The Holy Land

Never should have married a Christian, Bech thought, fighting his way up the Via Dolorosa. His bride of some few months, Beatrice Latchett (formerly Cook) Bech, and the Jesuit archaeologist that our Jewish-American author's hosts at the Mishkenot Sha'ananim had provided as guide to the Christian holy sites--a courtly Virgil to Bech's disbelieving Dante--kept getting ahead of him, their two heads, one blonde and one bald, piously murmuring together as Bech fell behind in the dusty jostle of nuns and Arab boys, of obese Protestant pilgrims made bulkier still by airline tote bags and of bored gaunt merchants with three-day beards standing before their souvenir shops. Their dark accusing sorrow plucked at Bech. His artist's eye, always, was drawn to the irrelevant: the overlay of commercialism upon this ancient sacred way fascinated him--Kodachrome where Christ stumbled, bottled Fanta where He thirsted. Scarves, caftans, olivewood knickknacks begged to be bought. Since his childhood in Brooklyn, Bech had worried that merchants would starve; the business streets of Williamsburg had been lined with disregarded narrow shops, a Kafka world of hunger artists, waiting unwatched in their cages. This was worse.

Père Gibergue had confirmed what Bea already knew from her guidebooks: The route Jesus took from Pilate's verdict to Golgotha was highly problematical, and in any case, all the streets of First Century Jerusalem were buried under 12 feet of rubble and subsequent paving. So they and their fellow pilgrims were in effect treading on air. The priest, wearing flared slacks and a short-sleeved shirt, stopped to let Bech catch up, and pointed out to him overhead a half arch dating, it seemed certain, from the time of Herod. The other half of the arch was buried, lost, behind a gray facade painted with a polyglot array of which Bech could read the word Gifts. Bea's face, beside the tanned face of the archaeologist, looked radiantly pale. She was lightly sweating. Her guidebook was clutched to her blouse like a missal. "Isn't it all wonderful?" she asked her husband.

Bech said, "I never realized what a big shot Herod was. I thought he was just something on the back of a Christmas card."

Père Gibergue, in his nearly flawless English, pronounced solemnly, "He was a crazy man, but a great builder." There was something unhappy about the priest's nostrils, Bech thought; otherwise, his vocation fit him like a smooth silk glove.

"There were several Herods," Bea interposed. "Herod the Great was the slaughter-of-the-innocents man. His son, Herod Antipas, was ruling when Jesus was crucified."

"Wherever we dig now, we find Herod," Père Gibergue said, and Bech thought, Science has seduced this man. In his archaeological passion, he has made a hero of a godless tyrant. Jerusalem struck Bech as the physical embodiment of conflicted loyalties. At first, deplaning with Bea and being driven at night from the airport to the Holy City through occupied territory, he had been struck by the darkness of the land, the lack of lights, an intended wartime dark such as he had not seen since his GI days, in the tense country nightscapes of England and Normandy. Their driver, the son of American Zionists who had emigrated in the Thirties, spoke of the convoys that had been forced along this highway in the '67 war, and pointed out some hilly places where the Jordanian fire had been especially deadly. Wrecked tanks and trucks, unseeable in the dark, had been left as monuments. Bech remembered, as their car sped vulnerably between the black shoulders of land, the sensation (which for him had been centered in the face, the mouth more than the eyes--had he been more afraid of losing his teeth than his sight?) of being open to bullets, which there was no dodging. Then, as the car entered realms of light, the suburbs of Jerusalem, he was reminded of Southern California, where he had once gone on a fruitless flirtation with some movie producers, who had been unable to wrap around his old novel Travel Light a package the banks would buy. Here were the same low houses and palm fronds, the same impression of staged lighting, exclusively frontal, as if the backs of these buildings dissolved into unpainted stats and rotting canvas, into weeds and warm air--that stagnant, balmy, expectant air of Hollywood when the sun goes down. The Mishkenot--the official city guesthouse, where this promising 55-year-old writer and his plump protestant wife were to stay for three weeks--seemed solidly built of the same stuff of cinematic illusion: Jerusalem limestone, artfully paitted by the mason's chisel, echoing like the plasterboard corridors of a Cecil B. De Mille temple to the ritual noises of weary guests unpacking. A curved staircase of mock-Biblical masonry led up to an alcove where a desk, a map, a wastebasket and a sofa awaited his meditations. Bech danced up and down this stair with an enchantment born in cavernous movie palaces; he was Bojangles, he was Astaire, he was George Sanders, wearning an absurd headdress and a sneer, exulting in the captivity and impending torture of a white-limbed maiden who, though so frightened, all her bangles tinkle, will not forswear her God.

