John (8 page)
One, Nuri, a rag of man, sag-fleshed, slit-eyed, said he himself had touched the Apostle's robe. He held a bone of arm towards Papias, outstretched claw of fingers, in invitation for the youth to leave his life and join them. Beneath the pulsing heat, blue canopy of sky and scorched light, Papias had considered them: the smallest of tribes, their two goats, their road-worn apparel a badge of their poverty, the watery pink of zeal in their eyes. He had read more books than all of them, had clean robes and a room of his own next to his parents, whose love he had as an only child. The claw wavered in the sunlight.
'Come with us,' Nuri said, hacking the words like pits from the thin gully of his throat. 'Come and follow the Lord.'
The others, who sat to listen or stood about momentarily to eye the curiosities, looked then at Papias as at a spectacle. He felt their eyes upon him, the sudden ringing in his ears as though his head was inside a bell. He had not expected it. Nuri was a shrunken and unseemly messenger if from God. His skull was reclaiming his face. His lips, part eaten by some long-ago disease, were dried crusts, quivering now as he waited for the answer.
'He has called you. Will you come and follow the Lord?' he asked a last time.
In the distance of the village a donkey brayed. The spell broke, and Papias shook his head and walked hotly away. There were jeers at the Christians and jokes in the aftermath of intensity. In the evening they were gone, empty circle of printed ground when Papias returned to it the following day, in its centre, stick-drawn, the sign of the fish.
For a time then he kept himself from others who passed that way.
But always there was a prompting. In night visions he would see the Christians flogged, the crucifixions rising one after the other along the roads of his dreams. He saw the outstretched hand hanging in air before him, and sometimes the white-clothed figure of the Christ himself, pacing away over desert sands toward immutable destiny. But these yet did not sway him. He awaited a sign, and believed he was sent it when one day two years later he heard that the apostle John, himself, the Son of Thunder, was banished in exile on the island of Patmos.
Papias sailed there and was baptised, and because of his youth and devotion, became the attendant of the Apostle.
These things he thinks now as he sits by John at the entrance of the cave and tells of the sky. His is to serve the Master, he tells himself, and in doing so serves best the Lord.
But as he sits and the clouds move swiftly across the blue, Papias also thinks of the two children he has buried beneath the stones, and the woman Marina who believes she is a harbour for demons and death.
'Master, it is Prochorus. He is ill with fever. The side of his face is imprinted with blister.'
Danil, a disciple of sixty, brings the news. It is late afternoon. Light is thinning.
'He speaks in delirium. We must pray for him.'
John stirs from reverie, angles to Danil his head, then rises quickly. 'I will go to him.'
'No!' Papias does not mean to startle but he does. 'I will go, Master, let me.' He wears a pink desert flower of guilt and concealment on his cheeks.
Danil looks at him, astonished that he would tell the Apostle what to do.
'It may be catching,' Papias says to him and twists the hand that touched Prochorus's face to wake him. 'Let me go only.'
John does not pause. 'Lead me,' he says.
They go down the rock face to the stones of the foreshore. Seabirds whirl above them. A bright wind hammers silver out of the sea. The Apostle's robe is blown against him, so he seems thinned to nothing, a pale sliver of light traversing the stones. They come along by the hardened sand, the smaller gulls dancing before them, printing the virgin ground.
'Here, Master,' Papias says, and they turn where the shore bends away and stones have been lifted to make a pathway upwards, towards two huts, part tent, part boat, perched on the edge. The old apostle is surprisingly nimble, his feet sure, his head high, and he moves with silent purpose and fixed demeanour, unencumbered, it seems, by blindness.
When they arrive on the cliff top, three of the other disciples, Simon, Lemuel, and Meletios, are knelt outside praying. They stop when the others approach, rise and go towards them.
'He is worse with every moment, Master,' Simon says. 'Ioseph is with him.'
John stoops in the doorway. The inner darkness is no darker to him. He does not see the ravage of black blister that spreads on the scribe's face and neck, the yellowish complexion of his forehead. By his side, Papias sees these and must draw his hand sharply to his mouth to obstruct the vomit, then spin gagging out into the daylight.
