In amazement Ben-Horin said, “What in the name of Mohammed are you talking about?”
“I—she—” He could not say it.
Ben-Horin shook his head furiously. “You lunatic, how could you possibly have gone to the village after all my warnings about moving cautiously? You have done me harm that is perhaps irreparable. This morning I went to see Yasin, the falafel-peddler—he pretended not to know me. As if I am police. I could hardly believe it when Geula said you had been to the village. Now they want nothing more to do with either of us. My relationship with them is severed and possibly cannot be rebuilt. How could you? The discourtesy, Hornkastle, the absolute stupidity—”
“I couldn’t reach you for four days. I thought you were avoiding me, God knows why. Finally the frustration built up and built up and I had to talk to those people, had to, so I—”
“How very stupid that was.”
“Yes. I know. Even as I was doing it, I knew it was a mistake, but I simply went through with it anyway, like a dumb schoolboy, I suppose, and even worse, when they were about to give me the damned mushroom—I’m sure that’s what they were going to do—I panicked, I bolted—” Hornkastle rubbed his aching forehead. “Can you forgive me?”
“Forgiveness is not the issue. I want nothing more to do with you. You may have crippled my own research.”
“All right.”
“I advise you not to try to return to the village.”
“I’m planning to leave Israel as soon as I can.”
“Probably there will be no flights available until after the Easter holiday. But while you are still here, keep away from those people.”
“Yes,” Hornkastle said meekly.
“I take no responsibility for what will happen to you if you approach them again.”
“There’s no chance of that.”
“I wish I had never invited you here. I want never to hear your name again.”
Ben-Horin turned with military precision and strode away.
Hornkastle felt shame and weariness and a deep sense of loss. It was ended now, the quest, the timid tentative adventure. Out there in the judaean desert are people acting out the ancient love-feast, communing with a god older than Rome, and he would never know a thing of it now. Slowly, defeatedly, he made his way back to the hotel. I’ll call El Al tomorrow, he thought—they’ll be open on Good Friday, won’t they?—and get the hell out of here, back to the real world, back to all that I wanted to flee.
But there was still tonight and he could not bear to be alone. Recklessly he phoned the room of the Englishwomen—what did he have to lose?—and Claudia answered. Would they join him for dinner? He had asked twice before; maybe he was making a pest of himself and they would tell him to get lost. But no. A lovely idea, she said. Did he have a place in mind? Hornkastle said, “How about right here? At half past seven?”
They both looked beautiful—fine clothes, pale skins, fluffy blonde hair. He loved the British sound of their serene voices. Helena’s gauzy blouse revealed fine collarbones, a delicate bosom. Had she been with a man, he wondered, since the unfortunate hunting mishap? Mother and daughter were heavy drinkers, and Hornkastle matched them two for one, so that things rapidly grew blurred, and he was only dimly aware of his food; he hoped he was being brilliant, suspected he was merely being boorish, and hardly cared. They were tolerating him.
“And your mushroom research?” the mother asked. “How has that been going?”
Painful recollection nearly sobered him. “I’ve botched it,” he said, and as they leaned toward him, eagerly, sympathetically, he poured out his miserable shabby tale of the illicit visit, the conversation with the Arab, the pathetic, inglorious retreat. “I see now that what I was looking for here,” he said, “was not just a nice little bit of folk-anthropopharmacology to write up for the Journal, but an actual mystic experience, a real communion, and as often happens when you want something too badly, you handle things clumsily, you reach too soon, you blunder—” He paused. “And now it will never happen.”
“No,” said Claudia. “You will have what you seek.”
He half expected her to pull a glowing red Amanita mushroom from her tiny purse.
“Impossible now,” he said mournfully.
“No. This is the city of divine grace, of redemption. You will have a second chance at whatever you hope to attain. I am quite sure of that.”
