The Book of Strange New Things (39 page)

‘The most cherished of hopes, as we all know,’ he said, ‘is a new child. The Bible – the book that some of you love as much as I do – contains many fine stories about the birth of children, including the birth of Jesus, our Lord. But this is not the time and place for me to tell Bible stories. All I will say is that the ancient words of
Ecclesiastes
have helped me make sense of what I’ve seen in the last few days.
Ecclesiastes
says: To everything there is a season. There is a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to plant seeds, and a time to reap. An old person – the mother of Jesus Lover One – has died. That was a very sad thing. A new person – สคฉ้รี่ – has been born today. That is a very happy thing. Let us honour the equal importance of each: in celebrating a new life we remember losing those who’ve left us, and then in the midst of sadness our spirits are lifted as we welcome new life. So, to little สคฉ้รี่, most beautiful and precious gift to our community, I say: welcome!’

He hoped he’d invested the last word with sufficient resonance to signal that this was the end of his speech. Evidently he had: the audience emitted a mass murmur, applauded and waved. Even the baby, catching the prevailing mood, extended his tiny gloves. The room, so hushed in the preceding minutes, was once again filled with cooing and conversation; the people who’d briefly been transformed into an audience turned back into a crowd. Peter bowed and retreated to his former spot against the wall.

For one instant, in the midst of the renewed celebrations that followed, his mind was tickled by a thought of his own baby, growing inside the body of his wife far away. But it was just a thought, and not even a properly formed thought – a half-glimpsed reflection of a thought, which couldn’t compete with all the commotion right in front of him: the brightly dressed crowd, the excited gestures, the unearthly cries, the watchful newborn with its spindly limbs, hero of the moment, king of the day.

16

Toppling off an axis, falling through space

On the fifth day, a day of rain and almost unbearable beauty, it slipped Peter’s mind that Grainger was coming for him.

It wasn’t that he didn’t want her to come, and it wasn’t that she’d ceased to be real to him. Every now and then, during the three hundred and sixty-odd hours leading up to their scheduled rendezvous, she had been in his thoughts. He wondered, for example, if she would let him help her with her next drug delivery; he recalled the scars on her forearms and speculated about what anguish might have led her younger self to inflict them; and sometimes, at nights before drifting off, he replayed a fleeting vision of her pale, troubled face. However, his life here among the Oasans was very full, and there were so many things he must try to hold in his head.
Observe the opportunity
, as
Ecclesiastes
urged him.
Be not ignorant of anything great or small
.

Oh, he didn’t forget to pray for Charlie Grainger and Coretta, and he thought of Grainger each time he did so. But when he woke up on the morning of the fifth day, the long night was finished, the sun had risen, and the rains were drawing near – and that was that. His appointment with USIC’s moody pharmacist was erased from his brain.

Keeping track of schedules had never been his strong suit anyhow. The longer he spent among the Oasans, the less point he could see in clinging to ways of telling time that were, frankly, irrelevant. A day for him had ceased to feel like twenty-four hours and it certainly didn’t consist of 1,440 minutes. A day was a span of daylight, divided from the next by a spell of darkness. While the sun shone, he would stay awake for twenty, maybe twenty-five hours at a stretch. He didn’t know exactly how long, because his father’s watch had stopped working, ruined by damp. Sad, but there was no point grieving.

Anyway, life wasn’t about measurement, it was about getting the most out of each God-given minute. There was so much to do, so much to digest, so many people to commune with . . . When darkness fell, Peter would slip into comatose sleep, his consciousness sinking fast and irretrievable like a car dumped in a lake. After an age spent down on the bottom, he would float up into shallower fathoms where he would doze and dream, get up to pee, then doze and dream some more. It was as though he’d discovered the secret of Joshua – Joshua the cat, that is. The secret of snoozing for hours and days on end without boredom, storing up energy for a future occasion.

And then when he’d slept as much as he possibly could, he would lie awake, staring up at the sky, familiarising himself with the eighty-seven stars, giving them each a name: Zimran, Jokshan, Medan, Midian, Ishbak, Shuah, Sheba and so on. All those genealogies in
Genesis
and
Exodus
had come in useful after all. They had begat a new constellation.

