A Thousand Paces Along the Via Dolorosa

by Robert Silverberg

Hornkastle said to the dapper young Israeli, “When they eat the mushroom, do they think they see God?”

“Far more than that. The mushroom is their god. When they eat it, they become one with Him: they become Him. It is the pure agapé,” Ben-Horin said, “the true Christian feast.”

Ben-Horin’s voice, light but firm, crisp and clipped, had a dizzying musical quality. A pounding began in Hornkastle’s forehead. Being with the Israeli made Hornkastle—a big man, some years older, nearly forty—feel thick and clumsy and slow. And what Ben-Horin was telling him about these Arab tribal rites stirred in him some mysterious hunger, some incomprehensible longing, that baffled and astounded him. He felt woozy. He suspected he might have had too much to drink. He looked up and across, out the big window of the hotel cocktail lounge. Off there to the west Jerusalem was awesome in the late afternoon sunlight. The domes of the two great mosques, one gold and one silver, glittered like globules of molten metal. Hornkastle closed his eyes and put his drink to his lips and said, “Take me to these people.”

“Gently, gently. What they do is very illegal in Israel. And they are Arabs, besides—Christian Arabs, who live between worlds here, who are very cautious people at all times.”

“I want to go to them.”

“And eat their mushroom? And become one with their god?”

Hornkastle said hoarsely, “To study them. To understand them. You know this is my field.”

“You want to eat the mushroom,” said Ben-Horin.

Hornkastle shrugged. “Maybe.” To swallow God, to be possessed by Him, to entangle one’s identity with Him—why not? Why not? “How long before I can go to them?” he asked.

“Who knows? A week? Two? Everything here is conditional. The politics, the inflation rate, the weather, even—one takes everything into account. I promise you you’ll see them. Until Easter everything is crazy here—pilgrims, tourists, wandering ecstatics—it gets a little like Benares, almost. After Easter, all right? Can you stay that long?”

Hornkastle considered. He was on sabbatical. He had virtually fled Los Angeles, escaping from the wreckage of his life there. It didn’t matter when he went back, or if he ever did. But he was gripped with impatience. He said, “I’ll stay as long as possible. But please—soon—”

“We must wait for the right moment,” said Ben-Horin firmly. “Come, now. My wife is eager to meet you.”

They went out into the surprisingly chilly April air. With a lurch and a roar Ben-Horin’s tiny orange Datsun took off, down the hill, around the compact medieval splendor of the walled Old City and through New Jerusalem. Ben-Horin was an outrageous driver, screeching through the streets like a racer in the Grand Prix, honking ferociously at his fellow motorists as if they were all retired Nazis. The Israelis must be the most belligerent drivers in the world, Hornkastle thought. Even a cool cosmopolitan type like Ben-Horin, professor of botany, connoisseur of rare fungi, turned into a lunatic behind the wheel. But that was all right. Life had been a roller-coaster ride for Hornkastle for a couple of years now. One more round of loop-the-loop wasn’t going to bother him much. Not after three stiff jobs of arrack on the rocks. Not here. Not now.

Ben-Horin lived in a gray-and-blue high-rise, spectacularly situated on a hilltop near the university. It looked stunning from a distance, but once inside Hornkastle noticed that the stucco was cracking, the lobby tiles were starting to fall out, the elevator made disturbing groaning sounds. The Israeli ushered him into a tiny immaculate apartment. “My wife, Geula,” said Ben-Horin with a brusque little wave. “Thomas Hornkastle of the University of California, Los Angeles.”

She was a surprise—a big woman, inch or two taller than Ben-Horin, probably twenty pounds heavier, with a ripe, if not overripe, look to her. It was hard to imagine these two as man and wife, for Ben-Horin was dry and precise and contained and she was full of vitality, young and pretty, in a way, and overflowing with life. Her eyes were dark and glossy and it seemed to Hornkastle that she was looking at him with outright interest. Probably a figment of the arrack, he decided.

He needed no more drinks, but he had never been good at refusing them, and soon she had a martini-like thing in his hand, something made with Dutch gin and too much vermouth. The conversation was quick, animated, impersonal. Perhaps that was the style here. Ben-Horin and his wife were both well informed about world affairs, though everything seemed to circle back to analyses of the impact of this event or that on Israel’s own situation. Possibly, Hornkastle thought, if you live in a very small country that has been surrounded by fanatical enemies for its entire life, you get fixated on local issues. He had been startled, at the international symposium where he had met Ben-Horin last December, to hear an Israeli historian expounding on the Vietnam war in terms of Israel and Syria. “If your government tells you to defend an outpost,” he had said, “you go and defend it. You don’t argue with your government about the morality of the thing!” With that sort of outlook even the rainfall in Uganda could become a significant domestic political issue.

Somehow he finished his martini and one after that, and then there was wine with dinner, a dry white wine from the Galilee. Hornkastle always drank a little too heavily, especially when he was traveling, but in the last few turbulent years it had started to be a problem, and the way the Ben-Horins kept him topped off could get troublesome. He knew he was on the edge of becoming sloppy and worked hard at staying together. After a time he was just nodding and smiling while they talked, but suddenly—it was late, and now everyone was drinking a corrosive Israeli brandy—she wanted to know about his field of study. He did his best, but his voice sounded slurred even to him. Professor of experimental psychology, he said, here to investigate rumors of archaic cultist practices among the Arabs just south of Jerusalem. “Oh, the mushroom,” she said. “You have tried it in California, perhaps?”

“In a minor way. In the course of my research.”

“Everyone in California takes drugs all the time. Yes?”

Hornkastle smiled blearily. “Not these days. Not as much as is commonly believed.”

