Prince of Peace (2 page)

The wind picked up and I tugged at my robe absently, as if it were a blanket under which I had been sleeping badly. I shivered. I had been there, where to you the virtue of detachment would have looked very much like the vice of indifference, for a fifth of my entire life, and all at once I was afraid. How did Eliot put it? I had seen birth and death, but had thought they were different.

I slid one hand inside its opposite sleeve and my fingers touched the paper I had hidden there. The note was folded neatly as it was when handed to me by Brother Porter just before Vespers. Once in the chapel, in my stall, I had opened it inside the psalter and while my brothers had chanted, "Praise is rightfully yours, O God in Zion, Vows to you must be fulfilled," I had read my contraband message in a swirl of happiness and terror that nearly toppled me. "Jerusalem," it said.

Jerusalem! Not the ancient heartbreak, secret or memory. Not the city Jesus would have gathered to himself like a mother her child. Another Jerusalem than these, a mundane one in which traffic gets snarled, taxi drivers grunt at the size of tips, and tourists check into hotels.

I pulled the folded paper out of my sleeve and in the wind prepared to open it again. My fingers were trembling.

I remembered taking her into my arms, no, hands; she was too small for arms. The doctor had barely wiped her clean of blood, Carolyn's blood. Carolyn was my wife whom I worshipped, considering my worship a higher form of love when, really, much later, it was what drove her away. If I had left too it was only when I understood that she would never be mine again. I must have traveled in a trance. I had come to that monastery. I had presented myself to Father Prior who must have taken my derangement for devotion. I had been completely disoriented, but for one thing. I knew enough right from the beginning not to tell him the truth. If I had told Father Prior the truth, he'd never have let me stay.

"Truth? What is truth?" said jesting Pilate—Bacon's line—as he washed his hands. And I wonder now, sitting here, rubbing at the skin of my own truth, was it the question of a sophist or was he really tormented?

My anguish was permanent, but I had long deflected it. But that afternoon I couldn't. I opened the square of paper and in the day's last light, with my back to the monastery, read it for the second time. "I must see you tonight. I am at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. Your Molly."

 

I flagged the rattling Arab bus that shuttled between Bethlehem and Jerusalem. The bus stopped for me as if it picked up vagrant monks at twilight all the time. With apologetic shrugs and my few words of Arabic I made the driver understand that I had no money for the fare. He waved me on. Mendicant Christians! What were our bizarre abnegations to him? I was grateful not to have the language. How could I have explained that a man of fifty, not perceptibly retarded, was violating a sacred vow by going into town without permission? Sometimes I saw my situation from the outside and it made me dizzy.

The bus was moving slowly. The road, winding up into the hills on top of which the city sat, was crowded with traffic. I had forgotten that, since sunset, it was Tishah-b'Ab, the late summer feast which drew Jews to Jerusalem from all over, including the controversial West Bank settlements. But this bus was nearly empty because it was for Arabs. There were a pair of old women in black shawls, three slouching youths in Banlon shirts and jeans, and a thin, hawk-nosed man seated by the door wearing, defiantly it seemed to me, the flowing Arab headdress. West Bank Arabs tended not to show themselves on Jewish feast days, and for good reason. The fanatics on both sides came out like goblins. They were the sensitive ones who were like the rest of us, but with less tolerance for life's cowshit. They'd rather be up to their asses in blood.

And so Israeli security was even more rigorous than usual. In Jerusalem, particularly in the Old City near the shrines, body-searches would be aggressive. Even monks got their flesh pressed on holy days, but I would not complain that night.

From the bus window I watched as the bleak dark desert landscape gave way to clusters of tall concrete apartment buildings which monotonously but so effectively surrounded Jerusalem. These apartment houses, hundreds of them filled with immigrant Jews, were the "facts" which bolstered Israel's resolve never to return East Jerusalem to Jordan. Since their strategic purpose was clear and crucial—and justified, I'd say—it didn't matter that the housing blocks, even at night, were unbearably ugly. The gray half-light of television glowed eerily in countless windows, and as we passed I wondered why those Jews were not going up to the city for devotions too. Was it Beirut? Were they watching the siege of the PLO stronghold on their little Sonys? Or did each apartment have its guard, its volunteer who stayed behind to resist when the Arabs finally came? "Remember," they would whisper to each other on that holy night, "the dogs attacked the last time on the Day of Atonement."

