Prince of Peace Page 3

  Once I admitted to him that I no longer believed in God. Such a statement seems entirely unmomentous now, but I remember trembling as I said it then. Our certainties had all flaked away like dried skin. Michael sat in silence for such a long time that I began to wonder if he'd heard me. I was unable to read his face. Finally he replied with a voice so sad as to be completely unfamiliar. "None of us believes in God, Durk, but we act as if we do because we love each other. Otherwise..." He checked himself, as if he'd said too much already. I never asked him, Otherwise what? But I must have known. We have to help each other cling to God while we can, because eventually we do each other in and then God is all there is.

  What desolation I felt, standing there outside the prior's room, watching him. That old monk had been my spiritual father now for more than a decade. We had never overtly expressed affection for one another. I'd hidden from him in my wry irreverence; the trouble with religious superiors, I'd say to myself, is they think they are. He had shown me only his stern mask. His habitual expression had for years been a version of a desert shrub's. Yet, watching him at his psalter and imagining him praying for me, I felt a rush of, yes, love for the man and for the company of brothers who had received me as one not merely welcome but wanted. That I dared allow myself at last to feel such love for those men was how I knew that I was leaving them and their monastery forever. Leaving without a word. It would have been impossible for me to explain. What? That I had a daughter? That she was waiting in a taxi? That she'd come to take me to America? That I was going to my wife's side at her husband's grave? That he was my dearest friend, my enemy? How explain such riddles? What could I have said? Not so much to make the prior let me go—I was beyond permission—as to make him understand. But weren't we beyond understanding too? Hadn't we always been? When I'd arrived years before, a vagrant refugee in flight from dingy rented rooms where for months after Carolyn had left me I'd groped for a way to live and for the bottles of cheap booze that were always rolling under the bed. I'd told the prior nothing then. I could tell him nothing now. He would be shocked to find me gone, hurt perhaps, but not really surprised. What monk ever presumes to know in the dark shroud of his vocation what the old Deus Absconditus is up to now?

  "On the river of tears," Picard says, "man travels into silence." That was what I had done, going there in the first place. And now, grief-struck, stunned at Molly's reappearance, at the summons she'd brought not from Carolyn, but from my own life, I was doing it again. I was leaving the silence in silence.

  I stifled yet another urge to burst in on the prior to throw myself before him for his blessing. Instead I stepped back from his door into the shadows of the desert. Goodbye, dear father, I muttered. God keep you, I prayed, since I cannot. Ad multos annos.

  I turned, faced Bethlehem for a moment. The stars were spread above me like a jovial throng, but like applause in church, affirmation from the night seemed wrong. This was loss, all loss. First Michael, my friend. Now Holy Cross, my only brothers. Gone, all gone. Already my years in the place were sliding away. I knew that I would someday account for myself to Father Prior and to my gracious confreres, but not then. In fact, of course, these pages are my accounting, and finally my mouth is at the grill of their cloister. Their ears are pressed against it and I am whispering, Oh my brothers, this is why I came to you and why I left.

  I didn't need a blessing. I didn't need permission. What I needed were my passport—I was Frank Durkin now, not Brother Francis—and something to wear. I circled the monastery and entered it by the proper door. The halls were quiet. In a few hours, but long before daylight, the monks would rise and sing the nocturnal psalms and they would pray for an absent brother. I stopped in the chapel to pray for them.

  And then, in the laundry room, I traded my habit for a denim shirt.

  "Why did you stay there so long?" she asked.

  I looked past Molly to the desert nightscape we were leaving behind. The taxi was halfway to Jerusalem, and the garish suburban settlements were coming into sight. "Because no one asked me things I had no answer for." I laughed modestly, just glad to be with her, and despite herself she laughed too. Such questions could only make fools of both of us, her for asking, me for never being able to respond. When I looked at her silhouetted against the window I wanted it to be that I'd just awakened and that she and I were two of a family which had survived the harshest winter without wood for a fire. We'd stayed together through awful times. Her mother was a spinner, and I was a miller and she was the girl the prince was wooing. We were going home now. My wife would be in the corner at her wheel, making clothes for me.