“The mushroom here, the Amanita muscaria,” she said, “is very strong, maybe because it is holy and this is the Holy Land. Stronger than what is in California, I believe. No wonder they call it a god. You want to try it?”

Hazily he imagined she was offering him some right now, and he looked at her in horror and amazement. But Ben-Horin laughed and said, “He is not sure. I will take him to Kidron and he can conduct his own investigation.”

“It is very strong,” she said again. “You must be careful.”

“I will be careful,” Hornkastle said solemnly, although the promise sounded hollow to him, for he had been careful so long, careful to a fault, pathologically careful, and now in Israel he felt strangely reckless and terrified of his own potential recklessness. “My interest is scholarly,” he said, but it came out skhollally, and as he struggled desperately and unsuccessfully to get the word right, Ben-Horin tactfully rescued him with an apology for having an early class the next day. When they said good night Geula Ben-Horin took his hand and, Hornkastle was certain, held it just a moment too long.

In the morning he felt surprisingly fine, almost jaunty, and at midday he set out for the Old City on foot. Entering it, he looked about in wonder. Before him lay the Via Dolorosa, Christ’s route to the Crucifixion, and to all sides spread a tangle of alleys, arcades, stairs, tunnels, passageways and bazaars. Hornkastle had been in plenty of ancient cities, but there was something about this one that put it beyond all others. He could touch a paving stone and think, King David walked here or the Emperor Titus or Saladin, and this was where Jesus had staggered to Golgotha under the weight of his own cross.

So, then: up one winding street and down another, getting himself joyously lost—Monastery of the Flagellation, Western Wall, Dome of the Rock, Street of the Chain, a random walk, poking his nose into the souks where old hawk-faced men sold sheepskin rugs, pungent spices out of burlap bags, prayer-beads, shawls, hideous blue ceramic things, camel statuettes, unplucked chickens, sides of lamb, brass pots, hookahs, religious artifacts of every sort and, for all Hornkastle knew, merchandise far more sinister than any of that. In a noisy fly-specked market he bought some falafel and a carbonated beverage, and a little farther on, still hungry, he stopped at a place selling charcoal-grilled kebabs. The fascination of the place was like a drug. These timeless faces, men in worn serge suits who wore flowing Bedouin headdresses, young women darting from doorway to doorway, grubby children, dogs blithely licking at spilled God-knows-what in the gutters, old peasant women with refrigerators or television sets strapped to their backs, cries and odors, the periodic amplified songs of the muezzins calling the faithful to the mosques, picturesque squalor everywhere, why, it was like a movie, like time-travel even, except that it was actually happening to him: he was here and now in Old Jerusalem, capital of the world. It was exhilarating and a little intoxicating. And there was that extra little thrill, that frisson, of knowing—if he could believe Ben-Horin’s story—that the ancient religion still flourished somewhat hereabouts, that there still were those who ate of the sacred mushroom that had been the forbidden fruit of the Tree of Good and Evil, the manna of the Israelites, the hallucinogenic phallic fungus that made one like unto a god. Perhaps that boy with glittering eyes in the dark doorway, that old man leaning against the cobbled wall, that powerful fellow in the tinsmiths’ stall—secret mystics, devouring God in rites as old as Sumer, undergoing joyous metamorphoses of the spirit, ecstasies. From the Greek ekstasis, the flight of the soul from the body. “You must come to Israel,” Ben-Horin had told him last winter at that meeting in Monaco after Hornkastle had read his paper on Siberian mushroom intoxication. “The most surprising things still exist among us, a dozen kilometers from the tourist hotels, and scarcely anyone knows about them, and those that do pretend that nothing is going on.”

At 2:00 p.m. Hornkastle emerged from the maze of the Old City at the Damascus Gate. Ben-Horin was already there. “A punctual man,” the Israeli said, turning a quick grin on and off. “You feel all right today? Good. Come with me.” He led Hornkastle back into the heart of the city. Near the Via Dolorosa he said, “Walk slowly and glance to your left. See the man at the falafel stand? He is one. A user of tigla’.”

“Tigla’?”

“The word is Aramaic. The mushroom. A reference to its phallic shape. Are you hungry?”

They approached the falafel stand. The man behind the counter, presiding over basins of bubbling oil, was an Arab, about thirty, with a lean triangular face, wide jutting cheekbones tapering down toward a sharp narrow chin. Hornkastle stared at him flagrantly, peering as though he were a shaman, an oracle, a holy man. Questions boiled and raged in his mind, and he felt once again that urgent hunger, that need to surrender himself and be engulfed by a larger force.

Ben-Florin said something curt and harsh in Arabic, and the falafel seller scooped several of the golden chick-pea balls out of the hot oil, stuffing them into envelopes of pita bread. As he handed one across to Hornkastle, his eyes—dark, faintly hyperthyroid, bloodshot—met the American’s and locked on them for a long moment, and Hornkastle flinched and looked down as he took the sandwich. Ben-Horin paid. When they walked away, Hornkastle said, “Does he know you?”

“Of course. But I could hardly speak to him here.”

“Because he’s an Arab and you’re a Jew?”

“Don’t be absurd. We’re both Israeli citizens. It is because I am a professor at Hebrew University and he’s a falafel seller and this is the Old City, where I am an intruder. There are class lines here that neither he nor I should cross. Don’t believe all you hear about what an egalitarian country this is.”

“Why did you take me to him?”

“To show you,” said Ben-Horin, “that there are tigla’ folk right in the midst of the city. And to show him that you have my sponsorship, for they trust me, after a fashion, and now they are likely to trust you. This must all be done very, very slowly. Come now, my car is near the bus station.”

