by Simon Mawer
Magda
Magda pads through the flat. Although she is tall, she treads as softly as a cat. Her feet are long and white, with uneven toes. Sometimes she takes her folder of sketches, occasionally a pile of paintings; more often none of these: just herself. I imagine a bus ride out into the suburbs – some place of ferro-concrete and ill-kempt verges – where she poses in front of a camera in a tawdry makeshift studio, her limbs contorted and splayed so that the lens can see everywhere, pry into every nook and cranny. Knowledge without understanding.
‘Do you want to see?’ she asked, and tossed a magazine across the room at me. Magda’s mag, a lurid, multicoloured creature as cheerful as Christmas wrapping. SUCK ME, it was called. I opened the thing and leafed through the coarse pages. There, sure enough, was Magda: Magda wearing a startling blonde wig and posed in a variety of awkward convolutions across the bed of what seemed to be a cheap hotel; Magda with legs apart, and flesh raw and glistening; Magda showing folds and declivities and delicate ravines; Magda called ‘Krystal, our own Velvet Revolution from the Czech Republic’, but Magda nevertheless. Unmistakable.
‘Disgusting.’ I can hear Madeleine even now. ‘I think’ – that th sound that lingers midway between two fricatives, the dental and the palatal, half th half d, whole Irish – ‘I tdhink that something should be done about it.’ Something? What?
A final turn of the page, and there was the centrefold spread, Magda peering round from behind her buttocks like a housewife opening the back door to the milkman.
She was watching me. ‘What do you say?’ she asked. ‘It pays the rent?’
‘You don’t pay any rent,’ I said.
She laughed.
Magda paints. She watches me when she paints, watches with the narrow possessive gaze of the artist. She watches me as she paints and I watch her as she goes about her ordinary life: Magda sitting naked on a chair, her knees drawn up, varnishing her toenails a funereal black; Magda in the kitchen boiling water for the coffee that she calls Turkish, but isn’t; Magda lying in the bath like a Bonnard woman, her breasts floating like poached eggs in the scum, the froth of pubic hair like seaweed at low tide, kelp in the foam of low tide, dark and mysterious and home to thousands of secrets. Magda is black and white – the black of her hair, the black of her eyes, the black of her lips, and the nude white of her skin. I watch her, and watching her I possess her.
‘You were not always a teacher,’ she said to me one day. Her words had the intonation of a plain statement of fact, not because of unfamiliarity with the language but because she knew that she was right. ‘You were something else.’
‘A priest,’ I told her.
‘I knew. Something else, I knew. Do you say that? Something else?’
‘Yes, you say that.’
‘A priest.’ She shook her head as though she had imagined something, but not that. ‘Katolicky?’
‘Katolicky,’ I agreed.
‘And now you are not.’
‘No.’
Every Sunday, as dutifully as a village girl, Magda goes to church. Round the corner from the palazzo there is an undistinguished baroque church sited on the edge of the ghetto like a watchtower. She walks quietly into the church and slips into one of the pews at the back, and watches, as though consigning everything to memory in the manner of someone playing a parlour game: the plaster saints, the elaborate altars, the dusty gilt of the ceiling, the aged and doddering celebrant, the few old ladies, the occasional young woman with an earnest Evangelical expression; all of this is consigned to memory.
When she gets back from church she paints the scene as an amalgam of things: the dome of the church, the bowed heads, the ornate plasterwork, the priest in his vestments with his arms outstretched as though he is not merely celebrating mass but actually in the throes of crucifixion. And the face is no longer the ancient face of the priest, but mine.
One day walking through a street nearby she saw a monstrance in the window of an antique shop. She happened to have money on her (perhaps she had just been paid for posing beneath the camera lens in the grip of some phallic, faceless man) and so she went in and bought the thing. It stands on the sideboard in the sitting room, a great tarnished brassy sunburst. It appears in many of her paintings floating over the crucified priest like an explosion, the fires of inferno, the holocaust in which the Lamb is sacrificed.
