The Thirteenth Apostle
Page 18
“Your place is there, my son: this is my journey’s end. Go back to Jerusalem, defend our house in the western district. You have a copy of my epistle, keep it in circulation. Perhaps they will listen to you. In any case, they won’t be able to transform that the way they have done to my Gospel.”
The old man died two days later. One last time he awaited the dawn. When the flames of the sun enveloped him, he uttered the name of Jesus and stopped breathing.
In the depths of a valley in the desert of Idumaea, a sarcophagus of dry stones arranged in a simple pattern now indicated the tomb of the man who had called himself the beloved disciple of Jesus the Nazorean, the thirteenth apostle who had been his close friend and his best witness. And with him, there vanished for ever the memory of a similar tomb situated somewhere in this desert. One which, even today, contains the remains of a Just Man, unjustly crucified by the ambition of men.
Yokhanan spend the whole night sitting at the entrance to the valley. When, in the clear bright sky, he could see only the star of the watcher still shining, he rose and headed for the North, accompanied by two Essenes.
53
“It’s the first time I’ve managed to identify so clearly the direct influence of a rabbinical melody on a medieval chant!”
They had spent several hours leaning over the glass table of the book stacks, comparing, word for word, a manuscript of Gregorian chant and a manuscript of music from the synagogues, both of them dating to before the eleventh century and composed on the same Biblical text. Leeland turned to Nil.
“Could the synagogue chant really be at the origin of the chant sung in church? I’ll just go and fetch the next text in the Jewish Manuscripts room. Take a break while I’m gone.”
Breczinsky had greeted them this morning with his habitual discretion. But he had taken advantage of a moment when Leeland wasn’t there to say to Nil, in a hurried undertone:
“If you can… I’d like to have a word with you today.”
His door was a few yards away. Nil, alone at the table, hesitated for a moment. Then he took off his gloves and went over to the office of the Polish librarian.
“Please, take a seat.”
The room was in the image of its occupant, austere and dingy. There were shelves with lines of folders and, on the desk, a computer screen.
“Each of our precious manuscripts appears in a catalogue which is used by scholars from all over the world. I’m right now setting up a video service which will enable them to be consulted via the Internet – as you’ll have noticed, not many people come here these days. Having to travel places to study a text will become more and more of a waste of time.”
“And you will be more and more alone,” thought Nil. A silence fell between them, and Breczinsky seemed unable to break it. Finally, he spoke, in a hesitant tone:
“Can I ask what your relations with Father Andrei were?”
“I’ve already told you, we were colleagues for a very long time.”
“Yes, but… did you know about his latest research?”
“Only partly. And yet we were very close, much more than is usually the case with members of a religious community.”
“Ah, so you were… close to him?”
Nil didn’t understand what he was driving at.
“Andrei was a very dear friend to me, we weren’t just brothers in religion but on intimate terms. I’ve never shared so much with anyone else in my life.”
“Yes,” murmured Breczinsky, “that’s what I thought. And to think that when I saw you arriving, I thought you were… one of the collaborators of Cardinal Catzinger! That changes everything.”
“What does it change, Father?”
The Pole closed his eyes, as if he were seeking for some inner strength buried deep within himself.
“When Father Andrei came to Rome, he wanted to meet me: we had been corresponding for a long time, but had never met. When he heard my accent, he switched to Polish, which he could speak fluently.”
“Andrei was a Slav, and could speak a dozen or so languages.”
“I was amazed to discover that his Russian family came from Brest-Litovsk, in the Polish province annexed in 1920 by the USSR, on the frontier of the territories placed under German administration in 1939. This unhappy plot of territory, which had always been Polish, never ceased to be coveted by the Russians and the Germans. When my parents got married, it was still under the heel of the Soviets, who populated it with Russian colonists forced to go and live there against their will.”
“Where were you born?”
“In a little village near Brest-Litovsk. The native Polish populace were treated very harshly by the Soviet administration, who despised us as a subject people – and then, to crown it all, we were Catholics. Then came the Nazis, after the invasion of the Soviet Union by Hitler. Father Andrei’s family lived next door to mine, and there was just a hedge between their house and ours. They protected my unfortunate parents from the terror that was raging in this border district before the war. Eventually, under the Nazis, they fed us first and then hid us. Without them, without their daily generosity and their courageous aid, my folks would never have survived and I would never have been born. Before she died, my mother made me swear never to forget them, or their descendants and relatives. So you were Andrei’s close friend, his brother? Well, his brothers are my brothers, my blood belongs to them. What can I do for you?”
Nil was completely taken aback. He realized that the Polish librarian had divulged as many personal details as he was going to today. In this basement under the city of Rome, the great winds of history and war were suddenly catching up with them.
“Before he died, Father Andrei wrote a short note, various things he wanted to tell me when he came back. I’m striving to understand his message, and I’m continuing along a path that he had ventured along before me. I find it difficult to believe that his death wasn’t accidental. I’ll never know if he was really killed, but I have the feeling that from beyond his death he has bequeathed his research to me, rather like a posthumous command, a mission. Can you understand that?”
