What Lot's Wife Saw

by Ioanna Bourazopoulou

  With the fine edge of the brush I applied a thin trail of foam over his upper lip. My boy, where is your jealousy that drove me mad in Liverpool, where is your fickleness, your cowardice, your superficiality that’s ruined my life? I started on the second cheek, applying an even coat on both. Why aren’t you petulant, why don’t you complain, why don’t you react, you who got angry without any reason, who cried over nothing, who loved without knowing what the word meant? I silently put the brush down and wiped a drop of foam that was poised to trickle down his Adam’s apple. You were blind but now you see with a thousand eyes, you stammered but now you make speeches, you hated but now you are indifferent, you were easy to kill but now …

  I reverently picked up the razor. I checked whether his breathing was still regular. I knew perfectly well what I should do to stop it permanently for a truly live man but I wasn’t totally sure that this one was. Was it really blood pulsing in his blue veins? I studied his face, seeking signs of life. I got very close, my lips reached the level of his until they were almost brushing. I felt a surge of desire. I wondered whether I should dare taste them. My lips parted in preparation; how else was I to confirm that he was actually alive?

  “Talk to me about your love life with my predecessor,” he said softly.

  I was thrown off-balance, standing, as I was, in two ports simultaneously, one foot in the Colony and the other in Liverpool, with my mind awkwardly straddling twenty compressed years. I couldn’t understand the question, I mean, to which of my two men was he referring? Whom did he consider his predecessor? I repeated the question in my head, hoping it would be easier to cope with the second time around. Alas, it was impossible to discern whom he had nominated as his “predecessor”. Love life? The man that had loved me in Liverpool would melt inside me, whereas Bera would remember his need for me every time he found the Green Box’s instructions distasteful and he needed to let off steam.

  “I didn’t notice any signs of your presence in his bedroom,” he said.

  In Bera’s bedroom I used to enter and leave as a transient visitor, how could he have found evidence of my passage? I had never spent an entire night in that room. Bera didn’t trust me enough to allow me to sleep next to him. He wasn’t wrong though, who knows what ideas would have passed through my head looking at him, flat-out beside me.

  “Why did you kill him?”

  He had me there for a fraction of a second. My mind clouded with confusion. I tried to separate the two ports to decide which of my men was he asking about. I hadn’t killed Bera, I had killed the other one. If I had murdered Bera, I would have remembered it.

  “I am accused of a murder in Liverpool,” I blurted.

  But I wasn’t sure; suddenly I wasn’t sure about anything. It was the fault of this damned youthful face that insisted on introducing himself as Bera and so mixing up two separate lives that I had never confused before. Liverpool’s Judith and the Colony’s Regina are two different women, two different widows of two different men who had died in different ways.

  “Did it hurt?” he inquired.

  Did who hurt? Did which one of the two hurt? Unless he’s asking whether I got hurt, that maybe it hurt me. Why can’t he be more precise with his questions?

  “Death didn’t bring the relief you might have hoped for,” he observed.

  Which of the two deaths? Which relief was he referring to? Death never gives you relief, I wasn’t so naïve. I killed him to give him relief, all Liverpool knew that afterwards. He would live on and I would be extinguished! No death provides relief to the surviving party, especially since this death had been freely offered by one who thought that she had boundless reserves. How stupid I was! Since, no matter how many men I lost and no matter in which manner I lost them, their graves will always haunt me. I had never loved the old Governor enough to kill him nor did I love myself enough to revenge myself on him. I had accepted the punishment and imprisonment that he had offered me because it was the only way for me to pay the price of my imprudence. To offer my lover release from his bonds at the cost of clamping them onto my own wrists.

  “You owe it to yourself,” he stated.

  Yes, he was right, no woman should be condemned to two merciless unions, to twice being nailed to the cross, to twice being torn apart. I had been a victim of two men who were so dissimilar in their love and so identical in their destructiveness. No woman should be deserving of torment just because she breathes. Either as the object of love or the victim of its absence, I’m equally punished. Whether they love me or not, they bleed me; whether I desire them or loathe them, I pay them! Whether I kill them or they die by themselves, they live on! I owe it to myself! So what I do today, I do only for myself, for Judith-Regina Swarnlake-Bera, for my salvation!

