The Shoes of the Fisherman

by Morris West

  To be sure, he had made a contract. He would be the White Knight without fear and without reproach, and the Christian Democrats would let him lead them into power. But there was room still for a footnote, and the Princess Maria-Rina had spelled it out for him…Trust and friendship…Perhaps even more! In the sour bargain he had made, there was suddenly a hint of sweetness.

  He picked up the telephone, dialled the number of his office, and asked young Campeggio to bring the afternoon’s correspondence to his apartment.

  At ten-thirty on a cloudless morning, Charles Corbet Carlin, Cardinal Archbishop of New York, landed at Fiumicino airport. An official of the Secretariat of State met him at the steps of the aircraft and hurried him past the Customs and Immigration officials into a Vatican limousine. An hour and a half later, he was closeted with Kiril the Pontiff and Goldoni the Secretary of State.

  Carlin was by nature a peremptory man, and he understood the usages of power. He was quick to see the change that a few months of office had wrought in the Pope. He had lost none of his charm, none of his swift, intuitive warmth. Yet he seemed to have reached a new dimension of authority. His scarred face was leaner, his speech more brisk, his whole manner more urgent and concerned. Yet, characteristically, he opened the discussion with a smile and an apology:

  ‘I’m grateful that Your Eminence came so promptly. I know how busy you are. I wanted to explain myself more fully, but I could not trust the information even to a coded cable.’

  Then in crisp, emphatic sentences, he explained the reason for the summons and showed Carlin the text of Kamenev’s two letters.

  The American scanned them with a shrewd and calculating eye, and then handed them back to the Pontiff. ‘I understand Your Holiness’s concern. I confess I am less clear on what Kamenev hopes to gain by this manoeuvre.’

  Goldoni permitted himself a faint smile. ‘Your Eminence’s reaction is the same as mine…A manoeuvre! His Holiness, however, takes a different view.’

  Kiril spread his crooked hands on the desk top and explained himself simply. ‘I want you to understand first that I know this man. I know him more intimately than I know either of you. For a long time he was my interrogator in prison. Each of us has had a great influence on the other. It was he who arranged my escape from Russia. I am profoundly convinced that this is not a political manoeuvre, but a genuine appeal for help in the crisis which will soon be upon us.’

  Carlin nodded thoughtfully. ‘Your Holiness may be right. It would be folly to discount your experience with this man and your intimate knowledge of the Russian situation. On the other hand – and I say it with all respect – we have another kind of experience with Kamenev and with the Soviets.’

  ‘When you say “we”, do you refer to the Church or to the United States of America?’

  ‘To both,’ said Carlin flatly. ‘So far as the Church is concerned, the Secretariat of State will bear me out. There is still active persecution in the satellite countries. In Russia the faith has been totally extinguished. Our brother bishops who went to prison with Your Holiness are all dead. The Soviet frontiers are sealed against the faith. I see no prospect of their being opened in our time.’

  Goldoni added agreement. ‘I have already put this view very clearly to His Holiness.’

  ‘And I,’ said Kiril the Pontiff, ‘do not disagree with it…Now tell me about the American view.’

  ‘At first blush,’ said Carlin, ‘this looks to me like another version of the old summit meetings. We all remember the arguments…“Let’s bypass the lower echelons and let the leaders talk freely and familiarly about our problems. Let’s skip the details and get down to the fundamental issues that divide us…” Well, we had the meetings. They were always abortive. In the end every discussion was wrecked by the details. What ever good will existed before the meetings was diminished, if not wholly destroyed. In the end, you see, the lower echelons of government are more decisive than the upper ones, because under our system, and under the Russian one, the leader is always subject to the pressures of political and administrative advice from below. No single man can sustain the burden of decision on major issues.’ He smiled expansively at the Pontiff. ‘Even in the Church we have the same situation. Your Holiness is the Vicar of Christ. Yet the effectiveness of your decisions is limited by the co-operation and obedience of the local ordinaries.’

  Kiril and Pontiff picked up the letters from his desk and held them out to his two counsellors. ‘So what would you have me do about these? Ignore them?’

