Chapter 10
Pilgrim’s Progress
Slavey told me he often found his conversations in this holy land to suggest that he and his counter-converser were the ancient mariner and the wedding guest. But he said he never could tell whether his role was that of the mariner or that of the guest, and so now he simply waited for the rest of what this Coca Cola salesman would condescend or ascend to say to him in that bright dusty sunlight.
“Outside the Lyons Gate,” said the Coca Cola salesman, “on the near side of the Mount of Olives, above the Garden of Gethsemane, is a terraced garden. It’s the Prayer Garden, named such because the Roman Catholic Church says Christ prayed there, for a little peace alone before his crucifixion. My brother is the gardener.
“It’s about a fifteen-minute walk, leisurely in the weather we almost always have for such walks here. Sit beneath an olive-tree, on the stones supporting one of the terraces, with a clear view of the sky and the walls of this city. If my brother is not too busy talking with other tourists, he will come to you and stand before you, gazing across the lower garden. If you ask him a question, he will sit beside you and answer all your questions until you seem to him to be ready to leave. Then he will rise and drop his walking-stick. Rise from the stone yourself and pick it up. Hand it to him with a little money. My brother sells answers. I sell Coca Cola.”
So Slavey bade the man farewell. He kissed his wrinkled hand and left the city. The first tribulation of that fifteen-minute walk was getting across the busy thoroughfare between the gate and the mountain. The next might have been finding the right road up the hill, but Slavey picked the first one he saw, trusting the Coca Cola salesman. Surely he’d have given more direction, were it necessary. So the next tribulation was an offer of guidance from a younger salesman.
The road was narrow, steep and nowhere straight, but its walls banked up on both its sides with no side streets aside in Slavey’s sight, and so he figured he could find his way alone. However, as soon as he entered the precincts of those weed-grown gray-stone walls, he saw a boy leaning beside a gate on his right. The boy elbowed himself perhaps reluctantly away from the wall and strode down the road, scowling to Slavey. Upon reaching him, he smiled and stopped.
“What do you want to see?” he asked, standing squarely in front of Slavey in the middle of the little road, smiling like the best of shopkeepers as his fingers moved, ready to point a way.
“Just here,” he said, not waiting for answer and waving his left hand toward the wall on Slavey’s right, “is the Garden of Gethsemane. I can show you there the oldest olive-tree in all this land. It’s huge.
“Just there,” he said, still not waiting for an answer from Slavey, who now was grinning as broadly as the boy, “is the tomb of Mary. It is very beautiful and full of beautiful paintings, and very dark and cool on this hot day.”
“Let me see,” said Slavey, considering his options carefully. “I would very much like to see the Garden of Gethsemane, if only you will promise not to cut off an ear of mine. I have use for both, if you can tell me the secrets of the place.”
“Not a chance,” said the boy, “either of cutting off your ear or of telling you the secrets of the place. Think what either would do to my tip.”
In the Garden, the boy indeed showed Slavey an obviously very old olive-tree, with its trunk wider than Slavey’s height, and Slavey was quite tall. But the garden did not much impress Slavey, as he found it much more pruned and small than he’d expected. So Slavey walked quickly around and out, as the boy tried to tell him things.
“And the tomb of Mary,” said the boy, as he followed Slavey out to the street. “It’s just here, just a little way back down, there across the road. Everyone wishes to see the tomb of Mary. Everyone knows who Mary is. You’ll find it beautiful.”
So Slavey followed the boy but baulked at the entrance. Looking down through the stone-framed entrance, into the darkness below the gray stones, he felt the coolness. He remembered the air-conditioning in Saint Louis Cathedral in New Orleans and feeling that God lived there, not Bob but something surreal, beyond his experience.
“No,” said Slavey. “Maybe some other time. Thank you very much.”
He handed the boy probably more shekels than such salesmen ordinarily received in a week, and he walked on up the hill. He was grateful to the boy for not trying to sell him something more. Around a bend, he turned into the prayer-garden.
The garden was exactly as the Coca Cola salesman had led him to expect, the olive-trees and the stone-blocked terraces, the view to the city and the sky. He strolled the terrace on the level of the gate and stopped where he felt halfway to the far end of the garden. He sat on the stones, looked across to the city, and up to the sky. He sort of prayed a little in his wait. But he didn’t wait long.