With his usual terrifying intensity Ben-Horin circled the northeast corner of the Old City and headed south out Jericho Road toward the Kidron Valley. Quickly they left the urban area behind and entered a rough, scrubby terrain, rocky and parched. Like a tour guide Ben-Horin offered a rapid commentary. “Over there, Mount Zion, Tomb of David. There, Valley of Hinnom, where in ancient times were the high places where Baal and Moloch were worshipped. Still are, perhaps, but if it’s going on, they keep very quiet about it. And here—” dry ravines, stony fields—” Kidron. You follow the valley to its end and you are in the Dead Sea.” Hornkastle saw shepherds, a camel or two, stone huts. Ben-Horin turned off on an easterly road, poorly maintained. It was amazing how quickly the land became desert once you were a short way down from cool, hilly Jerusalem. The Israeli pointed ahead toward a scruffy village—a few dozen crude buildings clumped around a couple of tin-roofed stores, one emblazoned with a giant red COCA-COLA sign. “This is the place. We will not stop today, but I will drive slowly through.”

The town was dusty, ramshackle, drab. Outside COCA-COLA sat a few old men in jeans, battered pea-jackets and Arab headdresses. A couple of sullen boys glowered at the car. Hornkastle heard a radio playing—was that an old Presley number wailing across the wasteland? He said, “How in God’s name did you ever get them to open up to you?”

“A long, slow process.”

“What was your secret?”

Ben-Horin smiled smugly. “Science. The Arabs had begun to exhaust their traditional fungus sources. I told them other places to look. My price was entree into their rites. I pledge you, it took a long time.”

“You’ve had the mushroom yourself?”

“Several times. To show my good faith. I didn’t enjoy it.”

“Too heavy for you?”

“Heavy? Heavy?” Ben-Horin seemed puzzled by the idiom. Then he said, “The physiological effects were fascinating—the intensifying of colors and textures, the sense of the earth as a breathing organism, the effect of having music turn into flavors and shapes, all the synesthesias, the familiar psychedelic circus. But also very, very powerful, more than I had experienced elsewhere. I began to feel that there truly was a God and He was touching my consciousness. I am willing to perceive the sound of a flute as something with mottled wings, but I am not willing at the age of thirty-one to begin generating a belief in supernatural deities. And when I began to lose sight of the boundaries between God and Ben-Horin, when I began to think of myself as perhaps partaking of the nature of Jesus—” Ben-Horin shook his head. “For me this is no pastime to pursue. Let those who want to be gods, saviors, divine martyrs, whatever, eat their fill of the mushroom. I am content to study its worshipers.”

They were well past the village, now, three or four miles into the empty desert. Hornkastle said, “Do you think this cult has simply survived since ancient times, or is it a deliberate modern revival?”

“I have no idea.”

“But what do you think?”

“I said I have no idea. Do you?”

Hornkastle shrugged. “Since the whole Near East once was honeycombed with mushroom cultists, I suppose it’s possible that one group has hung on. Especially here. I’m familiar with Allegro’s notion that Jesus himself never existed, that Jesus is just a code word for the sacred mushroom that rises from the ground, the phallic-looking son of God that is eaten and shows the way to the Godhead. And this is Jesus’ own turf, after all. But presumably these cults were all suppressed thousands of years ago.”

“Presumably.”

“It’s exciting to think that the belief simply went underground instead. I want to find out.”

“With luck you will, my friend.”

“Take me into the village?”

“Eventually.”

“Why not now? While we’re actually here.”

“Your impatience will be your ruin, dear Hornkastle. We must move very slowly.”

“If you understood how eager I—”

“I do understand. That is why there must be no haste.”

They rounded a bend in the road. An Israeli soldier was standing beside an overturned motorbike, signaling for help. Ben-Horin halted and there was a brief colloquy in Hebrew. Then the soldier clambered into the car, apologizing in mild, inexact English as he jammed himself next to Hornkastle and made room for his machine-gun. “We will give him a lift back to Jerusalem,” Ben-Horin explained. That put an end to any talk of sacred mushrooms.

As they passed through the village again, Hornkastle noticed that a younger man had emerged from COCA-COLA and stood outside it, arms folded. For an eerie moment Hornkastle thought he was the falafel seller—the same face, wide cheekbones, pointed chin, bulging, brooding eyes—but of course that was unlikely; this must be a cousin, a brother. In these villages everyone has the same genes.

“I will drop you at your hotel,” said Ben-Horin.

Itchy, irritating frustration assailed Hornkastle. He wanted much more than this, and he did not want to wait, and if impatience would be his ruin, so be it: he was impatient. He felt irritable, volatile, explosive. With an effort he calmed himself. Ben-Horin was right: only by moving slowly would anything be accomplished. The trouble was he had moved so slowly so long, all through his tame disciplined academic life. Now those disciplines seemed to be breaking down, and he stood on the brink of strangeness, awaiting the dive.

He said, “When will we meet again?”

“In a few days,” Ben-Horin replied. “I must deliver a lecture in Haifa tomorrow, and then there are other responsibilities. I will call you.”

The bartender at the hotel recognized Hornkastle and asked him if he wanted arrack again. Hornkastle nodded gloomily and studied the liquor, watching the ice-cubes turn the clear fluid cloudy. Shadows were starting to lengthen over the domes and parapets of the Old City. He was working on his third drink when two tourists came in, obviously mother and daughter, say fifty-five and thirty, good-looking long-legged golden-haired women with delicate slender faces, fragile sharp noses. British, he guessed, from the severe cut of their clothes and from their imperfect, somewhat bucked teeth. Before long he managed to draw them into conversation. British, yes, Claudia and Helena, cool and elegant and self-contained, friendly. Helena, the daughter, asked what he was drinking. “Arrack,” he said. “Anise liqueur, like the Greek ouzo, you know? The Turkish raki. Same stuff from Indonesia to Yugoslavia.” The daughter ordered one; the mother tried it and called for sherry instead.

