The Gospel Of Judas

by Simon Mawer

  ‘Of course I realise that.’

  ‘And instead we’re here, meeting like children who don’t quite know what to do.’

  ‘Maybe that’s what we are in a way. Children.’

  ‘You are,’ she said sharply. A sudden anger bubbled up within her. ‘Not me. You are like a child. Retarded, for God’s sake.’

  ‘That’s unfair.’

  She laughed, but there was no humour there. ‘What the hell do you know about unfair? What do you know about having to live with someone whom you know longer love, having to show affection for him, having to tell him how fond you are of him – I use the word fond, do you know that? So that I won’t actually have to lie about love. What do you know about having to let him fuck me when I no longer want it, when I want only you?’ And the word fuck hung there in the air between them like a threat, the scabrous issuing forth from that articulate arabesque of a mouth, while her expression trembled, shook, collapsed slowly into tears.

  ‘I’m sorry, Madeleine,’ he said pointlessly. ‘I’m sorry. God, I’m sorry.’

  She shook her head, as though trying to shake the tears from her eyes. ‘I’ll just disappear from your life if you want that. Do you want that? I’ll just vanish. I won’t give you any trouble, Leo, I promise you that.’

  He felt panic at the idea of her absence, a desperate, physical panic, a shortage of breath, a constriction in the chest, the emotional manifested in the organic, a plain, bewildering attack of panic as though he needed to come up for air, as though stricken by asthma, as though felled by shock. ‘I don’t want you to go,’ he said. ‘I love you, but I don’t understand how I love you. I’ve no practice in the thing, that’s the trouble. I don’t know which way to turn.’

  ‘You can turn to me,’ she said quietly. ‘You can always turn to me.’

  The telephone rang. He knew it would be her. His mind trembled as he lifted the receiver. ‘Pronto? Madeleine?’

  There was a silence.

  ‘Is that Leo? Leo Newman?’ A man’s voice, an American accent.

  ‘Who is this?’

  ‘This is Steve, Leo. Steve Calder. I’m glad I found you.’ There was something about his tone, some wavering hint of shock that was detectable even over the line. ‘You’ve moved, is that right? We called your old number. They said you’d moved and I had one hell of a load of trouble getting them to part with your new number. I’m his long-lost cousin from Wisconsin, I told them. Look, Leo, there have been developments. Pretty big ones, if you want to know. I’ve booked you a flight. I hope your passport is in date. You collect the ticket at the desk at the airport.’

  ‘What the devil are you talking about?’

  ‘Tomorrow morning. Didn’t I say that? There’s a problem? What time is it with you now?’

  ‘Half-past nine.’

  ‘Right. We’re one hour ahead. Look, someone’ll meet you at the airport, is that OK? Tomorrow morning. Your flight leaves at nine your time, that’s ten here.’

  ‘What’s all this about?’

  ‘I told you. There’s some new stuff from En-Mor. Didn’t I say that?’

  ‘You didn’t say anything. What is it? What have they found?’

  There was a silence, a hiatus in the rush of words, a carefully constructed pause. Calder knew how to do these things. At last he said it:

  ‘They’ve found a scroll.’

  Madeleine phoned later, when he had got back from lecturing at the Institute. Her familiar voice, the small hesitations, the slants, the quick, nimble tones, the anguish that lay behind it, and the anxiety: ‘Can we talk, Leo? Can we do that? Jack goes away this evening, Leo. Can I come round tomorrow? I promise … God, I don’t know what I promise. I promise I’ll not pressure you. Nothing like that. But I must see you.’

  ‘I can’t, Madeleine. Not tomorrow.’

  ‘Why not tomorrow?’

  ‘I’ve got to go away.’

  There was a silence on the other end, that strange hollowness on the line when you know someone is listening but saying nothing, a faint electronic questioning. When finally she spoke her voice seemed far away, a small, fragile thing far away. ‘Why so suddenly?’

  ‘This business in Israel. The excavation. They’ve asked me to go.’

  ‘Tomorrow morning?’

  ‘Tomorrow morning. An early flight.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me before?’

  ‘I didn’t know before––’

  ‘Why do you spring it on me like this?’

