The Gospel Of Judas (35 page)

Frau Huber edges into a pew right at the back. She kneels and, like the figure in front of her, she begins to pray – but unlike them she is praying for something that she will never grant herself for as long as she lives, even if her God does. She is praying for forgiveness.

People padded round, murmuring to each other like undertakers at a funeral. They prepared the body as for burial. They dressed it and anointed it with balm and wrapped it in shrouds. They inserted tubes and dripped in fluids. The scent of frankincense and myrrh filled the chamber.

He thirsted. He thought of Madeleine. He drifted to and fro on the shifting surface of consciousness and he thought of Madeleine. ‘Will I die?’ he wondered.

They drugged him. Morphine is the analgesic of choice. Morphine, from Morpheus, the god of dreams, who was the son of Sleep. And so he dreamt. Guilt, like a substance, pervaded his dreams. He dreamt of his mother talking to him, his mother incontinent and senile speaking to Leo, the living Leo and the dead Leo, the loathed and the loved. She spoke to Leo and she spoke about Leo, her mind meandering through the tortured landscape of senility, the distant landscape of her childhood in Buchlowitz. ‘We are all punished for what we do in our lives,’ she assured him.
‘I am punished, you are punished. We are all punished.’ And sometimes his mother and Madeleine were one, and he dreamt them naked, touched the cool and lucid skin of their belly with its rough scrub of hair. They enveloped him and they gave birth to him: the acts were the same.

‘You look terrible.’ Goldstaub bringing comfort. He was wearing a gown and a surgical mask, his beard showing ragged round the edges. ‘How do you feel?’

Leo peered through swollen lids and mumbled through swollen, blistered lips. ‘What happened?’

‘You tell me.’ Goldstaub gestured at his dressings. ‘Does it hurt?’

A grimace that may have been some kind of smile. ‘The superficial burns hurt, that’s what they tell me. The parts that don’t matter hurt. It’s the places where it doesn’t hurt that the real damage is done.’

‘Sounds like life.’

‘Tell me what happened.’

‘Don’t you remember?’

‘Nothing. I remember nothing. I remember breakfast. That’s it. And then fragments. Noise. Fear.’

‘Fire?’

‘Fear,’ he repeated, his lips fumbling with the sound. ‘Fear.’

They hustled the visitor away, with warnings about tiredness and shock, with assurances that he could come again later. They left Leo to dream and he dreamt of flames and he dreamt of Madeleine. He plunged through the air and into the fire, and Madeleine was with him. ‘I’ll come to hate you, Leo,’ she told him as they fell. He plunged through the fire and into her flesh, so that she enveloped him with her burning. This, he understood, was purgatory,
the purging of the soul in flame, the cleansing of the spirit, the ejaculation of guilt into the fire. They burned together, Madeleine and Leo, and they lived together in the burning, and she hated him.

Later there were David and Ellen, with stark, concerned faces. David talked while Ellen merely sat and folded her hands in her lap and watched him. Dimly Leo understood that she was praying, praying for his recovery, praying for his salvation. The idea brought a painful contortion to his lips and an agonising convulsion of his chest.

‘Are you in pain?’ David asked.

Leo shook his head. What must have looked like a grimace, like a fit of some kind, was laughter.

Later there was a man from the police department, speaking a kind of transatlantic English and frowning as he wrote things down. ‘Was there anything unusual that morning?’ he asked. ‘Did you notice anything out of the ordinary, any strangers around, anything at all?’

‘Why were you there so early?’

‘Do you possess a clock?’

‘Can you describe your movements in the previous twenty-four hours?’

‘Have you ever met anyone from outside the Bible Center, anyone at all?’

‘Did anyone give you anything to carry? Anything at all? A package, a gift maybe?’

‘Have you visited anyone’s house during your time here?’

‘Tell me.’

‘Tell me.’

Later there was a priest. They warned Leo of the priest’s presence as though the man might do some kind of harm. ‘Only if you wish to see him,’ they assured him.

‘Of course. Let him come.’

The priest entered the chamber with the solemn, processional step of a funeral mute: the Frenchman Guy Hautcombe, his hands clasped before him as though ready for some kind of self-defence, the defence of prayer. He sat by Leo’s bed and rested a benevolent and benedictory hand on his shoulder, then withdrew it sharply when Leo winced. ‘Do you feel pain?’ he asked, as though there was a possibility that Leo didn’t.

Goldstaub returned with copies of a newspaper. There were photographs showing the blackened, toothless gums of the windows of the manuscript rooms. There were charred lumps, and glistening puddles. ‘They put the damage at a couple of hundred thousand,’ he said.

‘What do they say?’

He held up the page for Leo to see.
Person or persons unknown
, was the phrase. ‘Why were you there so early?’ he asked. ‘What were you doing so early?’

Leo didn’t know. He knew only the noise and the light, the light of the sun, the light of the fingers of flame reaching out to touch him, Madeleine’s fingers touching his frigid flesh, fingers that scalded.

‘They say there was gasoline,’ said Goldstaub. ‘That’s what the forensic guys are suggesting. Gasoline and mineral oil. And maybe some kind of timing device.’ He folded the newspaper differently and held up another picture: a close-up of the cogs and wheels of a clock, blackened and charred.
Carpe diem
. The alarm clock shrilled in Leo’s ear and he awoke and Goldstaub was gone and there was his mother beside him, his mother’s arms around him, his mother’s flesh enveloping him, his mother’s flesh that became Madeleine’s, her slick suave flesh engulfing his,
engulfing him so that he drowned in it, struggled for life in it, swam out of the flames and lay there on the shore beside her.

Someone else from the police department, a woman this time, a woman with black hair and dark eyes and the sympathetic smile of a nurse. But the same questions, exactly the same questions. ‘Did you meet anyone from outside the Bible Center?’

‘Why were you there so early?’

‘What was the normal time that you began work?’

‘Was there anything unusual?’

‘Tell me. Take your time. Tell me.’

Later doctors talked to him in low tones of graft and granulation, of eschar and necrosis, of antisepsis and debridement. He liked the word
debridement
. He enjoyed its bitter and astringent irony. They injected him with anaesthetic and masked figures bent over his wounds and cut away dead tissue, and he saw Madeleine plunging into a lake of flame, Madeleine who became his mother: not his mother as he remembered her but his mother as a young woman, as naked as a blade.

People came and went: nurses, doctors, one of Hautcombe’s minions, someone languid and thoughtful from the British embassy who reminded him of Jack, who
knew
Jack, of course, knew Madeleine, knew the whole damned story. ‘Terrible business,’ he said. And Calder. Calder wandered round the room, gazed out of the window and talked to the blue sky and the clouds. ‘What happened?’ he asked.

Leo didn’t answer him.

‘They tell me you can’t remember.’

‘No.’

‘They think it might have been those protesters. The Children of God or whatever they’re called. They might have planted some kind of device. They’ve gone, of course, disappeared.’

‘You think that? You think it was them?’

Calder shook his head of silver hair. A vision against the window, a person with an aureole of light around his body. ‘I don’t know.’ He turned away from the window and looked at Leo. He didn’t like the look of the patient, you could see that by his expression. Leo understood. He knew what he was like because he had asked one of the nurses to bring a mirror. She hadn’t wanted to and he had demanded that she do what he say, and she had said that it was orders, and then she had disobeyed the orders and brought the mirror for him to look. He was like a leper, with running sores. He was like one of the creatures whom Christ had cured. His flesh was swollen black and mauve and crimson. His hair was a charred stubble, growing in patches like weeds in a parched field, the Potter’s Field perhaps.

‘What do you think?’ Calder asked as he watched Leo, and his eyes were narrowed, as though by that means he might descry the truth.

‘I don’t know what I think.’

Calder shook his head. ‘The sprinklers didn’t work. Can you believe that? The alarms went off but the sprinklers didn’t work.’

‘I remember the alarms. The noise. I dream the noise.’ Leo smiled painfully at him, turning his head slightly to see Calder better, willing him to believe. Calder was watching expectantly, as though waiting for Leo to discover more down there in the depths of his subconscious. But he wouldn’t discover anything, he knew that. ‘I dream a lot, you know: souls in purgatory.’

Calder’s tone was impatient. ‘A Catholic fiction. I thought you agreed with that.’

‘Didn’t anything survive?’

‘
You
survived. Just. And a copy of most of your transcription, did you know that? Not the last part. I’d copied it on to my own laptop, you see. And there are some photos. Not many, but they’re not bad. We can publish, of course. We
will
publish it. But what will it mean without the material evidence …?’

He left after a while. He gave the impression of having left things unsaid, accusations unuttered, suspicions unvoiced.

Resurrection is not an instant thing. It takes time and pain. It proceeds by small steps and it is measured in millimetres, the millimetres of epithelium and epidermis and dermis. And when pain dies away it is replaced by itching, the ant-crawl of pruritus, the exquisite torture of formication, the sensation of invisible fingers touching, stroking, caressing, perhaps as Madeleine had once touched him, touched the surface of him and through the surface, the very quick of him. Dreams awoke the itch of his love for her. She stood beside the tomb that he had left empty.

Later, days later, they flayed him alive and lifted layers of his skin like parchment from his thigh and laid them on his chest and neck like the priest spreading the corporal on the altar. Later still they buried him beneath anaesthetic, and surgeons worked away with minute instruments to reconstruct the tendons of his hands, to give the claws something to move them. Percentages were noised abroad, the percentages of burn, the percentages of probability, the percentages of success. There was more flaying, more grafting. It was like a snake sloughing off its skin, shuffling its way out of its old integument, shouldering its way out
into a new life where it would no longer have to crawl on its belly and be bruised, but could walk up and down a sterile corridor or sit in a chair and look out of the window at meagre pine trees and a distant view of hills. A life delimited by meals and books, peopled by hushed doctors and nurses and rare visitors, punctuated by the agonies of compression gloves and the small and intimate flexure of the fingers with a physiotherapist watching and advising. The physiotherapist reminded him of Madeleine. Something about the way she smiled, the way she inclined her head. Sometimes he fancied that Madeleine herself might suddenly step forward out of the physiotherapist’s body, slough off her superficial physiotherapist’s skin and stand there before him with that faint and ironical smile.

But the metamorphosis never happened, the transfiguration never took place, the physiotherapist remained immutably herself.

He was summoned to the official inquiry. The doctors didn’t want him to be moved. ‘Grafts need time to take,’ they said. But eventually they assented. It was like a day release from prison, the shuffled walk out to a waiting car, the drive through a world that seemed bright and surprising and strangely unfamiliar. Outside the court a clutch of photographers waited. In the courtroom they sat him in a black leather chair and they asked him the same questions that the police officials had asked. More or less he gave the same answers.

The story made the headlines in the local press and merited a few inches of column space in the international newspapers:
BURN VICTIM TALKS OF SCROLL FIRE
, a headline said. Back in the clinic a psychologist came to talk to him, an expert in post-trauma therapy or some such. He wore bright and hopeful colours and talked of grieving, grieving
for parts of your own body just as you might grieve for the dead. ‘What do you dream?’ he asked, crossing his legs and leaning forward to examine the patient, steepling his fingers, fingering his notebook, wishing he could finger the patient’s mind.

Leo dreamt of Madeleine.

Person or persons unknown
was the official verdict of the inquiry.

Later, much later, weeks later, months later, they discharged him from the clinic with assurances of cure and care, with recommendations for the future. He still wore gloves to keep pressure on the scar tissue on the back of his hands. He still used wax to soften the slick skin and did exercises to prevent contractions over the joints and round the neck. They gave him an address in Rome where he could find help with whatever was needed, and he walked out into the world abraded and burnished, shiny with polishing.

Goldstaub drove him to the airport. ‘Why back to Rome?’ he asked.

‘Where else?’

‘England?’

‘But England’s not my home.’ Why should he have been surprised by Rome? The city was Leo’s home, or all he’d got of one. As overwhelmed by history as a bankrupt is overwhelmed by debts, and equally spendthrift, Rome was the perfect place. ‘I’m an exile,’ Leo explained. ‘Rome’s a place of exiles. It always has been, perhaps it always will be. Foreigners and exiles.’

‘And what’ll you do?’

‘I’ve no idea.’

Goldstaub’s last words were these, just as Leo prepared to go through the security checks, just as he got into line for the ritual interrogation about whether you packed the bags yourself and where you were staying during your visit to the country and had you had any contact with people who lived here and that kind of thing: ‘Leo, did you do it?’ he asked.