The Mandelbaum Gate
We had a streamlined journey to Jerusalem,’ went on this firebrand. ‘But we have come in the hottest and least comfortable season because it’s the only time we could manage to come at all. Otherwise, quite rightly, we would have chosen to come in the spring or autumn. However, we know that Our Lord Jesus Christ was here in the summer time, when life was less comfortable than it is today, when the smells were smellier and the sick and the poor were more numerous and less hopeful of cure. Don’t let yourselves be bothered by the commercialism that goes on around the sacred places. There was commercialism in the courts of the Temple in the time of Christ. Don’t be put off because the shrines that commemorate what was once the simple life of Jesus are overwhelmed with glittering ornaments, silver lamps, jewelled inlays and the like. They are nothing like the Temple was that Our Lord frequented himself, healing the ordinary sick among all the grandeur. And we have come to be reminded of Our Lord. It does not count what feelings are, if our feelings can be conditioned by the weather or the artistic tastes of the people around us. A good disposition is more precious to God than fine feelings. In Jerusalem. our Blessed Lord suffered, died, and rose again to life. It is enough that we are here.
‘So it seems to me that you shouldn’t expect to feel exalted by awe and reverence on days like, for instance, today, among the crowds in the narrow streets and the temperature rising. In the next few weeks don’t wear yourselves out rushing round the shrines just for the sake of having said a “Hail Mary” and touched every altar with your rosary, like a child who invents for himself a sense of impending doom unless he steps over every crack in the pavement There is no need to visit every shrine in the place. There are far too many shrines. Some of them are sheer fake, others are doubtful. That’s not to say that the important sites that mark the life of Jesus, such as the spot we stand on at this moment, are not sacred places. They have been sanctified by centuries of the great Dead who have come —’ The three friars gazed at the priest as with one gaze. They had known it. The incipient défroqué was undermining the Holy Land, and as he went on to enumerate for practical purposes the shrines which his pilgrimage might well skip and the dubiety of their origins, their thoughts went to their brethren, the custodians of the Holy Land to whom these places were their whole heart and life; tears came to the eyes of the eldest friar as he thought of the venerable Franciscan, well past ninety, who kept the house where Our Lady was conceived by St Joachim and St Anne, and who had wanted nothing for himself all his life but to show it to the pilgrims and pray with them as they came, and collect alms for the poor of the place, and die there on that spot. Now this enemy of the Faith on the altar was openly preaching what other young foreign priests had only so far hinted. Moreover, he was saying more than a few words, he was preaching at length, and he should not be preaching at all. The youngest friar, a lay-brother, murmured fiercely that he would tell this priest after the Mass that he had transgressed by setting back the time of the next Mass. Already a fresh batch of pilgrims was waiting at the entrance. But the aged friar made a gesture of restraint towards the young brother. The other friar, also an old man, then whispered his support of the young brother, but he too was silenced by the elder one: ‘Observe meekness,’ he said softly, ‘it is our calling. Moreover —’ He paused to give full ear to the voice from the altar, to hear what next outrage was being uttered. When he had heard enough he continued. ‘Let us not provoke this man lest the bishop should say to us, “You have knelt to kiss the ring of the Schismatic of Canterbury, but one of our own good Fathers you have treated with reproof.”‘ At this they folded their hands and waited to hear what the Judas and intellectual standing at the Altar of the Nailing of the Cross would say next.