  "I hate it," my daughter said, about the land we were passing through.

  "Because it's barren?"

  She looked at me. "Because it's had you all this time."

  "It has and it hasn't, Molly. The best years of my life happened without me." I smiled again, trying to steer away from her mood and from my guilt. We weren't an inch from the fact of my having abandoned her. "Tell me about Mount Saint Vincent's. I'm surprised you wound up there."

  "Why? Because bright young women don't go to Catholic colleges?"

  "No, because it's where your mother went, and she wasn't ... well ... exactly happy there."

  "She says she was. She says she loved it."

  "Really?" I didn't disguise my amazement. So Carolyn had mellowed too. "Is she still working?"

  "Better than ever. She has a major show on now, in fact, at a gallery in Princeton. A dozen new paintings. There was an article in Time magazine."

  I was surprised again, but now I did disguise it because of the envy it implied. "Very colorful? Geometric forms?"

  "Mostly whites. She works in whites and pastels."

  "Color was her trademark. Great splashes of color."

  "She's more subdued."

  Weren't we all, I thought. I returned to the haven of silence. These exchanges with Molly exhausted me. There were a million things I wanted to know, but each of her answers was like the glass wall in the Marcel Marceau routine; I kept bumping into it until a kind of panic set it. When I stopped talking, so did she.

  In a few minutes the taxi slowed down. There was less traffic on the road than earlier, but the roadblock was still there. The taxi driver stuck his head out the window. The three soldiers were standing mutely before a pair of black-suited, bearded Orthodox men who were wildly berating them. The driver joined in, adding his own sharp voice, a one man antichorus. He was a Jew and his curses, if that's what they were, were in Hebrew. The soldiers waved us through. As we entered the outskirts of the city the taxi picked up speed.

  "Everyone seems angry here," Molly said.

  "They're at war...." I almost called her "sweetie," but my tongue stumbled and the endearment remained unspoken. "It isn't anger. Everyone's afraid."

  "But why can't they just live together? Why can't they just leave each other alone?"

  She looked like a woman, but she wasn't quite. "They both want the same thing, Molly. That's the trouble. They can't both have it."

  "What, land? There's plenty of land."

  "Not 'land,' Molly. Holy land. Do we have time to take a detour? I'll show you something that will help you understand." She looked at her watch. "We're supposed to be at the airport at two o'clock. They said the security check takes a long time."

  I leaned forward toward the driver. "Can we get to Lod by two if we go through the Old City? I'd like to see the Wall."

  "You have time, sir. But you'll have to walk. I can't get you closer than two blocks."

  "Fine." I faced Molly. "I'd like to see it one last time myself."

  "The Wailing Wall?"

  "The Western Wall. You can't have come to Jerusalem and not have seen it."

  "I came to see you." She poked me. "The Wailing Monk."

  "If you only knew." I seized her finger and held it.

  A few moments later we were walking hand in hand down the broad cobblestone ramp that led to the huge open plaza. We had bee
n frisked by soldiers twice. The streets of the Old City and this route in particular were mobbed, even at that hour. Well before we saw them we could hear the throng at the Wall, the hum of prayers hung in the air like an electric effect, an otherworldly moan. When we came around a last bend the sight leapt at us, stunningly. Floodlights illuminated everything, the plaza, the mammoth Wall, the sea of black-hatted men. But, dominating it all, suspended above the Jews and their shrine, dwarfing them, dwarfing even that block-long construction of hewn boulders were the Dome of the Rock and Al Aqsa, the great Mosque, which sat on the Temple Mount, occupied it, as if it was built at the beginning for Mohammed, not Moses.

  Molly pressed my arm, her nails bit through my shirt. She had gasped and was not breathing yet. We stood where we were, straining to take in the spectacle. Thousands of bobbing Jews, beseeching not Yahweh but the stolid indifferent stone; the brilliant blue tile and the golden egg, the mammoth Faberge, of the Arab shrine; and between them at intervals along the top edge of the Wall, like forged spikes, scores of Israeli soldiers at perfect attention with Uzis between their arms and breasts. Set in the blazing light against the pitch black of night, it was like a de Mille version of the apocalypse an instant before his "Action!"

