Balthasar's Odyssey (19 page)

So one day when I was about thirteen and had just returned home after one such pilgrimage, a litany of miracles still ringing in my ears, I couldn't help telling my father about the paralytic who'd been able to walk back unaided down the mountainside, and the madwoman from the village of Ibrine whose reason was restored the moment she rested her forehead against the chill stone wall of the shrine. I used to be very upset by my father's indifference to things concerning the Faith, especially after a devout lady from Gibelet hinted that my mother's early death — I was only four at the time, and she herself scarcely twenty — was due to her not having been prayed over properly. I held this against my father, and wanted to bring him back to the straight and narrow.

He listened to my edifying anecdotes without showing either scepticism or astonishment. He just kept nodding impassively. When I'd finished he stood up, tapped me on the shoulder to tell me to wait, then brought from his bedroom a book I'd often seen him reading.

Laying it down on the table, close to the lamp, he began to read out, in Greek, a number of stories about miraculous cures. He didn't say which saint had performed them; he wanted me to guess. I liked this idea. I considered myself quite capable of identifying a miracle-worker's style. Was it Saint Arsenius? Or Bartholomew? Or Simeon Stylites? Or Proserpina, perhaps?

The most fascinating story — it elicited great ecstasies from me — told of a man whose lung was pierced by an arrow that remained lodged there. He slept for a night in the saint's room, and dreamed the holy man had touched him. When he awoke he was cured, and the head of the arrow that had wounded him was clutched in his own right hand. The arrow made me think the saint in question might be Sebastian. No, not him, said my father. I wanted to go on guessing, but my father demurred, and told me flatly that the person who had performed the miraculous cures was Asclepius. Yes, Asclepius, the Greek god of medicine, in his shrine at Epidaurus, where countless pilgrims have gone for centuries. The book containing the stories was the famous
Description of Greece,
written by Pausanius in the second century AD.

When my father told me all this, I was shattered to the depths of my piety.

“It was all lies, then?”

“I don't know. Perhaps. But people believed in it enough to go to the temple of Asclepius year after year to be cured.”

“But false gods can't perform miracles!”

“I suppose not. You're probably right.”

“Do
you
believe it's true?”

“I haven't the slightest idea.”

And he went and put the book back on its shelf.

From that day on I've made no more pilgrimages to the chapel at Ephrem. Nor have I prayed very often. Though I haven't actually become a unbeliever. I now take the same view as my father of all praying and kneeling and prostration — a view that's sceptical, distant, neither respectful nor contemptuous, sometimes intrigued, but always free of any certainty. And I like to think that out of all His creatures the ones the Creator likes best are those who have managed to be free. Doesn't a father like to see his sons grow out of infancy into manhood, even if their young claws wound a little? And why should God be a less benevolent father than the rest?

At sea, Wednesday 2 December

We've passed the Dardanelles and are heading due south. The sea is calm and I often stroll on the deck with Marta on my arm. She looks like a lady from France, and the crew eye her surreptitiously — just obviously enough for me to realise how much they envy me, but at the same time most respectfully. So I manage to be proud without being jealous.

Day after day, almost imperceptibly, I've got used to her presence. So much so that I hardly ever call her “the widow” now — it's as if the word were no longer good enough — though in fact the reason we're on our way to Smyrna is to get proof of her widowhood. She's sure she'll get it. I am more sceptical. I'm afraid we might fall among venal officials again, who'll try to drain us piastre by piastre of all the money we've got left. If that happens we'd do best to take Hatem's advice and get a false death certificate. I still don't care for the idea, but we may be reduced to it if all the honest solutions fail. But come what may I won't abandon the woman I love and go back to Gibelet without her, and plainly we can't go back there together without a document, genuine or otherwise, that will let us live under the same roof.

