Gospel (92 page)

“And that's the damn thing about Meroitic. We can do some Kush, we can do most Axumite dialects, Ge'ez and Falasha-Semitic, Nubian scratchings … and here is this damn script, Meroitic right in the middle of the First Century. The Egyptians and the Greeks were there, the Romans, the Jews, then the Christians—they had trade with Persians, Indians, even the Chinese. A bunch of
schvarzes
—uh, Black Africans, but I promise you, the most cosmopolitan society of the age. With all those influences the language oughta be a cinch! But there's not a
hint
of anything familiar.”

Lucy sighed. “So there's the possibility that Dr. O'Hanrahan and you will never solve it.”

“No,” said the rabbi heavily.

Lucy let him think a moment.

“Because Rabbi Jacob Rosen was reading this thing about two weeks after he bought it. But he was very secretive. He's the reason we know it was addressed to Josephus, the Jewish historian, and why we know it was purported to be by Matthias the Disciple. He said a lot more but who paid attention? Who knew he was going to die in the middle of translating it, let alone that the scroll was going to be stolen?”

“Did he make any notes?”

“There was
one
sheet from his legal pad—he filled hundreds of them—that escaped the theft. Used as a bookmark, I found it by accident. It had numerous phrases we assume are in the Matthias scroll but we don't know.”

Lucy realized she had seen those notes in O'Hanrahan's bag before the Athos robbery, scrawled in Hebrew:
The Harlot Helen. Benjamin the Slave. All Heresies Refuted. The Messiah's Bones.

“And there was the business of the last chapter,” the rabbi added. “Rosen passed me in the hall and he seemed upset, which was odd, because he was always cheery. I was a graduate student, 1949, and hesitated to make idle conversation with the great man, but I asked what was wrong. He said the gospel was a very dangerous book. I asked what he meant. He said, ‘If it's going where I think it's going, there's not going to be a
sheygets
alive who doesn't want to burn this thing.' Another thing he said, ‘Do you suppose the Gentiles could survive it?'”

Lucy mulled that over. “So this final chapter has some unpleasant details about Christ, you think.”

“I don't think Professor Rosen lived long enough to get to this final chapter himself.”

“And now this last chapter is lost.”

The rabbi didn't answer directly. “It's not attached to the scroll, I wouldn't say it was lost.”

Rabbi Hersch decided to change sportscoats and went into his bedroom. Lucy stood and looked again at the old photographs. There was a man and wife, a rabbi and his young bride, hair pulled back under a babushka, but beautiful hopeful eyes. Her husband had Rabbi Hersch's eyebrows and knowledgeable stare. The place looked like a Central European town. It seemed to her that O'Hanrahan told her he was raised by his uncle in Brooklyn. But this couple could have been his parents. Why do you suppose he …

Oh of course. Oh no.

Not the Holocaust again. That gaping abyss that lurks behind daily life in Israel, only gone for a few happy distracted moments at a wedding, while caught up in a novel, but never really gone, that unrightable wrong, that criminal that got off scot-free. Lucy stepped back from the bookshelf and the photos; she didn't want to occasion the topic and hear Rabbi Hersch say the words, recite those litanies of dead relatives and people who couldn't get out of Europe in time, who instead poured their resources into smuggling out their children. This wrenching stab of sadness she felt—multiply by two, then three, for all of Mordechai Hersch's aunts and uncles, then by ten for the immediate family, then clutching something stable and solid, closing one's eyes, extrapolate by one, two, three, four, five, six million …

“Golda's you're gonna love,” said the rabbi spryly, pausing to exile another stack of books from the sofa to the dining room table.

Lucy turned away. With what dignity he tends their memorial—at no point in their friendly argument did he prostitute their deaths, his own suffering. Had it fundamentally altered and shaped him? It must have. Is this why no wife or children, the fear of more loss? Is this why he had to be a rabbi—a great rabbi? To replace the father he never got to know, to have a life in common with him, to perhaps follow the same traces of thought and reason?

