Gospel, page 48
Lucy closed her eyes in pain. “You’re kidding.”
“Nope, some of the Nag Hammadi gospels survived 2000 years only to go up in smoke for a pot of broth. Two kids were chasing a goat near Qumran’s ruins and turned up the Dead Sea Scrolls. In 1958 a letter of Clement of Alexandria was found in the vaults of Mar Saba Monastery’s library, mentioning a secret, second version of Mark passed only among church hierarchs. Consider, my dear, that archaeology and textual analysis are recent sciences. We in the 21st Century will have access to the First Century as no other century, even the Second or Third, ever had.” He then yawned. “And I better get to bed since I’ve got to leave at seven A.M. Night night, and don’t die of boredom here.”
“I’ll try not to, sir. Good luck.”
O’Hanrahan entrusted her with the VISA card. “July 19th, four days from now, a phone call to the Hotel Poseidon, at high noon—if I’m not back before that. Unfailingly!”
Lucy watched him pad off to the hotel and wondered if she shouldn’t have put out her hand or given him a hug or something. They were in an awkward stage of companionship. The next moment she saw Stavros, in a muscle shirt, ringlets newly arranged, tight jeans, leaving a plume of cologne behind him as he walked by on his way toward the thump-thump-thump of the disco.
Teddie’s right, thought Lucy. What a peacock.
AΓΙΟΝ ΟΡΟC
JULY 16TH
O’Hanrahan watched the town of Ouranopolis recede in the morning haze. Farewell to civilization for a while.
Or, on the contrary, maybe it was hello to civilization, the oldest and purest left, free from World Wars and common markets. Yes, also free of electricity, modern plumbing, sanitary kitchens … O’Hanrahan walked over to the portside to stare at the stark peninsula of rock, the rocky hills becoming mountains as the boat motored eastward. He could see two houses, a fishing pier—no, this wasn’t the Theocracy of Athos yet. O’Hanrahan patted his jacket; his wallet held several thousand drachmae in case a little old-fashioned bribery was called for among the elect of God.
As for O’Hanrahan’s fellow passengers, they were the same as the time before, no doubt the same as men centuries before: priests on retreats, monks returning to their monasteries or new assignments, mostly old with long gray beards and black robes worn unwashed for ages, but a few young hopefuls in pressed shiny black, with silky, curly black beards and piercing eyes full of questions for the holy men. Were these … children, teenage boys, for Christ’s sake, turning their back on the world? Were these young men here for a month of study or had they come to make a life in the 900s?
In a half-hour the boat came to a concrete pier.
On the shore a few monks waited to be taken back to Ouranopolis, their assignments done. Two backpackers—they looked British—had finished their allotted time as well; they looked parboiled in the full-length clothes Athos required. No shorts, no exposed arms, nothing but hands and face can be revealed. O’Hanrahan stepped off the boat and flashed his passport and letter of permission to the Greek customs official, who was barely interested, then he and the new pilgrims boarded Athos’s one bus.
Already hot by nine, the pilgrims sweated and groaned and laughed as the bus clung to the perilous dirt road up the cliff; their driver nonchalantly made wide, leaning turns, providing those passengers in the back with the impression that they were going to topple thousands of feet down to the dock below—genuflections, laughter, a lively Greek pantomime of a near-miss followed each careening turn. Undoubtedly one of these days, thought O’Hanrahan, this bus will miss a turn.
(But not this day.)
It delivered them, shaken, hot, nauseated and thankful, to the capital of Athos, Karyes. Here, since 963, representatives from the twenty monasteries have met to vote on issues ranging from the decline of Byzantium, the invasion of the Turks, the occupation by the Nazis. O’Hanrahan’s mind boggled trying to grasp the history viewed by the Protaton, the main church of Karyes, meeting room and “capitol.” Monks and pilgrims made their way through Karyes’s one street and here O’Hanrahan felt his soul stir, his heart fill with remembered affection for the East. The late Dark Ages before me! And God bless them, it was the same scene forty years ago when O’Hanrahan was first here, and eighteen years later when he was on his second visit. That, oddly, seemed more remarkable than the continuity for centuries; to have avoided the modernization and progress of the last forty years was truly to have rebuffed Humankind and the world.
