The Names Read online

  “It’s going to rain,” Frank said. “l want it to rain.”

  “Why?”

  “So you’ll take those glasses off.”

  “I don’t know what I expected,” she said.

  “So we’ll get drenched walking in the old city. So you’ll catch another cold to match Istanbul. So I’ll know the disaster is complete.”

  We shared an eight-seat taxi with Russian Orthodox nuns. The sun broke through heavy cloud as we neared Jerusalem, half gold on the tawny hills, on the limestone buildings and Ottoman ramparts. Our hotel was north of the old city. Volterra lingered at the desk to make inquiries.

  We entered through the Damascus (late and were caught at once in the polyglot surge. I felt crowded by languages, surprised and jostled as much as by donkeys loaded with produce, by running boys. Soldiers wore yarmulkas, a man lugged an eight foot cross. Volterra spoke Italian to some people who asked directions. Merchants loaded bolts of scarlet cloth, sacks of potatoes onto wooden carts which boys would use to batter through the crowds. Coptic priests in blue, Ethiopian monks in gray, the White Father in his spotless soutane. Was religion the point or language? Or was it costume? Nuns in white, in black, full habits, somber hoods, flamboyant winglike bonnets. Beggars folded in cloaks, sitting motionless. Radios played, walkie-talkies barked and hissed. The call to prayer was an amplified chant that I could separate from the other sounds only briefly. Then it was part of the tumult and pulse, the single living voice, as though fallen from the sky.

  Del was the first to wander off, disappearing down a twisted alley being torn up by workmen. Then Volterra muttered something about the Armenian quarter. We made vague plans to meet at the Western Wall.

  I found a café and sat outside to sip Turkish coffee and watch shopkeepers in idle talk. Their windows were full of religious souvenirs, rows of mass-produced objects. I found this presence a bolstering force. All the crippled pilgrims in the Via Dolorosa, the black-hatted Hasidim, the Greek priests, Armenian monks, the men at prayer on patterned carpets in the mosques—these streams of belief made me uneasy. It was all a reproach to my ardent skepticism. It crowded me, it pressured and shoved. So I tended to look with a small ironic measure of appreciation at the trashy objects in the shop windows. The olivewood, glass and plastic. They counteracted to some extent the impact of those larger figures who milled in the streets, coming from worship.

  I saw Del talking to an old man leaning on a cane outside a spice stall. He was white-bearded, wearing a knitted cap and sweater, a robe with a black sash, and there was an aura of stillness about him that was a form of beauty. His eyes were soft, a half-dreaming gaze, and in his face, which looked like a desert face, was an age of memory and light. It occurred to me that she was telling him something very much like this. I barely knew her, of course, but it was a thing she would do, I thought. Approach an old man in the street and tell him that she liked his face.

  She saw me and came over, making her way past a group whose leader carried a banner with the letter sigma on it. Del had propped the sunglasses on her forehead and was peeling a green orange. There was an element of street flash about her, a winsome toughness. She moved like a shambling kid in a school corridor, raggy and sullen. I hadn’t seen till now how good-looking she was. The face was proportioned and cool, eyes disregarding, a moody curve to the mouth. She gave me a slice of orange and sat down.

  “I don’t think he understood me.”

  “What were you telling him?”

  “How nice he looked, standing there. What beautiful eyes. That’s what I’ll remember. The faces. Even those macho faggots in Turkey. You see incredible faces. How long are we staying here?”

  “I leave in the morning. I have an afternoon flight out of Amman. I don’t know about you two. You’ll have to check the permits.”

  “Why are we here?”

  “I’m sightseeing. Y0u’re looking for an Armenian.”

  “I like that jacket. That jacket’s loaded with character.”

  “It used to be tweed.”

  “I love old stuff.”

  “It’s been worn down by erosion. You can have it.”

  “Too big but thanks. Frank says you’re lonely.”

  “Frank and I don’t always understand each other. Our friendship depended largely on Kathryn. When he and I were alone together, even then, the subject was Kathryn, the missing link was Kathryn.”

