Dimiter

  “Nothing,” Rey had answered.

  “Nothing? What about to each other? Do they talk to one another?”

  “No, they don’t.”

  “Well, then, what do they do?”

  Here Rey had looked down in thought for some moments as he seemed to be weighing the question judiciously. He then looked up and answered simply, “They witness.” For some reason that he couldn’t precisely grasp, this response had caused Mayo to worry.

  Five weeks later Rey was dead.

  Mayo brushed at the bottom of his nose with a knuckle. Rey’s death. Was that the problem after all? he brooded. He recalled being haunted very early in his practice by the dying words of a motion picture star who was barely into his sixties, the plaintively whispered words, “I just got here.” But in time Mayo grew to be inured to such loss. And besides, this isn’t grief, he thought; grief I would damn well know. From afar, the muffled clatter of dishware and clinking glass. Mayo glanced at his watch. Almost four. Preparation of patient breakfasts had begun. And soon the dawn will render visible the U.N. building, Mayo thought with wan gratification: Not every conceivable event is to be feared.

  Mayo continued his amble down the hall, turning right at an intersecting corridor, and when he saw that light was spilling out of a window in the door to patient room 422, his spirits immediately began to pick up. The room’s patient was Eddie Shore, the legendary 1940’s “Big Band” leader who, at the brassiest peak of his fame, had mysteriously decided to give up music and retire to a farm in northern Virginia to begin a career as a writer of novels. In Jerusalem to research a historical novel that was to be set in the time of Christ, he was here in Hadassah, not because of any neurologic disorder but rather with the symptoms of salmonella poisoning. He had been given a bed in the Neurology Ward because of its superior rooms. Mayo picked up his pace. In his youth an avid fan of Shore’s music, Mayo had boldly introduced himself and had already had long conversations with his idol in which he discovered him to be a completely unexpected human being: at once genial and warm and yet brusquely curmudgeonly; keenly insightful and brutally candid. Though at times there was an air of evasiveness about him, when he would seem to deflect or evade a question and sometimes pretending, Mayo thought, not to hear it, and it was on these occasions that a veil of mystery seemed to enshroud him.

  Almost totally bald, yet with high jutting cheekbones and a riveting stare that made him strikingly handsome even now in his sixties, Shore had been briefly and serially married to a number of Hollywood’s most glamorous starlets, once explaining to Mayo, who had asked how he could possibly have cast them aside, “Are you kidding? It was hard! I mean, how do you turn to this naked goddess lying in bed with you that every other guy in the world wants to jump and just tell her straight out, ‘You bore me!’ You really think that was easy? For God’s sakes, think, Mayo, will you? Think!”

  He had also confided what had caused him to abandon his career in music. “So one time I’d decided I’d do a very special tour,” he began to explain. “I mean, a tour with a really great band. The top musicians in the country. The best! And we were going to do original, innovative stuff, not that tired dumb drek that we played at the Paramount on Times Square, right after ‘Don Dickhead at the Mighty Wurlitzer’ was done, and at college and high school proms. So I came up with some classy compositions, really wild, really wonderful stuff, and I put this terrific band together and we toured. And guess what? People hated it, Mayo! They booed! Yeah, every gig that we played they’d start booing and yelling we should play my big hits, all the popular faves, until finally I said, “Fuck it!” and I cut the tour short and went back to my penthouse apartment in Manhattan where I stewed and I grumped and I farted around. And then I got really pissed off, really ticked, and I went to my booker and I told him to round up some hands, I was doing another tour, but I didn’t want to pay any more than minimum, I told him. ‘Minimum?’ he yelps at me. Eddie, Are you crazy? You can’t get good musicians for that! You’ll get stiffs! You’ll get trumpet players with emphysema!’ But I said to him, ‘Stiffs are exactly what I want! I don’t care if they can barely read music! I mean it! Make it happen!’

  “So he gets me these guys, these bums who think sheet music’s some kind of Rorschach test, and we go out on this tour and it’s sounding really putrid, just awful,—‘The Romantic Mantovani’s Greatest Stock Car Racing Hits’—but we’re playing all my biggies, my most popular numbers, all that Viennese pastry Mozart’s wife threw in his face, and all the troglodytes, they’re cheering and applauding and stamping their feet. I can’t believe it! I’m sick! I’m disgusted! So one night when we’re playing and I hold up my hand to show the boys with my fingers what stanza comes next—see, like this—I held my hand up sideways so they couldn’t really tell how many fingers were up, they had to guess, so they all wound up playing different stanzas and it’s sounding like galaxies in collision. Just cacophony. Sawmill sounds. Total garbage. So what happens? They give us a standing ovation!” Here Shore had stared glumly into space. “That’s what did it,” he said. “That was it. I called off the rest of the tour that night, bought a farm, took up writing, and I’ve never looked back.”

