Gospel, page 25
The rabbi put a finger to his temple, considering.
Lucy: “But they didn’t blow the safe, Dr. O’Hanrahan.” She took a deep breath. “I think someone different, the man in the German car, was trying to steal it. And he blew the safe, but it was too late—Gabriel had gotten it already. As I said, Gabriel got on the six P.M. bus.”
“And the safe was blown up,” said O’Hanrahan, “at seven…”
Then after a pause, Lucy said slowly, “Gabriel said that we were all in great danger. That … that truly dangerous people were after it and might kill you, sir, and you, sir, and me, if I kept with you. He said the only safe place for it was under armed guard. And then he said…”
O’Hanrahan felt a smile play on his face, despite himself: “What?”
“He said, I hope you get to Assisi sometime, Lucy. You know Assisi, sir, that’s where St. Francis founded the order—”
“I know where goddam Assisi is, Lucy—what else did he say?”
“And he said tell Dr. O’Hanrahan to look him up in Assisi.”
The rabbi: “You’re sure he was headed to Assisi?”
“Well, yeah.”
Rabbi Hersch was revived. “I hope it’s true, Paddy. I hope the Franciscans do have it!”
O’Hanrahan was rubbing his hands together. “We may not be dead yet!”
“Look, I gotta get back to Jerusalem before my department kills me,” said Rabbi Hersch. “You check out Assisi. The minute you get your hands on the thing again, you call me and let me know how we’re doing.”
O’Hanrahan was already scooping up clothes and papers and putting them into his suitcase, now open on the bed. “You got it. If we move fast we can be in Belfast tonight and get a nightbus to Dublin…”
“Are you kidding?” cried the rabbi, stupefied: “Get on a goddam plane!”
“Mordechai Hersch,” O’Hanrahan lectured, while throwing his shaving kit into the bag, “I did not come this far on this project to die in a lousy plane crash. For twenty years I haven’t been on a plane. I’ll take the ferry to Cherbourg, the train to Paris, and then—”
“What? Sometime in the next century you should get there!”
O’Hanrahan reexamined his shaving kit items. “Look, I got a copy of the photos, and you’ve got the slides. I want a little time to work on this mysterious script.” O’Hanrahan spied a white medicine bottle and removed it and set it aside, adding nervously, “Of course, maybe the Franciscans won’t want to give it back to us—”
“It’s the property of Hebrew University. Tell them that!”
“They’ll take us more seriously,” said O’Hanrahan, pausing to lay the whiskey bottle tenderly, reverently upon the clothes, “if they think we’ve figured out the translation.”
O’Hanrahan spun around to see Lucy sitting in the chair, her glass of whiskey untouched. He grabbed and downed it in a single gulp: “Aaaah! Well, at least you leave us, Miss Dantan, happier than when you found us.”
“Thanks for the information,” said the rabbi, perfunctorily. “And sayonara, little girl. And again, if ever you should be in the Holy City of Jerusalem, should you be so blessed, do stop in.”
Said with absolutely no conviction, thought Lucy.
“And let me say,” said O’Hanrahan, zipping his suitcase awkwardly, “that next time you make it your business to follow someone tracking down a scroll on the ecclesiastical black market, you might want to consider telling the people you work with everything you know, so these little incidents won’t happen—”
“Dr. O’Hanrahan, you made it quite clear you didn’t want to talk to me this whole day!”
“You should never get hung up on technicalities,” he said, closing the suitcase at last. “Morey, meet you downstairs in five minutes.”
“I’ll call a cab, Paddy.”
And after the rabbi left, O’Hanrahan reached over and took the white medicine bottle and put it in Lucy’s hand.
“What’s this?” she asked.
“Lomotil,” he said. “For that ever-churning stomach of yours you’re always going on about. A fair trade for the Bushmills, right?”
O’Hanrahan sat on the bed, catching his breath, a whirl of ideas in his head. The room was quiet, but from the street outside there was the noise of police sirens, downstairs the sounds of cleaning up of wood and plaster and broken beer glasses, customers returning to their pints in raucous, nervous laughter to erase the fear of some moments before.
“You’re not mad at me?” wondered Lucy.
