Gospel, page 62
O’Hanrahan’s thoughts upon the visage of the Holy City were much different from Lucy’s. She had the awe of the unacquainted; O’Hanrahan felt outrage at the atrocious, tasteless additions to Israel, campaigned by the insatiable Franciscans: Bethlehem’s Church of St. Catherine adjoining the Basilica of the Nativity and its prize attraction, a ceramic, rosy-cheeked baby doll in a manger that reduces busloads of pilgrims to tears and is on sale in replicas around town. The nearby Church of the Milk Grotto, a cave with a chalky white powder that can be scraped from the walls and is sold representing Mary’s own breast-drippings, featuring a chapel mannequin-Mary with exposed breast and life-size plastic Mary, Joseph, and donkey in another corner. The modern concrete Chapel Dominus Flevit, where Jesus wept. The cotton-ball sheep in the Church of the Shepherds of the Field. The airport-lounge modern of the Basilica of the Annunication in Nazareth, not to mention the Franciscans’ modern insertions into, of all unmodern places, the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, where they unpopularly installed an organ to drown out the other sects’ masses.
After his catalogue of aesthetic atrocities, O’Hanrahan announced, “I better go do homage to the rabbi this evening and soothe his feathers. So I can get another copy of the photos.”
“He’s not serious about denying them to you, is he, sir?”
“Ah, he was just being crabby,” O’Hanrahan asserted less than convincingly. He tried to jump-start his brain: “Yes, this is perfect weather, isn’t it? Perfect for work—and I’m eager to get back into it, Miss Dantan. We’re getting soft, huh?”
She concurred.
A drinks-waiter in a tight uniform marched across the balcony and told Dr. O’Hanrahan there was a call for him, a Gabriel O’Donoghue.
O’Hanrahan said, “Tell him I’m not in, if you would.”
The waiter did as ordered, and the professor turned on Lucy. “What do you suppose that good-for-nothing wants now?”
Lucy shrugged, not her brother’s keeper in this affair. But Lucy was curious about something else: “How do they know who you are already in just 24 hours at this hotel?”
“A minor accident in the bar last night after you’d gone to bed. A little fire, of sorts.”
“Of sorts?”
“I was merely demonstrating to this nice couple from Miami Beach the flammable qualities of a certain grade of arak. I was undone by a pillar of fire. A virtual pentecost!”
Lucy smiled as her mentor walked back to the hotel lobby, and she turned back to the Old City, the world’s only inhabited ancient monument. The wonder is that there is not as much as a single square mile incorporated within Suleiman’s walls, and yet the density of religious significance! Was there an unimportant inch in the Old City? A single brick that didn’t mark a spilling of blood, a miracle, a site where some unsuspecting man or woman looked up from daily chores to hear the dreadful voice of God?
* * *
That afternoon, with the Sabbath looming and modern Jerusalem about to come to a holy standstill, O’Hanrahan and Lucy went in search of 2000 years of Christianity.
They taxied to St. Stephen’s Gate, where one enters the Moslem Quarter of the city. The Temple Mount and its Islamic schools, the Dome of the Rock, where Abraham almost sacrificed Isaac, say the Christians and Jews, and Ishmael, say the Moslems; the site of the First and Second Temple, where Jesus argued with the Pharisees—the holiest of ground to nearly half the planet. From St. Stephen’s Gate, where the Temple regulars rushed to stone Stephen and other heretics, one stands at the beginning of the Via Dolorosa. Lucy sighed: she had never been in a Catholic church anywhere that hadn’t had along the walls the Stations of the Cross, and here she was! The Condemnation. The Accession to the Cross. Jesus Falls for the First Time. Jesus Beholds His Mother.
“I’m waiting,” said Lucy staring at the crowds milling about and snapping pictures across from an Arab business called the Fifth Station T-shirt & Souvenir Shop.
“Waiting for what?” O’Hanrahan then saw the arch announcing the Armenian Catholic Church of Our Lady of the Spasm. “Oh, I see. You thought a church named Our Lady of the Spasm was going to foster a blasphemous joke on my part.”
“It’s not like you to hold back.”
“I do feel compelled to point out that the 7th Century’s St. John of Climax in his travels through the Holy Land doubtlessly performed the Stations of the Cross like all good pilgrims, and no doubt John Climacus felt a sympathetic shudder at Our Lady of the Spasm, a simultaneous multiple Spasm perhaps, he and the BVM. Very rare in ancient times.”
