Requiem (9 page)

'That's my wife,' said Tom.

'Hell. Sorry. No offence.'

‘Maybe
I should break your teeth.' Tom wasn't joking.

The drunk
swayed and looked up at Tom, six foot four and an athletic fourteen stones. The
other men eased back a few inches. The drunk offered up his right cheek. 'Go
on. I deserve it. Hit me here. I've got an abscess on the other side.'

Tom
pushed the drunk's face away with the palm of his big hand. He scooped up his
beer and returned to the lounge.

A
couple of hours later Tom spotted the drunk pawing at Katie. He knew she could
look after herself, but then he recalled how drunk he himself had been on first
meeting her in this very room. He joined them.

'I was just
apologizing,' said the drunk,' bulging eyes leaking moisture, spittle spraying
in Tom's direction, 'for
m'earlier
gaff.'

'It's true,' Katie said. 'He was.'

'This
woman would be the apotheosis of any man. She's one of the seraphim. Believe
me. I've had firsthand '
sperience
.' He swayed
dangerously.

'Well, we're just leaving.'

'Look after
her,' bellowed the drunk. 'She's a
fuckin
' seraph!'

The
party host was at the door to help them on with their coats. 'Hey, who's the
yeti?' Tom asked.

'Sorry,’ said
the host, planting a damp parting kiss on Katie's proffered cheek. 'He's my
brother. He's just left the priesthood.'

14

'In this country, when
you hear someone shout, "God is Great," that's when you take cover.'
Sharon dispensed this advice lightly as they walked the wall of the Old City.
They were able to cross the area from Zion Gate to a little before Damascus
Gate. The rest had been sealed off as a result of yesterday's shooting
incident. The number of soldiers on the walls had been doubled. They looked
edgy.

'Did the newspaper say what happened?'

'There's
never an explanation. A young Arab ran through the street wielding a knife and
shouting exactly that, "God is Great," before stabbing two Jews. Then
he was shot dead by a soldier. The soldiers then chased any Arabs in the
vicinity and beat them half to death.'

'But what
made him do that? What made him explode?'

They
stopped at David's Tower and leaned on the wall, looking in across the Armenian
quarter. Sharon lit a small, wrinkled cigarette, and Tom identified the odour
of hashish. 'You can't explain it in the way you want. It's part of the
intifada
,
the Palestinian uprising. They see
it as an ongoing struggle to rid the land of the Jews. We see it as a holding
operation; we're staying. That's it. The thing flares up from time to time in
incidents like this.’

'But why
shout about God before doing such a thing? It doesn't make sense to me.'

'No,
not to you. But to these Palestinians - and to some of the ultra-Orthodox Jews
here - religion and politics are indivisible. Exactly as it would have been
when this city was founded, or in Jesus' time.'

'How
long will it go on?'

'Forever is my guess.'

Walking
the wall was Sharon's idea. From there, she'd told Tom, he could get a better
picture of the layout of the city. He was glad of her company. The armed
soldiers flicked glances of loneliness and longing at her, and she took away
from him the whiff of the naive tourist. He felt less of a target when he was
with Sharon, and her strength and confidence temporarily insulated him from the
city's phantoms. Now he'd had a taste of the political violence emanating from
the city. He didn't know which scared him most. He was waiting to confide, to
tell her what was happening to him. He was afraid that if he started talking
now, it would snag or knot or, worse, his head would
unspool
entirely and he wouldn't be able to put it back together.

She bit on
the smoke from her reefer. 'What do you think of it from up here?'

'It’s still beautiful.'

She
pointed out the ethnic divisions. 'Four quarters. Each contributing twenty-five
per cent of stupidity and bull-shit. See the Jews at their Wailing Wall? Half
of them don't even know what it is. They think it was the wall of Solomon's
temple. Have you seen them stuffing written prayers in between the cracks? They
think God is a spider? It wasn't the temple wall - it was the foundation of the
retaining wall of the platform on which the
Herodian
wall was built. Herod's, not Solomon's.'

She ground
the butt of her cigarette into the stone. 'Imagine spending your afternoons
whispering to the wrong stones.

'Then there's your mob.
Marginally more stupid. All of this because some Byzantine emperor's mother was
disappointed to find nothing here when she made the very first pilgrimage. So
what have we got? The Way of Sorrows built on an imaginary path. Great chapels
built over guesses. Churches stretched over vague holes in the ground. Have you
seen the shrine of the Virgin's milk? That's the best. The Virgin spilled her
mother's milk here. Please give three shekels - that's the best. They don't
know
where Jesus was crucified. They don't
know
where he walked. They
don't
know
where he was buried. It's all arbitrary. It's all a lie. A
theme park. A fucking Byzantine Disneyworld for dimwit pilgrims.' She pointed
across to the left. 'Have you been through the Armenian quarter?'

'Yes.'

'That's the
saddest. Singing Armenian songs and teaching their children dances to hang on
to a pocket of the past. A patch of Armenia preserved in amber. Then there are
the Muslims, with their Dome, where Mohammed ascended into heaven and their
random stabbings because God is Great. Aw, what's the use?'

She'd
burned out her exasperation before dealing effectively with the Muslims.
Leaning her elbows against the wall, she squinted across the rooftops. 'It's a
hologram. Sometimes I despise this city.'

'I know all
that,' Tom said, 'and yet it's still astonishingly beautiful.'

'That's the
strangest thing about it. You're absolutely right. Are we going to talk about
Katie?'

From his
pocket he took a piece of paper on which he'd written three words. He gave it
to her.

^'
De
profundis
clamavi
,'
she
read. 'What does it mean?'

