by Simon Mawer
‘It did not work, did it?’ There was a note of defiance in the Frenchman’s tone.
‘They couldn’t possibly have foreseen what would happen, could they? They couldn’t have predicted a resurrection story. The god who rises from the dead is not a Judaic myth. There’s no precedent for that idea in the whole of Judaism.’
There was a long pause. Tourists herded past towards the Dome of the Rock, towards the El Aqsa Mosque, Japanese with bewildered expressions, Americans with an air of studied piety, people consulting guidebooks, people listening to guides, people preserving everything on videotape and seeing nothing with their eyes: a motley collection of witnesses up there at the navel of the world.
‘There’s another thing.’
Hautcombe looked up from the text. ‘Another thing?’
Leo pointed. ‘There. One of the helpers at the removal of the body. One of Judas’ assistants. Saoul.’ The Frenchman looked back at the letters. ‘Look where it is damaged: Saul the Tarsian, it says. The final couple of letters are damaged, but there’s no doubt about the first four. Tau-alpha-rho-epsilon … Tarseus, the Tarsian. Paul of Tarsus.’
Hautcombe sat with his lips pursed, almost as though he was tasting something. Maybe he was trying to change the meaning, alter the wording by dividing the line differently. Maybe he was praying. Probably that is what it was: he was praying, praying for guidance, for help, for wisdom, all those things that every one of us needs and so few get. ‘A piece of anti-Christian propaganda,’ he said eventually. It was as though he was delivering a judgement after due consideration. ‘If it really stands up to critical examination, that is how it will be judged. A piece of early anti-Christian propaganda. Probably Ebionite. Written in Greek, trying to damn Paul, so probably Ebionite. Important, of course. But not truly significant except in so far as it confirms the gospels.’
‘Confirms the gospels?’ Leo almost shouted. There on the Temple Mount, a place charged with the beliefs of three religions, he almost shouted. ‘This scroll is older than any fragment of the New Testament. It is virtually complete. Yes, of course there are holes in the story. There are bits that don’t add up. There are lacunae. But that is only what you might expect. The overall impression is conviction. And it’s older than any gospel fragment and older than the whole gospel story. It even reads as though it might be the source of much of the Synoptic account. For God’s sake, this is a nightmare!’
‘It won’t hurt people with a powerful faith,’ Hautcombe replied. ‘It won’t hurt the educated. From what you tell me they will be able to find ways around the difficulties.’
‘They’ll always be able to do that. But what about the rest? What about the ordinary life of the Church?’
The Frenchman looked at him. His expression was a deliberate blend of surprise and accusation. ‘What do you care about the Church?’ he asked.
And Leo wondered, what did he care? Why should he care about the Church, he who was excommunicate and had accepted excommunication? He cast around for some kind of answer. ‘It’s what Paul said, isn’t it?’
‘Paul said many things, not all of them to the taste of the modern liberal.’
‘Or the orthodox Catholic. Perhaps one passage in particular, from Philippians.’ Leo recited it, and the words stung hard, stung his eyes and stung his mind, so that he couldn’t tell what he believed or thought any longer: ‘Whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just – you know the passage.’
‘Of course.’
‘Whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue and if there be any praise, think on these things.’
The Frenchman laughed at him. ‘Newman, you are one of those sentimentalists, who see Jesus Christ as a kind of social worker and the Christian faith as a series of conveniently liberal moral precepts. No wonder you abandoned the Church.’ He got to his feet. ‘The Almighty is not a liberal, Monsieur Newman,’ he said. ‘The Almighty is the driving force for the entire universe and the universe is not a very liberal place. That is what the modern world seems not to understand. I don’t give a moment’s credence to your papyrus, Newman. Go ahead with it. Publish it and be damned. The Church will survive this just as it has survived every other attack throughout the centuries. The Church will survive you.’ And then, in the act of walking away, he paused. ‘Do you know what they call you? Your former brothers in Christ, I mean. Do you know?’