“Yes, especially since he confided various things to me that maybe he said to no one else, not even to you. We’d just discovered we had a common past, a closeness born of particularly painful circumstances. In this office, the ghosts of deeply loved men and women arose, covered in blood and mire. It came as a shock, for him as for me. This is what led me, two days later, to do for Father Andrei something which… which I should never have done. Never.”
“Nil, my boy,” thought Nil to himself. “Take it easy with him, don’t rush. Drive those ghosts away.”
“To begin with, I have one problem I need to sort out: I have to find two references that Andrei left behind – Dewey classifications, more or less complete, for works by Church Fathers. If I don’t manage to track them down on the Internet, I’ll ask you to help me. Up until now I haven’t dared ask anyone: the further I go, the more the things that I’m discovering strike me as dangerous.”
“More dangerous than you think.” Breczinsky stood up to indicate the conversation was over. “Let me tell you again: a close friend, a brother of Father Andrei is my brother too. But you need to be extremely careful: what’s said between these four walls must remain strictly between us.”
Nil nodded and went back into the room. Leeland had returned to the table, and was starting to arrange a manuscript under the lamp. He glanced up at his companion, then lowered his head without a word and continued to adjust the light. His face was sombre.
54
Jerusalem, 10th September 70 AD
Yokhanan came through the south gate that was still intact and stopped, gasping in dismay: Jerusalem was no more than a field strewn with ruins.
Titus’s troops had entered it at the beginning of August, and for a month a fierce battle raged relentlessly, street by street, house by house. The men of the X Fretensis legion, driven to fury by the resistance, systematically destroyed each stre
tch of wall still standing. The city is to be razed – these had been Titus’s orders – but its Temple spared. He wanted to find out what the effigy of a God capable of inspiring such fanatical behaviour and of leading a whole people to sacrificial death could look like.
On 28th August, he finally managed to enter the parvis leading to the Holy of Holies. It was here, so they said, that the presence of Yahweh, the God of the Jews, resided. His presence, and thus his statue, or something equivalent.
He drew his sword and slashed through the veil of the sanctuary. Took a few steps forwards and halted, unable to believe his eyes.
Nothing.
Or rather, set on a table of pure gold, two winged creatures, cherubim of the kind he had seen so often in Mesopotamia. But, between their extended wings, nothing. A void.
So the God of Moses, the God of all these maniacs, did not exist – since, in the Temple, there was no effigy that made his presence manifest. Titus burst out laughing, and emerged from the Temple filled with merriment. “It’s the greatest scam ever! There’s no god in Israel! All that blood shed for nothing.” Seeing his general guffawing, a legionary hurled a flaming torch into the Holy of Holies.
Two days later, the Temple of Jerusalem had almost finished slowly burning. Of the splendid monument barely finished by Herod, nothing remained.
On 8th September 70, Titus left the ruins of Jerusalem and marched to Caesarea.
Yokhanan waited until the last legionary had left the city before he ventured in: the western district no longer existed. Making his way with difficulty through the rubble, he recognized, from its enclosure wall, Caiaphas’s luxurious villa. The house of the beloved disciple, the house of his happy childhood, was two hundred yards away. He found his bearings and walked on.
You could not even make out the basin of the impluvium. Everything had burned down and the roof had collapsed. It was here, under this pile of charred tiles, that the remains of the upper room lay. The room in which Jesus had taken his last meal forty years earlier, surrounded at first by thirteen, and then by twelve men.
For a long while he stood there, gazing at the ruins. One of the two Essenes accompanying him finally touched him on the arm.
“Let us leave this place, Yokhanan. There is no memory in these stones. Memory resides in you. Where do we go now?”
“The memory of Jesus the Nazorean,” thought Yokhanan. “That fragile inheritance, coveted by everyone.”
He replied: “You’re right. Let’s head north, to Galilee: Jesus’s words still echo there among its hills. I have an inheritance with me that I need to hand on.”
He took a sheet of parchment out of his pocket and brought it up to his lips. “The copy of the epistle written by my abbu, the thirteenth apostle.”
Three centuries later, a well-to-do Iberian woman, Etheria by name, who had treated herself to the very first organized tour that enabled one to participate in the Holy Week celebrations in Jerusalem, saw as she passed along the Jordan an engraved stele, tilting rather forlornly to one side. Filled with curiosity, she stopped her litter: was this another souvenir of the time of Christ?
The inscription was legible. It stated that at the time of the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem, a Nazorean, Yokhanan by name, had been massacred at this very spot while fleeing from the ruins of Jerusalem. Titus’s legionaries must have caught up with him, Etheria reflected; they had slaughtered him and thrown his body in the nearby river. She exclaimed:
“A Nazorean! It’s been ages since any of them were around. This poor man must have been the last of them, and that’s probably why they erected this stele on the site where he was killed.”
What the pious Christian lady did not know was that Yokhanan was not the last of the Nazoreans.
