Pilgrim in the Palace of Words Read online

  Of course, one can translate even the most complex of ideas from one language into another. That’s a fact. But it’s true that something more subtle might well be lost. Imagine William Shakespeare translated into Chinese. The plot would certainly remain, but the colour of Shakespeare’s words, the very thing that gives them their beauty, their identity, would surely be lost.

  The Christian world, however, freely translates the Bible. Some factions even pride themselves on how many languages they’ve translated it into — Swahili and Blackfoot, Finnish and Korean. But for me the colour of the Bible is always in the thees and begats of the King James Version. “Thou shalt be scattered over the face of the Earth” — there’s a certain power in that kind of voice, a terrible magic. It’s so powerful that it’s easy to get confused and imagine that the original texts must have sounded like that. The original Hebrew, Greek, or Aramaic must somehow have had that sort of flavour. But did they?

  In the Quran there’s no doubt. That book sings only in Arabic.

  I’d been staying for a week in a dirty little pension in the Armenian quarter of Jerusalem. I shared a room with Arno and Berhitte, a Dutch couple. Arno fancied himself a photographer. One day he took three hundred pictures. We would go our separate ways, and in the evening we’d meet for beer and discuss our photographic exploits, each trying to outdo the other.

  One afternoon, knowing full well I could challenge Arno with the adventure, I climbed a wall in the Arab quarter. I’d seen some Israeli soldiers sitting on the edge of a roof. They were watching the crowds below, and I figured if I climbed the wall and stuck my head above the far side of the roof they were on, I could get a great shot of them silhouetted against the Dome of the Rock.

  I figured out all the angles and scampered up for the shot. It’s only now, in retrospect, that I realize how foolish I was. Sneaking up on two soldiers armed with machine guns isn’t a smart thing to do. But I went, anyway, and snapped the photo without the pair ever realizing I was there. I still think about it. What if a chunk of rock had broken off under my feet? What if I had startled them? Sometimes, I guess, you think that because you’re a tourist, you’re bulletproof and not really part of what’s going on.

  One evening, poring over maps with Arno and Berhitte, we came up with our craziest escapade. We decided to tunnel under Jerusalem. That’s not as daft as it sounds — a tunnel really does exist. There aren’t many references to it, but we managed to find it. We were going to go through Hezekial’s Tunnel.

  Okay, I thought, here we go. It was a sort of metaphor for the whole trip. A tunnel, all Freudian analysis aside, is a dark place through which one emerges into the light. The real Hezekial’s Tunnel begins at a pool of water, and it was there, at that pool, that Jesus is said to have washed the eyes of a blind man and made him see again. That’s the metaphor exactly: to come through the tunnel into the light, to see clearly, to understand.

  In King Hezekial’s time the water supply of Jerusalem was outside the city walls. No river runs through Jerusalem and never has. Instead, the first settlements were built around a little artesian well, a pool of water that has bubbled faithfully up from the ground throughout the long years of the city’s existence.

  Now, when King Hezekial got word that an Assyrian army was advancing on his city, he wisely ordained that a tunnel should be built to bring water to a reservoir inside the walls. Work on the tunnel commenced. One party dug in from the pool, while another dug out from inside the city walls. And almost thirty centuries ago water flowed through the tunnel for the first time, the Assyrians were thwarted, and Jerusalem, the city of peace, survived to live another day.

  The tunnel is still there, carrying a stream of water through its dark shaft. Outside St. Stephen’s Gate an unmarked path winds down into a valley. Arno, Birhitte, and I descended it wordlessly, and at the bottom of the path, still within sight of the city walls, we saw an unremarkable concrete building. Inside it was the ancient spring.

  There, too, a group of young Palestinian boys appeared from nowhere and began pulling at our sleeves. “You go? You go?” They held flashlights so that we knew we had reached the place. Hezekial’s Tunnel starts at the bottom of a decrepit set of concrete stairs, and the boys’ faces quickly reflected disappointment when we declared forcefully that we would go through it without guides.