“… you know it takes years off your life,” he was saying, “but I can't do without the Golda's borscht. She serves it cold like a milkshake and then you watch her blend in sour cream—you feel the arteries harden, but…”

What can the world hope to say to a man like Rabbi Hersch? Only God can make a proper answer to his sufferings, proper recompense for his losses. His sadness lasts a lifetime, and for me, thought Lucy, it was only for a moment: but my eyes filled with tears, my heart trembled and I glimpsed vicariously one-millionth of an evil that could make you hate life and God Himself, I touched one bone in the pile, filled my mouth with ashes.

(Good. You now have all you need to know, My child, to understand the State of Israel.)

*   *   *

From the Intercontinental Hotel, O'Hanrahan gave a last glance at the Old City in the midday light, the gold Dome of the Rock and Temple Mount with the steeples of the churches near the Holy Sepulcher beckoning behind.

He left the hotel and found the lead taxi in the line and asked to be taken to the Damascus Gate where he was to meet Rabbi Hersch and Lucy in ninety minutes. The taxi driver pointed to another driver, who led him to another, back in the line … “Are you the right guy?” O'Hanrahan asked.

“Yes yes,” said the driver, scrambling to open the door for the professor.

As they left the parking lot, O'Hanrahan saw a wealthy-looking woman emerge from the hotel and get into the taxi at the front of the rank as he had attempted. “Why did the other drivers send me to you, sir?” asked O'Hanrahan.

“Because we go somewhere.”

“No, I do not need a tour,” he said in clear Arabic.

“It is not a tour,” said the man, still in English.

O'Hanrahan leaned back in the cab wondering where he was headed this time and who wanted to see him. Rather than descend the Mount of Olives, the driver seemed to be headed deeper into the West Bank toward al-Azzirya, a village known to Christians as Bethany, named by the Moslems for Lazarus whom Jesus raised from the dead. This was also the road to Jordan. O'Hanrahan looked out the back of the taxi to see a red Golf sedan following pokily behind. Added security, O'Hanrahan figured, in case I bail out and make a run for it.

“Where am I going?”

“You like to drink the coffee, yes?”

O'Hanrahan was let out at a simple café, iron tables, wooden stools, a blackened brewing pot that distilled strong Arab coffee near the door. The red Golf proceeded down the road, so O'Hanrahan dismissed his earlier scenario.

The sun was far enough west that the eastern-facing café was now in the shade. The shabby-looking men in Arab
kafiyeh
headdress, clones of Yasser Arafat, were indolent, the work for the day done, or more likely, done for them by their sons and wives. They observed O'Hanrahan with mild interest; the café dog, a mutt, sniffed up to O'Hanrahan's pant leg and showed slightly more enthusiasm.

“Patrick O'Hanrahan,” said one youngish man with a prominent Arab nose, very slim and short, handsome in a black Western suit.

“Whom may I have the honor of speaking to?”

“Mohammed Baqir al-Taki, and the honor is mine. Your reputation precedes you, sir.” The young man spoke excellent English in a high-pitched voice. He extended his right hand and displayed with his left the seat at the table intended for them both.

“Descendant,” asked O'Hanrahan, “of the famed author of the
Haqqu al-Yaqin?
”

It seemed the next moment his host was fighting back emotion. “Oh sir, it is true what is said of you! Oh that you had been born to Islam! What honors we would have bestowed upon you! How the Christian world ignores the flower of the mind that Allah, most merciful and generous, has allowed to bloom.”

O'Hanrahan nodded in complete agreement, as a small demitasse of Arabic coffee was set before him by the proprietor's eight-year-old son. “A Shi'ah deep in Sunni territory?” the professor ventured.

“Yes, though my Sunni brethren are objects of my daily prayers for reconciliation. My family is part-Palestinian, part-Iranian.”

A helluva mix, thought O'Hanrahan.

“I am not of the blood of the Mohammed Baqir to whom you refer, but I was named in his honor, may peace be upon him…” The coffee-boy set a dish of date cookies between the two men and scurried away.

“You have brought me here to tempt me, Mr. al-Taki?”

He laughed freely. “Ah, to lure you and your scroll from the Western world you may see as temptation, my learned professor,” he embellished, getting down to business with Arab indirection. “But is it temptation to put before a man such as yourself something that would produce mutual good? The people I represent would gain much by such a document as you possess: no less than the vindication of Mohammed's prophecies, may peace be upon him.”

