A simultaneous outburst of imprecations prevented him from carrying on. Some were still hesitant to admit to the divinity of Jesus, but they all agreed that he had indeed arisen from the dead. This idea of resurrection attracted the crowds, who found in it a means of putting up with a life that otherwise was devoid of hope. This man had few disciples – did he want to send thousands of converts home empty-handed?
Fists were being brandished in front of him.
“They want to use Jesus for their own ambitions? Let them do it without me.” He left, leaning on Yokhanan’s shoulder.
* * *
Yokhanan had still been a small child when the Roman legionaries crushed Sepphoris, the capital of Galilee. He had seen thousands of crosses erected in the streets, and the crucified dying a slow and agonizing death in the hot sun. One day they came for his father: horror-stricken, he saw him being whipped, then stretched out on the beam of wood. The hammer blows on the nails echoed in the very heart of him, he saw the blood spattering his wrists, heard the howl of pain. When they raised the cross against the sky of Galilee, he passed out. His mother wrapped him in a shawl and fled to the countryside, where they hid.
The child stopped speaking. But at night, in his restless sleep, he kept murmuring over and over: “Abba! Father!”
When he emerged from his torpor, they came and settled in Jerusalem. His mother dedicated him to God by making him take the vows of a Nazarite: he would no longer cut his hair. He was now a pious Jew – but he still would not speak.
Like everyone in the city, he learnt of the crucifixion of Jesus: the horror which torture and death on the cross inspired in the boy was so great that he drove this man out of his memory. A Messiah is awaited, he thought; he will come soon, and it can’t be Jesus: the Messiah would never allow himself to be crucified. The Messiah will be strong, he will drive the Romans out and restore the Kingdom of David.
And then he had met this Judaean, reserved just as he was, a man who had looked on him with friendship, without taking umbrage at his silence. A man who spoke of Jesus as if he had lived very close to him and seemed to know him from within. When his mother died, this man, who loved the Master so dearly and called himself his beloved disciple, took him into his home. He became his abbu, the father of his soul.
One day, to show him that he had understood the new world revealed by Jesus, Yokhanan took a pair of scissors and cut the long locks of his hair short. Without taking his eyes off his abbu, since he was still not speaking, and expressed himself only in gesture.
Then the beloved disciple held out his thumb and traced on his forehead, his lips and his heart an immaterial cross. Here again, Yokhanan understood, and silently stuck out his tongue, which was also marked with the terrifying sign.
The following night, for the first time he slept without throwing off his blanket of pure wool. And the next day, his tongue spoke again, from the abundance of his heart healed by Jesus.
As he approached his house, the beloved disciple placed his hand on his shoulder.
“This evening, Yokhanan, you will go and see James, the brother of Jesus. Tell him I want to meet him. Ask him to come to my house.”
The young man nodded and grasped his abbu’s hand in his own.
29
The night was far gone by the time Nil laid the dictionary down on his cluttered table. How far away he now seemed from the dramatic council in Jerusalem, whose swiftly changing events he had been examining just a few days earlier! And yet it was on that day, eighteen years after Jesus’s death, that the beloved disciple had been definitively excluded from the nascent Church.
He had managed to translate the fragment of parchment, discovered in the book published by his friend. Two short and apparently unrelated sentences:
The rule of faith of the twelve apostles
Contains the seed of its destruction.
Let the epistle be everywhere destroyed
So that the place may remain in place.
Nil rubbed his brow: what on earth could it mean?
The “rule of faith of the twelve apostles”: in antiquity, this was the name given to the Symbolon of Nicaea, the Creed of the Christian Churches. The one they had found engraved in Germigny, the one that had so intrigued Andrei. In what did this “seed of destruction” consist? It had no meaning.
“Let the epistle be everywhere destroyed”: the Coptic word he had just translated by “epistle” was the very same one that designates the epistles of St Paul in the New Testament. Was it one of these epistles that was meant? The Church has never condemned any of Paul’s epistles. Might the manuscript have been written by a group of dissident Christians?
The last line had posed another problem for Nil: “so that the place may remain in place”. The dictionary gave several meanings: “dwelling place”, or “house”, or even “assembly”. What was certain was that the same Coptic root was used twice in succession. So there was a deliberate play on words – but what was its significance?
He had just decrypted the meaning of the terms, but not that of the whole message. Had Andrei grasped this meaning? And what relation had he been able to establish between this message and the other clues on his posthumous note?
The librarian had died after being summoned to Rome to explain his translation. Did these four lines have anything to do with his brutal death?
Nil found himself facing a game of chess in which the pieces had all been scattered and lay in disorder. Andrei had patiently put them into place before him. And as he returned from Rome, in the train, he had written: now. So he had made, during his stay near the Apostle’s tomb, a decisive discovery – but what was it?
For him, nothing would now ever be the same. Was his whole life in question? Can one still call oneself a Christian if one doubts the divinity of Jesus?
There were still a few hours of night-time left. Nil turned off the light and lay down in the dark.
“God – no man has seen God. And Jesus, even if he was not God, remains the most fascinating man I have ever encountered. No, I have not been wrong to dedicate my life to him.”