  "There is a rock under that dome, an ancient boulder. Moslems believe Mohammed ascended into heaven from it, and that makes this shrine second only to Mecca. Jews believe that Abraham offered to sacrifice Isaac on the same rock, Molly. When God spared Isaac their religion was born. That's what they're fighting over."

  "What are all these people doing?"

  "They are reciting the antiphon of Tishah-b'Ab. 'Every generation in which the Temple is not rebuilt is guilty of its destruction.' They'll be here all night, praying for the restoration of Solomon's Temple, which implies the destruction of the Dome and Al Aqsa. The Arabs are right to be afraid of piety like this."

  "Are you against the Jews?"

  "No. I am afraid for them. And I am afraid of them. Many Jews feel the same way. What I wanted you to see was that this land is different. Step over here." She followed me up a set of stairs that led to a narrow alley winding back into the Jewish Quarter. From the top of the stairs was another view of another dome. This one was not illuminated, but even from several blocks away, its black unornamented form stood out sharply against the sky. "That is the Holy Sepulchre. Christians revere it both as the site of Calvary and of the tomb from which Jesus was raised. This patch of earth is less than half a square mile in size; the three great religions of the world all believe it to have been touched directly by God."

  "And so they fight over it?"

  "Yes. It's absurd, isn't it? What does God think, do you suppose?"

  "I don't believe in God," Molly said. "I never understood why until now."

  "You can't blame God for the madness of his people."

  "He made them, didn't he?"

  I poked her. "Not if he doesn't exist."

  But she refused to treat this lightly. She turned from me. "I didn't say he doesn't exist. I said I don't believe in him."

  "It is not easy here to believe in God. You're right about that." I was speaking softly. Molly gave no sign that she even heard me. "When I first came to Jerusalem I was put off by the shrines, even by the Holy Sepulchre. Bad art, contentious monks, superstitious tourists. The tomb of Jesus isn't even empty; a Greek priest with bad breath and no teeth waits in there to sell you candles. I hated the decadent religiosity of this place."

  "But you stayed." She faced me. Her eyes were full.

  I touched her cheek and I nodded. "There's an excavation cave I wish I could show you. It's being dug under a Russian convent not far from here. You go down, down, down, like into a mine, and you stoop through a tunnel to come out into a great, spacious cavern which is lit by naked bulbs. You stand before a large stone slab about nine feet long and three feet wide. It is unremarkable, an ordinary hewn piece of rock at your feet. You look down at it in silence for a long time, and finally you kneel and touch it and kiss it."

  "Why?"

  "Because it was the threshold stone of the city gate in the time of Herod. Only recently have archaeologists uncovered that section of the ancient city wall. They say it is certain that, only a few years before the threshold stone was covered by the rubble of the Roman destruction, Jesus of Nazareth stepped on it with his feet when he left the city to die."

  Molly let her gaze drift across the city. "It's hard to picture Jesus here."

  "Why?"

  "Everyone's so mean," she answered sharply. She was dangerously close to losing her poise. What was she afraid of ?

  "The world is mean, Molly. And it makes us mean. In his own way Jesus was mean too. The Incarnation wasn't puppy love, you know. Jesus was one of us, that's all. It could have been the Bronx, but it was here. God came here. That's the curse of this place."

  Molly was silent. In her face the immobile nightscape showed. Her eyes seemed to look out from one of the city's tombs, and I saw how very sad she was. Not fear, but grief was what undid her. I saw for the first time that she was a young woman profoundly in mourning.

  "Michael was a good friend to you, wasn't he?" I touched her.

  She nodded shyly. Now the tears came. She stood erect, ignoring them. The breeze feathered her hair. "He was more than that. Forgive me for saying this, but he became like a father to me."

  "I'm glad, sweetie. He was the best man I ever knew."

  "You don't hate him?"

  "I did. You've been asking me why I stayed here so long. It was to purge myself of that, to recover from it. No, Molly, I don't hate him. I haven't in a long time. That's why I'm coming back with you. I have to say goodbye to Michael. He was more than a friend to me too. And when I failed you as a father, I thank God he was there to take my place."