Lucy hid a smile. “Erudite, but I think I prefer it when you go straight for the lowest possible remark.”
“Yeah, so do I.”
And now the Via Dolorosa led up the hill, past the Fifth Station where Simon the Cyrene took the Cross from Jesus, the Sixth, where Veronica wiped his face and occasioned the miracle of the Face imprinting itself upon her veil. Jesus falls for the second and third time at Stations Seven and Nine; he lectures the Daughters of Jerusalem at Station Eight. Few tourists track these down, having to go into dark, grimy Palestinian alleys to find a small Roman numeral on a plaque, but O’Hanrahan was, if anything thorough.
“Now to the Holy Sepulcher?” Lucy asked, thrilled to finally reach the place where the Crucifixion and burial took place.
“First, I’m going to take you to a holy place instead.”
Winding down a dusty alley filled with construction materials, they reached the Ninth Station, an old column worn by the touches of millions of pilgrims that marked the exit of the Old City in Jesus’ time. Through the door and down a step was the roof of the great Church of the Holy Sepulcher. Lucy walked along the smooth plaster, hearing hymns and chants and bustle beneath her. She walked over to a cupola and peered down at the worshipers below in the Sepulcher’s basement at the Chapel of the Penitent Thief. Truly I say unto you, today shall you be with me in Paradise.
Lucy looked upward to see an even stranger sight. Huts. African huts, fashioned with white plaster. Beyond a wall were clotheslines with monks’ garments hanging limp from them, huddled under the ruins of Gothic vaults. There were several little houses, one-room dwellings with leaning doorways and slanted plastered walls, like something out of the The Hobbit or Munchkinland.
“Who lives here?” she whispered.
“The Ethiopians,” said O’Hanrahan.
When Ethiopia fell on hard times in the 1600s, the Greek Orthodox showed the Ethiopians the door when they couldn’t make payments on the Moslem tribute.
(Right. It never occurred to the Orthodox that they should pay up for Our impoverished brethren.)
Lucy immediately reminded herself to write of this oddity to David McCall, probably now on his way to Ethiopia. From the 300s the Ethiopians had clung to this church through every rise and fall of Ethiopia, through every persecution in the Holy Lands, and they were still here, with their impenetrable musical liturgy in Ge’ez, their walking sticks that they leaned against through their long masses, the chants that phased in and out like an eastern mantra, a hum that would coalesce into words at intervals. Lucy lingered at the door to the nearby chapel, aside the stairway that led down into the rest of the Sepulcher complex.
“The Copts,” explained O’Hanrahan, referring to those in the Egyptian Orthodox Church, “and the Ethiopians have been fighting over this stairway for centuries. The Ethiopians have it now because they changed the locks on the chapel in the 1970s and, after the Six Day War, no Egyptian could get a fair hearing in Israel. Fortunately, Moslems are in charge of the place and keep the peace.”
“Moslems? You’re kidding.”
“Nope. Saladin’s orders after the Crusaders were defeated. To this day the keys to the front door of the Holy Sepulcher, when it opens and closes and who gets in and who does what, are controlled by Moslems. They even do a lot of the repairs since the Christians can’t be expected to do anything that might benefit another sect.”
Lucy frowned, annoyed with her fellow Christians.
“All right,” said O’Hanrahan. “You can die now, Sister Lucy, you’re here at the Sepulcher where dispensations abound! I’m going to find Father Vico. I’ll see you back at the hotel if I don’t run into you. Wish me luck.”
Lucy was left to wander down the dark Ethiopian stairway that led to the courtyard and simple doorway that led inside to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. It was a mob scene. She snapped a picture although this famous church wasn’t particularly picturesque. There was no facade to speak of, just a doorway in a tall wall of ancient sandy stone. The dreamed-of portals for two millennia of pilgrims, the crowning moment of a medieval man’s or woman’s life, the greatest of indulgences.
* * *
O’Hanrahan penetrated the inner recesses of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. He asked in the Franciscan Chapel of Mary where he might find Father Vico, and was escorted to a small hallway. The place smelled of ruin and mold, though it was probable that the Franciscans were the best housekeepers of the six sects that shared this architectural pile-on. O’Hanrahan spied in a remote dank hallway the friar’s assistant, Brother Antonio, appearing no more happy than in Assisi.
