Gospel (132 page)

“My friend, from the 300s, from the time of Constantine, thanks to Eusebius, all of the East has known of Matthias and his heretical gospel.” Father Sergius moved to O'Hanrahan's luggage, which sat in one of the uncomfortable orange vinyl armchairs for visitors. Sergius began to rummage through O'Hanrahan's papers and notes, photos and yellow legal pads. “And you yourself told me of the
Gospel of Matthias
and its discovery by the Rabbi Rosen when you were much younger. When we met for the first time.”

Yes, thought O'Hanrahan. My first trip to Mt. Athos in 1948. To impress Father Sergius, O'Hanrahan, a lowly Jesuit novice, had mentioned Rabbi Rosen and his finding of the
Gospel of Matthias
in Jerusalem. A conversation over forty years ago.

“You remember everything,
Pater.”

“What I remember,” he said, “God has allowed me to remember.” Father Sergius discovered the brown cardboard tube and the ancient scroll it contained. He lifted it from O'Hanrahan's suitcase. “These are the End Times, my old friend.”

O'Hanrahan watched Father Sergius examine the scroll, reroll the vellum into a cylinder and put it back in its tube. Then he put the scrollcase into his own satchel.

“This world, so near to its end,” Father Sergius said calmly, “will use this for wrong, I fear.”

“Do you think it is the False Prophecy of the End Times?”

“I am sure that it is,” he said. “But the End must not come now, Patrick. Man is not ready. Mankind has so much that it must do. Think how we will have failed God should the world end tomorrow. I do not wish to see God fail … No, I will hide it, and if God wishes it known, He will see to it. I am willing to answer for this in Heaven.” Father Sergius's face looked at some distant otherworldly realm. “Just as Moses and Ezekiel begged the Lord to stay his wrath, so I too must hope the Lord will postpone His day of judgment. To the East it shall return to disappear from history again.”

Father Sergius returned to O'Hanrahan's bedside and his own black bag. O'Hanrahan was not directly able to see the tabletop to his side and he heard more liquid flow into the bowl.

“But this time not for another 2000 years,” said the monk. “Maybe what I do is futile! Who knows that the End will not commence before I return to Athos? War is coming in the Middle East, an Antichrist is before us in Babylon…”

O'Hanrahan thought deliriously of the apocalyptic frescoes of Dionysiou, the missiles, the masses huddled in underground shelters—

“You must never attempt to get this back,” said Sergius somberly. “No one must. Indeed, no one must know that I was here.” He returned to his mixing bowl and mumbled some prayers in Russian.

O'Hanrahan felt his heart beat faster. “What are you doing, Father?”

Father Sergius took the damp washcloth on O'Hanrahan's head and began to soak it in the bowl. Holding the bowl in one hand, and the cloth in the other, he sat on the edge of the bed.

“What … What is it?”

“Ssssh,” said Father Sergius calmly. “Did you really think I would fail in my mission to baptize you anew in the Faith?”

O'Hanrahan felt his eyes become full.

“Did you think, my friend, I was to do without your company in Paradise? Think of all we will talk about, all we will discuss.” Father Sergius dabbed O'Hanrahan's brow, pressing the sign of the Cross into his forehead.

Yes, this is just as well, thought O'Hanrahan: at the end reconciled to the East. It is where my absolutist heart has always been—it was my Western mind that caused all the trouble. He was comforted by Sergius's Russian-accented Greek:
Ego men udati baptizo umas, erchetaide o ischuroteros mon
 … Ah, this is the deathbed I would have selected. Sergius alluded to Ignatius of Antioch contemplating death:
My birth now approaches; let me receive the pure light!
And no, I shall not tell him that the scroll he has taken from me is the 14th-Century tract I stole from the Vatican, returned to me once by Father Vico and once by Clem Underwood.

“You sleep in peace now, my friend.” Father Sergius kissed his Greek Cross and then, lightly, supported by a trembling arm, O'Hanrahan's forehead. “We shall not meet again on this earth.”

O'Hanrahan closed his eyes for a moment.

Father Sergius gathered his things, returned the holy water to a phial, and with a final Russian blessing, crossed himself. The old men looked into each other's eyes a last time.

Then Father Sergius left.

O'Hanrahan did sleep only to find himself awakened by Gregorian chant. Opening his eyes, he was still in the hospital room. The drugs must be doing their job, he thought, as he had the strength to sit up, then put his legs to the floor, then stand. From the dark private room of Intensive Care he peeked around the doorway to see a long, torch-lit vaulted hall. Where was this? He had seen it before … that's right, Karak Castle in Jordan. He was there in 1948 before the U.N. Mandate. He remembered: Morey drove me there. It was built by Baldwin I in 1132, the luckless Crusader who set himself up as King of Jerusalem and built this very castle. O'Hanrahan ran his hand along the hewn stone walls. An old dusty place, many ghosts, many ghosts. I remember now: thousands of Frenchmen and Englishmen and Germans and Spaniards were camped within, awaiting the showdown with Salaadin. O'Hanrahan heard the chant dwindle as the sound of the
muezzin
took over. Yes, this is in Moslem Jordan today, O'Hanrahan realized, and it is the time of prayer. He heard the Arabian carpenters making little boxes outside the castle. He looked out from one break in the ramparts and down below, half a mile down this treacherous, unscalable cliff where the Moslems, in such bright robes and flashing turbans, were constructing hundreds of little boxes. For Salaadin had taken Baldwin's castle and they were preparing to execute the Crusaders; an officer with the face of Saddam Hussein looked back at O'Hanrahan, telling him to mind his own business. O'Hanrahan returned to the long, cool, vaulted hallway and heard the rattling of chains. He turned into a darkened cell … Morey? Was that you? Morey wordlessly nodded. He had been branded with the Star of David—burned into his face! Of course, I must apologize and see if I can get him out of this mess, thought O'Hanrahan, turning to run for help. But the faster he wished to run the slower his steps. I must get help and explain to Mordechai that I am not a part of the Crusaders who branded the Jews, massacred the women and children and hauled the men about as slaves, keeping the smart ones alive for doctors and advisers … I must explain to him …
François, you will see,
said one young soldier, not fifteen. Oh, a lovely boy, out of a medieval painting I saw once.
You will see, François, the Virgin Mary will rescue us. Before we hit the ground a band of angels will fly from the clouds commanded by the Queen of Heaven.
Oh no, I must tell these boys, these children, what is to happen here—they must fight again or bribe their Moslem conquerors …
St. George will save me,
said one young soldier, with an American accent. Why it is … it looks like …
St. George will ride on his fiery steed and prevent us from falling and he shall smite all our enemies and they shall be as dust
 … Rudy! Is that you? Why did you come on this Crusade, I never wanted you to go to war! Come, we will escape … No, no, Salaadin has bid them come forth and the Moslems are attaching the boxes they made to each Christian soldier's head. Ah, the boys are crying now, large boys' tears on their cheeks, calling for their mothers; some are in prayer.
The Queen of Heaven will rescue me
 … One soldier weeps into a medallion of the Virgin, who in this rendering bears a resemblance to Beatrice, my wife. Ah well, women are no help in these situations, condemned to sit and watch us men fill the earth with murder and persecution. It is a bright hot day and thousands upon thousands of boys will be pushed from this ledge. It's odd, really, they let me get up so close to see all this—clearly, they will not mistake me for a Crusader. I do hope Rudy got away … and Morey, I must see to him … The Moslems built little boxes to fit around the boys' heads so that their long fall will not break their neck in flight, and so they might never predict when they shall hit the ground half a mile below, but feel it when they do. Look at that spattered wreckage below, and it seems an airplane has crashed and scattered about the foot of the cliff … There goes François, praying while he falls—the little box prevents me from hearing him well. Such ingenuity, such effort for these young men's deaths. Ah, and there is Salaadin:
Jump my poor Christians, see where your God is now! See how He doesn't come to your rescue!
But listen to me, God never comes to the rescue—no barbarity can move Him anymore and we are left to ourselves for redemption! What are they doing? Yes, well, of course, they are nailing a box around my head now. Attractive race, the Arabs. These boys are fourteen, if that, smiling broadly with such white teeth. Considerate, these kids—does your box fit, they ask? Is it too tight, dear sir? Ah, listen to the music of that lovely medieval Arabic. Shame I don't have time to persuade them to write some down for me … And now they are pushing me to the edge. It will be this step or the next and then I will be falling. I hear the young man next to me, choking sobs, calling upon Mary, calling upon the Angel Michael and his flaming sword, for surely this is not how it is supposed to end, surely our God was to triumph here. Ah, another step. And—ouch—a kick in the backside … I am airborne. These boxes are ingenious, after all. I'm going to hit bottom
now.
Nope. A little longer. My clothes wrap around me, the wind buffets this little box; I feel the scrape of rock—it's quite close. It's odd, but how familiar is this fall. Have I lived, perhaps, a whole life of this? Oh, here's the bottom, coming up to meet me, tingling my feet in anticipation, one—two—three …

O'Hanrahan came to.