  “Can’t you get laid in Athens?”

  “I’ve developed a preoccupied air. Women think I want to take them to museums.”

  “I don’t like museums. Men always follow me in museums. What is it about places like that? Every time I turn there’s a figure watching me.”

  “I love Frank. It’s not that I don’t love him. But we don’t really live in the same world anymore. I love the times we had. We were in our twenties, learning important things. But it was Kathryn, really, who made the whole thing work.”

  I was expecting Del to ask if he’d slept with Kathryn. She had a way of looking through one’s remarks, waiting for them to end so she could get to what she thought was the point. Her voice didn’t quite match the blankish face. It had a sultry little disturbance in it, an early morning scratch. We looked at each other. She asked about lunch instead.

  Later we waited for Volterra in a light rain. Men washing at the fountain outside el-Aqsa, arrayed barefoot at the taps. Men swaying at the Wall, beneath the long courses of masonry, moon scarred limestone with finely chiseled margins, with rock-dwelling plants cascading out of the cracks. We stood near a fence adorned with stylized branch candlesticks. When he showed up finally, jacket collar raised against the chill, he took Del off to one side, where they had a brief unhappy exchange. He seemed to want her to go to the Wall, the section reserved for women. She looked away, her hands deep in the pockets of a nylon parka.

  On the way back to the hotel he told me he’d found Vosdanik.

  We walked in the dark to a restaurant near the Jaffa Gate. He didn’t say why Del wasn’t coming with us. It was misty and cold, we were a long time finding the place.

  Vosdanik walked in, a small dark man wearing an undersized fedora. He removed the hat and coat, offered us cigarettes, remarked that stuffed pigeon was the specialty here. There was a note of serious business in his manner, a modulated note, softest when he greeted people passing near our table. We drank arak and asked him questions.

  He spoke seven languages. His father had walked across the Syrian desert as a boy, a forced march, the Turks, 1916. His brother’s business was rubble in Beirut. He told us his life story as a matter of course. He seemed to think we expected it.

  Before he was a guide he’d worked as interpreter for a team of archaeologists at a site near the Sea of Galilee. Crews had been excavating for decades. Twenty levels were eventually uncovered, almost four thousand years of settlement. A vast cataloguing of fragments.

  “They made temples that will face the east. In Egypt at that time they call the east God’s land. Ta-netjer. The west is death, the setting sun. You will bury the dead on the west bank. The west is the city of the dead. The east is cockcrow, the rising sun. This is where you will live, on the east bank. Put the house in the east, put the tomb in the west. Between there will be the river.” He went at the pigeon seriously, rice spilling off his fork. His remarks were well spaced, pauses for effect, for mouthfuls of food, gestures of greeting and good will as people entered.

  He was the guide as storyteller. Even incidents from his own life he recounted with a degree of awe, as if he were pointing out the workmanship in a polychrome tile. There was a bump on the bridge of his nose. All his clothes looked shrunken.

  At the excavation he first heard of a group, a cult, apparently nameless. An archaeologist spoke of it, a Frenchman named Texier. In the beginning Vosdanik thought the references were to an ancient cult whose members had lived in this region. It was a land of cults and sects and desert monks and stylites. Every settled group produced a scatter of rival cells.
From these a man or men broke off, working toward a purer vision.

  “Wherever you will find empty land, there are men who try to get closer to God. They will be poor, they will take little food, they will go away from women. They will be Christian monks, they will be Sufis who dress with wool shirts, who repeat the holy words from the Koran, who dance and spin. Visions are real. God is involved with living men. When Mohammed was, there still were men who went away from him. Closer to God, always in their mind to remember God. Dhikr allah. There were Sufis in Palestine, Greek monks in the Sinai. Always some men go away.”

  This man Texier, himself half starved and a little distant, offered clarification, sitting in the evenings under a swaying bulb beneath the excavation roof. A note pad and briar pipe. He was working backward through curves of time, arc after arc of fragments set on the ground around his chair. At intervals he spoke softly in the general direction of Vosdanik, shadowed on a wall ten yards away, beyond the shards, a man unaccustomed to listening.