“Of course I am. You should have told me the second that twirp Gabriel spoke to you—you should have wrestled that little worm to the ground and held him there for me to pulverize.” O’Hanrahan stood and lifted his case. “Well, Luce. All is forgiven, and I apologize for being so unsociable.” O’Hanrahan gave Lucy the sign of the cross: “Sine, Domina mea, sine me flere; tu innocens es, ego sum peccator. Go in peace. And you keep checking the newspapers.”
“What for?”
“When I get my hands on Matthias and translate him, my dear, I’ll be front-page news around the world.” He gave her a wink. “And in your own infinitesimal, little insignificant way, you played a part.”
She smiled weakly. “Thanks a lot.”
And O’Hanrahan was gone.
Lucy stood up and realized she’d have to go back to David’s to get her things. Then down to Dublin to catch a plane home. As she walked down the stairs and into the bar, the smell of charred sawdust and plaster still in the air, she saw the spectacle of O’Hanrahan and the rabbi depart: the professor having purchased another half-bottle of whiskey at the bar, swigging it, laughing at something the rabbi said, frisky and revived as they could be. The old coots. Special Services had yet to arrive and the bartender was adamant that the old men stay and answer questions, but they had an unstoppable momentum.
Standing outside, she watched them scramble into a taxi and ride away. And Lucy was bereft, knowing the adventure continued without her.
JUNE 30TH
Lucy had an opportunity to make some kind of farewell I-really-like-you speech on the three-hour ride down in the car, but David and she talked about other things, and Lucy wondered if David was sensing the awkwardness too. Lucy had written a letter last night including her name, address, home number, all relevant details, and a short note saying how happy she was to meet him, how her sofa was open for business … she had paused and contemplated making a double entendre about her sofa bed being open for business too … No, not my style, Lucy figured. I could make the joke, but that’s all it would ever be then: a joke. And for once, I don’t want to be Lucy the Pal, Lucy with the jokes, the trusty female friend.
When they were on the outskirts of Dublin and began to see kilometers announced for the international airport, Lucy knew she was counting down the minutes.
(Why can’t you speak what is in your heart?)
I’m a coward, I’m a failure. I’m not pretty enough to be entitled to make a move on someone …
(But you are beautiful in ways that he can see.)
She sighed as the motorway exit passed, then the parking lot entrance, then as they walked with her bags to the terminal, then as they walked through the concourse to check in her bags and purchase a ticket to London, where she would use her return ticket back to Chicago.
“I don’t want to go back,” Lucy said heavily.
“I was just thinking how much I wanted to get on the plane with you,” David said smiling.
Was it that he wants so bad to see the U.S., Lucy wondered, or to visit me?
“Anyway,” she said clumsily, knowing he had to get back to Dublin for an afternoon class, “here’s a letter with lots of address things and my phone number … and stuff.” Lucy knew her capacity to say anything more romantic was dwindling; she felt her heart darken in defeat.
(For when dreams increase, empty words grow many.)
So David said good-bye and patted her on the shoulder, uncomfortably. Then they found themselves stalling, talking nonsense:
“Come see me in Chicago if you get there sometime.”
“Yeah, if I get there I’ll come where you are.”
David then kissed Lucy on the cheek and she waved good-bye. But then he ran back to say one more thing: “Whoa, how embarrassing, I forgot completely about this.” He held out an envelope. “For Dr. O’Hanrahan,” he said. “For some reason it came to our house.”
Lucy looked at it. It had no stamp, she observed.
“Must have been hand-delivered from the Post Office down the street, special overnight mail or something.”
Lucy wondered if she should open it. “Dr. O’Hanrahan’s God knows where.”
“Maybe you can forward it to the rabbi fellow.”
“Yeah, there’s an idea,” she nodded, though she didn’t have his address either.
“All right, good-bye this time.”
“Yeah, have a good term and all at Trinity. And later on, take care of yourself in Africa. Don’t get bitten by a—what are they? A tse-tse fly?”
“I’ll bring me spray,” he smiled.
And this time David left more memorably, waving happily, full of warmth for his new acquaintance. Lucy closed her eyes briefly: David. Oh, well, in another world you might have had an affair with someone like that, married him even, settled down and gotten fat in front of the TV together. But not this world.
