John Read online

  'Wait. Tell us,' John called after him.

  The traveller stopped, looked back over his hump. 'For what profit?' he asked.

  'I am a son of Zebedee,' John said and walked forward. 'Tell.'

  And for the pleasure of pain, for the tale he could carry to the towns of Phyrgia and perhaps trade upon it, the traveller turned. 'I saw myself the head of James, son of Zebedee, cut from his body by order of Herod Agrippa. I saw the blade rise, the hair pulled back, the eyes wide like moons.' He came closer. 'I heard the bone snap,' he said, clutching his hooked hand to his own throat below a blister-smile. 'The head, it rolled,' he said, and rolled his hand in a tumbling fall. 'The brown eyes stared till dust blinded them.'

  John fell to the ground and cried out. And then bowed down and scooped a handful of dust and pressed it into his mouth to keep from shouting out with sorrow. The wild lamentation that lacerated him he could not release in weeping, for the others of his followers he believed he could not show the feeling of abandonment by the Lord. Instead the wolf of grief he took inside himself and let it roam and savage freely.

  In repeated dreams after came the sight of his brother bowed before the blade the traveller told. In such dreams always John stood among the assembled witnesses; powerless, he saw James refuse to deny the Christ and his prayers growing louder even as the blade rose in the air. Forever since, though blind, he sees still; he hears the terrible crack and sees his brother's head fall away.

  Now, with news of Andrew, all such returns to him. The loss is so great as to be unutterable.

  John kneels and confesses. He kneels so long on the bare rock of the cave floor that his knees lock, and the framework of his bones entire is turned solid. First he aches, and pain is everywhere. And then, slowly, slowly, he passes beyond the condition of pain, into an inner terrain where by himself he himself is forgotten. There, these his ancient hands held together, this his bowed head with white hair, are no more present to him, and he is become instead like an element or a timeless feature of that place.

  He is away, and out of this world.

  Water sounds. The cave where he kneels speaks with the sound of a thousand invisible streams.

  On the far side of the island, Papias goes to visit one of the poor families of fishers that live there. On the eastern shore there is a small scattering of houses that existed before the Christians arrived. At first mistrustful of the band of men who were brought and released on to the island, the fishers grew to understand they offered no threat, and then to warm to them because they were hated by the despised Romans. Finally, some among them were converted by the stories of the Christ, Jesus. The kingdom everlasting was explained to them, and gave solace in the hardships of island life to those who felt abandoned on that bleak edge of the world. When sons and husbands drowned, the Christians were told and asked to come and pray.

  So now, the youth Papias.

  In the days after the storm one of the fishermen, Xantes, did not return. Then his broken boat washed up at the feet of his wife, Marina, who was watching from the shore. She went back to the house and held her two small children and said not a word. When the others came to tell her what she already knew, she did not weep. They said it was only his boat and Xantes might have lived. There was no body.

  For the following three days there was none, and it was presumed destroyed on the rocks or eaten by the creatures of the sea. The fishers sent word to the Christians, and old Ioseph, feeling ill, had asked Papias to go and pray with the woman.

  It is a morning bitter with cold. Grey seabirds claw on the rocks and do not fly. Dull oaten-coloured clouds travel the sky. Mercilessly the wind beats at the sea. While Papias hurries, he looks out at the small scars of white surf, the unsailed waters. His sandals are worn, the soles thin. His garments are dirty from the walls of the cave. He wishes it weren't so. He is honoured that Ioseph has asked him this first time, and he wants to appear as he imagines a holy man should. I should be clothed in light, he thinks, then chastises himself for such vanity.

  'You bring the Lord,' he says under his breath into the wind. 'You are clothed in the Lord.'

  He crosses up over the bare, smooth stone at the top of the island and descends toward the fishers' dwellings. In his haste the edge of a rock gashes his ankle. He cries out but does not slow down. He is thinking of the prayers he will say. He is thinking he is engaged in the most important business of life.

  He has been told the house, and knocks on the rough timber of the door. There is no answer and he knocks again. The third time he knocks and opens the door. Inside in the dark sits the woman Marina and clutched against her, her two small children.

  'I come to pray for your husband's passage into everlasting life,' Papias says, the door light framing him.

