Damascus Read online

  ‘He’s not here.’

  Bathsheba is bent over, sweeping the floor with a low broom. She rests on it, glaring at Saul. Then, as if reminded that her astonishing vows have made him her brother, her voice softens. ‘Ananias will be home soon.’ Then quickly: ‘Will you stay and eat with us?’

  He washes his hands and arms, his neck and his face.

  Bathsheba is sitting in the street, chopping radishes and celery.

  Saul squats beside her. ‘Have you another blade?’

  She clicks her tongue. ‘On the hearthstone.’

  He finds a sharp knife and sits down beside her. Silently they work.

  There is a sound of running, a tumble of feet. Two young children are standing behind them.

  The elder boy shyly places a hand on Saul’s shoulder. ‘Are you a brother?’

  Bathsheba’s stare is searing.

  ‘Yes,’ he answers.

  The elder boy takes the youngest to play in the street. They throw off their tunics and wrestle naked. Saul sees that the older boy is circumcised, the younger not.

  ‘They’re not brothers?’ He corrects himself. ‘Not in blood?’

  Bathsheba leans close. She whispers, ‘Judah is the son of our sister Miriam, a widow left destitute by her married kin. The youngest is Peri, he’s a good boy, though he has a terrible temper.’

  And as if hearing her, Peri starts to howl, bashing his fists onto the belly of the other. ‘Not fair, not fair,’ he squeals.

  ‘You know his mother,’ continues the old woman. ‘Our sister Ariadne, who you called a whore.’

  And then, collecting the peeled vegetables, she rises.

  ‘Come,’ she orders the boys, ‘enough of your silly games.’

  ‘She was going to abandon him.’

  Ananias points to the mountains that loom above the northern walls of the city.

  ‘We visit there whenever we can, try to convince the mothers not to leave their children. We save the ones we can.’ He shrugs, as if the cruelty of the world is beyond dispute. ‘Too often they are already dead or irrevocably wounded by wild animals.’

  Saul shudders at the cruelty of the Strangers.

  He looks at his friend’s hands, rough and scarred from a lifetime of work.

  ‘Why have you come back to us, Saul?’ asks Ananias softly.

  Saul looks into his eyes. He asks a question he has never asked before. ‘Why do you follow Yeshua?’

  They are sitting on the steps. The two men are alone; the rest of the household has gone to bed.

  ‘I am Galilean.’ As he says this, Ananias smiles. ‘Nothing good ever comes from Galilee. Isn’t that what you southerners say?’

  A blush colours Saul’s face. He is glad the darkness hides it.

  ‘I was a lad,’ Ananias continues. ‘So young. Yeshua, son of Joseph, was already teaching—he was a follower of the prophet John.’ He stops and turns to Saul. ‘Do you condemn the Baptist as well?’

  Saul is shocked. ‘I do not condemn the prophets or the martyrs.’

  Ananias laughs. ‘I am teasing you, brother.’ He sucks on the cardamom seed he is rolling around in his mouth. ‘Yeshua’s family was dirt poor so he must have been a very bright lad to be offered schooling. He was tutored by priests in Nazareth—he alone of his brothers was taught to read.’

  ‘He was pious?’

  ‘Pious, god-fearing, preaching the imminent coming of the Saviour.’ Ananias’s voice drops to a hush. ‘And the destruction of Rome.’

  His tone sharpens. ‘He made no impression on me when I first heard him speak in a meeting house in Cana. You know: the world is ending because of our sins and wickedness, and the coming of the Saviour will bring us to right. There was nothing new in any of it.’

  ‘What did he look like?’

  Ananias spits the chewed seed into his hand, rubs it to fine grit between his fingers. ‘Strong-shouldered. A long fine nose. Black eyes, deep set, very intense—they really drew you in. His hair was dark but receding. I thought his certainty and righteousness were so immature, almost arrogant. One of his fingers was ruined, the small finger on his right hand. His father, may his soul rest in peace, was a woodworker. All his sons were woodworkers or fishing men.’

  ‘And he made no impression on you at all?’

  Ananias shrugs. ‘It’s not just Jerusalem that has her Zealots. Every valley and every port and hillside in Galilee is crawling with young hotheads preaching the approaching end and the coming beginning.’ Ananias shakes his head. ‘No. I forgot all about him.’

  ‘And now you follow him.’

  ‘My father died, may his soul be in peace, and my eldest brother’s leg was crushed by a landfall in the quarry.’