A few minutes later, Father Nil, a Benedictine monk and the keeper of secrets too heavy for him, was sleeping peacefully.
30
“Take a seat, Monsignor.”
The Cardinal’s chubby face, crowned by a helm of white hair, looked anxious. He glanced at Calfo as he sat down with a sigh in the ample armchair.
Emil Catzinger had been born at the same time as Nazism. Like all the boys of his age, he had found himself enrolled, reluctantly, in the Hitler Youth. Then he had bravely distanced himself from the Führer, managing to evade the Gestapo purges. But he had remained deeply marked by the traumatic impact of these events on his childhood.
“I’m obliged to you for breaking off your activities on a Saturday evening.”
The Rector, who had just abandoned the young Romanian woman in the middle of a particularly promising discourse, nodded gravely.
“When it’s a question of serving the Church, Your Eminence, there’s no such thing as a bad time or a delay!”
“Quite so. Well now… This afternoon I had a phone conversation with the Father Abbot of St Martin’s Abbey.”
“An excellent prelate, worthy in every respect of the trust you place in him.”
“He informed me that the Father Nil of whom we have already spoken had stolen from a library – to which he does not have official access – a volume of the texts published by dissidents.”
Calfo merely raised an eyebrow.
“And he has just faxed me a sample of his personal notes, which are giving me serious cause for concern. He might be able to approach the secret jealously guarded by our Holy Church, and by your Society of St Pius V.”
“Do you think he has made much progress down this perilous path?”
“I don’t as yet know. But he was very close to Andrei, who – as you know – had indeed gone far down that forbidden road. You know what is at stake here: the very e
xistence of the Catholic Church. We need to find out how much Father Nil knows. What do you suggest?”
Calfo smiled in satisfaction, leant slightly backwards and took from his cassock an envelope, which he proffered to the Cardinal.
“If Your Eminence would be so good as to have a quick look at this… The minute you mentioned this Father Nil to me, I asked my brothers in the Society to carry out a twofold investigation. Here is the result and, perhaps, the reply to your question.”
Catzinger pulled from the envelope two folders marked confidenziale.
“Take a look at the first of those folders… You’ll see that Nil was a brilliant student at the Benedictine University in Rome. That he’s a… how shall I put it?… an idealist – in other words, he is completely devoid of any personal ambition. An observant monk who derives joy from study and prayer.”
Catzinger stared at him from above the rim of his glasses.
“My dear Calfo, you don’t need me to tell you that the most dangerous of all are the idealists. Arius was an idealist, so were Savonarola and Luther… A good son of the Church believes in the dogmas and doesn’t ask questions about them. Any other ideal may well turn out to be extremely harmful.”
“Certo, Eminenza. During his studies in Rome, he became friends with an American Benedictine: Rembert Leeland.”
“Well, well! Our Leeland? How very interesting!”
“Yes indeed: Mgr Leeland. I’ve picked up his dossier – it’s in the second folder. He’s a musician first and foremost, a monk in Kentucky, at St Mary’s Abbey, where there’s a musical academy. He was elected Abbot there. And then, following some rather controversial statements…”
“Yes, I know the story, I was already Prefect of the Congregation at the time. He was appointed bishop in partibus and sent to Rome, in accordance with the excellent principle promoveatur ut amoveatur. Oh, he wasn’t really dangerous: a musician! But we had to nip in the bud the scandal caused by his public declarations on married priests. He’s a minutante somewhere or other these days, I think?”
“At the Secretariat for Relations with the Jews: after Rome, he lived for two years in Israel, where he spent much more time studying music than Hebrew. Leeland is apparently an excellent pianist.”
“And?…”
Calfo gazed pityingly at the Cardinal.
“But Eminenza, don’t you get it?”
He suppressed his furious longing to light up the cigar making a bulge in his inner pocket. The Cardinal doesn’t drink and doesn’t smoke. But the Society of St Pius V held a certain dossier on his past, crammed to the brim with swastikas – so its Rector could feel quite safe.
“So long as Father Nil stays at St Martin’s, we’ll never know what’s going through his mind. He needs to come here to Rome. However, he won’t divulge his ideas in my office – nor in yours, Eminence. But just get him to meet up with his friend Leeland on some pretext or another, and give them time to open their hearts to one another. The artist and the mystic will soon be telling each other their secrets.”
“What pretext could we invent?”
“Leeland is interested in ancient music, much more than he is in Jewish affairs. We will discover that he suddenly needs the help of a specialist in old texts.”
“And you think he’ll be… cooperative?”
“That’s my business. You know we have him in our power: he’ll collaborate.”
There was a silence. Catzinger was weighing up the pros and cons. “Calfo is a Neapolitan,” he reflected. “He’s used to tortuous manoeuvres. He’s no fool.”
“Monsignor,” he said eventually, “I’m giving you carte blanche. Take whatever steps you need to get that James Bond of exegesis here. And make sure he’s feeling chatty.”
As he left the Congregation, Calfo had a fleeting vision of a thick carpet of green banknotes leading to Castel Sant’Angelo. Catzinger thought he was informed about everything, but he did not know the most important things. He alone, Alessandro Calfo, just a poor boy from a poor family who was now the Rector of the Society of St Pius V – he alone had an overall view.
