John (12 page)
One brought a stone jar of water. Others water bags.
'Sir, I would have wine for my guest this evening.'
'Sir, wine. Please make this wine. Wine, sir. Wine.'
In this your gentle composure. Like water untroubled in a deep pool. Waiting.
'Master,' Peter said, after the long journey, 'eat.'
But you said, 'I have meat to eat that ye know not of. My meat is to do the will of him that sent me, and to finish his work.'
We sat in the street shade. The Canaanites waited for their miracle. I watched the sunlight retreat on the stone wall of the house of Eli. The blue of sky with nothing in it, the eagle gone.
Patience was short.
'My water, Sir. I cannot stay here all day. I have work.'
'My water, Sir, to wine, please. It is no trouble to you.'
You answered them not, and some grew angry and muttered against you. But left the water jars in case.
They went away, all but a few. It was in the seventh hour when the nobleman came.
'My son is on the point of death, Sir.'
Peter looked to you. There stirred among us a silent anticipation. We had sat a long time by the steps attending such a moment, flies and insects moving in the shade.
'Except ye see signs and wonders, ye will not believe,' you said.
The nobleman fell to his knees. 'Sir, come down to my son ere he die.'
His old face. His love for his son.
None of us spoke, the old man kneeling so.
I watched your eyes. The pity that pooled, this love of the father.
'Go thy way; thy son lives,' you said.
And he raised his face to you, and we could see that he believed. And did not need the proof of his servants coming on the road to meet him when he went back from Cana, and they told him on the seventh hour the fever had left his son.
I believed. I believed already all things were possible to you.
I leaned and touched your robe.
Simon sits with Ioseph. They sip a brown broth offish and pulses. Simon's face is pale, his eyes running with rheum. He is nearly the age of Ioseph but of a more anxious disposition. He troubles over his health, always certain that he is ill. His pains and aches are legion; he fears clouds and rain and wind, and must temper this against his faith that God watches over them. The death of his friend Prochorus, the sight of the disease blotching his face, has filled him with dread.
'You saw it,' he says to Ioseph.
'I did.'
'He was as a leper.'
'Yes.'
Simon scratches the back of his hands. Itches are intolerable. Heat of blood, he believes, a sign of his ill health. 'But there was no warning.'
'I saw him myself the morning.'
'So it just came. It just came like that, and he was dead.'
'The Lord took him. I am saddened for you, Simon. I know Prochorus was a close companion.'
'Why? Why would the Lord not take him peacefully in his sleep? Why would he not pause his breathing and leave him on his bed mat? I have these itches in my hands since. My breath is shallow; do you think my breath shallow, Ioseph?'
'No, Simon. You are as you always are.'
'What if it is beginning? What if the itches are . . .'
'Simon.' Ioseph lays his hand across his friend's. For him he feels a duty of care, a bond he cannot quite explain; but it as though he is a kind of ointment, or knows the calm of his spirit to be the salve the younger man needs. 'Simon, do not be afraid.'
'I know. I know I should not even think such things. I know I should welcome what the Lord has in store for me. But I want to live to see. I want to live to see the promised day.'
'You will,' Ioseph says. 'God willing.'
Simon scowls at the broth; in the taste is something peculiar. It takes his mind from the itching.
'Matthias went out on a boat,' Ioseph says.
'Yes. I did not go. He did not ask me. But if he did, I would not go. The sea is treacherous this time of year. A storm can come from nowhere.'
'It is late for their returning. Did they return?'
'I did not see. I do not care greatly for our brother Matthias. Do you think something in this broth sour?'
'Only the reflection of your scowl, old friend.'
Simon sips it through tight lips, as if to sieve the sourness. Into the afternoon sky sail dark clouds. There is a wordless gap, the two old men sitting on their various discomforts, then Simon asks: 'Ioseph, do you think we will see Judea again?'
'Judea?'
'Yes. Do you think we will ever walk there freely again? I do not. Only in dreams now will I visit the house of my parents.'
Ioseph does not offer consolation.
'I have this thought, Ioseph; I will confess it to you that you may chastise me and forgive me for it. It is this: what if the Apostle dies?' Simon turns his rheumy eyes toward his old friend. 'I am a fool, and the weakest among us. But I confess I am afraid. What if he dies? What if you go to the cave in the morning and discovered? And the Lord has not come?'
