Damascus Gate by Robert Stone

Author:Robert Stone [Stone, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 0684859114
Publisher: Touchstone
Published: 1999-05-04T04:00:00+00:00

33

LUCAS WENT HOME through the early morning markets, by way of Jaffa Gate. In the middle of the morning he called Sonia.

"I don't think we should see each other," she told him. "I think it will turn out the same way every time."

Lucas held the phone against his chest to reject her message. Eight stories below him, an occasional vehicle sped headlong through the half-deserted streets. He felt like crying out in shame and pain. She was out of her mind, in the clutches of lunatics, and he was not man enough to save her.

"I need to know how you are," he said. "And where you are."

"For your book, you mean?"

"Yes," he said bitterly. "For my book."

"Well," she said, "I'll try to keep in touch."

"You should be seeing Obermann," Lucas said.

"No thanks. But maybe you should."

When he did see Obermann, with a selective report of what was happening, Obermann told him she was being manipulated.

"By Melker," the doctor opined. "He's a sly one. He wants her for his acolyte. Don't give up."

"I've got to take a break from them," Lucas said. "I've never felt so wretched in my life."

Obermann gave him a prescription for Prozac. "Keep working," the doctor advised him. It was sound, if self-serving, advice.

So Lucas kept working on the book, read Scholem's history of Sabbatai, read in the Zohar and about Jacob Frank's orgiastic rituals. Every few days he left a message on Sonia's answering machine. Then, during the last week of summer, he got a call from an American magazine asking him to report on a conference in Cyprus. The theme of the conference was "Religious Minorities in the Middle East."

He desperately needed a break from Jerusalem and its syndromes, in spite of the fact that the De Kuff story continued to unfold most interestingly. The old man was becoming a well-known figure in the city, and his statements were more and more provocative. The number of his followers was growing.

The police prevented him from holding forth in the Old City now, and he had been banned from the space in front of St. Anne's. He held some meetings in New City parks, billing them as concerts. At each gathering De Kuff and Raziel played Sephardic music.

Walking through Yemin Moshe the night before his departure for Cyprus, Lucas had an English-language flyer for that evening's session pressed into his hand by a young man he had never seen before. The advertisement was accompanied by something like program notes, which Lucas guessed had been written by Raziel Melker.

"If all art aspires to the condition of music," the flyer said, "so all true music aspires to tikkun and reverently reflects the process of tsimtsum and of shevirah."

The English text rendered the Hebrew words in the original, but Lucas had learned enough to recognize them. Tsimtsum: the expansion and contraction of the divine entity, like an anemone in the cosmic tidal pool, or the pool itself. Shevirah: the process underlying creation, the breaking of the vessels designed to contain the divine essence, the result of man's failure.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.