  Berhitte, though, took one look at the pitch-black entrance and chickened out. She couldn’t do it, she said. Too claustrophobic. Big Arno glanced at her sheepishly. I’d like to think he was feeling a little doubtful himself. “Berhitte,” he said, “I can’t leave you here by yourself. It’s not safe.” He was probably right. I’d already seen one young woman being followed ominously by a man with less than honourable intentions. The tunnel’s entrance wasn’t a safe place for a lone woman. Arno shrugged and said to me, “I can’t leave her alone.”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “I’ll do it myself.”

  “You are sure?”

  For a moment I, too, was unsure. I hadn’t really planned on going solo, but there I was and there it was.

  Berhitte and Arno said they’d meet me at the other end, and I ventured forward into the water, switching on my flashlight. The boys were still calling, their voices echoing in the darkness. Within a few steps the water was around my knees, gurgling and splashing as it has for three thousand years. The stone resembled unpolished marble, and the thin lance of my flashlight swept over rock that was a gentle pink like the hue of a seashell’s interior.

  I could see how the tunnel was carved out by hand chisels. The marks were still visible in the rock, and again I wondered how anyone could possibly have managed the feat. The water was crystal-clear, and the only sound was my own breathing and the slosh of my two pale legs, diffracted and determinedly striding beneath the surface. Literally, I was tunnelling through history, plunging deep below the meaning-heavy city above.

  At first the ceiling was a full metre over my head, and I could extend both arms and touch the walls on either side. Farther into the tunnel the walls began to squeeze in and the roof descended. Then, of course, the water was forced higher, and I had to crouch with only my head and shoulders and desperately precious flashlight free of the flowing stream.

  Somewhere above Christ had been crucified. Somewhere above Muhammad had ascended to heaven on a silvery steed. The tunnel stretched on, seemingly winding and bending toward the very roots of the world.

  In time I came to the point where the two parties of diggers had met all those years ago. There was once an inscription here in archaic Hebrew. It had read simply: BEHOLD … THE EXCAVATION.

  I continued on, a heartbeat from panic, knowing there were hundreds of tonnes of rock overhead. Hurrying, I tipped my flashlight occasionally to see if something was in the water. I didn’t know what I expected to see lurking in the depths — perhaps something unknown and terrifying, something scuttling along the bottom in the murk.

  There were also rumbles several times as if the earth was still settling around me. I hustled a bit more, jittery at the thought of being trapped in a cave-in. The thundering, I rationalized later, must have been the noise of trucks passing overhead — either that or more jets breaking the sound barrier.

  Finally, the tunnel started to weave back and forth, and it seemed that the ceiling was growing higher. I turned another bend and heard a voice calling. It was indistinct, but I had little choice but to forge toward it. Then I realized my name was being shouted. It was Berhitte. She was quite worried. I’d been underground for maybe forty-five minutes. Her voice became louder until all at once I emerged at the Pool of Siloah and into the light.

  A gang of boys was there, as well, but they were older than those at the entrance. They offered to take my picture as I arrived, but I didn’t trust them with my camera. These boys had a menacing air, laughed at my soaked T-shirt, and probably wondered why anyone would want to clamber through a three-thousand-year-old tunnel.

  I shook them off, and Arno slapped my back and gr
inned. Together we three trudged back up to re-enter Jerusalem by the Dung Gate, which was given its unpleasant name because ancient villagers had once tossed their refuse there.

  Today the Dung Gate leads into one of the most famous of all the sites of Jerusalem. In my wet clothes I was alarmingly out of place among the long white beards and black robes rocking gently in prayer. Directly in front was the legendary Wailing Wall.

  A few hundred metres away, in the Arab quarter, one is greeted with “Salam aleikum,” but at the Wailing Wall only Hebrew is heard, and for Israelis the salutation is that most Jewish of words — shalom.

  Salam, shalom — they are brother words from an ancient Semitic root. The name of the city, Jerusalem, literally means City of Peace. Now there’s a misnomer.