Bea was enraptured simply at being on Israel's soil. She kept calling it "the Holy Land." In the morning, she woke him to share what she saw: through leaded windows, the Mount of Olives, tawny and cypress-strewn, and the silver bulbs of a Russian church gleaming in the Garden of Gethsemane. "I never thought I'd be here, ever," she told him, and as she turned, her face seemed still to brim with reflected morning light. Bech kissed her and over her shoulder read a multilingual warning not to leave valuables on the window sill.

"Why didn't you ask Rodney to bring you," he asked, "if it meant so much?"

"Oh, Rodney. His idea of a spiritual adventure was to go backpacking in Maine."

Bech had married this woman in a civil service in Lower Manhattan one April afternoon of unseasonable chill and spitting snow. She was the younger, gentler sister of a mistress he had known for years and with whom he had always fought. He and Bea rarely fought, and at his age this appeared possibly a mode of love. He had married her to escape his famous former self. He had given up his apartment at 99th and Riverside--an address consecrated by 20 years of Who's Whos--to live with Bea in Ossining, with her twin girls and only son. These truths raced through his mind, marvelously stranger, as he contemplated the radiant stranger that the world called his wife. "Why didn't you tell me," he asked her now, "you took this crap so much to heart?"

"Crap? You knew I went to church."

"The Episcopal church. I thought it was a social thing. Rodney wanted the kids brought up in the upper middle class."

"He thought that would happen anyway. Just by their being his children."

"Lord, I don't know if I can hack this: be an adequate stepfather to the kids of a snob and a Christian fanatic."

"Henry, this is your Holy Land, too. You should be thrilled to be here."

"It makes me nervous. It reminds me of 'Samson and Delilah.'"

"You are thrilled. I can tell." Her blue eyes, normally as pale as the sky when the milkiest wisps of strato-cirrus declare a storm coming tomorrow, looked up at him with a new, faintly forced luster. The Holy Land glow. Bech found it distrustworthy, yet, by some twist, in some rarely illumined depth of himself, flattering. While he was decoding the expression of her eyes, her mouth was forming words he now heard, on instant replay, as "Do you want to make love?"

"Because we're in the Holy Land?"

"I'm so excited," Bea confessed. She blushed, waiting. Another hunger artist.

"This is blasphemous," Bech protested. "Anyway, we're being picked up to sight-see in twenty minutes. What about breakfast instead?" He kissed her again, feeling estranged. He was too old to be on honeymoon.

Their quarters in the Mishkenot included a kitchen. Bea called from within it, "There's two sets of silver. One says Dairy and the other says Meat."

"Use one or the other," Bech called back. "Don't mingle them."

"What'll happen if I do?"

"I don't know. Nobody's ever done it, in six thousand years. Try it. Maybe it'll trip the trigger and bring the Messiah."

"Now who's being blasphemous? Anyway, the Messiah did come."

"We can't all read His calling card."

Her only answer was the clash of silver.

I'm too old to be married, Bech thought, though he smiled to himself as he thought it. He went to the window and looked at the view that had sexually stimulated his wife. Beyond the near, New Testament hills--the color of unglazed Mexican pottery--were lavender desert mountains, long folds in God's lap.

"Is there anything I should know about eggs and butter?" Bea called.

"Keep them away from bacon."

"There isn't any bacon. There isn't any meat in the fridge at all."

"They didn't trust you. They knew you'd try to do something unkosher." His Christian wife was 13 years younger than he. Her belly bore silver stretch marks on it from carrying twins. She made gentle yipping noises when she fucked. Bech wondered if he had ever really been a sexy man, or was it just an idea that went with bachelorhood? He had been a satisfactory sprinter, he reflected, but nobody up to now had challenged his distance capacity. At his age, he should jog.

