Damascus Page 11
Then blackness. Is it hours, is it days, is it eternity? All is black.
When he returns to the world a figure—is it a man?—is lifting a heavy cloth from his forehead. He sees all this in shadows; the light has returned and it is dazzling, its form and beams and brilliance have clarity, but within the whiteness and the trembling he recognises the clots of scarlet on the drenched cloth. Blood. His blood. He returns to oblivion.
He dreams of a road through a valley and parched barren cliffs. He sees yellow sand and burnished red brick. He should not be able to determine colour or shade for the sky is only stars and the moon is weak. Yet he sees beyond the night.
A date palm towers above their camp, the pods full and plump. He and Silas are at their fire, and the two Strangers, the escorts they have hired for the journey, are roasting a desert hare over their own flame. Saul is at prayer, to deflect the treacherous hunger arising from the forbidden scent. Yet with eyes closed, lost in his reciting of sacred words, he still can see Silas’s tongue slide over his upper lip. That is how Saul knows that he is not in the world. That is how he knows he is dreaming.
The reek of the forbidden meat, the rough accents and sneering lewdness of the Strangers, the slush and grind of Silas’s mouth as he chews on the stale dried figs, it is all Saul can do to force his attention to remain on his prayers. He lowers his brow till it rests on the cooling sands. For they will bring war to you but they will not vanquish you, for I will deliver you, said the Lord. And though his eyes are shut and though he is within the chamber of the Lord’s words he sees Silas, his fellow trader in hides, a man of the north and not as devout or learned as Saul—but he is, is he not, a friend? Silas’s face looms over him, troubled. Saul can feel himself being shaken, prodded, and he hears the larger of the Strangers ask, ‘Is he ill?’ And that’s when the blinding light hurtles towards him and out of him and he feels the sand crunch and slither underneath him as he jerks and thrashes. He cannot see except for light but he can hear one man ask of Silas, ‘Is he dead?’ And he hears his friend—is he a friend?—answer, ‘I think not.’ And the other Stranger, who only grunts and curses, he says, ‘He’s dead alright.’ And though there is only the dazzling light, Saul sees the man’s foot rise and swing down and he hears it crack into his face. But there is no pain. This is how he knows he is still dreaming. He can feel hands all over him, stripping him of cloths, of his tunic, finding the hidden pockets, taking all he has.
Saul spasms and twitches and moans. He feels a man holding him down, sees a child bathing his face and hair. Saul falls back to peace and sleep.
But he sees the girl look up. Hears her say, ‘He hunts us, don’t he?’
The man lifts a hand to the girl’s cheek. ‘What did the prophet Yeshua tell us to do to those who hate us?’
‘To offer my other cheek?’
The man smiles. ‘That is right, little sister.’
The girl presses the damp cloth to the brow of the broken man.
He falls into further darkness.
Saul awakens and cannot tell if it is day or night. As yet he can only discern shadows. Then comes the wretched stink of shit and he feels the foul wetness around his buttocks and thighs. In shame he attempts to sit up and the blow of the pain is as if his spine is shattered. There is further shame when he recognises the howling of a beast as that of his own agony. A man’s hands are carefully turning him over and softer hands are cleaning him up. He unleashes a thousand apologies.
‘Hush,’ a man’s clear voice says in Greek.
And then, ‘Can you hear me?’
Saul forces his mouth to work. ‘I can hear you.’
‘The Lord is great.’
There are stirrings and whispers. He hears a new voice, boyish but assured, and swiftly his body is being lifted. He sags limply across the bridge of four strong arms. A rustling. When he is placed back on solid ground the rough hide beneath him is dry. He hears the splashing of cloths being rinsed in water. A gentle hand is wiping him. Through parched lips he struggles to speak to the shade ministering to him.
‘Are you a woman?’
‘No.’
It is the voice of a boy. ‘Do not be shamed, uncle, the women have gone.’
Saul’s breath is pain, it tears from his chest as though it might split him asunder.
‘Don’t speak. You must rest.’
The man’s voice. Saul reaches out into the dark for the shadow. His fingers alight on skin, the soft floss of a young man’s beard. He cannot yet surrender to sleep and return to the blessed light. He must ask his question.
