by Simon Mawer
The door to the manuscript rooms allowed NO ENTRY TO UNAUTHORISED PERSONNEL. His magnetic card – a new notion of Calder’s – let him through. The rooms beyond the door were bathed in a perpetual twilight; the only sound was the hum of the air conditioning and a faint buzz from the lighting. It gave the place a womb-like, amniotic atmosphere.
He turned on the lights and opened the lid of the cabinet that held the scroll. A host of letters, a multitude of letters, an ant-march of letters down a dry and dusty pathway, the road to hell perhaps. The pathway came to an abrupt halt just before it reached its goal and the final sheet, long ago glued to the rest of the scroll with starch paste, was now detached. He took the page from the drawer where it was kept sandwiched in glass, and laid it on the desk beside the computer terminal.
Madeleine stood at his shoulder, bright, acerbic, sceptical. Her namesake had been there at the discovery of the opened tomb, of course, the enigmatic Mary of Magdala. Appropriate then that Madeleine, his memory of Madeleine, should be with him now, at the rolling back of the stone.
He settled himself in his chair, put on his reading glasses, turned on the computer, picked up a pencil and drew a sheet of paper towards him. He let his eyes move along the lines of letters. The hand was so familiar now that he could read it as he might have read his own mother’s writing. There were no gaps, no caesuras, no pauses in the careful monotony of the pen strokes. He searched the lines (some damage in one place, a tearing of the fabric, some rough shreds of plant fibre and a blurring of some letters) until he found the combination that he sought:ΠEIΛYΩ.
There was that snatch of excitement, a thrilling, treacherous emotion. He paused and took breath. The letters were split between two lines, but they were clear enough: P-e-i-l-a-t-o. Pilate. The dative case: to Pilate. He moved backwards as far as the damaged patch, and then read forwards:
…KAIΠAPEΔΩKANAYTONΠEI
ΛATΩ
Then he transcribed the line and divided the words with pencil strokes:
… KAIIIAPEΔΩKAN/AYTON/IIEIΛATΩ
and they handed him over to Pilate.
He went back above the damaged area. Immediately before the script became indecipherable there were the letters Σ-Y-N-E. The prefix syne-. It means ‘together with’, ‘along with’; but it could also form compound words – ΣYNEΔPIA, ΣYNEΔPOΣ, gatherings, councils, congregations of men and birds. And the preceding letters were TO. T-O-Σ-Y-N-E. The definite article: The syne-. The synhedrion, the Jewish council.
He picked up his pencil. The Synhe(drion?) … (lacuna c.25 letters) … and handed him over to Pilate, he wrote.
Standing at his shoulder just as she had stood at his shoulder in the manuscript room of the Institute in Rome, Madeleine smiled. He almost looked round to find her. Then he shrugged and went back to the text, working steadily throughout the morning, scribbling with his pencil, tapping into the computer, leafing through books. A few people came and went. Calder looked in for a moment, but no one disturbed the figure crouched over the fragment of papyrus, the figure with the lexicons and the concordances, the figure with the flickering computer screen, the figure with tragedy at his back.
The synhe(drion) … and handed him over to Pilate to be judged, and Pilate … (put him to death?) … that night. It is Youdas who tells this, a man who wept over the body of the man who …
… and the night of his death they went to the tomb that was the tomb of Joseph … The witness of this was Youdas who writes. Joseph and Nicodemus and the same Youdas were there, and Saul …
Leo stopped.
ΣAOYA. Saoul.
He went over the letters again. No doubt, no damage. He continued, his pencil elucidating the letters:ΣAOYΛTAPΣE … Then the fabric of the page let him down: there was a blemish, a sore, a hole eaten away at some time during the centuries by some infinitesimal animal gnawing away at random in the cold tomb of the cave. But he had enough.
ΣAOYΛTAPΣE saoul tarse …
The incomplete word was tarseus, Tarsian, an inhabitant of the city of Tarsus. Saul from the city of Tarsus.
