At that moment I saw my doubtful expression reflected in the water, and two thoughts shot through my head. Why did my hair always look so crap? And what if I was that person?
It was certainly an idea. After all, there was no more average a person than me for miles around.
I turned to Jesus and explained that I would be providing the proof. In great detail, I explained that I already complied with loads of the Ten Commandments and that I would also manage to sort out the rest by tomorrow evening. I would honour my father and mother and I would stop coveting other people’s things. Jesus patiently listened to my oration. ‘The Ten Commandments are not enough for a good and righteous life,’ he explained calmly.
It seemed like nothing was easy if it had anything to do with God!
‘Then what else do I need to do?’ I asked. ‘I mean, I hope that you’re not expecting me to cut off a woman’s hand if she grabs a man’s private parts during a row?’
Jesus smiled. ‘You’ve been reading Deuteronomy.’
He clearly thought I was rather better-versed in the Bible than I actually was.
‘Don’t worry,’ Jesus explained. ‘There are plenty of rules in the Bible that you don’t need to follow. You just have to live in the spirit of God.’
‘And how would you translate that?’
‘You can find out everything that you need to know about a righteous life from my Sermon on the Mount.’
The Sermon on the Mount! Uh-oh! I’d heard of it of course. We’d learned about it during confirmation class, but at that time I was far too preoccupied with my heartache and drawing sketches on my notepad, in which my ex-boyfriend was sought out by the Ten Plagues. I particularly enjoyed having him be guzzled up by locusts. So if you’d asked me now what the Sermon on the Mount was about, I couldn’t even have told him if my life or, as in this case, the survival of the world, depended on it.
‘You do know about the Sermon on the Mount, don’t you?’ Jesus asked gently.
I grinned somewhat moronically.
‘You don’t?’
I grinned even more moronically.
‘I thought that you knew the Bible,’ Jesus said sternly.
‘Frddl.’
It wasn’t exactly pleasant to stand in front of Jesus and admit that you don’t know the Bible. It’s like telling your father that you’re on the pill, and have been for two years, despite the fact that you’re only sixteen years old. But I forced myself to deliver this brave confession: ‘You… you are right. I have no idea what you said there.’
Before Jesus was able to show his disappointment too much, I hastily added: ‘But just you wait, by tomorrow evening. I’ll live according to its rules, and then you’ll see that we human beings have the power and the potential to create a better world for ourselves.’
Jesus smiled at me. He seemed enraptured. Was he actually impressed by my impassioned speech?
Or even by me?
‘Is everything OK?’ I asked cautiously.
A jolt went through him; he pulled himself together and explained as emphatically as he could: ‘I agree to your suggestion.’
‘That’s good,’ I replied, not really knowing whether it was. I so hoped that I hadn’t bitten off more than I could chew. I was so scared that I almost prayed to God, but at the last moment I remembered that God and I were not exactly pursuing the same goals right now.
Jesus and I faced each other. We didn’t say a word. I would have loved to have spent the evening with him, like yesterday, but that was no longer possible. Far too much had happened. I would never see salsa-Joshua in him again.
With a heavy heart, I bid farewell. I got the impression that he didn’t find it easy to part ways with me either. Once I’d got home, I was relieved that my father hadn’t put up a ‘No dogs or Maries allowed’ sign.
I went into the house, saw that the little girl was already asleep on the sofa in the living room, and heard quiet sex noises coming from my father’s bedroom. For a brief moment I wished that the Day of Judgement would begin right now.
Kata came out of the loo. Before I could greet her, I heard Dad moaning. He sounded a bit like a wild horse.
‘Come into my room – you can’t hear the stallion from there,’ Kata suggested.
‘Then it’s a wonderful place,’ I answered and disappeared with her into the refuge of silence. But Kata seemed very unsettled.
‘Is something wrong?’ I asked her.
‘I… I’m scared.’
My sister admitting that she was scared? The world really did seem to be going crazy.
‘Of what?’ I asked.
‘I… I’m no longer in any pain.’
‘I thought that you didn’t have a tumour?’
‘Well yes, I do.’
This came as a serious blow to me.
‘But now that the pain has gone, it’s as though the tumour is gone too. I’m petrified.’
‘Because you’re hoping that it’s gone and you don’t want to be disappointed?’
‘No, because I’m going to die soon.’
When the tumour was first diagnosed five years ago, the fighting spirit was always visible in Kata’s eyes, but now it was just blind fear. And that scared me.
‘I… don’t want…’ she said quietly. She didn’t even articulate ‘to die’.
I hugged her. And she actually allowed me to.
Lots of questions were darting through my head. If the doctors had found the tumour, then why hadn’t Jesus seen it? Or was she just imaging that she had a tumour? But why would she do that? And why had Kata drawn this comic strip that I’d just found on the floor?
Why was Satan suddenly making an appearance in Kata’s comic strips? And why did she think that he was superior to her? Was she afraid of ending up in hell? But she didn’t believe in a life after death. Should I tell her that it did exist? And talk to her about Jesus? And about what was coming? Or would I be causing her even more anguish by doing so – was she a hot candidate for the eternal inferno after all?