‘My mother went to church,’ she said when I asked her. ‘I think she did not believe, but my father was a Party member and she could make him hate her that way. To go to church was bad for the Party. They asked him questions. Why does your lady go to church? You understand? As soon as he left she didn’t go more.’
‘But you believe?’
‘Believe?’ A shrug of her bony shoulders. ‘I believe there is God. What else can be?’
‘And what does He think of what you do?’
‘I don’t think he care. He does not care much of anything, does He?’
‘I don’t know,’ I answered her. ‘I used to know, but I don’t any longer.’
Then unexpectedly she asked, ‘Are you frightened?’ and I agreed that, yes, I was frightened and the shared fright seemed to please her. ‘I am often frightened,’ she said. ‘But I think that life has to be frightening, and that is why people go to church, to not be frightened.’
‘Something like that.’
‘But you are frightened and you do not go to church.’
‘That’s right.’
In bed that night she crept closer to me and drew my hand between her thighs. ‘Don’t be frightened,’ she whispered. And the warmth of her hair and the touch of her secret flesh, the part that she exposes to the camera without compunction and yet which is entirely hers, the quick of her, the warm mammal focus of her, gave me some kind of comfort. I love her smell. It is a warm, floury smell, the smell of grain and grass underlain with the tang of sweat. Her bones are strong and her flesh doesn’t have the soft, yielding quality of Madeleine’s. Magda’s flesh is tough. Two women with the same name but at the opposite end of every spectrum of femininity that there may be.
Two bus rides across the city and a walk down the Via Merulana and there we are. She recognises the type of place well enough: a narrow defile between tawdry, jerry-built flats, something that would have been familiar to her from the suburbs of any city in Moravia. The products of fascism and the products of the People’s Republic are very much the same; it is the banality of terror that is so striking. ‘Where is this?’ Magda asks. ‘Where are we Leo?’ The uncertain air of amusement which she has brought to the journey gives place to one of tacit fear, like a bright joke suddenly turned sour.
‘We are in Via Tasso,’ I tell her. ‘Number one hundred and fifty-five, Via Tasso,’ I add, to get things exact. Does she recognise the name? I doubt it. History for Magda began a mere decade ago.
The woman in the ground-floor office is earnest and helpful, like a nurse administering to the sick. There is a small library where we can consult the documents. There is a booklet in English. We can go up to the next floor whenever we wish.
‘What is this, Leo?’ Magda asks again. ‘What is this place?’
I don’t tell her. Perhaps I want to imbue her with a tremor of disquiet. Perhaps I want to make her afraid.
‘Tell me,’ she asks. ‘What is it?’
We go silently up to the next landing, to the dull doors, to the patina of grime and the smell of disinfectant. Council flats, that is how it seems. It reminds me of the couple of years I spent in a parish in south London, before the texts claimed me. Linoleum floors and tasteless flock wallpaper, narrow corridors and exiguous rooms and a shared kitchen and bathroom.
‘What is it, Leo?’ Magda repeats as she joins me at the front door, where you might ring the bell and the woman of the house might appear, her hair bound up in a scarf, her body bound up in a floral apron, slippers on her feet. But no one guards the entrance: as though something has happened, some domestic disaster perhaps, the door to the flat sta
nds open.
‘What is it?’ Magda looks in at the narrow corridor and the dull rooms, the ventilation grills above the lintels, the spy-holes in the doors. ‘What is it?’ she repeats, but she understands well enough.
Uninvited we step over the threshold. No nice cup of tea here. No peas for your tea, no sausage and mash or whatever it is. One of the rooms, the one facing the door, is windowless. Oh, they were all windowless then, but that was because the windows were bricked up and clever little ventilators fitted to the outside walls so that the inmates would not actually suffocate. But the room facing the door is narrow and bare and windowless by nature – a mere store room, a box room, what is called in Italian un ripostiglio. ‘In there,’ I tell her, gesturing. ‘In there.’
The room is two metres wide by five long. The floor is bare. The walls are plastered with thick blue paint, an ugly, utility colour. Magda stands in the doorway, looking in reluctantly, not knowing what she might see.
‘Look.’ Scratches of desperation and defiance are gouged out of the paintwork. I know the place well and know where each word is, each phrase, each pious hope or pathetic testimony. ‘Look.’
She steps in and looks where I point – at the Greek word IΨΘYZ, fish.
Time for your fish lecture.
‘And there.’
A date; a scratched calendar; a curse; a message: Dio c’è. Camerati non dimenticarmi. There is a God. Comrades, don’t forget me.
‘And over here.’ White plaster showing through the scrapings, like flesh showing through a wound, like bone showing through a burn: Addio pianista mia. Non serbo rancore. Un bacio Francesco.
The reality of the text, at one and the same time evidence and witness.
Addio pianista mia. Non serbo rancore. Un bacio Francesco.
What do you scratch such things with? Your fingernail? The buckle of your belt? No, they’d take that. A paper clip found amongst the dust in the corner of the cell? A nail from your shoe? What?
‘What does that mean?’ Magda asks. She grabs at a word, one word amongst many, the word made flesh. ‘Serbo? What does it mean? Serb?’
‘Rancore is rancour, grudge.’
‘What is that?’ There is an edge to her voice, a brittle fracture.
‘Non serbo rancore. I don’t bear any grudge. I don’t blame you, you understand?’
She looks at the words scratched into the plaster. ‘Who was Francesco?’ she asks. ‘Pianist, who is pianist?’ And she shakes with the terror of it all, the enclosure, the entrapment, the sense that here the past presses onto the present and allows no one any freedom. ‘I know what this place is,’ she says softly. ‘This place is prison.’
Magda paints just as I knew she would paint: Leo crouched in the corner of a blue room. Scratches on the wall, pictures and words in grey paint. Leo in prison.
13
At the World Bible Center in Jerusalem they worked on the scroll with the infinite care and patience of surgeons picking at someone’s brain. A video camera stood behind them and peered over their shoulders as mute witness to the events. There was the woman called Leah who had come from the Israel museum; there was the man called David Tedeschi, who had worked on the papyrus collection at Duke University and was one of the foremost experts in papyrus conservation – foremost in a world in which there are no more than a few dozen practitioners. ‘This is unique,’ they murmured to each other as they humidified the scroll with a gentle mist of water and picked at the edge with forceps and lifted it up to peer within. With care, with infinite care, they unfolded the papyrus as one might unravel a winding-sheet to discover the corpse inside, the secrets of two millennia. ‘Just amazing,’ they said as they worked. ‘Fantastic.’
The banality of words.
The opened scroll resembled a piece of coarse cloth, some three metres long. Gnawed, bitten, chewed at by mites or by time, eaten away in places and blurred and damaged in others, yet it was substantially whole. There were uncertainties, there were lacunae, but the text was more or less entire – squads of regimented letters without pause, without break, with barely a hesitation, marching down the length of the scroll as though they had been ruled by an unseen hand. Sixteen sheets beaten and glued together. An average of twenty letters per line and twenty-four lines per page. Sometimes a slight space seemed to indicate the start of a sentence. Otherwise there were no punctuation marks, no accents, no breathings. The language was the plain, muscular language of the eastern Mediterranean, the Koine.
‘A good documentary hand with elements of cursive about it,’ Leo explained to Calder as they examined the unravelled scroll for the first time. ‘Careful writing, but not by a professional scribe.’
Calder was searching along the strip, peering at the maze of lettering, hoping that something would leap out at him, the solution of a puzzle coming with the suddenness of revelation. ‘Can there be any doubt?’
‘Doubt?’