Before long the women were on their second drinks and he was ready for his fourth and everyone was a little flushed. There was a pleasant sexual undercurrent to the conversation now, nothing obvious, nothing forced, just there, mature and not unattractive man sitting with two mature women in strange land. Anything might happen. He was fairly certain of the glow in Helena’s eyes—that same you-need-but-ask shine that he had imagined he had seen in Geula Ben-Horin’s, but this did not seem like imagination. And even the older one had a spark of it. He allowed himself quick foolish fantasies. The mother tactfully excusing herself at the right moment; he and the daughter going off somewhere for dinner, dancing, night of exotic delights, breakfast on the veranda. Or maybe the daughter pleading a headache and disappearing, and he and Claudia—why not? She wasn’t that much older than he was. Or perhaps both of them at once, something agreeably kinky, one of those nights to treasure forever. They were widows, he learned, their husbands killed in a freak hunting accident in Scotland the previous autumn. Helena spoke matter-of-factly about it, as if being widowed at thirty was no great event. “And now,” she said, “mother and I are pilgrims in Jerusalem! We look forward so much to the Easter celebrations. Since the mishap we’ve felt the presence of God by our sides constantly, and Jesus as a living force.” Hornkastle’s dreams of a wild threesome upstairs began to fade. They had been Church of England, said Claudia, very high church indeed, but after the mishap they had turned to the Roman faith for solace, and now, in the Holy Land, they would march with other pilgrims along the Via Dolorosa, bearing the cross—

Eventually they asked Hornkastle about himself, and he sketched it all quickly, UCLA, experimental psychology, divorce, sabbatical, hint of severe inner storms, crisis, need to get away from it all. He intended to say nothing about sacred mushrooms, but somehow that slipped out—secret cult, hallucinogens, mysterious village in the desert. His cheeks reddened. “How fascinating!” Helena cried. “Will you take us there?” He imagined what Ben-Horin would say about that. He responded vaguely, and she swept onward, bright-eyed, enthusiastic, chattering about drugs, California, mysticism. He began to think he might be able to get somewhere with her after all, and started to angle the conversation back toward dinner, but no, no, they had a prior engagement, dinner at the rectory, was that it? “We must talk again soon,” said Claudia, and off they went, and he was alone again.

A suspended time began. He wandered by himself. One night he went down to the Old City—dark, a mysterious and threatening warren of knotted streets and sinister-looking people. He ate at a little Arab place, grilled fish and mashed chick-peas for a few shekels. Afterward he got lost in a deserted area of blank-walled houses. He thought he was being followed—footsteps in the distance, rustling sounds, whispers—but whenever he glanced back, he saw nothing but woebegone lop-eared cats. Somehow he found his way to Jaffa Gate and picked up a taxi.

He rented a car and did standard tourist things, museums and monuments. Jerusalem, he decided, looked a little like Southern California. Not the inner city, God, no, but the environs, the dry tawny rocky hills, the vast open sky, the clusters of flat-faced condominiums and whatnot sprawling over every ridge and crest—he could almost blink and imagine himself somewhere out by Yorba Linda or Riverside. Except that in the middle of it all was the city of David and Solomon and Herod and Pilate, and the place of the cross. Had any of that really happened, he wondered? A slender bearded man lurching up the Via Dolorosa under the weight of the two massive wooden beams? What is it like to carry the cross? What is it like to hang high above the ground in the cool clear springtime air of Jerusalem, waiting for your Father to summon your spirit?

Hornkastle prowled the Old City constantly, getting to know his way around in the maze. His path often took him past the falafel stand. When he bought sandwiches from the Arab, his hand trembled, as if the falafel-seller who had so many times devoured his own god held some awesome numinous power that instilled fear. What wonders had that man seen, what strange heights had he ascended? Hornkastle felt brutally excluded from that arcane knowledge, half as old as time, that the Arab must possess. Looking into his bloodshot eyes, Hornkastle was tempted to blurt out his questions in a rush of tell me tell me, but he did not dare, for the Arab would pretend not to speak English and Ben-Horin, when he found out, would simply disown him, and that would be the end of the quest.

From Ben-Horin he continued to hear nothing. At last, unable to contain his impatience, Hornkastle telephoned him at home but got no answer. A call to Ben-Horin’s office involved him in a maddening sequence of university switchboard operators; half an hour of persistence got him through at last to someone in Ben-Horin’s department who said he had gone to Athens to deliver a lecture.

“Athens? I thought Haifa!”

“No, Athens. He will be back soon.”

“Please tell him that Thomas Hornkastle would—” But Hornkastle was holding a dead phone. Break in service or just a hangup? He reminded himself that he was in Asia, that however shiny and modern Israel might look, the mentality here was not necessarily always Western. The idea of trying to call back, of going through all those intermediaries again, was appalling. It would be quicker to drive out there and leave a message on Ben-Horin’s desk. Shortly he was on his way, navigating grimly in his flimsy Fiat among the squadrons of Israeli kamikaze drivers. With minor confusions he reached the glossy campus and managed to find a secretary, a trim little Sabra who took his quickly scrawled note and promised to give it to Dr. Ben-Horin tomorrow when he returned from his trip to Geneva. Some communications failures here, Hornkastle thought. He felt like inviting the secretary to lunch. It was absurd; the frustrations of his mushroom chase were translating themselves into random sexual twitches. He got out of there fast, went over to the university library, and used up the afternoon with the five volumes of Farnell’s Cults of the Greek States, looking for veiled Amanita references.