He’d seen no other humans in the garden as he entered, but within a few minutes an old man strode slowly along the terrace, toward him from the direction of the further end. The old man walked with a stick in his left hand, touching the ground each time his left foot did. Slavey had never figured the mechanics of walking-sticks, how they helped, nor now. He didn’t try to figure anything.
The old man, garbed as Slavey understood more endemic to Afghanistan than here, in a loose turban partly trailing down his back and in other loose swaths of cloth, and rubber sandals in a style more common to leather, did not wait for a question before sitting. So Slavey did not begin the conversation.
“I’ve been to the United States,” said the man.
“Yeah, me too,” said Slavey.
“I live up there now,” said the old man, pointing.
He waved his hand, palm up further up the hill on the other side of the road. Slavey looked and saw some houses set into the hillside, with laundry hanging drying on balconies. Slavey wondered in which house the old man lived, and he wondered how many people lived there with him, wife and children, parents, who. But he didn’t ask.
“I know more about America than you do,” said the old man, leaning his chin on his untooled stick as his loose sleeves surrounded it and his turban shaded his crown from the sun, but not his eyes. “You talk about democracy, about how the people have the right to rule, and you use that notion to excuse depriving others of the right to just live quietly. You say you care for common concern, but you care more about thinking your car is better than your neighbor’s. If your neighbor disagrees, you call him stupid.”
“I don’t own a car,” said Slavey, “and I’d like to ask you about you.”
“Nice prelude,” answered the old man. “But I was telling you about me, about how I feel. You don’t call your neighbors stupid to their faces, but to other neighbors you also think are stupid. You do that because you think you’re being smart, by fooling your neighbors, by being sneaky. Have you heard of the Kasbah?
“Yes,” answered Slavey. “The mythical den of thieves.”
“It’s mythical alright,” said the old man. “But it’s far from fictional. It’s a presence, both cultural and geographical, wherein was founded the response of Islam to people like you. If you’re wondering where I learned enough English grammar to use words like ‘wherein’, the answer is Harvard University. I’m a Ph.D., in English literature, and I live up there. Up there.”
Again he waved his right hand, palm up at the houses on the hillside.
“You,” he said, “being an American, think I’m bitter being a Ph.D. and living in a house without electric or gas washing or drying machines. My family likes spending time washing, and my family likes the smell of the clothes drying on the line, and the feel of the air blowing through them. It’s better than electric air-conditioning.
“And it’s better than sitting around thinking up ways to lie and steal, like our people do in the Kasbah, like your people do everywhere. The Kasbah, and all the breaking of promises and other lying at which Islamic people have become competent, is nothing except retaliation against the silliness of western culture.
“Did I say silliness? Of course I said silliness! You Americans and Germans and French think, when your neighbors buy Cadillacs or Mercedes or Citroens, that they’re picking on you, if your only car is a Ford or a Volkswagen or a Renault or a Fiat. Ford built the car for all people, and ‘Volkswagen’ means people’s vehicle.
“Am I preaching? Of course I’m preaching! You people are so crazy that, when someone catches you in your silliness, shows you yourselves how crazy you are, you just think up some way to be stupider. And that’s the whole reason for the problems here now between Islam and Judaism. You westerners, you Americans, you people.
“You mean because we supported the Zionists after World War II,” said Slavey.
“Zionists, schmionists!” replied the doctor of English. “Are all you Americans totally deaf? You instigated the problem by teaching all those nice Semitic Jews who emigrated to New York to be like the rest of you people. After Joshua died of old age, the biggest problem we had here in this holy land was Europeans.
“Think about it! Joshua himself told the Israelites to cool it, to stop all that warring and greed and start paying more attention to the Ten Commandments, and they did, mostly. From then on, things were relatively calm here, until the Romans started trying to take over everything and everybody. Colonization! You know?
“I’m not a Ph.D. for nothing! Sure, David and his baby-chopping temple-building son caused some problems, but it wasn’t like Joshua’s or Hitler’s efforts at genocide. Romans tried to turn the whole wide world into Egypt, and everyone in it that wasn’t Roman, and a lot of other Romans as well, into what Israel was in Egypt.
“From then on, until this century, world history has been mostly Europeans fighting over the rest of the world. Thank Ala for Muhammad, coming along and giving us enough pride to resist all that crap, or enough unity, whatever. If Charles hadn’t hammered back Suleiman at Tours, we might have world peace now.
“But, instead, we had to wait for inevitable economics to bankrupt the over-reaching nations, and that took until this century, the last of this millennium, after Christ. No, I’m not a Christian, but those Europeans claim to be, while they do all that coveting of their neighbors’ Saabs. So what were you going to ask me?”
