The Book of Strange New Things

by Michel Faber

  ‘Are you really praying for her?’ she said abruptly, just as he was about to climb out of his seat.

  ‘You mean Coretta?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Every day.’

  ‘But you don’t know her at all.’

  ‘God knows her.’

  She winced. ‘Can you pray for one more person?’

  ‘Of course. Who?’

  ‘Charlie.’ She hesitated. ‘Charlie Grainger.’

  ‘Your father?’ It was a guess, an intuition. Brother was a possibility; son he didn’t think was likely.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, her cheeks blossoming red.

  ‘What’s the main concern in his life?’

  ‘He’s going to die soon.’

  ‘Are you close?’

  ‘No. Not at all. But . . . ’ She pulled her scarf down off her head, shook her bared head like an animal. ‘I don’t want him to suffer.’

  ‘Understood,’ said Peter. ‘Thanks. See you next week.’ And he left her in peace, and walked through the door of his church.

  The Oasans had made him a pulpit. God bless them, they’d made him a pulpit, carved and moulded from the same amber material as the bricks. It stood proudly inside the four walls as if it had sprung up from the soil, a tree in the shape of a pulpit, growing in the open air. Just before his departure, Peter had hinted that the roof should be put on as soon as possible, but there was no roof. Nor had any progress been made on the windows, which were still just holes in the walls.

  Standing here reminded him of childhood visits to medieval ruins, where tourists would potter around the remains of a once-thriving abbey abandoned to the elements. Except that this church wasn’t a ruin, and there was no need to worry about the effects of exposure. The roof and windows, when they finally came, would be a grand gesture of completion but, in truth, this church had been ready for use since the moment it was conceived. It was never going to be a hermetically sealed bunker like the USIC base. The roof would serve to keep a downpour out, but the air inside would be the same as the air outside, and the floor would still be trampled earth. The church would contain no perishable bric-a-brac or fragile fabrics that could be ruined by weather; the Oasans regarded this place purely as a gathering-point for bodies and souls – which boded well for their growth in Christ.

  And yet, they’d made him a pulpit. And they had finished the entrance. The two halves of the door which, when he was here last, had lain flat on the ground, fresh from the kiln, had been lifted into place and affixed. Peter swung them open and closed, open and closed, admiring the smooth motion and the perfectly straight line where the two halves met. No metal hinges or screws had been used; instead, the joints were cleverly dovetailed: finger-like appendages on the inner edges of the doors nestled snugly in matching holes in the jambs. He was pretty sure that if he were to seize hold of these doors and lift them, they would come away from the jambs as easily as a foot from a shoe – and could be replaced just as readily. Was it foolhardy to construct a building in such a way that a mischievous vandal could pull its doors off? Even if there were no vandals here to cause such mischief? And did building a church on this spongy earth qualify as ‘building a house on sand’, as warned against in Matthew 7:24–26? He doubted it. Matthew was speaking metaphorically, making a point not about architecture but about faith in action.

  The Oasans were slow workers, pathologically careful, but they never gave less than their best. The door had been decorated with intricate carvings. When first carried here across the scrubland, the two halves were smooth as glass. Now they were scored with dozens of tiny crosses, executed in such a variety of styles that Peter suspected each individual Jesus Lover had added one of his or her own. Near the tapered pinnacle of the door were three outsized human eyes, arranged in a pyramid. They had a blind look to them, pictorially elegant but produced without any understanding of what makes an eye an eye. There were also some gouges which might be mistaken for abstract curlicues but which he knew were meant to be shepherds’ staffs – or ‘สีรี่affสี’ as the Oasans had struggled to identify them when they’d discussed it.

  He had offered to learn their language, but they were reluctant to teach him and, deep down, he conceded it might be a waste of time. In order to imitate the sounds they produced, he’d probably need to rip his own head off and gargle through the stump. Whereas the Oasans, thanks to the pioneering efforts of Tartaglione and Kurtzberg, and to the zeal of their own faith, had made extraordinary progress in English – a language they were as unsuited to learn as a lamb was unsuited to climb a ladder. Yet they climbed, and Peter felt keenly the pathos of their strivings. He could tell, from the Bible verses they’d managed to memorise, that Kurtzberg had made no concessions to their physical handicaps: whatever was printed in Scripture was what they must voice.

