Damascus Gate Read Online Free PDF Page A

hands with her. Israel was full of throwbacks, and the doc was clearly one of them. With the spectacles on the end of his nose, the white coat and stethoscope, he looked like the family doctor in a thirties movie.
    "I have to ask," Kleinholz said. "What are the designs on your feet?"
    She laughed. "They're made with henna. When I worked in Baidoa, we sort of picked it up from the Somali women. Just for fun."
    "Good," said Dr. Kleinholz. "I was afraid they were tattoos."
    "No," she said. "Just henna."
    There was a pharmacy on Emek Refaim and she filled the prescription there. He had written her twenty pills. She also bought some colostomy bags, cotton swabs and cans of liquid diet to go visiting with.
    Her apartment was a few blocks beyond, in Rehavia. Once there, she showered and put on the clothes she wore to the Palestinian side of town: shirt and slacks under a Nubian robe and a headscarf. It was a cloak of invisibility across the line. On the Israeli side, Arab workmen sometimes stared at her, wondering what an Arab girl could be doing out and about, alone among the Jews.
    She took a bus to the Jaffa Gate. There were still a great many Easter pilgrims about. Sonia left them behind, passing through the quiet courtyards of the Armenian Convent and into the Tariq al-Zat. In the Khan al-Sultan souk, she bought some sweet rolls, candy and fruit.
    Sonia was headed for Tariq Bab al-Nazir, an ancient narrow street leading to the Nazir Gate, an entrance to the Muslim holy places through which believers and nonbelievers both could pass. Her friend Berger lived in a tiny garden apartment overlooking the courts of the Ribat al-Mansuri, a tarnished palazzo built by an Ayyubid sultan seven hundred years before for Sufi pilgrims. The palazzo had been by turns a prison, a ruin and a tenement block.
    In the years before 1967, a Sufi sheikh, an American of Jewish origin called Abdullah Walter, had lived in the same apartment. As a notable convert, Walter had enjoyed the patronage of al-Husseini, the grand mufti himself.
    The ownership had changed after the Six-Day War. Walter had gone to California and died there, leaving behind Berger al-Tariq, his friend and disciple. The municipality had torn down half the building and sealed the windows overlooking the Haram. The site's present owner was an Armenian Uniate tile maker who kept a shop on the Via Dolorosa.
    Little black children in white watched her heft her basket through the ancient portico and into the courtyard. Once the Haram's Sudanese guards had been quartered in a building across the street, and black people continued to live in the neighborhood. Sonia had a fantasy going in which she imagined that blacks had always lived there, going all the way back, back even to the pharaoh's Cushite soldiers.
    That day she had ballpoint pens for the kiddies.
    "Hey, homes," she said when two boys ran up to her. "Hey, wass hap'nin'?"
    There were four kiddies and each got a pen before she went upstairs.
    The interior of the apartment was dark and perfumed with incense sticks. Berger al-Tariq was on a divan, propped up on cushions. Beside him, face down, was a Simenon,
Maigret en Vacances.
    She put her bags in the corner, beside his sink and hot plate.
    "Easter bunny's here," she said. "A few things you might need. Can you eat?"
    "Not for a day or two," Berger said. "And then I don't know." He made an unsuccessful effort to rise. "May one ask," he asked primly, "has the Easter bunny brought some colostomy bags?"
    "You bet."
    She watched him light one of the locally made cigarettes he liked. The backs of his long slender hands were freckled and wonderfully lined with outstanding veins.
    "What a paltry conclusion to things," he said gaily. "Fucking disgrace."
    "You have to go where you can be comfortable."
    "I always wanted to die here," he said. "Now I don't think so."
    "Have you money to travel?"
    Not answering, he waved away smoke. She took the cigarette from his hands and took a drag.
    "I can get