Jerusalem Dreams. Church of the Holy Sepulchre

January 21st – endured a 30-second stare-down from a woman immigration officer in army fatigues. Young, blonde and unblinking, her Aryan gaze simmered with the quiet menace of Lana Turner about to whack Cecil Kellaway with a sockful of ball bearings. First sign we’re teetering at the cusp of consequence here, the gateway to a land permanently occupied by itself. Under preoccupation. Why do I already feel like an imposter? That at any moment somebody will point and bellow ‘what’s that asshole doing here?’ and the undead crowd will turn and stare.

Last night’s ElAl adventure was disconcerting. As if I had boarded the wrong flight. The normal one, in which people watch movies, sleep and read books slipped quietly away from a different gate. I’d stumbled onto the one where surly men elbow each other for the privilege of stuffing ventriloquist dolls into overhead lockers, pull out costumes from nativity plays, strap boxes to their heads and vanish under sheets to gyrate and mumble like citizens of Bedlam. Lights are off, then on, now off. Now they’re on again. The Three Kings disappear into toilets and re-emerge as pantomime genies, spasming in the aisles. Stewardesses, dispensing poached hand and muculent eyeballs, are ignored like beggars. Minibus to town, bullied into the wheel-well by a man whose loins threaten to overwhelm the vehicle like lava advancing upon Pompeii. More miles of empty urban corridors, ramshackle, pockmarked by rubble, cheap neon, stalled construction. Jerusalem. I had imagined something different. More The Crab with the Golden Claws. Less 80’s Beirut.

I’m on a nondescript corner where a three-lane highway meets a bus station meets a row of falafel shops, mostly closed. The minibus has pulled away; I was the last passenger. It’s almost midnight and I’m alone in empty East Jerusalem with no idea of what’s supposed to happen next. I feel my youngest daughter sleeping six thousand miles away, the down of her unconditional arms, her breath pocketed beneath the pillow, and I want to weep.

I pass through the Damascus Gate, now sheltering a litter of stalls and money-changers, all shuttered. The cobbles of the souk are polished by feet to glass. There is nobody here, no sound but the distant hum of traffic beyond the walls. No shops, no restaurants, no hotels. No crib for a bed. The imposing wooden door of the Austrian Hospice looms out of the darkness. It’s closed, but I ring and am buzzed in. A cheerful, floppy-haired young man, his eyes bright with missionary zeal, confirms they can find me a room. I want to kiss his Bavarian bee-stung lips. Second floor cell gazing out at a wall. Bed, upright chair, 60-watt bulb. Larkin would grin; though not at that bible, squatting there like a toad. I succumb to godless and sadly sober exhaustion.

5.30 am – Black as pitch outside and in, the gloom is shattered by a sudden, sustained metallic wail, not unlike John Lydon in his Flowers of Romance phase. But so much louder. As far as I can tell, it comes from directly outside my window. It’s pouring in like smoke, swirling around the room, licking at the corners and under the bed. Listening more carefully, I discern the presence of a second, similar wail, more distant. Then another. I lie on my monkish divan like a Crusader in effigy, unpicking each ululation as it weaves in and out of the whole; breaking, soaring, recovering into plaintive, dischordant harmony. Part lament, part din, part incantation. Shadows of Paul Bowles are dancing with Scheherazade on the back of my eyeballs. I want to hubble, to bubble, to ride camels across dunes with Debra Winger in nothing but a diaphanous winding-sheet. This is Jerusalem. Alone in a Christian tomb on Jewish bedrock listening to the Muslim call to prayer. Then just as the voices staggered one-by-one into being, so they cease; the song quiets by degrees to silence. The first blush of dawn rinses the walls of my cell and I ooze backwards into the ragged embrace of jet-lag.

10 am – plumped on black bread, ham and coffee, I totter downstairs into an imperious caravan of pilgrims advancing up the Via Dolorosa. These are not the sackcloth-and-ashes penitents of yesteryear, but instead: peroxided Eastern European ladies, dripping with gold: frightened Koreans lurking behind face-masks: lardy Americans in cargo shorts and sweatshirts that proclaim ‘iGod – Who Are You Listening To?’ mumbling along ancient alleyways, gazing upward with birdbrained expressions culled from The Good News Handbook on How to Look Pious. At the head of each group a buttery fatso shoulders a facsimile cross under the bored gaze of Israeli soldiers who smirk and smoke cigarettes while dandling automatic weapons. The Fourth Station of the Cross, where Jesus bumped into his Mum (an encounter sadly absent from the Bible) is conveniently situated opposite the steps of the Hospice, allowing me a front-row seat for the burlesque whilst munching on the nipple of an awful croissant. A combed-over hermaphrodite edges to the front and falls to his knees, blubbering ‘We adore you O Christ and we praise you!’ over-and-over whilst attendant drizzlers massage his shoulders as if commiserating over a lost pencil. He is assisted to his feet with treacly grimaces of sympathy ‘Bless you, bless you, bless you’ they say. It’s the kind of public infantilism that causes one’s anus to spontaneously prolapse. I find myself making eye-contact with Arab shopkeepers to apologise with my eyebrows for 2000 years of Christianity; but they are impervious. These manatees buy cartloads of trinkets. Let them blubber all they want. I fall into line as the procession waddles along to Station Five (Simon of Cyrene asks Jesus ‘Can I give you a hand with that?’), Station Six (Jesus asks Veronica for a turkey wrap) and Seven (Simon the Lisper says the sandwich-man hath no turkey, will a tuna melt do?). The whole thing is an utter fiasco. There’s as much chance Jesus plodded this medieval corridor with half a tree on his back as there is of Golda Meir being retroactively elected Pope. But the pantomime’s a hoot and the scenery delightful. I disembark the Ship of Fools and head down to Station Ten which, appropriately (it’s where Jesus got his underpants pulled down) is a murky corner inside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, shortly past the knot of Russian ladies taking on the Stone of Unction doggie-style.

