From Fire by Water, page 15
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The Bible, however, told an additional story: that of God taking it upon himself to repair the damage wrought by the Fall. I didn’t begin to grasp this other story until I read Jesus of Nazareth, the first book written by the German theologian Joseph Ratzinger after he was elected the 265th pope of the Catholic Church. It was to this one book, more than any other, that I owed, and still owe, my soul and my salvation.
I bought Jesus of Nazareth shortly after Benedict XVI’s 2008 visit to the United States. I watched television coverage of the visit, and I remember thinking that this was a very holy man. Yet it took me a year to crack it open and another couple to make it through a relatively short text, in part because my knowledge of the Bible was still spotty, and Jesus of Nazareth demanded a basic familiarity. Still, I often studied it in conjunction with Alter, which meant that I read the Torah with Benedict, and I read Benedict’s analysis of the New Testament in the light of the Old.
On one level, Jesus of Nazareth took on the various strands of theological liberalism that sought to cast doubt on the historicity of the Jesus portrayed by the four evangelists. To answer the skeptical theologians, the pope went on a “personal search for the face of the Lord”. The result was a sophisticated theological polemic that also served as a Christian primer addressed by a loving pastor to his flock and to a God-starved West.
At the heart of the book was that same Great Reversal—the Highest switching places with the lowest and submitting willingly to humiliation—that had so affected me when I had read the Passion narrative in Matthew all those years earlier. Benedict taught that the Great Reversal had begun not at Calvary but at Bethlehem, that it was there all through Christ’s public ministry. He also showed how nearly everything in the Old Testament pointed toward precisely this Great Reversal, toward the Word becoming persecuted flesh.
Et incarnatus est. What a marvelous, what a mind-boggling idea! The Incarnation overturned every “natural” picture that man had of God. Its very improbability to my mind counted in its favor: The omnipotent subjects himself to weakness; the Tent of Meeting becomes the manger; the Ark of the Covenant, a lowly Virgin; the creative Word of God, a newborn (with all the vulnerability that that implied); the pillar of smoke, the wood of the Cross. God is spat upon, scourged, crowned with thorns, and executed in the most humiliating fashion imaginable.
It was all too strange, too radical, to be man-made.
Reading the Bible as a unified whole, as Benedict urged, revealed the continuity between these two apparently contradictory conceptions of God. There was one narrative arc bridging the Old and New Testaments, and that was God’s drawing ever nearer to humanity and revealing ever more of himself. This drama of divine self-disclosure culminated in a forgotten corner of the Roman Empire a little more than two thousand years ago, when God—the same God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—entered history in human form and revealed what he had denied even to the prophets: his face.
That face looked like love, the bloodstained face of the Son of God. The face of the Lord was “crucified love”, as Benedict put it. Bloodstained and crucified, because only the self-sacrificial love of God could make right what was crooked in human nature. Thus, Jesus was not just a great man come to preach harmless moral maxims a la Confucius. Jesus was not a political liberator come to end hunger in Africa and Latin America. Jesus was not a liberal rabbi come to ease up Jewish ritual. Simply put, Jesus was God, come to bring God and reconcile man to him.
As I approached the final pages of Jesus of Nazareth—I couldn’t pinpoint the exact moment—I decided that this was the truest account of God and man and the relationship between the two.
I had already accepted the Fall as the most penetrating account of what ailed the world and me. I felt the Fall to be real as sure as I felt the pain of a pinprick or the thirst of dehydration. I saw its effects in all of my failings. I could almost touch the grime that encrusted my soul from years of my own lousiness. My conscience, then, was telling me something. Indeed, it had been whispering and then yelling it for quite a while. And it happened that the message of my conscience was in concord with the Christian faith as expounded by Benedict XVI. Who else but the self-sacrificing God-Man could set right what had gone wrong in the Garden?
None other. Nothing and no one else worked. Only Christ Jesus.