“Ah, professore,” said Father Vico emerging from the shadows. “Come to follow me … it is very dark, no? We cannot to make the electricity for to work here, eh?”
Father Vico had been given an office in the farthest reaches of the Franciscan vaults, virtually in the mosque next door. The room was airless and windowless, fitted with 19th-Century broken-down furniture one sees in poor parish offices.
“I have a soo-prise for you, professore,” Father Vico began.
“Oh boy.”
Father Vico walked to the tall clothes cabinet and opened the door, removed a long overcoat from a hanger and reached into a secret lining. He produced a long scroll case, which looked familiar.
“You’re kidding,” said O’Hanrahan, recognizing it.
“No, we have our old friend from the trecento again, yes?” Father Vico had managed to recover the stolen 14th-Century vellum Ethiopian forgery from Rome. “The criminals dutifully returned it to the Church as I thought they would. A friend of the Franciscans passed it back to us. It is not without value, my friend.”
“I’m sure it is worth thousands, Father.”
“No one at the Vatican has missed it, so I suppose it will do no more trouble to let you to have it again. We have a word, zimbello …”
“A decoy, Father.”
“Dee-coy, dee-coy, what a funny-sounding word.” He returned to his desk. “Ah, but that is not all.”
O’Hanrahan waited patiently.
“I had a dream.”
O’Hanrahan bobbed his head, hoping he would continue.
“I had a dream of you!” Father Vico joined his hands and leaned back in his chair, inordinately pleased.
O’Hanrahan looked to the ceiling. “Was it … was it a nice dream?”
“Oh, I will tell you of the dream and then provide for you a interpretation, yes? I dreamed you were in the desert walking and walking, walking and walking, then you walked some more, walking and walking…”
The professor pinched the bridge of his nose. “Anywhere in particular?”
“No. And then a man whose face I could not see approached you within long robes, like an Arab, but not an Arab—very strange robes but very beautiful. And the man was beautiful too, very handsome.”
“I thought you couldn’t see his face.”
“I could not but he had a possession of beauty, I knew without looking at his face. He held out to you a piece of bread and a vessel of water.”
“Did I take them?”
Father Vico motioned with his hands like fluttering birds. “I woke up and could not tell you. It is significant, yes?”
No, thought O’Hanrahan. “I’m not sure I believe in dreams.”
“Did I mention that the man had a tail?”
O’Hanrahan looked at the door that led out of the room and fantasized about passing through it. “You saw the tail?”
“No, I did not, but I knew of the tail, yes? You have this experience in the dreamworld? You know without seeing? Of course, it is the Devil perhaps. And you are to be tempted. Are you a man who can be tempted, professore?”
“Everyone can be tempted, Father.”
“But you are not a … not a … venalo, meschino…”
“A venal man? I’d like to think not, Father.”
Father Vico smiled at him placidly. “No, I think not also. I would hate for thees gospel to find the wrong possessor, and such a wrong person may to attempt to buy your favor, yes?”
“You have the gospel with you, Father?”
“Antonio!”
O’Hanrahan stared agog that the little safe on wheels had made it to Jerusalem. Squeak-squeak-squeak. Antonio rolled it from a locked closet in the antechamber into Father Vico’s room.
“Here,” said the father, “I shall open the safe and show you that Matthias is indeed with us in the Holy City. Ah, but you must turn your heads—yes, you too, Antonio. It is a very simple combination and anyone might see … ah, now what is it? Ha-ha, you are panicked that I have forgotten, yes? Of course I remember…”
Father Vico opened the safe and O’Hanrahan suspiciously examined the scroll case and slid the protective sack from it to glimpse the papyrus within. “Yes, this is it,” the professor said. “I may have to photograph it again,” he added, pessimistically contemplating a period of noncooperation from the rabbi.
“Ah,” said the Franciscan father, “I see from your eyes you are not to be bribed by money from our agreed arrangements.”
O’Hanrahan was certain that he could leave politely now. “You mustn’t worry, Father. Nothing means more to me than translating our scroll.” He then scooped up the Pseudo-Acts of Andrew, rested it in his satchel, and bade his host farewell. “Oh, I have a question.” This slipped out before he thought about the implication of detaining himself with Father Vico.
