On and on. Where are fields of grain, terrace of vines?
The straps of the sandals curl worn, dragging between the toes, abrading the skin. No matter. There must be an encounter soon with the people of God who have waited so long. Everywhere animal and human bones – the feet stop, of their own volition, at the sight – the relics of life are indistinguishable except for the rise of hope that is faith, for here is a jaw that could only belong to one who could speak, and the wonder of a skull so magnificent it must testify to the continual resumption of life in that of a pachyderm mutated through the millennia, survived until – what? What catastrophe?
O Lord have you forsaken them? What have your people done to the beautiful earthly abode you gave them, that you have forsaken them?
Where are they, his Father’s people to whom He has sent his son, come at last to save from the death sentence of Time itself; to save them from themselves? Always there have been some survivors. Receiving manna in the form of a plague of locusts become sustenance, consumed as food. Men, women, children, animals somehow clinging to a rock on Ararat. The Flood. Water: yes, he must direct himself to the waters, the sea, fishermen use an element of his Father’s Creation other than earth, from which to take and sustain life. In this Coming as again a mortal, the paths he makes for himself, the mountain pass he climbs and descends are of a long duration, maybe more than two risings and fallings of the light and day ordained in the Beginning. Emptiness. Still no one, nothing walking, grazing, crawling, flying, scuttling from his footsteps, no one hearing his weary intake and release of breath, no face to meet with the sweat bleeding down his brow, the scars wakening under the sweat-soaked shirt. His thick-tongued thirst. The pools where he stumbled to quench it are so putrid they hold no reflected image of what bent to them and the swallows he took were vomited in rejection from his body. The pains the flesh is heir to that he took on for himself with human existence, the first Coming.
And here they are, the waters. The sea spread in peace down there. Certainly soon, the scent of it to pass a cool tongue over the sweat. The seas of the world, of Creation. The sandals slipped and slid taking him to fisherfolk, that steadfast flock who master the wild elements, land, wind and water as everyday circumstance; they would be there for him as they had been since he was among them and in what has been measured while awaiting him. Whatever had befallen, they would be there to begin again, with life netted from the sea.
There are no huts, no boats, no spread nets. Scatters and heaps of what once were these, half-buried by the smoothing hands of sand dunes, half-fumbled through by water along with bones of rotted men, sea creatures on a piled tideline.
He wades in, the sandals which have brought him so far from so long ago are hooked off his feet by the vast decay that clutches at him, thrusts at him. Breast heaves; no cleansing smell of salt to draw into it. Through the shallows, up to his waist, his armpits, and to rocks where mussel and sea urchin shells are fallen choking pools where fingerlings should find shelter from predators. The decomposed corpses of seals buffet against him. No salt scent but a suffocating charnelhouse stink of decay, putrescence.
This was where he achieved the miracle of loaves and fishes.
This water, the day of his Coming, has no properties of transfiguration.
He brings himself in desperate desolation even to consider the heresy (may he be forgiven), the possibilities of the theory which denies the Creation of human life formed divinely in the image of the Father; a belief that a fish struggled out of this element, the waters, to learn to breathe in another, and transform fins into legs that propelled, to walk on earth. But there is no life in the seas. No fish to come a second time, begin again evolution, become human, on one of the planets of the six-day Creation.
The sea is dead.
AVAILABLE FROM PENGUIN
BY NADINE GORDIMER
Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black
ISBN 978-0-14-311423-9
Get a Life
ISBN 978-0-14-303792-7
Loot and Other Stories
ISBN 978-0-14-200468-5
A Sport of Nature
ISBN 978-0-14-008470-2
The Conservationist
ISBN 978-0-14-004716-5
July’s People
ISBN 978-0-14-006140-6
Burger’s Daughter
ISBN 978-0-14-005593-1
Life Times Page 60