  “Well, now, Maestro, up so late?” Or so early, I should say.”

  Peering through the door’s observation window and seeing Shore awake and sitting up in bed with pen in hand and a notepad and a facedown open book on his lap, the neurologist had breezed into the room and now was standing at the bottom of Shore’s bed with his hands in the pockets of his medical jacket.

  “Oh, hi ya there, kid! What’s happening, huh? What’s up?”

  Shore had slipped off his reading glasses and smiled as he recognized Mayo. Then he frowned a little, looking aside in thought. “Oh, yeah, something got me up, I guess. Something. Don’t know what.”

  “Feeling better?”

  “Oh, yeah, better, much better, Mayo. Thanks. At least the headaches and the stomach cramps are gone. And how are you? You okay? You look weird.” Shore had craned his neck forward, squinting, as he studied Mayo’s face intently. “You look like a guy who’s just lost his best friend.”

  Mayo’s smile was thin and wan. “Oh, I did that a very long time ago.”

  “Well, you look like you’re fixing to do it again. Here, come on. Come sit down. Pull up a chair.”

  “No, I can see you’re working. I won’t keep you.”

  “No, no, no, kid! I really want to talk to you! Really!”

  Mayo loved it that Shore always called him “Kid.”

  Shore picked up the book from his lap and held it up. “You know, as part of my research I’ve been reading New Testament scripture and I think I’ve found something interesting here in this gospel. It’s the gospel of John. Come on, sit, kid! Sit! You should hear this!”

  Mayo nodded and said, “Okay,” and then slowly sat down in a chair by the bed. “So what is it, then, Maestro? Tell me.”

  Shore slid his glasses back into place. “You know, this part here in John,” he said, pointing to the open pages of the book. “Oh, well, maybe you don’t. It’s where they’re stoning this woman for adultery. You know, I used to think all these stories were probably bull. But guess what? There’s this passage”—he was pointing to a page of the book—“it’s got a giveaway in it, a ‘tell’ that lets you know that this story here wasn’t made up! Any fiction writer sees it right away!” Shore then avidly recounted that passage in John in which the Pharisees, hoping to embarrass Christ, brought before him an adulterous woman and asked him what he thought about the law of Moses that commanded such a woman be stoned to death. Christ “bent over and wrote on the ground with his finger,” then stood up and said to those who had confronted him, “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.”

  “Then he bends to the ground and writes something more,” Shore went on, “and then these momzers, these Pharisees, they all took a hike.” His eyes bright with the thrill of discovery, Shore hunched his body forward toward M
ayo. “Now if that’s in a novel,” he said with intensity, “if it’s fiction, let me tell you something, Mayo; in fact, let me damn well guarantee you, in some chapter down the line we’re going to end all this pain-in-the-ass suspense and find out what exactly it was that Christ wrote. But these gospels don’t do it! No! We don’t ever find out what he wrote! Down the line there’s not a word of explanation, none, which has to be because the guy who wrote that gospel didn’t know, and not knowing, didn’t make something up!”

  Mayo gently nodded his head, his thoughts adrift.

  “Very nice,” he said.

  “ ‘Very nice?’ That’s really all you have to say? ‘Very nice?’ I, the Jewish Sherlock Holmes of the Judean Desert have just proved that the gospels aren’t all made up stories and to you it’s like I just played a riff on the cello. Are you deaf or just a putz of interplanetary standing?”

  Mayo looked up with a speculative air. “This is something rather new for you, isn’t it?”

  “What?”

  His eyes narrowed with suspicion; Shore’s evasive persona had appeared.

  “Aren’t you Jewish?” Mayo clarified.

  “Huh?”

