Shadrach in the Furnace Read online

  In a few minutes he comes to steps that lead downward to a great opened space, a cobblestoned plaza, at the far end of which stands an immense wall made of titanic blocks of roughhewn stone. Shadrach ambles across the plaza, heading toward the wall as he studies his map and tries to get his bearings. He remembers turning left, then left again at the Street of the Chain—perhaps he is in the old Jewish Quarter, heading back toward the Dome of the Rock and the Aqsa, in which case—

  “You should cover your head in this place,” says a quiet voice at his right elbow. “You stand on holy ground.”

  A small compact man, seventy years old or more, tanned and vigorous-looking, has approached him. He wears a round black skullcap, and, with a courteous but insistent gesture, has produced another from his pocket which he extends toward Shadrach.

  “Isn’t this whole city holy ground?” Shadrach asks, taking the skullcap.

  “Every inch is holy to someone, yes. The Arabs have their places, the Copts, the Greek Orthodox, the Armenians, the Syrian Christians, everyone. But this is ours. Don’t you know the Wall?” There is no mistaking the capital letter in his voice.

  “The Wall,” Shadrach says, embarrassed, staring at the great stone blocks, then at his map. “Oh. Of course. You mean this is the Wailing Wall? I didn’t realize—”

  “The Western Wall, we called it, after the reconquest in 1967, when the wailing stopped for a time. Now it is the Wailing Wall again. Though I myself do not believe much in wailing, even in times such as these.” The little man smiles. “Under whatever name, it is for us Jews a holy of holies. The last remnant of the Temple.” Again the capital letter.

  “Solomon’s Temple?”

  “No, not that one. The Babylonians destroyed the First Temple, twenty-seven hundred years ago. This is the wall of the Second Temple, Herod’s Temple, leveled by the Romans under Titus. The Wall is all that the Romans left standing. We revere it because it is for us a symbol not only of persecution but of endurance, of survival. This is your first time in Jerusalem?”

  “Yes.”

  “American?”

  “Yes,” Shadrach says.

  “I am also. So to speak. My father brought me here when I was seven. To a kibbutz in the Galilee. Just after the proclamation of the State of Israel, you know?—in 1948. I fought in the Sinai in ’67, the Six Day War, and I was here to pray at the Wall in the first days after the victory, and I have lived in Jerusalem ever since. And the Wall to me is still the center of the world. I come here every day. Even though there is no longer really a State of Israel. Even though there are no longer any states at all, any dreams, any—” He pauses. “Forgive me. I talk too much. Would you like to pray at the Wall?”

  “But I’m not Jewish,” Shadrach says.

  “What does that matter? Come with me. You are a Christian?”

  “Not particularly.”

  “No religion at all?”

  “No official religion. But I would like to go to the Wall.”

  “Come, then.” They stride across the plaza, the short old man and the tall young one. Shadrach’s companion says suddenly, “I am Meshach Yakov.”

  “Meshach?”

  “Yes. It is a name from the Bible, The Book of Daniel. He was one of the three Jews who defied Nebuchadnezzar when the king ordered them to—”

  “I know,” Shadrach cries, “I know!” He is laughing. Delight bubbles in him. It is a delicious moment. “You don’t have to tell me the story. I’m Shadrach!”

  “Pardon me?”

  “Shadrach. Shadrach Mordecai. It’s my name.”

  “Your name,” says Meshach Yakov. He laughs too. “Shadrach. Shadrach Mordecai. It is a beautiful name. It could be a fine Israeli name. With a name like that you aren’t Jewish?”

  “The wrong genes, I think. But I suppose that if I converted I wouldn’t need to bother changing my name.”

  “No. No. A beautiful Jewish name. Shalom, Shadrach!”

  “Shalom, Meshach!”

  They laugh together. It is almost a vaudeville routine, Shadrach thinks. That Citpol lurking over there—is he Abednego? They are right by the Wall, now, and the laughter goes from them. The enormous weatherbeaten blocks seem incredibly ancient, as old as the Pyramids, as old as the Ark. Meshach Yakov closes his eyes, leans forward, touches his forehead to the Wall as though greeting it. Then he looks at Shadrach. “How shall I pray?” Shadrach asks.