He thought of Geula Ben-Horin saying, We live as though there are no second chances. But maybe for Israelis, living in a state of constant war, things were different. Geula had also said, Live in the hope of glorious redemption, and now Claudia had said the same thing. Perhaps. Perhaps. He gave the British woman a bland hopeful smile. But he was without hope.
It was well past eleven by the time the last brandies were gone, and then, without any subtlety at all, Hornkastle asked Helena to spend the night with him, and she, smiling beatifically at her mother as though the barbaric American had just done the most wonderfully characteristic thing, as if he had performed one of his tribal dances for her, thanked him for the offer and pleasantly refused—no second chances there, not even a first one—and they left him to deal with the check.
He sat in the restaurant until they told him it was closing. Somehow he managed to persuade his waiter to sell him a whole bottle of arrack from the bar stock and he took it to his room and through the night he methodically emptied it.
By taxi the next morning he descended to the Old City, where a vast horde of pilgrims had gathered to reenact the Savior’s final thousand paces along the Via Dolorosa from the place of condemnation to the place of His interment. It looked like the crowd outside a college football game on Saturday afternoon. There were souvenir-sellers, mischievous boys, peddlers of snacks, police and soldiers, television cameramen—and also brown-robed friars, nuns of a dozen orders, priests, people costumed as Roman legionaries carrying spears, a queue of Japanese in clerical clothes with three cameras apiece.
Hornkastle walked in a lurching, shambling way that evidently had an effect on people, for the mob parted before him wherever he went, and soon he was deep in the city’s tangled streets. Occasionally hands passed lightly over his body—pickpockets, no doubt, but that was unimportant. He saw Arabs with wide tapering faces everywhere, bloodshot hyperthyroid eyes.
A small boy tapped his knee and took him by the hand. Hornkastle allowed himself to be led, and found himself shortly at Yasin’s falafel stand. Hornkastle felt like cringing before the Arab, who surely knew—they all knew everything—of his numbskull journey to the village, of his half-crazed pleadings and bizarre flight. But there was no condemnation on Yasin’s face. He was grinning broadly, bowing, making Hornkastle welcome to the Holy Land, to Jerusalem, to the Via Dolorosa; to his own humble falafel stand on the morning of Christ’s Passion. Yasin handed Hornkastle a bulging sandwich.
“I have no money, “ Hornkastle muttered.
The Arab beamed and shook his head. “My gift! Christ will rise!”
His eyes found Hornkastle’s and lingered there a long while in what was almost a kind of communion itself. Hornkastle had no idea of what was being communicated, but it left him with a sense of warmth, of trust, of faith. Perhaps Claudia was right, that this is the city of divine grace, of second chances. He thanked Yasin and gobbled the sandwich as if he had not eaten in weeks.
Let it begin soon, he prayed. At last: let it begin.
The boy was still at his side. He had the village face, too, triangular, but his eyes were gentler. Hornkastle realized that the boy had appointed himself his guide. All right. They ploughed together through the hordes and eventually carne to the courtyard of the Omarieh School, where a sign proclaimed the First Station of the Cross. Pilate had sentenced Jesus here. The crowd was flowing up the Via Dolorosa here, slowly, ecstatically, praying in many languages, singing, chanting. Wherever Hornkastle looked, he saw pilgrims tottering under immense wooden crosses, gasping and struggling and staggering. His head throbbed. He felt light-headed, giddy, weightless. He let himself be swept along, to the place where Jesus first had fallen—marked by a broken column—and then up the narrow, killingly steep Via Dolorosa through an Arab bazaar. Claudia and Helena, or two women just like them, were nearby, reading out of a guidebook. You were right, he said to them, not bothering to use words. This is the city of second chances. “The Fourth Station,” said the younger. “Where Jesus met his fainting Mother. This church is Our Lady of the Spasm. The Fifth: Simon of Cyrene carried the cross here. The Sixth, where Veronica wiped the face of Jesus.” It was a hard climb now. Hornkastle felt rivulets of sweat on his body.