  ‘I told you––’ Their words trampled across each other, contrasting words clashing where once their same words had echoed.

  The flight to Tel Aviv was half empty. There were a few tourists, a few kids heading for the kibbutz experience, one or two businessmen, a group of orthodox Jews. In the departure lounge he encountered two Dominicans he knew, one of them a scroll scholar, a Frenchman of fierce and sceptical expression who had worked under Father Roland de Vaux at the Ecole Biblique.

  ‘Father Newman.’ The Frenchman examined him critically, as he might have examined a text; and appeared to find him corrupt. ‘You look as though you are going on holiday. Surely this cannot be so.’

  ‘There’s a meeting,’ Leo told him.

  ‘A meeting? I know of no meeting.’

  ‘It’s a private meeting.’

  They made their way out to the bus. Hautcombe’s French intonation smoothed out the path, made the rough places plain. ‘You are making quite a stir at the moment, aren’t you? These papyri from En-Mor. Perhaps now you will remove your opposition to my reading of 7Q5?’ 7Q5 is a Qumran papyrus fragment that had been identified by Hautcombe and others as being part of an early gospel, a proto-Mark. Most authorities doubted it and doubt it still. Leo doubted it. A mere twenty letters, ten of them damaged, on five fractured lines. An academic quibble over whether the letters nu-nu-eta-sigma could be the middle letters of the name Gennesar, which may be the Gennesaret of Mark 6: 52–53. Things rankle in the minds of celibates. Ideas are your children, for you have no others. Ideas are your contribution to posterity. There had been an exchange of acid letters between Hautcombe and Newman in specialist journals, an embarrassing stand-up row during a conference of papyrologists in Switzerland.

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Leo in a conciliatory tone. ‘But perhaps it doesn’t matter any longer.’

  The bus drove them far across the airport to a distant hardstanding where the Tel Aviv plane stood, corralled by two police vehicles and an armoured car. The laughter of the orthodox Jews rang inside the cabin as the passengers took their seats. ‘They want to show that they are used to this kind of thing,’ Hautcombe said as he and Leo shuffled down the aisle. ‘Searches and questions, police and guns. They want to celebrate the fact that the Promised Land can only be gained by blood and sweat and tears.’

  ‘Isn’t that our line as well?’

  They took off into a spring sky. And as the plane climbed up over the Mediterranean the chaos of Leo’s life in Rome receded, thoughts of Madeleine diminishing as though fading along lines of perspective towards some far vanishing point. In the seat beside him the French priest turned to reading his breviary. Outside the icy wind of 30,000 feet howled across a glittering silver desert.

  When he emerged from the arrivals section at Lod airport he found a familiar figure waiting for him beyond the barrier.

  ‘Remember me?’ the man said.

  ‘Patron saints,’ Leo replied.

  ‘You got it. Hole in one. Saul Goldstaub.’ He held out a heavy paw to be shaken. When Leo had last seen him the man had been wearing collar and tie, sitting awkwardly at the Brewers’ dinner table; now he was absurd in shorts and sandals, with a straw hat that would not have looked out of place on a croquet lawn. The T-shirt stretched tight across his belly was embellished with the slogan THE CONTENTS OF THIS PACKAGE ARE KOSHER.

  For a moment Leo toyed with the possibility that this was all some ridiculous plot of Madeleine’s. ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘I�
�m with WBC now,’ the man explained. ‘Press and public relations.’

  ‘What a strange coincidence.’

  ‘Not strange at all. You know I once did an article on the human nexus?’

  ‘What’s nexus?’

  ‘Nexus, plexus, sexus,’ the man said, incomprehensibly. ‘Here, let me take your bag.’ They walked to the car park, Goldstaub prattling away. Spring in Rome, it was summer in Israel, the light burning hot and white outside the airport buildings and cicadas shrieking from amongst the agave plants. ‘You see, there’s this one professor in Boston who has demonstrated that everyone in the developed world is linked to everyone else through a maximum of about six acquaintances.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So there’s nothing at all strange about you and me coming up against each other like this. Happens all the time. It’s this professor’s theory of the human nexus.’