  Saul touches his palm to his heart. He is about to speak but Ananias continues.

  ‘Such calamities happen to stoneworkers all the time. I’m not asking for sympathy. It happens. But I was the next brother and I had two sisters to marry and a younger brother to school. It was my mother’s wish. I bonded myself to a quarry owner in Capernaum and it was outside those city walls that I heard Yeshua preach again.’

  The man’s fingers grip his shoulder and Saul flinches. But Ananias does not relax his hold. ‘Brother, I swear, it was as if he were a different man. The foolishness of youth had left him but so had the anger. He spoke against wickedness and against the lawbreakers, but his voice was as serene as a bright morning after heavy rain.’ His voice is filled with wonder, as if he does not quite understand what he is saying. ‘All of us there were filled with that voice.’

  Ananias releases his grip. ‘You don’t know what it is to be a slave, Saul, and may you never have to.’ His voice becomes hard. ‘They do what they want to you. You are their dog, you don’t have a soul. They do whatever the fuck they want to you and every night and every dawn you are on your knees, thanking the Lord they haven’t killed you. That’s what I learned being bonded to that quarry.’

  Silence.

  Ananias’s voice lightens. ‘On that hill outside Capernaum he preached that it was us—the enslaved, the poor, the beggars, the prisoners, the lepers, the fallen—it was us who were most loved by the Lord.’

  Ananias grabs Saul’s hand. ‘A miracle happened, brother. When I returned to my master that night I was not angry, I wasn’t filled with hate. But even more amazing, I was not filled with shame. I thought, let him beat me, whip me. Let him violate me. I am with the Lord and he is not.’

  He raises Saul’s hand to his mouth, he kisses it. ‘In Capernaum I befriended Yeshua’s twin. He believes that the Lord’s promised kingdom is not awaiting us. He claims that it is already here.’

  Ananias points to the ground. He touches his chest. ‘We are the kingdom, Saul.’

  ‘He had a twin?’

  Ananias speaks quietly in the darkness, as if speaking only to himself. ‘It was Thomas, his twin, who baptised me.’

  Saul knows about the rite of baptism, said to be the way to the new world by all the crazed followers of this strange and disturbing cult.

  A hound calls mournfully in the night. Deep in the darkness, where the wall of the street curves and descends, he sees shapes and shadows, beggars asleep on their stone beds. He hears hushed insistent voices: drunkards bartering for boys and whores.

  ‘How can this be the kingdom promised to us?’

  Ananias is defiant. ‘He has come. Yeshua is Israel’s Saviour, anointed so by the Lord. I believe that.’

  Saul sneers. ‘And was nailed to the gallows?’

  ‘Is that not prophesied? I don’t read and write, brother—you tell me.’

  Saul is silent. Then, with a sigh from the depths of his being, he reaches for the knowledge he has loved since a boy, since he first prided himself on learning. He recites the words of the prophet Isaiah. ‘But he will be pierced for our transgressions, he will be crushed for our sins; the punishment that brings us peace will be upon him, and by his wounds we will be healed.’

  Ananias nods. ‘That is what
I believe, brother.’

  Saul shakes his head. ‘That cannot be the meaning.’ His face floods with rage. ‘On a cross? Nailed to a Roman cross? There is nothing more degrading.’

  Ananias’s face mirrors his rage. ‘You think so? You’ve never been a fucking slave.’

  But then the bitterness leaves him. His friend leans across and gently kisses Saul on the lips. The light is on his mouth: the light has returned and is in him.

  ‘The first will be last and the last will be first—that is what Yeshua said and that is what I believe.’

  There is a cry in the night, a terrified wail. The dangers and temptations of night never allow Damascus to sleep. But here, alongside his friend, Saul is in peace. ‘What else did he preach to you that day?’

  ‘Many things. I will tell you in time. But the three most important were that the Lord’s kingdom belongs to the poor and cannot be entered by the rich, that we must be as passers-by and not seek influence in the world, and that the greatest commandment of our Lord is to love the stranger.’

  Ananias looks over his shoulder, into the dark depths of the house. ‘He was at that stage preaching to Jews and Samaritans, to Strangers and to slaves—to anyone who would listen. All the poor are brothers.’

  He turns to Saul. ‘No wonder the Zealots threw him out. They would have hated that.’ He spits. ‘Scratch a Zealot and you find a rich prick’s son.’

