The Gospel Of Judas (17 page)

He thought of Madeleine; and at the thought of her something inside him gave a small convulsion, the emotional manifesting itself in the physical; a disturbing, subversive thing.

‘You fallen asleep?’ Goldstaub asked.

‘I’m awake.’

‘Daydreaming? What does a priest daydream about?’

‘I was thinking of Madeleine.’

‘Her?’

Why had he mentioned her? She smiled at him from memory, Madeleine holding out comfort of a kind, the comfort of a fellow human being to replace the terror of the abyss. ‘How all this would affect someone like her.’

‘If the scroll is true,’ Goldstaub reminded him. ‘You called it a forgery.’

They drove beneath the silent hulk of a tank – a memorial to the Six Day War – and passed the olive trees of the Garden of Gethsemane where, at the dead of night, in the reign of darkness, Judas had led the cohort of Roman soldiers to arrest the man called Jesus. And Leo summoned up the words from deep inside him, from a small hard core of disbelief that had always been there, throughout childhood, throughout the years of training, throughout the years of fulfilled vocation. ‘It’s true,’ he said. ‘In my heart of hearts I fear it’s true.’

Goldstaub nodded. ‘I thought so,’ he said. ‘I thought so from the start. When you first saw the thing you looked like the guy who’s gone into the clinic with strep throat and come out with lymphoma.’

They drove on in silence. The road led round the Mount of Olives beneath the village of El-Azariye – which is the village of Lazarus, which is the village of Bethany where
Jesus was anointed before his triumphal entry into the city. From Bethany it dropped down past the Inn of the Good Samaritan with refreshments and holy pictures and camel for photographs, down into the bowels of the earth, down into a dawn of grey and silver and flushed rose where the Dead Sea, the Salt Sea, lay like beaten pewter beneath a high shield of cloud. On the far side of the water, drawn in two dimensions against the light, were the Hills of Moab, where Moses had looked across at the Promised Land that he was never permitted to reach. Above the hills dawn bled through like blood and lymph from a wound.

Down on the valley floor a sign pointed left to
JERICHO, THE OLDEST CITY IN THE WORLD
and right to nowhere. Goldstaub turned the Land Rover right, skirting the bluff on which the ruins of Qumran lie and the cliffs where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found. A battered, salt-rusted sign pointed the way to En-Gedi and Masada. The vehicle drove between the sullen sea and the crumbling ramparts of rock that are the ridges and gullies of the wilderness of Judaea, a place of lizards and jackals and prophets, a place where the man called Jesus passed his forty days and forty nights amidst the terrors of solitude. And as they drove there was a sudden disturbance in the morning light, a sudden intrusion of the twentieth century into this inert and timeless landscape, a sudden sound above the whine of the Land Rover’s transmission – two jet fighters sweeping down the valley, trailing their engine sound behind them like coat-tails. The aircraft tilted as they passed by, keeping to the Israeli side of the border, aware no doubt of the Jordanian radar watching them all the way. The Star of David was visible on their fuselages. Leo thought apocalyptic thoughts.
Who is worthy to open the scroll?
he thought as the aircraft shrank to mere specks on the sheen of the morning.

‘Not far to go,’ said Goldstaub. A withered, parched landscape, a place of scrolls that was itself the colour of scrolls: dun, the colour of desiccation. They went on past the brief flowering of En-Gedi, where David hid from Saul and cut a lock from the jealous king’s hair, and fifteen minutes later they reached Masada. For a few deceptive moments the grim mesa – where Herod had built a pleasure palace, where Mariamne the Queen had once walked the terraces to admire the view, where the last of the Zealots held out against the Roman legions and finally committed mass suicide rather than surrender – was tinged with a delicate, coralline beauty by the dawn light. On the left was Lisan, the Tongue, the salt flats where the waters of the Jordan finally evaporate into the languorous desert air. Beyond was only the salt waste where once the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah had stood.

Ten minutes later Goldstaub brought the Land Rover to a halt. ‘This is it.’ A track led off to the right. There was a barrier manned by a couple of bored soldiers. A sign said that the place was called En-Mor and a notice announced that the area was under the control of the Antiquities Authority. A rough ridge rose up to the plateau, a skeletal limb of the wilderness of Judaea.

