II

THE SOOT-STAINED ironstone church beside the lake of rubble is filled inside with pastel cotton dresses and sharp-shouldered polyester suits. Ahmad's eyes are dazzled, and find no balm in the stained-glass windows, depicting men in parodies of Middle Eastern dress enacting incidents in their supposed Lord's progress through his brief and inglorious life. To worship a God known to have died- the very idea affects Ahmad like an elusive stench, a stoppage in the plumbing, a dead rodent in the walls. Yet the congregants, a few of whom are even paler than he in his crisp white shirt, bask in the clean-scrubbed happiness of tbeir Sunday-morning assembly. The receding rows of seated and sexually mixed people, and the stagy confused area at the front with its built-in knobbed furniture and high, grimy triple window showing a pigeon about to alight on the head of a white-bearded man, and the giddy murmur of greetings and the crackle of heavy rumps shifting on the wooden pews, all seem to Ahmad more like a movie theatre before the movie starts than a holy mosque, with its thick muffling rugs and empty tiled mihrab and the liquid chants, la ildha ilia Allah, emitted by men fragrant of their menial Friday labors and, in their rhythmic unison of obeisance, crammed together as closely as the segments of a worm. The mosque was a domain of men; here, women in their spring shimmer, their expansive soft flesh, dominate.

He had hoped by arriving just as the ten-o'clock bells were ringing to slip into the back unnoticed, but he is tenaciously greeted by a plump descendant of slaves in a peach-colored suit with wide lapels and a sprig of lily-of-the-valley pinned to one of them. The black man hands Ahmad a folded sheet of tinted paper and leads him forward, up the center aisle, to the front pews. The church is nearly full, and none but the front pews, apparently the less desirable, are empty. Accustomed to worshippers squatting and kneeling on a floor, emphasizing God's height above them, Ahmad feels, even seated, dizzily, blasphemously tall. The Christian attitude of lazily sitting erect as at an entertainment suggests that God is an entertainer who, when He ceases to entertain, can be removed from the stage, and another act brought on.

Ahmad thinks he will have the pew to himself, as a sop to his strangeness and his sensed trepidation at being here, but another usher officiously herds down the carpeted aisle a large black family bobbing and bristling with the corn-rowed, beribboned heads of little females. Ahmad is pushed to the pew's far end, and in acknowledgment of his displacement the patriarch of the brood reaches over the laps of several small daughters to offer Ahmad his broad brown hand and a smile of welcome in which a gold tooth gleams. The mother of this brood, too far away to reach the stranger, gaily follows suit with a distant wave and nod. The little girls glance up, showing moon crescents of eye white. All this kafir friendliness-Ahmad doesn't know how to repel it, or what further inroads the service will impose. Already he hates Joryleen for luring him into such a sticky trap. He holds his breath as if to fend off contamination and stares straight ahead, where the curious carvings on what he takes to be the Christian equivalent of the minbar slowly sort themselves out as winged angels; he identifies the one of them blowing a long horn as Gabriel, and the crowded occasion therefore as the same Judgment Day the thought of which prompted Mohammed to gusts of his most rapturous poetry. What a mistake, Ahmad thinks, it is to attempt depiction, in images whose very grain betrays them as mere wood, of the inimitable work of God the Creator, al-Khdliq. The imagery of words, the Prophet knew, alone grips the soul with its own spiritual substance. Verily, were men and Djinn assembled to produce the like of this Qur'an, they could not produce its like, though the one should help the other.

The service at last begins. There is an expectant silence and then a swooping, bouncy thunder whose toylike timbre Ahmad recognizes, from assemblies at Central High, as that of an electric organ, poor cousin of the real pipe organ that he spies gathering dust beyond the Christian minbar. All stand to sing. Ahmad is brought to his feet as if by chains tying him to the others. A blue-robed mass, a choir, floods down the central aisle and fills the spaces behind a low rail beyond which, it seems, the congregation dare not pass. The sung words, distorted by the rhythm and languid accents of these zanj, concern, as best he can understand, a hill far away, and an old rugged cross. From within his resolute silence he spots Joryleen in the choir, a mass of mostly women, massive women among whom Joryleen looks girlishly young and relatively slim. She in turn spots Ahmad, in his pew up front; her smile disappoints him by being tentative, darting, nervous. She, too, knows he should not be here.

Up, down, everyone in his row but he and the smallest girl go onto their knees and return to sitting. There are group recitations and responses he cannot follow, though the father with the gold tooth shows him the page in the front of the hymnal. We believe this and that, the Lord is thanked for that and this. Then a long prayer is offered by the Christian imam, a stern-faced, coffee-colored man with wireless glasses and a flashing tall bald head. His gravelly voice is electrically amplified so that it booms from the back of the church as well as the front; while he, his eyes tight-shut behind his spectacles, burrows more deeply into the darkness that his mind's eye sees as he prays, voices from the congregation, here and there, shout out agreement-"Thass right!" "Say it, Reverend!" "Praise the Lord!" Arising like sweat on the skin, a murmur of assent continues when, in the wake of the second hymn, concerning the joys of walking with Jesus, the preacher ascends into the high minbar decorated with carved angels. In ever more rolling tones, moving his head in and out of the amplifying system's range so that his voice shrinks and swells like that of a man calling from the topmost mast of a storm-tossed ship, he tells of Moses, who led the chosen people out of slavery and yet was himself denied admission to the Promised Land.

"Why was that?" he asks. "Moses had served the Lord as spokesman in and out of Egypt. Spokesman: our President down there in Washington has a spokesman, our company heads in their lofty offices in Manhattan and Houston, they have spokesmen, spokeswomen in some cases, being spokespersons comes more naturally to them, doesn't it, brothers?"

There were guffaws and titters, inviting a digression: "Mercy, our beloved sisters do know how to speak. God didn't give Eve our strength of arm and shoulder, but he gave her double our strength of tongue. I hear laughing, but that's no joke, it's simple evolution, like they want to teach our innocent children in all the public schools. But seriously: nobody trusts himself to speak for himself any more. Too many risks. Too many lawyers watching and writing down what you say. Now, if I had a spokesperson right now I would be home watching a TV chat show with Mr. William Moyers or Mr. Theodore Koppel and having a second helping, a second slice or two or three, of that delicious, syrup-saturated French toast my dear Tilly makes for me some mornings after she's bought herself a new dress, a new dress or some fancy alligator purse she feels the teeniest bit guilty about."

Above the chuckles that greet this revelation, the preacher goes on, "That way, I would be saving my voice. That way, I wouldn't have to wonder out loud with all of you listening why God held Moses back from entering the Promised Land. If I only had a spokesperson."

To Ahmad it seems as if suddenly, in the midst of this expectant and heated crowd of dark-skinned knffar, the preacher is musing to himself, having forgotten why he is here, why all of them are here, while mockingly loud radios can be heard from cars swishing past on the street outside. But the man's eyes fly open behind his glasses and with a thump he pounces on the big gold-edged Bible in the minbar lectern, saying, "Here's the reason; God gives it in Deuteronomy, chapter thirty-two, verse fifty-one: 'Because ye trespassed against me among the children of Israel at the waters of Meribah-Kadesh, in the wilderness of Zin, because ye sanctified me not in the midst of die children of Israel.' "