  The woman does not move. Her fair hair is coiled on her head and tied with a headscarf, her dark eyes distant. Lain at her breasts the infants sleep.

  'I bring the love of the Lord Jesus,' Papias tells her.

  She turns to him. She is twice his age. Her face, planed with light, is sadder than any he has seen.

  Walking swiftly in the sunlight that day. The dust.

  The knowledge that all my life had come to this moment.

  Andrew running back to tell Simon. 'The Messiah, we have found the Messiah!'

  My eyes not moving from you as you walked forward. My mouth open, as if I had eaten the world. As if the world were round like a ball and I had taken it inside me and could not yet know how I might breathe again.

  'John, son of Zebedee,' you said. 'Come.'

  Some moments as clear as water. Your hand held out.

  A lifetime ago.

  Knowing. Knowing in that first moment: I believe. I will follow you.

  Andrew running up with Simon Peter. The smile in his face. How he wanted to laugh out loud with delight. As though this was a great victory. You turned to Simon and said: 'Your name shall be Cephas, Peter.'

  And Andrew wanted to laugh with delight.

  But gravely Peter looked at you, and bowed then and was changed already.

  'Come.'

  That road in the sand. The three of us just behind you speaking not at all.

  The blue of the sky. The light. As if something had opened and we had walked right through.

  I remember.

  A feeling of light, of lightness.

  And knowing. When I looked in your face. That was like no other face, and your eyes that were like no other eyes. Because of the kindness and the love. And the suffering.

  'Come.'

  Walking that dust road away from the river, we, your first disciples. The first time any had followed you.

  So we felt chosen.

  And the light and the blue of the sky. And the three of us just behind you speaking not at all.

  Each of us already thinking: this is what is to be.

  As if already it were written.

  My Lord.

  I remember.

  5

  She says not a word. She sits with the infants against her in the dark.

  'I bring the word of the Lord,' Papias says. His Greek is perfect, but the woman shows no sign of having understood. Fearful for the children catching cold, he closes the door against the bitter wind. The little windowless room of the dwelling is darkened. This dark she has been sitting in, he thinks, and goes across to a rough board on the far wall to seek a lamp. His hands pat where rats are, and he bangs with his open palm on the timber several times. There is no lamp. The room is darker than the cave.

  'Have you no light?'

  He cannot see her eyes, only the outline of her head and the lumpish shadows of the infants. He moves closer. There is a stool with lambswool and netting; he lifts these aside and sits. He is close enough to make out her face now. Her eyes stare as though sightless, and her demeanour is of one thrown back from drowning, a straw of strength remaining.

  Grief has exhausted her, Papias thinks, the good news of the Lord will be a salve.

  '
I am come to pray with you for the salvation of your husband, who has gone to eternal life,' he says.

  She makes not the slightest movement or response, but stares on into the darkness between them. The air of the damp dwelling is close and bitter with brine. Behind him Papias hears the rats returned to the board table against the wall, scrape, nuzzle, and gnaw. He must concentrate hard to remember the order of prayers he rehearsed. Then from the unseen he smells something foul rising. It seems to thicken in the air as if the grief itself is spewed and lumpish and vile. It sickens him, the foulness, and he blinks away from beginning and scowls. The wind laughs at the door, a dry rattling. The stillness of the small room presses upon him; he feels the strangeness of it as if he is entombed, and though he has ready the words to begin, he cannot begin. The foul air, the windowless dark, the staring eyes of the widow, and the rats running down the board hungry and dissatisfied and hunting meagre nothings in the blind underfoot, these all undress his courage. He feels the wound at his ankle smart, and he makes a small noise with his sandals to keep the rodents at bay.

  Still the woman stares, the children unmoving upon her breast.

  A cold ooze slides on to Papias's forehead. His lips dry. I am lost, he thinks. I am not prepared. The counsel he is to give, the comfort he is to bring, are taken from him into the dark as insubstantial things. He tries to begin a silent prayer, to ask the Lord to be with him.