She absently opened O’Hanrahan’s telegram. Inside was a note from the Treasurer, she assumed of Chicago’s College of Humanities, and … what do you know? A credit card.
DR. O’HANRAHAN:
ENCLOSED PLEASE FIND CARD FOR YOUR RESEARCH. WE DO REQUIRE REGULAR SUMMARY AND REPORT PLEASE. FAX: 312-555-2937
JOHN SMITH, TREASURER
Lucy looked at the VISA card, which had CORPORATE ACCOUNT emblazoned on it, and then PATRICK O’HANRAHAN engraved beneath that. Chicago finally came through for him! But that wasn’t all. There was an international money order made out in her name for—good God—one thousand dollars.
Dr. O’Hanrahan, Lucy cried to herself, you left too soon! Lucy wondered how she could send it to him.
First, she went to the Bank of Ireland counter in the airport terminal and cashed her money order.
Second, she went to the travel bureau in the airport concourse.
“Excuse me,” Lucy said to the lady at the Alitalia desk, “the board says there’s an afternoon flight to Milan at 4:30 P.M. Are there seats still available?”
“Yes, miss.”
“How much is it?”
Third, she went to a Eurail information desk and asked for a continental train schedule, which she offered to buy from the man.
“And so if my friend left on the Cherbourg ferry this morning, he’ll get in Paris tonight, and then how does he get to Assisi?” she inquired, circling the possibilities on the timetables.
Lucy: “So no matter what, he’s got to pass through Florence, right?”
Late that afternoon she sat in an Italian plane, taxiing to the runway. Her wallet contained the cashed money order, minus the plane fare, and she gripped a stack of lire notes ready for a brief stay in Italy.
Thank the heavens above, Lucy Dantan was going to Italy! She’d always wanted to see it. She’d find the professor long enough to give him his credit card and sightsee at the department’s expense and then turn right around. It was simply the most exciting thing, the most impulsive thing, the very best thing perhaps she had ever done in her life! Judy would be green with jealousy. “You went to Italy too!” she’d whine, condemned to a life on Kimbark Street ad infinitum.
The Allacciate le cinture di sicurezza sign dinged on, so Lucy fastened her seatbelt.
“Our Father, Who art in Heaven…”
Lucy, as always, prayed up a storm before flying. But here she was not alone: the Catholic contingent, St. Christopher medals by the score, was in evidence on this flight from Ireland to Italy.
“… And bless David McCall and his family and all who showed me such kindness and generosity in Northern Ireland, and bless Northern Ireland itself and help in all its troubles and move people to be better in the future, Catholic and Protestant…”
The plane started its acceleration.
“… and I ask the Holy Spirit to be with the captain and all the crew and passengers as we make this journey and keep us safe and free of harm.”
(You got it, Lucy.)
“But as in all things, Thy will be done. Amen.”
Takeoff. Those on the right side of the plane, now bathed in the intense afternoon light that made them squint, looked out over Ireland falling away beneath them.
Between the cumulus clouds and their fanciful shapes, under the blue sky and sea beyond, was the rain-lavished green of Ireland, performing now in the sunlight, verdant beneath the cloud shadows, emerald in the fields and smooth, gale-rounded hillocks of County Wicklow, a deep jade in the forests to the south, and different again like green glass held up to the sun along happier farms farther inland. And with tales of Patrick and Brigit, prophecies of Malachy and Columkille, the melange of hysterical Mariology and neurotic Blessed Wound tallies, and mostly, the blarney of O’Hanrahan in her head, she looked down to think: Yes, Eire, you are the perfect land for myth and legend, the right size for a fairy kingdom, and amid your bogs and loughs and glens, I can imagine the Celts and early Christians dancing amid the stone circles, telling lies by the fireside, and marveling at a magic not wholly of their own invention.
Turning from her window, she sensed something older and more decisive in herself, the sense of having learned a bit about what one is and what one need never be, where one comes from and where one hopes not to end up. She had bought an Irish Times to read on the flight and the bottom of the front page detailed a family of brothers in Derry. One had been killed, the other was in jail held by the British for some unspecified excuse, and the third brother had last night been knee-capped—held to the ground while someone drilled into his kneecaps with a power drill. The newest method, by IRA supporters who mistook him for an informer.