The world, and my own cynical side, had long tried to drown out that message with the opposite idea: “Relax. Be reasonable now. You can live a good, moral life without the superstition of religion. If you want to honor Christianity’s historic contributions, by all means, try to catch a performance of Rachmaninoff’s All-Night Vigil. Watch a movie by Andrei Tarkovsky. Go admire some Caravaggios at the Met. You can be ‘enriched’ by Christianity without going whole hog. You’re enlightened, remember. You’re roshan-fekr, an intellectual.”
Benedict XVI thundered against such complacency and relativism, against this “dictatorship of convention”:
Does someone achieve blessedness and justification. . . because he has declared his opinions and wishes to be norms of conscience and so made himself the criterion? No, God demands the opposite: that we become inwardly attentive to his quiet exhortation, which is present in us and which tears us away from what is merely habitual and puts us on the road to truth.
On the plane of politics, the worldly, “reasonable”, do-as-you-like-without-God alternative always led to slavery. One form of this temptation promised to fill every belly so long as man cashiered God. That was Marxism, and it wrought “ruin and destruction even of the material goods”, as Benedict noted. Another form of the temptation was “the worship of well-being”. That was the temptation in advanced technological nations. Left unchecked, the appetite for “rationality” and “well-being” could lead to a dystopian society of the abortion clinic and the euthanasia facility and the test-tube baby. Think Brave New World instead of Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Even as I hailed “free people, free markets” as a Journal editorial writer, a revulsion was growing in me of market democracies that lacked an absolute authority to say no to their sins. I especially feared efforts to bring the mysterious dimensions of life—birth, love, sex, death—under man’s full, scientific dominion. Western democracy was magnificent, yes, and I wouldn’t choose to live under any other model, at least in the fallen here and now. Only democracy didn’t obviate—but heightened—the need for those “steadying brakes” that Koestler had written about.
Too much autonomy was as likely to yield despotism as the hideous statist projects of the last century. True freedom, Benedict taught, was something else. It was “freedom in the service of the good”, freedom that allowed “itself to be led by the Spirit of God”. To know what God wants and to bring oneself into conformity with the transcendent order of the universe, then, was freedom. That was the essence of Israel’s joy, what set it apart from the pagans with their idols and god-emperors. The Christian, however, had the added joy of knowing the “face” of the law: self-sacrificial love. The road to the fullest freedom ran through the Cross.
By the time I was thirty years old and settled in London, I saw all of this clearly. I would even voice some of it privately, among a few close friends. Still I was in no rush to ascend Calvary.
Chapter Ten
The House on the Cape of Olives
The boy’s socks reeked of urine and excrement. Probably he had stepped onto the squat latrine neglecting to wear the communal slippers. In his restless slumber, he would fling his feet in my direction every few minutes, almost always landing a kick on the crown of my head.
Ten of us lay side by side on the floor, in two neat sardine rows. The boy with the fetid feet slept in the spot above mine. I had no choice but to suffer his kicks in silence. Crawling sensations on exposed skin hinted of an insect infestation, but the room was too dark, and the invaders too fast, to pinpoint the exact species. Cigarette smoke hung heavy in the frozen air. There weren’t enough blankets to go around; those who had managed to get their hands on them were wrapped like mummies; the rest shivered. Outside, the hollering of drunks and the booming of fireworks announced the new year, 2016.
I couldn’t fall asleep if I tried. I had managed to gain entree to an Afghan smuggling ring in Istanbul, and I was about to tell the story of the European migrant crisis from the inside, as no Western reporter had or could. Unlike most of my journalistic rivals, I spoke Persian, the second language of the migrant trail (after Arabic), and I could fit in with these poor souls. A career-defining triumph was at hand. I pictured myself signing a lavish book deal and, later, delivering an acceptance speech at some journalism awards ceremony.
Fear mingled with these happy thought bubbles. My adventure could go very wrong, very fast. As often as the boy kicked at my head, I would reach inside my peacoat, which I was using for a blanket, to feel for a hidden pocket. There, wrapped in several layers of duct tape, was my U.S. passport, the thin legal tissue that set me apart from the others. An authentic Western passport went for several thousand euros on the black market. I shuddered to think what might happen to me if one of my travel companions found the document.
