‘How could the Torah have been given to Moses! I mean literally written down by God?’ he asked Rebecca one night. She stared at him aghast. ‘Do you really believe that, that the Word of the Master of the Universe was dictated in seventy languages of Sinai?’
‘Raphael, be quiet! You have been listening to the lies of the malshinim. This is apikorsishe blasphemy!’
It was unfair, she was a simple woman, but he railed at her. ‘Why call them slanderers? They use their brains, Becky, that’s all. Would you recommend the gullible stupidity of the Neturei Karta, cowering behind their walls in the Mea Shearim?’ He had never lost a measure of loathing for the Hassidim, barricading themselves into the past, rigid with bigotry. ‘They deny the State of Israel, and they justify it by Torah. They refuse to speak Hebrew because that is sacrilege. Should I grow my payos back and tug out my ritual fringes for all to see, and join them in their blind adherence to superstition? Or is Orthodox nonsense sufficient?’
She ran from the room in tears, and he turned angrily to his printouts, where the limitations were the bounds of imagination and logic, and the diagnostics told you without pity where your own stupidity lay.
For his mother’s sake he retained the trappings of ritual, and found a kind of authentic comfort in its practice. If now the ceaseless argument and nuance of Talmud seemed arid to him, the eight-hundred-year-old nitpicking of Maimonides the Rambam and Nachmanides the Ramban, the clamour of Rashi and Ibn Ezra and Buber and Sforno, all the desperate ingenuity of brilliant minds dissecting the unreal, at least in the candle lighting of Hanukkah there was calm pride, especially in a land where you could see the lithe Maccabee runners pounding with the flame from Mode’in all the way to the kingly menorah, the Tabernacle candelabrum in Jerusalem, yes, there was comfort in the braying of the shofar, for it spoke of a unity of place and time which his heart desired more than truth.
On Pesach in the last year of the millennium of the Common Era, Raphael sat at Seder with his mother and his sister and voiced the Four Questions. The meager Passover feast lay on the table before them. The curtains were drawn. David’s empty seat was a rebuke. ‘How is this night different from all other nights?’ Raphael asked. ‘On all other nights we eat leaven and unleavened bread, tonight only unleavened—’ He could not hear the next word. Space-time had blinked, for a moment. Had his heart stopped? In the dim room he closed his eyes and watched the hard after-image bloom: the table, a silhouette of his mother and sister, the edge of a door frame. The chair fell with a grinding, splintering sound as his thigh muscles contracted, hurling him up and away from the table. ‘Cover your faces,’ he said, shouting into a place with no resonance. ‘Quick,’ and he seized his mother’s limp arm, dragging her to the floor, pushing Rebecca with her beneath the table. He forced himself to time eternity, studying his watch. The tin roof drummed, and a vast flat surge of thunder went over them like the wing of the Angel of Death. There were screams, screams. A siren was bleating, and others joined it. Six minutes? ‘God in heaven,’ he said, ‘Jerusalem is gone.’ He ran to the television set. Snow hissed on the screen. Panic was beginning to lock his muscles. His mother lay underneath the table, her breath coming in stertorous grunts. Becky cradled her in her arms. He found a portable radio. Through the static, a voice dehumanized by appalling self-control was saying: ‘—enhanced radiation device, triggered by laser, so there will be negligible fallout. The device was detonated, according to satellite information, at ground zero in the vicinity of Mount Zion. Most of the force was expended as prompt neutron radiation. I repeat, stay indoors and cover your windows. Prepare for evacuation. Arab invasion forces are massing on—’
A desolated voice, outside their shack, was chanting, chanting. The words tore Raphael to the soul: ‘Sh’ma Yisroel, Adonai Elohenu, Adonai Echod. Sh’ma Yisroel—’
Here, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord.
~ * ~
III
To make sure of being right in all things, we ought always to hold by the principle that the white that I see I would believe to be black, if the hierarchical Church were so to rule it. . .