He was saying, ‘It is not absolutely certain, for instance, that the Holy Sepulchre stands on the site of Golgotha. There are strong arguments of archaeology in favour of this place where we stand being the place of the Crucifixion, and for a Catholic these arguments are strengthened above all by the fact that this place was traditionally revered as Golgotha before the Emperor Constantine, in the fourth century, built the original church on this site. Archaeology is continually enriching our knowledge of the holy places. Where doubts of historic authenticity exist, they are as thrilling in their potentialities for quest and discovery as a certainty would be. The weight of probability leads most of the experts to believe that this is the site of Calvary. But other learned people have argued against it. Whether true or not, our religion does not depend on it. We know for a certainty that Our Lord was crucified, that he died and was buried, and rose again from the dead, at a place outside the walls of Jerusalem; if not at the spot where we stand, then at some other spot near by. If you are looking for physical exactitude in Jerusalem it is a good quest, but it belongs to archaeology, not faith. In the time of Christ the people built up the tombs of the Prophets, as he reminded them with a bit of irony. I am sure some were authentic, some doubtful. Jerusalem has been in many hands. Then, as now, soldiers patrolled the Holy Land. Jerusalem has been destroyed, rebuilt, fought over, conquered, and now is divided again. The historical evidence of our faith is scattered about under the ground; nothing is neat. And what would be the point of our professing faith if it were? There’s no need for faith if everything is plain to the eye. We cannot know anything perfectly, because we ourselves are not perfect. When we have come to perfection in time, then faith, like time, will be done away. “We have an everlasting city,” St Paul has said, “but not here; our goal is the city that is one day to be.” For there is a supernatural process going on under the surface and within the substance of all things. In the Jerusalem of history we see the type and shadow of that Jerusalem of Heaven that St John of Patmos tells of in the Apocalypse. “I, John,” he says, “saw in my vision that holy city which is the new Jerusalem, being sent down by God from Heaven, like a bride who has adorned herself to meet her husband.” This is the spiritual city that is involved eternally with the historical one. It is the city of David, the city of God’s people in exile: “If I forget thee, 0 Jerusalem, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy.” It is the city of Jesus, not only of his death, but of his rising again alive. It is the New Jerusalem which we seek with our faith, and which is the goal of our pilgrimage to this old Jerusalem of history. “What is faith?” said St Paul. “It is that which gives substance to our hopes, which convinces us of things we cannot see.”‘
The priest glanced at his watch and the friars at each other. He made a slight gesture of pulling himself off a subject that was leading far, and said, ‘I don’t mean you to be afraid of saying your prayers at the wrong shrine. It’s always the right place if you pray there.
‘We know the creed of our faith and what we believe. Outside of that it is better to know what is doubtful than to place faith in uncertainties. Doubt is the prerogative of the believer; the unbeliever cannot know doubt. And in what is doubtful we should doubt well. But in whatever touches the human spirit, it is better to believe everything than nothing. Have faith. In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Amen.’
They felt he had done his worst. The friars stood moveless, watching him return to the altar and begin the second part of the Mass.
‘Credo in unum Deum, Patrem omnipotentem, factorem coeli et terrae, visibilium omnium, et invisibilium —’
Suddenly he had broken off and had turned once again to the people. This alone was irregular…. But he was about to speak, with an advisory finger pointed… ‘I forgot to mention the Milk Grotto, near Bethlehem. Don’t go near the Milk Grotto. It’s a pure fake. They claim there’s a legend that milk from Mary’s breast fell in this grotto where for some reason she happened to be nursing the infant Jesus, in consequence of which the walls of the grotto turned white. They make up packets of white stuff from the walls for pilgrims to take away. The stuff is supposed to be a comfort to nursing mothers or some such hocus-pocus. Keep away from the Milk Grotto, it’s only a chalk c
ave.’
The communist agent returned to the altar and began again. ‘Credo in unum Deum …’
When the Mass was ended and he moved from the altar towards the friars, the youngest again made a move as if to say a few wild words. But both elders restrained him; and when the Englishman brushed past them, muttering the prayers appointed to be said after Mass, the friars stood mute, with downcast eyes, content to wait for their justification in Heaven, which, being all Italian territory, would be so ordered that foreign firebrands like this one would be kept firmly in their place.
Freddy already thought highly of Suzi, who had told him what a lovely smile he had. This was something he vaguely recalled having heard before at an earlier time of his life; it was a pleasant reminder — ‘… Freddy’s attractive smile’, or ‘… your nice smile, Freddy’ — something like that. Suzi was very outspoken but that was the Ramdez touch; Abdul was the same. By the time he came to stand outside the Holy Sepulchre after the service, waiting for the girls to emerge, he had forgotten Suzi’s compliment about his smile but only thought highly of Suzi. The girls had gone to look round the Holy Sepulchre and visit the other shrines. Suzi had told him to wait for them outside, had pushed confidently through the crowd, followed mutely by Barbara. Things seemed to be going well. Freddy had thought the sermon rather long but quite practical in its way. He had been to a Roman Catholic Mass once or twice before, for funeral services, and considered there was too much of it. He was not, anyway, a very religious man. He entertained a patriotic belief in God, but since his youth he had been to church about as seldom as he had been to Buckingham Palace. However, he disapproved of letting young chaps into the Foreign Service who openly professed to have no religion at all. A security risk, Freddy felt decidedly. He looked up at the scaffold props of the Holy Sepulchre and wondered if Joanna and Matt would hear of his lingering presence in Jordan. He didn’t really care one way or another; and when his mind turned on those tedious letters from Ma and Benny, his anxious replies, and the all-responsible letter to the doctor which had gone swirling down the lavatory at Alexandros’s place, he felt respectably at one with the world. Things were going well. It was like being at the races when one had started off with a pound each way and the horse had come in, perhaps second, at a good price; then, if one did quite nicely in the second race, even at a modest price, one knew one’s luck was in for the day.
One’s luck was in at last, and the enterprise of Barbara Vaughan’s pilgrimage had got off on a good start. He thought highly of Suzi Ramdez. Somewhere along the road to Bethlehem, their next goal, a pink gin before lunch would be a good idea.
Barbara, meanwhile, existed in numb misery. The clothes she was draped in, although they were loose, seemed to form a kind of oven for her burning body. The crowds pressed as if deliberately all round her, pushing crude faces close to her veil. Her eyes prickled and she felt their roots were red hot. Everything in her life was remotely in the past. Harry Clegg was a few feet of overexposed film. Nothing worse, she thought, can happen; it was the only thing she could think, but if she had tried she could not have placed what exactly that happening was, than which nothing could be worse. At a point during the sermon, she had wanted to say something to Suzi like ‘I want to go out and be sick’, but being in any case uncertain whether she actually wanted to be sick or not, she had remembered she was a mute. From the sermon she had got the erroneous impression of a sanctimonious voice pounding upon her physical distress. Now she followed Suzi, who was treating the crowds like those waves of the Red Sea between which the Israelites passed dryshod; the people made way for Suzi, but on Barbara they pressed with enlarged noses and twisted mouths on the other side of her veil. She was beyond feeling ill, it was merely that nothing worse could happen.
She stood beside Suzi before a stone slab and wanted only to lie on it full length, without the black shrouds she was wearing; she yearned for its coolness and for a long sleep, a sleep of death. Through her fever she heard the voice of an English-speaking Arab guide addressing the group which Suzi had joined. He was saying that this was the Holy Sepulchre itself, the tomb that had belonged to Joseph of Arimathea, where Christ was laid on that first Good Friday when his body was taken down from the cross. The body of Christ was embalmed with spices and herbs and wrapped in a linen shroud as the cool night was falling. Suzi took Barbara’s arm to draw her closer to the front of the group where the guide was pointing to this and that memorial of the burial of Christ. Barbara’s head was drumming; her ears had begun to ache. She held back and clung only to the one thought that nothing worse could now happen.
They were going down some cool dark steps. The guide had gone ahead and waited below for another group of people to move away before he collected his brood about him. The brood was talking softly, menacing Barbara. She heard that this was St Helena’s Chapel, where the true Cross had been found in the fourth century. Barbara wanted to return to the slab and lie on its cool surface; an Image of Tess of the d’Urbervilles in the last scene at Stonehenge passed her mind and was gone indiscernibly, so that she did not know what caused her to start and give a little shudder, as if touched by a bat that had somehow got into the crypt. She had stopped on the dark stairway, and the people behind her wanted to pass down. Suzi reached up and took her arm. Nothing worse can happen now. A woman who did not seem to belong either to the group that was about to leave the chapel or to the approaching group, was standing apart looking round her, sturdily clutching with one thumb the shoulder strap of her sling-bag; in the other hand she held a slip of paper about which she evidently wished to consult someone. Barbara and Suzi had reached the ground of the crypt. The woman approached their guide, but he had turned to consult with the departing guide about some guide-business. The lone woman then approached a man among the crowd that Barbara and Suzi had joined. She was within breathing distance of Barbara’s veil. She was Ricky. She was Miss Rickward. She said to the man, offering the slip of paper, ‘Excuse me, but can you read Arabic?’ The man said, no, he was afraid he couldn’t, but perhaps the guide … He looked round for their guide, who was nowhere visible at that moment. ‘You see,’ Ricky was saying, ‘it’s an address that I’ve been directed to. I’m looking for a friend.’ The man then caught sight of Barbara at the same time as Ricky did, and he started to say, There’s an Arab woman there, she’d be able to —’ Ricky approached Barbara with her piece of paper: ‘Excuse me, but can you tell me —’
Suzi’s arm shot forth like the arm of one holding back yet another Red Sea. ‘My poor servant is dumb,’ declared Suzi. ‘Very dumb, also holy. Praise be to Allah! She can utter no word, neither falsehood nor blasphemy. Do not approach my holy mute, I command you, but stand at a distance, and if there’s anything you want, ask me.’
‘Oh, I beg your pardon,’ Ricky said, stepping backward, as did the other people in their near vicinity. Suzi was reading the words on the piece of paper. She read out, The Crusaders’ Inn. Ask for Jaber Khalil, from Amin Mahgoub, St Helena’s Convent.’ Suzi explained how to get to the Crusaders’ Inn while Barbara looked at Ricky through her veil without feeling a thing, since nothing worse could happen than had already happened behind her throbbing head. She heard Suzi tell Ricky to ask for the proprietor, Mr Khalil, while Ricky informed her gratefully that she had got the address from the doorman at St Helena’s Convent; she had not been allowed to enter the doors of the convent as an outbreak of an infectious disease had occurred there that morning. ‘And,’ said Ricky, ‘I’m trying to catch up with an English friend. I thought she might have come here for a church service.’
‘Good luck, then,’ Suzi said, shaking off the intruder as firmly as if she had not been in total ignorance of any connexion between Ricky and Barbara. Suzi moved with the group towards the Altar of the Finding of the Cross, where the guide was now standing ready for them. Holding fast to Barbara, she thrust far into the stifling crowd, who now made a little space for this woman of Jerusalem and her picturesque servant.
??
?She has seen all the Holy Sepulchre,’ Suzi said, when they found Freddy in the courtyard. ‘But Barbara must come again on the return journey.’
‘I’m ill,’ Barbara said. ‘My throat’s closing up. I’ve got a fever.’ Suzi said, looking straight ahead, ‘Don’t speak. Say nothing. Even now, you might be noticed. Wait till we get to the car. You must keep it up.’
‘It must be those clothes,’ Freddy said. ‘She’ll be all right when we’re on the road to Bethlehem. I think if we can get a drink somewhere before lunch it would be a good idea. Let’s get moving.’
But there was no mistaking the fact, when they got a look at Barbara’s unveiled face on the way to Bethlehem — the hectic flush and the dead-white ring round her mouth — that she was ill beyond what could be accounted for by the heat and the clothes she was wearing. They turned back to Jerusalem and once more Freddy banged on Alexandros’s shop door, while Suzi stood on the pavement supporting Barbara, looking up at Alexandros’s face in the window.
‘The lady wishes to contribute to your Arab Refugee Fund,’ Freddy said, falling back on his past experience of Hong Kong and so forth. He said, ‘The lady wishes to remain anonymous.’ He handed over ten English five-pound notes out of Barbara’s newly-acquired supply — ‘and is honoured by your acceptance of this donation for so great a cause.’
Dr Russeifa stuffed his payment into the inside pocket of his coat, thanking both Freddy and the lady on the refugees’ behalf. Freddy, careful to mind his manners, then asked the doctor to state his fee for his professional services. ‘No fee,’ said Dr Russeifa, ‘I am perfectly honoured to be of assistance to the unfortunate lady. This outbreak of scarlet fever has of course made her a victim, and is without doubt the fault of our enemy, so-called Israel, who sends such germ-warfare to our country daily.’