Dimiter (16 page)

T
he genial and diminutive Armenian prelate’s wily little eyes held a mischievous glitter. “Yes, water from the Jordan River, Mister Parker! Little bottles of it! Blessed! Do you think it would go over in the States? Would it sell? And, oh, Sergeant, would you pass the risotto?”

The high vaulted ceiling of the Casa Nova dining room magnified the chatter of the Catholic pilgrims and the scrape of metal cutlery on plates as they fed at communal refectory tables joined tightly together on both sides of the room. It
gave Meral almost all of the little comfort he was capable of receiving: a vivid human contact that could ease his inner loneliness without the need for him to fully engage, to grow fond, to attach and risk pain. And there were sometimes those momentary leaps of the heart when emanations of the confident joy and excitement of so many believers crowded together would float up from their tables to create a penumbra of faith that would sometimes descend upon Meral and, if only for the briefest of moments, enfold him. But more enduringly helpful at these nightly dinners, like the breadcrumbs on the table the Italian Franciscan serving nuns swept into their hands at the end of the meal, were those stray bits of hope that Meral sometimes gleaned from the comments of the priests who led the pilgrims on their tours, though their balm was always brief. Over coffee during Easter week the year before, a former United States Army chaplain, after noting how so many of Christ’s disciples had chosen to die rather than to deny that they had really seen the risen Christ, ended wryly, “Call me nuts, but I tend to believe a man’s deathbed confession.” On hearing this, Meral had felt a slight warming elation, but by the time the osso bucco and the salad had been served, he had lapsed back into the dryness of doubt and that night, as he did on every other, he knelt down in the hostel’s chapel to pray to a God he wasn’t sure existed that his little boy somehow, somewhere, did.

“Some more San Salvatore? Shall I fill it?”

A freckle-faced young Italian nun, a black apron worn over her all-white garb, stood holding up an empty decanter of the pure and strong red wine.

“Oh, yes, please,” the Armenian bishop answered avidly.
He then turned back to the American couple sitting opposite him. “And so what do you think?” he asked. “Tell me really.”

“To be honest, I don’t know,” said the husband. He looked doubtful.

“Oh, well, I think it would do very well,” said the wife. “I mean, come on! Holy water from the River Jordan? I think it would do
wonderfully
well!”

Waiting for his first course plate to be cleared, Meral lowered a dull and disappointed gaze to the table’s little decorative clutch of pink cyclamen. This was not to be a night of uplifting insights. Although later, when the oranges and bananas had arrived at the table for dessert, for a moment Meral thought that events might turn.

“What do you think about the Shroud?” someone sitting to the right of the bishop asked him, a young engineer with crew-cut blond hair and a delicate German accent. He was speaking of the burial cloth of Christ. “I have heard that two American physicists are saying that this image of the crucified man could be only produced by something that is having to do with nuclear fission. What do you think about this, Father Youkemian?” At this, Meral’s mind made a leap to that enigmatic statement in the gospel of John by the risen Christ to Mary Magdalene outside the empty tomb when she fell to the ground and clutched at his feet: “
Noli me tangere”: “
Do not touch me for I have not yet been to the Father.” What did it mean? No one really knew. And now this mention of a nuclear event. But Youkemian told the German, “I don’t think that would sell,” and attempted to rekindle a discussion of the prospects for his bottled Jordan water scheme, although the one named Parker did return to the theme of Christ’s tomb with a comment
whose seriousness no one could accurately gauge: “Oh, well, why don’t they go in there with a Geiger counter, fellas?”

