Gospel, page 69
“Where am I going?”
“You like to drink the coffee, yes?”
O’Hanrahan was let out at a simple café, iron tables, wooden stools, a blackened brewing pot that distilled strong Arab coffee near the door. The red Golf proceeded down the road, so O’Hanrahan dismissed his earlier scenario.
The sun was far enough west that the eastern-facing café was now in the shade. The shabby-looking men in Arab kafiyeh headdress, clones of Yasser Arafat, were indolent, the work for the day done, or more likely, done for them by their sons and wives. They observed O’Hanrahan with mild interest; the café dog, a mutt, sniffed up to O’Hanrahan’s pant leg and showed slightly more enthusiasm.
“Patrick O’Hanrahan,” said one youngish man with a prominent Arab nose, very slim and short, handsome in a black Western suit.
“Whom may I have the honor of speaking to?”
“Mohammed Baqir al-Taki, and the honor is mine. Your reputation precedes you, sir.” The young man spoke excellent English in a high-pitched voice. He extended his right hand and displayed with his left the seat at the table intended for them both.
“Descendant,” asked O’Hanrahan, “of the famed author of the Haqqu al-Yaqin?”
It seemed the next moment his host was fighting back emotion. “Oh sir, it is true what is said of you! Oh that you had been born to Islam! What honors we would have bestowed upon you! How the Christian world ignores the flower of the mind that Allah, most merciful and generous, has allowed to bloom.”
O’Hanrahan nodded in complete agreement, as a small demitasse of Arabic coffee was set before him by the proprietor’s eight-year-old son. “A Shi’ah deep in Sunni territory?” the professor ventured.
“Yes, though my Sunni brethren are objects of my daily prayers for reconciliation. My family is part-Palestinian, part-Iranian.”
A helluva mix, thought O’Hanrahan.
“I am not of the blood of the Mohammed Baqir to whom you refer, but I was named in his honor, may peace be upon him…” The coffee-boy set a dish of date cookies between the two men and scurried away.
“You have brought me here to tempt me, Mr. al-Taki?”
He laughed freely. “Ah, to lure you and your scroll from the Western world you may see as temptation, my learned professor,” he embellished, getting down to business with Arab indirection. “But is it temptation to put before a man such as yourself something that would produce mutual good? The people I represent would gain much by such a document as you possess: no less than the vindication of Mohammed’s prophecies, may peace be upon him.”
“May peace be upon him. You and whomever you represent will have to go a long way to tempt me,” said O’Hanrahan, sipping the strong coffee, bitter and acid with a strip of lemon peel in it. “I was offered a million deutsche mark this morning.”
“Such money we cannot offer, but rather a position of great honor.”
“We?”
“My university.”
O’Hanrahan was curious. “In the West Bank?”
“In Teheran.”
O’Hanrahan was amazed but didn’t show it. “A position for me in Iran? I take it it’s in a prison somewhere.”
Al-Taki shook his head, his large eyes liquid and expressive. “Oh, if the West could only know the true Persian hospitality!”
“Dear friend, I have been to Iran, but it was Iran under the Shah and I found the people most hospitable, as throughout the Moslem world. No people has a greater code of generosity to the stranger. But governments tend not to reflect this charity.”
“That can be said of the U.S. as well, can it not? The government is one thing, but the people themselves are very, very good.”
No, thought O’Hanrahan darkly, the Arab world would be saddened to know how uncharitable the American people have become—how our poor can rot on the street, how little we seek to correct perpetual social injustice, how the stranger in the West, rather than being welcomed into homes and given gifts in Moslem fashion, is considered dangerous and avoided. O’Hanrahan recalled visiting the Armenian churches of Turkey near the Soviet border, and he remembered that hotels did not exist because the locals would invite you into their homes and feed you. When O’Hanrahan unintentionally insulted a family once by trying to offer money, they assured him that it would balance out in the eyes of Allah, for one day they would come to the United States where this hospitality, of course, would be returned. If they only knew!
“… for the Prophet, may peace be upon him,” rambled al-Taki, expressively allowing his hands to rise and fall, “assures us that Allah is most generous to his servants, and how more so for the scholar…” Al-Taki arrived at his proposal: “We want to make you a professor at Teheran University, my learned friend,” his host said, pausing, smiling. “You will have complete powers to teach Christian scripture as you wish, providing you do not refute the Holy Quran. You will have a house, servants. Life is very cheap in Iran.”
