Gospel (109 page)

“See?” he snapped. “The Acolytes all stick together.”

Lucy foraged for something positive. “Yes, and they'll rave over you too when you publish your book on the
Gospel of Matthias.
With a footnote,” she joked, hoping it was a joke, “by Lucy Dantan.”

“I may let you dot the
i
's.” He struggled to sit up, ready for action. Upon sitting up straight, his head swam and he fell back onto the pillow.

“You're not going anywhere,” said Lucy maternally. “Actually, you probably need to go ahead and be sick.”

“I will be sick if I eat any more of…” He trailed off, referring to what the proprietor's wife had brought him as a cure-all,
zabadi,
a mildly spiced yogurt dish. Lucy looked at it, oleaginous and strong-smelling. She reflected on some of their most preposterously unclean meals at the Egyptian Orthodox monasteries near Cairo—unpasteurized goat cheese, hard bread where one shook the small bugs free, treacle and wild onion sprigs for flavor. Then the grilled meats in Degoma they could not politely refuse.

“You'd make a good nurse,” he said quietly.

“As a little girl I always wanted to be one,” she said. “Being in such a needy country makes me want to, you know, do something for them.”

“Yeah, that's right,” O'Hanrahan chuckled. “The ol' nun routine. You told me in Ireland you were going to be a nun.”

“And you told me not to be one.”

O'Hanrahan recanted. “I was just being dismissive. If it appeals to you, do it. Hell, I wish I'd stayed a Jesuit in some ways. Some people aren't cut out for Father-Knows-Best, all that family crap. The Middle Ages knew this, they provided for people like us, people who longed to study or do something more meaningful than be a merchant or milk the cow.”

Lucy became vagarious. Do you realize, she told herself, this is the first time in my life anyone I respected ever stuck up for my childhood plan of wanting to be a nun? Was anyone aware of the years of ridicule and deprecation it had automatically received, and here was her idol, Patrick O'Hanrahan, saying go for it, Sister Lucy.

Her heart sank. She'd forgotten. She was probably pregnant.

“I wanted to do something good with my life too,” O'Hanrahan rambled, “when I was your age. There was no Peace Corps back then for my generation. I went to the Korean War as a chaplain—did I ever tell you that?”

“Yes, you told me.”

He patted the
Herald Tribune
lying beside him. “Read me something.”

Lucy opted, after the
Herald Tribune
was plundered, for a pamphlet she'd picked up in Cairo concerning the Coptic saints. She thought O'Hanrahan would be amused. She read portentously, “Our next selection is from this fine work of literature and, no doubt, thoroughly factual history
The Glorious Holy Saints and Martyrs of the Copts.
The Miracle of St. Bishoi,” she announced.

O'Hanrahan just made a low groaning sound.

“Sitt Bishoi after a great fast and show of piety received a rare and precious vision from Our Lord. The Lord appeared to him upon the Cross, then descended from the Cross borne by angels, blood streaming from his hands and feet. Bishoi was allowed to contemplate the agony of the festering, infected wounds of the stigmata…”

“This better improve.”

Lucy enjoyed herself.
“Sitt Bishoi was allowed to wash the feet of the Savior, and lovingly, with his own tears and perfumed water, cleaned the pus-filled wounds, washed the dirt and dung from the Savior's feet, until the water was brown with dirt and spilt blood. Then as a kindness from our Lord, he bade Bishoi to drink this heavenly broth, which Bishoi did gladly.”

O'Hanrahan felt the gorge in his throat rise, and rolled off the bed and hurried to the toilet. Lucy put her hand to her mouth, horrified but helplessly laughing at the vision of him scurrying in his boxer shorts and black socks pulled up to his knees.

“Oh, God, I'm sorry, sir!”

She winced as he retched in the other room.

“I was just … just getting you back for all those stories in Italy.”

Lucy crept from the room before Dr. O'Hanrahan could avenge himself!

A
UGUST
21
ST

Lucy steadied O'Hanrahan on the stairs from the hotel leading down to the street. Full of medicine, aspirin, and, as she suspected, a dose of Percodan, he was determined to flag a taxi and get to the National Library. The
Gospel of Matthias
was in his satchel.