•

The first sight they were taken to, by a Jewish archaeologist in rimless glasses, was the Wailing Wall. It was a Saturday. Congregations were gathered in the sun of the limestone plaza the Israelis had created by bulldozing away dozens of Arab homes. People were chanting, dancing; photographs were forbidden. Men in side locks were leaning their heads against the wall in prayer, the broad-brimmed hats of the Hasidim tipped askew. The archaeologist told Bech and Bea that not for a millennium could the wall be seen from where they stood, and pointed out where the massive, characteristically edged Herodian stones gave way to the smaller stones of Saladin and the Mamelukes. Bea urged Bech to walk up to the wall. The broad sun-struck area in front of it had been designated a synagogue, with separate male and female sections, so they could not pass in through the fence together. "I won't go where you can't go," he said.

Bech's grandfather had come to the United States from the ghetto of Amsterdam in 1880; Bech's father had been an atheist socialist, and in Bech socialist piety had dwindled to a stubborn wisp of artistic conscience. So there was little in his background to answer to the unearthly ardor of Bea's urging. "I want you to, Henry. Please."

He said, "I don't have a hat. You have to have a hat."

"They have paper yarmulke there. In that basket," the guide offered, pointing. He was a short, bored bearded man, whose attitude expressed no wish, himself, to approach the wall. He stood on the raw blinding limestone of the plaza as if glued there by his shadow.

"Let's skip it," Bech said. "I get the idea from here."

"No, Henry," Bea said. "You must go up and touch it. You must. For me. Think. We may never be here again."

In her plea he found most touching the pronoun "we." Ever since his honorable discharge from the Armed Forces, he had been an I. He picked a black paper hat from the basket and found it unwilling to adhere to his head; his hair was too woolly, too fashionably fullbodied. Graying had made it frizzier. A little breeze seemed to be blowing across the face of the wall and twice threatened to lift his yarmulke away. Amid the stares of congregated Hasidic youth (were their side curls, he wondered, meant to be menacing, like lions' manes?), he held the cap to the back of his skull with his hand and approached, step by cautious step, all that remained of the Temple.

It was a Presence. The great rectangular Herodian stones, each given a shallow border, like a calling card, by the ancient masons, were riddled with Time. Into the cracks of erosion, tightly folded prayers had been stuffed--the more he looked, the more there were. Bech supposed paper lasted forever in this Californian climate. The space around him, the very air, felt like a Presence. Numbly he reached out, and as he touched the surprisingly warm sacred surface, an American voice whined into his ears (continued on page 172)The holy land(continued from page 170) from a small circle of Hasidim seated on chairs nearby. "Who is this God?" the voice was asking loudly. "If He's so good, why does He permit all the pain in the world? Look at Cambodia, man...." The speaker and his audience were undergoing the obligatory exercise of religious debate. The Jewish tongue, divinely appointed to be active. Bech closed his ears and backed away rapidly. The breeze made another grab at his paper yarmulke. He dropped the flimsy thing into the basket and Bea was waiting on the other side of the fence.

She was beaming, proud; he had been attracted to that in her which so purely encouraged him. Amid many in this last, stalled decade of his who had wished to reshape, to activate him forcefully, she had implied that his perfection lay nowhere but in a deepending of the qualities he already possessed. Since he was Jewish, the more Jewish he became in her Christian care, the better.

"Wasn't it wonderful?" she asked.

"It was something," was all he would grant her. Strange diseases, he thought, demand strange remedies: he, her. As they linked arms, after the separation imposed by a sexist orthodoxy, he apprehended her with refreshed clarity, by this bright, dry light of Israel, as thickening in the middle, middle-aged, limited in every dimension, her flesh softening and her brain possessed by a bizarre creed, yet profoundly pleasing to him, as a presence asking for his loyalty as unquestioningly, as helplessly, as she gave him hers.