Back at the hotel he ran into Helena and Claudia. They were friendly, even warm, but that moment of unmistakable mutual attraction in the cocktail lounge seemed impossible to recapture, and when he again suggested dining with him, they once more blandly and smoothly refused. To fill their place he found an Episcopalian deacon from Ohio, who suggested an allegedly worthwhile restaurant in East Jerusalem. The Ohio man had come here for Easter services five years in a row. “Overwhelming,” he said, nodding forcefully. “When they surge up the Via Dolorosa under those heavy crosses. The pathos, the passion! And then on Holy Saturday, when the Greek patriarch declares the Resurrection, and the cry goes up: Christos anesti! Christ is risen! You can’t imagine the power of the scene. Bells ringing, people shouting and dancing, everybody going crazy, candles, torches—you’ll still be here for it, won’t you? You shouldn’t miss it!”

Yes, Hornkastle thought bleakly, I will still be here for it and probably for Christmas, too. Restlessness gnawed at him. This night, perhaps, the Arabs were celebrating the eucharist of the magic mushroom, gathered in some cobblestone-walled hut to turn themselves into gods, and he was here in this mediocre restaurant, trapped in the prison of himself, picking at gristly mutton and listening to the raptures of a wide-eyed Midwesterner. He hungered for escape, for the dive into the abyss of the divine, for the whips of oblivion. The Ohioan chattered on and on. Hornkastle, hardly even pretending to listen, wondered about his ex-wife, his ex-house, his ex-life in his far-off ex-city, and asked himself how it had come to pass that in the middle of his journey he had ended up here, scourged by inner demons he barely comprehended. He had no answers.

The next day he phoned the university again, this time getting through quickly to Ben-Horin’s department. Yes, yes, Dr. Ben-Horin had returned, he was leaving for Tel-Aviv tomorrow, perhaps you can reach him at home now.

The home number did not answer.

To Hornkastle it was like being released from a vow. In a sudden access of overwhelming anger, he drove out toward the Kidron Valley, toward the village of the tigla’ users, eyes throbbing, hands tight to the knobby wheel. In the village all was as it had been: the old men outside the shop with the COCA-COLA sign, two or three boys playing dice in the dust, a radio blaring sleazy music. No one paid any attention as Hornkastle stepped from his car and went into the shop. A dark place, cramped—canned goods, piles of sheets and blankets, a rack of used clothes, and, yes, a squat red Coca-Cola cooler that emitted dull clunking humming sounds. Behind the counter was the Arab who looked just like the falafel-seller. They are brothers, Hornkastle thought: this is Mustafa; the other is Hassan. Abdul and Ibrahim and Ismail are out tending the flocks, and they all look exactly alike. The bulging bloodshot eyes regarded him coldly. Hornkastle said, in a tentative, faltering way, “Do you speak English?”

“Yes. What do you want?”

Probably it was meant as a shopkeeper’s What can I do for you? but it came out a lot more hostile than that. Hornkastle moistened his lips. “I want—I am here for—I am trying to learn about—” He halted in confusion and chagrin. This was impossibly stupid. Blurt it out, ask blunt questions about an illegal secret cult? How many months had it taken Ben-Horin to establish contact with these people? I’m ruining everything, Hornkastle thought. He trembled and said, astonishing himself, “Do you sell liquor here?”

A flicker of the dark menacing eyes. “You must go to Jerusalem for that.”

“Wine? Beer?”

“Not here. You are in the wrong place.”

Hornkastle leaned closer. “I am a friend of Professor Ben-Horin. I study the red plant. You understand?” He pantomimed, trying to draw Amanita muscaria’s phallic shape in the air with his hand, and realized that it looked exactly like pantomiming masturbation. The Arab’s expression did not change. Hornkastle was shaking. “The mushroom. You understand me?” he said in a thick throaty voice.

“You are mistaken. This is not the place.”

“I know it is. Have no fear: I’m no policeman. An American, a friend of Ben-Horin’s. I want the mushroom. The closeness to God, do you understand? To taste God, to know the feeling of being divine, of being something greater than myself, of—”

“You are sick. I call doctor.”

“No. Please. Trust me. In the name of the compassionate Jesus, help me!”

The Arab stared. Some changes seemed to be going on at last behind the swarthy facade. Hornkastle, sweating, swaying, gripped the counter to keep from falling.

“You are American. You want only fun.”

“I swear it, no—”

“The mushroom is not for fun.”

“The mushroom is holy. I understand that. It is holy, God is holy, I—I am not holy. I want to be made holy. To be made whole, do you see?” Hornkastle laughed, a little too wildly. I am babbling, he thought. But he seemed to be getting through. He whispered urgently, “I want to be part of something, finally, does that make sense? To enter a world where I feel I belong. And the mushroom will open the gate. I swear to my need. By the compassionate Jesus, by the eyes of Mary, by the Holy Spirit itself—”

“You are crazy,” said the Arab.

“Perhaps I am. I don’t think so. But do you have to be sane to want to enter into God? I’ve been on the outside all my life—looking in, looking for the way, trying to pass that gate and never letting myself do it, never willing to take the last chance. You know, I’ve had mushrooms, in California. But I always took an underdose, I guess, or the mushroom was too mild, because I only got a hint of the experience, the shadow of it, a little light shining through the door to where I stood—” He faltered. “Please,” he said, in a small voice.

From the Arab came an enormous unending silence, broken after an eternity by a few quick gruff words: “Come with me.”