“You were saying about al-Hakim?” she prompted, once in the taxi, having requested a lewd Sudanese story.

“Al-Hakim?” the professor said, brightening. “I thought I gave you the goods in Cairo on this guy.”

“You started, but something came up.”

“Depending on the accent his name means ‘a just ruler,' which he was anything but. Like me he was sort of a night-person. In the 1000s as the Fatimid caliph of Cairo he outlawed daytime and everyone had to creep about at night—you would be put to death by his secret police if you went out in the day. He hated women, and outlawed them too.”

“How did the chores get done?”

“They didn't. The empire went to hell, he burned cities on a whim like Nero, decapitated holy men without a second thought. He was Saddam Hussein meets Caligula meets Herod the Great. He only liked his pet mule, named Moon,
Qamar.
Indeed, if I had time I'd research to see if the notion of ‘lunacy' took its cue from his moon-obsession. And Hakim adored his Sudanese slave, the result of an intensive search in these climes for a very specific quantification of length…”

“You don't have to elaborate, sir.”

“His slave Masoud was found to have the largest member of any black man alive. I'm sure given the proclivities of the Arabs Masoud was discovered after a not entirely joyless search. Not unlike the survey of Africa made by Tiberius for the same reason, his ‘collection' at Capri.”

Lucy added, “Lampridius writes that Elagabalus Caesar sent out emissaries to Africa for the same purpose.”

O'Hanrahan was momentarily silenced. “Lucille! Is this what you have done with your learning, read Late Empire filth like Lampridius?”

She put her head back and laughed. “That's the only reason
anyone
does Classics, sir—the filth.”

“I'm going to have to regard you in an entirely different light. What was all that blushing earlier in our acquaintance?”

“You were saying, sir.”

“Masoud had this tremendous organ that when at last aroused was used to mete out justice—that's m-e-t-e, Sister Lucy.” Lucy hid her face in her hands, laughing. “Hakim would stand on the offending man's head as the accused was sodomized. You can see why behavior of this sort convinced a number of holy men he was a messenger of Allah.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“You've heard of the Druse Militia in Lebanon? The Druse who live in northern Israel and Syria? That's the source of their Islam-based religion, that one day, al-Hakim, who rode off on his mule not to be seen again, was the Last Manifestation of God and will come back to see who has doubted and who has believed.”

Now Lucy was speechless. “What—you—Syria really wants these Druse people in the army?”

“Oh, they're very loyal. When the Golan Heights became Israeli property they stopped fighting for the Syrians and took up arms for the Israelis. They swear a deep oath of allegiance to whatever country they find themselves in. It's probably why they're still around.”

O'Hanrahan winced as the cab driver peeled an onion while waiting in traffic. The professor continued:

“Al-Hakim was an iconoclast's iconoclast. He was the only human crazy enough to go to Mekkah and smash the
Masjidu al-Haram,
the Mosque of the Black Rock. There are all kinds of apocryphal tales about fragments of this holy stone making their way to Europe to be used as philosopher's stones in Kabbalah and—well, you can imagine. Then Hakim went to Jerusalem and smashed the Holy Sepulcher. Only one true fragment of the original slab Jesus lay upon remains, thanks to that. He persecuted his own people but had especial hatred for Christians and Jews; he was surely the most fearsome of persecutors. If it hadn't been for him, one wonders if St. Bernard would have had such good material for whipping up a crusade.”

“I don't feel so bad for the Crusades now that you've told me about this guy. How could he be championed as a messenger of God?”

“It's in Islamic Law that insane people are not to be held accountable for sins and heresies, indeed, they are considered inspired beings. Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, John the Baptist, and maybe Jesus as well: all crazy to outward appearances. Mohammed the Prophet and his headaches, going into trances and spewing poetry. Think of medieval saints and their masochism and insane apocalyptic ramblings—religion has more than a toe in the water with insanity.”

O'Hanrahan said the Moslem world today was not very different. “The mob rises up in the street for a butcher like Saddam Hussein and we in the West can't figure out why. They'll never understand the Eastern mind, because we don't understand the ancient mind.”