Perhaps I haven't yet made it quite clear that I'm deeper in love now than ever I was in my youth. I don't want to open old wounds — they are deep, and still unhealed despite the passage of time. I just want to explain that my first marriage was a marriage of reason, while the marriage I envisage with Marta is one of passion. A marriage of reason at nineteen, and a marriage of passion at forty? Well, that's how my life will have been. I don't complain — I have too much reverence for the person I'd have to complain of, and I can't blame him for wanting me to marry a Genoese wife. It's because my forbears always married Genoese wives that they managed to preserve their own language and customs, and remained attached to their original country. As far as all that is concerned, my father was in the right, and anyhow I wouldn't have opposed him for anything. It was just unfortunate that the girl who came our way was Elvira.

She was the daughter of a Genoese merchant from Cyprus. She was sixteen, and both her father and mine believed she was fated to be my wife. I was about the only young Genoese in our part of the world, and our marriage seemed to be in the order of things. But Elvira had promised herself to a young man from Cyprus, a Greek whom she loved to distraction. Her parents wanted to separate them at all costs. So from the first she saw me as a persecutor, or at least an accomplice of her persecutors, whereas in fact I was as much forced into the marriage as she was. I was more docile, though, and more naive; curious to find out about what everyone said were the most wondrous of pleasures; amused by the rituals involved; and as obedient to my father and his commands as she was to hers.

Too proud to submit, too smitten with the other youth to listen to or look at or smile at me, Elvira was a sad episode in my life cut short only by her early death. I don't like to say it came as a relief. Nothing concerning her makes me think of relief or serenity or peace. The whole misadventure left me with nothing but a lasting prejudice against marriage and its ceremonies, and against women too. I've been a widower since I was twenty, and was resigned to remaining one. If I'd been more inclined to prayer I might have gone to live in a monastery. Only the circumstances of this journey have made me question my deep-rooted doubts. I may be able to go through the same motions as believers, but in that area too I remain a doubter.

I find it very painful to rake over that old story. Whenever I think of it I start to suffer again. Time has hardly healed the wound at all.

Sunday, 6 December

Three days of storm, fog, creaking timbers, driving rain, nausea and dizziness. My legs will scarcely carry me. I try to hang on to wooden walls, passing ghosts. I trip over a bucket, two unknown arms help me up, I immediately fall down again on the same spot. Why didn't I stay at home in my nice quiet shop, peacefully writing out columns of figures in my ledger? What madness made me set out on my travels? Above all, what possessed me to go to sea?

It wasn't by eating forbidden fruit that man annoyed the Creator — it was by going to sea! How presumptuous it is to risk life and property on this seething immensity, to try to mark out paths over the abyss, grazing with our oars the backs of buried monsters like Behemoth, Rahab, Leviathan and Abaddon — serpents, beasts, dragons! That's where the insatiable pride of man lies, the sin he commits over and over again in the face of repeated punishments.

One day, says the Apocalypse, long after the end of the world, when Evil is at last overcome, the sea will no longer be liquid. Instead it will be like glass, a surface that can be walked over dry-shod. No more storms, no more drownings, no more sea-sickness. Just one vast blue crystal.

Meanwhile the sea is still the sea. This Sunday morning there isn't a moment's respite. I put on clean clothes and have been able to write these few lines. But the sun is going dark again, time has ceased to exist, and the passengers and crew of our fine carrack are hurrying about in all directions.

Yesterday, when the storm was at its height, Marta came and clung to me. Her head on my chest and her hips against mine. Fear had become an accomplice, a friend. And the fog a tolerant innkeeper. We held one another, desired one another, our lips met — and people roamed around us without seeing us.

Tuesday the 8th

After Sunday's brief lull we're in the midst of bad weather again. I don't know that “bad weather” really describes it — it's all so strange. The captain tells me he's never seen anything like it in twenty-six years' experience all over the world — certainly not in the Aegean, anyhow. A kind of sticky fog lowering over everything, unmoved by the wind. The air is dense, heavy, ashen.

