‘Did we really? I’d completely forgotten.’
‘It was after the Temple of Tanit.’
‘Oh. The Temple.’
‘Yes. Right after the Temple. You suddenly wanted to show it to me, remember? It summed up something you wanted to share with me. We came on foot, and we had to go a very long way round because of all the streets being closed in the city centre, because of the marching bands and the crowds and the flags. Oh, by the way, this is Chris.’
Her friend comes over to shake my hand. A nice, warm, open face. ‘So sorry about your aunt. A wonderful woman. You must be very proud of her.’
Dru puts his head round the door of the chapter house, wondering where I’ve got to.
‘I’ll tell you what,’ I suggest to all three of them, ‘why don’t we go up the tower?’
Now that he’s sitting on it, dangling his long legs, I can see that what the Mason has been lying on is not a tomb but an altar, though there’s nothing on it but himself.
‘Stories,’ he says. ‘That’s my job. I come up with stories. Of course, they’re all about me really . . . well, I’m all I know . . . but I like to think others will find things in them that they recognize. Every month or two I come up with a new one and then Helga makes of it whatever she wants to make.’
‘So each story supersedes the last?’
‘I wouldn’t say that. It’s hard to hold them all in your head but I wouldn’t say they cancel each other out. My current story began with a nightmare that woke me up clammy with fear. But I don’t suppose you want to hear it, do you? I would have thought you’ve had enough of nightmares for the—’
‘I’d like to hear it.’
He shrugs. ‘Okay, well imagine this, then. Imagine a solid that was really solid – solid all the way through, I mean, not made of grains or atoms, but solid at every level of magnification, so that it’s impossible to crack, or chip into, or burrow through. And imagine that this is what nothingness is, and not empty space as we usually imagine. Space is still a thing, after all. You can move through space. It’s somewhere where things can be and things can happen. But through real nothingness, any kind of movement is impossible. And there’s nothing beyond it, so even if you could drill through it – which you obviously can’t – there would be no destination to get to.’
He pauses to examine my face. ‘Got it so far? Well, now imagine – and this was my nightmare – that, in an infinity of solid nothingness, there is a single tiny flaw. A bubble, if you like, like the bubbles you get in glass. And trapped inside that bubble is a solitary living being, who is the only living being in existence. Well, that’s God. God is all alone and always has been, with nowhere to go but where he is. He’s Christ nailed to a cross, if you like, but it’s a cross where he can never die, and from which he can never descend, because there’s no possibility whatever of him being anywhere other than where he is. Ha! Just like you said, it’s unbearable but he has to bear it.’
The Mason has been looking at his hands as they grasp the knob of his stick, but now he glances up at me beneath his bristly Old Testament brows, and seems to hesitate, as if he’s read some sort of rebuke in my face. ‘Or she has to bear it, if you prefer,’ he says. ‘Why not? In fact, I think I’ll call her “she” from now on.’
‘It sounds a very strange story to live by.’
‘Well, my approach is to attempt to tell the truth, and then deal with the consequences. And my idea was that God came up with a sort of solution. She imagined a world. In her imagination, she came up with a thing called space and another thing called time, and then she split herself into tiny pieces, and spread herself out across this imagined thing called space and this other imagined thing called time. And, as a result of that splitting, we think there are things and places and days and nights, and each of us believes that we are just one individual among many, one sentient being among many sentient beings, even though, when you really think about it, our actual experience is quite the opposite and there is only ever one. Do you see what I mean? There is only ever one. It feels itself to be looking out at a world of things and faces, but it has no face and it itself is the only thing it actually knows. And that’s where it all comes from: God by herself in her tiny cave, surrounded by nothingness.’
‘That is a nightmare.’ I’m really quite shaken. Just as the Mason warned me, this is all rather too close to my recent experience.
