Gospel Truths

by J. G. Sandom

  “Well, what’s it for?”

  “Some say it was used by pilgrims in the Middle Ages. If they were too sick or too old to make the journey to the Holy Lands, they simply acted it out here, by following the labyrinth in the floor. A symbolic pilgrimage. No one really knows for certain. Some say it depicts the passage to a heavenly city, the heavenly Jerusalem.”

  Mrs. Dawson tightened like a spring. “Well, I suppose it was a long time ago. You’ve done very well on everything else.”

  She was a woman who liked to forgive, Koster thought.

  “Who were those people?” the American with the cameras chimed in. He was pointing at the copper plaque at the center of the labyrinth.

  “Those are the names of the architects, the master masons who built the cathedral. Their guild claimed they could trace their science back to Daedalus, the legendary architect of Crete who built the original labyrinth for King Minos.”

  “What a wonderful story,” Mrs. Dawson added with transparent disbelief.

  Soury-Fontaine turned suddenly on his heels and strode away, his hands locked tightly at his back, his head bent and his deep voice coughing out, “The stalls, the stalls.”

  Mr. Dawson looked at Koster with a desperate expression on his face. His mouth hung open. His head wagged from side to side. Then, with a final gesture of disgust, he followed Mrs. Dawson, who was already dashing in pursuit. The file assembled. They sidled toward the south aisle quietly, embarrassed by the loudness of their shoes and the pensive shoulders which appeared quite suddenly as they approached—like targets in a shooting gallery—from in between the pews. How could anybody pray, thought Koster, with all these tourists everywhere?

  They spent the rest of the lecture admiring the ornate carvings of the choir stalls which rose up nearly twenty feet around the altar. Soury-Fontaine explained the Biblical stories which they depicted, but his heart was no longer in his work. Mrs. Dawson had usurped him. He simply repeated the words which he had said ten thousand times before. Even his plea for money at the end lacked luster. He told them in a flat, uncompromising voice that the state was not his master, and that he hoped that they would look upon him as the people of the Middle Ages had looked upon their traveling scholars—with generosity. Then he held his blunt hands out before him like a living cup, and turned his head away.

  Faced with this final gesture of humility, Mrs. Dawson came undone. She probed her purse, trilling like a wood dove, and withdrew a one-hundred-franc note. The Americans were already filing past, pressing their coins against his fingertips noiselessly. Mrs. Dawson folded the bill twice, then another time, and dropped it in his hands.

  Koster stood a few steps away, waiting for the band of tourists to leave. When they had finally shuffled off, Soury-Fontaine closed his hands and stuffed the money in his pockets without even looking at it. Then he noticed Koster by the stalls. “A frightening woman,” he said sadly.

  “But generous.”

  The big man laughed. “And you? Did you enjoy the tour?”

  “Very much so. In fact, I’d like to see some more…if I could.”

  The guide glanced at his watch. “I’m sorry, I have a luncheon engagement. But perhaps a few more minutes. What exactly would you like to see?”

  Koster leaned back against the carved oak stalls. He wound his hand around the head of Israel, who was worrying about his son, the dreamer Joseph, thrown in a cistern by his brothers two seats down. At his head the Magi watched the wooden skies, and at his feet a monk prayed with one word carved firmly on his mouth throughout eternity. Who had the unknown carvers of these choir stalls been? thought Koster. Were these their faces? “Actually,” he said, glancing up. “I’d like to make a separate arrangement. I plan to be in Amiens for several weeks.”

  The guide looked delighted. “Really?” he said. “You are a student, a scholar?”

  “In a manner of speaking. I’m doing a book on the cathedrals of Notre Dame. High Gothic, really. Chartres and Reims as well.”

  Soury-Fontaine closed the distance between them with one giant stride, snatched Koster’s hands together in his own, and shook them vigorously. “Félicitations,” he croaked in French, his long, bearded face intently serious. “It is a great honor indeed. I am at your complete disposal.”

  Koster looked up at him helplessly. The Frenchman’s massive head and shoulders had pinned him up against the stalls. “Thank you,” Koster said. He slapped him firmly on the shoulder and the guide stepped back.