He was fourteen.
He was in the hospital and just wanted everyone to know that even though there’d been a mistake, he still was a friend of the IRA and there was Gerry Adams with various Sinn Fein party members and old despicable drunks in battle fatigues crowded ‘round his hospital bed putting a beret on his head while the boy held a flower arrangement in the Irish tricolor, smiling for the photo.
And Lucy thought with some sadness: poor Ireland, you fucked up your island. The only one you have. For a thousand years you evaded the Romans, routed the Saxons and the Danes, dislodged the Druids, chased the British out for the most part, only to end up killing yourselves, mowing each other down in the alleyways of Ulster with British automatics and Libyan explosives. In the name of that God, no less, Who so favored you with those good hearts and fine talents for lyric and song, Who allowed you magic and superstition after He commanded it pass from the rest of the Christian world. Tolerant and loving He was to His Hibernian children. And now you make scars on the Body of Christ that will not heal.
Lucy looked out the window to the luminous Western sky and was not the first immigrant’s child to think: thank God, someone got on a boat and let me be born in America and not the streets of Belfast.
3
Well may I be forgiven, I am sure, a recitation of my own poetry when I describe the exhilaration of travel upon the road to what once was Jerusalem. Everything that befell the polis was deserved, but who among us does not remember its beauty and former glory? I am sure you are familiar with this much-praised passage in the Hebraika:
O golden towers! O streets of beryl!
Whose stones would dance and sing with glee …1
2. Out of Negev, Xenon and I returned, past Bethzur, so that Xenon might give salutation to his parents and tell of his many adventures. Xenon’s father, Jason, had decided the lad should begin a trade with his uncle in Ephesus rather than pursue mission work. It was determined that Xenon would accompany me that far.
My young charge and I ventured next to the environs of Jerusalem and to—what was then—my family estate, still a Nazirene commune. Things there were troubled, and I will admit that in the weeks I had traveled much petty bickering had broken out. A pair of Nazirene brothers had stolen monies accrued by the selling of our olives and so had to be expelled. (As you know, we live communally as Our Master would have us do, sharing everything, burden and bounty, and thereby avoiding the horrors of moneylending and rank commercialism Our Master so inveighed against.)
3. With the foolish, doomed Revolt surging and subsiding around us, Xenon chose to remain on my Nazirene commune through the spring and summer [of 67 C.E.]. There the enterprising young man learned our rules, befriending everyone with his simple ways, especially the womenfolk for whom he spared no effort to help with chores. O, to think of my noble band of Nazirenes now, weathering the storms and evils of the highway! Such is what you commanded with a wave of your hand when you usurped the property and evicted these living saints among us!
But let us not dwell on this time and time again.
4. No person, I determined, could better explain the mysteries of the time after Our Lord’s execution than Joseph [of Arimathea] himself, who offered up his own tomb for the Teacher.
O exquisite oblation!
Joseph had died in the time of the monster Cuspius Fadus [Procurator, 44–46 C.E.], but I thought a trip to Arimathea would not be amiss to learn some record of the man. Again, I made a short journey to find Duldul ibn-Waswasah, who extorted from me many coins before revealing the whereabouts of Joseph’s reclusive country estate. Joseph’s own mansion had been turned into a meeting place for Nazirenes: a commune, much on the model of my own, thriving and splendid. Xenon and I joined a group of tradesmen and their soldiers, to avoid the bandits who were omnipresent in that era, and we found ourselves after two-and-a-half days walking into much-trampled Arimathea. Joseph’s commune had become a rabbinical school for—steel yourself, my brother—Nazirene women!
5. The women resembled nothing more than Bedouins, with only their hands and face revealed. I imagined it would be a dowdy lot, filled with unmarriable daughters and penniless widows, but I was quite wrong. Some women could have entered marriage without dowries they were of such beauty, and I at once saw the necessity of the impenetrable defenses, given what marauding Romans might do to this panoply of Helens. I was reminded of my own lines from my epic The Hebraika in which the hero, King David, at first spies the Daughters of Jerusalem:
