A Division of the Light (30 page)

Suddenly, unexpectedly, she leaned forward, kissed Alice quickly on one cheek, and turned away before she could respond. Alice stood without moving as Cassie walked back toward the people she had promised to return to.

Alice stared again at the photographs of Ruth.

This was all that remained of love, she thought: a few images of a dying woman. At least Alice would leave a record. When it became available, as it would do sometime, men and women would find her image enticing, distinctive and erotic. She did not wish to be memorialized as objectively as Gregory's wife had been. That was a form of exploitation. But didn't all love eventually become a series of transactions strung like a web across foundations of exploitation, dissatisfaction and ambition?

She turned to make her way to the exit. At least part of what Cassie had said was correct: it was, indeed, all over. But Alice had known that for weeks. In visiting the exhibition, all she had done was settle accounts with a short period of her life. She had placed a seal on it. She had turned it into history.

A man edged his way through the crowd and stood in front of her. She did not even look at him. She would simply walk round him and leave.

“I hope you don't mind me talking to you again,” he said.

It was the architect. She shook her head and stepped to one side.

Wells began to talk quickly. “Look, it's just that you seemed interested in what I had to say. And that you know more than I had assumed about archaeological sites. I misjudged you and I
have to apologize for that. We have more in common than I thought. So, well, maybe we could take up those subjects at a different place—when we can both have a bit more time to talk about things.”

Alice looked into his face. Smug with his own forwardness, Wells held out a small rectangular card.

“You're interested in structures, I can tell that you are. Structures with a particular function. We could have an interesting discussions. I'm sure we could.”

She smiled faintly, but did not encourage him. He advanced the card a little closer and spoke again.

“If you'd like to meet sometime—if that appeals to you—well, we can have a drink or a meal or something. That's all that I mean. If you'd like to do that, well, just give me a call.”

Alice took the card without enthusiasm. She could always throw into the waste bin outside.

“Maybe,” she said, to avoid any further discussion.

“You'll think about it?”

“I'll think,” she said, and walked away.

Newly arrived guests were talking across each other in the space in front of the screen. As she walked past them Alice noticed that Gregory's message was still being played, but that someone had turned down the sound to a whisper. Isolated within the screen, he looked out from it without seeing and mouthed words that went unheard and unheeded. It was, Alice thought, probably the last time she would ever see him.

Outside it was cold. Drizzle gusted through the streetlights. She would get a taxi home. As she began to look for one coming along the road Alice began to consider how little she knew about architecture, or building restoration, or the rituals of the Church.
Or about how beliefs were expressed in vaults and buttresses and spires.

She put her hand around the card from Wells and held it firmly so it would not be lost.

*

He never rested soundly and always woke before dawn. Often his sleep was disturbed by the weather, but sometimes it was loud cries or the repetition of prayers that seemed as if they were being offered up just outside his door. Bad weather was the worst, and this winter was implacable. Gales harried the bare trees and pushed against the sides of the tiny caravan so that it seemed about to tilt across its moorings. As its frame creaked Gregory heard the overhead branches keen eerily, as if spirits were being driven from them. At other times hard rain would beat tattoos on the roof, or hailstones rattle the metal, or snow build up in a suffocating hush. The tiny heater was inadequate and every morning he lay within his blankets, fearful of the cold, while daylight broke in soft gradations through the ice layers that had formed on the inside of the windows. When he looked at his face in the tiny mirror on the wall he saw how he had aged. He was haggard, unkempt, and did not suit his ragged gray beard. Fortunately, appearance, either his own or anyone else's, was no longer important to him.

He put on the jacket he had worn to visit Sampson's Bratfull, laced his boots to the top eyelet, and opened the door. A fresh snowfall glared from the settlement roofs and lay in crumbled avalanches where it had slid from the sides of tents. A fox had prowled the length of the dwellings and its tracks punctuated the drifts.

On the mud path to the latrine the snow had already been
trodden into brown slush. Gregory carefully picked his way along it. The latrine was a canvas shelter with a small board hung outside with a crude marker to indicate whether or not it was occupied. Inside was a chemical lavatory that the users emptied by rote. He had developed the habit of not looking inside as he lifted the cover. Smells of shit and disinfectant rose round him, but back outside, a mere few yards away, the air was pure and cold enough that when he breathed through his nose he could feel the tiny hairs bristle inside his nostrils.

Back in his caravan he made a meal from a sachet of instant porridge while he waited for a knock on the door. Today was his special day; he had waited for it for weeks, and he could only hope that it would be the first of many. People who were not followers were incapable of understanding its importance. But there again, he thought, most people were forever denying themselves the offer of illumination.

Carla was living in a small hut nearer to the road, and had to walk a hundred meters to reach his door. When he opened it he saw that she was wearing her usual waterproof clothing with trousers whose legs were spattered with mud. A green woolen hat was pulled down over her ears. At the crown an incongruous group of loose ends had been gathered so that they stuck out from the top of her head like fronds. She nodded at Gregory and he opened the door wider to let her in. She scraped the slush from her boots on the metal steps and then stepped onto the coarse matting that he had put down at the entrance. Neither of them spoke.

By the time that Gregory arrived Carla had been living in the camp for three months. Almost immediately she had asked why it had taken him so long to decide that he must come back to
this place. She had not acknowledged that they had once slept together, and neither had he. Although it had not been obvious to Gregory at the time, it was clear to him now that when they had made love Carla must already have been succumbing to the mystery that was unfolding on this bleak remote hill.

Now she sat on his thin divan, her hat between her hands as she picked idly at the fronds. Her face was as lined and tired as his own, Gregory thought. He was grateful to Carla. She had helped him adjust, although recently she had seemed less committed to remaining in the settlement. And perhaps sooner or later one of them would admit they had once been intimate, but that they recognized that this had been part of a past that had often been tinged with unacknowledged shame. As for now, as though in preparation for a life of abstinence, they followed an unspoken rule and never actually touched each other.