I was hoping you could tell me.'

'Is it Latin?'

'Yes.
I feel I should know it. It was a message someone gave to me.'

'Who?

''A
woman.’ He folded the note and put it back in his pocket. He too squinted into
the sun to avoid her gaze. He couldn't allow his eyes to meet hers for too
long.

'It's not
easy, Sharon. It's not easy. It's been a bad year.' He felt her hand squeezing
his. 'I've been hallucinating from the moment I arrived in Jerusalem.'

'Hallucinating? You're
supposed to hallucinate in Jerusalem. That's why it's here. The entire city is
a hallucination.'

'I'm serious, Sharon.'

'Sorry,
babe. Did that sound like I was teasing you? Come on, I know a cafe in the
Armenian quarter. We can go there, and you can tell me about your
hallucinations.'

15

The aromatic coils of
rich roast coffee had hauled them in off the street. Shopping in town one
Saturday afternoon, they'd stopped at a cafe. But they'd run out of words.
Unspoken anger hung like a pall between them as they stared into
cappuccino
dregs.
Suddenly there was another's presence looming over the table.

'Couldn't
help seeing you. Had to come over.' It was the drunk from the party. The
absconded priest. He stroked his moustache nervously. 'Wanted to apologize for
my behaviour at my brother's party the other night. I was being a bore by all
accounts.'

Tom shrugged. 'It was a party.'

'You were no trouble,' said Katie.

'It
was my first night of freedom, so to speak. The drink got the better of me, and
I made a fool of myself

'Forget it,' said Tom.

'Anyway, my
name's Michael. Michael Anthony.' Rather formally, he shook hands with both of
them. He hovered for a moment, perhaps waiting for an invitation to sit down.
When he realized that an invitation wasn't about to present itself, he said
goodbye decisively and hurried out of the coffee bar.

Katie glanced up at Tom. Tom looked away.

16

De
profundis
clamavi
.
The words held no significance for Sharon. This left
one other person known to him in all of Jerusalem, so, despite his promise to
himself, Tom paid another visit to David Feldberg. He hoped the old scholar
might be able to divine meaning in the writing on the wall, or at least to
identify the literal sense of the words. So far he'd told Sharon nothing of
David's efforts to entangle him with the scroll fragments.

Sharon had
listened patiently to his account of the hallucinations. He preferred to speak
of 'hallucinations’ because it deflated the experiences, even though the woman
had been as substantial as the city walls. There was nothing vague or smoky or
translucent about her. Even his recollection of the experiences triggered an
intensity, a brightness, and that mysteriously associated cloying perfume. Only
the phantom's gravity-defying manifestation on the perpendicular walls cast
doubt on her  physicality.

'Perhaps
she's a real person,' Sharon had suggested at the Armenian cafe.

'Suspended from the wall?'

'A trick of the light?'

'Some trick. She keeps trying to talk to
me.'

He told her
about the voice in his head. It's in those moments before I fall asleep. I hear
this voice. Like she's telling me a story I can't understand. I don't know who
or what it's about. As if it's in a language I almost know, but not quite. And
every time I focus on it, I lose it, like a radio frequency drifting out. God,
it's weird. Could it be too much sun, do you think?  I've felt strange
ever since I got here. Trembling. Quivering. Could it be the sun?'

'You're
not suffering from sun-stroke, if that's what you mean.'

Sharon's
manner suggested she knew exactly what he was suffering from. If she did know,
she fell short of telling him.

David was absent from his usual
place in the communal kitchen. A dozen or so chipped mugs and cups, all ringed with
mouldering tea or coffee dregs, were clustered around the sink. When he tapped
on David's door there was no answer, so he tried the handle. The door swung
inwards. David was on his sick bed. Someone had cleaned and tidied the room.
Pillows were propped under his grey head, and a grim cortege of coloured pills
was laid out on his bedside cabinet, beside a bottle of blackcurrant juice.

He was
dozing, but he blinked open his eyes. Seeing Tom, he groped weakly for his
spectacles.

'Someone
been poisoning you again?' Tom settled uncomfortably on the edge of the bed.

David raised
his limp arms. 'You won't let me forget.' His voice was feeble. The whites of
his eyes were stained yellow.

'Have you seen a doctor?'

'I have. A most unpleasant old friend of
mine.'

'And? What are you suffering from?'

'From
surfeit of life,
monsieur.
Surfeit of life. Are there many cups in the
kitchen?'

'One or two.'

'Can
you tell me, please, when people are given a cup, why is it that they cannot
rinse it out after using it? Why? I am forever rinsing out cups.'

Uncertain
whether a smile was required, Tom offered one. I’ll have a look at them on my
way out.'

'Humouring
me, is that it? What brings this visit?'

'I
wanted to ask you something. But you don't look well enough to be bothered.’

'Ask.'

Tom produced
a scrap of paper from his pocket and unfolded it. Taking an age to hook his
spectacles around each ear, David finally, carefully, adjusted them on the
bridge of his nose. Though there were only three words inscribed there, he read
the note over like a letter from home. Then he refolded the paper, taking off
his glasses before handing it back.

'Well? What is it? What does it mean?'

'It
is Latin. I know enough to tell you what it says. It says:
Out of the
depths.
Or perhaps it could be rendered:
Up from the depths?

‘
Up from the depths?
But what does
that mean?'

'Mean?
That's another question. You asked me what it
says.
I've told you. What
it might mean is another matter entirely.'

David
closed his eyes and dozed again. He looked peaceful enough. He wasn't a man
who'd been poisoned. Old age had him, and had sprinkled on him a layer of
frost. His chest rose and fell under the blankets, a slight movement.