Before I could open my mouth, I felt a tear on my cheek. Kata was crying. It was the first time that I’d seen the adult Kata crying. It almost tore my heart apart. I held her even more tightly and decided not to burden her with the madness that surrounded me. Suddenly, she was the little sister, and I was the big one protecting her.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Once Kata had gone to bed, I went to my room. It knocked me for six that she was ill again. But it didn’t make me cry, because I had high hopes that Jesus could cure her. But for that, I would probably have to convince him that mankind – and Kata included – deserved another chance. So there was even more at stake.
I took my Bible out of my pocket, and while I was lying on the bed looking for the Sermon on the Mount – the Bible was in serious need of an index – I got quite immersed in it. For example, I learned that ‘Sheba’ wasn’t just cat food. And the precise crime that Onan had committed. (There seemed to be more sex and crime in this book than on Channel 5.) When I’d finally found the sermon in Matthew, I was so nervous that I just flicked through the TV channels for a while – I was just too afraid of what kind of demands were going to be placed on me. There was far too much folk music for my liking, so, then I turned the TV off and started to read the words of Jesus. The sermon was a kind of ‘Best of’, including teachings like the bird parable that he’d made during our first date – it seemed like it was ages ago. I grouped his teachings into the following categories: 1) Can implement them without any problems; 2) Won’t be easy to implement; 3) Will be difficult; 4) Will be bloody difficult; and 5) Bloody hell!
There wasn’t much in the first and second categories.
The only demand that would not present any great difficultly was not to swear. Watching out for false prophets seemed also to be achievable, and of course I did not cast pearls before swine – although I assumed that this was another one of his parables, which I didn’t really understand.
It would be harder for me t
o live without worrying about food and money. I was so damn good at worrying – if it had been an Olympic discipline I’d probably have won the silver medal, just pipped to the gold by Woody Allen. I was also not to be too attached to my possessions, and unfortunately there were no exception clauses whatsoever about shoes, iPods and Norah Jones CDs. But this was nothing in comparison to what Jesus required with respect to interpersonal relationships – you should give people who have done evil things to you even more. Or as Jesus put it: ‘And if any man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloak also.’ That was certainly a rule that would be well-received in tax offices.
But I doubted that I could ever be so selfless. And to turn the other cheek in a fight wasn’t something for me either – I wasn’t that into masochism. And it was equally problematic when it came to the subject of ‘Judge not, that ye be not judged.’ That’s what Svetlana had accused me of, and I was all too keen to adjudge her to death. Then not even Jesus’s parable ‘How can you say to your brother, “Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye?”’ could help me get any further. Even though I knew that ‘Sven’ was carved into the beam in my eye, and I was thereby just as guilty as Svetlana, I was just too angry at her.
The ‘Bloody hell’ category included demands such as sincerely loving your enemies. I didn’t have any enemies other than Svetlana. But how was I supposed to love this woman? Sincerely? And not be two-faced? Was the fate of the world now dependent on my ability to do so?
Then my mobile rang. It was Michi. He was all worked up and finally wanted to know when exactly the world was going to end. When I told him, he was even more frazzled, and when I told him what I’d agreed with Jesus, and that quite a lot depended on me loving Svetlana by tomorrow, he just groaned: ‘We’re finished…’
Then he gulped. He’d just realised: ‘And Julian Styles is going to die a virgin.’
I felt empathy towards him. ‘I’m sorry for Julian.’
‘Tell me about it.’
I sighed with him in solidarity. This obviously cheered him up a bit and he hemmed and hawed: ‘Do you think…’
‘What?’
‘Well…’ he hesitated a while longer, and then flatly said, ‘You could… once… with Julian…’
‘No!’
‘OK,’ he said hastily. I almost felt guilty that I’d brushed him off so harshly. But I just wasn’t in love with him, and sex without love generally gave me as much pleasure as having my legs waxed.
‘Then… then, I hope, for my old friend Julian’s sake, that you manage to convince Jesus,’ Michi whispered hoarsely. Then he hung up.
I groaned briefly and returned to the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus simply couldn’t make a load of demands without providing any advice on how to put this into practice as a normal mortal person.
I flipped through the pages, found something in Matthew 7:12 under the heading ‘The Golden Rule’: ‘Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them.’
Good, well that was pretty well known, and it sounded a little bit like those signs you find in train toilets: ‘Please leave the toilet as you would like to find it.’ Every time I read those signs I thought: am I an interior designer?
But now, when I really thought about the words of Jesus, I reached the conclusion that perhaps this was indeed the way to go! If I was nice to Svetlana, then maybe she might be nice to me and change. And then I might actually to be able to love her sincerely. Not an entirely realistic scenario, admittedly, but surely dreaming was allowed.