‘That this Yeshu and Jesus Christ are one and the same man.’
Yeshu the Nazir. Leo could pick the name out of the manuscript almost as he might recognise his own: IEΣOYTONNAZIP, iesou ton nazir. Jesus the nazirite. He crouched over the text, examining the lettering with a binocular microscope. Broken fibres floated in the brilliant circle of the microscope field. They carried flecks of pigment that were invisible to the naked eye, so that an omicron became, within the bleak circle of magnification, the fragmentary relic of a theta. ‘Maybe with time.’
‘How long?’
He answered without taking his eyes from the lenses: ‘You need method. First a diplomatic transcription, then the translation. Don’t muddle one with the other, not if you can help it.’ On a notepad he wrote, theta-rho and then peered once more, as though peering down through the centuries. Painful, painstaking work. ‘It’s thronon, throne,’ he muttered. ‘Surely it’s throne.’ But the following letters were damaged beyond recovery.
‘What’s throne? What the devil’s throne?’ Calder cried impatiently.
‘Nothing. Nothing’s throne. Just an idea.’
‘What about date? Can you give an estimate?’
Leo moved the microscope on to another patch of damage, cross-referencing to photographs they had taken, impatient with Calder’s questions. ‘No one can be certain. Early, I’ll say that. A consistent use of the iota adscript, for example, the general simplicity of the letters, the lack of breathing marks, other things. First century. I don’t think anyone can deny it’s that early. But they’ll deny that it tells the truth. Sure enough they’ll deny that, and no amount of palaeographic or carbon dating will tell them otherwise. Now please—’
‘I’ll leave you in peace,’ Calder said. ‘I’ll leave you be.’
They had housed Leo in an annexe to the Center, a building that had once been a private villa and now accommodated visiting scholars. There was a garden in which he could walk, a place of thorn and cactus, of century plant and prickly pear, of silvery olives flickering in the breeze. The soil was reddish-brown, the colour of dried blood. They were days circumscribed by work and nights by thoughts of Madeleine. He lived in the annexe and he walked in the garden during the evening and he laboured throughout the day in the artificial peace of the document rooms. He dreamt. Sometimes he had seductive dreams of life and resurrection, so that he awoke to the dull dimensions of reality and the bathos of mere existence. Sometimes his dreams were nightmares of falling through the air, of plunging towards the ground, of plunging into a pit that had no bottom; and then he would wake in relief to find that the nightmares were true. She was dead. Not a presence in some other dimension, a shade in Hades or a soul in She’ol; but dead. Her broken body had been packed up and dispatched to England for a private funeral and now she herself lived only in the impoverished memory of those who had known her, a strange, fragmented afterlife, like a familiar face glimpsed through a dozen different, cracked lenses, not one of the images the real woman who had lived and loved and just as surely died.
‘A terrible, terrible
tragedy,’ Goldstaub had said when he met Leo at the airport. ‘But at least you’ve got your faith.’ He had been trying to help, that was what made it so ridiculous. He had been trying to alleviate the pain. ‘Leo, at least you’ve got your faith.’
But Leo’s faith lay anaesthetised on the slab before him and at the mercy of his own careful intervention:
This is the inheritance of Yeshu the Nazir. He was son of Aristob(ulus, son of?) Herod. When the king had Aristobulus put to death his1 son Yeshu was ( … hidden away?) For a prophecy had been made that this son would … (ascend to the) thr(one?) Aristobulus was son of Mariam2 the Hasmonean and his3 mother was Mariam (daughter) of Antipater (son) of Herod and (daughter)4 of Antigonus the Hasmonean. He swears that this is true who knows it.
1 read: ‘Aristobulus’s’. Aristobulus was the second son of Herod the Great by Herod’s second wife Mariamne I. Aristobulus was executed on Herod’s orders in 7 BC.
2 i.e. Mariamne I.
3 read: ‘Yeshu’s’.