Hornkastle nodded. They left the store through a side door, and he followed the Arab on and on, out of the little village, toward the rocky hill to the east. There were a few stone huts up there. The elders of the tribe are convened there, Hornkastle decided, and that is the place of the mushrooms, and I will be presented to them and allowed to plead my case, and then—and then—

Sudden intense panic surged through him. He felt a buzzing in his kneecaps and fierce pressure in his bladder and stabbing pain at the back of his skull. He had a vision of himself being called into judgment in one of those huts, the prying, snooping, ignorant American arraigned for poking his nose where it did not belong, and found guilty and taken out behind the hill, two quick thrusts of the dagger and over the edge into the dry ravine. This is how we deal with meddlers, Frankish dog. It was absurd. These people might look sinister, but it was all in his overheated imagination; they were harmless peasants, simple shepherds and farmers, much closer to God than he would ever be and hardly likely to do evil to a stranger. Yet fear possessed him. Halfway up the hill he turned and ran back toward the village, feeling feverish, dizzy, more than half-crazed. The Arab yelled after him but did not pursue. Somehow Hornkastle managed to start his car, and in chaos, tears streaming from his eyes as they had not done since he was a child, he drove wildly back to the city, past his hotel, out toward the university area. Angry drivers honked and shook fists at him. Near the Knesset building he saw a public telephone and called Ben-Horin’s home, expecting nothing. Geula Ben-Horin answered. “Hornkastle,” he blurted. “I must come over at once.”

“Of course. Are you all right”

“Tell me how to get to your place.”

It was only five minutes away. He rang her bell and she peered out. A whiff of musky perfume enveloped him; she was wearing a sheer dressing-gown and nothing else, and he was unprepared for that, the absurd, comical, preposterous seductiveness of her, heavy breasts visibly swaying, all that voluptuous Mediterranean flesh. He said, “Your husband—”

“In Tel-Aviv. Come in. What’s wrong with you?”

She put a drink in his hand—the foul Israeli brandy—and he gulped it like medicine, and then a second one. She was warm, sympathetic, trying to find out what was the matter; he was barely coherent. Finally, as the brandy settled him a little, he managed to say, “I’ve just been to the mushroom village.”

“Ah.” She looked grave.

“Begging them to give me some. I couldn’t wait for your husband to get back from wherever the hell he’s been. I stood the waiting as long as I could and then I went out there. I talked the ear off some Arab, I reeled off a whole lot of hysterical drivel about wanting to be one with God, you know, the whole transcendental thing—” His voice trailed off in shame.

She said, “And they gave you some, and now it is beginning to upset your mind, is that it? It will be all right. There will be some hours of great delirium and then ecstasy and then gradually you will—”

“No, They didn’t give me any.”

“No?”

“The Arab told me to follow him and started to lead me toward some huts on the hillside. And I panicked. I thought it was a trap, that they were going to kill me for asking too many questions, and I ran back to my car, I drove, I—I—I fled here. To the only people I know in Jerusalem.”

Her eyes were warm with sorrow and pity and a sort of love, it seemed to him, and yet her mouth was quirked in what looked very much like contempt. “I think you are wrong,” she said calmly. “What you were afraid of was not that they would do harm to you, but that they really would give you the mushroom.”

He blinked. “How can you say that?”

“I think that is so. Often we turn in fear from that which we desire the most. You were in no danger from them, and you knew that. You were in danger from yourself, from your own troubled and tormented soul, and what you feared was—”

“Please. Stop.”

“—not what they would do to you but what you would see when the mushroom allowed you to look within.”

“No. Please.”

He was shaking again. He could not meet her gaze. She came close to him—she was nearly as tall as he was—and held him, comforting him, murmuring that she was sorry to have upset him when he was already in such a vulnerable state. He pressed himself against her and felt the tension draining from him. He felt like a child, a big foolish child. She was the great soothing mother herself, Isis, Astarte, Ishtar, and the power that she had over him frightened and attracted him all at once; if he could not let himself surrender to the god who was the mushroom, he would at least be capable of losing himself in the goddess who was His mother and consort.

“Come,” she said, taking his hand.

Easily she led him to the bedroom and with dreamy willingness he vanished into her warm billowing body, no longer caring, no longer resisting anything. He had no strength left. It was all very quick, too quick, and he collapsed abruptly into deep sleep from which he woke, equally abruptly, finding himself lying in her arms and for a moment not knowing who, how, where.

He stared at her, aghast.

Before he could speak she put her finger to his lips and said softly, “You are feeling better?”

“We shouldn’t have—your husband—”

“Life is very risky here. Any day the end might come. We live as though there are no second chances.” She winked. “Our little secret, eh?” Helping him up, finding his scattered clothes. “When he gets home I will tell him you called. He has been so busy, running everywhere, lectures, meetings—he has so little time. I am glad you came. About the mushroom village and what happened to you there: fear nothing. They will not harm you.”

“Will you tell him I went there?”

“No. He can find that out from you much better.”

“What am I going to do, though? I’ve bungled everything!”

“You are a Christian?” She smiled and touched her lips lightly to his. “Live in the hope of glorious redemption. Even bunglers are forgiven if there is a God. Forgive yourself and He will forgive you too, eh? Eh?” She drew him to her for a brief warm embrace. “Go, now,” she whispered. “It will be all right.”

For ten minutes Hornkastle sat behind the wheel of his parked car, groggy, stunned, before he could muster enough will to drive. All the manic energy in him was spent; he felt bleak, drained, desolate. All was lost. The sensible thing was to pack up and go to the airport and take the next plane out, but he was too numb even to do that. At the hotel he went to the bar for a few drinks and, in a stupor of guilt and bewilderment, dropped into bed.

He was still sleeping soundly when his telephone rang the next morning. Ben-Horin.

“Is it too early for you?” the Israeli asked.

Sunlight flooded the room. “No, no, I’m up.” The hand holding the receiver shook. “Good to hear from you again.”

“Will you meet me at eleven by Saint Stephen’s Gate?” Ben-Horin said brusquely, icily.

