by Simon Mawer
It is Youdas son of Simon of Keriot known also as Youdas the sicarios who writes this, he read, and he writes that you may know this to be true.
He glanced up at them, at the girl called Leah in her sharp white blouse and blue skirt, at Goldstaub looking ridiculous in T-shirt and shorts, at Calder with his expansive smile, at the young man called David, who smiled nervously from the background, perhaps just as his namesake had smiled at the giant Goliath as they confronted one another in the Valley of the Terebinth. Then he looked back at the papyrus and read through the lines again, almost in case he had made some absurd error:
It is Youdas son of Simon of Keriot known also as Youdas the sicarios who writes this and he writes that you may know this to be true.
Youdas, Judas. Somewhere within Leo’s skull a voice called: Who is worthy to open the scroll? Absurdly, for there could be no doubt, he read over the words a third time. Judas.
Had he always been dreading a moment like this, Leo wondered, ever since his first plunge headlong into the warm ocean of belief? Had he always feared that, as soon as he teased at the words that made up his faith, the whole fabric would unravel? Names, and the meaning of names. Judas Iscariot. He has always been a problem, has Judas. Even his name, being part patronymic – Judas Is’Qeriyot, Judas from Kerioth – and part nickname – Judas Sikarios, Judas the knife, even his name is a problem. And here was this scrap of papyrus crowning the academic debate with a simple pun.
‘Is this some kind of joke?’ Leo asked.
‘It’s as serious as sin, my friend.’
‘And who else has seen it?’
‘No one but us. The archaeologists did no more than recover it, just two days ago as I told you. As you know, any palaeographic finds are coming directly to us. You’re the first …’ Calder hesitated, the sentence incomplete.
‘The first what?’
‘The first from the other side.’ He smiled. The expression sat loosely on his face, as though it might easily slip off and reveal the embarrassment behind it. ‘The first Catholic.’
Leo turned back to the page. The motion was everything, the act of turning seemed to occupy his whole body to the exclusion of any thought or any emotion. Merely to act was enough. He called for paper and pencil and then read slowly and methodically down to the end, transcribing as he went. He skipped some dubious readings, went back and revised, crossed out, erased, rewrote. He took three hours, while Leah moved around in the background, bringing him a glass of water when he was thirsty, and a sandwich when he was hungry, and her view of an occasional doubtful reading when he asked. Goldstaub came and went, Calder looked in from time to time; no one else stepped into the room. He could hear sounds outside, the coming and going of the Institute, the slamming of a door down the corridor, vehicles manoeuvring in the driveway, a radio playing in the distance, but none of this deflected him from the text:
I write for the Jews (of the dispersion?) … the Hellenes and those that live in (Asia?), and for the God-fearers (theosebeis?) amongst the nations (ethne) that they may know the truth about Yeshu the Nazir that he was a branch (blastos) of the family of Mariam that took power to Israel from the hands of the Gentiles that was destroyed by Herod that he died and did not rise and I myself witnessed the body in its corruption …
He took a deep breath and looked round. Calder and Goldstaub had come in, sensing perhaps that he had reached the end. David and Leah were watching him impassively as though expecting a judgement.
‘It’s a forgery,’ he told them. ‘A piece of propaganda. Early propaganda, of course, but propaganda nevertheless.’
Calder wore an expression of quiet satisfaction. ‘It’s a first-century site,’ he said. ‘You know that. We’ve got coins of the Jewish revolt.’
‘It’s earlier than the Bar-Kochba papyri,’ David added, referring to one of the most implausible chances of his specialisation, the survival intact of certain letters from the leader of the second and final Jewish revolt, the Son-of-a-Star himself. ‘I’m certain of that. This is first century.’
‘It’s forgery,’ Leo repeated. ‘It must be.’
