Gospel (64 page)

“
Ohi gynaikes,
” said Stavros, trying to participate. “Women, no.”

Below them on the shore and the winding road down to it was the last reach of the 20th Century, Ouranopolis, a small town of a few blocks, L-shaped, just like the point of land it occupied. The nicer hotels faced the west; around the other corner of the L were a few junky beach shops, a pair of typical Greek restaurants, a newsstand with English and German newspapers amid the postcards, and a block behind those were three clubs—expanded bars, really, each with a disco ball hanging from the ceiling. The pebbly coast gave way to light blue water littered with numerous paddle-boats, windsurfing equipment, light sailboats. No harbor, judged Lucy, for expensive yachts or beautiful people, but rather for English and German couples on package holidays, whose greatest demand of the Aegean might be of floating upon an inflatable multicolored raft.

“Get that credit card out,” said O'Hanrahan as they walked along the west front, surveying possible hotels.

Stavros asked if he should go stay in a
thomatia,
a cheap room in one of the local's homes, but O'Hanrahan said he should stay at the hotel. They needed a hotel with a phone, so O'Hanrahan could be in contact with Lucy.

“That is,” added O'Hanrahan, faking concern, “supposing that I can even get ahold of Lucy by phone. I suspect she'll be out picking up Greek men at the local discos, meeting all the nice English boys.”

Lucy sniffed, “I just might be at those discos, Dr. O'Hanrahan.”

“Deeskos,” said Stavros, smiling.

“See?” said O'Hanrahan, lumbering up the front steps of a hotel called the Hotel Poseidon. “You've even got a hot date for tonight.”

“Hot deet, yays,” said Stavros, strutting especially for Lucy, bounding up the stairs of the hotel with his and Lucy's bags.

Stavros's English wasn't all
that
bad, Lucy was surmising.

The Hotel Poseidon was near empty and overjoyed to see customers of any variety. The proprietor mourned the fall of the dollar's value, the inexplicable, fanciful fear Americans had of being blown up by terrorists in Greece … The oblong building had four balconied rooms on the second and top floor. Lucy got one of the rooms and O'Hanrahan and Stravros another. Lucy went out to stand on her balcony and O'Hanrahan went out to stand on his, separated by a thick wall.

“Howdy, neighbor,” said Lucy.

As night approached the three had another meal at one of the two open-air, canopied cafés. Lucy had
kalamari
for a change of pace; O'Hanrahan and Stavros had souvlaki and happily absorbed two bottles of retsina. In a drawn-out trial Lucy was made to drink a whole glass without making a face.

“Tastes like turpentine,” she coughed. “I don't have to worry about falling in love with that.”

“You have failed my first test of holiness,” intoned the professor.

“Oh!” said Lucy, reminded of her test of yesterday. She dove into her carpetbag and produced, folded in half, her yellow legal sheet with the translation of the Alexandrian text O'Hanrahan had set for her. “Tell me how I did,” Lucy said, handing it over.

Stavros stood, bored and restless after a full day of listening to English being spoken. He excused himself for the hotel where he intended to adorn himself for the disco. As he left the café, the blond heads of the German female tourists turned to watch appreciatively his indolent saunter to the edge of the canopy, his striking a pose, and his finale, a slow stage exit to the hotel.

O'Hanrahan was impressed with Lucy's translation.

It was an Alexandrian Greek tale from
The Acts of Andrew and Matthias
of the 4th Century, this version much altered, featuring the Disciples Andrew and Matthias, the source of the
Andreas
Lucy had investigated back at Oxford:

And a statue poured out water from its mouth as from a canal and it was bitter and corroded men's flesh. In the morning all the people of the town began to flee. The water killed their cattle and their children. And Andrew said, “Let Michael wall the city about with fire.” A cloud of fire came and surrounded it and they could not escape. The water came up to their necks and consumed their flesh … And then Andrew went as far as the great vat and prayed and the earth opened and swallowed the water and the old man and the executioners. Then he bade them bring all who had been killed by the water but there were too many and so he prayed and revived them. Then he drew out the plan of a church and baptized them and gave them the Lord's precepts. And they begged the disciples to stay but Andrew refused saying I must first go to my disciples and he set forth and they were very sad. Then Jesus appeared in the form of a beautiful child and reproved him for leaving them and told him to stay seven days and then he should go with his disciples to the country of the Ethiopian man-eaters and then return and bring the men out of the abyss.