Mostly, by the light of slow-burning resin candles, he would sit up in bed, working on his paraphrases of Scripture. The King James Bible spread open on his lap, a notepad cradled on his forearm, a pillow for his head whenever he needed to mull over the alternatives.
Unto every province according to the writing thereof, and unto every people after their language
– Mordecai’s publishing manifesto, sometime during the Israelites’ Babylonian exile. If the Oasans couldn’t have the Gospel in their own words, they deserved the next-best thing: a version they could speak and sing.

More than once, he’d walked out from his church into the darkness, knelt in the area of scrubland where he buried his faeces, and asked God to tell him honestly if he was falling prey to the sin of Pride. These translations he was spending so much energy on – were they really needed? The Oasans had never asked to be delivered from consonants. They seemed resigned to their humiliation. Kurtzberg had taught them to sing ‘Amazing Grace’, and how sweet the sound had been – yet how excruciating, too. And wasn’t that the point? There was grace in their strenuous approximation. More grace, for sure, than you’d find in some complacent congregation in a British village, singing facile hymns while their minds were half-preoccupied with football or soap operas. The Oasans wanted their Book of Strange New Things; maybe he shouldn’t dilute its strangeness.

He prayed for guidance. God did not caution him. In the stillness of the balmy Oasan night, with the stars shining greenish in the azure heavens, the overwhelming message he felt in the atmosphere around him was:
All shall be well. Goodwill and compassion can never be wrong. Continue as you began
. Nothing could tarnish the memory of the day when the Oasans sang ‘Amazing Grace’ for him – it was Kurtzberg’s gift to them, which they’d passed on to their next pastor. But he, Peter, would give them different gifts. He would give them Scripture that flowed forth from them as easily as breath itself.

Close to a hundred and twenty Jesus Lovers were in the fold now, and Peter was determined to know them all as individuals, which took a lot more effort than simply keeping a mental record of robe colours and Jesus Lover numbers. He was making headway (so to speak) with telling the difference between the faces. The trick was to quit waiting for the features to resolve themselves into a nose, lips, ears, eyes and so on. That wasn’t going to happen. Instead, you had to decode a face as you’d decode a tree or a rock formation: abstract, unique, but (after you’d lived with it for a while) familiar.

Even so, to
recognise
was not the same as to
know
. You could train yourself to identify a certain pattern of bulge and colour, and realise: this is Jesus Lover Thirteen. But who, really, was Jesus Lover Thirteen? Peter had to admit he was finding it difficult to know the Oasans in any deeper sense. He loved them. For the time being, that would have to do.

Sometimes, he wondered if it would have to do for ever. It was hard to remember individuals if they didn’t behave like humans, with their circus displays of ego, their compulsive efforts to brand themselves on your mind. Oasans didn’t work that way. No one engaged in behaviours that screamed
Look at me!
or
Why won’t the world let me be myself?
No one, as far as he could tell, was anxiously pondering the question
Who am I?
They just got on with life. At first, he’d found that impossible to believe, and assumed this equanimity must be a front, and any day now he would discover that the Oasans were as screwed up as anyone else. But no. They were as they appeared to be.

In one way, it was really kind of . . .
restful
, to be spared the melodramas that made things so complicated when you dealt with other humans. But it meant that his tried-and-true method of gaining intimacy with new acquaintances was totally useless here. He and Bea had pulled it off so many times, in all the places where they’d ministered, from opulent hotel lobbies to needle exchanges, always the same message to open people up:
Don’t worry, I can see that you’re not like everybody else. Don’t worry, I can see that you’re special
.

The Oasans didn’t need Peter to tell them who they were. They bore their individuality with modest self-confidence, neither celebrating nor defending the eccentricities and flaws that distinguished them from others of their kind. They were like the most Buddhist-y Buddhists imaginable – which made their hunger for the Christian religion all the more miraculous.

‘You’re aware, aren’t you,’ he’d said to Jesus Lover One a while back, ‘that some of my people believe in different religions from the Christian one?’

‘We have heard,’ Lover One replied.

‘Would you like me to tell you something about those religions?’

It seemed the decent thing to offer. Lover One did the fidgety thing with the sleeves of his robe that he always did when he wanted a conversation to go no further.

