no-no according to my guidebook,” she said authoritatively. “You see, alcohol depletes the body's already-precious water supply…”

“Damn
foul.
”

“Don't be too hard on yourself, sir—”

“I said
foul
not ‘fool.' The bean thing I had last night with gobbets of unidentifiable flesh. Why aren't you dying?”

“Don't know. I had diarrhea all through the first world. Now that I'm here I'm fine.”

“It's all that bran dust and yogurt you eat. Your body wouldn't recognize real food. Luce, please, go to a pharmacy and say the word
ishail.
”

Lucy practiced the word for diarrhea two or three times until he gave her the nod. She whispered, “Sure it's not dysentery, sir? Is there blood in your … in your stool?”

“My stool's none of your business! And get me a
Herald Tribune
!”

Lucy gave him a last concerned look. She noticed beside him on the bed was the scrollcase and the
Gospel of Matthias.
He sure wasn't letting it get too far away from him.

This was Lucy's third or fourth venture unaccompanied out on the street in a Moslem country—maybe the Sudan would be better than Cairo and Aswan. She stepped from the Hotel El Qasr and into the sun of the street, calmly walking with the directions the hotelman had given her to a pharmacy two blocks away. The fine dust stirred by the traffic of military transport vehicles on the crumbling city streets lingered in the air and she breathed it, tasting the ashen, chalky taste.

Two teenage Arab boys in Western jeans sustaining a hum of constant laughter followed behind and made kissing noises.

“How are you?” cried the boys. “What's your name?” they offered after that, the official conversation-starter of the Nile.

Lucy found a newsstand and bought a paper, then discovered the pharmacy on the corner as promised. Soaps, razors, drinking water, diapers—an array of products stacked and crammed, lining the walls of the pharmacy. None of the veiled women spoke a word of English.

“Ishail,”
she tried, in every accent and emphasis.

The women fetched a dapper Arab man in a white coat, with trimmed beard and large, knowing brown eyes. A handsome race, Lucy admitted.

“May I be of assistance?” he asked. Educated in the United States, he happily supplied her with Nile-strength diarrhea medicine and two bottles of drinking water. It cost 50 cents, as Lucy converted in her head. While she was in the store one of the veiled women had the doctor ask if she needed a place to stay for the night. Lucy said no thank you, regretful that she wasn't free to take up the invitation. What whisperings behind the veil, what mysteries behind the
mashrabiyya
in the women's quarters would be revealed to her? The veiled women retreated and Lucy went back into the street. We in the West hate the unknown, imprecision, anything that deprives us of fact, thought Lucy, but the Islamic world cultivates mystery, suspends veils, whispers secrets too forbidden to speak of further …

“You need a guide?” asked a dirty Sudanese boy with a wide smile.

“No thank you.”

“You need place to sleep?”

Another scrambled to her side, “You American?”

The two smooching Arab boys turned the corner and delightedly approached her again: “What's your name?”

Back in O'Hanrahan's room, as she dabbed him with a cold towel:

“A single woman on these streets is public property,” she said, nearly laughing. “I don't know what was worse, the flies or the boys.”

O'Hanrahan looked at her hand. “They didn't see a wedding ring, so you were fair game.”

Lucy had forgotten to wear today a cheap ring purchased for that purpose in Cairo. She had hoped that her conservative dress, long skirt, long sleeves, scarf over the head with her hair pulled back—which she cursed as supremely unflattering—and dark stockings would meet the local requirements for modesty. She tossed O'Hanrahan the
International Herald Tribune
of a day ago. He rummaged through it, ignoring the headlines.

“We at war yet?” asked Lucy.

“I bet your parents must be fit to be tied,” he imagined.

“Fortunately, I called the department collect and had the department secretary call my parents. I'm not telling them I'm in Africa; they can just assume I'm still in Jerusalem. My mom objected to
Italy
as too dangerous.”

O'Hanrahan didn't respond, finding what he was looking for. “Yep. Yep, here it is…”

A review, glowing, worshipful, of Philip Beaufoix's latest work,
Silent Partner: The Contribution of Egypt to the Formation of Christianity.
625 pages … and here was a black-and-white photo of the bastard, smiling knowingly in pressed black monastic wear. Since when does a Dominican wear black? wondered O'Hanrahan. “Bet that photo got touched up with an airbrush the size of a Douglas fir,” he mumbled. And what shill, what stooge coughed up this puff-job of a review? When O'Hanrahan saw the name, he groaned. The review written by Sr. Marie-Berthe Comeaux, special to the
Herald Tribune.