Their guide led them up a slanted road, past an adolescent soldier with a machine gun, to the top of the wall. On their left, the faithful continued to circle and pray; on their right, a great falling off disclosed the ugly results of archaeology, a rubble of foundations. "The City of David," their guide said proudly, "Just where the Bible said it would be. Everything," he said, and his gesture seemed to include all of the Holy City, "just as it was written. We read first, then we dig." At the Gate of the Moors, their guide yielded to a courtly Arab professor--yellow face, brown suit, Oxford accent--who led them in stockinged feet through the two mosques built on the vast platform that before 70 A.D. had supported the Temple. Strict Jewish believers never came here, for fear of accidentally treading upon the site of the Holy of Holies. Within the Aqsa Mosque, Bech and Bea were informed of recent violence: King Abdullah of Jordan had been assassinated near the entrance in 1951, before the eyes of his grandson the present King Hussein; and in 1969, a crazed Australian had attempted to set the end nearest Mecca afire, with considerable success. Craziness, down through history, has performed impressively, Bech thought. They were led past a scintillating foundtain, up a few marble stairs, to the Dome of the Rock. Inside an octagon of Persian tile, beneath a dizzyingly lavish and symmetrical upward abyss, a spine of rock, the tip of Mount Moriah, showed where Abraham had attempted to sacrifice Isaac and, instead, founded three religions. Here also, the professor murmured amid the jostle of the faithful and the touring, Cain and Abel had made their fatally contrasting offerings, and Mohammed had ascended to heaven on his remarkable horse Burak, whose hoofprints the pious claim to recognize, along with the fingerprints of an angel who restrained the Rock from going to heaven also. For reasons known best to themselves, the Crusaders had hacked at the Rock. And Suleiman the Magnificent, who had wrested the Rock back from the Crusaders, had his name set in gold on high, within the marvelous dome. The king of Morocco had donated the green carpets, into which Bea's stockinged feet dug impatiently, aching to move on from these empty wonders to the Christian sites. Sexy little feet, Bech thought; from his earliest amours, Bech had responded to the dark band of reinforcement that covers half of a woman's stockinged toes, giving us eight baby cleavages.

"Do you wish to view the hairs from the Beard of the Prophet?" the professor asked, adding, "There is always a great crowd around them."

Hairs of the Prophet were the kind of sight Bech liked, but he said, "I think my wife wants to push on."

They were led down from Herod's temple platform along a peaceable path beside an Arab cemetery. Their guide suddenly chuckled; his teeth were as yellow as his face. He gestured at a bricked-up portal in the old city wall. "That is the gate whereby the Messiah is supposed to come, so the Ommiads walled it solid and, furthermore, put a cemetery in his path, because the Messiah supposedly is unable to walk across the dead."

"Hard to go anywhere if that's the rule," Bech said, glancing sideways to see how Bea was bearing up under these malevolent overlays of superstition. She looked pink, damp and happy, her Holy Land glow undimmed. At the end of the pleasant path, at the Gate of the Lions, they were passed into the care of the debonair Jesuit and embarked upon the Via Doloraosa.

•

Lord, don't let me suffocate, Bech thought. The priest kept leading them underground, to show them buried Herodian pools, Roman guardrooms that the sinkage of centuries had turned into grottoes, and paving stones scratched by the soldiers as they played the game of kings--proof, somehow, of the historical Jesus. Père Gibergue knew his way around. He darted into the back room of a bakery, where a dirty pillar of intense archaeological interest stood surrounded by shattered crates. By another detour, Bech and Bea were led onto the roof of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher; here an ancient company of Abyssinian monks maintained an African village of rounded huts and sat smiling in the sun. One of them posed for Bea's camera standing against the cupola above--Père Gibergue explained with zeal--the crypt where Saint Helena, mother of Constantine, discovered the unrotted wood of the cross. But, to their guide's sorrow, the Russian Orthodox priest (the image, Bech thought, of Ivan Karamazov) who answered his ring at the door of the Alexandra Hostel refused to admit them, this being a Saturday, to the excavated cellar wherein had been found a worn threshold certainly stepped upon by the foot of God Incarnate.

So this is the sort of stuff making the goyim tick all these years. All these levels--roofs coterminous with the street, sacred footsteps buried meters beneath their own--distressed Bech like a sea of typographical errors. Perhaps this was life: mistake heaped upon mistake, one protein molecule entangled with another until the confusion thrived. Except that it smelled so fearfully dead. The Church of the Holy Sepulcher was so needlessly ugly that Bech wanted to call down a curse upon it on behalf of his Christian wife. He said to Bea, "You should have let the Arabs design it for you."