  Carlin side-stepped the question. ‘What does Kamenev ask Your Holiness to do?’

  ‘He is very clear, I think. He asks me to communicate the letters to the President of the United States, and communicate also my own interpretation of his mind and his intentions.’

  ‘What is his mind, Holiness? What are his intentions?’

  ‘Let me quote again what he says. “Within twelve months, even sooner, we may come to the brink of war. I want peace. I know that we cannot have it with a one-sided bargain. On the other hand, I cannot dictate its terms even to my own people. I am caught in the current of history. I can tack across it but I cannot change the direction of the flow…I believe you understand what I am trying to say. I ask you, if you can, to interpret it as clearly as possible to the President of the United States…” To me, in my knowledge of the man, the message is quite evident. Before the crisis become irreversible, he wants to establish a ground of negotiation, so that peace may be preserved.’

  ‘But what ground?’ asked Goldoni. ‘Your Holiness must admit that he is somewhat less than precise.’

  ‘Put it another way,’ said Carlin in his pragmatic fashion. ‘I go back home. I call Washington and ask for a private interview with the President of the United States. I show him these letters. I say: “It is the view of the Holy See that Kamenev wants to begin secret talks to fend off the crisis we all know is coming. The Pope will be the intermediary of the talks…” What do you think the President will say or do then? What would Your Holiness do in his place?’

  Kiril’s scarred face twitched into a smile of genuine amusement. ‘I should say, talk costs nothing. So long as men can communicate, however haltingly, then there is a hope of peace. But close all the doors, cut all the wires, build the walls even higher – then each nation is an island, preparing in secret a common destruction.’

  Abruptly Carlin challenged the argument. ‘There is a flaw in the logic, Holiness. Forgive me, but I have to show it to you. Talk always costs something – this kind of talk especially. Secret parleys are dangerous because once they are brought into the open – and inevitably they must be – then they can be denied by those who took part in them. They can be used as weapons in political dealings.’

  ‘Remember!’ Goldoni added the potent afterthought. ‘There are no longer two grand powers in the world. There is Russia, and the United States. There is the European block. There is China, and there are the uncommitted nations of Asia and Africa and the South Americas. There is not only the arms race. There is the race to feed the hungry and the race to align vast numbers of mankind with one ideology or another. We dare not take too simple a view of this very complex world.’

  ‘I hesitate to say it, Holiness,’ said Carlin gravely. ‘But I should not like to see the Holy See compromised by offering itself as an intermediary in bilateral and probably abortive discussions…Personally I mistrust a truce with the Russian bear, no matter how prettily he dances.’

  ‘You have him in the papal coat of arms,’ said Kiril tartly. ‘Do you mistrust him there too?’

  ‘Let me answer the question with another. Can Your Holiness trust himself completely in this matter? This is not doctrine or dogma, but an affair of State. Your Holiness is as open to error as the rest of us.’

  He had been dangerously frank and he knew it. To be Cardinal Archbishop of New York was to sit high in the Church, to dispose great influence, to command money and resources vital to the economy of the Vatican. Yet, in the
constitution of the faith, the Successor of Peter was paramount, and in its history many a Cardinal Prince had been stripped of his preferment by a single word from an outraged Pontiff. Charles Corbet Carlin sat back in his chair and waited, not without uneasiness, for the papal answer.

  To his surprise, it was delivered in a tone of restraint and real humility. ‘Everything you tell me is true. It is, in fact, a reflection of my own thought on the matter. I am grateful that you have chosen to be open with me, that you have not tried to bend me by diplomatic words. I do not want to bend you either. I do not want to force you to act against your own prudence. This is not a matter of faith or morals, it is a matter of private conviction, and I should like to share mine with you…Let us have lunch first, and then I want to show you both something. You have seen it before, but I hope today it may take on another meaning for you.’

