‘Almost two thousand years ago.’
Joshua was not smiling when he said that. He either had the driest sense of humour in the world, or he really was taking flying lessons.
‘And where have you been living these past two thousand years?’ I tried to join in without being entirely sure whether or not he was joking.
‘In heaven,’ he replied, without the slightest hint of irony.
‘You’re joking, right?’
‘Of course not,’ he replied.
All I could think was: Damn. Definitely flying lessons.
I tried to calm down. Joshua was probably just a normal guy who’d been here for a while. Otherwise he wouldn’t have been able to speak German so well. He must just have a very strange sense of humour. The joke was probably ‘lost in translation’.
We sat in silence, looking out over the lake and waiting for the menus. Joshua didn’t mind the silence. I did. This wasn’t exactly fun.
But what had I been expecting? There was no way we could be on the same wavelength. We were too different. He was religious. I was depressed.
The whole thing was a crazy idea. I wondered whether I shouldn’t just get up and leave, and explain to him that this whole thing had been a misunderstanding. It was probably not too late for me to go home, wrap myself up in my duvet and torture myself wondering whether I would ever be happy without medication.
Joshua clearly saw that I was feeling down. He said something wonderful. ‘There’s a bird.’
That wasn’t the wonderful bit.
‘It doesn’t harvest anything, it doesn’t sow anything, and yet it doesn’t need to worry.’
I looked at the bird. It was a nightingale. He also didn’t need to worry about finding a partner for life, I thought. His only concern was avoiding ending up on someone’s plate when he headed south.
‘And people really shouldn’t worry,’ Joshua continued. ‘Who can extend their life by worrying?’
He was certainly right about that. Although he did sound like someone who’d read a few too many self-help books by Dale Carnegie.
‘Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself,’ Joshua said.
It was a simple sentence. But a nice one. And this man’s charm, voice and eyes certainly made it easier to believe what he was saying.
For the first time since my ‘will not’ at the altar, I felt a slight sense of optimism.
I decided to stay for now and to give the date the time it took to eat one pizza. Giovanni brought the menu, and Joshua didn’t really know what to do with it. I even had to explain to him what a pizza was. Finally he opted for a Pizza Vegetale.
He explained his choice: ‘Meat and cheese together are not kosher.’
‘Kosher? Is that what Muslims say too?’ I asked.
‘I’m not Muslim. I’m Jewish.’
A Jew from Palestine. Well I never, I thought to myself. I was pleased. It would probably be easier to introduce mum to a Jew. But what if he was one of those mad Jewish settlers? Then again, if he was a mad Jewish settler he would have had curly hair, wouldn’t he? How on earth did they get their hair to curl like that, anyway? With tongs?
‘And you?’ Joshua interrupted my train of thought about Jewish hairdressing techniques.
‘Erm… what?’ I asked.
‘What God do you believe in?’
‘Well, er… I’m Christian,’ I answered.
Joshua smiled. I had no idea what was so funny about that. Had Gabriel told him about me after all?
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘But to me, “Christian” is a description of someone who is a believer. It’s going to take me a while to get used to it.’
Joshua started to laugh. Just a little bit, not loudly. But this gentle laugh was enough to trigger a warm, pleasant feeling in me.
For the next few minutes we eventually got chatting properly. I asked where he’d learned his craft, and he explained that his stepfather had taught him everything he knew.
Stepfather? Was he a neurotic child of divorced parents like me? Hopefully not!
Giovanni served us and Joshua enjoyed his pizza and salad as though he really was eating for the first time in 2,000 years. He gushed about the red wine. ‘I’ve really missed this!’
Something like joie de vivre seemed to awaken in this carpenter. We spoke more and more and I told him, ‘As a child I used to love beards like yours. I even wanted one myself!’
This made Joshua smile again.
‘And do you know what my mother responded?’ I asked.
‘Tell me,’ he said cheerily.
‘She said that a beard like that was like a cemetery for crumbs.’