  Blinded by rage, I grabbed the razor from the trolley, aimed it at his neck, at the carotid, raised my arm and brought it down with full force. His hand, like a bolt of lightning, stopped my wrist a fraction of an inch before the blade met his skin.

  “Not yet, Judith,” he whispered. “I’ll let you know where to direct this rage when the time comes.”

  “Will it be long?” I queried impatiently.

  “I am sure you will realise when. I know I can trust you.”

  He carefully removed the razor from my hand. I stood up, totally spent. He softly said that I could go. I nodded obediently and turned for the door.

  27

  Letter of Dusan Zehta Danilovitz

  (Page 47)

  PRIEST MONTENEGRO

  … I heard those infernal teeth of the stubby African gnawing at the wood of my bed and I jumped but didn’t escape my nightmare. I was being covered by an avalanche of stolen idols, which made me cry out as the mound of statuettes, figurines and coins grew and buried me. The ground beneath me was giving way and I was about to be sucked under. Ali rushed the bed and shook me out of it. The dream receded but the foreboding did not. Someone was breaking the seals of the Apocalypse.

  I rushed over to the window. Banana trees, bushes and tangled undergrowth, like unsteady reflections in water, fell away from the periphery of my consciousness as I peered out into the parched darkness of the Colony. Then I saw, or thought I saw, a river of laden berlingas flowing north along the cobbled streets, like the Israelites of the Exodus escaping unrestrained from Egypt. I was sure that it was all a figment of my imagination and I was impatient to wake up from this dream, but the berlingas just continued to file past as if there was no end to them. I turned to Ali in desperation, hoping he could draw the line between illusion and reality for me.

  “The salt is being sent to the desert,” intoned the Negro, and for the first time I could see a flash of fear in his eyes.

  I returned to bed and asked Ali to pick up his straw mat from the floor and to start sleeping in his own room from now on. Since the salt was being transported through the desert and we still remained here, I would stop being frightened by my dreams. There was no point. The nightmare had left the domain of fantasy and was now rearing its head in reality.

  I passed a very rough night with the gnawing of the natives sending vibrations through the bed and with the local chiefs, from whom I had stolen the prehistoric idols, dripping mud onto my pillow. I hadn’t considered the smuggling a sin, I had taken the coins without feeling any guilt; let them who’d bought them worry. In any case, the laws against the illegal traffic of antiquities were mainly useful in raising the value of private collections. Theft, however? Some have never forgiven me for that. Especially those who’d trusted the young anthropologist and had welcomed him into their huts naively thinking that science, in its innocent wisdom, was incapable of producing crooks. They’d never suspected that the hot breath for knowledge and rationality which could define and safeguard value could also be twisted, using the same reasoning to debase it, and these people would pursue me to my grave! I gave a mighty whack to the frame of my bed to get revenge on those busy jaws but the Africans’ teeth were too sturdy to break – the Australopithecines
had proved their long-term superiority, at least in my nightmares.

  I wrapped myself tightly in my sheet, knowing that the worst was yet to come. Priests were not free agents in this society of salaried earners, if indeed they were free in other societies.

  The early morning was greeted by some loud knocks on the door – the threesome standing there were looking for me. I heard Ali’s feet dragging along the floor as he headed for the entrance. The door opened and I strained to make out what the soft male voices were saying. Having failed, I hid under the sheets when I heard Ali’s ominous footsteps climb the stairs and stop outside my room. The door opened and the indefatigable Ali shuffled over and uncovered me. He ignored my pleas to be left alone and spat on the floor to ward off the evil eye.

  “Vestments,” he mouthed.

  “You didn’t take them to the balcony, did you, so that the whole Colony could enjoy the spectacle?”