Ioseph rises from his place by the bed mat and touches the Apostle's hand. 'He will not take water, Master,' he says. 'He speaks wildly, cries out, then is silent but for convulsions that seize him. He is shaken as if by a force, then released like a creature thrown aside. His blister climbs and bubbles. He is fevered hot as fire. In instants he returns to himself, speaks for you to come, then is lost again.'
John approaches. He feels downward with his right hand, is guided by Ioseph, and so finds the rough timber stool. His head is upward, his eyes far away, as though watching in the infinite dark for the descent of most slender light.
The other disciples gather behind, silent, watchful, expectant of miracle and afraid it will not come. They have testament of many healings, have preached the same countless times — leprosy, lameness, wild contagions of the blood — death itself they have preached undone by faith. But never have they witnessed it. Their stories are their creed, and by these they have stood in marketplace and hilltop telling to the crowd until so many imagined damaged figures were made whole that the world entire could seem cured by this Saviour. The disciples recounted it with greater or lesser detail each to their own fashion. But in each of them, in the disparate corners of lands where they were, the telling was informed not by evidence. They had seen no curing themselves, only told of those told to them. Now they hold their breaths in the hut — to keep from the fever, and lest they obstruct by human weakness the coming of the power.
It is so. John bends down his head to Prochorus and whispers his name. The scribe does not move. He lies with shallow breath on the ledge of death. John lifts his right hand, thin fingers moving toward the other's brow.
'Do not touch him, Master!' It is Papias, flushed and wide-eyed in the doorway. 'Do not touch him, Master.'
Simon cannot help himself from moving slightly back, but not John. There is a fragment of delay, no more; John's hand reaches and finds the face of Prochorus. His fingers feel the broken skin, the fury of heat, the clam and ooze, a quality waxen and lifeless in the flesh. He lays his palm against the flamed cheek, bows his head, prays.
By the entranceway the others kneel. Discovering a shallow in their faith, they breathe through cupped fingers. The time is like a dark metal beaten thin. It stretches outwards to where it must give beneath the blows. For nothing happens. Swiftly the afternoon is taken by evening into the sea. A lamp is lit. And still the Apostle is bent down over the scribe, his hand upon the face. He prays in silence, moves slightly back and forth on the stool so its joints sing thinly.
And still nothing happens. How often is it to be so? To the ten thousand prayers they pray these years on the island what answers come? No miracles have attended them. No signs that they are cherished, or that the long suffering of their faith is considered, that their sacrifice is measured and in the hereafter will be rewarded.
There is nothing. There is darkness and wind off the stars. There is the same sea sighing in chains of waves. What invisible drama plays, what passes to and fro in the columns of air above them, none knows, but the disciples think: perhaps the time is arrived at last. Perhaps the bald scribe who had attended the Apostle in his revelation is himself to reveal the Lord.
The time is beaten away, and is as nothing. No hours are measured.
The knees of those kneeling ache, the damp of the ground travels through them. Night saddles their shoulders with cold. On the bed mat Prochorus tosses and wrestles the unseen. John says his name, but it does not still the scribe. He kicks at a beast that stalks toward him.
This, your servant, Lord.
If it be your will.
Before the dawn the wind turns about and comes from the sea into the dwelling. It makes flap the canvas sides; bestirs papyrus, dried seaweed, fistful of seeds; rolls the wooden beak-cup from table to floor. The disciples are statues in half sleep, half prayer, otherliness. The wind touches them on their stooped shoulders, passes to the Apostle, who turns towards it, inquisitive of what fills the dark room where the scribe is dying. His hand is laid on Prochorus's forehead. The fever is there still. The prayers, the herbs brought and crushed, tinctures dribbled on his lips, poultices applied, all have wrought little change. Only that the patient is grown calm. Several times in the night he woke and whispered with cracked voice what could not be understood. Now the wind whirls into the hut. The lamp is out. All are in blue-black shade and do not know at first that then Prochorus opens his eyes.
John feels it.
'Prochorus,' he says, and leans down. He puts his head close to the other's lips.