If the sanctified cretinism of the Via Dolorosa seems quaintly bonkers, the constellation of magic realism that constitutes the Holy Sepulchre is Alice in Wonderland on bath salts. Cave upon cave of woozy fabulism and goggle-eyed voodoo. We have your actual Rock of Golgotha, fingerable through a greasy hole in the plexiglass. How about your authentic True Cross, now under lock-and-key to stop ever-kissing pilgrims nibbling off pieces to take home under their tongues. For those leery of ecclesiastical herpes we have your verifiable Adam’s Tomb, lurking directly under the honest-to-God spot where Jesus – yes that Jesus –  was horribly crucified. And if you peer through that little window there you’ll see the crack made by the earthquake that erupted spontaneously when he gasped his last gasp. First floor Father of Man, second floor Son of God. Step up, step up for Emperor Constantine’s Treasure Room, teeming not only with chalices, doubloons and pieces of eight, but also such sweetmeats as Saint Agatha’s desiccated breasts, torn off with pincers. Not to mention the tongue of the infant Saint Barnabus, John the Baptist’s loincloth and the chickeny knobbles of Saint Galagnus’s scrotum. It is nothing less than a phantasmagorical pre-Renaissance theme park, complete with creaking sound-effects, pyrotechnics and splendidly costumed and bearded attendants. Roll up, roll up, ride the bloody water-flume into the Virgin’s Immaculate Uterus. The whole shitfest suppurates and crumbles under the weight of centuries of neglect and internecine rancour. Each mouldering crevice is under the rabid protectorate of a different pantomime orthodoxy and is jealously coveted by all the others. The Greeks loathe the Armenians who bite the Franciscans who kick the Coptics who piss in the chalices of the Syrians. The poor fucking Ethiopians have been exiled to the roof where they subsist in a muddle of pissy wigwams. Shuffling through their diminutive chapel, I swear I hear a huddled monk whisper ‘you wan’ buy ganja?’. The Copts have set up what appears to be a fleamarket booth, glued to the rump of the Holy Edicule, fashioned from wrought-iron gates, chenille bedspreads and plastic sheeting. It groans with liturgical tchotchke, Home Pong consoles and those rubber shower attachments that fit on bath faucets. Squatting inside is a 300 year-old witch, hacking, passing gas. One false move by any of the bewildering array of combatants and all hell breaks loose. As recently as 2008 the Greeks and Armenians went at it in full vestments over the issue of a monk loitering in a funny way. In 2004 the Greeks and Russians tag-teamed the Franciscans because somebody left a door open. Both cases involved full-on liturgical kung-fu, hurling of artifacts, tearing of tapestries and police intervention. Most delightfully, in a 2002 reinterpretation of the precept do as Thou wouldst be done by, the Ethiopians opened a can of whoop-ass with the Coptics on the roof after a monk moved his chair into the shade on a sunny day. Iron bars and paving stones were put to canonical use, resulting in several hospitalizations. In the run up to the 1989 Feast of the Holy Cross it was rumoured the Armenians had engaged the services of WWF’s Jim (The Anvil) Neidhart in false beard and cassock, to man the dodgy corner by the stairs to Calvary.

All competing attractions pale into insignificance, however, in the face of the eponymous Sepulchre itself. The Edicule. At the core of a dusky, public lavatory-sized Tardis, bound by girders stamped Bombay Metal Company and isolated at the centre of a chasmal rotunda – lurks Jesus of Nazareth’s one-and-only, honest-to-God, no-messing-about tomb. Within its marble confines, Gentle Pilgrim, beyond its Hobbity doorway, lies the final resting place of the Lamb of God. The ultimate, sacred repository of Jesus’s corporeal nuts and bolts. Christianity’s innermost sanctum. Having diddled the Rock, licked the walls, made out with the floor and sniffed Saint Sebastian’s foreskin, I’ll be damned if I’m leaving without a trip inside Christ’s Big Kahuna.

And so I fall in line behind a beautiful girl and await my turn for rapture. As the queue shuffles forward I cannot help but cast sidelong glances at her. She’s stunningly lovely: elegant, exotic, radiating calm and poise, her hair pulled back from her face and tucked sweetly into a headscarf. Albanian? Azerbaijani? I’m already envisioning fresh pomegranate and a thermos of negronis on a sweaty blanket in Gethsemane when I am struck by a dreadful realisation: that isn’t a headscarf. It’s a wimple. She’s a nun. I’m about to duck into Christianity’s Holiest of Holies and all I can think about is a nun’s vagina? As I crouch under the doorway, she smiles and places a hand on my head, shielding it from contact with the lintel. And I want to cry. I’m inside the Holy Edicule with an actual saint and my mind is just a vast, stinking reservoir of turd. I’m sure they can smell it in Tel Aviv. I want to beg her forgiveness and retreat, but the space is minuscule, she’s facing away and there’s a leopard-printed Ukrainian stabbing my buttocks with an iPhone. A couple of seconds and we are propelled forward through the low gap in the antechamber wall. And now we are in the tiny, candlelit tomb itself, three of us squeezed together like pilchards. My heart is pounding: this is all wrong. And she’s down. Down at my shins. Crumpled, on her knees, her cheek on the small, smooth slab, her hand tenderly stroking the cold stone, eyes closed, lips mouthing little supplications; pure, transparent, radiant ecstasy. A hundred-thousand secular, snorting mockeries evaporate in an instant. And I am an enormous, hapless Stinkosaurus, annihilated in the presence of such Love.

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