I find the Old City constantly moving: it is astonishing to me that the Syrian priests use Aramaic, the language of Christ. All around I see the evidence of this urge to fix ourselves in the blind uncaring universe. It seems we are crying out for recognition and validation. From the great golden dome of Al-Aqsa to the Chapel of the Ascension, this longing is evident. Both these places – although ‘places’ hardly does justice to their immeasurable spiritual charge – commemorate miraculous events, the night journey of Mohammed to Jerusalem from Mecca (it was a round trip on a small white flying horse, not unlike, I imagine, the Highland ponies) and the ascension of Jesus into heaven.
Outside my room the early almond blossom is offering itself promiscuously all over the city. I recognise the scent because Emily favoured Roger & Gallet’s Almond Blossom soap – also available in the Marais at fancy prices. As I lie here, waiting to hear the call to assemble, I am seized by an intense awareness of the devotion that is spearing the still-dark dawn, even if in my heart I know it is deluded. Also, I am a little frightened of the Palestinians, because they are seething with ancient resentments and the perception of centuries of accumulated slights.
The dawns of Jerusalem are beautiful – lavender and rose and ground cumin. Damman Frères’ teas come to mind.
The
muadhin
follows the round of
Allahu Akbar
with
As-salatu khayrun minan-nawm – Prayer is better than sleep
. I have lain awake before dawn for four days now, waiting longingly for the
iqama
, the call to line up for prayer. When it comes, it is particularly plaintive, fraught with longing and disappointment. I think that this thread of sound links Muslims with a loose but unbreakable cord; I see all the Muslims of the world walking blindly together, like soldiers gassed in the Great War, following this guideline to some unknown destination. One thing is for sure: it will be better there, wherever they are headed.
My room, No. 6, is part of the old building of the hotel; it was once the house of a wealthy pasha who kept a small harem. Room 6 is prized; it was built as the bedroom of the Pasha’s beloved fourth wife; it has stone flags, smoothed by the passage of soft Turkish carpet slippers. The Pasha’s wives, I guess, were as plump and soft as turtle-doves.
As the
muadhin
calls, I feel the ecstasy of solitude. There can be pleasure in thinking of yourself as alone and in this way closer to your true self. The desert around Qumran and Masada, which I visited yesterday in a bus full of upbeat and fundamentalist Christians from Oklahoma, was where Christ was said to have spent his forty days of solitude and I thought I could see in this parched tumbled landscape what it was the desert fathers valued. I also inhaled the aroma of the Dead Sea below, a strange sulphur smell, which Pliny the Elder noticed two thousand years ago.
There is a difference between solitude and loneliness. I was diminished by loneliness when Emily left me. As her retreat for her own period of self-expression, she chose Sheffield and for spiritual guidance, Edgar Gaylard.
I lie eagerly waiting, as if I am expecting some epiphany. Suddenly the
muadhin
finishes his final call. I have discovered that his inflection changes as the appeal to piety winds down. I take my time – I am assuming the habits of a pasha. All these towels and dressing gowns pander to me and encourage me. I shower and anoint myself in the marbled shower room – separate from the bathroom and its giant bath – and finally dress and go for breakfast in the courtyard, which has a fountain in the shape of a scaly fish standing on its tail in an octagonal pond. Real fish – lazy, overindulged carp and their golden cousins – barely move. Their mouths open idly as if they are expecting a little baklava to be popped into their fleshy lips. A small, obese boy in old-fashioned shorts is pointing out the fish to his mother and father who are eating
labneh
, a soft white cheese, at the table next to mine. They scoop up the cheese with wedges of pita. We smile at each other indulgently, encouraging the fantasy that children are uniquely charming . . .
Ah . . . children . . . the little innocent children
. Around the courtyard are pomegranate trees in deep red flower and palms in huge tubs. The sun is already warming the flagstones, which have the smooth sheen of thousands of years of slippered traffic. I feel a tremendous surge of well-being after my period of
anomie
. Durkheim defined
anomie
as a mismatch between the individual and the norms of society, a sort of detachment. Now I am fully engaged. Society and I are matched.
Things have changed in the last few months. Jacqui Gaylard left her husband, and Edgar Gaylard realised that he didn’t really want a life with Emily, but without the Lardies. Emily phoned me, just before I left for Jerusalem, but I was distant. She wanted to talk to me, she said. She was back in London. We met in a pub in Islington – it would be too painful for her to return to Hackney – and she burst into tears; she sobbed and she wanted me to hold her, which I did fastidiously. The pubs of Islington are used to this sort of thing – people around here are very highly strung – and no one took much notice, but I immediately felt better, although of course my chivalric role was to listen sympathetically to her drastically revisionist update of her autobiography, sometimes referred to as her goals.
She had been asked to leave the creative writing course – fees mostly refunded – after Mrs Gaylard went to the Dean of Arts to complain about the relationship with Emily – she had been caught
in flagrante
when the piano teacher was ill. Mrs Gaylard and the Lardies had seen Emily trying to get dressed in a hurry. In an email an ambitious and possibly jealous faculty member had given Mrs Gaylard the low-down about what had been going on. Edgar had been put on a warning about his unprofessional conduct. In fact it was his second – and final – warning, and it was this that was particularly tormenting Emily and at the same time cheering me up no end.
In the pub, increasingly loud with drink-fuelled chortles, shouted confidences, braying laughter and proclamations of happiness, little Emily asked if I would have her back. She had let the flat in Hackney, and I was renting a room from a friend in his flat on the down-slope that leads to King’s Cross. From my small bedroom I could see the Mad Ludwig towers of St Pancras Station, a cathedral of steam if ever there was one.