Yeah, not the way he means, thought O’Hanrahan.
“… and it is no exaggeration to say you will live like a king—a pasha, yes?” Mohammed Baqir al-Taki looked down at his cup, smiling humbly. “Even a wife can be found for you, should you require one. Many young women would be happy to have so eminent a husband.”
A young wife?
Did he hear him right?
Appearing in his mind was a pair of eyes behind a veil, once glimpsed in Baghdad, when all the wonder and mystery of the East were rushed to his heart!
“You said,” O’Hanrahan stammered, “a wife?”
“Yes, but of course. A virgin, I assure you!”
To have again in this world, as he hung on the very edge of his lifetime, as the abyss opened within view, to have a wife—no, he said, a virgin, a young wife, a girl! What was the Arabian Nights description of the smooth young thigh? Yes, the color of a sliced almond. We will burn scent of nard and lie naked in its blue wizardry!
(That was written for a prepubescent boy, Patrick.)
Oh the cruelty to hold out such a fantasy for an old man who had just made peace with putting such thoughts to rest! Ha, but why stop at one wife? Why not three or four? Awake my children and fill the cup before Life’s liquor in its cup be dry!
O’Hanrahan said distracted, “My Farsi is a bit rusty—”
“There is much English spoken, and the texts are Arabic.”
Yes, Persian Arabic, which is a whole different ballgame, but not an obstacle he couldn’t overcome. “And this is your deal? A position, a rich life of a pasha, in return for the Gospel of Matthias? Why is it so important to you?”
“Because it will surely establish the truth of the Quran regarding Isa Mesih, Jesus the Christ, will it not? And with you presenting it to the world, we shall at last be believed. It will be no small measure of success for Iran amid the Moslem brethren to begin the uniting of the Christian peoples with the Moslem under the magnificent teachings of Our Prophet Mohammed, may peace be upon him.”
“May peace be upon him.”
Al-Taki looked pleased to have been underestimated. “Ah, but there is more. We could not lure a man such as yourself with paltry promises such as a wife.…”
Wanna bet, thought O’Hanrahan, already well on the way to evolving a complete fantasy, his freckled, aged hand brushing against her lower abdomen, the young girl’s natural Middle Eastern modesty as the veils are removed, her breasts presented to her husband vulnerably as she calls upon Allah to make her worthy of the moment!
“Yes, a position, the life of a pasha, as you put it, but more, much more! We have a gospel for you to see as well. One that I think your scholars called ‘Q.’”
O’Hanrahan was again stunned.
The date cookie fell from his hand and the dog scampered under the table to consume it.
“You have heard of it, yes?” asked al-Taki.
The professor almost swooned. It was like a thief before unguarded jewels, a miser before stacks of uncountable gold … Mohammed Baqir al-Taki had mentioned the one scroll for which O’Hanrahan would abandon Matthias! How could they have it? The Ur-Gospel … although attaching “Ur” to anything Judeo-Christian is a bit curious. The original, oldest gospel of significance! Long analyzed in absentia, and now found! No, it must be a fantasy.
“The Nestorians have many old gospels, yes?” Mohammed explained.
Yes, the Nestorians, reflected O’Hanrahan. A Christian sect closed off to us most of this century—all the fruits of 20th-Century philology and textual scholarship had yet to be applied to their vast libraries.
(Our poor Nestorians. Maybe the most persecuted sect of Christianity, having been on the outs since 430 when Nestorius insisted Mary could not be termed the Theotokos, the Mother of God. Yet they survive in Iran and in Northern Iraq as the Assyrian Church, though they were almost wiped out viciously by the Kurds in the 1930s, who have since understood what it is to be annihilated.)
Al-Taki: “Nestorius commanded his people keep the earliest of gospels to better argue the status of Mary. Our own Moslem scholars have dated the ‘Q’ to your First Century, and they have written much on it, but we are dismissed and have no credibility in the West. No Christian wants to admit a ‘Q’ gospel exists beyond hypothesis and conjecture. In our discovery, there is no Resurrection for Jesus. Although, mysteriously, there is no Ascension either.”
O’Hanrahan was relieved to hear “Q” didn’t follow Moslem orthodoxy, for if it did it was surely a latter-day fake. “Why didn’t the Moslems burn the thing if it disagreed with the Prophet, may peace be upon him—”
“May peace and many blessings be upon him.” The man finished his coffee down to the grounds. “Ah, it is the Christians who burn books, not the Moslems.”
No, thought O’Hanrahan, you guys just issue fatwas and kill authors. But O’Hanrahan was enchanted: to go to Teheran was folly … but on the chance of “Q”! And the girl, let’s not forget the girl! And if their “Q” was for real it would render this double find, “Q” and Matthias, the greatest one-two punch in ecclesiastical history … and he could be the scholar who would present them BOTH to the world! The unceasing academic glory through the ages unending!
“You must forgive our Iraqi brethren,” said Mohammed, barely concealing distaste, “the al-Mu’tazilah who troubled you in Greece. So crude in their methods—Sunni, of course. What could one expect? Unforgivable. To you we offer a life that is worthy of you. You brought the first Moslem to the University in Chicago, did you not? You have always been a friend of Islam.”
“A most beautiful religion,” he said truthfully, bowing his head. The next minute adding to himself: it’s a shame it’s been so derailed by you fundamentalist clowns … O’Hanrahan noticed the young tea-boy going over to the growling dog and hitting it with a stick as hard as he could, trying to chase it away. The men in the café laughed, applauding this entertainment.
“I am not a man of the marketplace, professor,” said Mohammed Baqir al-Taki charmingly. “I have made my offer. I shall accompany you to Teheran if you like. I will take you up the Great Minaret and you may look down over the wondrous place—your new home.”
(Then the devil took him to the holy city and set him on the pinnacle of the temple …)
Al-Taki assured him, “None of our faculty is as fearsome as you believe! Teheran is not Qom; the university is not under the mullah’s thumb.”
Here, thought O’Hanrahan, you overplay your hand.
Of course, he had no intention of taking this academic position, but the thought did occur of going to Teheran, seeing “Q” and making a switch and then escaping …
(And when they catch you, it will be the last time your fingernails are attached to your body.)
And I might stay long enough to be married to a dark and nubile Persian virgin who doesn’t speak a word of English …
(The Temptations of O’Hanrahan. What on earth, We wonder, are you going to do now?)
* * *
Lucy and Rabbi Hersch walked through Suleiman the Magnificent’s Damascus Gate. Outside the Old City walls Arab tradesmen held up chickens ready to behead with a bloody knife, cookies and pastries and the ubiquitous sesame-pretzels were brandished before one, lambs and bleating goats stood tied together at another family’s stall. Inside the gate, the passageway curved like an S, presumably, thought Lucy, to prevent a straight charge of an invading army. Lucy was taken further back in time by the sight of the Jewish money changers, hawking their exchange rates, shekels for dollars, for francs, for Jordanian pounds—a scene startlingly out of some anti-Semitic 1930s German propaganda film. She thought of Jesus and his angry reaction to this going on in the Temple itself …
“Are we supposed to wait inside the gate or outside?” asked Lucy, concerning their meeting up with O’Hanrahan.
“No idea,” said Rabbi Hersch. “Let’s go inside.”
Passing through Damascus Gate, Lucy looked above her to see the guard patrols on the city walls, three soldiers with Uzis, two female, one male, fit and lean, smoking and staring intently at the day’s pilgrims, ready to rain down vengeance for any atrocity.
The plaza around Damascus Gate slopes down past several Arab storefronts and splits into three pedestrian avenues; to the right Lucy spied a tea shop, next to a Palestinian pop-music record and CD store. Lucy dragged her older companion to the record shop and tried to communicate the want of a “greatest hits” cassette of contemporary West Bank pop music, and she was sold something amid many flourishes and smiles.
O’Hanrahan, meanwhile, weary and hot, edged toward the tea shop run by friendly Palestinians. “That’s smart,” he called out crabbily, “hiding in a shop where I can’t find you.”
Lucy scanned him up and down. “Did you make it?”
“Make what?”
“The whole day without a drop.” Suddenly, she wondered if she should have brought up the subject with the rabbi in attendance.
“Of course I did,” O’Hanrahan claimed, guiding them to the plastic lawn chair and tables in front of the tea shop. “My my, how much I would love a good strong cup of mint tea. Yum yum.”