  Peter was determined to show more sensitivity than that. During his sleepless week back at the USIC base, he’d done a lot of work translating Bible terms into equivalents that his flock would find easier to pronounce. ‘Pastures’, for example, would be ‘green land’. ‘Righteousness’ would simply be ‘Good’. ‘Shepherd’ would be ‘he who care for me’ (niceties of grammar were less important than the meaning, and anyway, the phrase had quite a poetical ring to it). ‘Staff’ would be ‘care wand’. He’d sweated over that one. The hint of hocus pocus was regrettable, and ‘care wand’ lacked the straightforward vigour of ‘staff’, but it was better than ‘crook’ (too much potential for confusion with the concept of crookedness), it was merciful on the Oasan throat, and it incorporated the right elements of pastoral concern and divine potency.

  The fruits of these labours were in his rucksack. He swung it off his shoulder and dumped it next to the pulpit, then sat down next to it. A feeling of tranquility descended, like a warm infusion of alcohol spreading through his system. The awkward drive with Grainger faded from his mind; the earlier conversation with Tuska already seemed long ago; he had difficulty retrieving anything from Bea’s most recent letter except that she intended to take Billy Frame to a cat show. Oddly enough, the Noah’s Ark wall-hanging that Billy and Rachel had made was vivid in his memory, as though it had come on the journey with him and was hanging somewhere nearby.

  He was so looking forward to living with the Oasans again. It truly was a privilege. Ministering to his congregation in England was a privilege, too, but it was also difficult sometimes, what with the perverse, immature behaviour that various individuals were liable to spring on you. That Asian woman, Mirah, and her violent husband . . . She giggly and gossipy, he fat and peevish, poncing about like an overfed sultan . . . they were precious souls, sure, but not exactly restful company. The Oasans were a tonic for the spirit.

  He sat for a while, in a state of prayer without forming any words, just allowing the membrane between himself and Heaven to become permeable. A small red insect, like a ladybird but with longer legs, settled on his hand. He aligned his fingertips in a triangle and let the creature walk up the incline of one finger and down the slope of another. He let the creature nibble the surplus cells from the surface of his skin. It wasn’t greedy; he barely felt it and then it flew away.

  Ah, the power of silence. He’d first experienced it as a small boy, parked next to his mother at her Quaker meetings. A room full of people who were content to be quiet, who didn’t need to defend the boundaries of their egos. There was so much positive energy in that room that he would not have been surprised if the chairs had started to lift off the floor, levitating the whole circle of worshippers to the ceiling. That was how it felt with the Oasans, too.

  Maybe he should have been a Quaker. But they had no ministers, and no God – not in any real, fatherly sense. Sure, it was peaceful to sit in a community of companions, watching the play of sunlight on the pullover worn by the old man opposite, allowing yourself to be mesmerised by glowing wool-fibres as the sunlight moved slowly from one person to another. A similar state of peacefulness could sometimes be granted when you w
ere homeless: a time in the afternoon when you’d found a comfortable spot, and you’d managed to get warm at last, and there was nothing to do but watch the sunlight’s incremental shift from one paving-stone to the next. Meditation, some might call it. But in the end, he preferred something less passive.

  He took up his position at the pulpit, and rested his fingertips on the burnished toffee-coloured surface where he might spread out his notes. The pulpit was slightly too low, as though the Oasans had made it for as tall a creature as they could imagine but, in his absence, had still underestimated his height. Its design was modelled on the spectacular carved pulpits of ancient European cathedrals, where a massive leatherbound Bible might lie on the spread wing-span of an oaken eagle.

  As a matter of fact, the Oasans had a photograph of just such a pulpit, given them by Kurtzberg, torn from an old magazine article. They’d shown it to Peter with pride. He’d tried to reassure them that worship was an intimate communication between the individual and God, nothing grandiose about it, and that any props should reflect the local culture of the worshippers, but this was not an easy concept to get across when you had a crowd of foetus-like heads jostling around you, murmuring their admiration for a fragment of a Sunday supplement as though it was a holy relic.

  In any event, his pulpit did not much resemble the intricately feathered eagle in the photo. Its streamlined surface, inscribed with randomly chosen letters from the alphabet, might just as easily be an aeroplane’s wings.