He nods. ‘There are consolations, though. The terrible truth is always there in the background, it doesn’t go away, but all the same it’s just the beginning, and there are lots of other stories that flow out from it. For instance, let us for simplicity imagine that God started off by splitting herself into just two parts. You could see the two as a man and a woman if you wanted – Adam and Eve, why not? – or two men, or two women, or even two animals, if you prefer. The key point is that the two of them are essentially one and the same, but God must do her best to forget that, in order that they can seem to themselves to be two entirely separate beings. The trouble is that being separate is also lonely, itself a reminder of the loneliness that the entire universe was created to avoid, so they long to be close together, yet when they get too close, they stop being two separate people and become more like one again, and that too reminds them of the loneliness of God. So then one of them backs away. But that creates distance between them, so the other one feels abandoned and moves towards the first one. But that makes the first one afraid of being gobbled up and waking up alone in the cave in the rock, and so she hastily moves further away. And they end up chasing each other round and round, and back and forth, trying to be close and trying to stay apart, both at the same time.’
The Mason looks at me and shrugs. I wish he hadn’t told me any of this.
‘But what on earth’s the point of an idea like that? I thought your stories were supposed to provide guidance and help people to live a good life. How does that story help anyone? What can we possibly learn from it?’
He laughs. ‘Well, that’s Helga’s job. That’s why I’m up here and she’s over there in the village. She has that trick of knowing what to do. Stories never really tell you that. In fact, the truer the story, the less useful it is. I’d go as far as to say that, if it were possible to sum up the entire world in a single story, that story would give no guidance whatever, because it would be an account of why things have to be exactly as they are, and why everything that happens, and every choice that’s made, is as necessary and inevitable as every other.’
‘So why tell these stories at all, then?’
‘Ha! Good question! It’s hard to say. For some reason it just happens to be what I need to do. And Helga assures me she finds them useful. To be perfectly honest with you, she’s the one with the difficult job so I try to help her out by coming up with a few principles or axioms that she might draw out. For instance, from the story I’ve just told we might derive something like, “Be close but not too close,” or “Look after others, but look after yourself as well.”’
‘But . . . but those are just . . .’
The Mason barks with laughter. ‘I know, I know! They’re just platitudes. Anyone could come up with them, without going to all the bother of a story.’
‘I guess so, but . . .’
‘Ha! You know so! And platitudes always miss out the hard part, don’t they? I mean, any fool can say, “Look after others, but look after yourself as well.” It obviously makes sense. The difficulty lies in knowing where the balance should be struck.’
‘That’s the part I find difficult, certainly.’
‘Well, that’s Helga’s job. She makes the world work. I just build the tower and provide the stories. I don’t know why but she assures me she finds that helpful.’
He smiles, and shrugs again.
‘May I ask your real name? They just call you the Mason in the village.’
‘Of course. My name is Stein Pedersen.’
‘What did you do, back in your own country, before you came out here?’
&n
bsp; ‘I was a mason there, too: a stonemason like my father. It was pretty routine work, most of it. No one would have asked me to build a tower like this.’
‘Have you always been alone?’
‘No. I had a wife when I came here. Unfortunately she died. I’m afraid it wasn’t the easiest of marriages. She couldn’t see why certain things are just . . . well . . . necessary for me . . . you know? She couldn’t understand my point of view.’
‘Nor you hers, I guess?’
His expression suggests that this thought has much less hold on his imagination – I notice he hasn’t asked me about my name, my background, my occupation – but, in a spirit of fairness, he concedes the point. ‘I’m sure that was also the case.’
He contemplates what he’s just said for several seconds, and then repeats himself, this time with something rather closer to actual regret. ‘I’m sure that was the case. You’re quite right. I’m not an easy person to share life with.’
I’m being shown round a utopia.
‘So this is where we store all our grain,’ I’m being told, as we emerge into a stone-paved village square with a large and beautiful plane tree as its focal point. ‘Of course, anyone can help themselves to it whenever they want, but most of it we use to make bread in the village bakery here, where everyone takes a turn.’