He looked at the bedside clock, saw it was night again, and determined that it was ten hours since he had last come to. The days and nights are burning away in fever, he thought. The last days of my life and I am sleeping through them. He looked at the water glass on the table: tepid, milky water, direct from the Mississippi. There was the limp flower Lucy had brought in a simple dimestore vase. And next to that lay a Bible.
We bring our years to an end as it were as a tale that is told. The days of our years are threescore years and ten,
and I may not even make seventy, thought O'Hanrahan as an addendum.

So be it. We fear and dread the throes of the end, we grumble at God for the pain and awfulness of final hours, and yet it perhaps takes a bit of agony to convince us that we would do well to move along to the next world, whether that world be unfeeling sleep or the bourn of angels, this one no longer can please us. In which case there is a dark wisdom in these agonies. They are really but a moment in the whole span, a last exaction before surcease, a small price for having lived at all. And then the thing itself—will there be an instant where my dwindling consciousness shall glimpse the millennia of nonexistence upon which I embark? Will there be a pure emanation of light, as some have glimpsed near death, or will that light slowly turn cold and dim as the darkness rushes in ineffable, supreme.
The womb shall forget him. The worm shall feed sweetly upon him. He shall be no more remembered.

He thought back to Korea, how the men would revive, the terminal cases, often, to say a final word or utter a mother's name. And perhaps this is what is happening now, this returned consciousness. O'Hanrahan's eyes in his immobile head looked around the room and fluorescent light of the cork ceiling and the vinyl chair in the corner, my own little death-chamber.
Be with us, O Lord, now and unto the hour of our death.
Is this the hour of my death?

(It's looking that way.)

Well, O'Hanrahan thought, how to spend it? A little TV? I thought at this point I would feel defeated and broken. The scroll outlived me, after all. The Great O'Hanrahan goes to an ignominious grave, slightly better than the gutter his father went to. But you gotta hand it to me, Lord: I got one last, irresponsible adventure out of the world, didn't I? One last fling with my true romance, the rubble of the past, the wisdom of the ancients, the aged, bearded companions shielded by cross and Torah and crescent, the supernal mysteries—all 4000 years of them put upon this earth by God for me to dabble in and amuse myself. O Holy Spirit …

(You remember Me after all.)

Do You know how much I have loved this life? Have any of Your children had such fun as I? All right, all right, I'm an apostate and blasphemer, I'm aware, but it was to
amuse
You as well as me! I have always thought God was in on my jokes—surely You're as cynical as I am at this point.

(True, One has to have a sense of humor in this job.)

Forgive me, but even at this late date, I could never believe You were perfect. That you were God and greater than I, indubitably. But perfect? You're doing well to keep your head above water lots of times—Auschwitz, Hiroshima, World War I, and all that—and am I mistaken or do You need us lowly humans too? We're the best creation You could muster and, face it, there's a lot of hackwork. I objected to the pious infallible papal God, the God of omnipotence and omniscience … You're none of those things. Beatrice and my Rudy dying in a plane crash show there are cracks in this creation of Yours.

But I, Patrick Virgil O'Hanrahan, accepted your terms!

Of course I know my failures. My wife should have known how much I loved her. My son should have gotten bored with the constancy of his father's love. And there I failed. Failed, failed, screwed up, crapped out—no argument from me on this. But for the last twenty years I have lived in a hell of my own making, and perhaps that will check any more of hell off my list. I'm feeling faint now. This must be delirium, because here I am talking to the Holy Spirit and She's right in the room with her beautiful face of light with shining hair of stars … if I could only focus and look right at Her, but I feel sleep coming on again … My eyes grow heavy. A last thought, then: if I could keep on with this preposterous life I would, and I would find a way to make amends for my selfishness and lack of love to my wife and son. I know You must get tired of bargains but there it is. I would continue with a better heart.