The Gospel Of Judas (7 page)

Leo found that he wanted her to look at him, that was what was so disturbing. He even talked volubly so that she would. As they poked around the shadows of the cave he expounded on the subject of Mithras, of bulls and sacrifice and the secret rites of initiation into the mysteries, of the bull’s seminal fluid impregnating the whole world; and she did look, watching him with a secretive smile that may have been amusement, may have been imbued with something like sympathy. ‘The way that Christianity won,’ he told them, ‘was by abjuring the exclusive, by welcoming anyone, by having nothing to hide.’

‘What’s abjuring?’ the elder of the girls asked. ‘Why do you use big words all the time?’ And Jack laughed, and asked, ‘Why
do
you use big words all the time?’

‘Because small ones won’t do,’ Leo said.

They went back to the car and into the town. Leo held the younger child’s hand as they walked through the narrow, shabby alleys. ‘Shall I show you something?’ he said to her. ‘Do you know a man called Pontius Pilate?’

‘Of course,’ Claire said immediately. ‘He killed Jesus.’

‘The
Jews
killed Jesus,’ Catherine corrected her. ‘It says that in the Bible. The
Jews
killed Jesus.’

‘The Romans killed Jesus.’

‘The Jews.’ It threatened to become one of those ridiculous childish arguments – did, didn’t, did, didn’t, did.

‘Leo’s Jewish,’ said Madeleine.

Jack seemed startled. ‘Are you?’

Leo tried to shrug the matter away: ‘Newman, Neumann.
There was a conversion in my family early this century. My grandmother.’ He knew what Jack was thinking. Jack had a sharp diplomat’s mind and wouldn’t miss a thing like that. As they walked through the town towards the main square, past
alimentari
and bar, Leo felt the cold wind of jealousy blowing through his mind. Why had Madeleine betrayed that fragile, insignificant confidence?

‘Did
you
kill Jesus, then?’ Claire asked.

‘How could a priest kill Jesus, silly?’

‘What about Pontius Pilate?’

‘He wasn’t a priest.’

‘He was a Roman. And Father Leo’s a Roman Catholic.’

‘So are you.’

‘I’m not …’

‘You
are
, so.’

‘I think the children should shut up,’ Jack decided.

The main square of the town was like a stage set, with fountain and café and Municipal building, and a host of extras hanging around as though waiting for the orchestra to strike up and the overture to begin. Leo led the way across to the
palazzo
on the far side. A stone plaque beside the entrance proclaimed the
Municipio
, the council offices. The building was plastered in rust-red stucco and the entrance archway was decorated with marble fragments that had been turned up in the fields round about the town, a litter of bits and pieces hung on the walls at random, like dandruff clinging to a flushed scalp.

‘It’s here,’ he said, nervous that it would not strike the girls, for really it was not much, a mere plaque, a mere inscription, a trivial witness from the past. He couldn’t judge children, their mixture of innocence and sophistication, their honesty and their mendacity.

The group shuffled round and looked up to where he
pointed. And the word
Pontii
stood out from the epigraphic muddle, some reference to a local family, the
gens
Pontii.

‘So what?’

What, indeed? The only evidence, if evidence it be, for the Italian existence of a lesser colonial administrator with a chip on his shoulder and a pushy wife: Pontius Pilate. The most famous Roman there has ever been. There’s no competition really, is there? Forget Julius Caesar or Tiberius. How many Christians are there in the world? A thousand million? Apart from the Virgin Mary, Pontius Pilate is the only human being mentioned in the creed. So his name is on the lips of every single one of those thousand million Christians, every time he or she goes to church. That’s fame for you.

‘This is where he came from. This was his home town.’ And added ‘possibly’,
sotto voce
, lest it ruin his paltry story.

So Leo told the Brewer family and their friends about Pilate on that early spring day at Sutri, when the wind was colder than it ought to have been and he was eager for Madeleine’s attention. He talked of Pontius Pilate to the girls, to Madeleine, to Jack if he was listening, to Howard and Gemma if they cared. He gave him some kind of appearance – hair cut short, chin shaved clean: a sharp contrast to his bearded subjects – and sketched out a character of sorts – the kind of man who believed in the Republican virtues, in the rule of law, in duty to the state and honour to the ancestors. A man who had made a useful marriage and had now stepped on to the first rung in the ladder of imperial ambition. Pontius Pilatus, a knight of the equestrian class, who might now aspire to one of the greatest prizes of all – Egypt. Pontius Pilate, who gained the favour of the Emperor’s adviser Sejanus and was sent
to Judaea in the summer of the twelfth year of the reign of Tiberius.