‘We meet every Wednesday to solve problems and allocate tasks,’ someone else explains, as I stop to look around me at the harmonious sight of the various buildings of stone and wood that surround the square, and at the high scarp beyond the rooftops, against the cool blue sky. ‘And Sunday gatherings are to remind us what brought us here in the first place.’
‘Here is where we make glass and work metal,’ yet another villager tells me, and smilingly holds up for my inspection hands that have been scarred by fire. ‘A few of us are specially good at such things and are excused from work on the land.’
I have slept all night in a warm soft bed, with the comforting sniffs and grunts of other sleepers in the room beside me. My stomach is full of bread and fruit and meat and my battered body is tingling with the warm baths it has soaked in, and the ointments and salves that have been applied to it.
‘We try to ensure,’ Helga tells me as we head towards the church that forms the centrepiece of the village, ‘that disagreements are not allowed to fester. If two people can’t sort things out between themselves, each can choose an advocate, and the village as a whole chooses a mediator, and then they all stay in the meeting hall to talk and pray until, one way or another, the matter is resolved.’
‘Of course,’ says her husband Peter, ‘there’s less to argue about here than you have in the world outside, since we hold everything in common, and none of us is either rich or poor.’
For some reason I find myself thinking about those gods that my lazy, drug-addled imagination used to conjure up for me back in my days by the river, and I imagine them hovering round me now. Jesus is tense and ill at ease, as he usually is around Christians, like an anxious parent watching a clumsy child stepping out on to a stage. Apollo is scathing about the mediocrity of this miniature society, the lack of opportunity for real achievement, whether artistic or scientific, the lack of any encouragement for brilliance. ‘And don’t get me started,’ he says, ‘on the slavish reliance on superstition.’ Aphrodite, meanwhile, thinks that everyone is sexually repressed, and Dionysus finds the whole place dull and stifling. Where is the passion, he wants to know? Where is the ecstasy? Where are the joys of destruction and creation? And then Tanit appears, in her capacity as goddess of war, to sneer at the softness of it all. ‘They only survive at all because of their isolation,’ she says. ‘It would only take two or three soldiers of fortune to arrive with guns, and they’d all become slaves.’
It’s all very pretty, and if I visited a place like this as a tourist in some foreign country, I’m sure I’d take many photos, but I can’t help myself from wondering how on earth these people can bear to confine themselves, for their entire lives, in something as small and parochial as this little village.
‘And think of all the meetings they must have to go to,’ mutters the river god, the one that has no name, ‘all the strokes they must have to constantly give one another, all the petty arguments that have to be defused, all the nosiness and the gossip. Surely anyone who has the slightest imagination must feel like screaming sometimes, or running amok just for the sake of variety, and crave for a place where no one knows them, and no one expects anything of them at all, and they can be whatever they choose.’
I keep looking across at the strange, spiky tower that stands on its own small prominence at the far end of the lake.
‘That’s very striking. I’d love to have a closer look at it.’
Helga smiles. ‘We can go there whenever you feel ready.’
‘I wonder if I could go there on my own? I don’t mean to seem rude or ungrateful, but I’ve been so long by myself that it’s quite challenging being surrounded by people all the time. I think I’m going to need to give myself a bit of space at some point.’
‘Of course, of course,’ says Peter. ‘We mustn’t crowd you. By all means have a walk along the lake. But I’m afraid you can only look at the tower from the outside. It’s our holy place, you see. We don’t go inside ourselves except on special occasions. You’d have to get the Mason’s permission to go in, and he might very well not grant it.’
Helga opens the church door. It’s actually quite beautiful inside in a modest, austere kind of way: these rough stone arches, these plain windows of knobbly glass, and what appears to be the lesson for the week, written in chalk on a blackboard: Look after others, but look after yourself as well.
‘No cross,’ I observe.