  For a moment Shore stared blankly. Then he softly uttered, “Oh,” and put his head back on a pillow. The guarding veil and the tension in his face had disappeared. “Yeah, I’m Jewish to the core,” he said, staring up the ceiling pensively. “Still in all, you’ve got to wonder, don’t you think? Here are these guys, pretty young. Some barely literate. Fishermen. Whatever. One minute they’re all totally depressed and crapping their pants behind locked doors because they’re terrified of guilt by association and that they’re going to be rounded up and crucified next. And then all of a sudden they’re these death-defying maniacs climbing onto rooftops yelling, “Come and get me, copper!” and they go out on the road breathing fire and doing real fun stuff like getting beaten and tortured and thrown into jail; getting killed and even crucified upside down for preaching big-time winning ideas like ‘you’ve got to love your enemy’ and ‘no more divorces,’ plus incidentally ‘our dead guy isn’t dead anymore and you’ve got to eat his flesh and drink his blood,” all winners, all popular notions, easy sells. But these frightened guys do it, they actually do it, and in less than twenty years they’re recruiting in Rome and are practically taking it over. What do you call that, Mayo? You’ve got to wonder. Something happened to these guys. Something big. Like a resurrection, maybe. I dunno. But they sure must have thought they’d seen him walking around. Getting killed is an awful lot of trouble to go to just because you’re feeling bored and the fish aren’t biting.”

  For a moment Shore paused, and then he cryptically added in a pensive tone, “You know, sometimes you get into situations and you have to start thinking about these things.” A long silence ensued, causing Shore to turn his head to scrutinize Mayo, who was staring at an empty Band-Aid wrapping on the floor near the top of the bandleader’s bed. It had triggered recollection of the Band-Aid in his dream. Shore frowned. “You know, you’ve still got this zombied-out look,” he told Mayo, “like this temp fill-in drummer that I picked up in Phoenix one time. He’d heard that pandas get high on eucalyptus leaves, so they wound up his drug of choice, and he’d be doing these lazy, slow-mo brush sweeps, slack-jawed and staring straight out at the crowd with that same spacey look that’s on your face right now, just without the purple teeth. You been listening to anything at all I’ve been saying?”

  “Yes, everything, Maestro. Everything.”

  Mayo stood up.

  “I’d better go,” he said, “I’m not feeling too well myself.”

  “That’s too bad. Take care of yourself, kid.”

  “You, too.”

  Smiling wanly, Mayo turned and left the room to continue his drift through the hospital’s halls, stalked by specters of light and of darkness, of miracles and murders and the need to find an answer to an overwhelming question that no one had asked, or could even formulate, until finally, just before dawn, and without any notion of how he had gotten there, he found himself standing in front of the gray metal entry door to the Psychiatric Ward on Floor 7. Pasted onto it, random bright thoughts from some elsewhere, were a large crayoned drawing of a rainbow and another of a clutch of blue and yellow daisies. There was also a photo of a staff clinician, a smiling young woman in a medical jacket. “Sarah,” Mayo murmured fondly. The door was never locked. Beyond it were patients who were thought to be harmless: a woman addicted to plastic surgery, elderly victims of dementia, and odd assorted others, such as a professor of deconstructed English whose daily attire while teaching class had included knee-high paratrooper boots and a sinister shining black leather jacket. He had once been ejected from the Club 2000 for allegedly “emitting threatening vibrations” while standing at a pinball machine. And so why am I here? wondered Mayo. The Child in his dream? The murdered Christ? At this Mayo thought of Meral, recollecting the haunting thing he had told him after shepherding the murderous Christ to Kfar Shaul, an asylum for the criminally insane just outside of Jerusalem’s walls. On returning to Hadassah to brief the Sub-District police on what had happened, he said, “He was silent all through the ride until, trying to give him some comfort, I told him he was now the only Christ in the city. And then for the very first time he spoke to me. He said, ‘No. There is another.’ ”

  Mayo stared at the colorful drawing of the daisies. What had that tormented young soldier meant? Then while shifting his weight as he once again sifted his dream for connections, suddenly one flashed into view as Mayo realized that in both his dream and on Father Mooney’s finger there hadn’t been one Band-Aid, there had been two, one wrapped atop the other. His fingertips absently brushing at his chin, Mayo felt that icy mist of foreboding settling lightly once again on the back of his neck as he pondered what, if anything, the Band-Aids could mean. Then abruptly, with a grunt and loose flip of the hand, Mayo turned and shuffled toward the elevator bank. So what of it? the neurologist mentally harrumphed. This is all a Middle Eastern Marley’s ghost, he scoffed, a bit of undigested lamb. But as also occurs in the subatomic world where electrons, like saints with bleeding hands, are reportedly seen in two places at once, Mayo soon would abandon the uses of sense and come to radically change his mind.