7
Leo didn’t sleep that night. He needed no nightmares. Inured to solitude, he had never felt so lonely in his life. He lay in bed – an anonymous hotel bed with a mattress as hard as in a monk’s cell – and he battled with the text that he had deciphered. The words ran through his mind, driven by their own impetus, pulled and pushed by his manipulations. He listened to them and found nothing wanting – he believed them, and believing them he found the remainder of his beliefs (a fragile fragment of what had been) crumbling to dust. Maybe he could hide behind academic caution; perhaps for the rest of his life he could erect barricades of learned reticence, could argue and debate like the Pharisees in the Temple, could twist this way and that, posing trick questions, finding pat answers just as had been done with the Shroud of Turin, for example. But he knew. The papyrus had about it an awful, dull truth. It convinced by its plainness. He felt an awful void around him. The refuge he had learned to seek over the years – the refuge of prayer – was vacant.
Our Father, if there is a father, who art in heaven, if there is a heaven, hallowed be they name, if you have a name …
He abandoned prayer as though it was a sinking ship and found himself seeking comfort elsewhere, in the memory of Madeleine Brewer. Bereft of spiritual comfort, he searched for material comfort, the fugitive, evanescent comfort of the flesh.
Goldstaub came early in the morning, before dawn, when the air was still cold. ‘You look as though you’ve been dragged out of bed with a hayfork,’ he said. ‘The mattress too hard for you? I thought you guys were all about mortification of the flesh.’
‘These days the flesh is out,’ Leo told him wryly. ‘These days it’s mortification of the mind.’
They drove through still dark, silent streets, a place where the ghosts were at liberty. The walls of the Old City were shadows blocked against a lightening sky, the Dome of the Rock was dull as lead. They drove down into the Kidron Valley, the Land Rover’s headlights cutting a chalky swath through the darkness. Leo felt a strange detachment, as though this was an absurd dream pasted on to his normal life, a grey and colourless she’ol from which he would soon awaken. He would get up. He would wash and dress and have breakfast. He would make his way to the Pontifical Institute; he would celebrate mass in the chapel; he would give a morning lecture on the Development of the New Testament Canon; he would continue his work on the forthcoming publication of another of the En-Mor papyri. A life would continue as a life was planned to continue from days long ago in the seminary when his tutors had identified in him a certain dogged application to the trivia of language, an obsession with New Testament Greek, a quiet horror of the intrusive nature of parochial work.
He thought of Madeleine; and at the thought of her something inside him gave a small convulsion, the emotional manifesting itself in the physical; a disturbing, subversive thing.
‘You fallen asleep?’ Goldstaub asked.
‘I’m awake.’
‘Daydreaming? What does a priest daydream about?’
‘I was thinking of Madeleine.’
‘Her?’
Why had he mentioned her? She smiled at him from memory, Madeleine holding out comfort of a kind, the comfort of a fellow human being to replace the terror of the abyss. ‘How all this would affect someone like her.’
‘If the scroll is true,’ Goldstaub reminded him. ‘You called it a forgery.’
They drove beneath the silent hulk of a tank – a memorial to the Six Day War – and passed the olive trees of the Garden of Gethsemane where, at the dead of night, in the reign of darkness, Judas had led the cohort of Roman soldiers to arrest the man called Jesus. And Leo summoned up the words from deep inside him, from a small hard core of disbelief that had always been there, throughout childhood, throughout the years of training, throughout the years of fulfilled vocation. ‘It’s true,’ he said. ‘In my heart of hearts
I fear it’s true.’
Goldstaub nodded. ‘I thought so,’ he said. ‘I thought so from the start. When you first saw the thing you looked like the guy who’s gone into the clinic with strep throat and come out with lymphoma.’
They drove on in silence. The road led round the Mount of Olives beneath the village of El-Azariye – which is the village of Lazarus, which is the village of Bethany where Jesus was anointed before his triumphal entry into the city. From Bethany it dropped down past the Inn of the Good Samaritan with refreshments and holy pictures and camel for photographs, down into the bowels of the earth, down into a dawn of grey and silver and flushed rose where the Dead Sea, the Salt Sea, lay like beaten pewter beneath a high shield of cloud. On the far side of the water, drawn in two dimensions against the light, were the Hills of Moab, where Moses had looked across at the Promised Land that he was never permitted to reach. Above the hills dawn bled through like blood and lymph from a wound.
Down on the valley floor a sign pointed left to JERICHO, THE OLDEST CITY IN THE WORLD and right to nowhere. Goldstaub turned the Land Rover right, skirting the bluff on which the ruins of Qumran lie and the cliffs where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found. A battered, salt-rusted sign pointed the way to En-Gedi and Masada. The vehicle drove between the sullen sea and the crumbling ramparts of rock that are the ridges and gullies of the wilderness of Judaea, a place of lizards and jackals and prophets, a place where the man called Jesus passed his forty days and forty nights amidst the terrors of solitude. And as they drove there was a sudden disturbance in the morning light, a sudden intrusion of the twentieth century into this inert and timeless landscape, a sudden sound above the whine of the Land Rover’s transmission – two jet fighters sweeping down the valley, trailing their engine sound behind them like coat-tails. The aircraft tilted as they passed by, keeping to the Israeli side of the border, aware no doubt of the Jordanian radar watching them all the way. The Star of David was visible on their fuselages. Leo thought apocalyptic thoughts. Who is worthy to open the scroll? he thought as the aircraft shrank to mere specks on the sheen of the morning.
‘Not far to go,’ said Goldstaub. A withered, parched landscape, a place of scrolls that was itself the colour of scrolls: dun, the colour of desiccation. They went on past the brief flowering of En-Gedi, where David hid from Saul and cut a lock from the jealous king’s hair, and fifteen minutes later they reached Masada. For a few deceptive moments the grim mesa – where Herod had built a pleasure palace, where Mariamne the Queen had once walked the terraces to admire the view, where the last of the Zealots held out against the Roman legions and finally committed mass suicide rather than surrender – was tinged with a delicate, coralline beauty by the dawn light. On the left was Lisan, the Tongue, the salt flats where the waters of the Jordan finally evaporate into the languorous desert air. Beyond was only the salt waste where once the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah had stood.
Ten minutes later Goldstaub brought the Land Rover to a halt. ‘This is it.’ A track led off to the right. There was a barrier manned by a couple of bored soldiers. A sign said that the place was called En-Mor and a notice announced that the area was under the control of the Antiquities Authority. A rough ridge rose up to the plateau, a skeletal limb of the wilderness of Judaea.
‘This your first visit?’ Goldstaub asked.
Leo peered through the window, craned to see up the slope, up into the gullies. ‘That’s right.’
The soldiers exchanged some words with Goldstaub and then raised the barrier to let them through. The vehicle lurched off the road and Goldstaub changed down into low range for the long, slow climb from shore level, up the side of the ridge, winding up like the snake path to Masada itself, clambering over tortuous rocks. Yellow dust billowed behind them. There was dust on the windows, dust on the dashboard, dust on his arms and on his lips. For dust thou art and unto dust shalt thou return, Leo thought. Who came here at the pivot of history, he wondered? Who was it who stumped up this thorny slope with a bag of scrolls on his back?
Finally the vehicle breasted a horizon and reached the summit of a narrow bluff. They had arrived at the excavation camp. There was an army truck parked on a cleared area and a couple more Land Rovers. Beyond was a row of tents and a large marquee with the sides furled up. A group of volunteers was already moving around the dig, youths in T-shirts and shorts, mammary girls burned and blistered by the sun, boys with unkempt hair and rudimentary beards. The place had the atmosphere of a youth camp. Someone was at a bucket washing potsherds and distributing them to wooden boxes that had once held oranges. A radio announced the news in Hebrew. In the background a generator throbbed into the morning air. The excavation itself was little beside all this: a few lines of wall footings in the dust below the camp with surveyors’ stakes laid out in a grid.
As Leo climbed out of the vehicle the director came over. He owned one of those glum, monosyllabic Jewish names – Dov. Dov Agron. His eyes lit up when Goldstaub introduced Leo. ‘Father Newman, that right?’
‘Leo will do.’
As they shook hands Agron’s grip was dry and tough. His voice was a hybrid of accents, part Hebrew, part American, with an undertone of central Europe. ‘You should have been here earlier. You’ve seen the scroll?’
‘I’ve had a look.’
‘Any ideas?’
Leo shrugged noncommittally. ‘It’ll take time.’
The man nodded. ‘I mean, the first fragments were important enough, but this is something else. What do you reckon, eh? Early Christian is it, like the other stuff?’
‘Perhaps.’