  Molly lowered her head and whispered now, "You didn't fail me.

  And I could think of nothing to say to her, or of any way to touch her, because we both knew that she was lying.

  After a long time I said, "We should go." I took her arm and led her back along the cobblestone ramp toward the street where the taxi was waiting.

  After the glare of the floodlit plaza the narrow arched-over passageway was too dark to negotiate hurriedly. As we passed them I could make out the corrugated shutters that covered the stalls and alcoves of merchants. In the cramped Jewish Quarter the stale air with its unfamiliar odor, whether of food or waste, pressed on us. Three Hasidic men on their way to vigil at the Wall brushed by us, and I sensed Molly stiffen, as if modern women knew instinctively of their contempt. At a corner a machine-gun-toting soldier looked up from a match with which he had just lit a cigarette. "Hi ya, Father," he said. It was the young American who'd stopped the Arab bus. There was a snicker in his greeting, and I realized that he thought he had caught me, a monk out of habit, with a beautiful girl in the middle of the night. I winked at him.

  And at that very moment from behind us came the explosion, like the sustained clap of hailstones on a metal roof, and instantly it seemed to me that since I first laid eyes on the army in the Judean desert valley ten years before I had been waiting for that outbreak. Without thinking I pushed Molly to the ground. I had no way of knowing how close the bomb or shell or grenade was to us, though I felt a blast of heat and I was sure the ground under us had been jolted. The noise of the explosion hung in the air, and then, as it faded, other sounds grew to fill the night. First, of human screams, a great roar of screaming that was coming from the plaza by the Wall. And then, more immediate to us, the clompclomp of runners. When I opened my eyes to look, I saw squads of soldiers barreling past us. The American was gone.

  Molly was pressed into the corner of a shuttered merchant's stall and I was on top of her. When I looked, I thought at first she was pushing her entrails back into the wound in her abdomen. But she was not. Neither of us was hurt. The explosion, it was only now certain, took place some distance away. At the Wall, or at the Dome of the Rock, or in the Holy Sepulchre. I pictur
ed the night sky full of flaming debris. What had they blown to bits now, and whom?

  Just as Molly and I were struggling to our feet the roar of the coming wave reached us. By the time we faced it, the wave of panicked, fleeing Jews was on us. Hundreds of the thousands from the Wall had squeezed into the narrow alley and were running blindly through it, screaming. Only the yard-square alcove we were pressed in saved Molly and me from being crushed in the stampede. We clung to each other as the throng's edge ripped at us. Molly had buried her face in my shoulder. Her eyes were tightly shut, but mine were open. I couldn't help but stare at the terror in the faces of those Jews. For that instant they were in flight from every pogrom, every massacre, every slaughter, every crucifixion men had ever inflicted on the creation of God. And I, in my corner, holding my grown child, watched with the eyes of a guilty bystander through which, unfortunately, I had seen everything.

  THREE

  MICHAEL MAGUIRE was mobbed by a throng of panicked fugitives too, but he was not free to watch from the edge of the road as I would be years later. The old men, women and children coursing past him were as desperate to escape as those I would see, but they pressed against each other, always forward, forward, with greater restraint. They were less an avalanche of terror than a glacier, and it was about to become Maguire's job to stop it.

  It was January 4, 1951, the first of his fighting days. He was eighteen years old, had been in the army only since August and in Korea less than a month. Almost from the day of his arrival as a member of the 27th U.S. Infantry Regiment, the American forces had been falling back, withdrawing southward, collapsing around Seoul—not "retreating," the officers insisted—in the face of the shocking onslaught of Chinese troops. Maguire's company had been doing garrison duty in the Korean capital, but now it too had begun its move south. Maguire's platoon, consisting of seven GIs of whom he was one, a corporal, a staff sergeant and commanded by a second lieutenant, had been sent ahead the day before to guard the railroad bridge over the Han River a few miles below Seoul. But in twenty-four hours almost the entire U.N. force of soldiers and equipment had been evacuated across the Han, and now Maguire's platoon was one of only a few U.N. units remaining on the north side of the river.