“May peace be upon him. You and whomever you represent will have to go a long way to tempt me,” said O'Hanrahan, sipping the strong coffee, bitter and acid with a strip of lemon peel in it. “I was offered a million deutsche mark this morning.”

“Such money we cannot offer, but rather a position of great honor.”

“We?”

“My university.”

O'Hanrahan was curious. “In the West Bank?”

“In Teheran.”

O'Hanrahan was amazed but didn't show it. “A position for me in Iran? I take it it's in a prison somewhere.”

Al-Taki shook his head, his large eyes liquid and expressive. “Oh, if the West could only know the true Persian hospitality!”

“Dear friend, I have been to Iran, but it was Iran under the Shah and I found the people most hospitable, as throughout the Moslem world. No people has a greater code of generosity to the stranger. But governments tend not to reflect this charity.”

“That can be said of the U.S. as well, can it not? The government is one thing, but the people themselves are very, very good.”

No, thought O'Hanrahan darkly, the Arab world would be saddened to know how uncharitable the American people have become—how our poor can rot on the street, how little we seek to correct perpetual social injustice, how the stranger in the West, rather than being welcomed into homes and given gifts in Moslem fashion, is considered dangerous and avoided. O'Hanrahan recalled visiting the Armenian churches of Turkey near the Soviet border, and he remembered that hotels did not exist because the locals would invite you into their homes and feed you. When O'Hanrahan unintentionally insulted a family once by trying to offer money, they assured him that it would balance out in the eyes of Allah, for one day they would come to the United States where this hospitality, of course, would be returned. If they only knew!

“… for the Prophet, may peace be upon him,” rambled al-Taki, expressively allowing his hands to rise and fall, “assures us that Allah is most generous to his servants, and how more so for the scholar…” Al-Taki arrived at his proposal: “We want to make you a professor at Teheran University, my learned friend,” his host said, pausing, smiling. “You will have complete powers to teach Christian scripture as you wish, providing you do not refute the Holy Quran. You will have a house, servants. Life is very cheap in Iran.”

Yeah, not the way he means, thought O'Hanrahan.

“… and it is no exaggeration to say you will live like a king—a pasha, yes?” Mohammed Baqir al-Taki looked down at his cup, smiling humbly. “Even a wife can be found for you, should you require one. Many young women would be happy to have so eminent a husband.”

A young wife?

Did he hear him right?

Appearing in his mind was a pair of eyes behind a veil, once glimpsed in Baghdad, when all the wonder and mystery of the East were rushed to his heart!

“You said,” O'Hanrahan stammered, “a wife?”

“Yes, but of course. A virgin, I assure you!”

To have again in this world, as he hung on the very edge of his lifetime, as the abyss opened within view, to have a wife—no, he said, a virgin, a
young wife,
a girl! What was the Arabian Nights description of the smooth young thigh? Yes, the color of a sliced almond.
We will burn scent of nard and lie naked in its blue wizardry!

(That was written for a prepubescent boy, Patrick.)

Oh the cruelty to hold out such a fantasy for an old man who had just made peace with putting such thoughts to rest! Ha, but why stop at one wife? Why not three or four?
Awake my children and fill the cup before Life's liquor in its cup be dry!

O'Hanrahan said distracted, “My Farsi is a bit rusty—”

“There is much English spoken, and the texts are Arabic.”

Yes, Persian Arabic, which is a whole different ballgame, but not an obstacle he couldn't overcome. “And this is your deal? A position, a rich life of a pasha, in return for the
Gospel of Matthias?
Why is it so important to you?”

“Because it will surely establish the truth of the Quran regarding
Isa Mesih,
Jesus the Christ, will it not? And with you presenting it to the world, we shall at last be believed. It will be no small measure of success for Iran amid the Moslem brethren to begin the uniting of the Christian peoples with the Moslem under the magnificent teachings of Our Prophet Mohammed, may peace be upon him.”

“May peace be upon him.”

Al-Taki looked pleased to have been underestimated. “Ah, but there is more. We could not lure a man such as yourself with paltry promises such as a wife.…”