  Saul peers into night, trying to discern colour and shape in the shadows. ‘And you believed he was the Saviour promised by the prophets? And you still believe that? Even after you heard what they did to him? How they violated him and broke him? And then crucified him?’ Saul shakes his head in disbelief. ‘May his soul rest in peace. But such a wretch is not our Saviour.’

  Ananias brings his hand to his chest. ‘Do you want to know my shames, Saul?’

  His words promise an intimacy, but even in the night’s shadows Ananias’s eyes gleam with a fierce and engulfing anger. ‘I will tell them to you, brother. Do you want to know them?’

  And the fire in Saul’s heart and in his lungs and in his head burns with such ferocity that he cannot move. For it is his own shames that erupt in the night sky, his calamitous transgressions parade before him on a demented and ever-shifting canvas: from youth to manhood, all his crimes are visible. To himself, to his Lord, to his world. The veiled girl-whores, their plump flesh. The henna-tattooed faces of the boys, their soft hands and mouths. The mortification he has craved in taverns and brothels and even in the courtyards of meeting houses, all the dishonour he has courted on the road, from Anatolia to Judea to Syria. The shames he has committed and the shames that he has allowed to be done to him. He is in Hell. He could pray for eternity but his Lord will never forgive him. How can Ananias bear to sit next to him? His touch, his breath, his words, they must corrupt everyone who comes near him.

  ‘Saul! Saul! You are loved!’

  Saul comes back to consciousness sprawled in the other man’s arms. His tunic is wet. Is that the derisive laughter of a child he can hear? He comes slowly back to night.

  Bathsheba is in the doorway. ‘Is he ill?’

  Ananias sends her back to her bed.

  Carefully, the dark sky now blessedly free of visions, Saul releases himself from his friend’s hold. ‘Forgive me.’

  Ananias places his hand on Saul’s chest. ‘I recognise that darkness, my friend.’

  And something momentous has indeed been shared between them. How it can be, he cannot say, but he knows that Ananias has shared that terrible hallucination. It is as if they are as pure and naked children in front of each other.

  Saul places his hand over Ananias’s.

  Ananias strokes it. ‘Our Lord forbids us to take our own life.’ His voice is halting, but strengthens as he speaks. ‘But after I was released from slavery, all I wanted to do was cut my own throat. It could be the brightest of days, the sky clear and the horizon endless, but all I could see was darkness. I could not bear life. I could not bear to see and know how I had betrayed our Lord.’

  And this, Saul understands it completely.

  ‘I was feeling this despair, Saul, when I heard Yeshua preach again. He spoke about how our Lord loved the most wretched and debased of us. He told us about the Lord’s love for the slave, the prisoner, the beggar, the prostitute, the diseased and deformed. No priest or Zealot or fucking rebel had ever spoken like that before. His words were a light. I was filled by it. I know now that that light was the Spirit of the Lord and that convinced me, even more than his words. I felt the darkness go. I shed shame, I shed cruelty, I shed bitterness, I shed hate. That light hasn’t left me.’

  He grabs Saul’s hand. ‘Who are the most wretched on the earth? Isn’t it those damned to crucifixion? There is nothing more loathsome or debased than those poor souls. But that is why I believe him. It is because of what they did to him that I know he is the one that the Lord promised to us.’

  It is night. But they are cradled and cleansed in light.

  Saul hangs his head. ‘I have committed terrible shames.’

  ‘So have we all, brother.’

  ‘I cannot resist.’

  ‘The Lord forgives. Even while we are sinning, the Lord is with us. He is a shepherd, Saul, he guides us back to the light. That is what Yeshua teaches us.’

  The Lord cannot want me. Saul knows that he will not be forgiven. He starts shaking, his head jerking back and forth. But Ananias is holding Saul’s face, and he is forced to look into the other man’s eyes. And in those eyes he sees no revulsion or fear.

  ‘Saul, you are a stubborn cloth-eared fool. The Lord loves you. He will not abandon you.’

  The brilliant light. This is my friend, thinks Saul in wonder. This man, an enemy only a moon ago, was now a friend. More than a friend—a brother, but closer to him than any brother in blood. Saul cannot comprehend the force of the light within. Or how much he loves this man.

  ‘Baptise me.’

  ‘They will despise you.’

  ‘Baptise me.’

  ‘They will hound you.’

  ‘Baptise me.’