Or if the smugglers discovered that I was a journalist rather than a bona fide client. At the very least, I would be kicked out and be forced to restart the project from scratch. And what would become of Alireza, the Iranian migrant who had brought me here? Alireza had neither time nor money to spare. He was a man on the run. I felt responsible for his fate.
* * * * *
A friend of a friend of a friend had introduced me to Alireza a few days earlier, after I put out word on Iranian social media that I was looking to accompany a migrant on the journey from the Middle East to western Europe. We spoke by WhatsApp while I was in London and Alireza on a bus heading from Tehran to southeast Turkey. He agreed to let me join him on one condition: Under no circumstances were the smugglers and other “travelers” to know that I was a reporter.
“We’ll say you’re my cousin,” he said. “Otherwise everything will go to rot. Capisce?”
“Understood,” I replied. “We can say we’re cousins who grew up apart.”
“You got it, brother. Bring two thousand dollars. Cash. And pack lightly. You don’t want to be too heavy on the water. Ha ha ha!”
Alireza was due to arrive in Istanbul on New Year’s Eve. I flew there from London. From Istanbul onward, we would travel together. The plan was to make a series of illegal crossings that would take us from Turkey’s western shore to the Greek isles, then through mainland Greece and the Balkan States, until we would reach Germany, the migrant Zion. Known to journalists and officialdom as the Western Balkan corridor, this route had brought more than a million newcomers to Europe by the end of 2015.
The new arrivals included people fleeing the infernal wars in Syria and Iraq, as well as Afghans, Iranians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, and many others who saw a chance to escape the misery and precariousness of life in their homelands. This mass exodus was made possible by highly efficient smuggling networks that operated like any large enterprise but for that their clients and commodities were human beings. I traveled to Turkey to tell this story.
* * * * *
Taksim, the bustling square around which the rest of Istanbul orbits, was buried under half a foot of snow when I got there. A festive mood reigned in the nearby tangle of shops, tourist bars, and hotels. Couples snapped self-ies by snowmen. Burly restaurateurs carved doner kebabs, tempting the crowds with a greasy respite from the frigid temperatures. Stylish young women walked arm in arm, giggling and casting flirtatious glances at passing groups of young men. Syrian children slid down the ice-covered asphalt, making do with cheap sneakers for sleds.
A lonesome Turkish Santa imitated Father Christmas’ signature laugh, poorly: “Ho-ha-he!”
My nerves were shot. I walked over to an Irish pub and ordered a double Jameson, neat, and a Kronenbourg to wash it down. Alireza wasn’t answering my calls and messages. Had he been detained at the border? The mutual friend’s friend who had made the connection was an Iranian dissident. Was Alireza a political case, too? In any event, my cell phone eventually rang. It was him; the snow, not Iranian border guards, had delayed his bus.
He told me to come to the “Usman Peh-leese”. I couldn’t make heads or tails of this, so I headed in the direction of the Ataturk monument at the center of Taksim. There were only two hours left in the year, and hundreds of young people—Turks, Arabs, Iranians—were milling about the monument in anticipation of the countdown. Their various nations were at each other’s throats over Syria, but here, they mixed and made merry under the steely gaze of the Father of Turks—the same gaze that had brought me such comfort all those years earlier at the Turkish-Iranian border.
I had no clue what Alireza looked like. I circled the monument a few times, searching for an unfamiliar face in the throngs. Then I figured it out. “Usman Peh-leese” was the Ottoman Palace hotel, on the southern edge of Taksim. And there he was at the entrance, dressed in an Adidas athletic jacket with matching pants and bright orange running shoes. He was tall and broad shouldered and looked as if he had struggled to fit his muscly bulk into his clothes. His equine face broke into an easy smile when he spotted me, unveiling two rows of large, gapped teeth.