By this time, Slavey was ready to go, back to his hotel and get some sleep. His eyebrows were starting to strain the insides of his brain, and he was having a tough time looking at all at the wondrous deep blue sky there, or so much as remembering it was there, or where he was. But he managed to remember the Coca Cola salesman.
“Oh,” he said. “I almost forgot. Thanks for reminding me.”
The old man sat still, scowling over the Garden of Gethsemane.
“How do you feel about the Jews taking common ground to build a separate nation for themselves? I mean, true democracy gives them no right, since Muslims are more populous across the land than are Jews, don’t you think?”
The old man didn’t take a second to think about that then.
“I already told you. They won the right to call it theirs. So, if they wish to call it theirs, they can. But it isn’t theirs, and it isn’t ours, or yours. The land, all Earth, a gift from God, belongs to all of us, to you and to me and to them. ‘This land is your land; this land is my land,’ says an American song. I don’t care who calls it theirs, as long as we all can feel at home. I live up there, and that’s my home. That’s all.
“Parfois,” said the gardener, “il ne faut pas cultiver notre jardin.”
The old man rose from the stones and dropped his stick on the gravel path of the terrace. Slavey rose from the stones and stooped to pick up the stick, and he handed it back to the old man. He bowed and walked out of the garden, forgetting about the money. But back at his hotel he remembered.
Next morning, he returned to the inclining winding road and saw again the boy leaning against the stones. He waved, and the boy smiled and waved, as Slavey turned from the road to look at the place the boy had said was Mary’s tomb. Near the bottom of the cold stone steps, someone in some sort of ceremonial vestments sat at a tiny table, reading by candlelight. The person didn’t look up, and Slavey walked around alone, being the only other person there he saw. In the dim light and chill air, he looked at the lovely renaissance paintings and the older relics. One stone coffin had more candles burning near it than the others. Slavey stood before it, for several quiet minutes.
He turned in the chill air and returned to the steps, reluctant to leave. The person in the ceremonial vestments reading looked up a little before Slavey passed. Slavey nodded and received a nod in return.
He walked up the road and reentered the prayer-garden. He did not see the old man, but he saw a family having a picnic on the terrace above where he had sat. They were a man and a woman and several children, and one of the children looked at Slavey and laughed. Slavey felt that they all were laughing at him.
“Have you seen the old man?” he asked them.
“What?” asked the man, not smiling.
“Have you seen the gardener?” Slavey answered.
“No,” said the man, and looked away.
Slavey turned back to the gate and stopped where he had sat with the old man. He took from a pocket some shekels of change and stacked the coins neatly on a stone beside steps to the next higher terrace. He left the garden and returned to his hotel, and next day he was in Egypt. And he heard the same there, everywhere.
“Let them keep that land,” the Muslims said, in a refrain with no music, just a humility and rationale of heart that Slavey had never heard from anyone in America or throughout the universe, not even from Theresa.
“They won it,” said the Muslims. “But let us keep our homes.”
Slavey kept his schedule. He was there to see how Islam was doing, and kept his according plans. From Egypt, he moved on to Saudi Arabia, where he dined with princes and trod again his path to Mecca, across the vast and empty sand. Praying with thousands at the Kaba, he had never felt more wholly the brotherhood of man, and he knew that was his message to take back, to America.
But the message to him came more strongly at the Sphinx. At that monument, once to riches and now to riddles, built by slaves for the regime that had enslaved the Israelites, he tried to take the Sphinx’s point of view, literally. He stood, his back to the stone eyes, and stared across the seeming endless sands, and asked himself one more time, what anything was all about, anywhere, ever.
“Sand,” was the answer. “Let them keep that land.”
“So,” came the answer. “Help us have our homes.”
And so, when Slavey returned to the United States of America, he preached the error of his segregationist ways. He preached the brotherhood and sisterhood of all people and paid a public visit to Oliver and proclaimed agreement with peace. Next, he made a speech at the Renaissance convention center in Detroit, proclaimed the need for rebirth in the motor city of America. He proselytized brotherhood and sisterhood and neighborliness. He was tempted to sing Woody Guthrie songs. He spoke in parables and riddles. He rambled like brambles.
“What are left and right,” he asked, “other than opposite directions of one person? If one person facing west stands behind another facing west, left is south for both as right is north. If the two turn and face together east, north is left with south right, for both of them. If they face each other, they join their opposite directions. That is what we need to do, face each other. But first we need to face ourselves.”
