The Thirteenth Apostle (23 page)

“Once the legionaries had finished off Adon, they caught up with me at the Ein Feshka oasis and left me for dead there. Some Essene fugitives, who had managed to escape from the capture of Qumran and the ensuing massacre, slung me over their shoulders: I'd lost consciousness, but was still alive. For several months they looked after me in the community in the desert of Judaea where they had taken refuge. As soon as I could walk again, I begged them to come with me, to find you here – you can't imagine my wanderings across this desert.”

The thirteenth apostle was lying on a simple mat in front of the cave mouth. He stared at the deep defile that opened up
before them, hollowed out by erosion in the red ochre rocks. In the far distance rose the mountain chain leading to Horeb, where God had, long ago, given his Law to Moses.

“The Essenes… If it hadn't been for them, Jesus would never have lived in the desert for forty days, in that solitude that transformed him. If it hadn't been for them, I wouldn't have met him when he came to John the Baptist, and he would never have met Nicodemus, Lazarus and my friends from Jerusalem. It was in one of the jars of the Essene caves that you placed my epistle, at Qumran… We owe so much to them!”

“More than you think. In the desert of Judaea they are continuing to copy every kind of manuscript. Before I left them, they gave me this…” He placed a bundle of parchments on the edge of his mat. “It's your Gospel, Father, as it is now circulating throughout the Roman Empire. I've brought it for you to read.”

The old man raised his hand: he seemed to be keeping every movement to a minimum.

“Reading exhausts me these days. You read it to me!”

“Their text is much longer than your original narrative. They've stopped just correcting: they're inventing new things. The way you described him to me, Jesus used to express himself as a Jew talking to Jews…”

A faint flush of colour returned to the cheeks of the thirteenth apostle. He closed his eyes, as if he were reliving scenes that were deeply etched into his memory.

“Listening to Jesus was like hearing the wind blowing across the hills of Galilee, like seeing the ears of corn bending down, ripe for harvest, and the clouds floating across the sky above our land of Israel… When Jesus spoke, Yokhanan, he was the flute player in the market square, the tenant farmer hiring his labourers, the guests going in to the wedding feast, the
bridegroom arrayed for her bride… It was the whole of Israel, in its living flesh, its joys and pains, the sweet golden haze of evenings on the lakeside. He was a piece of music emerging from our native clay, raising us to his God and our God. Listening to Jesus meant that you received, like pure water, the tenderness of the prophets enveloped in the mysterious song of the Psalms. Ah, yes! He was indeed a Jew talking to Jews.”

“This Jesus you knew – they're now putting long speeches in his mouth, making him sound like the Gnostic philosophers. And they are turning him into the Logos, the eternal Word. They say: ‘All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.'”

“Stop!”

From his closed eyes two tears trickled solely down his hollow cheeks, with their straggling beard.

“The Logos! The anonymous divine principle of handme-down philosophers who pretend they've read Plato and harangue the crowds until they've got those idlers in their pockets – not to mention a few silver pieces too! Already the Greeks had transformed the blacksmith Vulcan into a god, and that whore Venus into a goddess, and a jealous husband into a god, and a boatman into a god too. Oh, how easy it is, a god with a human face – and how the public just love it! By deifying Jesus they are thrusting us back into the darkness of paganism from which Moses had rescued us.”

He was weeping now, weeping gently to himself. After a moment's silence, Yokhanan continued:

“Some of your disciples have joined the new Church, but others have remained faithful to Jesus the Nazorean. They are driven from the Christians' gatherings and persecuted, and some of them have even been killed.”

“Jesus had warned us:
You will be driven out of the assemblies, you will be handed over to torture and you will be killed
… Do you have any news of the Nazoreans that I had to abandon in order to take refuge here?”

“I've had some information from nomads. After leaving Pella with you, they continued their exodus as far as an oasis on the Arab peninsula, I think it's called Bakka – a stage on the commercial route to Yemen. The Bedouin who live there worship some sacred stones, but they call themselves sons of Abraham like us. Now a seed of the Nazorean faith has been planted in Arabia!”