Emily’s face, newly pale in an ethereal, sun-deprived, northern way, was older and more troubled. Her eyes seemed defensive. It was hard to recall the assertive young woman who had confidently left me in order to explore her personal space and creative energies. It had all been a huge mistake, she said. Edgar was a total failure as a writer, a charlatan who was teaching mainly to get close to troubled young women. He was a devious and inventive liar. He had a drink problem. He had poor personal hygiene. She had lent him money that she would never see again. For months he had denied he had a wife or children. At least, she said, she had acquired self-knowledge. What she actually said was that she had grown.
Many people believe in self-knowledge, and what they mean by that is a kind of self-justification: while confessing to error, they are suggesting that they have become better people in the process. But – it saddens them to recount – they have realised that they must learn to become less profligate with their kindness – it just doesn’t pay.
Actually now that she was sitting in front of me in the Albion, I saw that Emily was quite ordinary; her face had a kind of undue boniness and her eyebrows were straggly, so that she seemed to be merging with Virginia Woolf; over the months I had given her imaginary attributes. There was a juvenile-white-mouse look to her face: her eyelids were pink. She might have been weeping a lot. Still, I managed to get her to come to my little bedroom. She cried most of the time; I could not make up my mind why she was crying. Was she missing the unscrupulous Edgar, or was she regretting that she had left me? Our lovemaking took on the qualities of an autopsy. Neither of us was in the happy state of innocence that was required; we were deep in introspection.
‘Richie, please have me back. I am very, very unhappy.’
‘You remind me of the girl who murdered her parents and threw herself on the sympathy of the court because she was now an orphan.’
‘And you are still a smart-arse.’
After her humiliation, I was feeling far better. This equation is disturbing for what it tells us about human nature. I was concerned that she seemed so diminished, but there was still the matter of the sex she had had with Gaylard. You can’t just ignore it; I didn’t want to start asking how he was in bed, or whether he made her scream with ecstasy, or whether he liked blow-jobs or preferred to do it from behind
et cetera
. I didn’t want to try to calculate how many times he had put his fat prick into her: two days a week, during piano lessons, maybe the odd furtive coupling in the classroom, multiplied by twelve weeks . . . And so on. All the things that are normal in your own relationship are disgusting, perverted and painful when your girlfriend leaves you, taking her sexual repertoire with her.
Naked, she seemed utterly defenceless. God she was pale, her hip-bones poking unnaturally through her skin, which was not so much skin as a delicate membrane, barely hiding her organs. In there somewhere, but too close to the surface, were all the functioning parts. I noticed that she had shaped her pubic hair into a tiny Mohican, and of course I wondered why. I told her that I couldn’t come to a decision because I was going to Jerusalem on a grant given by my college.
A few months ago, after I had written to him asking for a research grant, my former tutor, Stephen Feuchtwanger, wrote back to say that there were travel and research grants available for pupils from state schools who had graduated from the college and required a short sabbatical. Now, he wrote, he was living in retirement in Cornwall, although as a fellow emeritus he was in close touch with the college and still had some influence. While I was at Oxford he had been fond of me. He believed I should become a writer. He was revered by many of his students. The grant had not been claimed for years, he said; I simply had to write a short proposal for the travel project, explaining how it would ultimately benefit mankind and attract funding to the college.
Please elaborate in not more than one hundred and fifty words
. I turned to my father’s damp and mildewed papers, saved from the fire, for help. I saw that he had been exploring the art of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, and I proposed this as a subject.
Now I told Emily that when I got back from Jerusalem – I was becoming lordly – I would give her a call. She raised the question of the rent of the flat tentatively; she felt it was unfair that her father had paid the deposit and I was now getting half the rental while
swanning
around the world.
‘What were you doing in Sheffield?’
It wasn’t fair, I said, but I had reluctantly come to acknowledge that the markets, harsh though they can be, contain some undeniable logic.
‘And by the way, you said you gave money to Edgar Gaylard.’
‘I didn’t tell you his name.’
‘No you didn’t.’
I had found in my father’s shambolic and almost-incinerated papers a reference to his employment at the École Biblique in Jerusalem, and to a Father Prosper Dupuis. It seemed like a good use of the college’s money to go to Jerusalem. Father Dupuis, a Dominican, was still alive, although semi-retired. I wrote to him requesting an interview for a research project, and he emailed back promptly – I was half expecting parchment and plant-dye ink – saying I was very welcome.
After breakfast I head off in a taxi for my appointment with him. Not only did he know my father, but he has been involved in all sorts of research, from the Dead Sea Scrolls to the fate of the True Cross. How difficult could it be to write a short essay on the art of the Crusaders.
The École Biblique stands on the Nablus Road. It was formerly in Jordan, but in 1967 it found itself in Israel. It was here that the Dead Sea Scrolls were first examined by Father Roland de Vaux, the director of the École Biblique, and his colleagues. My father came here – cheerfully hopeful – and managed, on his sketchy credentials of three and a half terms at Oxford, to find work with the team that was trying to preserve and understand the significance of the Dead Sea Scrolls, recovered from caves around Qumran and written on the skin of the local wild goats. The descendants of these goats still roam the hills. We know this because the DNA of the goats matches that of the vellum used by the scribes of Qumran. At that time there were many theories about what exactly the scrolls were: my father, his papers tell me, opted predictably for the theory that they were the work of a group of surviving followers of Christ himself, who had fled from Jerusalem. When the scrolls were translated and transcribed, they would revolutionise the understanding of Christianity. He was wrong on all counts.
Father Prosper is waiting for me under a cypress tree, in the garden. The Nablus Road is dusty and busy and unmistakably Middle Eastern, but here, although the pale dust has settled on the pepper trees and spiky sisal fronds, there is cool tranquillity. Beyond the garden are colonnades and the façade of a huge nineteenth-century church.
‘You are the child of Alaric, I can see it in your face. Bless you, my son.’