‘This your first visit?’ Goldstaub asked.

Leo peered through the window, craned to see up the slope, up into the gullies. ‘That’s right.’

The soldiers exchanged some words with Goldstaub and then raised the barrier to let them through. The vehicle lurched off the road and Goldstaub changed down into low range for the long, slow climb from shore level, up the side of the ridge, winding up like the snake path to Masada itself, clambering over tortuous rocks. Yellow dust billowed behind them. There was dust on the windows,
dust on the dashboard, dust on his arms and on his lips.
For dust thou art and unto dust shalt thou return
, Leo thought. Who came here at the pivot of history, he wondered? Who was it who stumped up this thorny slope with a bag of scrolls on his back?

Finally the vehicle breasted a horizon and reached the summit of a narrow bluff. They had arrived at the excavation camp. There was an army truck parked on a cleared area and a couple more Land Rovers. Beyond was a row of tents and a large marquee with the sides furled up. A group of volunteers was already moving around the dig, youths in T-shirts and shorts, mammary girls burned and blistered by the sun, boys with unkempt hair and rudimentary beards. The place had the atmosphere of a youth camp. Someone was at a bucket washing potsherds and distributing them to wooden boxes that had once held oranges. A radio announced the news in Hebrew. In the background a generator throbbed into the morning air. The excavation itself was little beside all this: a few lines of wall footings in the dust below the camp with surveyors’ stakes laid out in a grid.

As Leo climbed out of the vehicle the director came over. He owned one of those glum, monosyllabic Jewish names – Dov. Dov Agron. His eyes lit up when Goldstaub introduced Leo. ‘
Father
Newman, that right?’

‘Leo will do.’

As they shook hands Agron’s grip was dry and tough. His voice was a hybrid of accents, part Hebrew, part American, with an undertone of central Europe. ‘You should have been here earlier. You’ve seen the scroll?’

‘I’ve had a look.’

‘Any ideas?’

Leo shrugged noncommittally. ‘It’ll take time.’

The man nodded. ‘I mean, the first fragments were important enough, but this is something else. What do you reckon, eh? Early Christian is it, like the other stuff?’

‘Perhaps.’

They clambered round the dig while Agron pointed out the features, the storerooms, the living quarters of whoever it was who had occupied this place of dust and rock, a dull place squatting on its small promontory in the wilderness, a kind of hell under the sun. One of the volunteer diggers looked up from her labour as they passed by. Her skin was battered by the sun and the wind. She wiped her hair away with the back of her hand and called out to them in an Australian accent: ‘Over here.’ They climbed down over the low masonry to where she knelt in the dust. Her dugs hung loose in her shirt as she bent to brush dust aside, and Leo remembered Madeleine in the Church of San Crisogono: the same gesture, the same sly glimpse, the same potent sense of womanhood.
Time for your fish lecture
. But this time, there on the ground, exposed like a guilty secret by the Australian girl’s hand, lay a bronze coin.

Agron picked the thing up, blew on it and handed it to Leo. ‘The Tenth Legion, Fretensis. Judaea Capta. We’ve found a couple of dozen so far.’

Leo peered at the bronze disk, at the familiar engraving: the Jewish woman seated at the foot of a palm tree with her head in her hands and the Roman soldier standing over her.
What woman with ten drachmas
, he thought,
would not, if she lost one, light a lamp and sweep out the house and search thoroughly till she found it?
He handed the coin back. ‘So what was this place before the Romans came?’

Agron shrugged. ‘That’s the key question, isn’t it? Zealots? Somebody who got out of Masada before the end of the siege? Refugees from Qumran? Who knows?’ His voice
trailed away into the uncertainties of excavation. ‘You can always make up a convincing story, that’s the problem. If you are Arthur Evans at Knossos you can even rebuild a site in your own image. Who knows about this one? Judging by the papyrus finds they were some kind of early Christian sect. You should know about that better than me.’

Leo shrugged. They went along the ridge to the uppermost part of the dig where the ordered stones faded away into the rubble of the hillside. Agron pointed up the slope to the cliff that blocked off access to higher ground. ‘Up there,’ he said. ‘The cave.’