I suggested that we head to my pub to get our bearings. We needed to get in touch with Ehsan, our smuggler. Alireza’s phone was almost out of battery power, so he used my UK cell to make the call. He told the man on the other end—it was unclear whether it was Ehsan himself—that he was borrowing a British tourist’s phone. It was the first of many times that Alireza lied as he did something that could have endangered both our lives: bring a reporter into the inner sanctum of a smuggler. He covered his tracks with heaps of ta’arof, the beguiling Persian art of affected deference and self-effacement. We were instructed to take a taxi from Taksim to a neighborhood called Zeytinburnu.
“Oh, one more thing,” said Alireza as the call came to an end. “Remember I mentioned my cousin who wants to get on the water. Is there still room for one more?”
There was room for one more. Now there was no excuse for backing out of this.
Alireza negotiated hard at the cab stand, but the inclement weather made it a seller’s market, and we had to settle for a gouging fare. The swirling lights and hubbub of Taksim faded into slushy darkness as our taxi made its way through the city’s less touristy precincts, toward Zeytinburnu. By then the infusions of liquid courage had left me more than a little buzzed.
If Alireza was nervous, he didn’t show it. He spoke Persian in the looti vernacular of the south Tehran working class. The tone and cadence were such that, no matter the substance of his speech, he sounded as though he were vaguely objecting or taking issue—with his interlocutor, with the world, with God. “South Tehran” was more than an accent or a sensibility. It was a whole constellation of situation ethics, street wisdom, and survival skills, all of which Alireza appeared to possess in spades.
In the backseat of the taxi, he recounted a life story laden with misfortune. He had been born to a poor and pious Muslim family. His athlete’s physique, and arms and fists made for punching, had propelled him from those humble origins to the kickboxing semipros by the time he was a teenager. Yet his talents had come to naught, and he was a broken man before he decided to try his luck on the migrant trail. At thirty-two, he was only a year older than I was.
The source of his worldly misfortunes was his conversion to Christianity. Last time Alireza was in Istanbul, in January 2015, he and a dozen other young men had been baptized in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit at a ceremony organized by one of the many Turkey-based Protestant groups that cater to Iran’s underground evangelical scene. When they flew back to Tehran, security forces arrested them at the airport. A regime mole had infiltrated the group of converts. Alireza was detained for days.
“Sir, I didn’t know what I was doing,” he had blurted at one point, as an interrogator slapped his face over and over. “I love Islam! My life for Islam! My buddies told me this was to be some sort of water-therapy deal!”
The interrogator had burst out laughing at this; the beating went on.
“When they start hitting you,” Alireza recalled, “you’ll say anything to make them stop.”
He would go on to deny Jesus several more times before the authorities released him. Afterward, the railroad company where he worked fired him. He took up odd jobs—construction, fruit picking, scrap metal recycling—but couldn’t make ends meet. The neighborhood boys stopped showing up for the kickboxing classes he taught out of the makeshift gym in his apartment. He considered taking his own life. When word spread that Germany had flung the gates open to migrants from the Middle East, he borrowed enough money from relatives to pay the smugglers and took off.
“The me that left Iran was a corpse,” he told me. “You know, in Iran, Mother is something else. How could I leave my mother behind? Brother, I dragged a corpse out of that house.” But he wouldn’t change anything if he could go back in time. “With Islam, it’s ‘You’re a Muslim, or we kill you.’ With Christianity, there is a real choice, a real touch of God. That’s what I have.”
A real touch of God. His Christianity was as simple as that. Too much so, I thought, and I was inclined to doubt his faith on account of its simplicity. Then it occurred to me that, with his Baptism, Alireza had bound himself to Christ in a way that was infinitely more concrete and meaningful than my bookish half faith could allow. I still only admired the Cross from a polite distance. This simple man had thrown himself at its foot. For him, faith in Jesus Christ was as natural and effortless as being awe-struck by lightening. He was my Ivan Denisovich.
