A Stolen Tongue (24 page)

Father Guardian thanks us all for dining as his guests and reminds us that, should we feel inclined to leave a donation toward the church's upkeep, we might find the Brother Bursar standing within the cloister. He offers our thanks to Calinus Elphahallo, standing regally beside him, and blesses him as a friend to all devout men who wander far from home. Once more, the Father Guardian stresses the sixteen articles we heard in Joppa, adding to them rules for our upcoming night's visit to the Holy Sepulchre. Every pilgrim must buy for himself a candle to take, pilgrims should not waste time
within the church trafficking with Eastern merchants, the priests among us should not wrangle over who gets to celebrate mass inside the Sepulchre, we must not lie down or leave our property about because of theft, etc., etc. We listen attentively, and when he is finished, those who are of the means to do so set off to find the good Brother Bursar. Elphahallo approaches me and puts his hand on my shoulder.

“I hope to see you at my house when your stay in Jerusalem is over, Friar Failisk.” He smiles. “I only have a few more desert crossings left in me, but one belongs to you.”

I return his smile uncomfortably and thank him again for the melons I ate, even as my intestines rise up against them. Behind the Saracen, my patron waits anxiously, signaling me to hurry Elphahallo off.

“Lord Tucher, how may I help you?” I ask, after I've shaken the Saracen's hand and wished him good day. I have celebrated mass for my patron as a dutiful friar, but, between the Tongue and the Temptress Priuli, we have lost the easy familiarity we had on setting out from Ulm.

“We are keeping vigil in the holiest church in Christendom tonight,” he says, not looking at me. “I have a serious sin I cannot take into that sanctum unconfessed.”

Abbot Fuchs warned me of two things when he allowed me to become Lord Tucher's confessor: first, that my patron was easily whipped into frenzies of faith, and second, that these paroxysms passed as swiftly as they hit. Lady Tucher's confessor, who, by rights, should have had my place on this pilgrimage, flat out refused to come. He claimed it was impossible to know when his lady's husband might fancy to outfit them all with chains and hair shirts for a day, and he didn't want to risk the rash. Clearly, this holy city has tweaked my patron's conscience. Lord Tucher still holds the heavy water pitcher with which he humbly served the pilgrims. The red cross on his chasuble needs to be restitched where it is peeling back from the fabric; without thought, I smooth it into place before leading him into the church.

We settle ourselves inside one of the six wooden confessional boxes set into the wide aisles for use by the pilgrims. Three were already occupied and I could hear soft murmurs of Spanish, French, and Italian as we passed, worried men sharing their private sins, saving themselves from future shame by present shame. I sit upon an embroidered purple pillow and face Lord Tucher through a trefoil-patterned grate.

“Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned,” says he, his thin voice shaky and self-conscious. “I have not confessed since the night of the storm.”

“What sins do you have on your conscience, my son?” I ask.

“I know you think I committed adultery with the woman Emelia Priuli, but I swear, Felix, I did not.”

“I am not Felix in this confessional, my son,” I remind him. “I am the Ear of God. If you want the Lord to know you did not sin with the waiting woman, He already knows.”

“I did not commit adultery with her, but I am responsible for her death, which is even worse.”

I observe my patron through the flimsy grate. He sits erect behind the water pitcher he forgot to put down and directs his confession straight ahead. Surely Lord Tucher had no part in setting that fire?

“What was your role in her burning?” I ask evenly, trying not to betray my mounting concern. “Did you strike a flint?”

“No,” he says miserably. “But had she not found this among my things, she would have slept beside me, and her assassin would not have dared to touch her.”

My patron digs into his pocket and pulls out a carved ivory comb. A perfectly formed tiny Dionysus extends his hand to diminutive Ariadne, left behind on the shore of Naxos. Why is he showing me a woman's comb?

“It is Emelia's,” he says, holding it against the grate. “The one she lost her first day aboard ship.”

“You took it?” I stammer, remembering now all the petty thefts, the incidental items that disappeared at sea, where they could not
be replaced. Lord Tucher magnanimously substituted his own gold rosary for his son's lost silver one; his wife's costly Venetian comb for Emelia's ivory ornament; a fine nibbed pen for the humble instrument I had as a gift from dear Abbot Fuchs! Why steal in the first place? My patron was the richest man on Lando's ship.