His bowels turned. A good biblical phrase? It’ll do. Bowels in the New Testament, the Greek splanchna, has a meaning altogether beyond the obvious, the merely anatomical, the merely alimentary, the sorter of flesh from faeces: the cognate verb splancnizomai means to feel compassion for someone. The Good Samaritan felt it in the bowels for the wretched man he found lying in the ditch. Leo Newman, adulterer, apostate priest, felt it in the bowels for the whole of Christendom that is and was, and might never more be. Saul the Tarsian could only be one man. Surely he could only be one man.
He sat for a long while, bringing his thoughts under control. Even in the artificial cool of conditioned air, sweat rimed his forehead. Finally he summoned up some kind of calm and went on to the end, the final letters, the final words, the final statement from the last witness:
… and Joseph wept over the body that had been his son and anointed the body with his tears. And they took the body away that the jackals should not have it.
And then there remained only the final sentence of the whole testimony, the last utterance of Judas the man from Kerioth, known as Judas the knifeman:
He went painstakingly through the letters marking the word divisions, checking for possible alternatives, convincing himself that this is what was written, that the sequence would bear no other interpretation:
He wrote out the translation, hearing the last words of Judas as he did so, the final weary, matter-of-fact declaration:
The body that was taken was buried secretly by the town of Joseph that is Ramathaim-zophim beside Modin and to this day no one knows the place of his burial.
Leo stood amongst the litter of a thousand different popular beliefs, amongst the rubble of nineteen centuries of faith, amidst the ruins of a myriad of treasured illusions. He knew now for certain. There had been no resurrection on the third day. He knew that on the night of the Sabbath, a group of men, men who had no doubt believed in something, had gone to the tomb and struggled in the dark to roll the stone aside. And that one of them was the man known to the world, not by his Hebrew name of Saul, but by his Greek name, Paul: Paul of Tarsus. Saint Paul the apostle.
He was there at the tomb. He saw the flickering of the lamps and heard the urgent voices. He saw the figures enter the claustrophobic chamber where the broken body lay. He followed them into the smell of damp and the stink of blood, into the heady stench of myrrh and frankincense. They knew that they were defiled. They knew the words well enough: Anyone who touches a man who has been killed, or a man who has died, or human bones or a tomb, shall be unclean for seven days. They knew that merely by being there, they were defiled.
Lamps guttered in the cold air, throwing ugly shadows across the walls. Leo saw them. The body would have been awkward, rigid in death, its limbs like the branches of some rotten tree. He felt them. There would have been muttering and arguing, the urgent arguing that comes with fear. He heard the sound, felt the rigid flesh, smelt the myrrh and blood, the frankincense and corruption.
‘Leave the cloths. Get hold of him. For God’s sake don’t drop him.’
Still him no doubt. A man they had known and followed, loved in their own way, worshipped even, because worship is latreia, the act of service, the act of obeisance of a servant towards a master. They would not leave him to the jackals.
‘Lift him across. Now go back. I’ll guide you. Duck your head now.’ Edging the awkward corpse through the doorway and out into the blessed cool of the night where a cart was waiting, the horses snorting and shifting in the dark. The bump and slither of the limbs as they lifted the corpse and slid it across the boards. And then the nightmare journey away from the Holy City, down through the gorges, down over the paved road that the Romans had built, down to the foothills as the dawn came up over the heights of Judaea, a dawn that saw a woman from Magdala coming to the tomb and finding the stone rolled away.
The body that was taken was buried secre
tly by the town of Joseph that is Ramathaim-zophim beside Modin and to this day no one knows the place of his burial.
Then they had gone back to their lives, doubtless sworn to secrecy over what they had done. And a few years later one of them turned his back on Judaism and spread the Christian faith into the Gentile world; a man whose thoughts were etched with guilt, a man whose brain was on fire, a man whose lean and hungry Greek has thrilled every person who ever read it:
Behold I show you a mystery: we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible …
Who can unweave the motives of the past? Who can divide warp from weft? Leo sat for long while before the final page of the scroll. Someone looked in and asked how he was doing. One of the technicians came through whistling a mindless tune, some song that had just won a contest and now blared out of every radio, every open café door. Leo waited; but what he was waiting for was not clear. He waited and Madeleine stood at his shoulder and waited with him.