‘Rather like British India,’ said Jack, who
had
been listening.

‘Exactly like British India,’ Leo agreed. ‘The same fat, idle princelings sending their children to Rome or London for education – Herod’s children all went there. There were the same strange religions, the same holy men with mad expressions and a dangerous role in politics, the same local politicians with their eye on the main chance. And the same kind of blundering colonial administration.’

‘You could use it as a case study at the FCO,’ said Howard.

‘Poor Pilate,’ said Catherine.

‘Why poor?’

‘Because he had no choice,’ she said, with the sudden insight of the young. ‘Jesus had to die, so Pilate had no choice. Neither did Judas.’

‘And what about Mrs Pilate?’ asked Madeleine.

They walked back to the car, back to the tombs and the amphitheatre. ‘The tradition is that she was called Claudia. Claudia Procula. According to Origen she became a Christian and the Greek Orthodox Church even canonised her. Saint Claudia. But legend also has it that she was Sejanus’ mistress and that’s how Pilate got the job.’

‘What’s a mistress?’ asked Claire. ‘I thought it was a teacher.’

The adults laughed. Sisterly duty overcame Catherine’s embarrassment. ‘A mistress is a lady friend,’ she said firmly.

‘Is Mummy Father Leo’s mistress, then?’ the younger girl asked. She wondered, no doubt, why her words brought more laughter. Maybe she wondered why Father Leo reddened. Maybe in later years she would remember that
incident, and see in its small moments of awkwardness and amusement a strange foreboding.

They had returned to the amphitheatre. Jack and the girls and the two guests from London had gone ahead into the centre of the circle of rock. The tiers of seats rose up around them. Madeleine and Leo stood at the entrance looking across the grass to where the others posed like figures on a stage.

‘Why did you tell Jack about my being Jewish?’ Leo asked her.

She seemed surprised at his tone. ‘Is it a secret?’

‘Not a secret, no. But something I told you.’

‘I’m sorry.’ She seemed not to understand, as though she hadn’t grasped the significance, the secret shared. ‘I’m sorry if I betrayed a confidence but I didn’t think it was particularly private.’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘I’m sorry, Leo. Is that OK? I didn’t realise and now I’m sorry, all right?’

‘Let me have war, say I!’ Jack cried to the empty seats. ‘It exceeds peace as far as day does night.’

‘Why do you get so angry?’ Madeleine asked.

‘I’m not angry.’

‘Yes you are.’

‘– It is spritely, waking, audible, and full of vent! – ’

‘You just can’t accept an apology. God, is that what comes of living the life of a celibate?’

‘It’s got nothing to do with it.’

‘Not much.’

‘Peace is a very apoplexy!’ Jack declaimed. The girls ran circles around him and laughed. ‘A getter of more bastard children than war’s a destroyer of men!’

‘It’s got nothing to do with it,’ Leo insisted. ‘Nothing at
all.’ And he told her, there and then he told her, while Jack pranced round the amphitheatre of Sutri and the girls screamed with delight at his antics, and Howard and Gemma laughed.

Another picnic, another era, another pair of cars. The main road to the town of Sutri is only tarmacked in places now, mere hard-packed gravel in others. But there is the same avenue of umbrella pines, the same modern cemetery (less full now and without electric light) and the same row of Etruscan tombs on the opposite side. Tomb country, this, a landscape of the dead. And the same village on its perch of volcanic rock at the end of the avenue, like a ship about to enter the narrows and confronted by the small flotilla of cars coming towards it.

‘Over here!’ The leading car is a convertible, an Alfa Romeo, and the sound of the guide’s voice can be clearly heard above the noise of engines as he turns in his seat and waves to the left. A white silk scarf billows. ‘The theatre!’ He is a young man, narrow and dark, darker than the others, who are clearly his seniors. His car lurches and swerves (no traffic but a donkey cart) and runs off the gravel on to a flat area beside the road, beside the cliff and the gateway that leads into what he has indicated, a rock-carved amphitheatre.