“That's good, they'll be safe there. What about Jerusalem?” “It's under siege by Titus, the son of Emperor Vespasian. The city is still holding out, but who knows for how long…”

“Your place is there, my son: this is my journey's end. Go back to Jerusalem, defend our house in the western district. You have a copy of my epistle, keep it in circulation. Perhaps they will listen to you. In any case, they won't be able to transform that the way they have done to my Gospel.”

The old man died two days later. One last time he awaited the dawn. When the flames of the sun enveloped him, he uttered the name of Jesus and stopped breathing.

In the depths of a valley in the desert of Idumaea, a sarcophagus of dry stones arranged in a simple pattern now indicated the tomb of the man who had called himself the beloved disciple of Jesus the Nazorean, the thirteenth apostle who had been his close friend and his best witness. And with him, there vanished for ever the memory of a similar tomb situated somewhere in this desert. One which, even today, contains the remains of a Just Man, unjustly crucified by the ambition of men.

Yokhanan spend the whole night sitting at the entrance to the valley. When, in the clear bright sky, he could see only the star of the watcher still shining, he rose and headed for the North, accompanied by two Essenes.

53

“It's the first time I've managed to identify so clearly the direct influence of a rabbinical melody on a medieval chant!”

They had spent several hours leaning over the glass table of the book stacks, comparing, word for word, a manuscript of Gregorian chant and a manuscript of music from the synagogues, both of them dating to before the eleventh century and composed on the same Biblical text. Leeland turned to Nil.

“Could the synagogue chant really be at the origin of the chant sung in church? I'll just go and fetch the next text in the Jewish Manuscripts room. Take a break while I'm gone.”

Breczinsky had greeted them this morning with his habitual discretion. But he had taken advantage of a moment when Leeland wasn't there to say to Nil, in a hurried undertone:

“If you can… I'd like to have a word with you today.”

His door was a few yards away. Nil, alone at the table, hesitated for a moment. Then he took off his gloves and went over to the office of the Polish librarian.

“Please, take a seat.”

The room was in the image of its occupant, austere and dingy. There were shelves with lines of folders and, on the desk, a computer screen.

“Each of our precious manuscripts appears in a catalogue which is used by scholars from all over the world. I'm right
now setting up a video service which will enable them to be consulted via the Internet – as you'll have noticed, not many people come here these days. Having to travel places to study a text will become more and more of a waste of time.”

“And you will be more and more alone,” thought Nil. A silence fell between them, and Breczinsky seemed unable to break it. Finally, he spoke, in a hesitant tone:

“Can I ask what your relations with Father Andrei were?”

“I've already told you, we were colleagues for a very long time.”

“Yes, but… did you know about his latest research?”

“Only partly. And yet we were very close, much more than is usually the case with members of a religious community.”

“Ah, so you were… close to him?”

Nil didn't understand what he was driving at.

“Andrei was a very dear friend to me, we weren't just brothers in religion but on intimate terms. I've never shared so much with anyone else in my life.”

“Yes,” murmured Breczinsky, “that's what I thought. And to think that when I saw you arriving, I thought you were… one of the collaborators of Cardinal Catzinger! That changes everything.”

“
What does it change
, Father?”

The Pole closed his eyes, as if he were seeking for some inner strength buried deep within himself.

“When Father Andrei came to Rome, he wanted to meet me: we had been corresponding for a long time, but had never met. When he heard my accent, he switched to Polish, which he could speak fluently.”

“Andrei was a Slav, and could speak a dozen or so languages.”

“I was amazed to discover that his Russian family came from Brest-Litovsk, in the Polish province annexed in 1920 by the USSR, on the frontier of the territories placed under German administration in 1939. This unhappy plot of territory, which had always been Polish, never ceased to be coveted by the Russians and the Germans. When my parents got married, it was still under the heel of the Soviets, who populated it with Russian colonists forced to go and live there against their will.”