‘Are you—’ he almost chokes on the struggle ‘—are you a Stranger?’ The effort of expelling the words breaks his body once more.
‘I am of our people, friend. I am of Israel.’
Saul, relieved, falls back onto the bed. But he must ask one more question.
‘And the boy?’
‘He is one of us,’ the man answers, then adds, ‘but he is born a Stranger.’
Saul tries to summon the strength to smack the boy’s hands away from his body. But he cannot. He cannot even speak. He groans his distress and distaste.
The man addresses the boy in Syrian, and the boy’s shadow and touch move away.
‘Sleep,’ the man pleads, ‘you must sleep.’
Saul wants to fall back into the light. But he can’t trust sleep. He is one of us but born a Stranger? Such insane words mean that he must be still possessed.
The next time, Saul wakes to day. A figure is sitting cross-legged next to him, his head fallen forward as he releases a long whistling snore. Saul stretches out his hand, his fingers search the wooden floor. The sound wakes the man.
Saul is urgent in his need and his pain. ‘I have to piss!’
He feels the cool of the metal between his thighs, a fumbling at his groin, and then the ecstatic release as his waters hose the pot. Bladder empty, Saul rests back on his bed, marvelling at the glory of the colours he can see. The blanched blue of the sky against the red ochre of the opened shutters. The blushing skin of the man who has been ministering to him. And he feels something else, bringing a different but equal joy. Hunger and thirst—he has to eat and drink.
He finds the man’s hand, clutches it in gratitude. ‘Brother, I can never thank you for everything you have done. I am so grateful but I have one more thing to ask of you. Is there food?’
The man’s smile is radiant, kind: it too is an elation.
The meal is brought to him by an old woman, her face pox-scarred and her manner brisk. Her hair is veiled, but from a corner of the linen shawl that is loose at her temple, Saul glimpses grey stubble. Before Saul touches the bread and the gruel that is being offered, his eyes wander to the man, who smiles and urges him to eat.
‘She is born of Israel.’
‘And awakened in the Anointed Son.’
The man has spoken in Greek but she has answered in Syrian.
Saul thanks her in her language and then, without shame, like a ravenous dog, he devours the offerings in four quick scoops of his hand. Just as quickly, he wipes the bread across the dish and dispatches it in one fierce swallow. The man and the old woman laugh with pleasure and relief at his appetite.
Saul dares to ask for more.
The old woman takes the dish from him. ‘There will be more later,’ she says gently, smiling down at him. ‘I promise you, sir. But we daren’t give you too much all at once.’
She turns to the man, her voice grave. ‘Call me immediately if he can’t keep it in.’
The man nods and the woman bows to Saul, then says quickly, again in her language, ‘The Lord be thanked.’
Laying his hand over his full belly, Saul turns to the man. ‘Is she bonded to you?’
‘She is my sister.’
Saul frowns. The man’s beard is a shiny black lustre and his hair is long and thick. He cannot be enslaved.
‘What is your name, brother?’
‘My name is Ananias, son of Nathaniel.’
Confused, Saul asks, ‘How do you know me?’
Ananias’s smile is wry. ‘I know you. You and your friends chased me out of the Damascene meeting house in David’s city. You had a whip at my back—you said that if ever I returned to Jerusalem, you would turn my flesh to pulp with rocks.’
Saul immediately recalls the man, his false prophesying, his insane declarations of allegiance to a crucified Saviour, his blasphemous claims. But he also remembers the hands that nursed him and carried him into that startling and luminous light, the light that healed him. The man’s hands and that light—Saul is certain they healed him.
Exhausted, wanting to sleep again and, if possible, if the Lord be willing, to be returned to the light, Saul rests his head back on the bed.
‘May the Lord forgive you,’ he says weakly. ‘And may the Lord forgive me.’