‘We will have no other God than God our สีaviour. In Him alone we have hope of Life.’

It was what any Christian pastor might yearn to hear from a new convert, yet hearing it stated so baldly, so calmly, was a bit unsettling. Ministering to the Oasans was a joy, but Peter couldn’t help thinking that it was too easy.

Or was it? Why
shouldn’t
it be easy? When the window of the soul was clear, not smeared and tarnished with the accumulated muck of deviousness and egomania and self-loathing, there was nothing to stop the light from shining straight in. Yes, maybe that was it. Or maybe the Oasans were just too naïve, too impressionable, and it was his responsibility to give their faith some intellectual rigour. He hadn’t worked it out yet. He was still praying on it.

Then there were the ones who weren’t Jesus Lovers, the ones whose names he couldn’t even pronounce. What was he to do about them? They were no less precious in the eyes of God, and no doubt had needs and sorrows every bit as serious as anyone else’s. He should be reaching out to them, but they ignored him. Not aggressively; they just behaved as if he wasn’t there. No, that wasn’t quite right; they acknowledged his presence as one might respect a fragile obstacle – a plant that mustn’t be stepped on, a chair that mustn’t be knocked over – but they had nothing to say to him. Because, of course, they
literally
had nothing to say to him, nor he to them.

Determined to do more than just preach to the converted, Peter strove to get to know these strangers, noting the nuances of their gestures, the way they related to each other, the roles they seemed to play in the community. Which, in a community as egalitarian as the Oasans’, was not easy. There were days when he felt that the best he’d ever achieve with them was a sort of animal tolerance: the kind of relationship that an occasional visitor develops with a cat which, after a while, no longer hisses and hides.

Altogether there were about a dozen non-Christians he recognised on sight and whose mannerisms he felt he was getting a grip on. As for the Jesus Lovers, he knew them all. He kept notes on them, indecipherable notes scrawled sometimes in the dark, smudged with sweat and humidity, qualified with question marks in the margins. It didn’t matter. The real, practical knowledge was intuitive, stored in what he liked to think of as the Oasan side of his brain.

He still had no clear idea how many people lived in C-2. The houses had many rooms, like beehives, and he couldn’t guess how many of them were inhabited. Which meant he also couldn’t estimate how tiny, or not so tiny, the proportion of Christians was. Maybe one per cent. Maybe a hundredth of one per cent. He just didn’t know.

Still, even a hundred Christians was an amazing achievement in a place like this, more than enough to accomplish great things. The church was coming ahead. The building, that is. It had a roof now, sensibly sloped, watertight and utilitarian. His polite requests for a spire had been deflected (‘we do all other thing, pleaสีe, before’); he sensed that they would deflect it for ever.

As a compensation, the Oasans had promised to decorate the ceiling. Kurtzberg had once shown them a photograph of a place they called, almost unintelligibly, the สีiสีรี่ine ฐapel. Inspired by the handiwork of Michelangelo, the Oasans were keen to create something similar, except they suggested that all the incidents should be from the life of Jesus rather than from the Old Testament. Peter was all for it. Apart from giving the church some much-needed colour, it would give him an insight into the unique nature of these people’s perception.

Lover Five, as always, was quickest off the mark, showing him her sketch of the scene she proposed to paint. It was the one outside Jesus’s tomb, where Salome and the two Marys find the stone rolled away. Evidently, this story was already familiar to her. Peter couldn’t guess which of the four gospel accounts Kurtzberg had used, whether it was Luke’s ‘two men in dazzling raiment’ story, Matthew’s angel descending from Heaven with earthquake accompaniment, Mark’s lone young man sitting on a rock, or John’s pair of angels inside the tomb. Whichever it was, Lover Five had rejected these characters and replaced them with the risen Christ. Her mourners, daintily proportioned and clad in hooded robes like herself, confronted a scarecrow-thin figure wearing a loincloth. This Jesus stood erect with arms spread wide, an eye-shaped hole in each palm of His starfish-shaped hands. Above His neck, where His head should be, Lover Five had left a blank space surrounded by a porcupine profusion of lines, to indicate radiance from an incandescent light source. On the ground between Him and the women lay a bagel-like object which Peter realised after a minute must be the discarded crown of thorns.