Leo tried to shrug the question aside, but Hautcombe warmed to his theme, coming back towards him to deliver his parting shot: ‘You know how important names are in our work. You know that. Jesus means Yahweh is salvation, doesn’t it?’ He reached out and pointed his finger at Leo’s face. ‘They call you Judas, Newman. That is what they call you. A second Judas. And do you know what they do?’
‘What do they do?’
‘They pray for you.’
Solitude up there on the Temple Mount, on Mount Moria, at the axis of the world. He walked out of the shade and into the sun, out on to the platform that surrounds the Dome of the Rock. The dome dazzled in the light, a great golden blister, a ball of fire, golden, liquid fire. Looking up he saw the clouds and the sky circling about this point, as though the whole world was turning on this pivot, the place where the Temple had stood, the place from where Jesus had driven the profane, the place where Mohammed’s steed Burak had planted a single hoof before leaping up to heaven, the place where Abraham had grabbed his son’s neck and held him down against the rock. The sky swirled. Leo looked up and the sky swirled round him and voices babbled in his ear, a hundred voices, a thousand voices, babbling just behind him, just out of sight so that when he turned there was no one there. The light glared at him like a single, malevolent eye. He couldn’t tell if it came from outside or from deep inside his brain. The light glared and the voices babbled and the sky turned round and round overhead, and the polished pavement, polished by thousands and thousands of pilgrims, polished and burnished in the sun and the wind and the rain, came up to meet him …
Voices babbled. Hebrew and Arab and English. The word American came out of the noise, the word English, the word doctor. A blue uniform stood above him and hands struggled him into the shade.
‘My envelope,’ he said. ‘My envelope.’
‘It’s all right.’
‘It is here.’
Something was thrust into his hands. They shuffled him into the shade and asked questions of him, as though he was under interrogation. Where was he staying? Was he a visitor? Was he German? Did he understand English? Did he have a telephone number? Did he want a doctor? How did he feel? Someone pushed a glass of water into his hand, the friendly one, the one that gains your trust while the other rants at you, the one that gives you comfort while the other rails against you. A face looked right into his, bearded, moustached, the eyes dark. All right? Did he feel faint? Did he want a doctor? Did he want to call anyone? Did he want anyone?
‘I want Madeleine.’
‘Where is she?’
‘She is your lady wife?’
‘Is she here?’
‘She’s dead.’
Later he was in a bar, a small, dark place with three or four indifferent customers. There were two soldiers outside the bar and a policeman, some kind of Arab policeman, watching him. ‘I’m all right,’ he said. He clutched his envelope to his chest. ‘I’m all right.’
‘A doctor is coming.’
‘I’m all right.’
‘The sun. You Americans don’t know the heat of the sun. Because here is high up and the air is thin.’
‘I’m all right.’ He got to his feet and this time they let him. The customers just watched. ‘I’m all right.’ In the background someone babbled on the radio, voices babbling, someone singing that bloody song.
‘You all right?’ the policeman asked.
‘I’m all right. Just a headache. I want to go home.’
‘You get a taxi or something.’
‘A taxi,
yes.’
He walked out of the bar and into the narrow space just inside the gate, a gate he recognised, the Sheep Gate where they had brought in the sheep to the sacrifice, thousands of sheep, hundreds of thousands of sheep, and the paving running with blood and the smell of blood and the burning of flesh. Saint Stephen’s Gate, where the first of the martyrs had been led out to his death outside the walls in a hail of stones, with Saul watching. The Gate of the Blessed Virgin. The Lion Gate. So many names for one hole in the wall.
He stood outside the gate looking out over the Kidron Valley with his envelope clutched to his chest and his heart pounding. Was he dying, he wondered? There were graves on the hillsides, white tombs like teeth or pearls. And a dusty Mercedes taxi coming up the hill towards him.
16
An ordinary day in the world of textual analysis, if you could ignore the graffiti scrawled on the walls outside the Bible Center, the exhortations to repentance, the imprecations, the cries for damnation, and the clutch of protesters camped on the pavement. The Children of God. They changed in identity but not in appearance, these guardians of the true faith: four or five adults, each face dressed in the drab and sanctimonious uniform of belief. Opposite them there was the usual security van. The police had taken their own guard away after the first few days of protest. The government had decided that there were more important security issues in the Land of Israel than a squabble over the origins of the Christian faith. The World Bible Center would have to pay for its own protection.
There was a small stir of interest amongst the protesters as they caught site of Leo beyond the gate. They knew him. They know that it was he who had given voice to the Judas scroll, that he was the figure of the seer in the Book of the Apocalypse. BEHOLD THE BEAST, said one of their placards;the numerals 6–6–6 were written on another. They began to sing a hymn:
‘Were you there when they crucified my Lord?’
they sang.
‘Were you there when they crucified my Lord?
‘Sometimes it makes me want to tremble, tremble, tremble;
‘Were you there when they crucified my Lord?’
He went up the steps into the main entrance of the World Bible Center. ‘Beast,’ they called from behind. ‘Beast.’
Or was it Peace?
A face nodded at him from behind the glass cubicle just inside the door. ‘Asalamu aleikum,’ it said. Peace be with you. Under the circumstances it seemed to carry a heavy burden of irony. Leo turned down the corridor towards the manuscript department with its NO ENTRY signs and its warnings about alarms and security, with its lipless mouth that took his security card and mulled over it and spat it out with a grunt from the locking mechanism.
The heavy doors closed behind him. Within the manuscript rooms all was quiet. You couldn’t hear the chanting from outside, the praying and the ragged hymn that the protesters cobbled together. You couldn’t even hear the interior noises of the building itself. There was nothing more than the hush of the air conditioning and the heavy stillness of double glazing and fireproof doors. A digital clock on the wall gave the time as five fifty-nine. His own clock – that old-fashioned mechanical thing that Madeleine had given him – sat beside his keyboard and contradicted the electronic age: eight minutes to six. Carpe diem, it exhorted him.
He went about his work as usual – the comfort of the quotidian, the consolation of ritual. He turned on the radio to listen to the morning news on the BBC and then turned on the computer. Powered up. Goldstaub had taught him to say that. He powered up the computer. The words Welcome to the World Bible Center appeared in an arc across the screen, like the rays of light from a great sunrise. The Center’s logo, the open book with the word LOGOS inscribed across the pages, took the part of the world. On the radio the newsreader spoke in measured terms of protest and demonstration.
How long now? A month? Time seemed an elastic, malleable dimension. Only a month since Madeleine’s death? As much as a month since the first words of the scroll? He dreamt about her often. Sometimes she was remote and inaccessible, sometimes she was all too vividly present, suave and naked against his own naked body so that he exploded into her and woke up with the shock to find his belly wet and glutinous with his own wasted semen. And other times she just seemed so plainly, simply there that when he awoke he expected to find her in the room with him; and the discovery that she was not was like the loss all over again.
RANDY PRIEST BETRAYS HIS VOWS, the Sun newspaper had written.
Leo opened the file directory on the computer, and selected the folder named Judas. What had happened yesterday? He couldn’t remember exactly. He had experienced something, some kind of panic, some kind of breakdown perhaps. Was that it? A notice on the wall warned that YOU were responsible for any document taken from the shelves, that YOU must enter your name in the logbook, that NO DOCUMENT was to be removed from the room, that NO IMAGE of any part of the Judas scroll was to be made with the intention of removing it from the manuscript rooms of the Center. He recalled speaking to Hautcombe, showing him the evidence, begging him to do something about it all. But what? What could be done now that the beast was unleashed?
The newsreader was talking about a group of fundamentalists holed up in a log cabin in Montana, waiting for the end of the world. The Beast of the Apocalypse is at large, one of them had declared. The tone of the report was of faint irony, a hint of BBC amusement. The group was reported to have anti-tank weapons with them and assault rifles.