Père Gibergue overheard and said, "In fact, an Arab family has been entrusted with the keys for eight hundred years, to circumvent the contention among the Christian sects." Inside the hideous edifice, the priest seemed overwhelmed; he sat on a bench near some rusting pipe scaffolding and said, "Go. I will pray here while you look." He hid his face in his hands.

Bea with her guidebook led Bech up (continued on page 360)The Holy Land(continued from page 172) a marble stair to the site of the Crucifixion. It was a great smoke-besmirched fungus of accreted icons and votive lamps; six feet from the gold-rimmed hole where Christ's cross had supposedly been socketed, a fat Greek priest, seated with his black muffin hat at a table peddling candles, was taking a swig from a bottle in a paper bag. At Bech's side, Bea was doing a genuflective dip and gazing enthralled at this compounded mass of aesthetic horrors. German tourists were noisily shuffling about, exploding flashbulbs. Bech looked incredulous at his radiant wife, and dragged her away, back down to the main floor of the church, which her guidebook itself admitted to be a "conglomeration of large and small rooms, impossible to consider as a whole."

Père Gibergue greeted their return hopefully. "Enough?"

"More than," Bech said.

The Jesuit nodded. "A great pity. This should be Chartres. Instead--" He told Bea, "With your camera, you should photograph that, what the Greeks are doing. Without anyone's permission, they are walling up their sector of the nave. It is barbarous, but not untypical."

Bea peered through an ornate grate into a sector of holy space crowded with scaffolding and raw pink stone. She did not lift her camera. She had been transported, Bech realized, to a realm beyond distaste. Her skyey eyes seemed unseeing.

"We can't go without visiting the Sepulcher of Christ," she announced.

Père Gibergue said, "I advise against it. The line is always long. There is nothing to see. Believe me."

Bech echoed, "Believe him."

Bea said, "I don't expect to be here ever again," and got into line with her husband to enter a little building that reminded Bech of nothing so much as those mysteriously ornate structures that used to stand in discreet corners of city parks, too grand for lawn mowers but unidentified as latrines. He had always wondered what had existed inside such little buildings. The line moved slowly, and the faces of those returning looked stricken.

There were two chambers. The outer held a case containing a bit of the stone which the Angel is said to have rolled away from the mouth of the tomb; a woman ahead of Bech in line kissed the cracked glass top of the case and caressed herself in an elaborate spasm of pious gratification, eyeballs rolling. He was relieved that Bea did nothing of the kind. The inner chamber was entered by an opening so small Bech had to stoop, though the author was not tall. Within, as had been foretold, there was "nothing to see"--smoking lamps hanging thick as bats from the low ceiling, a bleak marble slab, no trace of the original sepulcher hewn from the rock of Golgotha. In the confines of this space, elbow to elbow with Bech, a Greek priest, stocky and dazed in appearance, was waving lit tapers held cleverly between his spread fingers. The tapers were for sale. The priest looked at Bech. Bech didn't buy. With a soft grunt of irritation, the priest waved the lit tapers out. Bech was fascinated by this sad moment of disappointed commerce; he imagined how the wax must drip onto the man's fat fingers, how it must sting. A hunger artist. The priest eyed Bech again. The whites above his dolefully sagging lower lids were very bloodshot. Smoke gets in your eyes.

Back in their room at the Mishkenot, Bech asked Bea, "How's your faith?"

"Fine. How's yours?"

"I don't know much about places of worship, but wasn't that the most Godforsaken church you ever did see?"

"It's history, Henry. You have to see through external accidents to the things of the spirit. You weren't religiously and archaeologically prepared. The guidebook warns people they may be disappointed."

"Disappointed! Disgusted. Even your poor Jesuit, who's been there a thousand times, had to hide his face in his hands. Did you hear him complain about what the Greeks were doing to their slice of the pie? Did you hear his story about the Copts' swooping down one night and slapping up a chapel that then couldn't be taken away for some idiotic superstitious reason?"

"They wanted to be close to the Holy Sepulcher," Bea said, stepping out of her skirt.

"I've never seen anything like it," Bech said. "It was--celestial pollution."

"It was beautiful to be there, just beautiful," Bea said, skinning out of her blouse and bra in one motion.