  The cult was not ancient as far as Texier knew. The cult was living. The members had last been seen, a handful of men, in a cliffside village some miles north of Damascus—a Christian settlement where the people at times still spoke Aramaic (or Western Aramaic or Syriac), which happened to be the language of Jesus.

  Wait, wait, go slow, we said.

  He ate twice as fast as we did, spoke a thousand words to every one of ours. It was his job, telling stories, supplying names and dates, sorting through the layered calamities of his city, the alleys and crypts where profound things had taken place.

  It was not one of Vosdanik’s seven languages, Aramaic, but he had heard it in the Christmas liturgy. The cult lived in two caves above the village. They were elusive men, rarely seen, except for one of them who occasionally came down into the streets and talked to the children. The language of the streets and schools was Arabic. But this man made efforts to speak Aramaic, amusing the children. Good reason why the others stayed above the town. They were keeping a watch, waiting for someone or something.

  “They follow you like a crooked shadow,” he said.

  After they’d left, the body of a man was found in one of the caves, a villager, his chest full of slashes and puncture wounds, blood everywhere. The cultists were thought at first to be Druze, blondish, some of them blue-eyed—a Muslim sect living in the mountains in the southern part of the country. A murder based on religious differences, it seemed. But arising out of nothing. There’d been no trouble, no provocation. And why were the initials of the victim cut into the blade of the crude iron tool used to kill him?

  Vosdanik paused, his sad face hanging in the smoke.

  “You will want to hurt your enemy, it is in history to destroy his name. The Egyptians made pottery that the names of their enemies were engraved with sharp reeds. They will smash the bowls, great harm to the enemies. The same harm that if you cut his throat.”

  None of this was easy for us to follow. Vosdanik was involved in the textures of place, in histories, rituals, dialects, eye and skin color, bearing and stance, endless sets of identifying traits. We leaned forward, straining to hear, to understand.

  He ordered more arak. I poured a scant measure of water, watching the arak cloud, a sedimentary stir. His narrative worked back to the dig, the overshadowing background, whispers of Islam, occult rabbinical doctrine, the vast embroidered mist of precepts and dreams. Shining, icons, strands of hair from the Prophet’s beard. He believed it all.

  Slow, we told him. Go slow, give us a chance to get it straight.

  He was taken back by the intensity of Volterra’s questioning. It was clear he had few answers. He hadn’t thought about these things and there was no reason he should have. The cult was just another mystery in the landscape. They were unremarkable to him, these men, considering where he lived, what he knew about the dark places, assassins in cloaks, the dead who walked. He told us of two other cult murders, one we knew about, the Wadi Rum, although the version he’d heard was different in some ways.

  He went after the last traces of food with a thoroughness almost cleansed of pleasure and zest. To an Arab at the next table he said something that sounded like “German shepherd.” A boy came with arak.

  “With sweet words you make them naked,” Vosdanik said to us.

  “Who?”

  “The Arabs. You will be soft with them you get what you want.”

  He offered us cigarettes. A man with half his face covered by a scarf came out of the toilet, wearing black and carrying a stick. Smoke collected near the ceiling.

  “Where are they now?” Frank said.

  “I hear nothing.”

  “Do you think there is one group, two?”

  “I hear three murders, I see one pair of blue eyes.”

  “Were the initials on the knife in Aramaic?”

  “This I don’t know.”

  “Is there an Aramaic alphabet, or what?”

  Shrugging. “No one can write it anymore. It is only sounds. It traveled in history with the Jews. It was used by itself, it was mixed with other languages. Dog-Aramaic. It was carried by religion and now it fades because of religion, because of Islam, Arabic. It is religion that carries a language. The river of language is God.”

  And this.

  “The alphabet is male and female. If you will know the correct order of letters, you make a world, you make creation. This is why they will hide the order. If you will know the combinations, you make all life and death.”