  “How? How? Pray any way you want to pray! Speak with the Lord! Tell Him things. Ask Him things. Do I need to tell a grown man how to pray? What can I tell you? Only this: it is better to give thanks than to ask favors. If you can. If you can.”

  Shadrach nods. He turns toward the Wall. His mind is empty. His soul is empty. He glances at Meshach Yakov. The Israeli, eyes closed, is rocking gently back and forth, murmuring to himself in what Shadrach assumes is Hebrew. No prayers come to Shadrach’s lips. He can think only of the wild children, the organ-rot, the blank despondent faces along the Via Dolorosa, the posters of Mangu and Genghis Mao. This journey of his has been a failure. He has learned nothing, he has achieved nothing. He might as well get himself back to Ulan Bator tomorrow and face what must be faced. But the moment he articulates those thoughts, he rejects them. What of that sudden upwelling of optimism as he sipped tea with Bhishma Das? What of the moment of delight, of warm fellow-feeling, that he experienced on first hearing Meshach Yakov’s name? These two old men, the Hindu, the Jew, both so sturdy of soul, so patient and steady under the weight of the world catastrophe—has nothing of their strength rubbed off on him?

  He stands a long while, listening to the silence within his body that is the absence of Genghis Mao’s outputs, and decides that it is not yet time to return to Ulan Bator. He will go onward. He will complete his tour.

  He says, under his breath, too self-conscious to let Meshach Yakov hear it. “Thank you, Lord, for having made this world and for having let me live in it as long as I have.” Better to give thanks than to ask favors. Even so, asking favors is not forbidden. To himself Shadrach adds, “And let me stay in it awhile longer, Lord. And show me how I can help make it more like the place you meant it to be.” The prayer sounds foolish to him, mawkish, ingenuous. And yet not contemptible. And yet not contemptible. If it were given to him to live this one moment over, he would not revise that prayer, although he would not like to admit to anyone, either, that he had uttered it.

  When they are done at the Wall, Meshach Yakov invites Shadrach to dinner; and Shadrach, who has come to regret having refused Bhishma Das’s invitation, accepts. Yakov lives in the modern sector of Jerusalem, far to the west of the old city, out beyond the parliament buildings and the university campus, in a high-rise atop a bare lofty hill. The apartment house, one of a complex of twenty or so, has the glossy, glassy look favored in the late twentieth century, but the marks of decay are all over it. Windows are dusty, even broken, doors are out of true, the balconies are splotched with rust, the elevator creaks and groans. The place is more than half empty, Yakov tells him. As the population dwindles and services deteriorate, people have deserted these once-choice suburbs to live closer to the center of town. But he has been here forty years, he says proudly, and he intends to stay another forty, at the very least.

  Yakov’s apartment itself is small, well kept, furnished sparsely in a tasteful, old-fashioned way. “My sister Rebekah,” he says. “My grandchildren, Joseph, Leah.” He tells them Shadrach’s name, and they all have a hearty laugh over the coincidence, the close biblical association. The sister is in her seventies, Joseph about eighteen, Leah twelve or thirteen. There are black-framed photographs on the wall—Yakov’s wife, Shadrach assumes, and three grown children, probably all victims of the organ-rot. Yakov does not say, Shadrach does not ask.

  “Are you Jewish?” Leah demands.

  Shadrach smiles, shakes his head.

  “There are black Jews,” she says. “I know. There are even Chinese Jews.”

  “Genghis Mao is a Jew,” Joseph say
s, and bursts into wild laughter. But he laughs alone. Meshach Yakov glares at him; Yakov’s sister looks shocked, Leah embarrassed. Shadrach finds himself shaken by the sudden intrusion of that alien name into this serene self-contained household.

  Stiffly Yakov says to the boy, “Don’t talk nonsense.”

  “I didn’t mean anything,” Joseph protests.

  “Then save your breath,” Yakov snaps. To Shadrach he says, “We are not great admirers of the Chairman here. But I would not like to discuss such things. I apologize for the boy’s silliness.”

