From The Kenyon Review, New Series, Spring 1991, Vol. XIII, No. 2
In your rented Fiat, the size of a roller skate, you can drive south from the heart of Jerusalem and be in Bethlehem in fifteen minutes. It also makes an attractive walk—two gentle hours, no real climbing and the compact town, strung out on its ridge as your visible goal through the clear desert day. That winter month, a dry December toward the end of the eighties, I drove south a dozen times alone. Because I’m a licensed architect who veered into writing years ago, I was there to plan a commissioned piece on the Church of the Nativity, the town’s great magnet. That big dim good-smelling warren of a place is the oldest continuously used church in Christendom and has a good deal to be said for it still as a showcase of middle-eastern architecture from Constantine onward—a depressing good deal. The lines and pillars of the oldest church shame the Catholic and Greek Orthodox additions, a boatload of jimcrack pictures and lanterns—the eunuch Babe and his boneless Mother in cancer-causing pastel inks.
The beating heart of all that weight is a limestone cave. You walk toward the altar, then start down one of a pair of steep stairs. Twelve feet later, you’re inside the cave. You look overhead, or steal a glance behind leather wall-hangings, to see the live stone. It’s very much there, despite two millennia of chiseling pilgrims. And trustworthy records that date to less than a century after Jesus’ death say that here he was born, that simple a fact—a low space not as long as a school bus, that served as dry shelter for livestock and overflow guests from the nearby inn.
There’s a silver star in a low corner niche that says “Here Jesus Christ was born of Virgin Mary.” It was stolen early in the nineteenth century and caused the whole Crimean War before its return. Five yards away, down three more steps, is a trunk-sized niche where the manger stood, the feeding trough that served as a cradle on the night in question. When the emperor Constantine’s mother came here in 339, she allegedly confiscated what was left and took it to Rome, where it’s still on view in Saint Mary Major just under the altar, a few warped boards in a busy crystal-and-gold container.
Anyhow I was leaving for home the next day and had spent the morning in east Jerusalem, buying belated Christmas presents and a sidewalk lunch that either would or would not kill me. Then I napped for an hour on my narrow bed in the YMCA, an honorable hostel facing the famed King David Hotel, with its high-rolling weird component of guests—American Jews and German civilians. I dreamed about a guided tour, where Jews walked Germans through Hebrew history, a long stage-pageant with actual blood. Though an Anglo-Saxon, since early boyhood in the 1930s I’ve dreamed I was Jewish and the prey of a hunting party of Germans who are blind but equipped with exquisite noses.
By the time I got my eyes full-open, the afternoon was more than half gone; and the sky had thinned to the good light-blue of your favorite work-shirt, a billion years old. Most of the weary cells of my mind longed to fall back and sleep again. But a sensible lobe, the size of a nickel, said “Haul yourself down there one last time.”
As I crested the rise to Manger Square, Kamil, the parking manager, hailed me; and I suddenly thought I knew why I’d come. Lying on the occupied West Bank, Bethlehem has dapper Arab police in dark blue and white, plus anxious young Israeli soldiers with Uzzis primed. They sometimes deign to help with traffic in the packed town-center. But Kamil is strictly a freewill agent, a hometown boy who shepherds tourists to the scarce parking places with a hand-ballet as good as any cop’s in rush-hour Rome. He assisted me three or four times before I understood his problem. The boy is dumb—mute, unable to speak. He’ll sound an occasional baritone note as he opens your door or shuts you in and waves you off with the small banknote you offer in thanks but not a word. Still his listening face is mostly as pleasant as his general mood, and he always sports a baseball cap in fire-truck red.
He loped toward me now, beckoning wildly with a barn-wide grin as he caught my face. I quickly knew I’d give him all my leftover shekels and not bother splurging at the airport tomorrow on the useless gewgaws of duty-free shops. I had about fifty dollars left; and Kamil had been my favorite Arab of the several dozen on this first visit who’d shown me the hawkeyed, boundless kindness of their faith and tribe. And since he seemed to go home at dark, I’d give it to him now.
As I braked to park, he was at my window with the eager smile of a child-actor; but I took a moment to see who was near us. A bus was loading German nuns a few yards away, all stout and grim. Their hard eyes blocked my immediate plan but I hatched another. I got out, locked up, and shook young Kamil’s eager hand. Then I risked a question, “Will you have coffee with me?”
The smile disappeared; he was painfully baffled. Had I somehow offended or was he deaf too? A local waiter had said he was mute; I’d forgot to ask about his hearing.