“I don't know why I took those things,” Lord Tucher moans. “I didn't need them. I wanted so badly to be generous, but no one has seemed to need my help.”

“You know theft is a serious sin,” I say, inwardly marveling at the tangle of this man's deception. To what lengths may a man rationalize theft, brothers? Tucher steals from his fellow pilgrims so he may be known as a giver of gifts; Arsinoë steals the identities of the dead so she may survive to feed her mad mission; it is truly only a matter of time, as Ser Niccolo says, before we are baldly stealing from God, taking away His creative force and shaping it for ourselves. Is this not what I have done? Is that not what this new Age of Man is all about?

“I am ready to accept my penance,” Lord Tucher answers, “however severe it may be. Let me be bowed under a great weight when I pass through the doors of the Holiest Sepulchre.”

My patron looks upon me expectantly. How best to handle the man who takes pride in his own punishment? Will I make him fast on bread and water? Will I encourage him to buy that black scourge I saw him eye covetously today, that he might cut a fine, remorseful figure before Christ's grave?

“In the Alcoran,” I say at last, “Mahomet commands: ‘As for the man or woman who is guilty of theft, cut off their hands to punish them for their crimes.'”

Lord Tucher hugs his pitcher and sputters. This is not what he was expecting.

“But that is the Devil's book,” he says.

“Then be thankful we are happy Christians!” I cry. “For Proverbs tells us, ‘There is no great sin in theft.' Your confession is its own punishment, my lord. Say three Hail Marys and an Our Father, and go about your way.”

Frustrated tears spring to my patron's eyes. He has no penance with which to accessorize his pilgrim's garb. He goes practically naked before Christ tonight.

“You are indeed a merciful priest, Felix.” Lord Tucher turns away from me chastised. “It is more than I deserve.”

He slides back the grate and leaves with a weak shake of my hand.

Into it, he slips my stolen pen.

The tomb of our Savior sits at the heart of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre; the church occupies a square on what was once the Mount of Golgotha; the mount rises now in the center of the city of Jerusalem; and from Jerusalem, brothers, the entire world radiates. The miracle of Christian faith, and its ultimate paradox, is that the center of our world is hollow. Jesus Christ rose from the dead; his tomb is empty. We have no physical relics of our most precious Savior to fight over and steal. He exists as pure love, everywhere and nowhere, a corona of light from this dark, buried grave. To this eternal tomb, the pilgrims who boarded Lando and Contarini's ships—in fact, the pilgrims who for the past one thousand years have set sail to this place—bring the sins they've carried from the ends of the earth. Centuries of trespasses—adultery, fraud, regicide—find their way into Christ's tomb, and yet it is never full. There will still be plenty of room for the sins of our grandchildren's grandchildren's grandchildren.

Before you can enter the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, however, you must run the gauntlet of merchants that feed off it. One bustling candle stall features an emaciated wax Christ, tall as a church door, dripping crimson wax blood from real thorns pressed into the taper; a Mary-in-agony candle worked with gold leaf beaten so flat it would melt like the sacrament on your tongue; thin tallow-yellow tapers that clump together like a fistful of underdone spaghetti, a dozen of which Lord Tucher buys to light inside, blow out, and take
back to Swabia, believing, like many, that if his wife holds a lighted candle from the Holy Sepulchre in childbed, she'll be delivered safely and without pain. Next to him, the Greek proprietor measures Ursus with string and snips the string to use as a wick, pouring hot wax into a mold to match his height.

Strolling merchants hawk amethyst rosaries, thick corked vials of River Jordan water, fistfuls of tin medallions, and clay ampullae pressed with an image of the Holy Sepulchre. A man may get the Holy Sepulchre in any medium he fancies: etched into a cameo, stenciled on napkins, or, in direct contradiction of Scripture (paying unto Caesar what is due unto Caesar), minted on a coin whose flip side depicts the three crosses of Calvary. Our pilgrims trip all over themselves to buy sepulchre gilt back scratchers and old bits of sepulchre candy, wrapped in paper that has touched the Edicule. I buy a simple sketch to put in my window back home and compare it against the original.