He has been saved from death. He knows it from the way his limbs won’t obey him, from the lack of vision in his throbbing left eye. In his delirium he cannot tell how long he has lain in this strange bed. And yet he is not in despair. He marvels at the solace of the light, the joy it brings him, and feels closest to a happiness he hasn’t felt since he was still a student. Before that first flush of beard; the deepening of voice and sprouting of hair and the more sinister unwanted and dangerous stirrings of youth. Lusts and desires and shames that cannot be spoken. He had last known joy sitting in a circle of boys, listening to the recitations of their teacher. On becoming a man that had been stolen from him. He had to surrender to labour, and keep vigilant and futile watch over his disobedient body. Manhood had corrupted friendship and poisoned hope. Until this moment, with his body violated and broken, when joyfulness had returned. He has been searching a lifetime for such light.
Saul knows he has to pray and ask and seek. He has to understand why the Lord has brought him to this bed and to this house and to these people.
The house is always full. There is the man to whom he owes his life, Ananias, and the old woman, Bathsheba. The Stranger boy is called Pup, and there is another boy who sometimes peeks in through the curtains, and scampers back down the stairs as soon as Saul lifts his head. He hears activity and conversation, and often laughter and singing, coming from downstairs.
He discovers that Ananias doesn’t like being referred to as the head of the household.
‘No, sir,’ he would counter, shaking his head, while feeding Saul soup or pieces of honeycomb. ‘We have no head in this house—we are all, from the old to the very young, brothers and sisters.’
But not in blood. Some are slaves, like Bathsheba and the curious boy who spies on him. Some are Jews and others Strangers. But it isn’t a divided house. Saul suspects that in the rooms below the household has their meals together. And that is forbidden, a violation. And he now knows that they are disciples of that despised teacher, that would-be prophet, that crucified Nazarene crank. Over the years Saul has heard of Yeshua’s teachings and they never made any sense to him: sometimes he had preached as a devout Jew, but at others spoke as an apostate. He had some learning but no understanding, and he did not keep faith with the Lord’s sacred words. That was why his followers had been led astray into blasphemy and perversion. That was why Saul spied on them, bore witness against them. But now he is in their house and they have saved him.
Yet, as he lies there in his bed, with a body that no longer obeys him, he feels neither fear nor rage, not even confusion, as he thinks about why he has been brought here, saved by the very people he has for years now persecuted. The light is no longer a dazzling source from which he is comforted and nourished. That blinding gift has faded and softened to become shimmering rays that dance through the open window, the gleam on a thread of a spider’s web, and the magnificent luminance in Ananias’s eyes. The astounding light that had first overwhelmed him had been a tempest that had cocooned him in its serene centre while all around was chaos and destruction. And the soft light in this room, on the faces and in the eyes of those who care for him, that is the forgiving breeze of the day after the storm. But whether in tempest or in calm, it is all one light and it is all the whisper of one Lord.
Saul awakens to screaming from the street. Two boys—they must be boys, their voices are shrill—are accusing each other of theft. The argument is so heated and the abuse unfurled so obscene that Saul can only discern half of what they are saying. The argument is solved when he hears a crack and a man calling out, ‘You dirty little she-dogs,’ and then the whimpering and crying of the vanquished boy. Saul twists. And as he does so he senses his knee bend.
Carefully, fearfully, he attempts to bend the other, and that leg too gently moves.
He wrenches his body off the bed. The shock of movement, of being on his feet again, is such that he trips and stumbles after three ungainly steps, as if he were drunk. He smashes one side of his body against the wall. His innards heave outwards with the impact; forcing himself with a mighty will he falls to his knees in front of the chamber-pot and vomits. Emptied, his breathing steadying, he tests his legs again. He stands with greater care this time, balancing carefully, and walks to the door. His head roars with blood and for a moment he thinks the walls of the room are collapsing and that he too will drop with them through to earth. But he is standing. His hand moves to the heavy canvas nailed across the door. Then, aware of his neglect to the One he must never neglect, he falls to his knees and kisses the wooden floor as he gives his thanks to the Lord.
He is heavy with exhaustion, and cannot raise himself again. He crawls to the curtain and pushes it aside.
There is laughter, a chanting. He looks down to the room below.