  ‘So tell me what the excitement is all about,’ Leo asked as he climbed into the car beside Goldstaub. ‘What’s all this secrecy?’

  But Goldstaub only laughed. ‘You’ll find out soon enough. Steve Calder looks like he just got the tablets of the law from Moses himself.’

  * * *

  They left the heat of the coastal plain and drove up to the cool of the city in the hills: Jerusalem, Yerushalem, whose Hebrew name was born out of the Canaanite god Shalem but over the centuries has become conflated with the Hebrew word that everyone knows, the word for the one thing that they have never had there in that dusty corner of the Mediterranean – shalom, peace. Approaching from the west they saw nothing of the Old City, nothing of that view that the prophets wept over. They straggled along behind buses and trucks into the sprawling suburbs. New housing projects were startling white in the sun, their buildings scattered like dice across bare hillsides where before only lizards had licked their chops and shepherds had tended their flocks. ‘How are the Brewers?’ Goldstaub asked. ‘How’s Madeleine?’

  The Brewers were fine, just fine. Madeleine was fine. Her name, her words, danced through Leo’s mind as Goldstaub weaved the car through the traffic.

  ‘You see much of them?’

  ‘A bit,’ he replied evasively. ‘Every now and then.’

  ‘A difficult woman.’ Goldstaub shook his head and laughed, but there wasn’t much humour in it. ‘Crazy. All that patron saint stuff …’ Something obviously rankled with him.

  ‘Just her idea of a joke,’ Leo said. He stared away from Goldstaub, out into the alien streets and guilt seeped through his mind like a thin and corrosive fluid. Keep away from fornication. All other sins are committed outside the body; but to fornicate is to sin against your own body. They passed the bus station and the central markets, and the song of the police siren was loud in the land. Outside the windows of the car soldiers slouched along the pavements toting guns, like children with toys. Your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit. You are not your own property; you have been bought for a price.

  ‘They found a bomb in a supermarket bag,’ Goldstaub said as they slowed for a roadblock. The soldiers peered at them through the windows but it was only Arab cars that were being flagged down to be searched. ‘Round up the usual suspects. Where the hell does that line come from? Round up the usual suspects.’

  ‘Casablanca,’ Leo said.

  ‘How does a priest know a thing like that?’

  ‘A priest watches films.’

  Signs pointed the way to the Old City but Goldstaub turned aside and swept along a boulevard that had been carved through the northern suburbs towards the Arab quarter of east Jerusalem.

  ‘Why can’t you tell me about the find?’ Leo asked.

  ‘Steve would kill me. He wants to keep the surprise all to himself.’ They crossed the desolate spaces where once the city had been divided, the Mandelbaum Gate that was no more, the Damascus Road that still was and always would be. Finally the car emerged from the buildings and Goldstaub brought it to a halt. Before them the ground fell away down a slope of scrub and bare limestone; and there across a mile of luminous air lay the Old City, cupped in the palm of the hills. All the familiar sights: the dark, funereal green of the Mount of Olives running down into the valley, the wall of Suleiman the Magnificent draped like a golden curtain across the stage, and behind the wall the crowded rooftops with the Dome of the Rock rising in the midst of it all like a turquoise jewel box capped with a bubble of perfect gold. This was, perhaps, the view that the prophets had wept over.

  And I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.

  ‘You want to get out and look?’ Goldstaub asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Seen it all before?’

  ‘It’s not that.’

  Goldstaub sniffed. ‘Trouble is, it means too many different things to too many different people. One place cannot bear so much devotion. That’s the trouble.’ He shoved the car into gear and pulled away from the kerb. They turned up the hill and into a driveway past a plaque that announced WORLD BIBLE CENTER.