“Oh, they’ve made some changes,” said an Australian monk, a serious-looking man in his forties, the only English-speaker O’Hanrahan could discover from the boat. “A library burned down a few years back, so now, with great reluctance, they have a fire engine and they’ve cut some primitive roads to get to the twenty monasteries.”
“Ah,” said O’Hanrahan, “a worthy addition, if they had to make one. Of course, much of the best of Mt. Athos isn’t in the twenty monasteries.”
He was thinking of the sketes, mini-monasteries for the more serious monks attached to a larger monastery. In particular O’Hanrahan recalled a house called Prophet Ieremiou and a man who had haunted him since he had first met him in 1950, Father Sergius.
One of the few true men of God he’d ever met.
* * *
Morning in Ouranopolis.
Lucy scanned the town’s main newsstand on the promenade by the shore for news. There was a week-old Time magazine, a three-day-old Herald Tribune, which she’d read. What I want, she ascertained, is a romance novel. Classy, decorous … and failing that, a piece of utter garbage. Maybe something set in the ancient world, just because I’m here.
“You speak English?”
“Yes, sir,” she said, looking up at the proprietor.
He reached behind the counter and produced some dog-eared paperbacks that had been read fifty times or more. A Fitzgerald translation of Homer, three plays by Aeschylus, a few orange-sided Penguin paperbacks left by holiday-makers who had taken something classy to read and sold it the first day to this newsstand owner, or traded it for Valley of the Dolls, Hollywood Wives, The Other Side of Midnight, previous decades’ best-sellers in their final resting place in Ouranopolis.
“You read all thees?” asked the man.
Actually, yes, the classics and the trash. “Anything else, sir?”
There were some Mills & Boons and Harlequins, most without covers. Lucy took So Hot the Sun and thumbed through it to see if too many pages were missing. She checked the ending: “A wedding ring? I’ll take it, darling! Oh, yes, yes!” she cried, falling into Sir Gregory’s arms, knowing now her desert nightmare was over and her dreams had just begun.
Lucy’s kind of ending. “I’ll take it, yes,” hearing herself echo unintentionally the book’s last line. “How much?”
It was 1400 drachmae, eight bucks, which you’d never pay back in the States but English-language pulp was at a premium here. O’Hanrahan must never see this, she sighed, or the ridicule would form a continuum.
In fact, the spirit of O’Hanrahan must have been with her because she felt like a retsina, having reviled it the night before. An acquired taste that suddenly in the baking Grecian sun she seemed to have acquired. Maybe she would wander down to the shore and the restaurants, unbusy at this hour, and order a bottle of retsina and sit and drink it in the sun and feel like … Hemingway or someone like that.
The retsina arrived and, later, a Greek salad. Then Lucy automatically ate a stack of cellophane-wrapped, humidified crackers in a basket on the table before her, and she read lightly without attention. She glanced up to see a pleasant blond woman with a sunburned face laughing in her direction.
“No, I wasn’t laughing at you,” she smiled, speaking in a twangy, singsong British accent. “But the book.”
“Well, it’s not Plato, I admit—”
“No, I mean, I read it here last summer. So Hot the Sun. That bloody book’ll be here twenty years from now, I’d wager.”
Lucy put it down and introduced herself. The woman’s name was Tracy, she was from Birmingham, England, mid-twenties, doomed to stay untan because she’d burned herself so bad the second day and now she was condemned to long-sleeved everything. Down here with her boyfriend Derek, they weren’t getting on, they’d had four major rows: one over how silly Derek was, spending an hour each morning getting his hair to go spiky, as if any of his mates were gonna see him down here, having a row over her sunburn and whether she did it on purpose so she could whinge about it the whole time, a row about Derek not eating any of the Greek food and being peculiar about it and not getting into the spirit of their holiday, and a row this morning about his watching a football match on Greek TV for two hours rather than do anything romanticlike with her, now how do you like that?
“I would never waste my vacation time,” said Lucy, assuming a pose, “with my boyfriend. You can have your boyfriend any old time, I figure, and my vacation is too short to throw away on him. I always go somewhere interesting by myself and do something I know will be fun.”
“Brilliant, that is,” Tracy said, scooting her chair closer, scraping the concrete floor. “You got the right idea there. Are you on holiday now?”