  Then, seeing the doubt and surprise on their faces, he laughed almost boyishly. ‘No, there are no plots, no Borgia subtleties. I’ve learned something in Italy. One should never discuss weighty matters on an empty stomach. I think Goldoni will agree that I’ve reformed the Vatican kitchens if nothing else. Come now, let’s relax for a while.’

  They ate simply but well in Kiril’s private apartment. They talked discursively of men and affairs and the hundred intimacies of the hierarchic society to which they belonged. They were like members of an exclusive international club, whose fellows were scattered to every point of the compass, but whose affairs were common knowledge in all tongues.

  When the meal was over and the Vatican had lapsed into the somnolence of siesta time, Kiril put on a black cassock and led his two guests into the Basilica of Saint Peter.

  The tourists were sparse now, and no one paid any attention to three middle-aged clerics halted by the confessional boxes near the sacristy. Kiril pointed to one of them which carried on its door the laconic legend, ‘Polish and Russian’.

  ‘Once a week I come and sit here for two hours, to hear the confession of anyone who chances to come. I should like to hear them in Italian as well, but the dialects escape me…You both know what this ministry of the tribunal is like. The good ones come. The bad ones stay away; but every so often there arrives the soul in distress, the one who needs a special co-operation from the confessor to lead him back to God…It’s a lottery always – a gamble on the moment and the man, and the fruitfulness of the Word one plucks from one’s own heart. And yet there, in that stuffy little box, is the whole meaning of the faith – the private speech of man with his Creator, myself between as man’s servant and God’s. There, encompassed by the smell of blood sausage and cabbage water, and the sweat of a frightened man, I am what I was ordained to be: a sublime opportunist, a fisher of men, not knowing what I shall catch in my net or whether I shall catch anything at all…Now come over here.’

  He beckoned to an attendant to accompany them. Then he took the arms of the two Cardinals and walked them across to the steps that led down to the confession of Saint Peter, in front of the great altar of Bernini. They descended the steps. The attendant unlocked the bronze grille in front of the kneeling statue of Pope Pius VI. When they entered the recess, he closed the door on them and retired to a respectful distance. Kiril led his two counsellors to the space where a dark hole plunged down towards the grottoes of the Vatican. Then he turned to face them. His voice dropped to a murmur that echoed softly round the enclosure.

  ‘Down there, they say, is the tomb of Peter the Fisherman. Whenever I am afraid or in darkness, I come here to pray, and ask him what I, his inheritor, should do. He was an opportunist too, you know. The Master gave him the Keys of the Kingdom. The Holy Ghost gave him the gift of wisdom and the gift of tongues. Then he was left, still a fisherman, an alien in the empire of Rome, to plant the seed of the Gospel wherever there was earth to receive it…He had no method. He had no temple. He had no book but the living Gospel. He was conditioned by the time in which he lived, but he could not be bound by the condition…Neither can I. Do you remember the story of Paul coming into the city of Athens, among the philosophers and the rhetors, and seeing the altar of the Unknown God? Do you remember what he did? He cried out with a loud voice: “Men, brethren! What you worship without knowing, I preach!” Is not this an opportunist also? He does not reason with the moment. He does not appeal to a system or a history. He gambles himself and his mission on a word tossed into a milling crowd. Don’t you see? This is the meaning of faith. This is the risk of belief.’

  He turned a luminous face on Carlin, not commanding but pleading with him. ‘Before Your Eminence came to see me I was in darkness. I saw myself as a fool shouting a folly to a heedless world. So be it! That is what we preach : transcendent nonsense which we trust in the end will make a divine logic…’

  Abruptly he relaxed and grinned at them mischievously. ‘In prison I learned to gamble, and I found that in the end the man who always won was he who never hedged his bets. I know what you’re thinking. I want to navigate the barque of Peter by the seat of my papal breeches…But if the wind is blown by the breath of God, and the water is rocked by His hands…how better can I do it? Answer me! How better can I do it?’

  In the narrow enclosure, Goldoni shifted uneasily on his feet.

  Carlin stood as obstinate and unshakable as Plymouth Rock. He said evenly, ‘This is perhaps the faith that moves mountains, Holiness. I regret that it has not been given to me in the same measure. I am compelled to work by normal prudence. I cannot agree that the affairs of the Church can be administered by private inspiration.’