  The Center was one of those institutions that float like an ocean liner on a flood of funds from the United States. Part museum, part conference centre, part temple, part university, it sat on the slopes of Mount Scopus in east Jerusalem and looked out over the Kidron Valley and the Old City with a modern, complacent smile. It housed a major collection of finds from the Second Temple period, relics from the times of King Ahab, important fragments from the ancient city of Jericho, scrolls from the caves of Qumran. It had access to the latest techniques and the most astute minds; it was one of the front-runners in the world of textual analysis. The building itself was an uncomfortable blend of styles, a pillared and pedimented body that looked something like a courthouse, with, on either side, low-lying wings of a vaguely oriental caste. It had once been an annexe of the Queen Augusta Hospital, later, during the Mandate, a British military establishment. In front of the steps was a sculpture of an open book with the word LOGOS carved across the double page and the motto of the institution inscribed along its base: WORDS WITH KNOWLEDGE. Bougainvillaea climbed over the main entrance. The blossom looked brilliant and festive, but it was the exact colour of priests’ vestments at a funeral.

  So what did Leo Newman find there on the slopes of Mount Scopus, behind the golden limestone walls of the World Bible Center? Understanding? Revelation? Expiation? He found a shaded room that hummed with the faint reverberations of air conditioning, and held within its shadows a soft, aquatic coolness. He found the director himself, his face tanned, his hair a fine silver, his manner that of a business entrepreneur; he found a middle-aged woman with the no-nonsense manners of a nurse, and a tall young man who might have been a doctor. And he found a scroll.

  ‘The day before yesterday, Leo,’ Calder said. The lighting was subdued. It gleamed on his platinum hair. ‘We found it just the day before yesterday. I called you straight away.’

  There were cabinets along the side of the room. There were binocular microscopes and a pair of computer terminals. And in the centre of the room was a table on which the roll lay. Beside it in a second dish lay a filthy rag, like an ancient, stained bandage. ‘It was wrapped,’ the young man said. ‘Wrapped and tied off with some kind of twine. We’re sending pieces of the cloth for radiocarbon dating, of course. And the bundle was inside a jar. The jar is still at the site.’

  Leo peered at the roll. It looked like a dried-out piece of turd, like something excreted from the bowels of history, from the fundament of the earth, which is the Valley of the Dead Sea. He peered at the frayed edges, at the dumb, blank verso. ‘Well?’

  ‘It’s the first literary papyrus ever recovered from the Dead Sea area,’ the woman added. She was called Leah, Leah the daughter of Laban and wife of Jacob. Was she, Leo wondered irrelevantly and absurdly, the plain-looking one of two sisters, the other called Rachel? ‘When we opened the cloth we found that the first sheet was fragmented. It had come detached from the rest of the scroll. But
we have all the pieces and it seems there are no significant lacunae.’

  ‘You’ve read it?’

  ‘Koine is not my specialism,’ she replied.

  ‘But you could read it?’

  ‘More or less. There were some problems, but I could get the sense.’

  Calder spoke. ‘Leo,’ he said portentously, ‘this may be the greatest text discovery there has ever been. It could make the Dead Sea Scrolls look like a picnic in the Garden of Eden.’

  ‘Why? What the devil is it?’

  The little group had gathered round. They were like a medical team gathering round a patient in a hospital ward. Almost as though delivering a fatal X-ray, the young man leaned across and placed a sheet of glass on the table beside the scroll, a sandwich of glass, two pieces held together with black tape. In between the panes were eight fragments of papyrus. They made a crude jigsaw, the edges in approximate juxtaposition like a collage assembled out of old, discoloured fragments of newsprint. ‘The first page,’ he said. ‘Have a look.’

  Leo sat. He turned the glass towards him. Greek cursive script straggled across the pieces, leaping brightly from one fragment to another along the line of the fibres, the strokes of lampblack almost fresh despite their two thousand years’ entombment. ‘Different script, different hand from the other En-Mor fragments,’ he said. You learn to remember hands. You get to know them as you might recall your own mother’s, the particular shape, the idiosyncrasies, the quirks. He glanced up at them. ‘It’ll not be easy. I’ll need time.’

  ‘All the time you need,’ said Calder. The others of the group were silent, as though their collective breath was held.

  Leo began to read. He adjusted the light over the plate, put on his reading glasses and began to trace the lines of script with his finger, like a child reading the Torah at a bar mitzvah ceremony, tracing out the holy scripture with a yad, a silver pointer that is made in the form of a pointing hand, for the word of the law is too precious to be defiled by human touch.