  “Naturally,” Koster continued, “I’ll be happy to pay you for your time and assistance.”

  Soury-Fontaine laughed gruffly. Then his face began to change, a fixed expression at a time, from happiness to indecision, from doubt to resignation, as if he were removing one mask from another, one extra turn along the labyrinth. The almost oafish grin was gone. Instead, a child’s fear clutched the corners of his eyes. He shook his head. He turned away. “As you wish,” he added, like an afterthought.

  Koster leaned forward, his hand still holding the carved head which jutted from the choir stall. There was something odd about Soury-Fontaine, something not altogether right, and Koster felt himself thrown back to SoHo in New York. He was having coffee with Priscilla, at a small Greene Street cafe. A station wagon pulled up outside the window, panting at the stoplight. There were two children in the rear of the car. It was autumn and the sun cut through the window at the back, illuminating the children’s faces, flooding them with a light of near unnatural brightness. Koster noticed they were girls. They were laughing and throwing their hands against the glass when one of them just stopped, all of a sudden, and looked up at the sky. Koster knew then, in that one brief moment, that there was something terribly wrong with her, but hidden. A slowness of the mind perhaps. A retardation. Even Priscilla knew. The other girl reached forward and pulled her back into the game. And then the car moved on.

  Koster tried to smile. The guide seemed perfectly normal. He had remembered all those dates and names—no mean task—and yet Koster could not shake the feeling.

  Soury-Fontaine ran his eyes along the stalls, as if searching for another detail to unravel. Then he pointed at the lacy wooden spires by the entrance to the choir and abruptly waved.

  Koster followed his gaze. A woman was approaching up the southern aisle. She seemed to hover through the shadows. Only her face was clearly visible, revealed by random light beams from the clerestory above. Her eyes were large, her lips almost too full. She had a strong demanding forehead which caught the warm glow of the votive candles as she stepped inside the presbytery gate.

  “My luncheon, I’m afraid,” Soury-Fontaine said cheerily.

  She seemed much younger now, Koster thought. Maybe twenty-five. She was wearing a short-sleeved, blue cotton dress. Her long dark hair was held back by a patterned silk scarf. He watched her rise up on her toes and kiss the guide firmly on both cheeks. “Hungry?” she said in French. Then she reached her hand out slowly, and Koster realized it was meant for him.

  “How do you do,” she said quite formally.

  Koster shook her hand, bowing as his father had once taught him years before in Rome. He always did it out of habit, and it always made him feel uncomfortable. “Very well, thank you,” he answered. His French was precise, inelegant but perfect.

  “My sister, Mariane,” the guide said.

  Koster leaned against these words, buoyed by them. So he was only her brother, he thought.

  They stared at him blankly and Koster realized that he hadn’t introduced himself. “Oh, I’m sorry. My name’s Joseph Koster. Your brother here has just agreed to help me on a book I’m writing.”

  “On the cathedral,” Soury-Fontaine threw in. “Imagine.”

  Koster watched the girl closely. The more she smiled, the more genuine she seemed—and the more he felt a fraud. “I’m really more of an architect than a writer,” he admitted. “Although the book is quite professional, I assure you.” Neither Soury-Fontaine nor Mariane replied. “I will
, of course, credit any assistance you might give me.”

  Soury-Fontaine began to laugh deliciously, but the girl looked unimpressed. Her smile faded. She cocked her head a little to the side and said, “Mr. Koster. I’m sure that Guy will help you, with or without acknowledgement. Won’t you, Guy?”

  Soury-Fontaine nodded.

  Koster leaned against the stalls. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that. I’d be very grateful for your help.”

  Mariane smiled. “You Americans,” she said. “I suppose you’d like to buy us lunch as well.”

  Koster shrugged. “I wouldn’t want to impose.”

  “I only have a picnic,” the girl added. “Nothing very grand by American standards. But you’re welcome to join us.”

  Koster noticed that the short sleeves of her dress were a little tight above the elbow, creasing the skin. “We’ll get more,” he said.