Finally he acted. He reached down and opened his briefcase and slipped the sheet of papyrus inside. Then he stood up and made his way out of the Bible Center and went back to his room.
15
One man amongst many at the Damascus Gate. An ordinary man, getting down from a bus at the grimy bus station, clutching an envelope to his chest, looking vaguely round as though uncertain where he is or what he is doing amongst the crowds. ‘American?’ someone asked him, and he smiled and shook his head. ‘English.’ They nodded with something like approval. The English were friends of the Arabs, they told him.
He crossed the road to the gate. The gate was a place of focus now as it had always been, a place where demonstrations were held, where camera crews from news agencies kept desultory watch, a place from where, long ago, a young and intransigent man called Saul had set out on a journey northward on a mission to stamp out the embryo Christian Church. The young man had ended up grovelling in the dirt of the road, with his brain exploding with light and a voice ringing in his ears. Saul, Saul, a voice had called, why are you persecuting me?
He joined the tide of people passing through, a mixed and muddled tide passing in and out of the Old City, El Quds, the Holy One. In the narrow alleys beyond there was a suk, a shamble of stalls selling vegetables and fruit, chickens and quails in tiny cages. A pair of soldiers toted their guns through the throng. He pushed past the traders and the customers, past a man cooking lamb’s liver on a large and fire-blackened hot-plate, past a shop that wanted to sell him rosaries made of olive wood and crucifixes of mother-of-pearl, past a coffee shop where old men sat and smoked narghiles. Further on, at a junction of the ways, a ceramic sign high up on the wall announced the Via Dolorosa, but of course he knew that it wasn’t. He knew all the arguments. Station VII, Jesus Falls for the Second Time. But he hadn’t. Not there anyway. Assuming the gospel account to be true the actual route would have been in the other direction, from the Roman Praetorium which lay beside the Jaffa Gate. Probably. Everything was probably. A group of pallid pilgrims were reciting the rosary in the company of an earnest priest. Women in floral dresses and open sandals, men in straw hats against the sun. As he passed he turned his head away from them in case – the thought was ridiculous really – in case he should be recognised.
Narrow alleys of dark shadow and sudden shafts of light. The storm of the day before had cleared the air and the sun was bright and sharp even amongst the constricted streets of the ancient city. Round the corner from the pilgrim group was a narrow space where Arabs sold religious trinkets and leather handbags stamped with images of camels and palm trees. ‘Rosary?’ the traders asked. ‘Holy crucifix from olive wood of Garden of Gethsemane? Holy picture?’
Daylight burned the margin of a small courtyard. There were twin Romanesque arches and a narrow door at the back. He went through the yard and into the door, out of the glare into the shadows, into a darkness that was like the darkness beneath the Church of San Crisogono. He stood for a while to let his eyes accommodate to the light. A stone slab emerged from the darkness as though materialising out of the past, a slab where a body had been laid to be anointed with oil. On his right, steps led up to a raised chapel where you could look down through plate glass at a lump of rock as grey as an elephant’s back and a post hole where they had jammed, so the story went, the pole that formed the upright of the Cross. Once long ago, on his first visit to the Holy Land as a senior seminarian, he had stood up there and wept for the blessed misery of it all. Now he ignored the steps and went on into the rotunda of the building where there was scaffolding to prevent the whole place from collapsing into a heap of rubble, and where, in the midst of the circle, the tomb itself stood, a cave that had long ago been cut away from the bedrock by the engineers of the Emperor Constantine, long ago been dressed and decorated and clad with marble, long ago made the opposite of what it was, the cavity become a prominence, the cave become a hut.