  “To the library.”

  Defeated, I pulled my robe on and pinned the Purple Star on my chest before going down to the library. Father Efsevios, Father Vassili and Father Yuri, the so-called “bishop”, had darkened my library with their black robes. Their dense beards were scented with deodorant, their crosses nestled on the shelving stomachs and the stones with the linked arms of the Consortium were displayed on their middle fingers. We are not ashamed to wear them, we boast that we are salaried and shackled. Two were on the couch, below the paleontological shelves, and Father Yuri was slowing rocking on my rocking chair between Darwin and Ecclesiastes. I closed the curtains so that we couldn’t be seen from outside. Now that the colonists knew that the salt was leaving through the desert, they would be desperate for answers and unscheduled conclaves of priests could easily be misinterpreted. Yuri, sensing the reason behind the curtains, smiled ironically as if to convey that my belated attempt at containment was superfluous.

  “Bishop” Yuri holds the chair of the (informal, of course) Synod of the Orthodox Clergy of the Colony and he bears the weight of his tin crown with the appropriate melancholy vanity of one who knows how meaningless those titles were in a Colony of employees but, oh, how necessary to maintain the illusion of an independent Church in spite of the fact that it wasn’t autonomous in the Colony and wouldn’t survive on its own. Thus, I showed him proper respect and knelt before him.

  “Your blessing, Father.”

  “I bless you, my child.”

  The “Bishop” indulged me by moving his fat fingers over my head, simultaneously being very careful to keep them from straying across the rays of reflected sunlight that shone from my Purple Star.

  I rose and bowed towards the other two. “The Lord’s Peace be with you, brothers.”

  “Amen, my brother.”

  This discussion promised to be strewn with thorns, as the investigating trio that the Synod of the Orthodox Clergy had sent was one of the most effective. Their eyes were thirsting for explanations. Why was the salt fleeing? I was the last person in the Colony to ask but I couldn’t hope to convince anyone about that, let alone these inquisitors. I sat as far away from them as I could manage and leant back against two volumes on the evolution of Echinoderms, inwardly focusing on trying to maintain my composure. Experienced in their tactics, I knew that they would let Yuri broach the subject in his beloved, pedantic way, petal by petal, like plucking a rose. His verbosity, his insinuations and his hypocritical compliments would derail the discussion continuously so that I would become confused and lulled into divulging what they were after.

  Father Yuri stopped fidgeting and knitted his fingers over his belly, signalling the commencement of the ordeal. He started with his classic praise about the snatching of the Metropolis from the Catholics, a feat for which the Orthodox community of Hesperides will always venerate me. Alas, more and more Spaniards and Italians are gathering in Hesperides and are being promoted to managerial positions, displacing incumbents from the Balkans and the Black Sea so our dominant position in the executive borough is anything but secure. The transfer of the Metropolis to my jurisdiction had been a great surprise and had brought about an upsurge in interest in the Orthodox faith but maintaining its position would be a struggle.

  Father Vassili precipitated into the conversation to state that my eccentric behaviour had perversely increased attendances, especially those of a specific sex, and, of course, the Church recognised its debt to me in that regard. However, he went on to stress, one had to be careful to gauge where the profit wore thin and the damage began.

  Yuri observed that my appearance was quite unconventional for an Orthodox priest and my sermons controversial, but they touched the hearts of the colonists and since the Lord often surprises us with the agents He chooses to disseminate His word, he would refrain from nit-picking further. It could also be said that a healthy dose of obfuscation was of recognised value in teaching and, possibly, a more effective tool than clarity when targeting colonists. One must take care, however, not to use confusion to excess! Times were troubled, and a measure of restraint could prove instrumental, as it was only too easy for the gift to become a liability.

  “Times are troubled,” I chorused.