“Yes?”
“Is the Gospel of Matthias safe here, amid the other five sects?”
Father Vico leaned forward and said confidentially, “None but the Franciscans will ever lay hands on it, and we will defend it, as we have defended thees church, to the death!” It struck O’Hanrahan that Father Vico rather titillated himself with thoughts of defending the scroll to his own demise. The father continued gleefully, “If someone were to pursue me, they should have no satisfaction! I am but a zimbèllo—what was your word? Dee-koo, Dee-koe…”
“Decoy, Father.”
“Ah, I shall write that down…” Father Vico looked through his robe for a pen and could not find one, then every drawer of the desk, then the cabinet, then he called for Antonio, who also did not have a pen but went to fetch one, returned without a pen, was lectured, was sent out again, returned some minutes later with a pen.
“And now I am ready … ah! No paper! Antonio!”
* * *
Like all pilgrims, Lucy Dantan was initially disappointed in the run-down Holy Sepulcher, some chapels little better than storage rooms for debris, the Chapel of the Apostles, alive with frescoes from floor to ceiling, now a dumping ground for rotted lumber and rusted pipes. How, she wondered, did it ever get so dilapidated?
(The Syrians and their small caves in the back had had a fire—their fellow Christians cheering their misfortune. The Greeks and the Franciscans who have let walls and ceilings fall in rather than go to the expense of repairing something that might benefit another sect. A church that in 1834 had a fire during which a panic broke out among the Christian congregation and 300 people were trampled to death as the crowds rushed to save themselves. A church that in 1852 had a violent riot over who got to sweep the doorstep. A church in which a riot this century began over who had jurisdiction over the changing of an oil lamp. Monks have killed other monks over the issue of who gets to polish what. Godless place!)
Then the afternoon services began and the resulting cacophony Lucy found enthralling: the Armenian boys’ choir with their atonal chanting was led in by pointed-hooded monks. The Syrians grouped around the backside of the Sepulcher itself and began a mass in Aramaic. Up on the mezzanine, as it were, at the site of Calvary, the Greeks began a ceremony. The Franciscans held Latin mass before the front entrance of the Sepulcher, which was encased in a gaudy marble hut under Constantine’s much-restored dome. And at last the Ethiopians filed down from the roof and into the church and began touching their heads to the floor before the Stone of Unction, where Nicodemus and the women anointed the Lord’s body with oils and balms. This echoing, ill-lit church in which one can barely see the ceiling reverberated with chant and rite and clinking censers that spread an Eastern perfume throughout the ancient hodgepodge.
It will take, thought Lucy, more than a few visits to decipher this labyrinth of catacombs: the Chapel of Adam, displaying the crack in the rock made during the earthquake as Jesus was crucified, his miraculous blood trickling down to the grave and bones of Adam—redeemed at last for his Fall. Down the stairs to a basement level, and down more stairs into a cave, was the Chapel of the Invention of the True Cross where Constantine’s mother, Helena, was convinced she had found, 300 years after the fact, the real McCoy.
Lucy smiled. Invenire, “to find,” in Latin; making the Latinized “Chapel of the Invention of the True Cross” a more cynical commentary than its namers had intended for us moderns. The Chapel of the Division of the Raiment. The Chapel of the Derision. The Chapel of Mary Magdalene on the spot she first beheld the Risen Christ. The Chapel of the Armenians where one can buy frankincense and myrrh from a nice monk—which she did—where one can view the 4th-Century pavement with Armenian letters in the mosaic, and see the Armenian Patriarch’s throne, which looked amazingly like an easy chair in her mom and dad’s living room … In fact it was an easy chair, discovered Lucy, inspecting it up close.
With clouds bringing an early darkness over the Holy City and the mosque across the courtyard sounding time for prayer, Lucy stepped out of the complex and into the open air, free of incense and chant, only the birds making noise. The inevitable horde of pilgrims, who lined up for hours for a solitary prayer in the Sepulcher or for the privilege of having a flash-photo taken at Calvary, where a silver plaque marks the spot of the Cross, had mysteriously thinned. There were no more than twenty people in the courtyard and Lucy lingered to look at the variety of Christians from East and West.