  Mariane laughed quietly. It made her seem older. Her hands reached up to pull the scarf more tightly round her face. “Well, come on, Mr. Koster.”

  They sat under an oak tree only a few hundred yards from the cathedral. It was strange, thought Koster, how the cathedral’s flying buttresses seemed less to anchor the stone structure to the ground—like the roots of mangroves—than to contain the walls, to keep them from rushing upward to the heavens. The church was like a natural force, with the presence of a mountain or a butte, dominating the landscape, watching over them patiently, constrained yet waiting for release.

  Mariane had spread a blanket out on the grass and she was kneeling on one corner, emptying a picnic basket. Soury-Fontaine sat next to her, opening bottles of Belgian beer with a key. “Here,” he said, handing one to Koster.

  “Thanks.”

  “Have you been to France before, Mr. Koster?” Mariane asked casually.

  “Yes, several times. I lived in Italy when I was younger, and then in Switzerland for a while. My father played with the Roman Philharmonic. You may have heard of him. Peter Koster.”

  Mariane shook her head.

  “First oboe,” Koster said. “He’s retired now.” He took a sip of the beer. It was cold and sweet. “How about you? Have you always lived in Amiens?”

  “No, not always,” she said. “Our family comes from the Channel Islands originally. But we’ve lived in Picardie for three hundred years now, so the locals are finally beginning to accept us. I spent some time in Paris too, when I was younger, in school.”

  “Really. Where?”

  “The Sorbonne.” She laughed quietly. “I studied philosophy and literature. It seems like a long time ago now.”

  She began to slice a loaf of bread. Koster could not take his eyes off her hands, the way her fingers curled about the knife, the way she held the loaf in place, squeezing it slightly. “Is that what you do now, Mariane? Philosophy?” It was the first time that he had spoken her name.

  She stopped slicing the bread and looked up. “No, I left all that behind me years ago. I work at the Cartier Photo Shop. On the other side of the cathedral.”

  “Why did you leave Paris?”

  “I never really liked the city, Mr. Koster.”

  “Please call me Joseph.”

  Mariane laid the knife on the blanket beside her. Then she said, “When you’re from the country, as I am, Mr. Koster, you’re taught to have a certain image of Paris. From films and television. From books. You know. Paris is meant to be the center of everything: fashion, business, the intellectual wellspring.” She smiled sadly. “I suppose it is in some ways. Of course by the time I’d finished school, few things still lived up to my expectations.” She passed a piece of bread to her brother. “Why did you decide to write a book about the cathedrals?”

  Koster smiled. “That’s easy. I’ve always found them fascinating, ever since I was a kid. Their proportion. Balance. I remember my parents took me on a train trip once, from London to Rome. We stopped off for a day in Amiens. I was eleven years old at the time. I remember being in a taxi, riding through the streets not far from here, seeing the spires of the cathedral for the first time across the roofs. There was something about it, something almost magical. It’s hard to explain. I was very interested in mathematics then. There’s a kind of beauty in numbers, in their powerful simplicity, their order, that I’d never experienced anywhere else. They seemed to belong to a secret world, separate from the everyday, a special place that I could see and play in, but that was invisible to everyone else around me. When we got out of the cab, I saw the cathedral looming over me, just as it is now. It was as if my secret world had come to life, somehow made physical before me.”

  “The heavenly Jerusalem,” said Guy Soury-Fontaine. “The church of faith. You’re not the first, you know.”

  “I can’t describe it. I remember walking over and touching the stone walls, looking up. I remember entering the cathedral for the first time, seeing the arches unfold above me, over a hundred feet up. The windows. The tympanum. The triforium and clerestory rushing together to form that wall of light. It was, I don’t know … perfect.” Koster tore his gaze away from the cathedral. “When I got older I got my graduate degree in mathematics.”

  “My best subject in school,” said Guy. “Remember, Mariane? I won that book.”

  “I remember,” she said. “Tintin on the Moon. What kind of mathematics, Mr. Koster?”