How, Bech asked himself, out of a great materialist nation containing 100,000,000 fallen-away Christians, had he managed to pick this one radiant aberrant as a bride?Instinct, he answered himself; his infallible instinct for the distracting. At the height of the lovemaking that the newlyweds squeezed into a shadowy hour before they were due to go out to dinner, the bloodshot eyeball of the unsuccessful taper-selling priest within the tomb returned to him, eying Bech like a demon brother unexpectedly met at. the site of a mutual crime.

•

The dinner was with Israeli writers, in a restaurant staffed by Arabs. Arabs, Bech perceived, are the blacks of Israel. Slim young men, they came and went silently, accepting orders and serving while the lively, genial, grizzled, muscular intellectuals talked. The men were an Israeli poet, a novelist and a professor of English; their wives were also a poet, a novelist and a professor, though not in matching order. All six had immigrated years ago and therefore were veterans of several wars; Bech knew them by type, fell in with their warmth and chaffing as if back into a party of uncles and cousins. Yet he scented something outdoorsy, an unfamiliar toughness, a readiness to fight that he associated with gentiles, as part of the psychic kit that included their indiscriminate diet and their bloody, lurid religion. The poet, a man whose face appeared incessantly to smile, broadened as it was by prominent ears and a concentration of wiry hair above the ears, said of the Wailing Wall, "The stones seem smaller now. They looked bigger when you could see them only up close."

The professor's wife, a novelist, took fire: "What a reactionary thing to say! I think it is beautiful, what they have done at the Kotel Ha. They have made a sacred space of a slum."

Bech asked, "There were many Arab homes?"

The poet grimaced, while the shape of his face still smiled. "The people were relocated, and compensated."

The female novelist told Bech, "Before '67, when the old city was theirs, the Jordanians built a hotel upon the Mount of Olives, using the old tombstones for the soldiers' barracks. It was a vast desecration, which they committed in full view. We felt very frustrated."

The male novelist, whose slender, shy wife was a poetess, offered as a kind of truce, "And yet I feel at peace in the Arab landscape. I do not feel at peace in Tel Aviv, among those Miami Beach hotels. That was not the idea of Israel, to make another Miami Beach."

"What was the idea, then?" asked the female novelist, teasing--an overweight but still dynamic flirt among hirsute reactionaries. There is a lag, Bech thought, between the fading of an attractive woman's conception of herself and the fading of the reality.

The male novelist, his tanned skin minutely veined and ponderously loose upon his bones, turned to Bech with a gravity that hushed the table; an Arab waiter, ready to serve, stood there frozen. "The idea," it was stated to Bech in the halting murmur of an extreme confidence, "is not easy to express. Not Freud and Einstein, but not Auschwitz, either. Something ... in between."

Bech's eye flicked uneasily to the waiter and noticed the name on his identification badge: Suleiman.

The poetess, as if to lighten her husband's words, asked the American guests, "What have been your impressions so far? I know the question is foolish, you have been here a day."

"A day or a week," the female novelist boisterously volunteered, "Henry Bech will go back and write a fat book about us. Everyone does."

The waiter began to serve the food--ample, deracinated, Hilton food--and while Bech was framing a politic answer, Bea spoke up for him. He was as startled as if one of his ribs had suddenly chirped. "Henry's in raptures," she said, "and so am I. I can't believe I'm here, it's like a dream."

"A costly dream," said the professor, the youngest of the men and the only one wearing a beard. "A dream costly to many men." His beard was red as a viking's; he stroked it a bit preeningly.

"The Holy Land," Bea went on, undeterred, her voice flowing like milk poured from above. "I feel I was born here. Even the air is so right."

Her strangeness, to her husband at this moment, did verge on the miraculous. At this table of Jews who, wearied of waiting for the Messiah, had altered the world on their own, Bea's voice with its lilt of hasty good news came as an amazing interruption. Bech answered the poetess as if he had not been interrupted. "It reminds me of Southern California. The few times I've been there, I felt surrounded by enemies. Not people like you," he diplomatically amended, "but up in the hills."

"You were there before Camp David," joked the female professor; until then, she had spoken not a word, merely smiled toward her husband, the smiling poet. It occurred to Bech that perhaps her English was insecure, that these people were under no obligation to know English, that on their ground it was his obligation to speak Hebrew. English, that bastard child of Norman knights and Saxon peasant girls--how had he become wedded to it? There was something languid and eclectic about the language that gave him trouble. It ran against his grain; he tended to open books and magazines at the back and read the last pages first.

