Robert Silverberg - A Thousand Paces Along the Via Dolorosa

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.