My sketch does not indicate the four elderly Saracen guards set at the doors to represent the overlordship of the Sultan. Elevated on a stone dais, they sit cross-legged like vigilant tailors, gazing sightlessly upon what once was the church's bell tower—before bells were outlawed in the Holy Land—a five-story structure capped with a parqueted wooden dome. Behind these guards, the church's white marble facade, crowned itself with the dome of the Anastasis, absorbs the eerie blue shadows of pilgrims moving through torchlight. Only last year, the Saracens began the practice of locking the pilgrims in for the night. It is an honest hardship to spend all day walking in the heat, only to remain awake all night in the Sepulchre and then walk all the next day, once more in the heat.

Two by two the Saracens let us in, scrutinizing us like convicts. It is said these solemn guards are so greatly skilled at physiognomy that as soon as they look upon a man they can determine his station in life, his disposition, and his desires. I am filled with confusion and covered in blushes passing before them, not from guilt but from having to endure their power over us, even at this holiest of Christian sites. When we are all counted and herded inside, they
slam the doors upon us, as guards are wont to do with robbers and rapists, turn the key, and lock us in until sunrise.

What joyous imprisonment, my brothers! What delightful detention! Now that we are rid of the Infidel, we rush to and fro about the church, seeking holy sites as we find them, led only by what attracts our eye. Pilgrims elbow each other out of the way to kiss the pillar where Jesus was scourged in the house of Pilate (††), where the bad Roman soldiers cast lots for his robe (††), where he appeared to Mary Magdalene after his resurrection (††). This area once lay outside the city limits until the Emperor Hadrian commanded the walls be rebuilt to include it, erecting upon the spot a temple to Venus, purely out of spite. Not until Empress Helena journeyed here some hundred and eighty years later, discovering the True Cross and casting out the pagan icons, was Calvary reclaimed and rededicated to Christ.

With some difficulty, the Father Guardian lines us up, makes certain our tapers are lit, and begins our more orderly procession to the holy places before Christ's actual tomb.

We sing and progress and receive indulgences on practically every stone in the church, kneeling before small shrines themselves bowed under the weight of candles. We weep over the stone brought here from Pilate's house, whereon Jesus sat to be crowned with thorns, and take turns sitting there to imagine for ourselves His pain and humiliation (††). We circle around the stone altar marking the “Center of the World” and dispute piously among ourselves if this is indeed the true center. Lord Tucher says it must be, for he was told that at noon the sun shines so directly upon a man's head that his body casts no shadow; he points to a steep flight of stairs leading to a hole in the dome, where, during the day, men are allowed to test this theory. Now I draw the name of Doubting Felix upon myself, by informing them that the casting of shadows in no way determines the centrality of a place. We are told by Dionysus in his third book of Antiquities of a Southern Island, wherein no midday object casts a shadow; likewise, Peter de Abano says the same thing takes place in Athens. Some men believe any spot of ground can be the center of the world, because they believe men are spread all over
this earth, with their feet opposite to ours, and each with his own zenith. No, I tell Lord Tucher, in this case Science only confuses us, and we must look to Scripture for the truth: Ezekiel, Leviticus, and the Seventy-forth Psalm all proclaim Jerusalem to be the center, and thus it must be so.

From the Center of the World we climb eighteen steep stone steps into a vaulted, airy, lamplit chapel, its dome adorned with vertiginous mosaics of David and Solomon, Abraham drawing his knife across the lamb's throat. We had entered this chapel singing
Vexilla regis prodeunt,
but upon seeing the structure before us, like uncanny birds sensing a storm, we cease all psalmody.

Rouse yourselves up now, lords and brother pilgrims, lay aside sorrow, dry your tears, refrain from lamentation, for we have come through a toilsome Lent into a happy Easter day! Sing alleluia, somber Abbot Fuchs! Break your fasts, brothers one and all! Jesus Christ after His scourgings and torments, after His sponge of gall, after His piteous crucifixion, after His dolorous burial, after He had descended into Hell, after He harrowed the Prince of Darkness and set free all the chosen patriarchs, rose resplendent and triumphant from this darksome tomb. In this sepulchre the phoenix renewed its life, Jonah came forth unharmed from the fish's belly, the sun shone forth from behind a cloud, the stag again put forth his horns, the green of spring broke through the snow, Joseph came out of prison and ruled in Egypt; and besides all this, our toilsome pilgrimage and weary wanderings are here ended and brought to rest. Come then, brothers and pilgrims, feel with your hands, see with your eyes, touch with your lips the place where Christ lay; and receive upon this rock entire and plenary indulgences for all your miserable sins (††).