  In 1947, when the United Nations mandated Israel into existence, a number of things happened with amazing speed. A war broke out, of course, but also the beginnings of a most remarkable language story occurred. Across Central and Eastern Europe a Jewish language, Yiddish, had already been in place for hundreds of years. For a while it was assumed Yiddish would become the official tongue of the new Israel. In those heady early days it was even proposed that Albert Einstein should become the first prime minister. Neither of these two things came to pass.

  Yiddish is a Germanic language related to Old German with a smattering of Slavic thrown in. We know Yiddish for such words as putz, verklemmt, and schmooze, which evoke something of the world of those lost northern Jews, a hint of the colour, rhythm, and humour of their lives.

  During the Holocaust, several million Yiddish speakers perished, and the language has never fully recovered. So in 1948, in one of the first sessions of the new Israeli parliament, a most extraordinary decision was made: the official language of the new state would be Hebrew. However, for almost two thousand years hardly a living soul had spoken that language in everyday situations. It’s true that Hebrew was well-known in its biblical context, but for people on the street it had about as much use as Latin. That meant it was a fossil language, a remnant of a long-ago time.

  Nevertheless, the movement to revive Hebrew has been incredibly successful in Israel. In fact, even before the United Nations mandate, groups of people had been working on adapting Classical Hebrew to the twentieth century. They certainly had some problems describing technology. Bicycles, for example, are most definitely not mentioned in the Torah. And how about airplanes?

  To deal with such modern inventions, Hebrew has adopted the word , written in the Roman alphabet as matos. The root ma basically means “a tool.” If we attach it to the verb to move (pronounced lanor), we get the word for machine (manor), and if we wed it with the verb to fly (latus), we wind up with matos, or airplane.

  Languages are pliable entities. They’re infinitely creative in their solutions to problems such as dealing with new ideas and new ways of thinking. Hebrew is a perfect example. Resurrected when it was all but extinct, it’s now spoken as a mother tongue by nearly six million people. Remarkable.

  One reason for the success of today’s Hebrew is that the flood of Jewish immigrants to Israel hailed from many different language groups — a sort of Tower of Babel in reverse. Moreover, while the choice of Hebrew as the official language was initiated by the Israeli government, it was the heartfelt choice of the people, as well. The language is as intimately linked to the Jewish religion as Arabic is to Islam, and therefore it became one’s duty to learn Hebrew and to pass it on to children, not only as a language of religion but as the language employed for all things.

  So for me this story is one of the most powerful of all in the annals of language. It is the one and only time in history that a language has been successfully resurrected from the dead, not just as a museum piece but as a fully functioning modern tongue.

  In West Jerusalem, the new city, there’s a museum that holds the Dead Sea Scrolls. When I went to see them, I merged behind a group of people on a tour. Not that I like organized tours. It was just a cheap way of getting a free guided commentary.

  The little guide was a passionate fellow, and at one point we stood in front of a large fragment of the Scrolls. Most of the group’s members were Israeli, I think, and could read ancient Hebrew. The guide told us to go ahead and read the fragment, and I studied it solemnly as if I could actually decipher it.

  “What is this text?” he finally asked after a few moments of silence. Some keener in the crowd said it was from Isaiah, and the guide beamed. “That’s right. This piece of sheepskin is two thousand years old. It’s almost a thousand years older than any previously known copy of the Book of Isaiah. And what do you notice about it?”

  Again I stood shamefaced, hoping the guide wouldn’t notice I didn’t have a clue. Those around me seemed a bit confused, as well. “Do you remember,” he continued, “when you were children and played the whispering game?”

  The whispering game?

  “Yes, where children get in a line and the teacher gives something to whisper in the ear of the first. That first child whispers to the next and then that one to the next. The fun is when you see how much it changes. ‘I want French perfume for my birthday’ eventually becomes ‘I wore frog pajamas that burned my dog.’ Now what do you notice here?” His hand swept over the glass-enclosed manuscript. He paused dramatically, then answered himself. “There’s no change. Two thousand years of copying and there’s no change at all. Look, you can read it yourself.”