The rabbi and Lucy took their seats, neither apparently convinced of his pledge.
“No, really. This has been my alcohol-free day, Morey,” O’Hanrahan insisted, as he groaningly took a seat at the one of two outdoor tables. “Not as if I have to have it every second…”
Lucy positioned herself to watch the packed, stopped passageways of Jerusalemites and goods and animals, mingled in perfumes and aromas, obscured by smoke from grills, vibrating with the noise of bargaining and the volunteering of advice about how to solve the frequent human traffic jams.
She noticed a peculiar vehicle designed just for the Old City and the Palestinian teenage boys who “rode” them. This vehicle was a cart, sometimes two wheels, sometimes four, and at breakneck speeds the boys would lift their feet and hang on the backs of the carts, careening through the alleyways and slopes of the worn-smooth stair-streets, clocking 30 to 40 m.p.h., screaming a battle-cry warning for all to get out of their way. When it came time to put on the brakes, a worn tire dragging behind the cart was jumped upon and the weight of the driver brought the cart to a screeching, tire-smoking halt. The rabbi, watching the spectacle too, reported that with years of practice on these carts, the only conveyance possible in these narrow streets of Old Jerusalem, the boys became masters, stopping and turning on a dime. Lucy watched a young man with a cart piled high with apples speed through the Damascus Gate and fearlessly part the crowds, who dodged him nonchalantly, without missing a word of their conversations.
It was evening. Lucy observed the orange light settling on the white polished stone of the City Walls, pursuing the tops of alleys into the Moslem Quarter, finding the white sheets of clotheslines. But no surface was as accommodating as the ancient, time-softened stone that seemed to hold the evening glow, hoard it, bask in it nobly.
“The gold dome of the Dome of the Rock really gets the sun nice, and the Mount of Olives behind it,” said the rabbi. “Messiah couldn’t pick a better place to return to, though I suspect He’ll arrive in the morning.”
“In order,” mumbled O’Hanrahan, having ordered the tea by pantomime, “to take aim on the Golden Gate.”
“Through which Messiah must enter the city,” the rabbi explained, seeing Lucy was confused.
“How do you keep some average person from walking through this gate?” she asked.
The rabbi: “Oh, it’s sealed up with stone. It’ll take a miracle to open it and when that happens, that’ll be a good sign we’re dealing with the real Messiah. And the Lubovitchers say it’s coming soon.”
Lucy rolled her eyes. “Please, not more End Times. You guys have got me spooked enough as it is. Everywhere we’ve been, they’re saying it’s the end of the world.”
They fell silent, pursuing ominous thoughts. Would Jerusalem be standing six months from now? Where would the simmering Kuwaiti conflict end—nuclear missiles, biological and chemical exchanges? The Judgment Day?
A pot of mint tea arrived and three glass cups. The proprietor set down a plate of six thick almond cookies with a sprinkling of powdered sugar.
“Like I said,” said Lucy for everyone, taking a cookie, “I’m too young to be judged.”
Rabbi Hersch continued. “There’s an amazing 13th-Century prophecy already much discussed here, that says the kings of Media, which would include Baghdad and Saddam Hussein, would turn on the kings of Arabia, which seems to be in the works, and they would bring down a king by the Jordan, which I take it means King Hussein. And that this would throw the world into a war that would begin the End Times and the arrival of Messiah and the triumph of Israel. The Lubavitchers have bumper stickers: WE WANT MESSIAH NOW.”
“That ought to get God’s attention,” said the professor.
Lucy looked up to see the stone of the Old City had reddened, the sky warm and violet behind the City Walls. Odd, she thought, of anyone wanting to fight in this lovely, blessed place. And yet you saw the films on the news, the fighting in these streets, the tear gas in East Jerusalem. Everywhere amid this bustling, human scene were Israeli soldiers, ruthless and cocky, not loath to use their Uzis. What was the body count? 400-some Palestinians dead in this uprising so far, mostly teenage boys from wretched unimproved environments—environments fostered by this occupation of what used to be Jordan, in a land that in 1917 boasted no more than 90,000 Jews. Yes, wave it away as the rabbi might, there were deep, irremediable differences, true injustices, children killed and homes bulldozed and people who’ve spent 25 years in horrible refugee camps.
