Shadrach in the Furnace

21

In the morning he flies onward, toward Jerusalem. He is aware of the curve of the planet below him, the enormous belly of the world, and he is amazed anew by its complexity, its richness, this globe that holds Athens and Samarkand, Lhasa and Rangoon, Timbuktu, Benares, Chartres, Ghent, all the fascinating works of vanishing mankind, and all the natural wonders, the Grand Canyon, the Amazon, the Himalayas, the Sahara — so much, so much, for one small cosmic lump, such variety, such magnificent multitudinousness. And it is all his, for whatever time remains before Genghis Mao calls upon him to yield up the world and go.

He is not, like Bhishma Das, ready to go whenever his marching orders arrive. The world, now that he is again out in the midst of it, seems very beautiful, and he has seen so little of it. There are mountains to climb, rivers to cross, wines to taste. He who has been spared from organ-rot does not want to succumb to another man’s lust for immortality. Shadrach’s passivity has fallen from him: he does not accept the fate in store for him. Bhishma Das called him an optimist, a wise and good man whose face glows when he speaks of the better days that are coming, and though that was not how Shadrach had ever seen himself, he is pleased that Das saw him that way, pleased that those unexpectedly hopeful words tumbled from his lips. It is agreeable to be thought of as a man of sunny spirit, to be a source of hope and faith. He tries the image on and likes the fit. It is a little like smiling when one is not in a smiling mood, and feeling the smile work its way inward from the facial muscles to the soul: why not smile, why not live in the hope of a glorious resurrection? It costs nothing. It makes others happier. If one is proven wrong, as no doubt one will be, one has at least had the reward of having dwelled for a time in a warm little sphere of inner light rather than in dank dark despair.

But it is hard to put much conviction into one’s optimism when the threat of immediate doom hangs over one. I must deal somehow with the problem of Project Avatar, Shadrach resolves.

December 8, 2001

So I am not to suffer the organ-rot after all. Today I had my first dose of Roncevic’s drug. They say that if your smears have shown no trace of the virus in its active state before your first injection, you are safe, but the antidote can do nothing for you if the thing has already entered into the lethal phase. My smears were clean: I am safe. I never doubted that I would be spared. I was not meant to perish in the Virus War, but rather to endure, to survive the general holocaust and enter into my own true time. Which now has come. “You will live a hundred years,” Roncevic said to me this morning. Does he mean a hundred more years? Or a hundred all told? In which case I have only about twenty-five years left. Not enough, not enough.

No matter what, I’ll outlive poor Roncevic. He has the rot already. It glistens and blazes in his belly. How hard he worked to develop his drug, how eager he was to save himself! But not in time. The disease went active in him too soon, and he will go. He goes, I stay: he plays his appointed role in the drama and leaves the stage. While I live on, perhaps another hundred years. My physical vitality has always been extraordinary. No doubt my bodily energies are of superior order, for here I am, past seventy, with the vigor of a young man. Resisting disease, deflecting fatigue. They say that Chairman Mao, when he was past seventy, swam eight miles in the Yangtze in an hour and five minutes. Swimming is of no interest to me; yet I know that if there were need, I could swim ten miles in those sixty-five minutes; I could swim twenty.

Jerusalem is colder than Shadrach expects — almost as chilly as Ulan Bator on this late spring morning — and smaller, too, amazingly compact for a place where so much history has been made. He settles in at the International, a sprawling old mid-twentieth-century hotel stunningly located high on the Mount of Olives. From his balcony he has a superb view of the old walled city. Awe and excitement rise in him as he looks out upon it. Those two great glittering domes down there — his map tells him the huge gold one is the Dome of the Rock, on the site of Solomon’s Temple, and the silver one is the Aqsa Mosque — and that formidable battlemented wall, and the ancient stone towers, and the tangle of winding streets, all speak to him of human endurance, of the slow steady tides of history, the arrivals and departures of monarchs and empires. The city of Abraham and Isaac, of David and Solomon, the city Nebuchadnezzar destroyed and Nehemiah rebuilt, the city of the Maccabees, of Herod, the city where Jesus suffered and died and rose from the dead, the city where Mohammed, in a vision, ascended into heaven, the city of the Crusaders, the city of legend, of fantasy, of pilgrimages, of conquests, of layer upon layer of event, layers deeper and more intricate than those of Troy — that little city of low buildings of tawny stone just across the swooping valley from him counsels him that apocalyptic hours are followed by rebirth and reconstruction, that no disaster is eternal. The mood that came upon him when he was with Bhishma Das has survived the journey out of Africa. Jerusalem is truly a city of light, a city of joy. He remembers his hymn-singing great-aunts Ellie and Hattie clapping their hands and chanting—

—and suddenly he is again a boy of six or seven, wearing tight blue trousers and a starched white shirt, standing between those two colossal black women in their Sunday finery, singing with them, clapping his hands, humming or making up words where he does not know the right ones, oh, yes, Jerusalem, Jerusalem, lead me unto Jerusalem, Lord! That promised land, long ago, far away, that city of prophets and kings, Jerusalem the golden, with milk and honey blest, and here he is at its gates, trembling with anticipation. He calls for a cab.

But when he actually enters the city, passing through St. Stephen’s Gate and stepping forth onto the Via Dolorosa, that romance and fantasy begins unexpectedly to evaporate, and he wonders how he could have babbled so blithely to Das of the good times a-coming. Jerusalem is undeniably picturesque, yes — but to call a place picturesque is to damn it — with its narrow steep streets and sturdy age-old masonry, its crowded stalls piled high with pots and pans, fish and apples, pastries and flayed lambs, its scents of strange spices, its hawk-faced old men in Bedouin regalia, but a cold wind whistles through the filthy alleyways and everyone he sees, children and beggars and merchants and shoppers and porters and workmen alike, has that same look of dull despair, that same hollow-eyed broken-souled expression that is the mark not of endurance but of anticipated defeat and surrender: The Assyrians are coming, the Romans are coining, the Persians are coming, the Saracens are coming, the Turks are coming, the organ-rot is coming, and we will be crushed, we will be everlastingly annihilated.