St Ignatius Loyola, Spiritual Exercises
~ * ~
The City burns in his mind like a shrine of illuminated flowers. Silverman paces uneasily in the narrow confines of his cell. The habit of composure is sloughing from him, as if his soul had begun to shed some dried constricting husk. He discovers himself naked and defenceless without its protection.
Madrazo undoubtedly was taken aback by his outburst but had chosen not to press the matter. Nobody had expected Silverman to find anything as drastic and unsettling as the City. Orbital surveillance had registered the valley only as a mild magnetic and gravitational anomaly, tagging it for closer scrutiny, but redundancy photoscan failed to reveal anything remarkable. The small puzzle teased the physicist in Silverman sufficiently to send him to the surface. Artfully camouflaged, yet plainly uninhabited, the screened City confused his expectations. Still, to suggest that the City was waiting for the return of its builders, as if it were a sentient creature, was patently ridiculous. But Silverman balks at his own rationality. Something he cannot fail to see as vital has touched him, balm to his woes: something breathlessly expectant.
His uncertain steps halt finally at the prie-dieu angled from the foot of his bunk. Lowering himself to his knees before the crucifix, he gazes on the image of the hanging Man. The City’s bright image superimposes itself, an affirmation. A flood of gratitude suffuses his being.
Once before he has known illumination. At his ordination in Rome, in St Peter’s Cathedral, under the hands of the great Franciscan pontiff Sixtus VI, he stood at the boundary of transcendence. Pungent and near to sickening, incense had risen in his nostrils. The palpable intensity of thousands gathered in solemn common worship, the unspeakable antiquity of tradition and love and anguish, conspired with sentiment to lift him free, a newly made priest according to the order of Melchizedek, from the horror of the Second Holocaust, his family’s pitiful and useless martyrdom, his guilt and doubt. Today in the City he has known it again.
A chill of fever afflicts him. It is not sickness. If anything, this roaring in his vital centres is a surfeit of life. He strives against it, battling for detached clarity, lest pride make of this grace a most subtle temptation.
For all that he is a scientist and priest in this most militant of Orders, he has never renounced his sense of poetry. In a decade on the run from himself, he has dreaded the stars. Through the opaque hull they have seemed to stare in at him, a thousand brilliant haunted eyes plaguing him at the edge of sleep. His poetry has been bleak; it has addressed him from a universe cold and uncaring and baited with traps, where the purest soaring of theology has been perverted into mechanisms of murder, where the spasms of nature throw men heedlessly into existence and the corruption of nature sucks them dry at death and leaves them less than nothing.
More than once the sour words of the Talmud, memorized in childhood, have returned to jeer at him: ‘Akabaya Ben Mahalalel says, “Whence thou art come?” From a putrid drop.’ This is Pirke Abot, the Wisdom of the Fathers. Rabbi Simeon ben Eleazar says, ‘I shall tell thee a parable: to what might this be likened? To a king who built a large palace and decorated it, but a tannery pipe led through it and emptied at its doorway. So too is man. If then, with a foul stream issuing from his bowels, he exalts himself over other creatures, how much the more would he exalt himself if a stream of precious oil, balsam or ointment issued from him!’ Now the words take on new meaning for Silverman. He beholds the gnarled timber representation of his Lord’s Corpse, recovered to glory in resurrection, and sees how profound his error has been. Nature is finally beneficent. Yes, as Loyola said, it is created for man’s sake, to help him fulfil the end for which he was created. If it is unfathomable, that is precisely because it is the ‘letting be,’ the creative outpouring, of the Infinite.
Even this Monastery, a spangled cross hurled into the b
lack sky, token of everything infertile and plastic and contrived, never truly home to the limping mendicant, finds its place in his assent. He clasps his fingers and lets his gaze drift to the arresting non-devotional print framed on the wall.
With surprise it occurs to him how premonitory the madman’s drawing is, its embedded borders and obsessional hood-masked faces, its Edvard Munch-mouthed elongated ghosts or spectral otters or eyed slugs or spermatozoa slithering back to belly, interlocked but never crossing, the pallid green and yellow and orange and blue of the hospital’s crayons, the unfrightened capital letters identifying its draughtsman and his century, adolf—1917, and the hard, anxious script which scrambles across the exploding water beneath the crowded ferry with its double smokestack and triple masts and its windows crammed like nightmare with half-seen faces asphyxiated in terror. Poor Adolf Wölfli, contacting some limb of the absolute in his psychosis, drawing on doors and cupboards and walls and any vagrant scrap of paper in the asylum, his fierce blurred eye of truth still open for want of a psychopharmacology accurate enough to calm his craziness and his fear.
The print was an ironic gift from a fellow Jesuit before they packed their scant belongings for exile: Father Thorne had got it from the University Psychiatric Clinic at Waldau, in Berne, where the original Wölfli collection is housed. Had Thorne meant quite so explicitly to tell him that they were embarking on the Ship of Fools? But neither of them had known, then. In any case, as Silverman sees now with an immense lifting of his burden, that analysis of their condition has always been trite. Even the doomed starship Southern Cross had been more than a ship of fools.
It is no accident that the Loyola resembles the plan of a cathedral. If the Monastery lacks ribbed vaults, pointed arch and flying buttress, masons’ tricks hardly appropriate even in aesthetic mimicry to a starship, still it glows with its own luminous flamboyance. Nave and transepts fling themselves out like exultant limbs, multicoloured metallic glasses soar in a clerestory wall irradiated by strange suns. Here is a vindication of the proud genius of Pope Sixtus, who found in a shattered world, revolted by the Jihad’s savagery, such a loathing for faith that he called all Christendom to a new raising of cathedrals, a moral equivalent of crusade, a sign in heaven. The world’s first starship, years in the building, had flamed from the solar system in 2015; but Southern Cross was merely the final monument to an expired technology. This high cathedral is purely the creation of unitive physics, lilting between stars in the cryptic transition of dream.
And if Sixtus VI’s own dream has soured, his monastic cathedral, outcast under prohibition by the godless owners of twenty-first century Earth, outcast with the remnants of his pledged soldiers and diplomats and (as those rulers believe) masters of insidious casuistry, why, a kind of blessing can be found here too, for the Word of Gospel is thus scattered into the skies like a memory of the black-garbed missionaries who strode without dread into unknown Asia and the Americas five hundred years before.
Silverman stirs, glancing at his watch. He is bone tired. There is no slightest sound: the Monastery is deep into the maximum silentium, the Great Silence. Before he sleeps, the Jesuit must say his daily Office. He reaches for his worn leather-bound breviary and turns to the litanies of the day, for the feast of St Andrew Corsini, Bishop and Confessor.
When that is done, he kneels once more to make a full Examen of conscience. The City has convicted him of sin. And a cold memory comes to him, hard and clear: his first confession, close to four decades ago, in his bolthole in Rome. Did he truly believe? It seems to him now that that Jewish youth, fresh from the renewal and risk of baptism, had believed nothing. Nothing.
~ * ~
IV
The Spirit of the Lord moves on its course with relaxed reins, to illumine souls and to draw them closely to Himself. He has methods without number.
Claudio Acquaviva, Fifth Father-General of the Society of Jesus
~ * ~
‘Come in, Raphael. I imagined you’d be older. Have that chair. You took instruction from poor Father Hertz, didn’t you?’
‘Yes, Father.’
‘A tragedy. God forgive them, they’re like animals. I suppose it was his name. Morris never struck me as looking like a ... Well, anyway, Raphael, you’re stuck with me. It really is a pleasure welcoming you into the family of Christ. Have you prepared your general confession? No need for all the gory details, the intention of repentance is sufficient.’
‘Thank you, I don’t mind. Unless—’
‘Bless you, son, take as long as you like. I don’t have a golf date, if that crossed your mind.’