Joshua laughed out loud. It seemed as though he was familiar with this problem.
It was a great laugh.
So genuine.
So free.
‘I haven’t laughed for ages,’ Joshua declared.
He pondered for a while and then, from the bottom of his heart, he said, ‘It’s laughter that I’ve missed the most.’
And I’d never been so happy about making someone laugh. This man was strange, foreign, and unusual – but I’m telling you, he was also truly fascinating.
I wanted to find out more about Joshua. Did he have a girlfriend? And if not, was he still pining for an ex?
‘So who used to make you laugh, then?’ I asked.
‘A wonderful woman,’ he replied.
That there had been a wonderful woman in his life bugged me more than it should have.
‘What… what happened to her?’
‘She died.’
Oh my goodness! If I’d been interested in him – which was obviously not the case, but if I had been – then I was up against a dead woman. That was a bit creepy.
I therefore decided that I was never going to be interested in Joshua.
But then I looked into his sad eyes, forgot all about the ‘never being interested’ thing and wished that I could give him a comforting hug.
He seemed like someone who didn’t often get hugged.
‘Her name was similar to yours,’ Joshua explained with a dejected look on his face.
‘Woodward?’ I asked, sounding surprised.
‘Maria.’
God I was stupid!
‘Maria used to make some really witty jokes about rabbis,’ he swooned.
I was confused. ‘Rabbis?’
‘And about Romans.’
‘Romans?’
‘And Pharisees.’
I tried not to think of loose screws.
‘Although you really shouldn’t joke about Pharisees,’ Joshua added.
‘Yes… no… of course not,’ I stammered. ‘Pharisees are… totally unfunny.’
Joshua stared out over the lake, obviously thinking about his ex, and said, ‘I will be seeing her again soon.’
That was a rather morbid announcement.
‘When the Kingdom of Heaven will be on earth,’ he added.
The Kingdom of Heaven? Alarm bells were now ringing in my head. Captain Kirk shouted from the bridge: ‘Scotty! Get us out of here immediately!’
Scotty replied from the engine room: ‘I can’t, Captain.’
‘Why not?’
‘We haven’t paid for the pizza yet.’
‘How long will it take for Giovanni to bring the bill?’ Kirk screamed, louder than the deafening alert siren.
‘At least ten minutes. Possibly eight if we signal for attention,’ came the answer from the engine room.
‘We don’t have eight minutes. He’s on about the Kingdom of Heaven!’
‘Then we’re doomed, Captain.’
Since I couldn’t escape, there was only one alternative. I had to change the subject. I was desperately looking for a way out of this conversation and found one. ‘Oh, look Joshua! Someone’s peeing in a bush.’
Not the most elegant way to change a conversation, I know.
But there really was a homeless person taking a leak in a tho
rn bush. After all, even in an idyllic place like Malente, there were people who were unemployed, on benefits and nutters who liked to have conversations with lampposts in the high street.
‘That man is a beggar,’ Joshua declared.
‘Yes, it seems so,’ I replied.
‘We must share our bread with him.’
‘What?’ I said, astonished.
‘We’ll share our bread with him,’ Joshua repeated.
‘Sharing bread?’ I thought. ‘You only do that with ducks.’
Joshua got up and made as if to approach this slightly chubby, unshaven man and invite him to join us at the table. This date was well on its way to turning into the dinner from hell.
‘We shouldn’t share our bread with him,’ I said, in a very loud, slightly squeaky voice.
‘Give me one reason why not,’ Joshua replied calmly.
‘Erm…’ I was trying to think of a good reason, but all I could come up with was: ‘We don’t have any bread, only pizza.’
Joshua smiled. ‘Well, then we’ll share the pizza.’ And with that he went over to the homeless man and led him to our table.
The tramp, who went by the name of Frank and was probably in his late thirties, had a rather different idea about sharing than I did. He took our pizzas and all that was left for us were the side salads drenched in vinaigrette. He told us that he had been in prison last year, having robbed a mobile phone shop because of money troubles.