Gregory put his jacket back on. He had not repaired the charred hole that had been blasted through its shoulder; he was as proud of that as any badge.

Carla spoke for the first time.

“I hope you will not be disappointed if she speaks to you in simple words. Maybe she will tell you that we do not realize how much we need simplicity. Most probably she will say that only you can solve your own—” For a moment she sought the apposite word. “Predicament,” she said.

“I understand. And I'm grateful for the translation.”

She nodded. “I do the best that I can.”

They stepped back outside. Sunlight was brightening the camp. It reflected upward from the drifts, illuminated the stubby icicles hanging in friezes from the protruding edges of roofs, and shone on the dirty pathways, patches of soiled snow and caravans with
flat tires, flaking chrome and warped panels. A woman they did not know, and who never greeted anyone, was on her knees by her caravan door, her hands raised and her eyes half closed. Her lips moved rapidly in prayer. She looked emaciated, cold and desperately ill, but would never be stopped from doing what she believed was demanded of her.

When Gregory and Carla reached the road they found they were able to follow it upward along trails of compressed snow that had been formed by car tires. Others had gone before them and left footprints across the tracks. A hundred meters ahead a small group of people laboriously pushed a wheelchair uphill. They took turns at the handles. Sometimes the occupant, an elderly woman, shouted out as if in pain. The wheelchair scored thin wavering marks across the tire indentations. Powdery snow drifted liked spume from conifer branches and fell across the road in a glittering mist.

“Are you nervous?” Carla asked.

“No,” Gregory answered, “I'm looking forward to it.”

“Other followers are still waiting. You are favored. She remembers you, I think. You were different then.”

“We both were.”

“Yes. We both were.”

The snow crunched or slithered beneath their steps. The wheelchair slipped and would have begun to slide backward had its movement not been blocked. The people around it began to argue among themselves. Gregory could not understand what they said. The face of the woman in the chair was full of anger and fear.

Carla talked to them for a minute and then turned back to Gregory.

“They do not want our help.”

“They refuse?”

“Yes. We go on.”

The group reformed around the wheelchair and once more began to push it uphill. Their breathing was as noisy as the breathing of animals. By the time the shouts started again Gregory and Carla had left them far behind. He thought that if he had still been a photographer he could have turned and taken their picture. It would have been an evocative image.

“We could have helped,” he said.

“No,” Carla explained, “they see it as a trial they must undertake. We cannot interfere with that.”

They trudged past a line of deserted cars blinded with layers of frozen snow. Gregory often wondered how soon after his first visit they had been abandoned. The engine of the broken-down tractor was sheathed in a block of dull ice. Nearby the nail heads on the cross no longer shone, but had rusted into the wood.

A wall of roughly mortared blocks had now been built like a palisade on either side of the road. In front of it was parked a four-wheel-drive police car, recently arrived and with only a light dusting of snow across its bonnet. Beyond the wall was an open courtyard that was partly roofed by canopies of corrugated plastic. Sheltering beneath these were a number of stalls, all gaudy with the tacky paraphernalia of worship—crucifixes, rosaries, statuettes, portraits, pottery, trinkets, postcards, choral CDs.

Further up the incline two armed policemen in heavy coats and fur hats were talking to men who had the look of officials. Gregory realized that one was the priest he had photographed on his first visit. The priest showed no sign of recognition until Carla spoke to him, and then he grasped Gregory's hand in exaggerated greeting.

“Welcome,” he said in English, and then, too emphatically, “
welcome
.”

When Gregory tried to pull away his hand the priest resisted. Through the gloves his fingers felt stiff and badly articulated, like those of an automaton.

“Perhaps a donation,” Carla said. “Donations are needed to help protect this place.”

She had already suggested to Gregory how much he should give, and he handed over the notes without complaint. The priest put the payment into his pocket and ushered Carla and Gregory forward.

“Will they really use it for that?” he asked under his breath.

“They need charity. Also it guarantees that you will be given an audience.”

Not for the first time, he noticed a skeptical edge in Carla's voice.

The site of Little Maria's vision no longer stood on its own. Instead it was surrounded by other buildings, all of them assembled hastily and without thought to anything other than worship and shelter. Everyone knew that the broken-roofed cowshed was now a sacred place that none but Little Maria could enter.

Two guards stood by the door of a new building with a wooden balcony. It was here that Little Maria would stand, once a week and for only five minutes, while pilgrims fell to their knees in prayer. Sometimes she spoke a few sentences; often she was silent. For many, that was enough. They gave their money to officials threading through the gathering and afterward talked of the halo they had seen around her head, or the words that had come unbidden into their minds, or the profound sense of peace that had settled within their souls.

The guards stopped Gregory and Carla from going any further. Carla produced a document that they took a long time to peruse. Eventually they nodded and motioned that she and Gregory should stand where they were. The door was heavy and functional and set into a blank whitewashed wall. It was closed. A bright metal crucifix had been screwed to the wood.

Carla spoke in a low voice. “Some want to cover over the site of the vision with a transparent glass dome. And there are others who want gold cloths, incense, lamps, sacred music played through speakers. Little Maria has said no. She says that true holiness is never honored by riches. She says the Holy Mother of God chose this place because it was like the stable in which she gave birth to the Christ.”

Gregory began to shiver. He was not sure what was going to happen.

“Are you cold?” Carla asked.

He did not have time to answer. The door was opened from the inside and a middle-aged man came out. The man held one hand cradled within the other and he walked downhill past them with a curious shuffling gait. Distant light shone in his eyes, as if he had gazed for too long into a vivid sunset.