  The first Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered by a Bedouin shepherd named Muhammad Ahmed el-Hamed. One of his goats climbed into a cave along the Dead Sea to escape the searing heat, and he picked up a rock and threw it in to get the animal out. When he tossed in the stone, he heard the tinkle of pottery breaking. Up there in the caves he found the Scrolls hidden in ceramic jars. This, our guide told us, happened on the same day the United Nations created the State of Israel. “Now you can believe whatever you want about such a coincidence,” he said, “but I know what I believe.”

  My last day in Jerusalem was a Friday which, as it happens, is when Franciscan monks walk in procession down the Via Dolorosa, the Way of Sorrows. Arno and I got our cameras ready, Berhitte sighed, and off we went.

  The winding path of the Via Dolorosa leads from the Temple Mount to a Crusader church built over the site where it’s thought Christ was crucified. On July 15, 1099, the knights of the First Crusade entered Jerusalem and slaughtered almost all of the inhabitants. Forty thousand people, Jews and Muslims alike, were cut down until the streets were knee-deep in blood. And then the Crusasders built the Church of the Holy Sepulchre over the place where Christ was said to have died for humanity’s sins — one more profoundly ironic bit of history in Jerusalem where meanings easily become tangled, where belief sometimes obscures reality.

  There are some wonderful accounts of the Muslim reaction to this First Crusade. There was a sense of confusion and dismay. The city had been open to everyone and was peaceful for five hundred years. One Muslim writer, in an attempt to make sense of these acts of barbarism, set out to understand what had happened, so he read the Christian books. In Islam, of course, there’s only one god, but in reading about the Holy Trinity, it seemed to him that the Crusaders worshipped three divinities: a father, a son, and a holy ghost. Moreover, Christians appeared to cannibalize their god — eating his body and drinking his blood. To top it off, this same god created his own mother who then created him … immaculately. No wonder the scholar was confused. All of this demonstrates how difficult it is to truly understand the nuances of another culture. It doesn’t help, either, when that new culture is intent on slaughtering you and all of your family.

  The Church of the Holy Sepulchre is somewhat gaudy, which I admit is a terrible pun, but it’s true. The building is ornate to a fault and is run by six different sects, which is a big problem. The different sects are often not on speaking terms, and the church is strictly divided into areas of influence. Changing a light bulb or even moving a carpet a few centimetres can spark fist
fights between monks from the different groups. Up on the roof, out of the fray, is the Ethiopian sect. It laid claim to the top of the church and has, in fact, lived in crumbling wooden shacks on the roof for more than a hundred years.

  Christ himself spoke a language called Aramaic. It’s neither Hebrew nor Arabic but a cousin of the two. Salam in Aramaic, for example, is shela’m (the apostrophe denotes a glottal stop, a sort of gulping pop of breath). Aramaic began as a pidgin language in the Middle East a few hundred years before Christ and had become the standard tongue in Jerusalem by the first century of the current era.

  On the main floor of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is a little grotto. Visitors line up to go into it because only a half-dozen people can fit at a time. It was dark when I entered. Candles flickered in the shadows, and an old priest, Greek Orthodox by the look of his clothes, stood guard. Behind him was a small rocky space, smooth with all the hands that have reached out for it. It is said to be the tomb of Christ. I waited for a moment, hoping for a revelation. I waited for the light of understanding to hit me, but there was nothing. Not for me at least. I still couldn’t feel a thing.

  Later that same afternoon, sick of the crowds, dirt, and heat, I went for a walk outside the old city walls. There, up ahead, was a garden, almost a park. I could see the tree branches poking above the dusty walls, and in this desert land I was drawn toward the greenery. The only problem was that an old nun was standing at the gate. What belief system was she going to foist on me? I wondered. I walked up, still desperate to sit among the flowers, and she smiled and simply said, “Welcome.” That was it. I actually hesitated, expecting her to say more. Didn’t she want to ask if I’d found Jesus in my heart? Didn’t she want to tell me that fire and brimstone would rain down on me for eternity?