The ship is buffeted about all the time but doesn't make any progress. As if it were impaled on a fork. I suddenly feel I'm nowhere and going nowhere. All the people around me keep crossing themselves and muttering. I shouldn't be frightened, but I am — like a child alone at night in a wooden house, when the last candle goes out and the floorboards start to creak. I look around for Marta. She's sitting with her back to the sea, waiting for me to finish writing. I can't wait to put my desk away and go over and hold her hand — and go on holding it as I did that night in the tailor's village where we slept in the same bed. She was a foreign element, an intruder, in my journey then. And now she's its compass. Love is always an intrusion. And by it chance is made flesh, passion becomes reason.

The fog is getting denser. My head is throbbing.

Wednesday the 9th

Darkness at noon, but the sea has stopped tossing us about. The ship is quiet — people have given up shouting at one another, and when they do speak it's in hushed voices, apprehensively, as if in the presence of royalty. Some albatrosses are flying overhead, and other birds with black plumage that I don't know the name of, screeching horribly.

I found Marta weeping. She didn't want to tell me why, and said it was just because of the fatigues and concerns of the journey. When I pressed her she eventually confessed.

“Ever since we put to sea I've had the feeling we'll never reach Smyrna.”

Was it a premonition? Or just the effect of her anxiety and all her previous misfortunes?

At any rate, I clapped my hand over her mouth to stop her words flying up to Heaven. I begged her never to speak like that again on board ship. I should never have forced her to speak at all. But, Lord, how was I to know she set so little store by superstition? I don't know if I should admire her for it or be frightened.

Hatem and Habib keep whispering together, sometimes laughing and sometimes serious. But they stop whenever I come near.

As for Boumeh, he walks back and forth on the deck from morning till night, deep in unfathomable meditations. Silent, absorbed, wearing that distant smile that isn't a smile at all. The down on his cheeks is as light as ever, though his younger brother has been shaving for three years now. Perhaps he ought to be more interested in women. But he doesn't really take an interest in anything, whether men or horses or finery. The only thing he knows is books. The only skin he admires is parchment. Several times he's walked past me without even seeing me.

But this evening he came and asked me a riddle.

“Do you know the names of the seven Churches in the Apocalypse?”

“I've read about them. Let's see … there's Ephesus, and Philadelphia, and Pergamos, I think, and Sardis, and Thyatira ...”

“That's it… Thyatira! That's the one I'd forgotten.”

“Wait… that's only five of them!”

But my nephew went on, as if reciting to himself:

“‘I, John, who also am your brother, and companion in tribulation, and in the kingdom and patience of Jesus Christ, was in the isle that is called Patmos, for the word of God, and for the testimony of Jesus Christ. I was in the Spirit on the Lord's day, and heard behind me a great voice, as of a trumpet, saying, What thou seest, write in a book, and send it unto the seven churches which are in Asia; unto Ephesus, and unto Smyrna, and unto Pergamos, and unto Thyatira, and unto Sardis, and unto Philadelphia, and unto Laodicea.'”

God! Why had I forgotten Smyrna?

Friday the 11th

Marta's presentiment was wrong. We have arrived in Smyrna.

Now I'm on terra firma again I can write it down without my hand trembling: I felt the same as she did throughout the crossing. It was more than a feeling, though — it was a horrible conviction. It caused me physical pangs, though I did my best to hide them from the others. I really did feel this was my last voyage. And so it may be, after all, even if it won't have ended before we get to Smyrna. The only question I asked myself was how the end would come. At first, when the storm began, I was sure we were going to be shipwrecked. Then, as the sea and the sky grew calmer but at the same time darker, my fears became more ambiguous and less admissible. My fears were no longer those that afflict all who go to sea: I didn't scan the horizon for pirates or storms or fabled monsters; I wasn't worried about fire or epidemics or treacherous currents or falling overboard. There wasn't any horizon, there wasn't any deck to fall from. Only the endless gloom, the clinging fog, the low apocalyptic cloud.

I'm sure all my fellow-passengers felt the same. I could tell from the look on their faces — like people suddenly and inexplicably condemned to death. And from the way they muttered to themselves. Not to mention the haste with which they eventually disembarked.