John (6 page)
'How long have you been asleep?'
Prochorus does not answer. He crosses the cave with the lamp to where the Apostle had last been sitting. He looks into the empty space in puzzlement. Papias comes to his shoulder. Neither of them say what crosses in their minds. Neither say that perhaps the Apostle has been taken from them.
'Go, wake the others. Call his name. Quickly, quickly,' Prochorus says.
The dawn is near to breaking. There is a chill wind. Papias hurries away across the rocks, while Prochorus stands and cups his hands and calls after the Apostle. His voice travels nowhere. The sea sighs back at him and he feels unwell. He calls again, and again. He goes some way along the upper ledge of the scarp and stumbles and falls forwards, and fears then the blind apostle has plunged off the edge to death in the rocks below. The thought is as a sickness and he lets out a cry.
Across the darkness the other disciples come. Shades against the blued blackness of the predawn, they announce themselves like seabirds by calling. Their master's name is cried over and over. They assemble and disperse, assemble again. None admonishes Prochorus for sleeping when he was to be watching. The business of finding the Apostle is too urgent. Even the elder, Ioseph, is with them now, and with him the wheezing, anxious figure of Simon.
'Where might he be gone? This is not good. This is not good.' Simon wrings his hands.
Ioseph is swift and decisive. 'Two along the upper rocks,' he says, 'two to the eastern ledge. Linus and Prochorus go above to the meeting place, either side of the pathway. He may be fallen. Simon stay here. Papias and I to the foreshore.'
'I am more nimble, I will go with him.' It is Matthias, who appears out of the dark.
'Very well. Simon, remain here by the cave lest he come.'
'But why is he gone?' Papias asks.
'Go,' Ioseph says. 'Hurry.'
A dull daylight greys the island. The figures of the disciples clamber away, calling. They are like ones abandoned in the dark. Across the air no seabirds fly, and the bleak sky above the island seems lidded closed. Matthias moves quickly, his thin figure light. He stops calling. From the foreshore he considers the ledge above them, the fall that would be fatal. Papias is behind.
'Do you think he is perished?'
'Papias, are you unwell? Your face is pale.'
'I am . . . I may have taken ill in the night. Do you think he is perished?'
Matthias looks at him in the thin light. He does not answer. He thinks: What will it mean for them if the Apostle is gone? Without him what will be the hope for their faith enduring there in banishment on the island? What if he is simply wandered out in the dark and fallen to death? What if he has simply succumbed to the fate of the aged or infirm? A mere human ending. It will mean nothing; his power will fade away. There will have been no sign, no miracle. They will feel cheated; they will hunger for a new master.
'I will go the southern shore,' Matthias says. He points in the opposite direction. 'Can you walk that way?'
Papias nods.
'If you find him and he . . .'
They look at each other, then away. They do not say. Matthias's impatience is clear; the old man cannot be left alone; that is what their living has become, minding him on an island. He shakes his head at the thought of it, then he is gone up on to the large rocks, where a man falling from above would be broken like a shell.
Papias prays as he walks. He scans the upper shore, the grey sand where gulls stand curious over spews of seaweed, the smoothed salted stones. The morning is bleak and cold. His eyes are rheumy, blurring the middle distance so a blackened mound of algae, or rockweed might easily be the figure of a fallen man. Papias fists an eye, the other blinks into the bare wind. Is that him? His sandals quicken on the sand, sinking some and making jagged twists of his prints. His heart races, his prayers are stopped. He runs lamely, wound in ankle smarting, pushing back with his hands parcels of the air, wavering his head to and fro and blinking for vision. The black mound, is it the Apostle's white garment sea-spoiled? Did he fall blindly into the sea? Papias clambers on to the first of the rocks, his ankles angled over and slipping, his body pitched forward so he feels for balance with his hands. He progresses, and then stands, fists his eyes again, and sees that the mound is not a man but a large, dark fish haloed with flies.