A fire snaps in the open hearth. The household is seated in a circle around a rug on which are placed three loaves of bread and a long thin vessel. He can make out Ananias, the old woman, and Pup. Squinting, catching flashes of faces and bodies in the light of the darting flames, he sees that there are six others included in the circle. The room is small, squalid, and they are all touching shoulder to shoulder. Women and men, children and slaves. He stills his breath. He listens.
A veiled woman with her back to him begins a chant. He recognises it as a prayer of thanksgiving to the Lord. At first he thinks it is one of the songs of the blessed King David, but the words do not follow the decreed order. The Lord is blessed, as Protector and Creator, but the prayer also praises a son of man. When the woman finishes, she reaches for a loaf and tears a chunk out of it.
Ananias speaks. ‘Our Saviour, Yeshua, anointed by the Lord, said that we must remember his teachings as we share this bread.’
The others speak as one.
‘We remember your teachings, Yeshua.’
The woman tears more bread from the loaf and passes it around the circle. There is silence as they eat. Hunger stabs Saul. He forces himself to be quiet.
The woman takes the vessel and holds it aloft. ‘Our Saviour, Yeshua, anointed by the Lord, said that we must remember his sacrifice as we share the wine.’
And then the chorus: ‘We do not forget you, Yeshua. We drink this wine to remember the blood that you shed for us.’
The woman places her mouth over the narrow opening and sips at the wine. She passes it to the child sitting next to her. She too places her mouth over the lip of the jug but as she drinks drops of wine fall on her white tunic.
It looks like blood. Could it possibly be blood? Saul feels faint again; the walls sway as he looks at them. This is what they say of the followers of this Yeshua from Nazareth: they drink blood and eat human flesh and thus make themselves more deranged and despised than the Strangers. Saul himself has often whispered these rumours to anyone who would listen.
And his own heritage and faith return with almighty power to reawaken his anger. You corrupt the law of the Lord, you make a libel of the promise of the Saviour
, and you return us to Baal, to the sins and calamities that destroyed Israel. Death is what this evil sect deserves.
And the anger is fire and might and, though fury will not return his damaged eye, nor make his broken body whole, his righteous anger will return him to the truth of the Lord. He will rise, he will declaim against them.
He struggles to his feet, ready to condemn the wicked circle below. But he suddenly realises that the light has gone.
He is upright but he cannot speak.
They hear him. Nine faces are looking up at him and they are smiling, women and men, children and slaves.
Pup jumps up, elated. ‘Uncle, uncle,’ he calls in his mangled Greek. ‘Us join, us please join.’
Saul cannot move. He is looking at Ananias’s composed, rueful face.
‘Brother Saul may not wish to join us,’ he says, placing a warning hand on the boy’s shoulder.
He is speaking to the boy but his eyes don’t move from Saul. ‘You are welcome to join us, brother. But you need to know that some of us were born Strangers.’
Saul knows that if he chooses to join the circle, he will exile himself from his world as surely as death partitions the flesh from the soul. He trembles and a shudder runs through him. A flame shoots from the hearth, raining a thousand glimmering sparks. The faces below are lit up, made shining and incandescent. The light has returned.
‘Boy,’ Saul calls to Pup, ‘come and help me climb down.’
There are salted acorns; there are boiled greens in oil; and all manner of Syrian fruits, dates and persimmons and stewed figs, pomegranates and olives. There are thick slices of goat cheese that Saul will not touch. A shyness has descended on him; he dares not ask how the food was cooked, what law guided the preparations of the women in the kitchen. There is no meat, and he wonders whether it is forbidden to them. He takes some wine but is careful. He must not get drunk in this company. His skin brushes against a slave and he forces himself not to flinch, not to betray his revulsion. Reaching for a date his hand knocks against the hand of a woman. It is as if he has touched fire, but again, he makes no sign of this. They think he is exhausted, lost within his sickness. But he can’t speak now because he must not cease his silent prayers. He prays to be absolved of the sins he has committed by being here, by that unclean touching of skin. He does not know if he can be forgiven. But it is as if his body demands the warmth and comfort of the light. Is this illumination granted by the Lord or is it an evil conjured by sorcerers? He does not yet know. He must pray.