A spoil of boulders had spilt out from the cliff like the waste from a mine working. Round to the right, perched over the gully, there was a dark cleft in the rock, bearded with scrub and thorn. ‘Pure luck,’ Agron said. ‘There was an earth tremor not long after we started the excavation. Common enough in these parts. It caused a rockfall and exposed the cave …’

They clambered up to the entrance, Agron leading the way, Goldstaub huffing and puffing at the back. They had to crouch to get into the cave, but the space inside was high enough for them to stand. There was a cable running up from the generator in the camp below and the darkness was punctuated by the light from half a dozen lamps. Three volunteers were at work there, picking through the debris of dust and rubbish like fastidious tramps at a dustbin. Their shadows loomed vast across the ragged ceiling. They barely took any notice of the visitors, just muttered amongst themselves as though reciting some arcane religious liturgy.

‘We reckon that the Romans found this place when they took the camp,’ Agron explained. ‘There’s no real evidence, but that’s what seems likely. They found the cave and these jars inside and they smashed everything to pieces, tore
the documents up, that kind of thing. Set light to some of them. And then they just pushed off. And that’s the stuff we’ve been getting over the last few months. Just fragments.’

‘And the scroll?’

Agron smiled. This was his moment. This was the thing that would promote him into the hall of archaeological fame. ‘Over there. It was hidden away and the soldiers must have missed it. We missed it for weeks as well. It’s been sitting there for almost two thousand years.’

He led the way to an opening in the back of the cave, a narrow cleft in the rock that went through into a further chamber. They had to get down on hands and knees. Leo felt the weight of rock above him, the weight of rock all around him, pressing on him. Panic rose in his throat.
Rock of Ages cleft for me, let me hide myself in thee
, he thought. But there was no hiding, not even here in the breathless bowels of the earth.

Just ahead of him Agron clambered to his feet. The inner chamber was just high enough to stand in with your knees bent and your head tucked down into your shoulders. Two figures crouched over a pit in the floor of rock. They had the only lamp. The light glowed beneath their figures like the light in a Caravaggio painting, light issuing from what they were examining. Leo peered over Agron’s shoulder. There was a little assembly of pieces in a crevice: the curved lip of a jar and shards of brown pottery like fragments of broken cranium. Battling with panic, he tried to concentrate on Agron’s words.

‘There must have been a land movement at some time. The earth fell across and crushed the jar.’ Agron gestured to show the movement, like a crushing of skulls. ‘We got the papyrus out almost entire, and now they’re trying to
excavate the rest. We thought we could make out names on the papyrus,’ he said. ‘Youdas, we thought. And possibly Simeon. But there’s no one with Greek here. You’ve had a look. What do you reckon?’

‘It seems possible.’

‘Who were they, then?’

‘Common enough names.’

The excavators were like surgeons at the scene of an accident attempting first aid, trying to ease broken bones, trying to lift trapped limbs out of the wreckage. They worked with brushes, painstakingly sweeping the dirt away, cleaning up the wound, searching for any other survivors of the disaster of time.

‘Is there anything more?’ Leo asked. ‘I think I’d like to get out into the fresh air.’ Panic welled up inside his chest, a tangible, physical thing. The press of rock against his head, the press of circumstance all around him.

Agron looked round. His face was harsh in the lamplight, a structure of light and shadow, almost biblical, almost the face of a prophet. ‘Thought you’d like to see the actual place.’

‘It’s fascinating. But I’d rather get out.’

The prophet grinned. ‘It gets some people like that.’

Outside the cave the light was dazzling. Leo felt a surge of release as he emerged, a tide of relief flooding through his body. He dusted himself down and looked around with all the delight of someone who has just come back from the dead. The sun was up now, shining through the high cloud like a malevolent eye glaring through a thin gauze. The temperature was rising. A radio blared pop music. Dust shifted above the baulks and hollows of the excavation where the small volunteer army grubbed in the dirt. Was it here, Leo wondered, in this place of dust and
rock, a dead place beside a dead sea, that the history of Christianity would finally come to an end?

‘It’s bloody important, isn’t it?’ Agron said, following him out. ‘They wouldn’t have flown you out like this if it wasn’t important.’ He looked anxious, as though it might not be. Leo nodded and patted him on the shoulder, a gesture that he would never have made in the past, a physical, companionable gesture. ‘It’s important,’ he assured the man. ‘Very important.’