He opened the drawer where the photographs of the text were kept and took them out. Thirty-five of them, each showing a different page, a different view, a different light. He placed them on the desk beside the computer, then he turned to the cabinet that held the scroll.
A discussion programme had started on the radio. Focus on Faith, the programme was called. There was the Anglican Archbishop of York and the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Liverpool, allies in the battle against a representative of the British Humanist Society.
‘What exactly does the discovery of this scroll mean in the post-Christian age?’ the chairman asked.
‘I don’t think we are in a post-Christian age,’ one of the archbishops retorted. He had an ingratiating voice, a voice that sounded as though it had been strained through a dozen layers of abstract reasoning. ‘The Christian message is as relevant today as it has ever been …’
Leo turned the key in the lock and opened the lid of the cabinet.
‘But we haven’t even been allowed to see this so-called scroll,’ the Archbishop of Liverpool was complaining. ‘All we have is a whole mélange of rumour and half-truth. The so-called World Bible Center must release the text for all of us to assess. At the moment it appears to be the exclusive property of an apostate priest and a renegade Baptist.’
‘I must take issue with that description …’
Leo looked down on the scroll, the winding-sheet, the long, faded banner from some distant war. His hands did not shake. His bowels did not churn. His mind did not balk. He thought of Madeleine, of course. Yes, he thought of her. Two minutes past six. The manuscript rooms were still and silent. No one came in, no one would come in for two hours or more. He opened the glass lid that covered the scroll.
The radio was saying, ‘If this scroll is what it purports to be – and I may say I am extremely sceptical about that – but if …’ and there was a small bright splutter, a sharp, cheerful spurt of flame.
‘… a genuine account by a hostile witness, then why should we worry …?’
There was a concussion, a soft warm wave of heat like a belch from some deep and fiery maw. Leo made a sound, lifted his hands perhaps in protection, perhaps in benediction. As though it was possessed with an inner life the length of papyrus blackened and coiled. And then a great body of flame emerged from the cabinet, a transparent liquid body out of whose heat claws reached out to tear at him, to tear at his clothing, to tear with talons of pain at the back of his hands as he raised them to his face.
Madel
eine. Somehow he thought that she might save him. The claws tore and scoured, the arms reached out to embrace him. Madeleine. And the last thing he heard was the prattle of the radio and above it the sound of screaming, the screaming of the beast, the wailing of the souls of the damned deep inside the pit into which he was being pulled.
In Via Tasso
‘I want to see him.’ She has found her husband in the top garden, the formal Italian garden, amongst the box hedges and the gravel paths where he is reading an official document, the word Geheimnis, secret, in red across the top. She is distraught, her hair awry, her eyes – those blue, innocent eyes that captivated the older man all those years ago in Marienbad – wide with anguish. ‘I want to see him.’
A tired smile and a weary glance up from his paper. ‘My dear Gretchen, why on earth?’
‘I want to see him.’ The repetition is dull, mechanical, as though she has steeled herself to do this but the effort has strained her beyond the point where she can bring any arguments to bear. ‘I just want to see him.’
‘It is out of your hands now. Out of our hands.’
‘I want to see him.’
‘But it is all over. You have promised me.’
She bites her lower lip. ‘I want to see him,’ she repeats.
* * *
During the 1930s the building in Via Tasso was conveniently near enough to the Villa to turn it into the German cultural centre, where Teutonic and Aryan values could be transmitted to the people of Italy. But now another use has been found for it: the roadway is blocked at either end by steel chevaux-de-frise and barbed wire, and pedestrians pass down the street with reluctance, under the eye of armed soldiers. Only the long, black Mercedes belonging to the embassy is allowed through the barricades, to slide as slowly as a barge past the reefs of steel and dock alongside the pavement beside number 155. A soldier holds open the nearside rear door and the passengers emerge. There is the tall, stooping form of Herr Huber. The figure behind him shows a flash of blonde hair beneath the black scarf that she clutches around her head. Black scarf, black dress, grey stockings. The two hurry up the steps and inside the door.