I pointed across the square to a restaurant, Saint George’s (he of dragon fame, the other local-boy-made-good, after David and Jesus—a fair enough record for a town you could lose in a block of Manhattan).
Kamil shook his head.
“Coffee? Caffe?” In the air, I drank from a nonexistent cup.
He finally got it. The smile beamed on and he took off his fingerless right-hand glove to shake my hand again, skin-to-skin.
The air was still warm; the outdoor tables were all but empty. So we sat outside and faced each other like players in a game. Musa, the waiter who’d also befriended me, showed no surprise. He met us with benign self-possession and eyes that could drill through armor plate, and may get the chance, but showed no hint of disdain for Kamil. Yet a dumb and grubby unofficial parker must have stood ten rungs down on the ladder from a spotless waiter.
And though I had a moment of panic—what would I say or do for these minutes?—once coffee came, the time went smoothly.
Kamil pocketed his cap, hand-combed his tan hair; and when he’d had his first long sip, he lapsed at once into what seemed a trance of meditative calm. The harried cords and lines of worry melted inward. In under ten seconds, he showed for the first time his actual age, maybe thirty-five.
Much older than I’d guessed. So I took his lead and also lapsed and was well away in thoughtless peace when Kamil bolted to his feet and waved at a bus that was struggling to park. I wanted to stop him, but he had his job so I nodded “Go.”
He gave a quick but sweeping salaam, like a movie sheik. Then the grin resumed and he jogged toward the bus that, obligingly, needed serious guidance. As ever, once the motor died, Kamil took his place by the door and met each tourist, dead in the eyes. He never appeared to expect a tip, and I never saw him get one. It seemed enough to search their faces—maybe news from where he’d never go.
I lapsed off again and watched the dance of some evening birds high over the church. They had the curved-wing shape of swallows but were twice the size of swallows at home. They went on tumbling with the fixed intent of carnivorous raptors. So as a further aid to calm, I chose the smallest bird and watched her weave through all the rest. Her rapid patterns calmed me too well. For actual minutes, I never thought once of the son I’d lost five months ago, not to mention my present aim in a town that was known for births. And when the flock dissolved in space and I came to Earth, it was nearly dusk. The church would shut at the last trace of light. The square was empty of all but children. Kamil was nowhere in sight, surely gone. Another American charity foiled.
The church was open but the inside was dark and looked utterly empty. I’d walked a good halfway up the nave before I thought I might get locked in. By then I was reckless and pushed ahead. Any healthy person could do a lot worse than spend a night on the cold cave-floor. And the farther I went, the darker things got till, up near the altar, I was feeling the air itself for directions. I’d never longed for a Greek monk before, that surly breed, but I almost did. And then the precipitous steps were at me—slick stone, no railing—and I almost fell.
The cave though was lighted, the usual candles and hanging oil lamps secreting a moist enfolding heat. Still no other human in sight. There are no chairs or benches, so you have two choices of respectful posture, standing or kneeling. I have a trick knee and in any case am not given to kneeling. I also have a nagging tendency to awe at the ancient sites of any faith that doesn’t advocate a slaughter of the faithless, but prayer and prostration are matters I retired from in junior-high.
Still, there alone for maybe ten minutes, I came as near a physical bow as I’d come for decades. The thing my mind kept going back to was some brand of touch. I’d bend my good knee and press my forehead—forehead, not lips—on the famous star. I told myself I could do the same at a few other places, like Keats’s tombstone or the sill of a hut at the back of my grandfather’s vegetable garden where an old black man, born a slave, had died after tending my childhood with well-meant patience. And I did step forward and start to crouch before I heard footsteps on the stairs. This would be the mad monk, with beard aflame.
Instead it was Kamil—unsmiling, bareheaded again, even older. He came straight toward me and took my right hand; his gloves were gone.
He had never followed me before. I was glad of course and pressed his palm.
But his head shook hard. Then his face came down; and with lips so dry they scraped my hide, he kissed the heel of my hand by the thumb.
I thought that was more than a fair return on one cup of coffee; and next I laid my other hand on the crown of his bowed head, the kind of blessing you see in paintings of Abraham or Isaac and Jacob. I knew I would never do it elsewhere, above ground in daylight; but here it felt apt.
When he stood back up, Kamil still hadn’t smiled. He moaned a low note, no word but no grunt. And he turned to leave.
I may be a hack but I can be moved, every year or so. I called his name in two clear syllables, “Ka-mil.”