  “It’s all right,” Shadrach says.

  Leah says, “Why do you have a Jewish name?”

  “My people often took first names from the Bible,” Shadrach tells her. “My father’s father was a minister, a religious scholar. He suggested it. I have an uncle named Absalom. Had. And cousins named Solomon and Saul.”

  “But the last name,” the girl persists. “That’s what I mean. It’s Jewish too. There once was a great rabbi named Mordecai, in Germany, long ago. We heard about him in school. Do black people pick their own last names too?”

  “They were given to us, by our owners. My family must once have been owned by someone named Mordecai.”

  “Owned?”

  “When they were slaves,” Joseph whispers harshly.

  “You were slaves too?” the girl says. “I didn’t know. We were slaves in Egypt, you know. Thousands of years ago.”

  Shadrach smiles. “We were slaves in America. More recently.”

  “And your owner was a Jew? I don’t believe a Jew would own slaves, not ever.”

  Shadrach wants to explain that the slavemaster Mordecai, if ever he existed and gave his name to his blacks, was not necessarily Jewish, but might have been, for even Jews were not beyond owning slaves in the days of the plantation; but the discussion is making Meshach Yakov uncomfortable, apparently, and with such abruptness that the children are left gaping he changes the subject, asking his sister whether dinner will be ready soon.

  “Fifteen minutes,” she says, heading for the kitchen.

  As though heeding an unspoken warning to leave the guest in peace, Joseph and Leah withdraw to a couch and begin a stilted, awkward conversation about events in school—a worldwide holiday has been proclaimed, it seems, for the day of Mangu’s funeral, and Joseph, who is at the university, will be deprived of a field trip to the Dead Sea, which annoys him. Leah cites some remark made by Jerusalem’s PRC chief about the importance of paying respect to the fallen viceroy, bringing a derisive hoot from Rebekah in the kitchen and a brusque comment about the official’s intelligence and sanity, and soon things degenerate into a noisy, incomprehensible discussion of local political matters, involving all four Yakovs in a fierce bilingual shouting match. Meshach, at the outset, attempts to explain to Shadrach something about the cast of characters and the background, but as the dispute goes along he becomes too embroiled in it to keep up his running commentary. Shadrach, baffled but amused, watches these articulate and spirited people wrangle until the arrival of dinner brings a sudden halt to the debate. He has no idea what the battle was about—it has to do with the replacement of a Christian Arab by a Moslem on the city council, he thinks—but it cheers him to see such a display of energy and commitment. In Ulan Bator, bugged and spy-eyed to an ultimate degree, he has never witnessed such furious clashes of opinion; but perhaps the spy-eyes have nothing to do with it, perhaps it is only because he has lived outside the framework of the nuclear family for so long that he has forgotten what real conversation is like.

  The advent of dinner is worrisome—should he don the skullcap? What other customs are there that he does not know?—but no problems arise. Neither Meshach nor his grandson wears a skullcap; there is no prayer before eating, only a moment of silent grace observed by the two old people; the food is rich and plentiful, and Shadrach does not notice any special dietary customs in force at the Yakov table. Afterward Joseph and Leah retire to their rooms to study, and Shadrach, warmed by red Israeli wine and strong Israeli brandy, settles down with old Yakov to study maps of the vicinity, for they have agreed at dinner to go on a sightseeing tour in the morning. The old city, certainly, its towers and churches and marketplaces, and the supposed tomb of Absalom in the Kidron Valley nearby, and the tomb of King David on Mount Zion, and the archaeological museum, and the national museum where the Dead Sea scrolls are kept, and—

  “Wait,” Shadrach says. “All this in one day?”

  “We’ll take two, then,” Meshach says.

  “Even so. Can we really cover so much ground so fast?”

  “Why not? You look healthy enough. I think you can keep up with me.” And the old man laughs.

