Gospel, page 84
Lucy longed to hear what the rabbi would advise them and, committing her remaining Sudanese pounds, she had the Marriott Phone Center operator place her call to Hebrew University.
The voice was a gravelly whisper. “This Lucy?”
“Rabbi Hersch, is that you?”
Silence.
Lucy: “Is something wrong?”
“Yes, to answer your question, everything’s wrong. I don’t trust the phone in my office so I’m having my calls bounced to my colleague’s office, where I am now. My office got broken into again and so did my desk safe…”
Lucy’s heart beat faster. “Who got into it?”
“I don’t know, but they must have great connections. Hebrew University is an armed camp against terrorism and Intifada—you can’t just walk in there and break in a safe, break in an office, unless you’re…”
“Someone else in the university?”
“God Himself,” he contemplated, a strong note of frustration in his voice.
Lucy offered her own uncheery report. O’Hanrahan had been arrested, the embassy got him out of trouble, Mr. Underwood stole their scroll at gunpoint, but got the wrong one, the Mad Monk showed up in Khartoum two days before they did. “We seem to be falling two days behind him now,” Lucy sighed.
Rabbi Hersch took a deep breath. “What good is this monk’s research doing him? He doesn’t have the scroll.”
“Not yet. I’ll talk quick. We’re leaving for Addis Ababa tomorrow and then I guess we’ll fly from there to Jerusalem.”
“Wouldn’t do it. Let’s get to Chicago or New York maybe—I got friends there.”
But Lucy really didn’t want to go home. Rabbi Hersch was messing up her Operation Secret Baby in the Holy Lands plan—
“Can’t believe Paddy O’Hanrahan is getting on a plane,” the rabbi said softly. “After Rudolph died in that crash at O’Hare, Paddy swore he’d never get on another one.”
Lucy felt her head lighten. “I thought it was a car accident…”
“No, Beatrice died in a car accident speeding hysterically to O’Hare in seven inches of snow and ice to see if Rudolph survived the plane crash. It was a 727, slid off the runway, everyone injured and just ten deaths but Paddy’s kid was one of them. And then Beatrice went crazy … didn’t anyone tell you any of this?”
“Not the details.”
The rabbi: “So. Does Addis have a Hilton? When and where can I meet you guys?”
“Well, Dr. O’Hanrahan says…” There had been a click. “Hello? Hello?”
And now a repeating dial-tone noise.
Lucy went out into the late-afternoon light, which had turned the Ministry of Transportation a warm desert orange. She found O’Hanrahan where she’d left him. After passing on the highlights of her phone call, she asked, “Any progress on our rubber stamps?”
“A lady just told me it would be two minutes, tops.”
Ten hopeful minutes gave way to an impatient fifteen, twenty, then the anesthetized blank stares returned as an hour evaporated in the heat and stench of the building. Finally, two toothless men, smiling, laughing, enjoying it vicariously—they had been waiting days for such a moment for themselves—pulled on O’Hanrahan’s sleeve, rousing him to life: as-sikriteera! they shouted. The omnipotent secretary was knocking on the glass of the service window. O’Hanrahan clambered to his feet and received the passports … his own and some other white woman’s, not Lucy’s.
“But this is not her,” he insisted.
She shrugged. What’s the difference?
O’Hanrahan wrote out “Lucy Dantan” and put an Arabic equivalent next to it. Please, he begged, for the love of Allah! Find her passport and put a single Sudanese half-pound, 17-cent, stamp on it.
O’Hanrahan returned to the dark stretch of floor in a hallway that Lucy had marked as her own. He looked at the place he had formerly sat and there was a chicken there, scrawny, undernourished. As he shooed it with his foot, a woman came running for it, shaking her finger at him, scooping up her prize possession.
“I don’t suppose,” said Lucy, “I want to know what the toilet is like in this building.”
“I can assure you you don’t.”