The warm, amniotic smell of candles was all around him. An Orthodox priest stood there like a shadow, his lips moving faintly in the depths of his beard. There was a coming and going at the tomb. Pilgrims knelt in prayer, people ducked in and out of the opening. In some sense just there, in those exact co-ordinates of space, Mary of Magdala had stood and seen the stone rolled aside and the black maw of the tomb. If you could move through time as you can move through space, if you could shift along the single dimension of hours and days and years and centuries, back almost two thousand years, she would be there still, on a silent morning in a garden outside the city walls, with the smell of death in the air.
Paradise is a garden.
Leo walked round the little hut, to the back where you can still see the actual rock, the place where the Copts have their pitch. The least favoured of the various sects who squabble for control of the Holy Sepulchre, the Copts have trumped the whole lot by removing a bit of the marble cladding to reveal the bare limestone beneath. For a dollar or two they will draw a curtain aside for you to see the living rock behind. ‘Candle lit at the tomb of God?’ they ask. ‘One dollar.’ And before you can move, a new wand of wax has been lit from their own lamp, and just as swiftly blown out and handed over. It is like a conjuring trick, a sleight of hand so fast that you are not quite certain what has happened.
He stood up with his still-smoking taper and looked down at the crouching monk and a voice behind him said, ‘It adds a certain drama to the proceedings.’ He turned and there was the Frenchman standing in the gloom of the rotunda with a faint and ironical smile on his face and his own taper (but no tell-tale curl of smoke) in his hand.
They walked. Out of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre through the narrow alleys of the Old City, past Jews in ringlets and homburgs, past Arabs carrying bales of cloth and bags of beans, past Christians overburdened with guilt, beneath arches as old as Islam itself, past a battered sign that warned the orthodox that it was forbidden by the Chief Rabbinate to trespass on this ground because of the utmost holiness of the place, to a gate where police officers were checking documents, searching handbags, running hands over pockets. There was a bright light ahead and an air of suppressed excitement amongst the waiting people, as though something startling was about to happen, the Prophet about to descend from heaven on his steed Barek, perhaps, or Messiah come down on clouds of glory. Leo Newman and Father Guy Hautcombe passed through the gate and climbed wide stairs on to the great open space, up out of the tunnels of the dark city into the sharp sunlight where, mounted on a box inlaid with turquoise and ivory, the golden dome dreamed of the ineffable glory of God.
They found a stone bench in an avenue of cypress tress and sat down. ‘So tell me,’ said Hautcombe. ‘Tell me what you have to say.’
So he told him. Was the Frenchman his last chance? He told him, and the Frenchman heard him through without interruption, with an expression of calm consideration on his face. It might almost have been a confess
ion, the one failed priest opening his soul to the other. ‘And you think this is all genuine?’ Hautcombe asked at the end. He pronounced the word genuine as though it was French, with a soft g.
Leo opened the envelope and took out a cardboard folder. The Frenchman raised his elaborate Gallic eyebrows. Leo opened the folder, and there was the final sheet, the broken ragged thing the colour of biscuit, the colour of tobacco, the colour of the earth. With its straggle of grey lettering.
He held it for the Frenchman to see. ‘I am sure it is genuine,’ he said. ‘I am sure that the scroll is more or less what it purports to be.’
Hautcombe shifted on the bench, partly to see the thing, partly to shield it. ‘The light, for God’s sake be careful of the light,’ he cried. He craned to see. ‘How can I make a judgement like this? I need time, time.’
‘You don’t have time. And I’m not really expecting a judgement. I have made a judgement already.’
Hautcombe’s finger glided along just above the surface of the sheet. Without looking up he asked, ‘Does anyone know you have taken it?’
Leo ignored him. ‘Look,’ he said; and he leaned over the Frenchman’s shoulder to point to the word ΠEIΛATΩ. Pilate.
Hautcombe nodded.
‘And here.’ Leo pointed once more, and caught the smell of the man, the fusty smell of celibacy that surely he himself had once possessed. He read the lines out loud rapidly in his clumsy, Anglicised Greek: ‘The body that was taken was buried secretly by the town of Joseph that is Ramathaim-zophim beside Modin and to this day no one knows the place of his burial. Maybe they wanted to stop the tomb becoming a focus for further disturbance—’