Over coffee a visiting priest stood up and clinked a spoon against his water glass for attention. Meral stared at him, riveted. It was the priest he’d seen quarreling with the blond young woman in front of The Shalom. “Hello, I’m Father Dennis Mooney,” he said, and then after a string of quips that drew a few chuckles, he announced an impromptu entertainment that consisted of a “singing contest” between himself and Father Mino Mancini, the chubby bald director of the hostel whose constant expression was a kindly smile and who reminded almost everyone of Friar Tuck. Meral lowered his head for a moment, as his mind replayed the scene in front of the hotel. Was the handsome priest involved in a secret dalliance? Meral lifted his head and stared as Mooney led off the singing contest with “The Rose of Tralee” in a pleasing and emotionally tinged tenor voice. Mancini then countered with “Non Dimentica.” A few popular ballads by each of them followed, including a reversal of roles when Mooney spoofed the rotund Italian by singing “That’s Amore” with a mock-drunk Dean Martin imitation, while Mancini’s riposte of “My Wild Irish Rose” proved equally amusing due to his heavy Italian accent.

The contest ended with no winner declared and soon afterward the room had almost emptied of life, its vibrant sounds dwindled down to a few scattered voices, the clearing of dishes, and a pair of continuously ringing tones as a playful Rumanian count and countess sitting near the opposite end of the room were each rubbing the tip of a moistened forefinger around the rims of their empty wine glasses. Alone, and with his head bent deep in thought about the eerie find of the two charred birds, Meral finally noticed the sound and looked up. And then
inwardly groaned. Seated at the head of the Rumanians’ table was Scobie, once a British clandestine agent now retired from the SIS, the British Secret Intelligence Service, and, like Meral, a longtime Casa Nova resident. He was also a notorious wind-bag and a bore with apparently not even the slightest regard for the “Top Secret” stamp on the record of his exploits, which, after two Pimm’s Cups he would freely divulge to any guest at the hostel or, in desperation, to luckless staff. He was staring intently at Meral down the length of the nearly empty tables with his eyebrows raised and a speculative look in his eyes. Meral made a show of glancing at his wristwatch and shaking his head with a troubled frown, and then quickly stood up and walked out of the dining room without meeting Scobie’s gaze.

Suddenly fatigued, Meral started toward his room, but then remembering a promise to Sister Angelica, the wrinkled and tiny Casa Nova head nun, he reversed his course and went to the reception lobby to mildly reprimand Patience, the tall, willowy Abyssinian concierge who tended bar both before and after dinner and had a fondness for quoting from the works of Shakespeare and randomly dosing the hostel guests’ drinks with Mickey Finns.

“Why do you do it, Patience? Tell me. I want to understand.”

“I don’t know.”

“Are they people you don’t like, the ones you do this to?”

“No. No, I like them very much. I truly do.”

“Then why, Patience? Why?”

“I don’t know.”

With a pious promise of reform in hand, although still without a clue as to the concierge’s motive, Meral left the reception area and was wearily walking toward his room when,
at the intersection of a hallway leading to the sleeping quarters of the nuns, he stopped for some moments to stare down the hall to its very end where a strongly built man wearing khaki pants and shirt and a belt of workmen’s tools with a dangle of room keys attached was standing with his back to him close to the door of the head nun’s room. Motionless, his head inclined toward the door, he appeared to be listening to violin music issuing softly from a phonograph within. Meral’s stare was distantly fond. The man was Wilson, whom he knew to be a likeable and seemingly simple-hearted American, with the radiant and transparent smile of either the innocent or the retarded, who did handyman work for the nuns free of charge. Meral recognized the music as well, Bruch’s soul-catching
Violin Concerto #1,
and for no more than the moment that it takes the heart to break, Meral, too, bent his head a little bit and listened, but then had to move on lest the music, like Joshua’s horn at Jericho, topple the walls of protection around him, sending them tumbling and shattering to the ground.

