Gospel (59 page)

39.
And so comfortless, bereft, I left the presence of another Disciple, but this time wiser to my failure. (My scribe Tesmegan is near tears for my sadness—yes, you may be recorded, dear boy, put it down if you like.)

40.
Within that week Xenon and I began our trip to Ephesus where we would make our formal parting. All about us the news for Judea was bad—the Romans burned and marauded and we were told not to bother to return; Xenon worried greatly for his parents and we prayed much for their safety. I heard some years later that Xenon married and I counted this as a personal loss, but what other ending could there have been after such a despicable fall? I began to wonder if there was anyone or anything that I had made better in my time on earth.

Then again, thinking now of Ephesus and the brothel it has become, it seems to me that decline of all standards is worldwide, would you not agree, Josephus? The Jews of the Herodian age were not the fractious fanatics of our own; the Rome of the Republic had some scant honor; the Greeks of the age of Alexander were hardly the lust-driven voluptuaries of today. What chance, with or without me, did poor Xenon have? I attest even now: it is virtually impossible to maintain the ideal of virgin celibacy in such a land as Greece!

GREECE

 

Let us not make arbitrary conjectures about the greatest matters.

—H
ERACLITUS
(ca. 580
B.C.E.
)

[Emperor Julian, the Apostate] ordered the priests of the different Christian sects and their supporters to be admitted to the palace and politely expressed his wish that they each might follow his own beliefs without hindrance or fear. The Emperor thought that freedom to argue their beliefs would simply deepen their differences, so that he would never be faced by a united common people. He found from experience that no wild beasts are as hostile to men as Christians are to each other.

—
Histories
(ca. 360)
A
MMIANUS
M
ARCELLINUS

Even God cannot change the past.

—A
GATHON
(ca. 410
B.C.E.
)

James shook his hard obstinate head. “It too, this spirit of Truth you talk about—it too will be crucified. You must realize, rabbi, that the spirit will be crucified as long as men exist. But it doesn't matter. Something is always left behind, and that, I tell you, is enough for us.”

    “It's not enough for me!” Jesus shouted in despair.

—
The Last Temptation of Christ
(1954)
N
IKOS
K
AZANTZAKIS

 

 

Patrick O'Hanrahan stood at the rails and attempted to button his suitcoat. He unbuttoned the bulging jacket subsequently, preferring coldness to looking piteously rotund. There was an indistinct sun rising,
stepping up to her bright chair,
O'Hanrahan quoted to himself, behind the craggy mountains of Kerkira, “Corfu” to the tourists, looming before him in the blue-gray mists.
When primal Dawn spread on the eastern sky her fingers of pink light …
No, it will be a more spectacular day than that—he recalled his Homer in the Greek:
The sun rose on the flawless brimming sea into a sky all of brass, all one brightening for gods immortal and for mortal men on plowlands kind with grain.
That's how you write, folks,
plowlands kind with grain.

Surrounding him at this hour were backpackers asleep on the deck, squirming into their sleeping bags for as-yet-undetected pockets of warmth, not quite ready to commence another day of hardcore tourism. O'Hanrahan tiptoed around a threesome of snoring young men, one of whom had wrapped his head in a windbreaker like a mummy.

O'Hanrahan settled himself on the leeward side of the ship.

On his left rose dreadful Albania, not so much mysterious anymore as simply weird, abandoned in the collapse of communism to its Marxist misery by an indifferent Europe. O'Hanrahan's mind was playful after two Greek coffees, and he smiled to think of how Albania disproved all rules of geography: a country smack between the West's greatest civilizations, Greece and Rome, with a final layering of Islamic culture at its Mameluke height. Albania should have been the show-place of the world's cultures, but instead it is the most wretched, backward land in Europe. Civilization, mused O'Hanrahan, is not contagious, not accidental, not a whim of geography. It doesn't spill over or infect; it is a deliberative act: we will have art, we will rise to advanced thought, we will surpass our normal venality, we will walk on the Western Slopes.