“Where were you born?”

“In a little village near Brest-Litovsk. The native Polish populace were treated very harshly by the Soviet administration, who despised us as a subject people – and then, to crown it all, we were Catholics. Then came the Nazis, after the invasion of the Soviet Union by Hitler. Father Andrei's family lived next door to mine, and there was just a hedge between their house and ours. They protected my unfortunate parents from the terror that was raging in this border district before the war. Eventually, under the Nazis, they fed us first and then hid us. Without them, without their daily generosity and their courageous aid, my folks would never have survived and I would never have been born. Before she died, my mother made me swear never to forget them, or their descendants and relatives. So you were Andrei's close friend, his brother? Well, his brothers are my brothers, my blood belongs to them. What can I do for you?”

Nil was completely taken aback. He realized that the Polish librarian had divulged as many personal details as he was going to today. In this basement under the city of Rome, the great winds of history and war were suddenly catching up with them.

“Before he died, Father Andrei wrote a short note, various things he wanted to tell me when he came back. I'm striving to understand his message, and I'm continuing along a path that he had ventured along before me. I find it difficult to believe that his death wasn't accidental. I'll never know if he was really killed, but I have the feeling that from beyond his death he has bequeathed his research to me, rather like a posthumous command, a mission. Can you understand that?”

“Yes, especially since he confided various things to me that maybe he said to no one else, not even to you. We'd just discovered we had a common past, a closeness born of particularly painful circumstances. In this office, the ghosts of deeply loved men and women arose, covered in blood and mire. It came as a shock, for him as for me. This is what led me, two days later, to do for Father Andrei something which… which I should never have done. Never.”

“Nil, my boy,” thought Nil to himself. “Take it easy with him, don't rush. Drive those ghosts away.”

“To begin with, I have one problem I need to sort out: I have to find two references that Andrei left behind – Dewey classifications, more or less complete, for works by Church Fathers. If I don't manage to track them down on the Internet, I'll ask you to help me. Up until now I haven't dared ask anyone: the further I go, the more the things that I'm discovering strike me as dangerous.”

“More dangerous than you think.” Breczinsky stood up to indicate the conversation was over. “Let me tell you again: a close friend, a brother of Father Andrei is my brother too. But you need to be extremely careful: what's said between these four walls must remain strictly between us.”

Nil nodded and went back into the room. Leeland had returned to the table, and was starting to arrange a manuscript
under the lamp. He glanced up at his companion, then lowered his head without a word and continued to adjust the light. His face was sombre.

54

Jerusalem, 10th September 70 AD

Yokhanan came through the south gate that was still intact and stopped, gasping in dismay: Jerusalem was no more than a field strewn with ruins.

Titus's troops had entered it at the beginning of August, and for a month a fierce battle raged relentlessly, street by street, house by house. The men of the X Fretensis legion, driven to fury by the resistance, systematically destroyed each stretch of wall still standing. The city is to be razed – these had been Titus's orders – but its Temple spared. He wanted to find out what the effigy of a God capable of inspiring such fanatical behaviour and of leading a whole people to sacrificial death could look like.

On 28th August, he finally managed to enter the parvis leading to the Holy of Holies. It was here, so they said, that the presence of Yahweh, the God of the Jews, resided. His presence, and thus his statue, or something equivalent.

He drew his sword and slashed through the veil of the sanctuary. Took a few steps forwards and halted, unable to believe his eyes.

Nothing.

Or rather, set on a table of pure gold, two winged creatures,
cherubim
of the kind he had seen so often in Mesopotamia. But, between their extended wings, nothing. A void.

So the God of Moses, the God of all these maniacs, did not exist – since, in the Temple, there was no effigy that made his presence manifest. Titus burst out laughing, and emerged from the Temple filled with merriment. “It's the greatest scam ever! There's no god in Israel! All that blood shed for nothing.” Seeing his general guffawing, a legionary hurled a flaming torch into the Holy of Holies.