‘So why a mobile phone shop and not a bank?’ I asked.
‘I felt that these service providers have earned a lot of money with their impossibly complicated tariffs.’
Frank could be accused of a lot of things, including a lack of interest in personal hygiene. But I couldn’t fault his logic.
‘How did you get into financial trouble?’ Joshua asked after Frank had explained to him what a mobile phone shop actually was. Joshua poured Frank some more wine. He showed compassion – too much compassion, in my mind. I leaned over to him and said, ‘Let’s pay and go.’
But Joshua declared, ‘We’ll carry on breaking the bread with him.’
With that terrible stench in the air I would soon be breaking other things.
Meanwhile, Frank was answering Joshua’s question. ‘I lost my job at an insurance company.’
‘And why?’
‘I’d stopped turning up for work.’
‘And was there a reason?’ Joshua asked.
Frank hesitated. It seemed that this brought back painful memories.
‘You can confide in me,’ Joshua said in a pleasantly calming voice.
‘My wife died in a car accident,’ Frank explained.
Oh my goodness, I thought.
‘And it was my fault.’
Now I had real sympathy with Frank and poured him some more wine.
And myself.
Frank spoke of his deep love for his wife and of the terrible night of the accident. It was the very first time that he had spoken about it in so much detail. Frank had been taking his wife Caro to a party. They were driving along a country road when a sales rep coming the other way pulled a risky overtaking manoeuvre. The cars collided head on and Caro died instantly. She was still planning to do so many things with her life. She’d just started a belly-dancing class for example.
‘Were you driving too fast?’ I wanted to know.
Frank shook his head.
‘Could you have reacted differently?’ I dug deeper.
He shook his head again.
‘So why is it your fault then?’ I asked, gulping.
‘Because… because she died and I didn’t,’ he replied and started to cry. This was the first time he’d told anyone about his guilt and it was the first time he was able to grieve freely. Joshua took his hand, allowed Frank to cry for a while and then asked, ‘Was your wife a good person?’
‘She was the best,’ Frank answered.
‘Then you should be as well,’ Joshua said in his gentle, convincing tone.
Frank stopped crying. ‘So I guess that means I can’t rob any more mobile phone shops then, does it?’ he asked ironically.
Joshua nodded.
Frank pushed the wine to one side, thanked us from the bottom of his heart, stood up and left. It was certainly possible to imagine that this guy would be off the booze for a while now. Man, Joshua could probably make loads of money with a rehab clinic in Beverly Hills.
He smiled at me. ‘Sometimes you just have to listen to people to banish their demons.’
I suddenly thought how lovely it was that we’d shared the bread.
Joshua and I left the restaurant and walked silently along the lake towards the town centre. This time I didn’t mind the silence. I watched the sunset with Joshua. Although it wasn’t as impressive here in Malente as in Formentera, it was still nice enough to enjoy a few wonderful moments.
Joshua confused me. Sometimes I wanted to escape from him, sometimes I just wanted to listen to his voice, and other times I felt this tremendous urge to touch him. And I wasn’t sure if he had this urge as well. Objectively speaking, he hadn’t actually given me a single reason to think so. He had never once scanned my body from top to toe, and hadn’t made any attempts to flirt with me. Why not? Was I really so unattractive? Was I not good enough for him? Who did this guy think he was? As a carpenter this guy certainly wasn’t the pick of the singles market!
‘Why are you looking at me so angrily?’ Joshua asked.
‘Nothing, nothing. My face just sometimes looks a bit strained,’ I said awkwardly.
‘No, it doesn’t,’ he responded. ‘It seems friendly.’
He said that without a hint of irony in his voice. In fact, he was rather behind the times when it came to irony. I never had that feeling that any of his actions or gestures were fake, rehearsed or insincere. He really did seem to find my face friendly. Was that a compliment? At least it was better than Sven’s constant refrain of ‘I love every pound on you’.