  ‘Iสี iรี่ good?’ A soft voice, which he recognised at once. Jesus Lover Five. He’d left the door of the church open and she’d walked in, dressed in her canary-yellow robe as usual.

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ he said. ‘A lovely welcome.’

  ‘God bleสี our reunion, Father Peรี่er.’

  He looked past her small form, through the doorway behind her. Several dozen Oasans were making their way across the scrubland, but they were far away still; Lover Five had hurried ahead. Hurrying was unusual among her people. She appeared none the worse for it.

  ‘I’m happy to see you,’ said Peter. ‘As soon as I left, I wanted to come back.’

  ‘God bleสี our reunion, Father Peรี่er.’ Slung on her shoulder was a net haversack, with a furry, yellow lump stashed in it – the same intense hue as her robe. He thought it might be a shawl, but she pulled it out and held it up for him to examine. It was a pair of boots.

  ‘For you,’ she said.

  Smiling shyly, he plucked them from her gloved hands. Unlike the petite booties he’d been given on his first visit, these looked as though they might actually be his size. He removed his sandals – whose inner soles were misshapen and almost black from constant wear – and slipped the boots onto his feet instead. They fitted perfectly.

  He laughed. Bright yellow boots and an Islamic gown that resembled a dress: if he’d had any ambition to be a macho man, this combo would have spelled the end of it. He lifted one foot and then the other, displaying to Lover Five how excellent her handiwork was. Having witnessed the Oasans making clothes on a previous visit, he knew how much labour this project must have cost her – and how much obsessive concentration. Oasans handled sewing-needles with the same care and respect that humans might handle chainsaws or blowtorches. Each stitch was such a ponderous ritual that he couldn’t bear to watch.

  ‘They’re excellent,’ he said. ‘Thank you very much.’

  ‘For you,’ she said again.

  They stood together by the open door, watching the rest of the Jesus Lovers make progress towards them.

  ‘How’s your brother, Jesus Lover Five?’ asked Peter.

  ‘In the ground.’

  ‘I mean the other one,’ said Peter. ‘The one who’s causing you sorrow because he doesn’t love Jesus.’

  ‘In the ground,’ she repeated. Then, helpfully, she added: ‘Alสีo.’

  ‘He died? In the last week?’

  ‘The laสีรี่ week,’ she said. ‘Yeสี.’

  Peter stared into the shadowed cleft of her hooded head, wishing he could guess what emotion lay behind her impeded speech. His experience so far had made him suspect that Oasans’ emotions were expressed in the rustlings and burbles and squimphs they uttered when not straining to imitate an alien language.

  ‘What did he die of? What happened?’

  Lover Five stroked herself perfunctorily over her arms, chest and midriff, to indicate the entire body. ‘Inสีide him, many thingสี gone the wrong way. Clean thingสี became foul. สีรี่rong thingสี became weak. Full thingสี became empรี่y. Cloสีed thingสี became open. Open thingสี became cloสีed. Dry thingสีbecame filled with wa รี่er. Many other thingสี alสีo. I have no wordสี for all the thingสี.’

  ‘I’m very sorry to hear this.’

  She bowed her head, a gesture of shared regret perhaps. ‘For a long รี่ime already, my brother waสี สีick. Life remained in him, but with a plan รี่o leave. I go every day รี่o my brother, and hiสี life สีpoke รี่o me when he fall aสีleep, สีaying, I am here another day, but I will noรี่ remain here another day more, I am noรี่ welcome in thiสี body. While life remained in my brother, grief remained in me. Now he iสี in the ground, my grief iสี in the ground. God bleสี our reunion, Father Peรี่er. รี่oday will be สีunday.’

  Peter nodded, although in truth he didn’t know if it was a Sunday. He’d lost track of his accustomed measures of time. But it didn’t matter. He and the Oasans were about to worship. That was no doubt what Lover Five meant by ‘Sunday’. And she was right.

  ‘I have something for you, too,’ said Peter, striding over to where he’d left his rucksack. Her head moved down and up, following the motion of his hands as he fetched out the booklets he’d prepared.