There at the end of the hallway came a drinks seller, hawking bottles of water for two pounds apiece. The poorer Sudanese watched sadly as the glistening bottles of liquid passed, not able to afford them. The Arabic Sudanese bought some bottles, as did the soldiers. O’Hanrahan asked for two. Is it clean? he asked. Oh yes, he was assured. Lucy and he stared at the bottle. It was room temperature. O’Hanrahan held it up to the dim light. No, damn them, better not drink it. Lucy gave hers away to the ragged family of eight, her idea of a leper colony, hunched silently across the hallway from them. She studied how they each had a sip gratefully, and then passed it on to another indigent family—three mouthfuls of water stretched to sixteen people.
O’Hanrahan’s legs were falling asleep so he got up to wander the hallway to the end and then turn around. Between two connecting hallways he noticed that the tile-cement floor had been chipped away as if hit by a mortar in this one spot. It was filled with brownish, brackish water. Five stories up: a mud puddle in an office building.
Africa!
AUGUST 24TH
On the limousine ride to the airport at six A.M., O’Hanrahan was anxious, wiping his brow repeatedly like a tic.
“You fly all the time, don’t you?” he asked her.
Lucy didn’t fly all the time but she would not have joked with him, knowing that his son had met his death that way. “All the time,” she reassured him. “There’s nothing to it. And this isn’t a long flight to Addis, is it? Just think if we were flying from here to Chicago, how long that would be. This is just a little hop.”
“Yes,” he said, swallowing her answer like medicine.
In the pause, she was of two minds about her bringing up his son’s death: in a human way she wanted to know the details and commiserate, but another facet wished to keep O’Hanrahan invulnerable—too much had conspired to make her mentor and idol, her Moses in the wilderness, fragile and fallible. She longed briefly for their inequitable relationship in Ireland, his great somebody to her meaningless nobody. There was some comfort, after all, in his Jovian domination of events.
(So you think it best not to give comfort where you can.)
She sighed. And before she could retract it, she said, “I’m sorry.”
“Hm?”
Lucy looked at the shambling, outlying shacktown passing by, the open sewers gurgling up brown water, the roosters atop trash piles crowing the dawn. “I’m sorry about what happened to your son.”
Oh, registered O’Hanrahan. The McCalls or the rabbi probably satisfied her curiosity. “Yes, I’m sorry too.”
“I mean, there’s nothing I can say…”
“I appreciate,” he said mechanically, “that you said something at all. It was a long time ago, of course,” he added, wondering why.
“But you must be reminded. You know, getting on this plane.”
He nodded, back in touch fully with the old sadness, the lifelong ache. There ought to be, he thought, a moratorium on sympathy past a certain point—within six months of the funeral, fine. But after that, why bring it back anew?
(But Patrick, this is all humankind has. Sympathy, if everyone practiced it, would save your world tomorrow from most pain and woe.)
True. And there were people, he reflected, men he had appointed to the department and given tenure to, women in the administrative pool who’d typed hundreds of letters for him and owed their Christmas bonuses to him who did not say a thing to him, who sent no card, who turned their heads at his bereavement. All my intimate friends abhor me, and those whom I loved have turned against me. He said at last, “He was a good kid. Rudolph.”
Lucy repeated the name, “Rudolph.”
“We called him Rudy. You’da liked him, Luce.”
Hoping to lighten the mood, she flirted in absentia. “Was he good-looking?”
O’Hanrahan mumbled, “An acquired taste perhaps, but I would say so.” He scooted forward and edged out his wallet from the back pocket. Deeply enfolded within was a photo, the photo Gabriel must have seen. He held it up and looked at it but not intensely, not to make eye contact with the eyes in the photo.
Lucy gingerly held it.
Indeed, Lucy thought there was a resemblance between Gabriel and Rudolph. Or maybe mostly it was the monastic haircut. It was a senior high school official photo, the one that went in the yearbook, circa 1971 or so, with wide lapels on a corduroy jacket, a wide brown tie, too much hair. In contrast to the yellowing photo and the pale, unsmiling face staring back at her, perhaps unhappy with the photo being taken, O’Hanrahan was forcing a cheery spiel:
“A bit unathletic perhaps, but that’s because he read all the time. He was a scholar like his old man. Sure do miss the talks—I mean we used to … sure do miss the long talks we used to have. If he’d lived he’d have probably done something in academia, against my sternest warnings.”
“What subject?”
“Of course, theology.” He closed his eyes, fighting nausea. Where was this stuff coming from? “A real ladies’ man,” he heard himself say. “You’da had to watch yourself, I think. Sister Lucy.”