  It was morning.

  And then would come night.

  CHAPTER 2

  7 MARCH, 3:20 A.M.

  Dearest Jean,

  Meral is the saddest of men. I saw him again at the Tomb of Lazarus this morning. It touched my heart. All the tourists had clambered up the jagged stone steps of the darkened crypt into terrifying light, the stunning last of them a tall black woman from Texas, her hair in tin curlers that danced in the sun as she emerged crying, “Praise be to God!”, her face a glory. When she’d ambled to the others picking over remembrances in the Lazarus Tomb Souvenir Shop, I boarded the dilapidated dusty old tour bus, sat alone amid its empty rows of seats and thought about dead men walking out of their graves. A storm was blowing in. Whipping gusts set up a moan at the yellowed windowpanes and the air in the bus turned gray. On a slope above the tomb there’s a shabby little house, a poor family of seven or eight, perhaps more; and it was when I glanced over at their brightly colored laundry flapping billowed on a line above a tether of goats that I spotted him. Meral. He was just as I had seen him there once before. A tall and imposing, strongly built man, yet looking somehow crumpled in his blue winter uniform, he was seated at the wheel of his police car wistfully staring at the entrance to the tomb. For as long as I watched him he was utterly motionless, his head slightly tilted to the side as if pondering some hopeless expectation. Poor Meral. His parents, all his brethren, are dead, as are his wife and only child, a beloved young son. Coming home at noon on the five-year-old’s birthday at a time when they lived in the country’s north, Meral thought to surprise him, the story is told, and had parked his jeep out of sight behind a hill and then hurried toward his house with a blaze of bright sunflowers clut
ched in front of him—they were the little boy’s favorite flower—and a stuffed toy dinosaur tucked behind his back. The little boy, who had spied him through a kitchen window, raced out of their house with a radiant smile, his slender bare arms outstretched to greet him, when a whim-launched rocket from across the border fell upon his life with a sound he never heard. Soon afterward, cancer took Meral’s wife. That was four years ago. Meral still mourns. He is a man who seems to ache at the slightest parting, always turning, when he leaves you, for a long glance back as if against the possibility he might never see you again. When we were leaving and the engine of the bus roared to life, a mist of rain began to fall on that quickening dust and as we left him, forlorn amid the dead white stones, Meral’s gaze was still fixed upon the tomb.

  Quiet Meral. Honest Meral. One day I must touch him.

  I was glad to get back to Old Jerusalem and its bustling vaulted bazaars, the pungent scent of ground cardamom and new leather and the tumble of countless church bells ringing; to its jostling hurly-burly and the women with trays of warm bread on their heads and the blue-and-white uniformed, dreamy-eyed children singing as they march in neat columns to school, their little voices made hollow by the high stone walls on narrow dark streets that abruptly burst out into sun like a sudden and unexpected glimpse of joy; to where the blind always travel in pairs, hand in hand.

  It is here that I will find him, the one that I am hunting.

  He is here in this city of crumbling stone.

  I must stop. My mind is on Meral.

  Your Paul

  CHAPTER 3

  A booming thunderbolt rattled the windowpanes of the Old City’s local police post, a hulking former Crusader castle stolidly crouched by the Jaffa Gate. The young lance corporal behind the reception desk lifted a sullen stare to the sound and then slowly let it settle back down to a ledger bristling with notations in black and red ink: black for a log of arrivals and departures and red for the recording of citizen complaints. The corporal’s gaze was on an item in red: the charge of a weeping, frail old man that his burly young son had beaten him severely in a fury at the father’s habitual drunkenness. The corporal noticed something. Leaning over, he picked up the pen that was infused with red ink and very slowly and carefully corrected a misspelling, leaned back to review what he had done, and then set the pen down and looked through a window at the rough stone cobbles outside the post where a gust-driven rain spattered back and forth in hesitant, indecisive sweeps like a wispy gray soul just arrived on the empty streets of some afterworld, lost and forlorn. The sounds were muted by the station’s thick block walls so that except for the soft dull clacking of a typewriter floating down from an upper floor, the damp yellow-walled reception room was quiet. The corporal shifted his gaze to the portable police radio on his desk. It had suddenly emitted a feeble sputter, but when nothing more came, he looked up at a sign on the wall beside the entry to the jail, a reminder that guns were to be checked in and out. The corporal’s stare was one of quiet incredulity, for almost never was the ledger’s red ink spent on matters warranting the use of a gun.