It is impossible to escape the twenty-first century even within these medieval walls. Climbing toward Golgotha, Shadrach sees the standard mourning poster of Mangu pasted up all over, the bland young face against the brilliant yellow background. Mangu’s presence was not absent from Nairobi, naturally, but in that spacious and airy city the posters were less oppressive, easily obscured by the dazzle of the bougainvilleas and the jacarandas. Here the heavy stone walls sweat garish images of Mangu over passageways barely wide enough for three to go abreast, yellow blotches impossible to escape, and, seeing them, one feels the malign hand of Genghis Mao passing over the city, imposing on it an unfelt grief for the dead viceroy. Genghis Mao is more immediately present, too, the familiar sinister leathery features glowering from breeze-bellied banners at every major intersection. The natives take these alien images as casually as, no doubt, they once took the posters and banners of Nebuchadnezzar, Ptolemy, Titus, Chosroes, Saladin, Suleiman the Magnificent, and all the other transient intruders, but to Shadrach these reduplicated Mongol faces loll against his consciousness like so many leaden bells counting out his dwindling hours.

Then too the organ-rot is here. Not as conspicuously as in Nairobi, perhaps, for on the broad avenues of that city the terminal cases walked alone, stumbling and lurching through private zones of vacant space. Old Jerusalem is too congested for that. But there is no scarcity of victims, shivering and sweating and groping along the Via Dolorosa. Occasionally one halts, sags against a wall, digs his fingers between the stones for support. The Stations of the Cross are indicated by marble plaques set into walls: here Jesus received the cross, here He fell the first time, here He encountered His Mother, and so on. And here, up the Via Dolorosa, go the dying, lost in their own crucifixions. As in Nairobi, they stare without seeming to see. But a few stretch their hands toward him as if imploring his blessing. This is a town where miracles have not been uncommon, and the black stranger is a man of dignity and stature: who knows, perhaps a new Savior walks these streets? But Shadrach has no miracles to offer, none. He is helpless. He is as much a dead man as they are, though he still walks about. As they do.

He feels much too conspicuous, too tall, too black, too alien, too healthy. Beggars, mostly children, cluster about him like flies. “Dol-lar,” they implore. “Dol-lar, dol-lar, dol-lar!” He carries no coins — he uses a government credit planchet to cover all expenses — and so there is no way he can get rid of them. He scoops one five-year-old into the air, hoping to make a piggyback ride serve in lieu of baksheesh, but the expression of terror in the child’s huge eyes is so pitiful that Shadrach quickly puts him down, and kneels, trying to give comfort. The child’s fright passes at once: “Dol-lar,” he demands. Shadrach shrugs and the child spits at him and runs. There are too many children here, too many everywhere, unattended, running in packs through the cities of the world. They are orphans, running wild, a feral generation. Shadrach has seen Donna Labile’s demographic surveys: the worst impact of the organ-rot has fallen upon those who would now be between the ages of twenty-five and forty, Shadrach’s own contemporaries, those who were children during the Virus War. Slower to succumb than their parents were, they survived into adulthood — just long enough, most of them, to marry and bring forth young; then they died, having seeded the world with little savages. The PRC has begun to establish camps for these abandoned children, but they are not much more attractive than prisons, and the system is not working well.

It is too much for Shadrach — the fierce children, the woeful staggerers, the dirt, the unfamiliar density of the populace that throngs this tiny walled city. There is no way to escape the overwhelming sadness of the place. He should never have entered it; it would have been better by far to look out from his hotel balcony and think romantic thoughts of Solomon and Saladin. He is pushed, prodded, pawed, and elbowed; harsh-sounding things are said to him in languages he does not understand; he is beleaguered by offers to buy his clothing, to sell him jewelry, to take him on tours of the great religious sites. Without the help of guides he makes his way to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, a grimy and graceless building, but he does not go in, for some kind of pitched battle seems to be under way at its main entrance between priests of different sects, who shout and shake fists and tug one another’s beards and shred one another’s cassocks. Turning aside, he finds, just back of the church, a busy bazaar — more accurately a flea market — where sherds and tatters of the former era are for sale: broken radios, antique television tubes, outboard engines, a miscellany of gears and wheels and cameras and electric shavers and telephones and pumps and gyroscopes and vacuum cleaners and batteries and lasers and gauges and tape recorders and calculators and microscopes and phonographs and washing machines and prisms and amplifiers, all the debris of the affluent twentieth century washed up on this strange shore. Everything is seemingly broken or defective, but the traders are doing a brisk business anyway. Shadrach is unable even to guess what uses these remnants and fragments may now be finding in the Palestinian hinterlands. He actually spies something he wants for his own medical collection, a gleaming little ultramicrotome once used to prepare tissue sections for the electron microscope, but when he produces his credit planchet rather than haggle, the trader merely gives him a blank, sullen stare. The PRC has decreed that government planchets must be accepted as legal tender everywhere, but the old Arab, after examining the glossy strip of plastic without much interest, hands it silently back to Shadrach and turns away. There is a Citpol at the edge of the marketplace who appears to be watching the aborted transaction. Shadrach could call the policeman over and get him to make the trader honor the planchet, but he decides against it; perhaps there will be unforeseeable complications, even dangers, and he does not want to attract attention in this place. He abandons the microtome and walks off to the south, through quieter streets, a residential district.

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 Citipol 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 says, 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 yhe 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.