“I was a real nothing in high school,” she said, handing the photo back, “so he would’ve steered clear of me.”
“Oh I doubt that. You remind me a bit of one of his girlfriends, really…” He mopped his brow, wondering if he had lost his mind. He was talking about his son with no more reality than if he were a TV-advertised product … But he was inexpert at this. For the mourners of Beatrice he had a prepared set piece: what a good wife she was, how he missed her, what a splendid woman, and that satisfied all parties. But for Rudolph he was flailing, he had no patter to throw as a sop to the world, who would not leave his injuries alone!
But did you hear me, Rudy? Hm, did you hear your father there? All right, so I took a few liberties but I owned up to you, didn’t I? All the approval you were looking for, all the love—did you hear it? And yet … yet in the pit of my bowels I feel something has been torn out and a great emptiness put back in its place.
(The truth will set you free, Patrick.)
At the dilapidated airstrip, Lucy and O’Hanrahan joined the line of sleepy travelers, mostly Arab and a few refugee Ethiopians. They were guided to a desk where no one presided, then to a counter where a woman insisted she had nothing to do with anything, then they were led outside in the cool morning shade of the hangar to await the authorities.
“Maybe,” suggested O’Hanrahan, ever ready to figure out a route overland, “we could go down to Kassala and get the Red Cross to take us in by jeep…”
He trailed off as he saw the 1950s Soviet-built propeller plane bouncing along the tarmac to the terminal. Black smoke plumed from one of the propellers, not that anyone official-looking on the field found this alarming. Religious designs, the intricate weaving of holy phrases in Arabic into geometric shapes, graced the exterior on faded decals.
“Insha’allah Airways,” O’Hanrahan said almost in a whisper. “If God wills it.”
There was a cardtable desperately leaning to one side, where a fat Sudanese army officer and a bureaucrat of some sort in a dirty galabiyya sat organizing passports, papers, and tickets, arguing with whomever was brought before the table. A toothless man raged vehemently with the officials, showering them with little sprays of spit that made them wince, stamp his passport and wave him on—but not before demanding his knife. The man reached into his boot and produced a shockingly long dagger and put it on the table. Guns, knives, sabers, stilettos, one by one the passengers disarmed themselves and the army officer swept them into a ratty suitcase for distribution after they landed.
Lucy swallowed with difficulty. “At least there’s some security.”
O’Hanrahan was stricken.
Then there was a pop and two men emerged from behind the plane to yell at one another, while there appeared another man in a uniform … My God, thought O’Hanrahan, that shambling man with khaki pants from one uniform and a blue jacket from another is the pilot. The pilot ordered the two men to the garage and soon it became apparent that one of the plane’s wheels had gone flat. A steady hiss underscored the workmen’s conversation as the plane slowly tilted toward the leak.
“I’m sure,” said Lucy, horrified herself now, “that in order to fly they must have been in the Sudanese Air Force. I mean, you can’t just be a pilot with no qualifications, can you?”
O’Hanrahan laughed darkly. “You’re handing me the Sudanese Air Force? That sure makes me feel a whole goddam lot better.”
Soon a group was waved through and O’Hanrahan found himself at the leaning cardtable with the heavily mustached army officer, who looked like a browner Saddam Hussein. He disinterestedly examined their passports and visas and set them aside. “You go to Gonder?” he asked in Arabic.
“Insha’allah,” O’Hanrahan said.
“Indeed,” the officer nodded, reverting to English. “No is safe Ethiopia. Very bad, very bad. You daughter?” he asked, meaning Lucy.
“Yes,” he said.
“Two names not the same name.”
“She is a widow,” O’Hanrahan invented.
“Ah,” he said, then mumbled a blessing upon widows from the Quran. He stamped their passports.
Takeoff would be as bad as feared. The plane rumbled and bumped along to a dirt runway, though no reason for avoiding the paved one was given by the pilot. Each announcement deteriorated into a crackle of static because of a broken public-address system. O’Hanrahan and Lucy were buckled up, grimly preparing for death. O’Hanrahan noticed the fellahin on board were doing the same, prayers, mutterings, tears, hands outstretched imploring Allah. The round-faced African man in the dashiki across the aisle smiled at him however, impossibly serene.