Momentarily, Papias sits, sighs relief. A needle of pain presses in above his left eye. The fish is of great size and without wound. It lies on one side with mouth pursed and flat incurious eye, its scales lustreless beneath the leaden sky. How it arrived so far up the rocks, what ailed it, age or disease, are not apparent to Papias. It seems to him a strange portent, and for a moment he delays on lunatic logic: the fisher gone, a fish in his place.
He looks at it, waves away flies: is it living still? Is it beached and in need only of return to water? It may be, and is briefly puzzling for reasons he cannot shape, but Papias cannot delay. He steps back, the flies return. He scratches at his face and moves back down the rocks again, hurries limping once more along the grey sand.
My soul longs for you.
Each day, each night.
I have loved you with my life, Lord.
As the vine for water, my soul thirsts for you.
Come, Lord.
I have remained.
Come for me now and take me to you.
This is my prayer. Now, Lord.
Now.
Further along the shore Papias finds the footprints. The parting tide has left a virgin floor of sand, and upon it in the curved pathway of the blind is a pair of barefoot prints. Heel-heavy, stagger-stepped, by the white salt frill the prints make a route towards the water. Papias hurries after them. His head is still needled, his stomach unwell. Is a fever establishing in the caverns of his body? Warm droplets glisten on his brow, fall like stars past his eyes. The prints blur in the softened sand and sink, vanished into the shallow pools and low waters of the tide. Papias feels his heart drop. The Master is gone into the sea, he thinks, and without reason he thinks again of the large fish, the symbol of the Christian, beached on the stones, and steps himself into the first skirting wave. The water is shocking with cold. It seizes his ankles like ice manacles, burns his toe wound. He is gone, he thinks, gone; and with utter grief he scans the waves coming toward him and thinks he will fall into them and never rise such is his loss and guilt and regret.
He wades forwards and scans sideways into the sea, his vision smeared, and grief delirium not far. Gulls raucous wheel and hang overhead. Long, ragged ribbons of weed are in the tide and twine about him. He presses further into the freezing waves, peering down at what touches against him, half expectant to see floating and dragged there the drowned apostle.
Papias sees what may be the white head. It is some way out, in the high, rolling waters. If it is a man, he is to the point of his depth and faces the waves that come higher than him, making his head vanish in the foam.
Now, Lord.
Now.
I am here to meet you.
By water. As in the beginning.
Come now.
'Master! Master!' Papias calls. His voice is carried away, but in the expiration of another wave he sees clearly now that it is the Apostle deep in the sea. Papias calls to him again and wades forward. The water is ice against his chest, his breath is crushed. But he pushes on; John is thin and weak and will drown in moments. What madness is this? Why has he blindly gone into the sea? Is his mind overthrown? He must be saved. Unevenly the sand floor falls away, and suddenly Papias is deeper and loses footing and drops beneath a wave, wide-mouthed and gulping. He cannot swim; he paws wildly at the sand glitter and a long, slimed scarf of weed that enwraps his neck. His life bubbles furiously; kicking and flailing he sinks to drown.
In blind underwater his eyes are bulged O's of astonishment that it will end so. He calls out another grey bubble, is by a wave rolled upon himself so his garment swirls as a sea flower, and his white legs are strange stamens, loose and long and darted through by silvered fish in that fish-full sea.
Kicking done, a sandal falls free, spins, floats, sinks, heels into the home of sea lice and sea worms.
Papias is taken out by the hungry tide; the one who came to save, drowned. His eyes are open, white and pinked as scallops, his fingers pale starfish, all his body a bountiful island of feed. Underwater, the motion of the waves is soothing, is as waves of sleep coming, one after the other, each taking him further. He lets go, lets go of rescue, of struggle, of overcoming the sea. In the same instant, as if his life departs from him like a ship and he watches it go, Papias feels float from him the service of the Apostle. Floating from him are the years he has followed the Master since he heard the Christians were banished on Patmos and came himself in a fisher's boat to be baptised and stay. From him go the years of prayer and attendance and faithfulness, dissolving goes the night he has spent, the woman Marina, her dead children just ahead of him now on the journey into the everlasting. All sails into the deeps. Papias lets go, is dragged down by the undertow, wave-spun, his chest crushed for last air. A briny nothingness takes him. His brain is dulled, a sea cabbage, his final expression empty surrender.