  But the woman reaches forward and the thin bones of her fingers grasp his wrist. 'I am with demons,' she says. 'Death comes from me.' And she pulls his hand across the dark to alight on the cold infant nearest, and at once Papias knows that both children are dead. The cold of the flesh is appalling and he stands up and pulls back his hand. He cries out and rushes to the door to pull it open. The wind meets him. The light of day blinds and spins his head, and he staggers some steps to where he stumbles and bends down and voids himself on the rocks.

  'Papias is not returned, Master, from the fisher's widow. I will care for you this evening,' Prochorus says.

  'I need no care. You may return.'

  'I have brought some bread and fish pottage.'

  'Have them yourself with my blessing.'

  John hears the other cross the cave to the small table and place a bowl there then return. He hears his knees crack to sit. There is the small puttering sound of a flame for the lamp.

  'Shall I read with you, Master?'

  'My thanks. No.'

  They sit. At the mouth of the cave the wind noises. It is as if they are deep within a shell cast back by the tide whose memory is captured. John's breath is slow and thin. Next to him, the other is more restless. Prochorus is sixty years. His head is bare but for two thin ridges of grey hair above his ears. His beard is a wisp. The long fingers of his hands seem destined for fine work, and he can scribe with either one, but without instrument or papyrus they seem lost for purpose and move about on his thighs, his forearms, smooth the nothings on his pate. At sixty years he retains this energy in his body and would prefer any chore to sitting with the old apostle in silence.

  'The pottage is good,' he offers.

  'Prochorus, there is no need to stay. Nothing will transpire.'

  There is a sigh released through the nose, there is the sound of fingers spreading on the knees and the slight friction of the cloth as Prochorus rocks very gently back and forth. The stool rhythms his restlessness.

  'Should we pray, Master? Perhaps I should pray with you?'

  'Pray as you return from here, Prochorus. I thank you for your intentions. I will see you at the dawn bell.'John offers his hand. But the other returns it to him and says: 'I am staying here until Papias comes.'

  'Very well.'

  John sits perfectly still. He has an ability Prochorus cannot fathom, to simply be. To sit in the turning of time as though nothing of him is diminished by it, as though he may wait for ever. His patience is beyond patience, is beyond any quality nameable in the vast vocabularies of the four languages Prochorus knows; it is a quality he has never seen in another human. For in the old apostle's constancy is a stillness that is not reposed or serene, no portion of him sleeps nor idles, but all is instead attentive, expectant, and indefatigable. From him there is not the smallest movement. Patior. Prochorus thinks of the Latin verb, to endure and to suffer.

  The younger man folds his arms, his hands cup his elbows and he rocks forwards. He looks about him into the halo of light the lamp throws against the cave. The water sounds run, and here and there high in the roof glisten thin streams. He looks at them. He looks at the patterns of their descent, where they pool into the dark. Hunkered forwards he studies the cave floor, the beaten arc of path the years have made, elsewhere the sandal-printed dust. A place near the entrance where Papias lights small fires from what fuel can be found on that treeless isle. He rubs his palm across his beard, smoothes with right forefinger his right eyebrow. He tries to listen to the sound of the wind, to interpret in it music or messages, but hears only the howling and the loneliness.

  Night is fallen; Papias is not returning. Prochorus is staying until the dawn now. He looks to the old man. Should he ask him will he be guided to the mat on the floor for sleep? Does he sleep at all?

  They have sat for hours, John moving not the slightest. Pro­chorus himself is weary. When he is not active, heavy soft sponges of drowsiness descend on his brain. But he will not leave the old man; he will not sleep unless John does. And he decides that he cannot ask or disturb the Apostle in his meditation. Instead Prochorus blinks his eyes; he opens his mouth wide and hears his jawbone crack in its socket and holds a hand against it as if in admonishment. His head grows unbearably heavy. He feels it nod forwards as if in agreement and straightens himself and shakes it once to throw off the sleep that nests on stillness. He should get up and move about. He should put out the lamp perhaps. But he does neither. The sitting is intolerable prison now, but he cannot escape it. He considers it would be weakness and fault to move now. He must offer it. The old Apostle may be in communion such as he himself has never known. He it was, after all, who came upon John years earlier in their banishment, when the lightning had passed and the Apostle lay collapsed on the great stone. Prochorus had thought him struck by lightning in the temple of his head. His eyes were blind and he was speaking quickly, so quickly that at first it seemed he spoke in no language the scribe understood. Prochorus asked him if he had been out in the storm, if he been struck, for the rock was blackened. John did not answer but continued as if in tongues. His hand he reached on to Prochorus's shoulder, and the younger disciple led him to this cave nearby as their shelter. It was there, in the days and nights ahead, in fevered fits and starts, in long streams of words, and longer pauses, in a voice loud and strong and often angry — his hands flying out into the air about him, his blind face to the cave roof— that the Apostle dictated his revelation and Prochorus wrote it down.