  22

  In Istanbul a few days later he has no guide, and he wanders that intricate city of many levels alone, confused, defeated by the complexities of getting from one place to another, wishing that some Meshach Yakov would discover him here, some Bhishma Das. But none does. The map he gets at his hotel is useless, for there are few street signs, and whenever he veers off a main boulevard he immediately gets lost in a maze of anonymous alleyways. There are taxis, but the drivers seem to speak only Turkish, tourism having perished during the Virus War; they can follow self-evident instructions—“Haghia Sophia”—“Topkapi”—but when he wants to go to the ancient Byzantine rampart on the outskirts of the city he is unable to make any driver understand, and in the end he has to resort to asking to be taken to the Kariya Mosque on the city’s outskirts, and getting from there to the nearby wall on foot, by guesswork.

  Istanbul is gritty, grimy, archaic, alien, and irritating. Shadrach is fascinated by its architectural mix, the opulent Ottoman palaces and the glorious many-minareted mosques and the eighteenth-century wooden houses and the sweeping twentieth-century avenues and the battered fragments of old Constantinople that jut like broken teeth from the earth, bits of aqueducts and cisterns and basilicas and stadiums. But the city is too chaotic for him. It depresses and repels him despite the powerful appeal of its rich-textured history. Even now more than a million people live here, and Shadrach finds it hard to cope with such a density of humanity. There are the usual dismaying organ-rot tragedies on display in the streets, and an extraordinary number of feral children, some only three or four years old, trooping like desperate scavengers everywhere. And there are Citpols moving in wary pairs wherever he turns. Watching him, he is convinced. Is it just paranoia? He doesn’t think so. He thinks that Genghis Mao, unhappy over having given his physician leave to roam the world, is keeping him under surveillance so that he can be brought back to Ulan Bator at the Khan’s whim. Shadrach had not expected to be able to vanish totally—indeed, returning to Ulan Bator is definitely central to his emerging plan of action, though he still does not know when the right moment to go back will arrive—but he does not like the idea of being spied upon. After two days in Istanbul, a perfunctory tour of the standard sights, he flies abruptly to Rome.

  He spends a week there, making his headquarters in an ancient hotel, mellow and luxurious, a few blocks from the Baths of Diocletian. Rome too is densely populated, and its urban pace is frenetic, but for some reason there are fewer scars of the Virus War and its nightmare aftermath here, and Shadrach begins to relax, to ease himself into a comfortable Mediterranean rhythm of life: he strolls the splendid streets, he sips aperitifs at sidewalk cafes, he gorges himself on pasta and young white wine at obscure trattorias, and all the traumas of the Trauma Ward become insignificant. Truly this is the Eternal City, capable of absorbing all of time’s heaviest blows and never losing its resilience. He sees, of course, the imperial monuments, the Arch of Titus that commemorates the Roman sacking of Jerusalem, the temples and palaces of the Capitoline and Palatine, the magnificent jumble that is the Forum, the haunted wreck of the Colosseum. He visits St. Peter’s, and, looking up toward the Vatican, muses on Genghis Mao’s mocking, corrosive offer to make him Pope. He does the Sistine Chapel, the Etruscan collection in the Villa Giu
lia, the Borghese gallery, and a dozen of the best baroque churches. His energies seem to grow rather than flag as he pursues the infinite antiquities of Rome. Oddly, he finds himself responding most intensely not to the celebrated classic monuments but to the ancient gray tenements, steep and gaunt, in Trastevere and the Jewish quarter. Are these the very tenements of Caesar’s time, mansions once, slums now? Is it possible that they are still inhabited after two thousand years? Why not? The old Romans knew how to build six stories high, and even higher, and built of durable stone. And it would not have been hard, despite the sackings and the fires and the revolutions, to keep those buildings intact, to rebuild, replaster, patch the old and make it new, constantly to refurbish and restore. So these gray towers may once have housed the subjects of Tiberius and Caligula, and Shadrach gets a pleasant little shiver from the thought that they have been continuously occupied across the ages. On second thought, it probably is not so; nothing, he decides, endures that long in daily use. These are more likely twelfth-century buildings, fourteenth-, even seventeenth-. Old enough but not truly ancient. Except in the sense that anything that antedates the rise of Genghis Mao, that has survived out of that former world, that prediluvian epoch, is ancient.