I would make my way up into the mountains, find him at his monastery, and . . . And what? Bring him down. What did I mean? Bring him back to earth? From out of the clouds he’d ascended, back to reality. Or did I mean bring him to his knees? Did a part of me want that?
‘I will find him and bring him back.’
I remember her eyes, so true, so sharp, laying me open. But not to contest this, because Sophe refused to be my rival. Her eyes were unforgiving in their penetration – What is it that you want? – demanding I understand myself, challenging me to. But I was flailing around again. Do I flail any less today, after all these years? Who knows. I’ve no wish to chase shadows now, I know that. I prefer to let them be.
‘I will find a lift up the mountain. I will be gone three days, no more. I will bring him down.’
She looked and she looked. How thin I felt under her gaze. Whatever solidity I thought I had dissolved before her. How insubstantial and small my heart must have appeared to her.
‘OK,’ Sophe said. The same calm as the first day I saw her, all equanimity residing in her breast. ‘I trust you.’
THIRTEEN
When I first glimpsed the Ahaggar, the distant mountains looked to be a series of mounds rising from the desert, like the abandoned anthills in the back paddock at home. Slowly they metamorphosed, the entire landscape rising, swelling, enveloping us as we drove onwards, inwards. I’ve since heard travellers marvel at their beauty, read their breathless descriptions of wonder and of majesty. It was nothing of the sort. The creative drama of the place was dark.
Everywhere were the scars of gods and demons. The land was what was left over after their warring. Or their play, who could tell? But it was desolate. All the miles of desert I’d passed through till then were fertile when set against this heartless landscape. No blade of grass, no tree, had ever lived here, no memory, even, of life. No ancient trace of it. In the wind that whistled and howled and screeched all the hours of the climb, there was no longing. There was nothing mournful or nostalgic. This place had been created by darkness and unto darkness it had been eternally delivered.
It was earth, but set in a turbulence of volcanic movement so great it seemed the mountains were still shifting. How many volcanoes? An expanse of them, like a never-ending field of mines, bursting and blowing, spitting and exploding – the cores were what remained now, ramparts and pinnacles, peaks and broken spires and towers, all cracked or crumbling. And the lava, splattered and piled. Nothing – anywhere – smooth. Everything was damaged, every surface scoured like an overworked piece of stone.
Up the jagged track we went, the vehicle jolting and shuddering, my shoulders bruising against the insides of the cabin. That a track existed at all among these upward-rising slopes brought a sense of foreboding: that this undertaking was folly, that I was being lured towards some disaster. But I was beyond any decision to continue or to return. Wide-eyed and anxious, I huddled close to the car while each puncture was repaired. Though these pauses were respite from the violence of the climb, outside the vehicle we were exposed to these canyons and whatever spirits dwelt among them.
Eventually, I became numb. The unrelenting jarring of my body, the continuing barrenness. The hardness of it all. The total victory of the forces of lifelessness.
*
It was late-afternoon when we reached the end of the track and stopped. My Dutch companions hoped to sell photos of the Ahaggar sunrise the next morning to National Geographic, and were soon busy making camp for the evening. The cold was bitter, chiselling out shadows all around.
‘You’re sure you know what you’re doing?’ one of the photographers asked.
‘If I need a lift down again, I’ll be back here by midday tomorrow.’ I answered. ‘And thanks.’
A narrow footpath led from the road’s terminus, pushing even higher. For me there was only onwards so I leant, alone, into the path. The way passed between boulders, deep in shade. My bag across my shoulder, filled with emergency rations, was a comfort. I moved steadily upwards, scuffing the dark path with the toes of my boots, checking it without tripping.
Night fell, the awful weight of it dousing the sun. The boulders at each side seemed to grow larger, became walls of rock, till the darkness was so complete I imagined the stones might grow over me.
And only then – at the prospect of absolute envelopment – did I see, in the sky, light. It was the stars, breaking through into immensity.