  He lit another cigarette, leaving one in the pack.

  “Food for tomorrow,” he said. A shy smile.

  Tomorrow he would show us an Aramaic inscription on the wall of the Syrian church if we were interested. He would take us to Bethlehem, to Jericho. The columns in el-Aqsa are Crusader columns, he said. Mohammed flew to heaven from the Dome of the Rock.

  After he left we stayed behind, drinking and talking, and when we hit the street we had a little trouble Ending the way to our hotel.

  “Let me get this straight,” I said. “There was someone Texier.”

  “He’s not important.”

  “Slow down. We should have left when Vosdanik left. Always leave with the guide. These alleys are full of religious fanatics.”

  “The archaeologist. Forget him.”

  “All right. We’re with the cult. Where were they?”

  “Somewhere in Syria,” Frank said.

  “What is a Druze?”

  “What were the other words for the language?” he said. “Shit, did I ask about hammers?”

  “I thought he spoke Hebrew.”

  “Who?”

  “Jesus.”

  “He’s not important. Forget him, forget what he spoke. I’m trying to concentrate on essentials. Did I ask about the victim’s health?”

  “He was dead, Frank.”

  “Before they killed him. Did they choose an imbecile, a cancer victim?”

  “His health was not good. This is one of the qualities we associate with death. In all seriousness, where are we? We should have gone out the gate and found a cab.”

  “I thought the walk would clear our heads.”

  He started laughing.

  “I don’t think I’m drunk,” I said. “It’s the effect of the smoke, that’s all, and then coming outside. That was a smoky place.”

  He thought this was very funny. He stopped walking in order to laugh, doubling up.

  “What did he say?”

  “Who?” I said.

  “I don’t know what he said. Vosdanik. Maybe it was the smoke. It was a smoky place.”

  He was talking and laughing at the same time. He had to lean against a wall to laugh.

  “Did you pay him?”

  “Damn right I paid him. We haggled. The little bastard.”

  “How much did you pay him?”

  “Never mind. Just tell me what he said.”

  He crossed his arms on his midsection, bent against the wall laughing. It was a staccato laugh, buildin
g on itself, broadening in the end to a breathless gasp, the laughter that marks a pause in the progress of the world, the laughter we hear once in twenty years. I went into an alley to vomit.

  Through the night I kept waking up. Scenes from the restaurant, patches of Vosdanik’s monologues. His face came back to me as a composed image, movie-lit, bronzed and shaded. The prominent nose, the indentations on either side of the forehead, the crooked fingers lifting a cigarette from the pack of Montanas, the little smile at the end. He seemed a wise and sympathetic figure in this dawn projection, super-lifelike. The third or fourth time I woke up I thought of the dead man’s initials cut into the weapon. Old westerns. If one of those bullets has your name on it, Cody, there’s not a goldarned thing you can do about it. Spitting in the dust. Montana daybreak. Is this what I wanted to isolate from everything else he’d said, is this what I was driving up out of sleep to tell myself to remember? Initials. It was the only thing he’d said that seemed to mean something. I knew something. There was something at the edge of all this. If I could stay awake and concentrate, if I could think clearly, if I could be sure whether I was awake or asleep, if I could either snap awake completely or fall into deep and peaceful sleep, then I might begin to understand.

  I sat with Del Nearing in the back of the long Mercedes, waiting for Volterra. A camel stood near the hotel entrance and the Baptists from Louisiana took turns mounting and dismounting, photographing each other.

  “Frank has crazed eyes this morning. It’s a look he gets now and then. The blood drains out of his eyes. Deadly.”

  “Where were you last night?”

  “Watching TV.”

  “You missed the guide, the linguist.”

  “Not interested.”

  “We drank too much.”

  “It’s not that,” she said. “It’s the old disease. The one that science hasn’t noticed yet. He’s obsessed.”

  The camel driver posed with a woman named Brenda.

  “Why was he annoyed at you yesterday?”