He alone would do the necessary. Even if it meant using the same means that had led to the Templars being burned alive in fourteenth-century Europe.
Without knowing it, perhaps, Philippe le Bel and Nogaret had saved the West. Now it was his task, and that of the Society of St Pius V, to fulfil this lofty and dangerous mission.
31
Jerusalem, 48 ad
“Thank you for coming, Iakov.”
The beloved disciple called James by his familiar Hebrew name. The setting sun was illuminating the impluvium of his house with its red and gold light; they were alone. Jesus’s brother had removed his phylacteries, but he was still wrapped in his prayer shawl. He looked scared.
“Yesterday, Paul returned to Antioch. The Church’s first council almost ended badly. I had to impose a compromise, and Peter emerged greatly diminished. He hates you, the same way he hates me.”
“Peter’s not a bad man. Meeting Jesus made him face up to his destiny as a poor man, and it was quite a shock: he refuses to retreat, and loathes anyone who might take the first place away from him.”
“I am Jesus’s brother: if either of us has to withdraw, it’s going to be him. He’ll have to go and set up the seat of his dominion elsewhere!”
“He’ll go, James, he’ll go. When Paul has established the new religion he dreams about, the focus will shift from Jerusalem to Rome. The race for power has only just begun.”
James lowered his head.
“Ever since he assassinated Ananias and Sapphira in public, Peter no longer bears weapons, but some of his faithful followers do. I heard them yesterday: they view you as a man from the past, someone opposed to those who are building the future. There cannot be a thirteenth apostle, as you know: your life is in danger. You can’t remain in Jerusalem.”
“The murder of Ananias and his wife happened a good while ago, and it was all a question of money. These days, money is flowing into Jerusalem from all the churches in Asia.”
“It’s not a question of money: you’re casting doubt on everything they’re working for. Together with Judas, you were the disciple my brother Jesus liked best. We know how Peter got rid of Judas, how he eliminates any obstacles on his path. If you disappear as the Iscariot did, a whole portion of memory will disappear too. You need to get away, quickly, and this may be the last time we’ll see each other. So I beg you, tell me in which place the Essenes buried Jesus’s body. Tell me where his tomb is!”
This man had neither Peter’s ambition nor Paul’s genius: he was just an ordinary Jewish man asking after his brother. He replied with some vehemence.
“I lived with Jesus for a much shorter time than you did, Iakov. But none of you can possibly understand what I understood about him. You, because you’re viscerally attached to Judaism. Paul, because he’s always been familiar with the pagan gods of the Empire, and dreams of replacing them with a new religion based on a Christ reconstructed in his own way. Jesus doesn’t belong to anyone, my friend, neither to your followers nor to Paul’s. He rests in the desert now. The desert alone can protect his body from the Jewish or Greek vultures of the new Church. He was the freest man I have ever met: he wanted to replace the Law of Moses by a new law written not on tablets, but in men’s hearts. A law with no other dogma than love.”
James’s face darkened. Nobody can touch the Law of Moses: it is the very identity of Israel. He preferred to change the subject.
“You need to leave. And take my mother Mary far away from here: she seems so happy with you…”
“We have a great deal of affection for each other, and I venerate Jesus’s mother: her presence at my side fills every minute with joy. You’re right, I no longer have any place in Jerusalem or Antioch – I’m leaving. As soon as I know where I’m going to pitch my wanderer’s tent, I’ll ask Mary to come and join me. Meanwhile, Yokhanan can act as a go-between. For him, she’s practically a second mo
ther.”
“Where do you think you’ll go?”
The beloved disciple gazed around. The shadows were now lengthening in the impluvium, but the window in the upper room was still lit up by the light of the setting sun. It was the room of the last supper with Jesus, eighteen years ago. He needed to leave this place, which was now nothing but an illusion. And seek reality where Jesus himself had found it.
“I’ll head east, into the desert: it was during his stay in the desert that Jesus accomplished his transformation, it was there that he realized what his mission would be. I often heard him say, with a smile, that he was surrounded by wild beasts there and that they had respected his solitude.”
He looked Jesus’s brother full in the face.
“The desert, James… Perhaps that is now the only land which the disciples of Jesus the Nazorean can call their own. The only place where they can feel at home.”
32
As he took off his choir vestments after the office of lauds, the Father Abbot noticed how drawn and pale Nil’s face appeared.
Just as he reached his office, the telephone rang.
Twenty minutes later, when he hung up, he was both perplexed and relieved. He had been surprised to hear Cardinal Catzinger in person informing him that a great honour was to be bestowed on his abbey: the skills of one of his monks were urgently required in the Vatican. An ancient music specialist who worked in the Curia needed help for his investigations into the origins of Gregorian chant. This was important research, which the Holy Father himself hoped would greatly improve relations between Judaism and Christianity. In short, Father Nil was expected forthwith in Rome, so as to put his expertise at the service of the Universal Church. He would be absent for only a few weeks, and he should take the first train: he would be staying at San Girolamo, the Benedictine abbey in Rome.
The Thirteenth Apostle Page 10