“Sort of.”
Lucy noticed that Stavros was approaching the promenade, shirtless and exposing a perfectly chiseled chest supremely, evenly tanned to a caffè latte shade—she suspected him of grooming his chest hairs—and tight jeans out of fashion two years ago in the United States. He spotted Lucy and directed his beauty in her direction, cantering, absorbing all the nearby female adulation.
“Loocy,” he said in his heavy accent, “you want to make to eat tonight?”
“I suppose so,” Lucy said boredly.
“I come in your room, eh?”
“Okay—I mean, neh, yes.”
Exit Stavros. Tracy was wide-eyed with admiration. “’Scuse me, love, but that one’s a bleedin’ Greek god! And I thought you said you didn’t travel with your boyfriend.”
“He’s not my boyfriend. I met him in Athens a few days ago.”
“Bloody hell…”
Then Tracy, imitating Lucy, said she needed a drink even though it was eleven A.M. Tracy went inside the cantina to get the waiter, which one did here even in the midst of dinner, the waiters not being devoted to service as the day wore on. Lucy mentioned she had been to Great Britain, specifically Oxford.
“Oh, Oxford’s dire. Bloody horrible place, dreadful people. The student-types are so damn snooty.”
“How’s Birmingham?” asked Lucy, pronouncing it as if it were the one in Alabama. Lucy felt she had been there by the time Tracy finished regaling her with its virtues; afterward, Lucy took a turn talking about Chicago. Then Derek the boyfriend, scowling, made an appearance:
“Oy, Trace. Thought we were going to meet for lunch.”
Tracy: “You didn’t want to talk last night so we made no plans that I recall. Besides, my friend Lucy here … Lucy, this is Derek; Derek, Lucy … decided to have lunch since you up’n disappeared.”
Lucy stared at Derek. Concave chest, skinny, hairless legs burned on their backside like Derek’s back, and though he was sort of cute in the face, the spiky hair needed a rock star under it to look convincing.
“This soddin’ goat cheese again,” he said, looking at their salads. “Enough olive focking oil to stick you with the runs for days.”
Tracy refused to look at him. “Oh, lovely talk for the table, Derek. Do say some more pleasant things, we’re only trying to bloody eat.”
Derek: “And this meat here. You know what this is, don’t you? Heeeeere kitty kitty…”
“Oh I’m sure.”
Derek pouted. “I’m just saying worra bloody great mistake it was comin’ here, that’s all.”
Tracy, after a few more smart-ass remarks at her boyfriend’s expense, gave in and started to follow Derek back to the hotel, whispering to Lucy, “It’s time for our daily row,” before leaving with a wink.
Couples, thought Lucy.
Do I really want this? All men are more or less Derek, some smarter, some smoother, but all big babies who want their own way. And this male vanity thing …
At this juncture, Lucy turned to the harbor to see Stavros strutting about the German compound, all the healthy-looking German girls with white-blond hair and good tans enjoying Stavros’s broken German, poking him with a rowboat paddle, one of them hopping to her feet, her perfect body covered with coconut tanning oil, bouncing and gleaming, trying to lead Stavros over to the windsurfing rental. Stavros put up a fake fight, pretending not to want to, so there could be much physical contact and tickling and dragging and a naughty threat concerning what the Fräulein was going to grab hold of to lead him away. I suppose, thought Lucy disinterestedly, that Helga (or whatever) will get Stavros to a deserted lagoon and have Eurosex in an aquamarine cove. Until the shark comes by to eat them, Lucy invented to render it poetic justice.
Lucy regressed into her romance novel but the heroine was being whiny and downtrodden and Lucy found herself yawning and wishing for the cool linen sheets of the hotel room and an afternoon nap.
* * *
The Athonite bureaucracy frees the pilgrim around one P.M., which gives him four hours to reach an accommodation. Doors slam and medieval bolts close the impregnable gates around five which is suppertime followed by bedtime for the monks, as in ancient days.
O’Hanrahan had been walking for about three hours and to his relief the golden onion-shaped dome of Skete Prophet Ieremiou poked above the trees ahead. O’Hanrahan, hot and short of breath, admired it: a monastic outpost for 1600 Russian monks in its heyday, the turn of the century. The Russians virtually supplanted the Greeks in the last century on Athos; the Russian Skete of St. Andrew had some 5000 monks and outnumbered any monastery of the peninsula, but Greek authorities wouldn’t upgrade these houses into full-fledged voting monasteries for fear the Russians would take over. Which they would have done gladly.