I smiled. Joshua smiled back. And I chose to interpret this as flirting.
We strolled through the town centre. From a bar we could hear a crowd bellowing Meatloaf’s Bat Out Of Hell.
Joshua was alarmed when he heard this.
‘What’s the matter,’ I asked him.
‘This music is satanic.’
Before I could reply, he stormed into the bar. I rushed in after him. There were about twenty young men and women who looked like they worked at the local building society, standing in the bar in front of a karaoke machine. The men had loosened their ties and the women had taken off their suit jackets. The atmosphere was boisterous; everyone was singing and swaying from side to side. It was the kind of karaoke party that can only be organised by people who spend the whole day battling bank transfer forms.
But Joshua was annoyed. Singing ‘songs of Satan’ like that did not meet with his approval. ‘It’s as though they are dancing around the golden calf.’
‘And there is such a thing as taking things too far,’ I grumbled. ‘It’s only a karaoke machine. Not a golden calf. And listening to Meat Loaf is indeed hellish, but nothing more than that.’
Then I went over to the building society employee who was holding the microphone and asked him, ‘Can I borrow that for a while?’
The man, a typical typical product salesman with slicked back hair thought about what he was going to answer. But before he could respond, I’d grabbed the microphone off him and shoved it into Joshua’s hand.
‘What do you want to sing?’
He hesitated, not quite sure what I wanted him to do.
‘It’s fun,’ I said cheerily. ‘What are your favourite songs?’
Joshua got himself together and said, ‘I particularly like the psalms of King David.’
I looked at the song lists on the karaoke machine. ‘All right. You’re getting La Bamba.’
I pressed the button and the machine started, but Joshua didn’t get into the groove, even though he tried, as he was clearly trying t
o do me a favour. He half-heartedly sang along to La Bamba, but at the Soy capitán, soy capitán bit he put the microphone down. It wasn’t for him. I’d made a mistake. And I was sorry that I’d coerced him into doing it.
The slick-back man came up to me. ‘So, are you done killing the mood?’
I looked around and saw lots of annoyed faces. ‘Yes. It looks like it.’
I was about to pass the microphone back to him. But then Joshua joined us. ‘I would like to sing. Is there perhaps something more meaningful in this machine?’
‘We don’t want anything meaningful,’ the building society guy shouted. ‘We want 99 Red Balloons!’
I saw that Joshua really did intend to sing. He clearly didn’t want to let me down. That was kind of sweet.
So I pulled the building society man aside and quietly whispered, ‘Let him sing or I’ll kick your red balloons. Then there’ll only be 97.’
‘Well, it sounds like a good idea with a calmer song for a change,’ he answered fearfully.
I went over to the machine, perused the song catalogue for a while and found Landslide by Fleetwood Mac. Joshua took the microphone and started singing in his wonderful voice. By the time he’d finished, half of the building society lot were in tears. The rest of them were shouting: ‘We want more! We want more…!’ A young, quite petite woman approached Joshua and said, ‘How about We Will Rock You?’
Quite annoyed at this suggestion he asked: ‘Is it about a stoning?’
But he wasn’t half as confused as the young woman and I were.
I looked through the song catalogue again and was only able to find tracks that I did not think were particularly suitable for Joshua, like Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?, Bad or Who Let the Dogs Out?
‘I think, we can go,’ I suggested to him. But the building society gang simply didn’t want to let him leave, and so Joshua asked the crowd: ‘Am I allowed to sing a psalm as well?’
The slick-back answered. ‘Yeah sure. Whatever that is.’
Joshua showed him what it was. He sang a wonderful psalm, which he had – seemingly instinctively – chosen for the bankers, as it included the line: ‘If riches increase, set not your heart upon them.’
When he’d finished, the building society people clapped their hands excitedly. ‘Bravo’, they shouted. ‘We want more!’ and ‘Encore’.
Apocalypse Next Tuesday Page 5