Ever since that day, only two copies of the epistle written by Jesus’s thirteenth apostle had been in existence. One was hidden away at the bottom of a jar, inaccessible in its cave perched in the middle of a cliff overlooking the ruins of Qumran on the Dead Sea.
And the other was in the hands of the Nazoreans who had escaped from Pella. And taken refuge in an oasis in the Arabian desert named Bakka.
55
Mgr Calfo slipped on his purple-hemmed cassock. To receive Antonio, he needed to be dressed in the attributes of his episcopal dignity. Young recruits should never forget who they are dealing with. Once the preliminary interviews had been conducted, he rarely invited the members of the Society in to see him. They all knew his address, but the demands of confidentiality are better respected in one of the discreet trattorie of Rome. And sometimes, Sonia’s fragrance would float in his studio long after she had left.
It was with pleasure that he opened his door to the twelfth apostle.
“Your mission will now consist in keeping an eye on Father Breczinsky. He’s a pauvre type, a loser. But that type of man is always unpredictable. He might react impulsively.”
“What do I need to get out of him?”
“First, he needs to keep you informed about what the two monks might be telling each other during their sessions in the book stacks of the Vatican. Then remind him where he comes from, who he is and who the Cardinal is. That simple reminder should keep him faithful to his mission. You are now one of the very few men to know of the extremely confidential documents he has in his guard. Don’t forget that he has a terrible wound lodged in his memory: we just need to prod that, and we’ll get what we want from him. You need have no scruples: the only thing that counts is the current mission.”
Once Antonio had been given his instructions, he left the building and ostentatiously took a right turn, towards the Tiber, as if he were heading back into town. Without looking up, he could sense the eyes of the Rector staring down at the back of his neck from the window of his apartment. But once he reached the corner of Castel Sant’Angelo, he took another right turn, and after another sudden swerve he started to walk away from town, towards St Peter’s Square.
Rome’s ochre-coloured walls still gleamed in the wan December sunlight. For centuries she had watched the incessant ballet of the intrigues and plots of her Catholic prelates. Eyes half-closed, she lay in a maternal doze, enjoying the long winter of her splendour; she no longer attached any importance to the games of power and glory unfolding around the tomb of the Apostle.
“Come in, my friend,” exclaimed Catzinger with a smile. “I was expecting you.”
The young man bent forwards to kiss the Cardinal’s ring. “He escaped two successive purges,” he reflected, “that of the Gestapo first, then that of the Liberation. Honour and respect to those fighting for the West.”
He sat down opposite the desk and fixed his strange black eyes on His Eminence.
56
Nil had asked Leeland to go to the Vatican book stacks without him.
“I want to work on a phrase I discovered in the diary left by Andrei at San Girolamo. I need to use the Internet – it’ll take me maybe a couple of hours. If Father Breczinsky asks you any questions, invent some excuse for my absence.”
Now that he was alone at the computer, he was starting to feel discouraged, lost in the midst of a tangle of paths leading in every direction. The texts photocopied by the Huntington Library merely confirmed what he had been sensing would be the case since he had been studying the manuscripts of the Dead Sea. The Coptic manuscript? Its first phrase had enabled him to understand the code introduced into the Symbolon of Nicaea. That left the second phrase, and the mysterious apostle’s letter. He had decided to follow up this last clue, a trace of which he had found in Andrei’s diary. All these leads must come together somewhere or other. This had been his friend’s last message: link things together.
Rembert Leeland… What had become of the friendly, confident student of bygone days, the laughing young man who played his life the same way he played his music, with brio and optimism? Why had he succumbed to that brief attack of despair? Nil had perceived within him a wound that went too deep for him to tell an old friend about it.
He decided to concentrate on the apostle’s letter. He needed to find a book, somewhere in the wide world, just from its Dewey classification. He connected to the Internet, called up Google, and typed university libraries.
A page with eleven sites came up. At the foot of the page, Google indicated that twelve similar pages had been selected for him. About a hundred and thirty sites altogether.
With a sigh, he clicked on the first site.
* * *
When he came back shortly after noon, Leeland was irritated to find that there was just a brief note propped up in front of the computer: Nil had returned to San Girolamo as a matter of urgency. He would be returning to Via Aurelia in the course of the evening.
Had he found anything? The American had never been much of a Biblical scholar. But Nil’s work was starting to interest him to the highest point. As he sought to discover what had led to Andrei’s death, his friend was filled with the desire to avenge his memory – as for himself, it was his own ruined life that he now dreamt of avenging. For he sensed that those who had destroyed his existence were also those who had caused the fatal accident that had befallen the librarian of St Martin’s Abbey.
The setting sun gave a dark red tinge to the cloud of pollution hanging over Rome. Leeland had headed back to the Vatican. In the apartment underneath, the Palestinian suddenly heard someone come in, then sit down at the computer: it must be Nil. The tape recorder was merely recording the clatter of the keyboard.
Suddenly the aural landscape came to life: Leeland had just arrived in his turn. They were going to talk.