‘I never learned to play. Uh, I somehow expected you to be solemn and grim, sort of the Grand Inquisitor.’
‘How odd. In my neck of the woods Jesuits are regarded with some suspicion for their levity. You’re thinking of the Dominicans. That’s a shop joke. We’ve always maintained that the sacrament of reconciliation should be made as painless as possible, though with due regard to the gravity of sin. “My yoke is sweet,” Our Lord said, “and my burden light,” and I’m sure He meant it.’
‘Yes.’
‘Okay, away we go. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. May God, Who has enlightened your heart, help you to know your sins and trust in His mercy.’
‘Amen.’
‘“What proves that God loves us is that Christ died for us while we still sinned. Having died to make us righteous, is it likely that He would now fail to save us from God’s anger?” That’s a lovely text, Raphael, St Paul to the Romans. Shoot.’
‘Uh, I confess to almighty God that before my baptism I sinned grievously against faith, for I denied His truth, and against hope, for I fell into despair when all my people were ... I’m sorry—’
‘That’s all right, son, get it off your chest. I’ve never thought it unmanly to weep when grief truly touches us. Did your family die in Jerusalem?’
‘No, Father, a little later, when the Jihad blitzed Israel. The mullahs blamed us! They actually blamed us for destroying their holy places.’
‘Tell me this, Raphael. How pure was your intention in renouncing Judaism? Was it to save your skin?’
‘Wow. You don’t believe in fighting clean, do you?’
‘To answer my question honestly might be the most important thing you ever do in this life, Raphael. We would have given you sanctuary anyway, you know.’
‘Look, don’t think I haven’t put it to myself. Father Morris kept me dangling for six months before he’d baptize me. Obviously there’s an element... I’ll tell you how it was. Before they pre-empted Jerusalem, I’d lost my faith. My old faith. I was studying physics, and there didn’t seem any room in quantum theory for the Yahveh of the Torah.’
‘Yet there is for the Blessed Trinity?’
‘I can’t pretend to explain it, but yes. I worked it out after the priests smuggled me here to Rome. No classic conversion number, no bolts of lightning into the brain—’
‘Generally humbug. St Paul’s got a lot to answer for. Neurotics and hysterics dote on bolts of lightning.’
‘You’re a refreshing man, Father. The thing of it is, I spent a lot of time so depressed they had to feed me with a spoon. Then I put in quite a deal of praying even when I didn’t know Who to, and reading a couple of books a day about Judaism and Islam and Christianity, and I finally understood that we’d been punished.’
‘Really? The entire Jewish nation?’
‘Like original sin. The whole human race shares in the sin of Adam. Well, the Jewish people rejected the Messiah when He came, and we’ve been punished, to open our eyes.’
‘I’m glad you added that last bit. The Jews were not responsible for Christ’s murder. That’s an error which has been formally condemned by Pope Sixtus as heretical.’
‘No, no, of course not. The beasts out there claim that when they’re napalming us to death. But I read St Paul, the same epistle you quoted before, I f
orget which chapter. There is no distinction between Jew and gentile, everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord shall be saved. But how are they to call upon Him until they’ve learned to believe in Him?’
‘And how are they to believe in Him, unless they listen to Him? Yes. And that metaphor in the next chapter about the olive tree which is pruned and grafted with alien stock. You think the Second Holocaust was God’s latest nudge to His chosen people? A rather harsh educational technique. Wouldn’t it be better to place the blame where it really lies—in the wicked, scapegoating hearts of men?’
‘I’m not the theologian, Father. But why else would the Master of the Universe permit the obliteration of my people?’
‘Raphael, I imagine we’ll be pondering that terrible question to the end of time.’
‘Have I answered your question, Father?’
‘Our Lord clearly has given you a very special grace, Raphael. You must nurture His flame within you.’
The Dark Between the Stars: Speculative Fiction Page 21