“Not bad,” said O'Hanrahan. “You even got ‘vat' right. Matthias, you see, was meanwhile cooking in the cauldron.”

Lucy wondered, “God kills all these people, then revives them, then the disciples leave, then Jesus says go back … whom could this ever have appealed to?”

O'Hanrahan handed the sheet back to her. “You have now learned, Miss Dantan, the first rule of apocryphal texts: most gospels disqualify themselves from serious consideration after ten lines. People like to think there are gospels out there somewhere just as valid as
Matthew, Mark,
and
Luke,
but the sad truth is most are of this variety. It's very rare that a useful, credible document shows itself. And until the greatest of all finds, ‘Q,' the proto-gospel, turns up, the greatest find in ages will be the
Gospel of Matthias.
”

Lucy: “Where did the
Gospel of Matthias
come from in the first place?”

O'Hanrahan shrugged. “I hope to investigate that in Jerusalem. I know Rabbi Rosen bought it from a Mustafa al-Waswasah, an acquaintance of mine from Dead Sea Scroll days. I'm going to go interrogate the old fox.”

O'Hanrahan held forth about the whimsical ways gospels have turned up.

“Who knows where Matthias might have been hiding? In a museum or a library or in a private collector's case or in an attic. The thirteen Nag Hammadi gospels found in 1945 were discovered when an Arab in a blood feud killed his rival and tried to stash away the body. He dug a grave and turned up the scrolls. His mother that night used a few of the gospels for fire kindling to cook her soup.”

Lucy closed her eyes in pain. “You're kidding.”

“Nope, some of the Nag Hammadi gospels survived 2000 years only to go up in smoke for a pot of broth. Two kids were chasing a goat near Qumran's ruins and turned up the Dead Sea Scrolls. In 1958 a letter of Clement of Alexandria was found in the vaults of Mar Saba Monastery's library, mentioning a secret, second version of
Mark
passed only among church hierarchs. Consider, my dear, that archaeology and textual analysis are recent sciences. We in the 21st Century will have access to the First Century as no other century, even the Second or Third, ever had.” He then yawned. “And I better get to bed since I've got to leave at seven
A.M.
Night night, and don't die of boredom here.”

“I'll try not to, sir. Good luck.”

O'Hanrahan entrusted her with the VISA card. “July 19th, four days from now, a phone call to the Hotel Poseidon, at high noon—if I'm not back before that. Unfailingly!”

Lucy watched him pad off to the hotel and wondered if she shouldn't have put out her hand or given him a hug or something. They were in an awkward stage of companionship. The next moment she saw Stavros, in a muscle shirt, ringlets newly arranged, tight jeans, leaving a plume of cologne behind him as he walked by on his way toward the thump-thump-thump of the disco.

Teddie's right, thought Lucy. What a peacock.

AΓΙΟΝ ΟΡΟC

J
ULY
16
TH

O'Hanrahan watched the town of Ouranopolis recede in the morning haze. Farewell to civilization for a while.

Or, on the contrary, maybe it was hello to civilization, the oldest and purest left, free from World Wars and common markets. Yes, also free of electricity, modern plumbing, sanitary kitchens … O'Hanrahan walked over to the portside to stare at the stark peninsula of rock, the rocky hills becoming mountains as the boat motored eastward. He could see two houses, a fishing pier—no, this wasn't the Theocracy of Athos yet. O'Hanrahan patted his jacket; his wallet held several thousand drachmae in case a little old-fashioned bribery was called for among the elect of God.

As for O'Hanrahan's fellow passengers, they were the same as the time before, no doubt the same as men centuries before: priests on retreats, monks returning to their monasteries or new assignments, mostly old with long gray beards and black robes worn unwashed for ages, but a few young hopefuls in pressed shiny black, with silky, curly black beards and piercing eyes full of questions for the holy men. Were these … children, teenage boys, for Christ's sake, turning their back on the world? Were these young men here for a month of study or had they come to make a life in the 900s?

In a half-hour the boat came to a concrete pier.