  ‘Bibles,’ he said. ‘Or the beginnings of Bibles, anyway. For you to keep.’ He’d managed to produce twenty pages of Scripture rendered in an English that the Oasans could speak with a minimum of trouble, printed in King James-style columns on ten sheets of paper folded double and stapled in the middle. Not the handsomest display of bookbinding since Gutenberg, but the best he could come up with the tools available at the USIC base. On the front cover of each booklet, he’d hand-drawn a cross, and coloured it gold with a highlight marker.

  ‘The Book of สีรี่range New Thingสี,’ confirmed Jesus Lover Five, as her fellow converts began to file into the church. Treading slowly in their padded boots, they made almost no sound on the soft earth, but Lover Five heard them come in, and turned to greet them. ‘The Book of สีรี่range New Thingสี,’ she repeated, pointing at the booklets that Peter was piling up on his pulpit. ‘For uสี to keep.’

  There was a murmuring and sighing among the new arrivals. To his shame, Peter recognised individuals only by the colour of their robes. He hoped their colour-coding hadn’t changed since last week. He’d trained himself to tell the difference between brown, bronze, auburn and copper, crimson, burgundy and coral, at least in his mind. Each shade reconnected him with conversations – however brief and stumbling – he had had with that person.

  ‘Friends,’ he announced, when everyone was in. ‘I’m very happy to see you. I have brought you these gifts. Small gifts from me, containing much bigger gifts from our Saviour.’

  There were, he estimated, about ninety souls gathered within the four walls, a dazzling flock of different hues. As a minister, he was well-practised in casting a quick eye over a congregation to do an approximate head count. If his estimate was correct, it suggested the number of Christians had swollen by ten or twenty during his time away.

  ‘As I explained to some of you before,’ he said, ‘the Bible that you’ve seen me carry – and Kurtzberg carry – is a very thick book. Too thick for most people to read. But it was never meant to be read all at once. The Bible is a storehouse of messages, which grew for hundreds of years, as ou
r Lord shared more and more of his thoughts and intentions with whoever was ready to listen.’ As he spoke, he handed booklets to Lover Five, and she distributed them to her fellow worshippers. Each recipient took the computer-printed pamphlet into his or her gloved hands as though it were a fragile egg.

  ‘When Jesus walked the earth,’ Peter continued, ‘people wrote down what He said and did, and after that, they wrote down the things that happened to His followers. But the Bible was begun in the time before Jesus came, the more ancient time when God seemed much further away and more mysterious, and it was harder to know for sure what He wanted. In those days, people told stories about God, and those stories are in the Bible too. Some of these stories require a lot of knowledge of the customs and places that existed before Jesus. Even among my own people, many don’t have that knowledge.’

  He noticed, as he spoke, that every tenth person, rather than taking a booklet from Lover Five, elected to share one with his neighbour. Peter had brought eighty booklets, having judged his congregation to be slightly under that number, not expecting it to grow in his absence. Evidently, the Oasans had counted, at a glance, the number of booklets and – without any consultation or awkwardness – adjusted the logistics of distribution to ensure that the last few people in line weren’t left with nothing.

  ‘You have told me,’ he said, and gestured towards a robe of saffron and a robe of pale lavender, ‘– you, Jesus Lover Twelve and Jesus Lover Eighteen – that Kurtzberg once told you the story of Nebuchadnezzar, and the story of Balaam and the angel, and of the destruction of Jerusalem, and other stories that you struggled hard to understand and could not understand. Please take heart, my friends. There will be time to understand those stories later, when you have grown in Christ. But for now, Nebuchadnezzar can wait. When God decided to become Jesus, He did it because He wanted to spread His word among strangers, among those who’d never heard of Him, among those who didn’t care for religion or understand it. The stories He told were simple. I’ve tried to put some of the best, most useful ones in your Bibles.’ He picked up one of the booklets and opened it. ‘Your books are small and thin, not because I doubt your hunger for Scripture, nor your power to think, but because I’ve tried to use only words that you and I can speak together in this church, and that you can speak amongst yourselves, with ease. I’ve worked as fast as I can, yet, as you can see from the smallness of the books, I’ve been slow. I promise that in future, I’ll be faster. As you grow in Christ, your Bibles will grow. But we must begin somewhere. And on this wonderful Sunday, as I stand here filled with happiness to see you all here with me, we will begin with . . . this.’