And such contemplations brought O'Hanrahan to the topography now distinguishing itself from the shoreline fog before him, only the fishermen awake at this hour, their boats now leaving the harbors. What number odyssey to Greece was this? His seventh or eighth, something like that. And possibly his last. And still so much that will now, he supposed, never be seen. Here on the Ionian side of Greece, so many treasures unvisited: Ithaka, for example, that astoundingly little islet where Western Civilization got a running start from Homer.
Someone immortal who cares for you will make a fair wind blow.
Alas, I never made it to Ithaka, sighed O'Hanrahan, no immortal willed my course to that far-famed Ithacensian shore, no seafaring Phaiakians granted me passage.
No other Odysseus will ever come, for he and I are one, the same; his bitter fortune and wanderings are mine,
mulled O'Hanrahan, feeling for the moment Odysseus-like and the only one on these waters who could feel such things.

Greece, O'Hanrahan addressed the mainland, for my entire scholastic life you have fascinated me, from mystery cults at Minos, the Delian League, the baptizing of St. Lydia, the first European Christian at St. Paul's hands, to your smoke-stained, imperious ikons of Byzantium glowering through the centuries. Now the Patriarch of Constantinople performs a weekly mass for less than a hundred faithful in what used to be the capital of Christianity, a sad old show of clinking censers and old men and women, mumbling the desperate prayers of age—such exquisite, bitter decline!

O'Hanrahan reasoned: Modernism betrayed you, Greece. It is the contemporary ugly country with its worthless trains and third-world plumbing, philandering presidents, deposed dictators, conniving restaurateurs who cheat on the bill, and polluted, rude Athens that annoys me. And yet, what affection you still inspire, the Western World's love, her greatest love … If Italy is the schoolboy infatuation of the Western mind, then you, Greece, are surely the enduring wife, our Penelope, outlasting all rivals and suitors, confident with maddening Greek arrogance that our world will return to you again, no matter how long it deigns to stay away.

“You're up early, sir,” he heard Lucy say behind him.

“Ah,” said O'Hanrahan, raising a hand in salute, “Amphitrite herself walks upon the waters, O gods!”

She sniffed back a runny nose. “Well, Amphitrite's got pneumonia now.”

O'Hanrahan fished in his pocket for the key to his cabin. “Here,” he said. “Go back to sleep in a nice warm bed.”

“But I might miss seeing something.”

“See the mountain there? Scrubby rock, a few houses, white church at the shore. It's that over and over again until Patras. I'll wake you.”

That afternoon O'Hanrahan knocked on the cabin door, rousing Lucy at three
P.M.
Glancing at her watch, she sputtered a few half-awake apologies for sleeping so long and monopolizing his cabin. He said through the door that he would meet her in the ship's cafeteria.

Primping in the mirror, Lucy saw in the reflection that on an opposite shelf was O'Hanrahan's open suitcase. She turned cautiously to examine it; beside the suitcase, at a little writing desk, were some notes. She checked the door and made sure it was locked before poking still further: on a worn piece of paper, some kind of Xerox, was something O'Hanrahan had labeled in his fierce handwriting:
J. ROSEN BOOKMARK.

The paper itself was a copy of a many-times-folded scratchpad of doodles and designs where someone had tried out a pen. Lucy surmised that this must be some fragment of what Rabbi Rosen of Hebrew University, translator of the Matthias scroll forty years ago, left behind after his not-so-accidental death. She glanced at the phrases and bits of words in Hebrew:
Jude
or was that “Jews”?
in Beersheba … All Heresies Refuted … Yochan …
John perhaps?
in Ephesus … The Harlot Helen, her dreaded teats!
 … What was that about?
Benjamin the slave
 … And what was this?
The Messiah's Bones.

Lucy put that aside and examined O'Hanrahan's open suitcase with its contents slopped about. There was the edge of a golden frame of a five-by-seven black-and-white photo. With her hand trembling in anticipation, she pulled it from its surrounding of unwashed clothes. It was Patrick O'Hanrahan, slim with—good God—
dark
wavy hair, in a chaplain's uniform standing beside a squinting, worried-looking woman in a hospital sister's uniform, about twenty or so, much shorter, uneasily pulled close to O'Hanrahan. Mr. and Mrs. O'Hanrahan. Lucy felt a sudden untraversable gulf between her 20th Century and O'Hanrahan's, this wartime, all-American world saluting in patriotic black-and-white two Asian wars ago.