And maybe, yes maybe, I would be allowed to dream about me and Joshua again some time.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Meanwhile…
The Reverend Gabriel was sitting in the moonlight on a bench in the vicarage gardens. The Messiah was resting in the guest room, and in the distance he could hear the gym-body vicar playing his horrendous electric guitar. That he was playing It’s the End of the World as We Know It is not something that Gabriel noticed. It had been a terrible day for him. He had thrown his beloved Silvia out, and even though she repeatedly assured him that she was not of Satan, and shouted angrily that she knew a very good psychiatric ward which she could recommend, he did not believe her. He also didn’t believe her when she cried, trying to soften his heart. And most certainly not when she confessed through her tears that she had really come to love him.
He took his gaze off the moon and stared into the dark garden. He felt lonelier than ever before – he had lost Silvia.
At that moment, the thorny bush in front of him burst into flames.
This encounter was all he needed.
WHY IS MY SON NOT ON HIS WAY TO JERUSALEM?
the burning bush asked. His impressive voice wasn’t that loud, but you still felt as though it could pervade the entire world.
All Gabriel wanted to do was flee. But since God was omnipresent, he would probably appear to him everywhere – as a burning palm tree in the Maldives, as a burning fir tree in Norway or a burning bonsai in Japan. There was nowhere to escape to. So Gabriel pulled himself together and thought about how he could best tell the Lord that his Son was currently being led up the garden path by Satan.
‘Erm, my Lord, how shall I say this? There is a complication…’
COMPLICATION?
Judging by the tone of his voice, the burning bush did not currently seem to have a high tolerance for complications. And particularly not with respect to the complication that Gabriel was going to have to tell him about.
‘Well now, it’s not easy to explain,’ Gabriel stammered.
THEN EXPLAIN IT IN A COMPLICATED WAY.
the thorn bush suggested.
Gabriel desperately wanted to keep all of this to himself. He knew that the burning bush tended to overreact. You just had to think back to the Egyptian Pharaohs. But Gabriel also knew that he couldn’t hide anything from the Almighty. So with a trembling voice he explained what had happened between Jesus and Marie to date, and he didn’t skimp on the details:
‘…and salsa is a dance in which you move your hips close together…’
The burning bush remained silent and began to look increasingly angry as the oration progressed. At the end of Gabriel’s account, he was so angry that he burned as only an angry thorn bush can. Gabriel could hardly stand the fury that the thorn bush was exuding. But he was also quite confused. God was the Omniscient – how come there were things that had escaped him?
He was just about to ask this question when the thorn bush flared up metres into the sky, and his voice sounded angrily:
IF MY SON IS NOT ON HIS WAY TO JERUSALEM BY TOMORROW EVENING, I WILL BE MAKING A PERSONAL APPEARANCE TO THIS MARIE.
Chapter Thirty-Five
At least I could still dream about Joshua… We were holding hands, enjoying a lovely hike through the mountains, and when we’d reached the sunny summit, we looked deep into each other’s eyes, our lips drew closer, and we would have kissed, had not Svetlana turned up. She was sitting on a stallion, which looked at me and said: ‘I am your father.’
Horrified, I woke up. When I’d calmed down again and looked at my mobile, which I had put on silent, I saw that I had fourteen missed calls. They were all from my mother; she hadn’t rung me as often as she did last night in the last ten years. I was shocked and worried, so I called her immediately. All I heard at the other end was a choked ‘Hello?’
‘Has something happened?’ I asked clumsily.
At first I heard nothing. Then some gulping. And finally a wailing, ‘Gbrllisssttlllycrzzzyy.’
‘The rail is totally lazy?’
‘Gabriel,’ she sobbed.
‘Gabriel is totally lazy?’
Why would I care about that?
‘Gabriel is totally crazy!’
Well, that made much more sense. I told my mother to calm down, but unfortunately she didn’t and carried on wailing. I tried to
speak to her as compassionately as I could: ‘It’s good for you to let your emotions run free.’
‘Don’t use any of that psychobabble on me,’ she snapped.
‘Then stop blubbing,’ I barked back. I still had to work on this empathy business. But my harsh tones seemed to have an effect. Mum stopped crying. She apologised and then she told me about Gabriel as calmly as she could. She said that she had feelings for him, which was not completely unrelated to the fact that we had made peace and that this had released blockages within her, and that Gabriel had now told her to leave because he thought that she was Satan.
‘It’s all just an excuse, because he has commitment issues,’ she snorted angrily. ‘I mean Satan. Please! He’s about as real as God!’
‘Or equally real,’ I gulped.
‘What?’ my mother asked.
‘Erm… forget it.’
She started snivelling again. Man, Gabriel really should be happy that I was not able to wither him like Jesus could have. As soon as I had finished my ruinous thought, I was pretty shocked. Not because I felt guilty about thinking such a thing, but because it basically said in the Golden Rule that wishing someone to die was tantamount to killing them directly. Well, this implementation of the Sermon on the Mount had got off to a flying start.
‘I’ll have a chat with Gabriel,’ I offered.
Apocalypse Next Tuesday Page 16