"What shall we do?" the flamboyant novelist was urgently asking him, evidently apropos of the state of Israel. "We can scarcely speak of it anymore, we are so weary. We are weary of war, and now we are weary of talk of peace."

"The tricky thing about peace," Bech diffidently suggested, "is that it doesn't always come from being peaceable."

She laughed, sharply, a woman's challenging laugh. "So you, too, are a reactionary. Myself, I would give them anything--the Sinai, the West Bank. I would even give them East Jerusalem, to have peace."

"Not East Jerusalem!" the Christian in their midst exclaimed. "Jerusalem," Bea said, "belongs to everybody."

And her face, aglow with confidence in things unseen, became a cause for wonder among the seven others. The slim, shy poetess, whose half-gray hair was parted in the exact center of her slender skull, asked lightly, "You would like to live here?"

"We'd love to," Bea said.

Bech felt he had to step on this creeping "we" of hers. "My wife speaks for herself," he said. "Her enthusiasm overwhelmed even the priest who took us up the Via Dolorosa. My own impression was that the Christian holy sites are hideously mismanaged. I liked the mosques."

Bea explained with the patience of a saint, "I said to myself, I've waited for this for forty-two years, and I'm not going to let anybody ruin it."

Sunday-school pamphlets, Bech imagined. Bible illustrations protected by a page of onionskin. Bea had carried those ocher-and-moss-green paper images up from infancy and when the moment had at last arrived, had placed them carefully upon the tragic, eroded hills of Jerusalem and pronounced the fit perfect. He loved her for that, for remaining true to the little girl she was. In the lull of silence her pious joy had induced, Suleiman came and offered them dessert, which the sated Israelis refused. Bech had apple pie, Bea had ice cream, to the admiration of their hosts. Young in marriage, young in appetite.

"You know," he told her in the taxi back to the Mishkenot, "the Holy Land isn't holy to these people tonight the way it is to you."

"I know that, of course."

"To them," he felt obliged to press on, "it's holy because it is land at all; after nineteen hundred years of being pushed around, the Jews have a place where they can say, OK, this is it, this is our country. I don't think it's something a Christian can understand."

"I certainly can. Henry, it saddens me that you feel you must explain all this to me. Rodney and I once went to a discussion group on Zionism. Ask me about Herzl, about the British mandate."

"I explain it only because you've surprised me with your own beliefs."

"I'll keep them to myself if they embarrass you."

"No, just don't offer to immigrate. They don't want you. Me, they wouldn't mind, but I have enough problems right now."

"I'm a problem."

"I didn't say that. My work is a problem."

"I think you'd work very well here."

"Jesus, no. It's depressing. To me, it's just a ghetto with farms. I know these people. I've spent my whole life trying to get away from them."

"Maybe that's your problem. You could write and I could join a dig, under Father Gibergue."

"What about your children?"

"Aren't there kibbutz schools?"

"For Episcopalians?"

She began to cry, out of a kind of sweet excess, as when angels weep. "I thought you'd like it that I love it here,"she got out, adding, "with you."

"I do like it. Don't you like it that I like it in Ossining, with you?" As their words approached nonsense, some dim sense of what the words holy land might mean dawned on him. The holy land was where you accepted being. Middle age was the holy land. Marriage.

Back in their room in the Mishkenot, a calling card had been left on a brass tray. Bech looked at the Hebrew lettering and said, "I can't read this."

"I can," Bea said, and turned the card over, to the Roman lettering on the other side.

"What does it say?"

Bea palmed the card and looked saucy. "My secret," she said.

I never should have married a Christian, Bech told himself, without believing it. He was smiling at the apparition of his wife, holding a calling card shaped like a stone in Herod's wall.

Wifely, she took pity. "Actually, it's somebody from The Jerusalem Post. Probably wanting an interview."

"Back to earth," Bech said.

"I suppose he'll come again," Bea offered.

"Let's hope not," Bech said.

"Their guide led them up a slanted road, past an adolescent soldier with a gun, to the top of the wall."

"Bea peered through an ornate grate into a sector of holy space full of scaffolding and raw pink stone."