Tishah-b'Ab commemorates the two destructions of Solomon's Temple, the first in 586 B.C. over which Jeremiah wept, and the second in
A.D.
70 over which Jesus wept in advance. These events, of course, have new meaning in our century as emblems of that people's fear. On Tishah b'Ab Jews remember all their destructions and their fear gives way, rightly, to their rage. Israelis therefore by the thousand streamed into the city that night to approach the Western Wall, to place their prayers in its crevices and to stroke those ancient stones or, ritually, to strike them.

The bus driver let out a curse. The slouching boys sat bolt upright. The bus stopped and suddenly the glare of spotlights blinded us. Roadblock.

The door slapped open.

Uzi-toting soldiers clambered aboard, two, then three of them.

The first soldier barked at the driver a word I did not understand, but I heard it as "Goatfucker!" The driver cringed and appeared ready to throw himself at the soldier's feet.

Another soldier leveled his weapon at the man in the headdress. With great dignity the Arab turned his head slowly away to look out the window. The soldier forced him to stand and frisked him. As the Israeli jammed the snout of his gun into the Arab's neck, the man barely seemed to register his presence. I could see his grandfather turning that impassive face on a two-bit British overseer.

The third soldier was approaching me. I imagined him demanding to know by what authority I had left the monastery. Instead he shocked me by saying in a friendly voice and American-accented English, "Good evening, Father."

I couldn't bring myself to answer him at first. Was I afraid? "You're from Holy Cross, I assume."

"I am indeed." I adopted a cocky tone that in no way corresponded to what I was feeling. "Very clever of you."

He smiled. He was proud of himself. "I grew up in Latrobe, Pennsylvania. There's a Benedictine monastery near my aunt's house. I recognized your habit. Of course, now I know the Franciscans', Trappists' and Dominicans' too."

"Someone as smart as you are should know better than to call me 'Father.' Don't assume all monks are priests. And don't assume all Arabs are terrorists."

"Believe me, we don't, Father. These searches are for everyone's protection. Especially tonight, we can't be too careful." "But you've called me 'Father' again. You're not careful enough to listen." I was aware that the other two soldiers had moved together on the three formerly slouching youths. Would the fools resist? Would there be shooting? I looked sharply up at the soldier above me. "We understand that you have to do this, but still it affronts what dignity remains to us."

Us? Was I throwing in with Arabs?

He nodded. He had been trained to be patient with the likes of me. We were the ones—the clergy, the Americans—who could cause them trouble. Clearly his job on this bus was to occupy the field of my attention so that his comrades could jam the rods of their guns into the collarbones and ribs of the Arab scumbags. As long as they were not too obvious about it they knew I would not protest. Of course he would attempt to ingratiate himself with me and of course—"Father" indeed!—his ingratiation would insult me. My resentment of his pseudo-deference, I saw too late, served his purpose.

One of the other soldiers called back to him. They were getting off.

"Good luck, Father," the Israeli said to me, and he saluted informally.

I stared at him. To my annoyance I saw that he was waiting for me to speak. "Shalom," I said.

 

The King David Hotel, touted spa of the Middle East, but famous first for having been blown up by young Menachem Begin in 1946. Nearly a hundred people died, many of them Jews. But its glory days returned. Nixon, Kissinger and Sadat stayed there. Also Rockefellers, Toscanini, successful salesmen from the Bronx and my daughter. Would I know her?

Once, in the alley behind our house on Brooklyn Heights, we were playing catch with an old tennis ball. In her exuberance—she was perhaps six at the time—she turned our game into a contest, "running bases" the boys called it, she said. I, not an athlete, was uneasy with her burst of energy as she tore up and down the narrow pavement, dodging my feeble efforts to tag her. She laughed continually. At a certain point I sensed that I would never catch her. She had me and she knew it. Her fuddy-duddy father. What child wouldn't squeal with delight to so defeat a parent? She zigzagged in, then out, daring to come close, but only to show how easy it was to scoot away. I remember how impatient she made me feel until I realized what was happening. My impatience changed in a sorcerer's flash to awe: my child was more alive than I was. She had a grace and fire all her own. I stood there slack-jawed, thinking, She is so fast! Happiness as brief as it was sweet overwhelmed me. Later I found Carolyn reading in the corner of our book-lined living room. Without explaining, I sat on the floor next to her chair and put my head in her lap and gazed up at her, silent until she asked and I said, "We have made a kind of masterpiece."