“Whatcha doing in there?” hollered O'Hanrahan outside the door, wanting his room back.

Lucy jumped, yelled something back too cheerily, and hid all signs of her investigations.

AΘHNA

J
ULY
9
TH
, 1990

O'Hanrahan explained his acquaintance with the Matsoukis family while he and Lucy endured the obligatory two-hour bus shuttle from Patras to Athens. Lucy half-listened, desperate for fresh air, distracted by the
deedly deedly deedly
balalaika music shrilly piped throughout the bus.

The professor reminisced: Eleni Vlahos, Mrs. Matsoukis's maiden name, was the most brilliant girl in Athens and if O'Hanrahan had had any sense, according to O'Hanrahan, he would have married her and moved to a Greek island and written his books while she wrote hers.

(Your wife writing books, something you could never do, would have made for a marriage, Patrick, almost as tortured as the one you had with Beatrice.)

Eleni had written definitive histories of four of the Cycladean islands and taught at the American University, where she was a distinguished professor, a
Kathigitria.
But not only that, Eleni had been a beauty, piercing and dark. “God knows what she looks like now,” wondered O'Hanrahan. “I suppose, though, many a beautiful Greek girl becomes one of those old Greek crones, so I ought to prepare myself.”

Look who's talking, thought Lucy.

“Anyway, if I'd married her—”

“I thought you were a Jesuit back then.”

“Details, details,” he kept narrating. “Anyway, Eleni married this doctor, Dr. Matsoukis, a nice guy. Someone she could boss around, I think. And they have two kids, Theodora and Stavros. See? I've written it down in my address book so in my senescence I'll remember.”

Once they arrived in Athens, O'Hanrahan telephoned the
Matsoukoi
and Eleni insisted he and Lucy come immediately to the house, and to banish all thoughts of a hotel. O'Hanrahan spent the next half-hour flagging a cab—no easy task in Athens where the taxis have a seller's market and ignore whom they wish—and subsequently sped with Lucy to Kolonaki, the beautiful-people's modern Athens of haute couture salons, chic art galleries, cafés where the plebeian ouzo and metaxa gave way to whatever cocktail was in vogue this summer in Europe. Kolonaki, speculated O'Hanrahan as the cab ascended the steep slopes of Likabettis, was a city state of the upper-middle- and upper-class Greeks, media and government people, artists and academics.

Eleni Matsoukis was hardly the old crone that O'Hanrahan had prepared Lucy for. She was sixty, striking and noble, with deep black hair pulled back tight to a bun, and her slim, tailored black dress brought out the soft paleness of her face. Except for the lipstick, Lucy found her remarkably monochrome, black and white. Dr. Matsoukis spoke little English, so after his visitors were escorted into a spacious marble living room, he sat there politely seeing that glasses were filled, O'Hanrahan's with ouzo, endless rounds, and Lucy's with mineral water.

Presently Theodora, a shorter, less regal version of her mother, breezed into the room in a blue turtleneck and designer jeans with a chartreuse scarf trailing behind her. Her English was excellent. Theodora went to the American University for some form of international business degree. Last to present himself was Stavros, who shlepped in unwillingly and only at the loud request of his father.

Stavros was a god, Lucy noticed.

Not the delicate, classical Praxitelean youth but the potent
kouros
from the Archaic period. Curly black hair in ringlets on either side of his large eyes, high cheekbones, developed neck and upper arms, a wonderful tan … Lucy was not personally drawn to this beauty, but she was damn impressed. Besides looking vain Stavros looked a little, well, packaged, Lucy decided, a little manufactured by spending too long with his blow-dryer or in some effete Eurohairstyling salon.

“Stavros is a business student,” Theodora, called Teddie, explained with a sarcasm that communicated through all cultural barriers. “He's at Southwestern College.”

Lucy gathered that was not the coup that attending American University was.

“He doesn't like Americans,” Teddie continued. “He thinks he's a communist this month. The last one in Europe.”

“Teddie,
parakaló
…” warned her mother gently.

Teddie: “He has one thought a month. It is all he can do.”

“Sibling rivalry,” smiled O'Hanrahan, willing things to remain light.