“Amen,” murmured parishioners of Oliver, as they did in their Baptist and African Methodist Episcopal churches when they felt the heart of the preacher beaming through. That is, when they felt the heart of the preacher warming through, whether or not they figured what he said, and Slavey went on more obliquely.
“Let’s talk about bigotry,” he said. “Not racism, but bigotry itself, of which racism is a horrible part but yet but a part, a symptom and not the whole disease. Let’s talk about some other forms of bigotry, the rotting whole disease devouring us all.
“Following our civil war that threatened the union of these states, Democrats were the party of the segregated South, and Republicans the party of Lincoln. Now the opposite is true, according to some on either side. How did that come about?
“Some people define freedom of choice as depriving infants of any choice ever, and many of those people decry killing killers. How is killing the guilty worse than killing the innocent, and how did that turnabout of rationality come about?
“We call those people the liberal left, and we call those who disagree with them the religious right, and many of those who disagree with the right to choose to kill babies do call themselves Christians and call their disagreement belief in the right to life but at the same time believe in killing not only killers but also anyone who disagrees with them, whether or not they would ever kill, however they are otherwise, at all.
“How can people calling themselves Christians preach killing, for revenge or anything else? Besides the questions of turning the other cheek and forgiving one’s neighbor seven-times-seven times, how can people claiming to believe in the Gospel of the lord Jesus christ preach the refusal of the possibility of repentance that only life can give, that only life can give? Can you tell me how the dead can repent?
“Often so-called psychologists of the liberal left support vengeance by calling it closure. Aside from the question of how having the guilt of another death on one’s conscience in one’s life can make one a more happy or peaceful person, how can killing in return for killing be called closure? How do most women feel after an abortion, and can two wrongs make a right? Can killing close killing? If not, close what?
“What has this to do with bigotry? Bigotry is taking sides, and it ranges from partisanship to my-religion-right-or-wrong, and it ends in decent people making worse than fools of themselves, just to stay on the side they’ve chosen, despite themselves.
“One of many relevant facts is that the political terms ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ both refer to the same thing. ‘Liberal’ refers to the ideals of this nation’s Declaration of Independence. I mean ‘liberal’ refers to what conservatives are trying to conserve.
“But maybe I’m missing something. I know I’m no political scientist. In grade school, even before I dropped out of school because my favorite teacher told me I’d never be a lawyer because niggers don’t know nothing about anything that takes brains, I couldn’t understand the difference between a republic and a democracy, something about Greeks and Romans. Well, I’m an African American, and I still don’t understand the difference between a Republican and a Democrat, except that they disagree. So maybe a psychologist can teach me better. But, for now, I’m saying how I see it.
“And, my brothers and sisters, whether or not you choose to admit the fact that that’s what you are besides being my neighbors whom I love, if you think this African American has wigged too far out already, consider this as well, if you please.
“Hitler wasn’t beastly. No beast could or would do what he did. No species on Earth kills its own species for reasons. Humans claim to be better than beasts because they have the capability of reasoning. Well, if so, I have to ask, when are they going to start using that capability for something better than trying to excuse bigotry?
“Most of you know I’m a Muslim. Most of you also know I recently returned from a visit to what Muslims and Christians and Jews call the Holy Land. A few of you, certainly not many of you, also know that I spent a little time sitting on a rock at the top of the Mount of Beatitudes, where Jesus is supposed to have preached a sermon.
“Jesus was beastly, and he said so. He asked us to look at the fact that sparrows don’t take thought for tomorrow, but rather just accept the gifts of God. He also asked us to consider the lilies of the field and see how beautiful they are without going out and trying to make themselves grand in some kind of ceremonial vestments, Gucci or otherwise. So maybe Jesus was less than a beast. Maybe he was a vegetable.
“Well, be that whatever, as I sat at the top of that mountain, on a rock beneath three Eucalyptus trees, breathing the fragrance of the lilies of that field, enjoying their splendor and the view of the Sea of Galilee beneath the mist, I looked aside and saw two lizards necking on a rock in the sunlight. And oh, such smiles on their faces there.
“I, however, scowled in my realization that all around me, there in that holy land and across the sand to Mecca and across the sea to Detroit, humans were sitting around on upholstered chairs reasoning how to find ways to hate each other. So, uneducated as this nigger is, I had to kind of wish I were a beast, like those lizards.