‘No, we’ve never had a cross,’ Helga says. ‘As the Mason used to say, if we’re going to follow Jesus Christ, we should have a symbol that represents what he said when he was alive, not a story that others told about his death.’
‘And that cup there . . . Is this what you believe to be the Holy Grail?’
They both laugh. ‘Not the Grail,’ Helga says. ‘That’s just a fairy tale! This represents the Holy Chalice, the real cup that Christ himself used at the Last Supper.’
‘But of course this is just a cup,’ Peter says. ‘It represents the Chalice. It’s not the Chalice itself.’
I’m simultaneously slightly relieved and a little disappointed. The relief comes from learning that they’re not quite such a bunch of cranks as I’d been led to believe, the disappointment because it turns out that, in spite of my scepticism, I have imbued enough of those old stories in my childhood to have been looking forward to being in the presence of something that might just really be the Grail. (And Grail is what I still call it in my mind, whatever their objections to the word.)
‘I apologize,’ I say. ‘It did seem rather far-fetched. It’s just I’d understood that—’
‘The real Chalice is in the tower.’
So they are a bunch of cranks. Oh dear. I find that almost embarrassing, even as the tower acquires a new and magical allure in my mind.
‘It’s important not to be greedy, we feel,’ Helga says, ‘in spiritual matters as in everything else.’
‘Oh look!’ I exclaim. ‘That painting! I know that painting. It hangs in the cathedral in . . .’
The cathedral I mean is the one back in the city, which was a regular outing in my childhood, a place where we took the families of Dad’s many foreign visitors. For me as a child, the highlight of the place was always the tower, and the rest of it was just something to get over with as soon as possible, so I never gave more than a passing glance to the painting that hung above the altar. But now the familiarity of it, in such a strange and unfamiliar place, gives it an extraordinary power, and has the effect of making me really look at it in a way I’ve never done before: those dark shadows across the table, the sharp, stormy light that cuts through the glass carafes, the waiter in the foreground, for whom this is just another pri
vate party, asking a customer if everything’s all right, and, deep inside the picture, Christ giving bread to the disciple next to him.
As we emerge from the church, the tower is still in full sunlight, but the escarpment behind it is in shadow. Of course I don’t believe any of this nonsense, but it is staggering even just to imagine the possibility that the cup used in that very scene could be just over there across the lake, behind those lonely windows.
I didn’t pass out. That’s one blessing. I had to stand like that for quite a while, leaning over my frame, while the waves of dizziness moved through me, but eventually they faded and I was able to move forward again. It’s been a long hard journey and there were moments when I was sure I wasn’t going to make it, but I’ve reached my destination – the chest of drawers – and now comes one of the hardest and most dangerous parts of my quest, because I need to open a drawer, and I happen to know that it’s a stiff one that requires a fair amount of force, and is therefore likely to resist at first and then come out with a jerk. The one thing you don’t need, when you have slow reactions and bones made of glass, is to find yourself suddenly thrown outwards into space in a direction where there’s nothing to grab hold of.
So, before attempting to open the drawer, I need somehow to get a grip on the chest itself with one hand, sufficiently firmly that I can rely on that single hold to keep me upright. And then I need to push my frame to one side in such a way that it won’t get in the way of me pulling out the drawer, but will still be near enough for me to make the transfer back to it when it’s time for my return journey. My body is the landing vehicle, the frame the orbiting module with which I must dock if I’m to have any chance of getting back to Earth. I feel quite afraid. I feel that I’ve been a stubborn fool to embark on this journey at all, considering that I have people visiting me three times a day who could easily have done it for me, and it doesn’t help that right now I can feel the pain coming back. In fact, it’s happening much earlier than it would have done if I’d remained on my bed, for my own treacherous internal organs, hijacked and swollen by disease, have been pulled and yanked about by my shuffling progress across the room, and they feel like lumps of red-hot lead.
Tomorrow Page 21