I stopped to put on my last jumper; not even the steep hike was enough to warm me. When I looked up, to draw breath before pressing on, there was a rock ahead darker than the rest. I climbed closer and it seemed to glow – despite its darkness – from deep within. Then, when I was almost upon it, the glow became a pulse of soft yellow light and I realised the rock was a hut. Slabs of wood had been set into stone, as walls, and in the gaps between stone and timber I could see the small flickering of a candle or a lamp. The door was small and the night was vast.
I knocked. I was ready to wrap my arms around my brother, and to weep, or laugh.
The door opened and a tall figure appeared, but it was not Jack. The man’s face was in shadow, his body shrouded by a long white cloak.
‘Je m’excuse,’ I said, ‘je cherche un homme qui s’appelle Jack Adams.’
There was a sound behind the monk, the smallest of movements from deep in the room’s interior.
The monk slowly turned his head, then lowered his eyes and stepped aside for my brother.
‘Bas.’
‘Jack.’
He too was cloaked, a blanket also wrapped around his shoulders. He stepped forward, across the threshold and into the cold night where still I stood, my bag fallen beside me on the stony earth.
‘Bas,’ he said again, and as he embraced me the blanket fell from his shoulders to the ground.
FOURTEEN
He’d always been larger than me. But now, chest pressed against chest, something had changed. He had thinned, turned into bone and sinew. Not frail, but lean, and there was power in it.
His hands pressed my shoulderblades, firmly at first, and when my arms still hung by my sides, Jack drew me to him a second time. I felt his fingers in my back gently prompting me, my older brother guiding me even here. Not only how I should act, but how I should feel. And I did follow. I raised my arms and wrapped them around him and held him. And wept.
*
Inside we sat at a simple wooden table, facing each other. The monk had disappeared into a back room. Jack and I studied one another in the flickering light of a lantern.
So much was unrecognisable. Jack was darkly bearded, and the tops of his cheeks were tanned and leathery. His forehead appeared broader, though that must have been because of the beard and the leanness of his face. Then there were his eyes – a new intensity in them, as if their youthful green had been polished and sharpened by the sun until they might do damage. He looked so strange in the white robe, its hood drawn back and resting on his shoulders. Stitched onto the front of the loose garment were a crude red heart and a rough cross, and hanging from the leather belt around his waist was a large set of rosary beads. On his feet, handmade sandals.
Then Jack smiled, and there was something I recognised.
Here was my brother. Here, after so much time. Lean, bearded, robed, Jack. A stone hut at night in the desert. The cold. Time and distance stretching then contracting. The giddiness of it. I wished the occasion would guide me, but it remained immense.
Jack spoke first.
‘You’ve come a long way, Bas.’
His voice was a little quieter perhaps, but as compelling as ever.
‘We didn’t know . . . whether . . . you were dead or alive,’ I stumbled. ‘We thought dead . . .’
‘Bas, I’ve never been more alive.’
I let the words go. Barely heard them. They
didn’t belong to my quest. The lantern’s flame swayed then leapt, as if it might rise through the opening in the glass. Again and again it leapt, stretched, thinned, peaked and paused, and some luminescent gravity would draw the tongue of flame back into itself. It would settle, and glow once more, solid.
‘You’re a long way from home, Jack,’ I said.
The word fell awkwardly. Home. Jack laughed.
‘I am home.’
Again, he waited for me. As if allowing me time to understand what he was saying.
‘How are you, Jack?’ I tried a third time, aware I was failing, falling back to formula.
‘I’m alive, Bas. Gloriously and gratefully alive,’ he said.
Only minutes before I’d been hugging him and crying. But how great was the distance between us? They seemed false, his words, as if they were practised. A mantra. Perhaps he’d expected me, and this was how he’d readied himself: I’m alive, he’d say in prayer. The ecstasy of performance, fragile and untrue.
‘But come,’ he said, ‘let us eat.’