The taxi cab driver spoke: “Yes, Saddam Hussein!”

Both O'Hanrahan and Lucy froze, having assumed the driver only spoke Arabic. “You speak English, sir?” said O'Hanrahan after a moment.

“Oh yes!” the rotund driver said proudly, chomping now on a leek.

Lucy leaned back having detected the pungent oniony smell. She realized their discussion about Sudanese black men imported for their propensities had been attended.

“Saddam Hussein, a great man, a very very great man!”

“You think,” said O'Hanrahan, “that he perhaps is the Mahdi?”

“A very great man,” he repeated. “Perhaps the Mahdi, yes.”

Hmm, thought O'Hanrahan, I don't want to be responsible for starting up
that
kind of idea!

“You want to go to Mahdi Tomb?” he asked quickly, thinking of the money to haul them back across the two Niles and north to Omdurman. “See whirling dervish?”

O'Hanrahan declined, asking, “Sir, why do you eat that leek? Is it very tasty?”

“No,” he said, factually, “it is not for to eat good.” He patted his perfectly spherical belly. “It has no … what you say?” He said the Arabic phrase for “no calories” and after some Arabic explanation, O'Hanrahan communicated this diet to Lucy. The driver, nearly swerving into a curb, held up a small bag of spring onions. “Thees is no calories too, yes?” He bit down happily into the onions and continued eating right up to the green ends.

O'Hanrahan grimaced, rediscovering his nausea.

“So far I lose lots and lots of weight, very much weight.” He patted his belly again. “For my young wife, yes?”

O'Hanrahan smiled. “You have more than one?”

“Oh yes, I have three, and the new one very very young.”

Lucy considered the prospect of being married off as this man's third wife. As O'Hanrahan and she had discussed, this was the Moslem solution to divorce and broken families. You could have up to four wives if you could afford it but you must treat them all equally, buying the recently displaced wife a home. O'Hanrahan had said there are many songs and tales of wives luring young women into shops for their husbands to marry, so they might get an apartment and happily pass on their wifely duties to a younger woman. Once the older, first wife was in her own home and unobserved, then she too could play the field. A conservative society, yes, but not at all a sex-hating, puritan one.

Lucy snapped to attention when a leek, half-chewed, was pointed toward her face by the driver. “You want?”

“La, shukran,”
she said, having mastered no-thank-you.

“She is very very young your wife,” said the driver.

“She is my daughter,” O'Hanrahan answered, in a mood to vary the charade.

“Does she have a husband? I have five sons!”

Lucy said
la shukran
again, imagining his five handsome devils would one day expand to sphericality like their father.

O'Hanrahan and Lucy got out at the university and the professor paid the driver, who said he would just as soon wait for them to finish and drive them back.

“But we may be hours, sir,” O'Hanrahan said.

The driver shrugged. A sure fare in two hours was better than wasting gas, driving aimlessly.

Waiting, as expected, was Dr. Ibrahim Mehmet, perhaps the last of the internationally respected Sudanese philologists, former member of the Acolyte brotherhood before transferring from Cambridge to Khartoum University in an effort to save the institution from the
sharia
and the tide of Islamic fanaticism replacing independent thought in his homeland.

What did poor 70-year-old Dr. Mehmet make of these years?

Having been raised with tales of his grandfather fighting with the Mahdi, having seen the colonial powers leave in 1952, having danced and celebrated independence only to watch his country deconstruct into civil war, only to watch the elected leaders eliminated by military dictators with phony medals down their chests. There was hope in the '70s, briefly, with one of these generals, Jafaar Nimieri, Sudan's Nasser. There was flirtation with investment and massive irrigation, land reform and progress, but this, like all things in this doomed African century, failed, became an embarrassment, made his country a synonym for hopeless tinpot African backwater … and so rose the Moslems to impose Islamic law on the Christians and tribal peoples to the south, having exhausted all other practical notions. O'Hanrahan empathized with Dr. Mehmet: to have spanned that first taste of independence, to have taught and dwelt in the first world and to have brought back those hopes for his reborn country, only to see the dark ages reenacted—the old 7th-Century battle cries, defeat of the infidel! Then the famines and ever-lengthening war, so much death.