The undersea sounds constant pounding. As though all is within a great ear, pulse and thrum, susurrus, the ceaseless sighing. Fish, silent as death, slip one direction for another. On the sea floor a shell moves minutely. Black weed waves funereal slow. The body of the man sinks unevenly, feet down, head up, as if to foot off water sprites or land walking in the afterlife. It is as ascension in reverse, slow, deliberate, hands outwards, hair fanned, garments waving even with heavenly majesty, but in descent. This floating sinking is for ever, a journey not many feet but enduring out of time, the sea's small mercy before the body touches bottom and does not rise.
But then it does.
It defies the laws of death and dominion of the sea.
It surges upwards, past waterweed and fish shoal and bursts headfirst through the waves.
Papias does not feel the hands that grasp him. His eyes are away, his mouth agape. He does not know how the drowned return, how life is measured, cut, or granted, how in the vastness of the sea the blind apostle has found him. Has he pulled back the tide like a cloth? Has he
seerP.
Papias has no mind to ask. Lifeless, he does not feel the fierce strength in the old man, but is fallen against the Apostle's breast, is cradled there, where the sea seems to withdraw from them. What daylight shines, what air enwraps them, are all unknown to the drowned servant; what prayers may be said, what words called up to the very gates of heavens, unheard by him.
He is held in the arms of the Apostle.
Then brusque life returns. Violent air like fierce light is thrust into the flooded chambers, and Papias is convulsed. He gags and his head shudders. John holds him. The sea about their waists. With brief flickering the eyes of the drowned open. Papias sees where he is.
He opens his mouth and speaks a spew of seawater.
'Praise God,' the blind apostle says.
And Papias turns to the grey swirl of sky all about them, as if he might see just then, the sight of the Lord himself departing.
'His mind is lost,' Matthias says. 'In his blindness he does not know day from night. He wandered out and did not know where he was and could have perished in the sea. This is the truth. Prochorus, tell me, is this not the truth?'
They sit inside the open doorway of Matthias's dwelling of skin and sticks, planking and rock. Iron light falls, the sea beyond rough.
Matthias offers a dried fig, gnaws on its aged wrinkling when it is declined.
'You have known him, Prochorus. He is no longer the same man. You cannot say so. And yet we follow what he says. Answer me this: if he says we must all walk into the tide and drown in the morning, what shall we answer?' Matthias's hooded eyes seek the scribe's, but Prochorus looks away.
'I tell you this. We do nothing here for the Lord. This is not what God wants of us, Prochorus. He spoke to the Ancient many years ago, but does he now? The others will not ask this question, but they think it. I know they do. You do, too, don't you? You must wonder where is the one singed with fire that dictated the revelation? Where are the revelations he promised were at hand?'
The fig requires harsh chewing to find flavour. Matthias works it, pursed in his cheek, fingers out seed caught in his teeth. His voice is clear and unafraid; he has calculated what he is to say and has chosen now, and Prochorus, with whom to begin.
'Consider,' he says, and draws another fig from the pouch, offers it, is declined, eats. 'Consider this: Jesus of Nazareth was a man. He was the son of Joseph the carpenter. A Galilean. As a child he was a child. He did not cure the sick, raise the dead. He was as you or I, Prochorus. There were no signs. Nothing. Why so, if he was the Son of God? Why, if the Son of God, and his cousin is dying of a snakebite, his aunt lame, why not lay a hand and heal? Why not begin God's work at once? Illness and hurt were always present, why wait? Why play with other children and live an ordinary life if Jesus was the Son of God?'