At which he rose and was busy. He lit a gas burner and put a small pot of water on it. Even these movements appeared awkward. But here was my brother! That simple fact should have closed the distance. Was he not filled with the wonder of it too?
‘We save the tea for guests,’ he said.
I felt a pang. I was a mere guest, undifferentiated from anyone else.
‘How are Dad and Em?’ he asked from the safety of his task. Was this formula too? As predictable as the withdrawal of his fellow-monk to pray?
‘Worried,’ I said. ‘Confused. Angry.’
‘Both of them?’
‘Dad, at least.’
‘So, Em?’
‘Just worried.’
‘I wrote to them.’
‘They told me. It made them more worried . . . Both of them.’
‘I tried to explain.’
‘You failed, I’m afraid, big brother.’
‘It’s difficult to explain.’
Of course, it wasn’t just about our father and Em, and it wasn’t just about escorting him back to The Springs. There were things to know, too.
‘Come on, Jack –’ and I waited until I had his attention. ‘What’s happened?’
Jack sighed. He turned off the boiling water but did not pour the tea. He returned to the table and sat down once more. He seemed suddenly small. For a long time he didn’t look at me. Then, drawing breath, he began.
‘This I know, Bas –’ each word was mouthed with care – ‘I must embrace humility . . . poverty . . . detachment . . .’
Finding the words, weighing them, then with each pause it seemed he was sealing the word he’d just uttered. This was a new language, one I’d never heard him speak before, almost as foreign as the Arabic that had been swirling around me.
‘. . . abjection,’ he continued, ‘. . . solitude.’
Each word so full of sorrow and loneliness. An inventory of suffering.
‘I must seek the lowest of the low places, and arrange my life so that I may be the last among men. I will rejoice not in what I have, but in what I lack – in lack of success, and in penury – for then I have the cross and poverty, the most precious possessions the earth can give.’
A manifesto.
‘When I am sad, or angry, Bas, I must think of Jesus in his glory, sitting on the right hand of the Father forever, and rejoice.’
These words from childhood liturgies – ‘Jesus in his glory’, ‘the cross’, ‘the right hand of the Father’ – the shock of them now, spoken by this man who resembled my brother less with each passing moment. The words quickening, Jack absorbing the energy of them, growing stronger, word by word.
‘Little by little he is sweeping me clean. He is cleansing the filth from my soul. He is entrusting it to his angels.’
Jack looked at me then, his eyes wider than when he’d begun, almost pleading:
‘Bas, he plans to re-enter my soul himself.’
Where had he gone, my brother? From where had this other man emerged? Who was it my father wanted brought home?
‘Jesus sweeps me clean, Bas. Clean.’
His eyes were shining.
‘I long for Jesus’ embrace. I long for death.’
I didn’t know what to say. I wasn’t prepared for Jesus, or for death, or for religious ecstasy, or for the God of my childhood intensified a thousand-fold. I had not prepared myself to meet a brother I did not recognise.
I fixed on the lantern and its dancing flame. Its rising and falling. The shadows on the stone walls.
‘I’m getting hungry.’
If Jack was disappointed, he didn’t show it. He just nodded and returned to his pot and his burner.
We ate in silence, except for our breathing and our jaws munching on the stale bread and the clattering of our teacups against the table as we lowered them after each sip. The night grew colder and the lantern flame seemed to shrink. We drank a second cup of tea, for warmth. Even so I began to shiver, and nursed the mug in the palms of my hands, leaning over it to feel the rising steam on my neck and face.
I noticed Jack’s lips were moving. I was startled, confused – I’d heard nothing. I was about to ask him to repeat himself when I realised he was praying, and below the table, in his lap, he was turning his rosary – all the while humming like an insect.
‘Jack . . .’
He turned his face to me and smiled.
‘Come, Bas. It is time for sleep.’