  It is the event of Prochorus's life. It is as close as he has come to the presence. Though years later he does not forget an instant of it. Not the hairs that stood on the back of his neck as he wrote, nor the chill in his blood, nor the sense he had as his stylus moved on the papyrus that the words would last the lifetime of the earth. He believed.

  He knows it by heart. In the small hours of night, to keep awake now he mutely recites verses. Beside him, John is as before.

  Some moonlight is uncovered by the wind-dragging clouds and falls at the entrance. Prochorus looks; he wonders what it might be to be visited just then by seraphim. Would he give his eyes for such? Would the dazzlement singe his brain? Although not an ancient, he is already an old man himself now. Perhaps there is nothing more for him. He wonders how each is chosen. How as if from a great constellation a hand sweeps through stars and selects one. He wonders at the destiny God has chosen for him, and if perhaps again, now, this bitter night, the Apostle will catch fire and speak.

  'Let it descend' is his prayer. 'Let it come again, now, Lord.'

  The wind whips up from
the shore where Papias crouches to his knees over the stones. His head sings. His eyes blur with sudden tears. He feels struck in the pit of his stomach and retches violent, vacant gulps. The sea wind salts his face. From the corner of his mouth it pulls aslant a thin drool. He cries out a sound none hears. He stands upright and looks back at the widow Marina's dwelling, where the rough door opens and bangs with invisible traffic.

  When he collects himself, Papias goes back inside. The scene is unchanged: the widow and the infants motionless upon her. The door opens and closes the light so she appears as in a series of identical portraits, each painted a grievous grey, each with a wild, implacable suffering.

  'The children must be buried,' Papias says, softly. 'They are gone to the Lord.'

  The widow shows no sign of understanding. Her eyes stare, as if across the room she keeps demons at bay.

  Gently Papias leans down and places his hands on one of the children. The flesh is cold and scaled with something rough he cannot see. He goes to lift the child off the mother, and the moment the weight shifts she lets out a scream and grasps the infant to her.

  'The children must be buried,' he says again. But the mother will not let go the child and shakes her head back and forth, and would be weeping if she had not wept herself away already, and so instead makes a kind of moaning crying and clings to the dead. Papias pleads with her. He tells her he will pray over the children. He tries to lift the first from her again, a girl it is, but the mother will not let go her hold. It is wretched and ugly and intolerable, and still the door bangs and opens and bangs and opens behind him in the wind.

  'O Lord, help me,' Papias cries. 'Stop, stop, let go!' He wrenches the infant from her then, and then the other, and rushes outside into the ravaged light of day.

  The girls are as nothing in his hands, weight of shells, no more. The lower side of one child's face and down her neck is spread a greenish scaling; the other wears it about her mouth like a lumpish paint. Papias looks up to the sky and wails. He holds the infant girls in the wind as if in offering, as if he believes that from the sky now will come a miracle. He draws down into the deep well of his faith and brings up this clear pure stuff that believes in the absolute bridge-way between man and God, that between earth and heaven is constant traffic of beseech and grant, that somewhere in all the lands stretching from Judea into Asia Minor, and even to Rome and Gaul beyond, there occur visits of the Divine, and the sick are sometimes restored. He holds the infant girls aloft in the wind. Ioseph has baptised all on the island, and will have dipped these children in the water; there is no fear for them. But still Papias finds himself asking. His faith tempts him to think of a personal favour. He looks at the girl with the ruined skin of her face and he closes his eyes. When he opens them, it will be gone; it will be cleansed away and he will feel the returning breath. Papias prays for it. He asks that it happen now. In a fever of belief he tells God that he will not succumb to vanity but keep the curing a secret. No one need know.