The day was bright and warm. Crowds of tourists swarmed about the Old City: the climax of the Easter season was at hand. From a distance of twenty yards Hornkastle could feel the anger radiating from Ben-Horin, and it was all he could manage to force himself to approach the little Israeli.

Ben-Horin said, “How could you have done it?”

“Sheer idiotic spinelessness. She gave me a couple of drinks, and I was already overwrought, I guess, and—”

In amazement Ben-Horin said, “What in the name of Mohammed are you talking about?”

“I—she—” He could not say it.

Ben-Horin shook his head furiously. “You lunatic, how could you possibly have gone to the village after all my warnings about moving cautiously? You have done me harm that is perhaps irreparable. This morning I went to see Yasin, the falafel-peddler—he pretended not to know me. As if I am police. I could hardly believe it when Geula said you had been to the village. Now they want nothing more to do with either of us. My relationship with them is severed and possibly cannot be rebuilt. How could you? The discourtesy, Hornkastle, the absolute stupidity—”

“I couldn’t reach you for four days. I thought you were avoiding me, God knows why. Finally the frustration built up and built up and I had to talk to those people, had to, so I—”

“How very stupid that was.”

“Yes. I know. Even as I was doing it, I knew it was a mistake, but I simply went through with it anyway, like a dumb schoolboy, I suppose, and even worse, when they were about to give me the damned mushroom—I’m sure that’s what they were going to do—I panicked, I bolted—” Hornkastle rubbed his aching forehead. “Can you forgive me?”

“Forgiveness is not the issue. I want nothing more to do with you. You may have crippled my own research.”

“All right.”

“I advise you not to try to return to the village.”

“I’m planning to leave Israel as soon as I can.”

“Probably there will be no flights available until after the Easter holiday. But while you are still here, keep away from those people.”

“Yes,” Hornkastle said meekly.

“I take no responsibility for what will happen to you if you approach them again.”

“There’s no chance of that.”

“I wish I had never invited you here. I want never to hear your name again.”

Ben-Horin turned with military precision and strode away.

Hornkastle felt shame and weariness and a deep sense of loss. It was ended now, the quest, the timid tentative adventure. Out there in the judaean desert are people acting out the ancient love-feast, communing with a god older than Rome, and he would never know a thing of it now. Slowly, defeatedly, he made his way back to the hotel. I’ll call El Al tomorrow, he thought—they’ll be open on Good Friday, won’t they?—and get the hell out of here, back to the real world, back to all that I wanted to flee.

But there was still tonight and he could not bear to be alone. Recklessly he phoned the room of the Englishwomen—what did he have to lose?—and Claudia answered. Would they join him for dinner? He had asked twice before; maybe he was making a pest of himself and they would tell him to get lost. But no. A lovely idea, she said. Did he have a place in mind? Hornkastle said, “How about right here? At half past seven?”

They both looked beautiful—fine clothes, pale skins, fluffy blonde hair. He loved the British sound of their serene voices. Helena’s gauzy blouse revealed fine collarbones, a delicate bosom. Had she been with a man, he wondered, since the unfortunate hunting mishap? Mother and daughter were heavy drinkers, and Hornkastle matched them two for one, so that things rapidly grew blurred, and he was only dimly aware of his food; he hoped he was being brilliant, suspected he was merely being boorish, and hardly cared. They were tolerating him.

“And your mushroom research?” the mother asked. “How has that been going?”

Painful recollection nearly sobered him. “I’ve botched it,” he said, and as they leaned toward him, eagerly, sympathetically, he poured out his miserable shabby tale of the illicit visit, the conversation with the Arab, the pathetic, inglorious retreat. “I see now that what I was looking for here,” he said, “was not just a nice little bit of folk-anthropopharmacology to write up for the Journal, but an actual mystic experience, a real communion, and as often happens when you want something too badly, you handle things clumsily, you reach too soon, you blunder—” He paused. “And now it will never happen.”

“No,” said Claudia. “You will have what you seek.”

He half expected her to pull a glowing red Amanita mushroom from her tiny purse.

“Impossible now,” he said mournfully.

“No. This is the city of divine grace, of redemption. You will have a second chance at whatever you hope to attain. I am quite sure of that.”

He thought of Geula Ben-Horin saying, We live as though there are no second chances. But maybe for Israelis, living in a state of constant war, things were different. Geula had also said, Live in the hope of glorious redemption, and now Claudia had said the same thing. Perhaps. Perhaps. He gave the British woman a bland hopeful smile. But he was without hope.

It was well past eleven by the time the last brandies were gone, and then, without any subtlety at all, Hornkastle asked Helena to spend the night with him, and she, smiling beatifically at her mother as though the barbaric American had just done the most wonderfully characteristic thing, as if he had performed one of his tribal dances for her, thanked him for the offer and pleasantly refused—no second chances there, not even a first one—and they left him to deal with the check.

He sat in the restaurant until they told him it was closing. Somehow he managed to persuade his waiter to sell him a whole bottle of arrack from the bar stock and he took it to his room and through the night he methodically emptied it.

By taxi the next morning he descended to the Old City, where a vast horde of pilgrims had gathered to reenact the Savior’s final thousand paces along the Via Dolorosa from the place of condemnation to the place of His interment. It looked like the crowd outside a college football game on Saturday afternoon. There were souvenir-sellers, mischievous boys, peddlers of snacks, police and soldiers, television cameramen—and also brown-robed friars, nuns of a dozen orders, priests, people costumed as Roman legionaries carrying spears, a queue of Japanese in clerical clothes with three cameras apiece.

Hornkastle walked in a lurching, shambling way that evidently had an effect on people, for the mob parted before him wherever he went, and soon he was deep in the city’s tangled streets. Occasionally hands passed lightly over his body—pickpockets, no doubt, but that was unimportant. He saw Arabs with wide tapering faces everywhere, bloodshot hyperthyroid eyes.