'We believe he will come.'
'But if he doesn't? If this plague takes the Apostle? What will become of us?'
'He has survived many plagues, been imprisoned and stoned, had burning oil poured upon him. Yet he remains. He will not die, Simon. I believe he will not die until the Lord returns.'
Simon scratches at the back of his hands. 'I had a dream. In the dream there was a great storm, and sand blew and a city was lost beneath it. A whole city. No trace of it remained. Not a trace, Ioseph. It was forgotten.' His breath is shallow, his heart is jumping unevenly. 'If he dies, I have thought. If he dies, Jesus dies again. For we will fade away here without our witness, our testament. We will be a city forgotten beneath the sand. And this thought, once come to my mind, will not leave now.'
The light is swiftly fading out of the sky, and before them the sea deepens gray to black and churns like a mind troubled.
'If he dies,' Simon says again. But the words are neither question nor answer, and hang in the darkening. He looks down at the backs of his hands, sees the scratches from which thin blood seeps.
Auster presses his eye to the wood chink. Papias howls again and again, hand-patches the black blood and ooze, holds the jagged stump of ear root, touches the unstoppered hole in himself, views aghast the bloodied fingers, and falls unconscious to the ground.
Before him on the floor is the woman Marina, the knife stilled in her chest. Auster waits. He cannot move. He has not believed what has appeared before him. He saw no devil but heard the woman say the devil was there. He believes the devil is as great as God and has looked about him in the sky for signs of rupture, portents of presence. He has heard her say she killed her children. When she took the knife, he thought she would plunge it in the chest of the youth, and he had been transfixed and would not have been able to save him. In the instants after, Auster does not move. He fears evil invisible in the dwelling, thinks to run away, but is held by the terrible conceit that he may see here, now, the face of Lucifer. He presses against the wood wall, eyes downward for a serpent, upward for the fallen angel that might manifest fierce and dark and awesome in the roof space. He bites his lips to blood. He clings to the little dwelling, expectant of a revelation from which he cannot move. In his mind the fiery figure of the fallen, the proud, unvanquished though banished, possesses strange glory. He barely admits it to himself. But here by the fisher's hut it is this that delays him. The life leaks out of the youth. Still there comes no manifestation, no great wing-beat, no descent of fire. The sky is darkening, it is true. Perhaps if he waits longer. Perhaps this is the work of a minion, a lesser devil, and Lucifer himself must come from vast distance, ascend from nether regions, traverse fiery ringed chambers of the damned to arrive with warm flutter and seize the souls for himself? Auster studies the clouds, looks back inside the dwelling, where all is stilled now.
Where is he? Where is the devil?
From the boat, Matthias sees the smoke rise. His words done, they are sailing back to shore. It is a fisher's hut, he realises. It is burning to the ground. The black smoke curls and hangs in heavy pall above that end of the island. Matthias makes no comment. He has asked the disciples to pray with him that all may be enlightened, and their heads are bowed. With grim concern the pilot has indicated to Matthias the darkening of the sky and stirring sea and been given permission to sail them back. The waters slap at the sides, tilt and sway the slim boat with the bowed men, heads like darkened moons.
It has gone well, Matthias thinks. He has taken the step and none have spoken against him. Why should they? Why would his word not be as another's? Why believe one and not he? Belief is not a lamb but a sword. It must be seized and then wielded. We are not shepherds but soldiers. The Romans have already shown what comes of shepherds. The Christians will be wiped out, banished or crucified, until they dwindle away to nothing, confined to the pages of annals where the scribes record the bizarre heresies of the ages. The Children of the Lamb will rank alongside Followers of the Sacred Goat, Disciples of the White Dog. It is the Jews and the Romans who will write the history. In more wise times the truth of the Divine Mind will be understood, and those who have touched it will be honoured as sages. To think of God as a man was a man's creation. Only a man could have the conceit of thinking God was himself, was like a father who sent down his son. No, God was not like a man, nor did he have a son. He is called the Father only so that the simpleminded might understand. And then they took it as the Word. The Father, the son! Childish ignorance. The truth of the Divine Mind was beyond them. God is a spirit, even Jesus had said, and must be worshipped in spirit, but they had not understood. Of course not. Clamour of the blind: What about our temple? What about our high priests and elders? Who will pay the temple taxes? Ignorance of sheep. Yes, sheep, apt.