E
xcept for the colorful window drapery, Meral’s Casa Nova room could have been a monk’s: a clothes tree, a desk and chair, a single bed without headboard, and a tall stained pinewood wardrobe, on top of it a statue of the young boy Jesus handing a single red rose to his mother. When Meral had first moved into the room, he had requested that the statue be removed. But then a few weeks later he had it brought back. No explanation was given at either time. Meral looked at it now as he sat on the side of his bed, exhausted, then turned his head to look at the dark bronze crucifix hanging on the wall just above the room’s door. Was that the highest aspiration of
man? To suffer? Why? To what end? The answer of a priest at his table months before had been a mere two words: “soul formation.” It had given Meral light for a time but little warmth. Was there no other way? He looked down at the terra-cotta tiles of the floor and then lifted his stare to the array of framed photos that were propped on a desk set against the wall. His parents. His beloved wife. And then his gaze settled onto the son he had loved with an intensity that surprised him, that at times he had even feared, although never knowing why until that day when the uncaring sky had birthed death and he at last understood that the thing he had feared was the essence of hell: the pain of loss. Standing with his legs wide apart on green grass, dark ringlets of curly hair banding his brow like a Grecian Ephebe of Marathon raised up from the floor of the sea and given breath, Meral’s son stared out from the photo with the love of angels shining from his face as he proffered a long-stemmed red rose to the camera.

Meral stared. He would cry now yet he couldn’t. The Wall.

He saved all his tears for his dreams.

Meral lowered his face into his hands. Why had he come home so early that day? Why not five minutes earlier? Five minutes later? Two? One? The litany of guilt and recrimination had been faithfully repeated every day now for years. Meral looked up and turned his head, staring pensively at something on his bedside table. He reached over and picked it up. It was a book about Einstein, God, and quantum physics. Though never the grail of complete assurance, Meral did find help in such books. But it wasn’t this one’s content that had his interest. It was something else. He stared at the cover for a moment and then opened the book to the page where on the night before last, before getting into bed, he had placed a narrow Casa
Nova paper bookmark—it had a photo of the hostel on one of its sides and a spiritual quotation on the other—into the book to mark his place. When about to fall asleep that night, the policeman had murmured as he had every night for the last four years, “One more day, son. One day closer.” He had tired of asking for signs that never came, although even were the sun still in the sky days later his doubts would all return. But on this night he had decided to petition his son: “If you live, if you hear me, please come to me. Visit me tonight in my dreams.” The son didn’t. He never had. But on the following night when Meral had again picked up the book, he found the Casa Nova bookmark no longer there and in its place there was a freshly picked bright yellow sunflower, the favorite of his son. This early morning when Meral asked the gray and green uniformed housekeeper regularly charged with the care of his room if she had made the exchange, she had looked him askance and with a smile of bemusement had told him, “Why would anybody do such a thing?” Afterward, heading to the dining hall for breakfast, Meral had stopped, spying Wilson with his head bent low at the reception counter where he was resting his weight on folded arms, perhaps waiting for the tiny nun in charge to give instructions. For a moment Meral stared at the cluster of room keys attached to Wilson’s belt of tools, and then, on a sudden impulse, walked over to him.

“Oh, Wilson!”

Wilson lifted his head with a look of warm trust and recognition.

“Sergeant Meral!”

“Was it you?” Meral quietly asked him.

Wilson’s brow crinkled up with an innocent bewilderment.

“What do you mean, Sergeant Meral?”

Suddenly embarrassed, Meral answered, “Never mind. Have you a monkey wrench I could borrow? A small one, the smallest that you have.”

“Oh, well, sure!”

“I haven’t seen you here in quite some time.”

“Yes, I know.”

Wilson was wearing leather workman’s gloves, and when he’d slipped one off so that he could grasp the tiny wrench at his belt, Meral noticed there were bandages wrapped around the palm of his hand.

They were red with a seepage of blood.

“Hurt yourself, Wilson?”

Looking down at his belt as he reached for the wrench, the handyman had shrugged and smiled faintly.

“That’s the job, sir,” he’d said, “Getting hurt.”

M
eral picked the sunflower out of the book and for moments held it up to his probing stare. He wondered. But could go no further. “One more day,” he murmured into his pillow. “One day closer.” He wanted time to sweep him up into its arms and then to carry him, to race with him, at blinding speed to a place where he might find something other than this sadness that clung to him on and on without end. And again he slept. And did not dream.