"But, next I’d wish I were a lily, and there’d be no end of the pride I’d manage to muster with my human reason, and I might end up leading the lizards or the lilies in a jihad or a crusade against other lizards or lilies. Worse, I might make long speeches, trying to justify my newfound bigotry. So I’ll get to the present point.
“Israelites slaughtered Philistines after the death of Moses. Christians slaughtered Muslims and Jews in Jerusalem in the Crusades. Hitler, under the sign of a similarly broken cross, killed six million Jews, anywhere he could.
“Most people calling themselves Christians rightly have compassion for the enslavement of Israel in Egypt, but following the teachings of Jesus would have them compassionate with a few other events of history as well.
“In the name of God, Israel tried to kill all the Canaanites for their land. When some of the Canaanites took some of that land back, Europeans killed more of them and called the killing crusading, in the name of Christ’s cross.
“English people calling themselves Christians, to be free from other Europeans trying to keep them from being the sort of Christians they wished to be, came to this continent and instituted the effective genocide of its natives.
“Hitler’s trying to do that sort of thing to the children of Israel in this century is called the Holocaust! But all those events were holocausts, and mostly in the name of Christ and all in contradiction to his teachings and the commandments God gave Moses for us! When will it ever end? How long, O Lord?
“Now the Israeli Canaanites are trying to do it again to the Palestinian Canaanites, and again in the name of religion. Worse, when the Palestinians try to defend themselves, the Israelis retaliate and get sympathy from the descendents of the perpetrators of the North American holocaust.
“Muslims say that there is no God but God and that Muhammad is his prophet. I say that there is no God but God, and that every honest loving person is his prophet. And I say that every dishonest hateful greedy person is his enemy, and every bigot is a hateful liar, since hearts are better than names.
“That’s the point. Let’s try a parable. Then we’re out of here.
“People are professional painters. They profess whatever makes them feel good, and then they paint it in abstractions to make it look good, and paint is like the people themselves. White is supposed to have no pigment and is used to symbolize purity, and black is supposed to have all pigments and is said by many to be beautiful, and yet no paint is entirely either, or neither.
“Death turns people pale. Just before their dark graves. But no humans are black or white. They’re all the same colors as the earth. Caucasoid or Negroid, desert sand or peat moss, it’s all some shade of rusty brown, and the rust is the same. In people, it’s the oxidation of iron in blood, yes iron in blood. But Rustoleum in our minds.
“If Moses and the Ten Commandments are Jewish, few people calling themselves Jews today are Jewish, since most of them preach killing Palestinians and stealing their land. If Jesus and the Beatitudes are Christian, few people calling themselves Christian today are Christian, since most of them preach killing Palestinians and stealing their land.
“But most people on these sides of the oceans don’t much care about those on those sides of the oceans. Most people don’t look so far, being too preoccupied getting better stuff than that of nearer neighbors, and most people will do anything they can get away with toward that narrow end, and call it getting even.
“Unpainted truth is that vengeance is a vicious endless cycle that began with the first bigot, the first person who thought himself different and therefore more deserving than a neighbor, and so tried to diminish his neighbor for his own gain, thereby selling his soul. Unpainted truth is that most of us ignore our souls.
“I am an African American, an African and an American. I am your friend and your brother, and you are my friend and my brother or sister. Like it or not, that’s how it is on God’s green Earth, beneath the seas, across the sands.
“And, sooner or later, that plain unvarnished truth shall make us free.
“All of us, you and me.”
That was Slavey’s grand finale, and Oliver’s grand finale was coming soon, since now he had been nominated for the Nobel peace-prize, as we knew he would be after Montgomery and Birmingham and Selma, and maybe more loudly to this world the hundred-thousand-person march. The hetero-phobic pervert in charge of the United States federal police was futilely trying to defame them both, and soon his futility would turn his tactics to killing both Slavey and Oliver.
Lev would later explore homelessness in the western half of Earth, and he found bigotry also there in professional treatment of the homeless, and he found it and the competitive decadence in persons purporting to provide help for the homeless in the cradle of liberty, in the name of the love of Saint Clare of Assisi. Lev, in his old Slavic sadness, wished to know how pallid folks can be.
And Theresa witnessed a piece of that, long after Slavey and Oliver accepted death for the cause at the hands of instruments of American law enforcement. They, Lev and Theresa, found it in the next millennium.
Rather than enforcement of unalienable common law.
Rather than common sense, compassion.
Rather than sympathy.
Dissonant.