  The river runs from the mountains sacred to the idolators. The two men walk alongside it, following its flow. Behind them are the city walls. Cloud storms are gathering over the mountain and, though the heat is rising, the day is grey and shadowless. Birds sing their curiosity from the cypress trees as a man leads another from the bank of the river and into the water, holding him steady in his arms as the other falls back into the burbling stream. ‘Awaken,’ calls out the first. Saul opens his eyes. He doesn’t see cloud nor glade nor embankment; not man nor even river. All he sees is light, from the glimmering sheet of the heavens to the answering sparkle of water and gleam of the earth. He is not man. Saul has been reborn, as and into light.

  ‘Some French writer that I read when I was a boy, said that the desert went into the heart of the Jews in their wanderings and made them what they are. I cannot remember by what argument he proved them to be even yet the indestructible children of earth, but it may well be that the elements have their children. If we knew the Fire Worshippers better we might find that their centuries of pious observance have been rewarded, and that the fire has given them a little of its nature …’

  —W.B. YEATS, ‘EARTH, FIRE AND WATER’

  We are drinking the blood that is pouring over us and it froths and spills from our mouths we are inhaling the valiant breath of a toilworn beast that refuses to surrender life we inhale and the blood fills our throats and tastes of the earth and of war and we can taste a heart beating as we hungrily feast on the blood and we tilt our heads back to take in more of it above us the bullock is still clamouring its hooves stamping the boards and the scaffold shakes and we do not move we are determined not to move though within this black hole the earth is splitting and above us the beast batters the wood it cannot bellow its windpipe has been severed so instead there is a wheeze of the last desperate gulps of life through the slats we see The God the sun
is fire spears of burning light that explodes the darkness that marks with a blaze the dark earth the blood is in our mouths and in our nostrils and has made black masks of our faces and the beast has collapsed its life disappearing but returning in us the life extinguished is reborn in us as we stand underneath the sun the light that is The God is also in us the sheaves of fire that we also swallow and the light and the blood choke our throats and fill us and the beast is dead but it is living in us now and our engorged stomachs and our swollen bladders have stretched to contain so much life and so much blood and we will not allow ourselves to spit to waste even a drop of this life for it would be ill-fortuned it would betray the sun the fire The God and our three bodies press closer together and we are wet with blood and sweat and our bodies are one as we were when we were soldiers and I am no longer a cripple and he is no longer impotent and he is no more being eaten away from the disease that cannot be named and we are soldiers again and we are young again and we are three warriors in the marshland of a desolate and forsaken plain and we are crushing skulls and slitting throats the blades of our daggers slice through flesh and bone as if man is butter and we slaughter the longhaired foes and the blood that spills from their bowels and from their throats and from their eyes and from their guts it splatters upon us and it makes us stronger and bolder and we are warriors under the sun we are warriors for The God above us the sun illuminates the field of battle to the horizon and beyond and The God is rapturous and The God is with us and The God feeds on the blood we are sacrificing to Him and we march and we storm and we burst into song and we break through the woeful defences of our enemy and we have kicked down walls and we are setting fire to huts and to tents and to cellars and we are bursting into rooms where women cradle their children in their arms and we are nourished by their cries and lamentations for their men are dead and their fathers are killed and their husbands are slain and their sons are butchered and they now belong to us every woman and crone and every child and maiden and we pick our favourites and we enter the tight unsoiled cunts of the girls and we break open the tight buttocks of the boys and our spirits and our sex are guided by the hand of Venus and our hatred and our lust is enflamed by the mighty Mars and all is permitted to sanctify Venus and her escort the god of noble war and beyond the sibling gods we raise shouts and we chant songs to the gods The God who is the god of we soldiers and who is also the god of victories and the god of vengeance and as we spill our seed into the children and the maidens and the women and the crones we know we are continuing the justice of war and our bawlings are the songs of exertion and exhilaration and our cries are for victory and we know we are beloved of The God and in this sodden pit our sex is full and we smear our sex with blood and we spill into the earth as we once did as soldiers we raise our arms in gratitude to death and we raise our arms in gratitude to the sun and we raise our arms once more in thanksgiving to The God and the blood that still pours through the slats still flowing we cup it in our hands and we bathe our faces in the blood Oh fire let it be a son and we moisten our necks in blood we rub our chests and shoulders in blood Oh fire remove this curse from my loins and we smear our sex and arses in blood and we wash our thighs and calves and feet in blood Oh fire banish this canker until we are the colour of satisfied earth sodden with rain renewed in life and we are the colour of life and we are the colour of death and we are the colour of blood.