  “Oh, I struggled with a whole bunch of things. The null set. Group theory and symmetry. It’s a strange career being a mathematician. You’re basically an academic, always living at the mercy of the university, trapped in some tiny subsidized apartment. You struggle for grants. You write papers for obscure journals that only a handful of people bother to read. I did my greatest work on something called the Goldbach Conjecture.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s a mathematical hypothesis that’s extralogically true, but that defies being proved with logic. Gödel, the great Viennese mathematician, used to call them unprovable verities. Anyway, in 1742 this German mathematician named Goldbach conjectured that every even number can be written as the sum of two prime numbers.”

  “A prime number,” Soury-Fontaine said eagerly. “Wait a minute, I know that one.” He screwed up his face in concentration. “A prime number is a number that can only be divided by itself—and one.”

  “That’s right. But it’s only a conjecture, because although it’s been explicitly verified to around two million or so, no one’s ever been able to prove it.”

  “Not even you?” said Mariane. “But you tried, after all. That’s what counts.”

  Koster smiled. “I guess so. Anyway, my career as a mathematician didn’t last too long. Most people do their best work in their twenties.” He shrugged. “So I went to the École Polytechnique in Geneva, and got my degree in architecture. Do you know Switzerland? It’s been years now since I was there. We were hoping to go next spring.” He took another sip of beer. “Then last year a friend of mine suggested I do this book. He’s a publisher in New York. I wanted to get away and my company said fine. So I came.”

  “Would you like some cheese, Mr. Koster?”

  “Call me Joseph, please.”

  “Who is we?” Soury-Fontaine said.

  “What’s that?”

  The guide took another sip of beer. “You said, ‘We were hoping.’”

  “Did I?” Koster smiled tightly. “I meant my wife and I. My ex-wife. I’m divorced.”

  “Please don’t mind Guy, Mr. Koster.”

  “It’s all right. I have nothing to hide.”

  “But you must have,” Soury-Fontaine continued. “That’s why everybody comes to Amiens. I remember only last year how a man named Gerard Frank, a postal worker, came all the way from Dinard just to confess he’d killed his brother’s wife. Every pilgrim has something to hide. That’s why he’s a pilgrim.”

  “I’m sorry to disappoint you,” Koster said. He leaned back across the blanket on his elbows. “Do you tell that story to all the tourists, Guy? It’s a bit l
urid, isn’t it?”

  Soury-Fontaine began to laugh. “You should hear the one about Antoine Avernier. He’s the fellow who carved the choir stalls.”

  “Perhaps another time.” Koster glanced round at Mariane and smiled. She was staring at him, and her eyes looked dark and unfathomable despite the mottled sunlight filtering through the tree. There was something about her, Koster thought. Something vulnerable and strong at the same time. Something wounded. “And what are you hiding, Mariane?”

  She handed him a piece of bread and cheese. “I’m not hiding anything,” she said, and the words comforted Koster.

  She was just like him.

  He took the slice of bread from her hand and their fingers brushed together.

  They were both wounded. And both of them were liars.

  Chapter VII

  AMIENS

  September 14th, 1991

  LYMAN DROPPED FROM THE RAILWAY CARRIAGE ONTO the rain-soaked platform of the Amiens train station. He wore an old felt fishing hat from Ireland, which he had pulled down low across his face, and with his green wool coat hanging heavily from his shoulders, and an old overstuffed tartan suitcase in his right hand, he looked almost like a pilgrim shuffling through the rain.

  The terminal was crowded with commuters. Lyman threaded his way slowly through the lines, past a newsstand and a woman selling postcards of the Amiens cathedral. Then he noticed a sign just up ahead. LOCKERS, it announced, with a small red arrow pointing down. And there they were.

  He crossed the room and began to study the numbers on the locker doors. 10. 11. 12. It was no use. He scanned them several times but he couldn’t find 02, the number on the key which the vagabond had given him in London. Had he been misinformed?

  He walked over to the lost-and-found booth near the ticket counter. Through the opening in the wall, Lyman could see boxes and old suitcases stacked on top of one another, and on one side a teenage boy in baggy overalls checking through a notebook.