He stopped in his tracks but didn’t look round.
So I thought “He can hear.” And I covered the ten feet of cave between us, pressed my gift in his hand and shut his fingers on it.
He looked down slowly, then carefully opened the dingy wad of shekels. On his own hand, he counted meticulously. Then grinning wide, he folded them back and thrust the wad into my breast pocket.
I said “No. For you, my friend.”
He kept on grinning but shook his head.
When I reached to my pocket and tried to insist, Kamil pointed to the star and raised a hushing finger to his lips. Many Arabs in Bethlehem are Maronite Christians, and Muslims honor Jesus as a prophet, so I understood him to mean “Pipe down.” By then I had the money out again.
But his head shook hard; and when I said “Please” in a lower voice, his eyes went fierce and his dry right hand came up and covered my offensive mouth. Now he’d muted me, he still didn’t smile. But a sudden idea lit in his eyes. The hand came down and he moved past me toward the end of the cave, waving me on like a smoking bus. By the time I joined him, he’d shouldered aside a leather curtain and pointed to a low door set in the rock.
It looked as old as the smoky stone. But closer by, I saw it was wood with an ancient iron latch and lock. Any instant a monk would howl down on us or burst through the door with a flashing blade.
Kamil paused to test the silence. We might as well have been on Neptune. Then he fished in his trouser and brought out a key, four inches long, as black as the door and older looking. It turned the lock, and the door crept open at its own slow rate on a blacker space than any I’ve seen in years of walking through nights in the mountains with no city lights for fifty miles.
But when Kamil took my elbow to guide me, I didn’t resist and didn’t feel strange. The cave itself was country as strange as the back of Tibet. In three short steps we were in the deep dark, and the door shut behind us. We stood there awhile.
Kamil kept a strong grip on my arm, but that and the wide-spaced sound of his breath was all that let me know he was with me. For a second I thought of movie theaters in childhood summers—how I’d enter from a sun-drenched street and be blind at the top of the aisle, groping my way and sometimes sitting on a lady’s lap before I could see. But as long as we waited, maybe two minutes, my eyes never widened enough to find light.
Then Kamil nudged me forward again and brought my left hand down onto something. Dry wood apparently, the edge of something that felt man-made, some two feet long. I didn’t want to go past the edge to explore. My hand must have stiffened; and still pitch-dark in a voice that resembled his parking grunts, Kamil said something. Some way, this time, I thought it was a word. I said “Beg your pardon?”
He waited in place and again repeated what was surely a word, though I still failed to hear it. Then he turned my arm loose and fumbled in his clothes.
That was when I balked. What in God’s name would come down next? I wouldn’t stay to watch. I turned back toward what I thought was the door.
But a quick light flared. Kamil had struck a long kitchen-match and was holding it out. We were in a walled-off deeper niche of the same birth-cave. It was ten feet long with raw stone walls and a random huddle of junk on the ground. I could make out oil lamps, a stack of icons and whatever thing I’d just now touched, on a shelf at waist level. I walked back toward it.
It was coated with an even layer of dust, except where Kamil and I had disturbed it. But at first I could only think of a boat. It looked like an antique child’s canoe, roughly gouged from a straight tree trunk and a good deal longer than my hand had guessed, maybe three feet long by two feet wide. Oddly I pictured the infant Moses, afloat on the Nile in his bulrush boat.
The match burned down; Kamil lit a second.
In the moment of dark between them, I managed to guess this was some kind of manger, something the monks kept hid away for processions upstairs. I met Kamil’s grin with a grateful nod—an average tourist seldom glimpses the family junkroom of Jesus’ birthplace.
Again he took my hand and thrust it to the scooped-out bottom of the manger. I felt it and, this time, thought of my mother’s old bread-kneading bowl, a fine smooth oak but sold at her death for under a dollar. I even paused to want it back. The second match was dead by then.
The voice that had made Kamil’s dumb grunts now said a word.
I thought it was real. He had said the word real and he somehow meant this wood trough here. We were back in absolute dark again, and the trough was still not glowing or pulsing, nothing my eyes could read as uncanny. But too much was coming at me too fast—this changing man and his awful place, the thick taste of dark and whatever wooden worn old thing my fingers touched. I only knew I must not ask Kamil to speak again. I must leave here now. I tried to slide my hand from his grip.
Strong as anyone I’d ever known, the man that held me wrung my wrist with a huge warm hand and said again “Real,” the same one word, many times through the night.