A small boy tapped his knee and took him by the hand. Hornkastle allowed himself to be led, and found himself shortly at Yasin’s falafel stand. Hornkastle felt like cringing before the Arab, who surely knew—they all knew everything—of his numbskull journey to the village, of his half-crazed pleadings and bizarre flight. But there was no condemnation on Yasin’s face. He was grinning broadly, bowing, making Hornkastle welcome to the Holy Land, to Jerusalem, to the Via Dolorosa; to his own humble falafel stand on the morning of Christ’s Passion. Yasin handed Hornkastle a bulging sandwich.

“I have no money, “ Hornkastle muttered.

The Arab beamed and shook his head. “My gift! Christ will rise!”

His eyes found Hornkastle’s and lingered there a long while in what was almost a kind of communion itself. Hornkastle had no idea of what was being communicated, but it left him with a sense of warmth, of trust, of faith. Perhaps Claudia was right, that this is the city of divine grace, of second chances. He thanked Yasin and gobbled the sandwich as if he had not eaten in weeks.

Let it begin soon, he prayed. At last: let it begin.

The boy was still at his side. He had the village face, too, triangular, but his eyes were gentler. Hornkastle realized that the boy had appointed himself his guide. All right. They ploughed together through the hordes and eventually carne to the courtyard of the Omarieh School, where a sign proclaimed the First Station of the Cross. Pilate had sentenced Jesus here. The crowd was flowing up the Via Dolorosa here, slowly, ecstatically, praying in many languages, singing, chanting. Wherever Hornkastle looked, he saw pilgrims tottering under immense wooden crosses, gasping and struggling and staggering. His head throbbed. He felt light-headed, giddy, weightless. He let himself be swept along, to the place where Jesus first had fallen—marked by a broken column—and then up the narrow, killingly steep Via Dolorosa through an Arab bazaar. Claudia and Helena, or two women just like them, were nearby, reading out of a guidebook. You were right, he said to them, not bothering to use words. This is the city of second chances. “The Fourth Station,” said the younger. “Where Jesus met his fainting Mother. This church is Our Lady of the Spasm. The Fifth: Simon of Cyrene carried the cross here. The Sixth, where Veronica wiped the face of Jesus.” It was a hard climb now. Hornkastle felt rivulets of sweat on his body.

He was amazed how intense colors were becoming, how bright everything looked, how strange. The walls of the ancient houses seemed furry and were undulating slightly. The voices of those about him dwindled and swelled, dwindled and swelled, as though some amplifier were being turned up and down. Marching beside him was Ben-Horin, implausibly wearing a friar’s cassock. He leaned close and in his crisp, cutting way whispered into Hornkastle’s ear, “So you study the ceremony after all. Perhaps at last you learn a thing or two.” Out of a doorway came Geula Ben-Horin with some sort of Halloween costume on, stripes and splotches of green and scarlet and brilliant yellow. A succubus, perhaps. She winked at Hornkastle and shimmied her hips. “Put this in your thesis,” she murmured, throaty voiced, a kosher Mae West. The two Israelis danced around him, melted and flowed, and were gone. Hornkastle pawed at his eyes. He would have fallen, for his legs were growing swollen and rubbery, but the press of the crowd was too tight. “This is the Seventh Station, where Jesus fell the second time,” said the cool clear voice behind him, and the tones echoed and reverberated until they were tolling like gongs. Just ahead a dozen Arabs in dark blue suits were singing some ominous hymn as they hauled their cross along; he perceived the words of the song as individual gleaming blades that severed each instant from the next. “And here,” said the woman, “Jesus spoke to the compassionate daughters of Jerusalem. This is where He fell the third time. We are nearly at the end of the Via Dolorosa. The last five stations are within the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.”

Hornkastle felt the ancient paving stones squirming and sliding beneath his feet. He stumbled and would have pitched headlong but the blue-suited Arabs caught him, laughing and cheering now, and passed him from hand to hand, tossed him about like a sack of old clothes, moved him uphill. He saw a woman in an upper window making the sign of the cross at him and throwing kisses. The hymn was unbearably loud.

His back was pressed up against the Arabs’ enormous wooden cross. He saw clearly, as though he were at a movie, how a dozen men with the same triangular face and fierce swollen eyes were holding him in place and driving in the nails. It was not the nails that bothered him but the sound of the hammer blows, which rang in his head with clamorous frenzy. Hornkastle went limp and let it happen to him. A voice as mighty as that of Zeus cried, “Help him, he’s having a fit!” But Hornkastle simply smiled and shook his head. All was well. Push me, kick me, do whatever you want to me. I am yours. God is in me, he thought. God is everywhere, but especially He is within me. He could taste the fiery presence of the Godhead on his lips, his tongue, deep in his belly. They had the cross upright now. “Make room! Get him out of here before he’s trampled!” No. No. There are still five more Stations of the Cross, are there not? We have not reached the end of the Via Dolorosa. Hornkastle felt utterly tranquil. This is the true ekstasis, the parting of the soul from the body. He closed his eyes.

When he returned to consciousness, he found himself lying in a hospital bed with a placid sweet-faced nun watching him. His arms were rigidly outstretched, his fingers were tightly coiled, the palms of his hands seemed to be on fire, and wave upon wave of nausea swept across his middle. From far away came the sound of wild bells ringing and the roar of mad voices crying a rhythmic slogan over and over.

To the nun he said faintly, “What are they shouting? I can’t make it out.” She touched his blazing forehead lightly and replied, “Christos, anesti, Christos anesti, Christ is risen!”

Content

A Thousand Paces Along the Via Dolorosa
by Robert Silverberg