  Kiril the Pontiff was still smiling when he answered. ‘You elected me by inspiration, Eminence. Do you the Holy Ghost has deserted me?’

  Carlin was not to be put off. He pressed his argument stubbornly. ‘I did not say that, Holiness. But I will say this : no one is large enough to make himself the universal man. You want to be all things to all men, but you can never truly succeed. You’re a Russian, I am an American. You ask me to risk more on this Kamenev than I would risk on my own brother, if he were President of the United States. I cannot do it.’

  ‘Then,’ said Kiril, with unexpected mildness, ‘I will not ask you to do it. I will not ask you to risk anything. I will give you a simple command. You will present yourself to the President of the United States. You will offer him these letters, and one which I shall write myself. If your opinion is asked, you will be free to say whatever you wish, as a private cleric and as an American, but you will not attempt to interpret my mind or Kamenev’s. This way I hope you will feel free to discharge your duty to the Church and to your country.’

  Carlin flushed. He said awkwardly, ‘Your Holiness is generous with me.’

  ‘Not generous, only logical. If I believe the Holy Ghost can work through me and through Kamenev, why should he not work through the President of the United States? It is never wise to discount Omnipotence. Besides,’ he added gently, ‘you may do better for me in opposition. At least you will guarantee the good faith of the Holy See towards the United States of America…I think now, perhaps, we should pray together. It is not expected that we should agree on what is prudent, only that our wills should be set towards the service of the same God.’

  As the month of July drew to a close, and the summer exodus from Rome began, Ruth Lewin found herself caught up once more in the cyclic drama of mental distress.

  The onset of the action was always the same: a deep melancholy, a sensation of solitude, a feeling of rootlessness, as though she had been set down suddenly on an unfamiliar planet where her past was meaningless, her future was a question mark, and communication lapsed into gibberish.

  The melancholy was the worst sensation of all. As a symptom it was familiar to her; yet she could neither reason with it nor dispel it. It drove her into fits of weeping. When the tears stopped; she felt empty and incapable of the simplest pleasure. When she looked in a mirror she saw herself old and ravaged. When she walked out into the city, she was a stranger, an object of derision to the p
assers-by.

  The flaw in her personality must be evident to everybody. She was a German by birth, a Jew by race, an American by adoption, an exile in the country of the sun. She demanded belief and refused it with the same gesture. She needed love and knew herself impotent to express it. She wanted desperately to live, yet was haunted by the insidious attraction of death. She was everything and nothing. There were times when she huddled helpless in her apartment like a sick animal, afraid of the clamorous health of her kind.

  All her relationships seemed to fail her at once. She moved like a stranger among her protégés in old Rome. She made expensive telephone calls to friends in America. When they failed to answer she was desolate. When they responded with casual thanks, she was convinced she had made a fool of herself. She was oppressed by the prospect of summer, when Rome was deserted and the heat lay like a leaden pall over the alleys and the sluggish life of the piazzas.

  At night she lay wakeful with aching breasts, tormented by a fire in the flesh. When she drugged herself into sleep, she dreamed of her dead husband and woke sobbing in an empty bed. The young doctor with whom she worked came to visit her, but he was too immersed in his own problems, and she was too proud to reveal her own to him. He was in love with her, he said, but his demands were too blunt, and when she drew away he was quickly bored, so that in the end he stopped coming, and she blamed herself for his neglect.

  A couple of times she tried the old prescription for unhappy widows in Rome. She sat herself in a bar and tried to drink herself into recklessness. But three drinks made her ill, and when she was accosted, she was brusquely and unreasonably angry.

  The experience was salutary. It made her cling with a kind of desperation to the last vestige of reason. It gave her a little more patience to support the illness which she knew must pass, even though she dare not wait too long upon the cure. Each petty crisis depleted her reserves and brought her one step nearer the medicine cabinet, where the bottle of barbiturates mocked her with the illusion of forgetfulness.