What the scribe says is not heard by the others. The Apostle listens at the swollen, blistered mouth. To Prochorus he says then, 'I tell you, Jesus is the Christ, truly he is the Son of God.' And leans slightly back as though he is newly aware of a task ahead of him and the enormity of it, as though he sees suddenly the frailty of faith, of Christianity itself. John sits upright. He raises his voice in the wind.
' "The wind blows about at will," Jesus said to Nicodemus, in Jerusalem. "You hear the sound it makes but do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone begotten of the spirit. If you do not believe about earthly things, how are you going to believe when I tell you about heavenly things? No one has gone up into heaven except the one who came down from heaven — the Son of Man. And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert, so must the Son of Man be lifted up," the Lord said, "that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life in him." Yes, the Lord said, "God loved the world so much he gave his only Son that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life." '
The Apostle pauses. He has preached the scene many times in far places. He has remembered often sitting in the starlit night when Jesus spoke the words for the first time, when the lemon trees were in bloom and the air sweet.
He leans close to the scribe. He touches with his fingertips the eyes, discovers that Prochorus is dead.
Anger and grief course through him. John stands up, a pale figure before the dawn, and when he speaks there is violence and hurt in his voice. The other disciples are gathered at the doorway, Matthias now among them.
'The light has come into the world, our Lord said, but men have preferred darkness to light,' he cries out, 'because their deeds were evil, for everyone who practises wickedness hates the light and does not come near the light for fear his deeds will be exposed.'
His chest heaves. It is not clear if he knows that Matthias is there, or whether he thinks there are others, too, who no longer believe as he has told him. He stands and is a glimpse of his younger self, fierce and loyal and resolute. His lips quiver with anger. It is as though he sees in the landscape of his blindness a vast temple begin to crumple, and he throws out his hands to hold it up.
Abruptly he pushes forward and knocks a stool. Papias steps quickly to his side, offers his shoulder for his master's hand, and they go past the others outside to where the dawn is not yet risen and the wind gone elsewhere.
The scribe is buried in a mound on the cliff top, his face towards the east. Stones are piled above him, their soft clack a doleful music. The disciples stand and pray. John is not with them. He has told Papias to leave him, and his absence is felt but not spoken. Old Ioseph leads the prayers. Matthias stands by his side with two others, Auster and Linus. The ceremony is short, Ioseph's voice thin with grief. For each there is a sense of betrayal of which they cannot speak. How has this happened, that their scribe has been struck down like this? That one who gave so much of himself to the service of the Lord has been visited by this plaguey death? Why has he been taken from them? The air above their heads is crowded with questions. The death threatens the unspoken belief they have in being chosen, in being set apart. Not because they have imagined themselves free from dying, nor because they have taken as a sign the great age of the Apostle and believed they, too, will outlast all perishing until the dawn of the Second Coming, but because Prochorus was not old. Because his role in their community was to record, and the taking of him seems an act full of portent, as if their tongues have been pulled out. All have expected the Apostle to have further revelation, and for Prochorus to be on hand to write it down. Now his death seems a wilful silencing. The disciples voice no protest. Some of them, bowed, mute, with vigilant rigour tour the inner rooms of their souls and find evidence against themselves - jumbled furniture of doubt, unbelief, false piety, pride — and leave to begin atonement.
Among them Papias harbours the greatest guilt. He fears he brought the sickness to the scribe, but has told no one. He has no sign of it on himself. When the disciples leave the burial mound, he hurries away down the rocks to the shore. His face is white, his eyes glitter like fish scales. Arriving on the soft pebble-and-shell floor of the departed tide, he slips and sinks in haste, his sandals are unfooted as he steps forward into the shallow waves. There, grey corona of gulls turning above him, he bends and dips his hands in the salt sea and rubs them hard together. Again and again he dips and draws the water and scrubs the invisible from his hands. The waves are against his calves, his robe darkly stained to his waist. Against the backs of his legs and beneath his feet he feels the suck of the out-flowing sea. His actions are uncalled for. He has already tumbled entirely in the waves since visiting the fisher's wife, but nonetheless scrubs now at his hands with a wild passion for absolution. He knuckles one palm then the other, presses his fists through the cold surface of the sea and holds them there as if manacled. The gulls wheel, waiting to see what strange fish may appear.