But here, these are different. These are hungry to see God. They are tired of waiting for the promised return. What is Jesus to them? A story. They never saw him. They have only the word of a blind old man who forgets more every day and soon will not be able to remember his own name. What then of his promise? What credence in a man who will dribble his food and smell of his own waste? No. They were ready to hear. I knew it. When I told them Jesus was only another of many teachers, many who had understood the Divine Mind, I could feel ground fall away in their minds. A whole shelf of faith without foundation falling into nothing. Their love for him is deep, but not so well founded that it is strong. He becomes whatever they want him to become. Now he is fierce, now gentle, now damning the tax collectors, now forgiving all. A convenient god. The kind a man might invent for himself. But I knew to leave him his place in their minds. Continue to pray to him. O, yes. O, a great teacher. A wise teacher. But misunderstood.
The Divine Mind is like the sky that covers the world, I told them. A good picture. A simple one to understand. It is over everything and everyone.
Perhaps Baltsaros doubted most. Perhaps at first Cyrus. But the reverence of the others swayed them. How perfect this boat, too. The setting. Already we were freed from the prison of Patmos and its prisoned thinking. How easily is loyalty won when the disciples believe they have been chosen! The select. Sitting either side of the fishing boat and swelling with their own importance. Realising they are the younger, the stronger, that I have chosen none of the elders. Soldiers, not shepherds. And proud ones.
Flattery moves all things.
'I have chosen you amongst all others. As yet tell none what we alone know and what I have spoken here. Your ministry will follow when the hour is at hand.'
How the words sat like doves in my hands. How else but I am guided by the Divine?
The sea pitches and heaves and Matthias must sit. Still the dark smoke rises above the fisher's hut. The sky is weighted with stones of storm. The pilot takes them to the shallow waters, and those in the prow step gingerly overboard, hold firm the boat. One offers Matthias his hand, and he alights without word or gesture, walks from them across the stony underwater, and stands, looking at the distance as though he hears things told. The disciples come up and attend, their faces pale with soft bliss of meditation.
'I will send word,' Matthias says. 'We will sail again to speak of these things. Go. Go and consider the truth I have told you.'
He turns from them, walks up the pebbled shore with swift purpose. Something has happened. The clouds build on each other still. The air is cooler by the moment. As he ascends the rough stone steps in the cliff-way two at a time, he has a sour twist in his stomach. What is it? What has happened? Wind is turning like a mind; it spikes the scent of burning through all.
When Matthias reaches his dwelling, Auster is slumped before it. The disciple is exhausted and dirtied, the side of his face stained with blood. He does not rise. He does not tell Matthias what he has seen, nor that he was impelled after to set fire to the fisher's hut and leave the bodies to burn. He has not the strength, nor the knowledge even of how. How did he decide? How one moment was Auster outside and Papias awakened, breathing in moans on the floor, then how was Auster entering and seeking the lamp oil and setting the blaze? How? He cannot say. The flames kissed him. He did not run out. He stood in the swift devouring, the whoosh of the fire opening its mouth, its hot tongue taking the woman Marina like a blistered fish skin. Auster had stood too long, mesmerised by what was released there. Too long blinking at the wild smoke, breathing its blackness, until scorch and choking ran him outside. He had flung himself forwards on to the stones, retching. The roof caught. Creak and collapse, snarl, hiss, crackle: the fire ate at all. Then Auster, blur-eyed, throat-burned, coughing at the black gagging that kept him from air, stood, and for reasons he cannot explain, re-entered. To be himself taken by the flames? To allow the fury of the fire to devour him, too? He cannot say. Nor can he yet tell what he saw then. How the fire danced around the walls, how it took all but did not touch the fallen figure of Papias. He cannot tell this yet, nor how he came back to himself in that black place and stooped down to lift the youth up on to his back and brought him from there all the way across the island here to the dwelling of Matthias.