  Father Vassili, misinterpreting my vacuous gaze and thinking that I needed proof that times were indeed troubled, raised a finger and announced that the Catholics had never stopped trying to recapture the Metropolis, claiming that it should be theirs by right. They still found it difficult to believe that it had slipped through their fingers to the Governor’s wife’s protégé despite the stark fact that they were the majority in the quarter. One must also not ignore the intentions of the rabbis who, working behind the scenes, as they do, conspire to saw away the legs of Christian thrones and dream of seeing the Metropolis transformed into a synagogue.

  Father Efsevios joined in to remind us of the Moslem threat, since they also had designs on Hesperides. We would do well not to underestimate them just because they were divided into numerous factions. Moslems had been quietly ascending the ranks of hierarchy and already there were quarters where there were no Christians.

  Let us keep in mind, Father Yuri hastened to point out, that at heart, the Consortium didn’t care about dogma since what mattered to them was the story of the destruction of the Twin Cities which could be found in all the holy books – the Bible, the Torah and the Koran. That meant that the obligation to keep the Metropolis and Hesperides in the Orthodox fold fell squarely on our shoulders.

  Father Efsevios grumbled that the imams had wised up and had polished their preaching, trying to stress the similarities between the will of Allah with that of the Seventy-Five. Our employers demand that preachers try to convince the faithful to identify their chosen God with the Seventy-Five. So they study the Bible, they contrast it with the Koran and present impressive comparative interpretations of critical chapters since their Allah conformed more closely to the model the Seventy-Five wished to advance. We had suffered serious setbacks in this battle.

  “May I recall Genesis 18:21 to your attention?” he sighed, to force me to realise that our dogma could not tolerate further defeats.

  In Genesis, chapter 18, verse 21, God decides before destroying Sodom and Gomorrah to descend and make sure that the inhabitants are every bit as sinful as He believes them to be. Moslems interpreted this as proof of God’s inability to determine the magnitude of the problem, the existence or absence of excessive sin, since He had to inspect the cities in Person. Conversely, their Allah, in the equivalent passage in the Koran, destroys the cities without needing a Personal inspection, since in His capacity of All-Knowing, He knew perfectly well beforehand what evil was abroad in their souls. The Seventy-Five were delighted with the Moslem version and they distributed generous bonuses to the imams – a triumph that the Christian community has never been able to match. We were forced to stammer that the Lord’s site inspection was only a figure of speech but that didn’t really wash and we spent the next six months bereft of bonuses, which we only earn if our preaching advances the Consortium’s cau
se in some way. The Seventy-Five are very meticulous in establishing appropriate symbols so that correct associations would flow unhindered in the colonist’s minds. There had been instances where temples were lost overnight to a particular creed just because a voice from the pulpit enunciated a wrong word.

  I attempted to calm them, explaining that the Koran lacked a crucial detail that would always relegate the Moslems to the second division in the running for the Metropolis. Their holy book didn’t mention that after Lot’s wife turned her head to gaze at the destruction of Sodom she was turned into a pillar of salt. It just said that she was severely punished and left behind. There was no mention of salt and, no salt, no Metropolis.

  Father Efsevios persisted, despite my arguments, that the rise of Moslems to positions of influence worried him. Everyone knew that Captain Drake, who’d reached the top echelon of decorated officials, had never truly accepted Jesus Christ. The Moslem community could boast of a very important leader in his person, a robust figure that controlled the Colony’s war machine, the guards, the outposts, the weapons and the means of establishing and maintaining order. God forbid that we should wake up one day to find the Metropolis a mosque!

  “In a word,” Father Yuri said, sweetly, trying to rein in the conversation which was showing tendencies of wandering, “danger is lurking.” He pointed out that the Purple Star that I wore gave me free access to the Governor’s office, which in turn increased my responsibilities and obligations to my faith. Orthodoxy expected me to conscientiously serve its interests.

  I assured them that I had never stopped fighting for our interests but, unfortunately, the Governor was more influenced by the contents of the Green Box than those of the Scriptures. At least, this year has already proved a profitable one for our creed as funds were earmarked for the iconography of two Serbian churches in Hesperides and for new bells for a Greek temple in the dockers’ quarter.