The King David Hotel had its name marked on its entrance in English, Hebrew and Arabic, an ecumenical gesture, but the doorman in his martial red jacket looked at me suspiciously. A monk on the loose?
Apostata et fugitivus?
You might think my Benedictine habit was what put him off, but the eccentric dress of religion was ubiquitous in Jerusalem. I nodded at him and pushed through the oversized revolving door.

I was uneasy because of the war and because of my daughter, but also because it was years since I had been in a city at night. It was all like a dream to me.

In the lobby, mammoth pillars of pink stone supported the massive beams of a blue ceiling which could have been the canopy of a Semite chieftain's throne room. King-sized chairs of cedar and leather spread across the lobby. Sitting in the chairs or strolling between them were impeccably tailored guests. The men were large but not portly. They were smoking. The women glittered. Everyone looked rich to me. At each pillar huge sunflowers, bunches of them in front of floor-to-ceiling swatches of damask, arched over us from antique pots. A group of American Jews clustered at the reception desk in front of me. Those men were wearing yarmulkes, those women sensible shoes. All seemed to clutch guidebooks and they nodded in unison while the concierge explained in accented English how the adjacent road snaked across the valley into the Old City. Even those tourists were going to the Wall to grieve.

Finally I caught the eye of the clerk behind the desk.

"You have a guest registered? A Miss Molly Durkin?"

He flipped through the file. He looked up blankly. "No, Father."

I resisted the urge to correct him. "Are you certain?"

"Quite, Father."

"Would you check again? I'm sure she's here."

The clerk made a show of fingering the registration cards. Suddenly, at a particular one, he stopped and looked up. "You said 'Molly...'?"

"Durkin."

He shook his head and continued through the cards.

"What was that one?"

He flipped back to it absently. "Maguire. Molly Maguire."

It must be that the color drained from my face because he was staring at me. Molly Maguire? I could not grasp it. Molly Maguire? As in the Irish equivalent to the Stem Gang? Her very name was an assault, a bomb.

Why had it never occurred to me that once Carolyn married him, Molly would have taken Michael's name? Michael Maguire. How long had it been since I'd thought of him? Did Molly call him "Daddy"? Had he legally adopted her? Involuntarily, my mind threw up a picture of his face, smiling with such fondness. Michael, you bastard! You fucking bastard! You always said you loved us
both!

The clerk was looking at me wearily.

"That's her." I smiled. "Her married name. I knew her parents. I still think of her as Durkin."

"Room 722. You can call from the phone-bank there." He pointed to a shelf in a corner ten yards away.

I approached the phones slowly, knowing I would never use one. Because I could feel the clerk watching me, I went through the motions of calling her room, all the while depressing the engage button. If even clerks cast a disapproving eye upon me, how would my daughter look at me? She rejected my name?

As I crossed the broad sweep of marble floor toward the massive bronze elevator doors, it was like walking back in time. Memories tugged at me the way Arab boys did in the marketplace. I shook them off as I had ruthlessly now for ten years, but they clutched this time.

My daughter's four-year-old face was streaming with water. Her soaked hair framed her eyes. She had just climbed up to the float and now, arms spread, she was about to throw herself back into the lake where I waited to catch her. Her trust in me was absolute.

The elevator doors opened. The operator was short and obsequious. His bellhop's uniform looked wrong. Then I realized that his pitch-dark hair was cheaply dyed. His skin was not ruddy but flushed with age. He was too old to be dressed like that. I wanted suddenly to ask him, Were you here when Begin bombed the place? Were any young girls killed?

The elevator doors opened again, then closed behind me. I felt like a sleepwalker. How could my Molly have taken another name?