Exodus - Leon Uris [191]
David Ben Ami took Kitty into the Old City through the ornate Damascus Gate and they walked along the Via Dolorosa—the Way of the Cross—to Stephen’s Gate which looked over the Kidron Valley and the tombs of Zacharias and Absalom and Mary and to the Mount of Olives, the scene of the Ascension.
They walked through the narrow streets, through the Arab bazaar and the tiny shops and the scenes of wild bartering. At the Dome of the Rock, the Mosque of Omar, a thousand pairs of shoes covered the steps. Ancient, bearded Jews stood and wept before the Wailing Wall of their great temple.
How strange this place is, again Kitty Fremont mused. Here, so far away in these barren hills, the merging point of a hundred civilizations in its thousands of years. Of all the earth, why this place, this street, this wall, this church? Romans and Crusaders and Greeks and Turks and Arabs and Assyrians and Babylonians and British in the city of the maligned Hebrews. It is holy, it is sacred, it is damned. Everything strong and everything weak, all that is good in man and all that is evil in him are personified. Calvary and Gethsemane. The room of the Last Supper. The last supper of Jesus, a Jewish Passover Seder.
David took Kitty to the Holy Sepulcher, the site of the crucifixion and the tiny chapel lit with ornate hanging lamps and perpetually burning candles over the marble tomb of Jesus Christ. Kitty knelt beside the tomb and kissed it as it had been kissed thin by a million pilgrims.
The next morning Ari and Kitty left Jerusalem and continued northward into the Galilee. They drove through the timeless Arab villages into the fertile carpet of the Jezreel Valley, which the Jews had turned from swamp into the finest farmland in the Middle East. As the road wound out of the Jezreel toward Nazareth again, they moved backwards in time. On one side of the hill the lush lands of the Jezreel and on the other, the sun-baked, dried-out, barren fields of the Arabs. Nazareth was much as Jesus must have found it in His youth.
Ari parked in the center of town. He brushed off a group of Arab urchins, but one child persisted.
“Guide?”
“No.”
“Souvenirs? I got wood from the cross, cloth from the robe.”
“Get lost.”
“Dirty pictures?”
Ari tried to pass the boy but he clung on and grabbed Ari by the pants leg. “Maybe you like my sister? She is a virgin.”
Ari flipped the boy a coin. “Guard the car with your life.”
Nazareth stank. The streets were littered with dung and blind beggars made wretched noises and barefoot, ragged, filthy children were underfoot. Flies were everywhere. Kitty held Ari’s arm tightly as they wound through the bazaar and to a place alleged to be Mary’s kitchen and Joseph’s carpenter shop.
Kitty was baffled as they drove from Nazareth: it was a dreadful place.
“At least the Arabs are friendly,” Ari said. “They are Christians.”
“They are Christians who need a bath.”
They stopped once more at Kafr Kanna at the church where Christ performed his first miracle of changing water to wine. It was set in a pretty and timeless Arab village.
Kitty was trying to digest all that she had seen in the past few days. It was such a small land but every inch held ghosts of blood or glory. At certain moments the very sacredness of it was gripping; at other moments exaltation turned to revulsion. Some of the holy places struck her speechless with awe and others left her with the cold suspicion of one watching a shell game in a carnival. The wailing Jews of Mea Shearim and the burning refinery. The aggressive sabras of Tel Aviv and the farmers of the Jezreel. The old and the new jammed together. There were paradoxes and contradictions at every turn.
It was very late afternoon when Ari turned into the gates of Yad El. He stopped before a flower-bedecked cottage.
“Ari, how lovely it is,” Kitty said.
The cottage door opened and Sarah Ben Canaan ran from it. “Ari! Ari!” She was swept into