On the shore a few monks waited to be taken back to Ouranopolis, their assignments done. Two backpackers—they looked British—had finished their allotted time as well; they looked parboiled in the full-length clothes Athos required. No shorts, no exposed arms, nothing but hands and face can be revealed. O'Hanrahan stepped off the boat and flashed his passport and letter of permission to the Greek customs official, who was barely interested, then he and the new pilgrims boarded Athos's one bus.

Already hot by nine, the pilgrims sweated and groaned and laughed as the bus clung to the perilous dirt road up the cliff; their driver nonchalantly made wide, leaning turns, providing those passengers in the back with the impression that they were going to topple thousands of feet down to the dock below—genuflections, laughter, a lively Greek pantomime of a near-miss followed each careening turn. Undoubtedly one of these days, thought O'Hanrahan, this bus
will
miss a turn.

(But not this day.)

It delivered them, shaken, hot, nauseated and thankful, to the capital of Athos, Karyes. Here, since 963, representatives from the twenty monasteries have met to vote on issues ranging from the decline of Byzantium, the invasion of the Turks, the occupation by the Nazis. O'Hanrahan's mind boggled trying to grasp the history viewed by the Protaton, the main church of Karyes, meeting room and “capitol.” Monks and pilgrims made their way through Karyes's one street and here O'Hanrahan felt his soul stir, his heart fill with remembered affection for the East. The late Dark Ages before me! And God bless them, it was the same scene forty years ago when O'Hanrahan was first here, and eighteen years later when he was on his second visit. That, oddly, seemed more remarkable than the continuity for centuries; to have avoided the modernization and progress of the last forty years was truly to have rebuffed Humankind and the world.

“Oh, they've made some changes,” said an Australian monk, a serious-looking man in his forties, the only English-speaker O'Hanrahan could discover from the boat. “A library burned down a few years back, so now, with great reluctance, they have a fire engine and they've cut some primitive roads to get to the twenty monasteries.”

“Ah,” said O'Hanrahan, “a worthy addition, if they had to make one. Of course, much of the best of Mt. Athos isn't in the twenty monasteries.”

He was thinking of the
sketes,
mini-monasteries for the more serious monks attached to a larger monastery. In particular O'Hanrahan recalled a house called Prophet Ieremiou and a man who had haunted him since he had first met him in 1950, Father Sergius.

One of the few true men of God he'd ever met.

*   *   *

Morning in Ouranopolis.

Lucy scanned the town's main newsstand on the promenade by the shore for news. There was a week-old
Time
magazine, a three-day-old
Herald Tribune,
which she'd read. What I want, she ascertained, is a romance novel. Classy, decorous … and failing that, a piece of utter garbage. Maybe something set in the ancient world, just because I'm here.

“You speak English?”

“Yes, sir,” she said, looking up at the proprietor.

He reached behind the counter and produced some dog-eared paperbacks that had been read fifty times or more. A Fitzgerald translation of Homer, three plays by Aeschylus, a few orange-sided Penguin paperbacks left by holiday-makers who had taken something classy to read and sold it the first day to this newsstand owner, or traded it for
Valley of the Dolls, Hollywood Wives, The Other Side of Midnight,
previous decades' best-sellers in their final resting place in Ouranopolis.

“You read all thees?” asked the man.

Actually, yes, the classics and the trash. “Anything else, sir?”

There were some Mills & Boons and Harlequins, most without covers. Lucy took
So Hot the Sun
and thumbed through it to see if too many pages were missing. She checked the ending:
“A wedding ring? I'll take it, darling! Oh, yes, yes!” she cried, falling into Sir Gregory's arms, knowing now her desert nightmare was over and her dreams had just begun.

Lucy's kind of ending. “I'll take it, yes,” hearing herself echo unintentionally the book's last line. “How much?”

It was 1400 drachmae, eight bucks, which you'd never pay back in the States but English-language pulp was at a premium here. O'Hanrahan must never see this, she sighed, or the ridicule would form a continuum.

In fact, the spirit of O'Hanrahan must have been with her because she felt like a retsina, having reviled it the night before. An acquired taste that suddenly in the baking Grecian sun she seemed to have acquired. Maybe she would wander down to the shore and the restaurants, unbusy at this hour, and order a bottle of retsina and sit and drink it in the sun and feel like … Hemingway or someone like that.