FIFTEEN
A rough square of morning framed the wooden door when I woke. I’d slept in my clothes, covered by three blankets, a fourth folded beneath me as insulation from the cold stone floor. Jack had offered me his mattress and slats but I’d refused. My pride. Now my shoulders ached, my back, my neck. I was stiff from the stone and the night’s shivering. I stood and stretched.
I was still stretching, arms raised above my head, fingertips brushing the low ceiling, when the door swung open and brightness sprayed in. I had to turn my eyes away.
‘Good morning!’
‘Morning,’ I replied, unable to match his energy, not willing to try.
‘Have you eaten yet?’
I shook my head.
‘Come,’ he said. This new language of his.
I folded the blankets and laid them in a corner while Jack and the monk prepared breakfast. It didn’t take long: tea and bread, this time with jam.
At the table Jack and the monk bowed their heads and pressed their palms together for Latin grace. With closed eyes and the angle of their heads the same, their voices joined in low-murmured harmony. I was still inspecting the monk’s face when he opened his eyes and looked at me. They were dark eyes, hooded and unmoving. After this moment of silent regard, he reached over the table, placed a hand on my forearm, and nodded. I didn’t understand, but smiled – out of habit, or nervousness. He smiled too, patted my arm once or twice, then straightened a crucifix he’d positioned at the end of the table before we’d sat down.
As we ate Jack talked quietly about the mountains, and the seasons, and the priest who’d first lived here at the turn of the century, Charles de Foucauld, a refugee from the French Foreign Legion who’d been called by God to live among the Muslims in the desert. He was the first to translate their language into French. He was a humble man, a man of service, a man of God. The church had already beatified him, Jack said. Sainthood could not be far away. He’d built the hut with his own hands. This hut was built by a saint – that’s what Jack said. And that it was an honour to be there. To replace a stone when it cracks from the cold and falls out. He studied his hands, in thrall to the wonder of it, that privilege.
‘We’re going out,’ Jack said when the table was cleared and he and the monk had returned fr
om a tiny chapel where they’d spent half an hour praying. ‘Make yourself at home.’
And he grinned, then winked. A joke. Home.
‘We’ll be back before sunset. Is there anything you need?’
I shook my head, more in amazement than in answer. That he was leaving. Just like that. That he and I – brothers – had been reunited in the mountains of the desert, after trials yet unknown to each other, and he would leave me alone in his stone hut for the day.
‘See you soon, then, little brother.’
And with that the two men passed through the door, and let it swing back into place on its own weight. I followed them to the threshold and watched their white robes disappear down a track between two dark boulders.
With a cup of tea I sat on the doorstep. The hut faced east and sunlight fell on my cheeks. The stone step was slowly warming under the sun and my body. I opened my palms to the warm light.
*
Later I wandered the small plateau above the broken landscape of volcanoes, less fearsome in the brightness of the day though still strange and powerful. I explored but kept the hut in view, tethering myself to it. Still later I propped the hut door open to let the light in, and sat at the table and sketched, then moved again to the front step and resumed carving a piece of rock I’d laid aside for a few days. Eventually I tired of that too, set down the rock and tool, and moved inside to examine the hut.
Behind the living space was a tiny chapel with cross and shrine and kneelers. Beyond it, in the back of the stone shelter, was a bedroom each for Jack and the monk, both furnished with a simple wooden bed, a set of drawers, icons hanging from the walls, sacred hearts. On the floor beside Jack’s bed was a pile of books: meditations and lives of saints and spiritual exercises and daily prayer books. A Bible with a dried gum leaf as a marker.
There were also notebooks. I picked one up, a diary of sorts. I’d never known Jack to keep a diary. I opened it without any sense of guilt; this Jack was so different from the brother I grew up with. Sitting on his bunk I read passage after passage in his hand. Prayers, and half-formed philosophies, aphorisms and confessions of failings I didn’t recognise in him. Jack’s declarations of the night before were there, his ideas reworked with subtle variations. Was he trying to perfect his thinking, to better capture what he believed? Or wanted to believe – Was he writing himself into being?
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