They clambered round the dig while Agron pointed out the features, the storerooms, the living quarters of whoever it was who had occupied this place of dust and rock, a dull place squatting on its small promontory in the wilderness, a kind of hell under the sun. One of the volunteer diggers looked up from her labour as they passed by. Her skin was battered by the sun and the wind. She wiped her hair away with the back of her hand and called out to them in an Australian accent: ‘Over here.’ They climbed down over the low masonry to where she knelt in the dust. Her dugs hung loose in her shirt as she bent to brush dust aside, and Leo remembered Madeleine in the Church of San Crisogono: the same gesture, the same sly glimpse, the same potent sense of womanhood. Time for your fish lecture. But this time, there on the ground, exposed like a guilty secret by the Australian girl’s hand, lay a bronze coin.
Agron picked the thing up, blew on it and handed it to Leo. ‘The Tenth Legion, Fretensis. Judaea Capta. We’ve found a couple of dozen so far.’
Leo peered at the bronze disk, at the familiar engraving: the Jewish woman seated at the foot of a palm tree with her head in her hands and the Roman soldier standing over her. What woman with ten drachmas, he thought, would not, if she lost one, light a lamp and sweep out the house and search thoroughly till she found it? He handed the coin back. ‘So what was this place before the Romans came?’
Agron shrugged. ‘That’s the key question, isn’t it? Zealots? Somebody who got out of Masada before the end of the siege? Refugees from Qumran? Who knows?’ His voice trailed away into the uncertainties of excavation. ‘You can always make up a convincing story, that’s the problem. If you are Arthur Evans at Knossos you can even rebuild a site in your own image. Who knows about this one? Judging by the papyrus finds they were some kind of early Christian sect. You should know about that better than me.’
Leo shrugged. They went along the ridge to the uppermost part of the dig where the ordered stones faded away into the rubble of the hillside. Agron pointed up the slope to the cliff that blocked off access to higher ground. ‘Up there,’ he said. ‘The cave.’
A spoil of boulders had spilt out from the cliff like the waste from a mine working. Round to the right, perched over the gully, there was a dark cleft in the rock, bearded with scrub and thorn. ‘Pure luck,’ Agron said. ‘There was an earth tremor not long after we started the excavation. Common enough in these parts. It caused a rock
fall and exposed the cave …’
They clambered up to the entrance, Agron leading the way, Goldstaub huffing and puffing at the back. They had to crouch to get into the cave, but the space inside was high enough for them to stand. There was a cable running up from the generator in the camp below and the darkness was punctuated by the light from half a dozen lamps. Three volunteers were at work there, picking through the debris of dust and rubbish like fastidious tramps at a dustbin. Their shadows loomed vast across the ragged ceiling. They barely took any notice of the visitors, just muttered amongst themselves as though reciting some arcane religious liturgy.
‘We reckon that the Romans found this place when they took the camp,’ Agron explained. ‘There’s no real evidence, but that’s what seems likely. They found the cave and these jars inside and they smashed everything to pieces, tore the documents up, that kind of thing. Set light to some of them. And then they just pushed off. And that’s the stuff we’ve been getting over the last few months. Just fragments.’
‘And the scroll?’
Agron smiled. This was his moment. This was the thing that would promote him into the hall of archaeological fame. ‘Over there. It was hidden away and the soldiers must have missed it. We missed it for weeks as well. It’s been sitting there for almost two thousand years.’
He led the way to an opening in the back of the cave, a narrow cleft in the rock that went through into a further chamber. They had to get down on hands and knees. Leo felt the weight of rock above him, the weight of rock all around him, pressing on him. Panic rose in his throat. Rock of Ages cleft for me, let me hide myself in thee, he thought. But there was no hiding, not even here in the breathless bowels of the earth.
Just ahead of him Agron clambered to his feet. The inner chamber was just high enough to stand in with your knees bent and your head tucked down into your shoulders. Two figures crouched over a pit in the floor of rock. They had the only lamp. The light glowed beneath their figures like the light in a Caravaggio painting, light issuing from what they were examining. Leo peered over Agron’s shoulder. There was a little assembly of pieces in a crevice: the curved lip of a jar and shards of brown pottery like fragments of broken cranium. Battling with panic, he tried to concentrate on Agron’s words.