Closer to the skete, O’Hanrahan smiled to see the many onion-domes, plated in a faded, dull-gold brass, and the whitewashed, crumbling cathedral-sized church beneath them. To the Russians, the first Rome had fallen in heresy and decadence. The second Rome, Constantinople, had fallen to the Moslems. And so the third Rome, Moscow, would assume Rome’s role, and the Duke of Muscovy assumed a title fit for a Roman: Caesar, or tsar in Russian. But history also brought the Bolsheviks. And where there were once thousands of Russian aristocrats’ sons and peasants here, eager for God, the numbers dwindled to ten here, seven there. Monks and religious leaders were put in Siberian concentration camps and the survivors on Athos began the task of praying for their unfortunate brethren. What had been a continual hymn of praise, a celebration, had turned into a requiem for the dead church of Russia.
Perhaps their prayers this very decade will be answered, thought O’Hanrahan. With state atheism and communism itself on the wane, the Orthodox Church again is sweeping the steppes, congregations are again returning to the katholikon; how soon before Athos populates itself again with ex-Soviet holy men? Or is it too late? Is this way of Eastern Christianity now too old-fashioned for the young of Russia and Romania and Bulgaria, so long kept from the modern world they yearn for? Have the old men who have fanned the small censers in the dark, abandoned chapels of Athos kept the candles burning for nothing?
O’Hanrahan stood before the two-story medieval gate to Prophet Ieremiou. O’Hanrahan pulled the bellrope. At last the door creaked open and O’Hanrahan recognized the man he had met forty years ago, Father Sergius.
“Father Sergius,” said O’Hanrahan slowly. “You do not remember me—”
“Patrick O’Hanrahan, isn’t it?” The father stroked his silver beard and squinted. “I told you when you left, we would meet again. Was I not right?”
“You were correct,” said O’Hanrahan, marveling at the memory of the man in his eighties. He had last been here in 1950 and then in 1968—twenty-two years ago! “Do I have permission to enter your skete, Pater?”
“You betcha, come on in … I’ll get the fellas up from the field.”
Father Sergius was one of the last males to be oblated to Athos, left to a monastery as an orphan to grow up and serve the monks. He remembered as a child in the 1910s the Christmas treats courtesy of the Tsar and Tsarina, the despair at the destruction of the state church, the slow dwindling of monks through death, disease, and those who went back to Mother Russia to fight the Germans or Stalin. He had outlasted them all. And his English was pure Brooklynese. The only monks these days in the Russian sketes were Russian-American, grandsons of the original Russian-born Orthodox who had emigrated to America. It was from his seven monks, all from Brooklyn, that he had learned his English, tinged with the nasal street talk of Sheepshead Bay and Greenpoint.
O’Hanrahan was led into the quiet courtyard, where he could sense the stillness of a place meant for thousands, now down to seven. He was brought cool well water, and offered an ouzo from the still. O’Hanrahan put down his cup to peek inside the church. This sanctuary and the one at nearby Skete Prophet Eliou were the last great works of Russian ecclesiastical art patronized by Tsar Nicholas II.
O’Hanrahan beheld the ikonostasis, an icon wall from floor to ceiling of the vast whitewashed cathedral, every disciple, scores of Russian saints, the Tsar and Tsarina humbly kneeling in another panel, all bordered and decked out in gold leaf upon intricate woodwork. With what confidence the Romanovs built these great churches, never imagining that most would be in ruins within a decade, themselves executed, and God driven from the Russian heart with bureaucracy and secret police as the crushing substitute.
“Ah, there you are,” said Father Sergius, discovering him in the chapel. “If you’re praying don’t let me stop you. Uh, hands off the ikons, though. I’ll have to reconsecrate and that’s a pain.”
“I won’t kiss anything, I promise,” assured O’Hanrahan. “It’s a beautiful church.”
“You remember my showing you last time the samovar Tsar Nicholas gave to the skete? We almost got so poor that we had to sell it, but I couldn’t do it.”
