The Priest's Madonna (33 page)

She took it, but did not bring it to her mouth. “He loved you,” she said.

“Shh,” Miryam said. Gently, she helped Yeshua’s mother lift the ladle to her lips and said, “Drink.”

At the tomb, the men anointed the body with myrrh and aloe, wrapped him with linens, and laid him down. When they rolled the stone over the opening of the tomb, Miryam felt as if it rolled across her own body, crushing bone and organ, preventing breath.

O
N THE MORNING after Shabbat, Miryam of Magdala rose at dawn and went to the tomb. When she arrived, she saw that the rock had been rolled back. She thought first of Elazar and was immediately fearful, imagining Yeshua, skin a ghastly pallor, emerging weak and monstrous into the dawn. She approached the tomb with trepidation. But when she looked inside, she saw no body, only the strewn linens that had covered him. The tomb smelled still of myrrh and aloe.

Who has done this?
she thought.
Who has taken him?
She rushed into the garden, thinking only of his missing body, her eyes senseless to the beauty of the dew that silvered the new flowers. But she was stopped in the garden by a voice that called her name with the passing breeze on her cheek. She breathed, listened, and then, with the fresh morning air, a rapture penetrated her heart and enlarged it beyond all containment. It seemed to fill the whole of her body and mind, making the blood beat at her fingertips and the inner drums of her ears. “Yeshua,” she whispered, and heard, within that glorious expanse of her new heart, his response: “Miryam.”

She saw him then, not with her eyes, but instead with this sudden great heart: Yeshua wholly transformed. He was not embodied—he was instead a radiance, a shifting emanation of light that took shape now as the glint of silver in a dewdrop perched on the lip of a petal, now as a flash of brilliance cast across the surface of a wet stone, now again as the shimmer on a moth’s wing, glinting and fluttering with the speed of a thought, and now once more as an elliptical flame, bending and twisting as in a wind.

“Rabboni,” she cried. “Wait. Wait!”

The patterned light dissipated into the bright morning. She cried out once more. “Where are you? Where have you gone? Don’t go!” But she saw nothing more. The breeze caressed her cheek.

When the wind stopped, Miryam looked around, noting now the beauty of the garden: the orchids and the meadow-saffron, the cyclamen, the lilies and the irises, the milk-vetch and the rock rose, the panicles of henna, and the almond tree with its white blossoms, all jeweled with quivering drops of dew. She breathed deeply, catching the sweet scent of the wet narcissus petals and the heady urgency of the mandrake, and exhaled, letting the breath shudder from her lungs. She still felt her swollen heart, its pleasant pressure against her throat, her chest, her belly, even her thighs, the spreading peace that came with each pulsation. It was the peace she’d felt when he first healed her, that astonishing sense of newness, the unfamiliarity with herself. And she felt the knowledge, newly born within her, as evident as the empty tomb, that she was with child.

W
E RETURNED TO the crypt night after night. Bérenger was careful not to touch me, not even casually, not even in the protective darkness of the church. I gathered he regretted our indiscretion, and though I was sorry, I did not blame him.

Our pace in opening the caskets was rapid. I feared we would reach the little Berthelot coffin and the book of visions I felt sure was hidden inside within the week, and that Bérenger might set fire to it there and then, without even allowing me to handle it, so convinced he was of its poisonous qualities. Once again, I considered telling him Madame’s story in full, explaining her family history and her rightful claim to the book in the hopes that he might see reason. But he had never harbored kind feelings toward Madame. He suspected it was she who had reported him to the State so many years earlier. And, perhaps because of his suspicion, he tended to take the point of view that she had been at least partially responsible for the mayor’s suicide. It was not likely he would soften his stance for her benefit.

So I had to find the book before he did. It would be difficult, for he seemed intent on opening every casket as quickly as possible. The sight of so much treasure energized him; he barely slept.

I thought, then, of involving Madame. If I could tell her where the coffin was located, and instruct her how to enter the tomb, she might be able to search for the book alone while I kept Bérenger occupied with some other task.

I went to Madame the following day, a few days after Christmas Eve. Mme Siau opened the door as usual, and asked me to wait while she called for Madame. Mme Laporte came to the door a moment later dressed in a black gown, her face washed and rested.

“Hello,” I said. “You look well.”

“Thank you, Marie. I feel better. You look a bit peaked, yourself.”

“I haven’t been sleeping.”

“Come in, please.”

I followed her inside. She guided me to the parlor. Stacked against the far wall were several large crates I had not seen before.

Madame had hardly sat down before I blurted out my news: “I’ve been exploring the tomb the past few nights. With Monsieur
le curé.
”

“Have you?” Madame said. Her face betrayed no expectation. “And what have you found there?”

“It’s incredible. The bones, all stacked as high as our heads. And the numbers of coffins. Dozens upon dozens! I’ve spotted the one I think belongs to Jeanne Catherine’s son, but we haven’t opened it yet—”

“Opened it?” Her gaze was uncharacteristically judgmental. “You’re not opening them, are you?”

“Well, yes.” My enthusiasm for our project withered.

“What for?”

“To find the book, of course,” I said impatiently. “It must be in the little boy’s coffin. It’s the only place it could be.”

“It seems dreadfully morbid.”

My heart sank. I had never before felt her disapprobation, and it wounded me. I didn’t dare tell her what we’d found in the coffins. “I thought you’d be glad, madame. You wanted to find the tomb. And I thought you hoped to see the book.”

She took my hands in hers. “Marie. You are kind to want to help me. But please, I do not want you to disturb the dead for my sake. The story you’ve told me is enough. Truly. It’s given me a good deal of relief, knowing that my Jeanne Catherine’s tale was honored enough to have been written down. I find I have little desire to read the visions myself. Even if they were to be found. I would rather leave the contents of that book to my imagination.”

I nodded as though I understood. “I thought it might help you. To read what she’d written. It might be a kind of proof.” Though as I spoke, I knew it wouldn’t: a book like that, of one individual’s visions, could never prove anything.

“You’re very kind, Marie. But I don’t require proof any longer, thank goodness. What I require is peace.” We regarded each other for a long moment before she spoke again.

“And now I have something to tell you. I am going to be moving. For good this time. To Paris.”

“No!” I shouted, surprising both of us with the force of the exclamation. Madame made a small leap backward in her seat. “Oh, no, madame,” I said again, more quietly. “Excuse me. But I would miss you so.”

“I will miss you, Marie. Very much. But it’s time for me to go. There’s little keeping me here now.”

I swallowed, feeling the sadness collect in my throat.

“I would like to leave you with something, Marie. A gift to remember me by. I would like you to have my library.”

I hesitated, amazed. “Madame,” I whispered. “All those books?”

She nodded, delight in her eyes. “Paris has more books than I will ever be able to read. And it would please me so to know the books were in your care. Will you accept them?”

“I’m honored, Madame. I don’t know what to say.”

“Of course, I realize it may be hard for you to find the space for them. You won’t need to move them from the castle for some time yet—I don’t plan to sell it immediately. In the meantime, I thought Monsieur
le curé
might be able to build you a library of your own to house them, since he takes such pleasure in building.”

“Yes,” I answered gratefully. “Yes, I imagine he might do that.”

I left the château that day in a pensive mood, saddened by the impending loss of Madame, humbled by her great gift as well as by her wisdom. She was mistress of herself, more so than anyone I knew: she knew her own demons and dealt severely with them. Likewise, she understood the nature of pleasure: how the imagined, anticipated event was often far more rich and rewarding than the event itself. And she had suffered so. Perhaps it was true, then, that suffering was a necessary predecessor to wisdom.

T
WO NIGHTS LATER, Bérenger and I reached the little Berthelot coffin. I held my breath as Bérenger forced open the fluted lid, eager to snatch the book from the coffin before he could grab it and afraid, too, of what more we might find within. I had dreamed that afternoon, in an hour of stolen sleep, of a lifelike corpse with skin as smooth as Pichon’s and eyelashes as long, darkening the full cheeks with a filigree of shadows. But there was no undecayed flesh here, no undefiled arm to reach out of the grave and circle its slender fingers around my wrist. Nor did I glimpse any book. There was only bone: a small skeleton draped with bands of tattered gray cloth. Emboldened by disappointment and relief, I picked up the skull. Its lightness was remarkable. On its left side, just above where the ear would have been, I noticed a slight indentation about the size of a horse’s hoof. I laid it down again, and as I did, the knobs of vertebrae clacked delicately, one against the other.

In the end, we opened all the tombs, and even dug a few feet into the massive pile of dirt that blocked the bottommost room, but found no evidence of the book of visions nor of any ancient passageway. Only more earth, more rubble, more dirt—and more wealth. Bérenger worked with the same driven meticulousness that he used when planning and supervising the construction in the church. He steadily opened the tombs, and though he wrote nothing down, I could see him cataloguing each item in his mind as he saw it, making note of its relative worth, the quality of the material, the weight. He had begun to touch the jewelry—only to touch, and he replaced each item just as it was—but his wonder in the age and the fine crafting of some of the items became more and more proprietary. Little by little, these small treasures seemed to be supplanting his thirst for God’s favor.

When we did not find the book in the crypt, we decided to turn to the cemetery, where we wielded our shovels and picks to exhume the graves of the more recent dead, including Jeanne Catherine Berthelot’s. (Inside it, we found a golden bracelet endowed with a large ruby and a skeleton—clean, like her son’s.) We dug in the churchyard cemetery by night off and on over the course of the next year, trying to find an alternative entry into the crypt and hoping, despite all signs to the contrary, that we might still find the book of visions.

Throughout that year my dreams were filled with dirt. Dirt gritty against my palms, in my mouth, sifted into my clothes and hair, lodged beneath my fingernails, settling into the deepening lines of my face. When I woke, I found my sheets silted with dust; when I ate, I crunched grains of sand between my teeth. I drifted through those days—for I slept irregularly, catching a fitful hour or two some nights before going out to dig and then sinking into a deep sleep just before morning—with dirt and dust on my body and my mind. I felt it always on my skin, and despite my most vigorous efforts with a washcloth and basin in the silent predawn, I could not scrub it all off. I saw it everywhere: inside and out, beneath my feet on my way to the grocer’s, clinging to the cloth I swiped over the shelves, in the air as motes turning in a sun ray. I felt it filtering into my lungs when I took a breath. Pulverized rock, bits of skin and bone, decayed flakes of flesh, minuscule pieces of waste, hair, fingernail, dirt, soil, earth, ground, clay, mud, land. I ingested it, I breathed it, I imagined it, I
was
it: I was the dust that would return to dust. Each moment of each day, I knew the eventual fate of my own flesh, my own bones: my eventual grinding down, my disintegration.

Disintegration. A funny word, for it appears to mean the opposite of mixing, of merging, and yet the disintegration of one thing must imply the integration of another. I saw, more clearly than ever, the disintegration of previous wholes: bones, stones, roots, tree trunks, teeth—all ground down and newly integrated into this one thing: the astonishing red-brown dirt.

It was this dirt, I saw, this pitiless, masticating earth, from which the Church strove to save us. Hell was not fire and brimstone—nor unending pain, for pain implied vitality. Hell was the apprehension of this nothingness, the unfeeling sleep of the dead, our own soulless decomposition. What a brutal, unjust end: to live for years, sensing, recoiling at pain and luxuriating in pleasure, dreaming futures, remembering pasts, constructing stories of ourselves that spoke of nobility, strength, hope, and unmet yearning, and finally to have it all cease, to have it come to nothing but dust. It was too cruel a fate to abide.

Yet the alternative seemed equally cruel. Could I really hope for my own soul to persist for eternity? This immaterial assortment of grasping desire, of need and disappointment, of pain, confusion, resentment, self-pity, and, yes, cruelty—could I justly pray for Christ to preserve such a soul? My soul was a burden, a thing just as mortal as my flesh. How could I faithfully ask for God to save such an evil thing, to gather up such a blighted harvest and accept it into his Kingdom? And if his Kingdom housed a store of souls like mine, what sort of a heaven would that be? I believed I should prefer the hell of nothingness to an eternity of human limitation.

But that is not heaven, Bérenger insisted when I confessed my worries to him. Heaven is bliss. Heaven is living in the presence and the sight of God himself. Heaven is to breathe, to drink, to soak, to swim in God’s love for all eternity. There is no place for human failure in heaven.