Mercedes follows and draws to a halt alongside the Alfa. The passengers get out. The ladies are in floral print dresses with square shoulders and narrow waists. They wear wide-brimmed hats against the sun, and platform sandals against the earth, and they pick at this and that like birds. Three of the men are in flannels and soft shirts and white canvas shoes, and look as though they may be about to play some kind of game, tennis or badminton
or something. In sharp contrast to them the man in command wears a suit. His only concession to the day, to the sky of untrammelled blue and a sun as sharp and painful as a thermic lance, is a battered and incongruous panama hat. ‘How can you
bear
it in this heat, darling?’ The woman who half admonishes him is blonde (hair rolled into an elaborate sausage that frames her face), lean and busy.

‘This amphitheatre is unique,’ the young man explains in the manner of a professional guide. ‘Probably Etruscan in origin, it was of course used through the Roman period.’

‘The
first
Roman Empire,’ one of the men says. There is a hint of mockery in his voice, and some, but not all, of the others laugh. The blonde woman does not laugh, for example. When the young man speaks she is inclined to look away, to busy herself with other matters, like directing the operations of the fifth male, the servant who takes things from the back of the Mercedes – hampers, a tablecloth, a canteen of cutlery – and carries them through the entrance into the amphitheatre. The woman instructs him like a general deploying troops, while her husband – the suited, hatted man – watches her keenly. ‘Over there. Not here. And those there, so that people can take them as they wish. And put the wine in the shade. We used to picnic in the woods at Buchlov,’ she explains to the others, as thought to justify her orders by claiming great experience in the matter. ‘Carriages, not cars. And tables, chairs, everything. And my brother would organise games for the children …’ The white cloth is laid out in the very centre of the theatre, as though a performance is expected and all these are props – the silver cutlery, the long-stemmed glasses, the white bone china. The servant makes a number of journeys to and fro, from cars to
picnic, while a peasant with the donkey cart observes them soundlessly from the road.

What does he make of it? Seven adults and a young boy, all milling round in the spring sunshine, exclaiming at the place, at the rough tiers of seating that rise up and outwards from the space in the centre like ripples in pond, all talking in tones he cannot grasp, words that mean nothing. But he knows them as German. That much. ‘
Ciao, nonno
,’ the boy calls to him in accented Italian. He acknowledges the greeting with a toothless grin before thumping his donkey on the flank and continuing along the road towards the village.

‘Spätlese,’ says the tall man, picking a bottle out of a hamper. The label is elaborate with Gothic script, bearing a picture that looks like a scene from the
Ring der Nibelungen
. The glass is beaded with condensation. ‘Wonderful.’

‘I prefer
our
wine,’ his wife says.

‘Absurd. Your wine is Austrian rubbish. This is the finest Rheinwein.’

‘Not Austrian, Moravian.’

‘Worse. Nothing but Jews and Slavs.’

There is laughter. He draws the cork (this is a picnic: the servants can’t do
everything
) and pours the pale wine and they all take a glass and hold it to the light and sip, and agree with Herr Huber that this is delicious. They sip and swirl and make noises with their appreciative lips. Frau Huber bends down to adjust something on the tablecloth and the young man pauses to watch her skirt’s soft rise. She wears silk stockings (rare these days). They are wrinkled slightly at the knee and their seams lead eyes irrevocably upwards into the shadows where one can, for the moment, imagine stocking tops and fasteners and the cool, living silk of flesh. Herr Huber notices the
young man’s glance, and frowns. ‘I’m afraid we’ll have to sit on the ground,’ Frau Huber says, dropping to her knees as though to show the way. Her legs fold demurely beneath her. The men relax. The servant begins to serve the food, awkwardly, far too much part of the group as he stoops to present the ladies with their portions of
prosciutto crudo
(‘not as good as Viennese
Schinken
,’ Herr Huber says) and green figs, far too close to the ruling class and conscious of it.

And then there is a sound – sudden and intrusive, like the fabric of the blue sky being torn apart. The group pause in their eating – ‘I prefer Prague ham,’ someone is saying – and glance upwards as something dark and silver, something awkward, cruciform, loud, flashes overhead from behind the fringe of holm oak and streaks over the theatre and away over the road and above the umbrella pines, tearing at the sky as though doing it a great hurt.