The plane sped down the gravel road, leaned to the right, then the left, then nosed up, then touched back down, all at a leisurely speed that seemed to defy attaining lift. Finally they were off, though they hovered close to the ground for what seemed ages before gaining any altitude; O’Hanrahan wondered briefly if the pilot intended to bounce all the way to Ethiopia, touching down every one hundred yards.
Lucy crossed herself.
They were airborne.
Khartoum looked like a junkyard from the air with two swaths of green near the mud-colored rivers and beyond that an endless void of soft yellow sand. It was not long until a range of reddish-brown, sunbaked mountains appeared. The mountains, thought O’Hanrahan, that kept the Romans out of Ethiopia. It was not until the 19th Century that an overland route was found through these mountains. Strange emissaries periodically escaped—like Prester John, the legendary Ethiopian king who rode in the Crusades bedecked in gold and silver armor, leaving rock-sized gems in his wake, who no sooner appeared than disappeared again, back to this inscrutable land of Jews the world’s Jews barely recognize and Christians the world’s Christians have forgotten. Yes, down below the mountains and canyons that warped this land, the peaks two miles high, the chasms impossible to traverse, the terrain that allowed Ethiopia to fall off the earth, the land of abysses, Abyssinia.
Just as a modicum of ease had begun to set in, there was turbulence and the plane rapidly raised and lowered itself, rattling and creaking. This set off a new round of supplications to Allah.
“God,” said O’Hanrahan, sweat pouring off his forehead, his silver matted hair hanging in his face distressfully, “this is how it was in the days before jets. I went over to Korea in a bigger version of this.”
“And you survived.” Lucy was grasping at any assurance.
The plane swooped up and down and all the fastened seats and tray tables seemed as if they might detach themselves. Lucy, who had bravely undone her seat belt, fastened it again with bloodless hands.
O’Hanrahan: “Lotta good that will do.”
Then there was a sound like a siren, a high-pitched arc of noise.
O’Hanrahan speculated, “Probably a warning sound meaning the tail section’s fallen off.”
On the left side of the aisle many of the men were agitated and pointing out the windows, raising their voices. O’Hanrahan disbelievingly watched one man leave his seat and abase himself in the aisle, feet twisted in prayer position, bowing his head to the floor over and over …
“Uh-oh,” said Lucy, afraid to seek more information.
Then another 4th-of-July-noisemaker sound, this time from behind them on the right. Lucy looked out the window to see what looked like a child’s smoke bomb falling down into the canyons below.
“What on earth?” said O’Hanrahan, crowding her at the window.
“Did that fall off the plane, sir?”
Then they heard the sound of marbles and ball bearings being loosed on a sheet of tin. Something was scattering itself under the floor in the belly of the plane.
O’Hanrahan, resigned, fell back in his seat and said quietly, “Speaking of Korea. We’re being shot at.”
It was the end, Lucy thought absolutely.
O’Hanrahan was not merely a doctor of the faith, he was a prophet—he said they would die, and now they were going to die. Thanks to the Sudanese Civil War or the Tigrean resistance or the Eritrean rebels or the Loyalist forces of Mengistu or, since this is Africa, maybe someone is just using the plane as target practice—
“Jesus,” said O’Hanrahan, clinching the armrests as the plane received a thwack on its underside. He noticed the plane was ascending as well as it could in the turbulence. The Moslem passengers were keening and howling prayers now—Allah is good, Allah is merciful, Allah is all-powerful! The professor listened and thought with coldness: I don’t know, boys. Allah is pretty tough on you people in this part of the world. Not exactly your hands-on deity.
(It would be much worse than it is, if not for Us.)
I suppose, thought O’Hanrahan, thanks are in order, Lord, for this quick death. I can say it’ll be a helluva lot better than what would have happened had I never left my armchair back in Forest Park. There’s some justice to all this that must please You. Dying in a plane crash, like my son. An equivalence. If Rudy could endure it, then I can endure it. I don’t know if he was brave or in a panic or maybe never knew what hit him, but in case he’s watching from up above, I’ll meet the end with dignity. I dedicate this death to my son.
