Jesus says, ‘Never worry about small things. Break away from all that is small and mean, and try to live on the heights. You must break with all that is not Me,’ Jesus says.
There was much like that: things I might have read in a thousand of my mother’s prayer books, but could never have imagined Jack writing.
I turned the pages trying to imagine Jack composing by lantern-light, trying to picture the expression on his face, what labour it must have taken to lay out this new life for himself. How long had this been going on, I wondered? Not long, surely, I thought. He was a novice, wasn’t he, fired by a novice’s fervour? Or a zealot’s.
At some point the voice in the notebook changed.
It is through detachment you will attain all this, by driving out all mean thoughts, all littlenesses which are not evil in themselves, but which succeed in scattering your mind far from Me, when you should be contemplating Me from morning to night.
I had to reread it to make sure I’d seen it right. You should be contemplating Me from morning to night. He’d adopted nothing less than the voice of God.
Make to yourself a desert where you will be as much alone with Me as Mary Magdalene was alone in the desert with Me.
He repeated it, repeated himself practising being Jesus, being God. Like Sophe’s schoolchildren making the shapes of the letters of the alphabet, again and again, to become literate.
Make to yourself a desert. Make to yourself a desert. Make to yourself a desert.
Or was it a punishment, a hundred lines, for some wrong he’d committed?
Make to yourself a desert.
On some pages these were the only words, set in the middle of an otherwise blank sheet. My brother, the desert ascetic.
So Jack had become one of those for whom the body and the mind were things to be conquered and he was determined to defeat them. We’d been taught about those desert saints and their feats of endurance, their lives of fasting and solitude and nakedness and battles with demons and nights of endless prayer. John the Baptist, and his diet of desert locusts. Others had been even more bizarre and fascinating. The saint who lived for thirty-seven years on a tiny platform at the top of a pillar set among the ruins of a deserted town. The one who tied his hair to a chain hanging from the ceiling so he would pray standing throughout the night. The ascetic who, before retreating to his desert cave, lowered himself into a tomb overnight to confront his soul. So many desert caves.
So it was this form of man, this tradition my brother had joined.
Towards the end of the notebook, though not quite the last entry, he’d written just once:
Lord, I pray that I die as a martyr, stripped of everything, stretched naked on the ground, unrecognisable, covered with wounds and blood, killed violently and painfully. How beautiful such a gift would be. I desire this today, Lord. That I may grant You this infinite grace, watch loyally, carry Your Cross faithfully.
The perfect logic of it. The inevitable conclusion of his radical belief.
SIXTEEN
Jack and the monk returned the hour before nightfall. It was impossible to tell how far they’d travelled, where they’d been, what tasks had occupied them. Had I found enough to do? Jack asked on the step of the hut. Yes, I said, and showed him the miniature I’d finished carving just moments before.
‘Eve?’ he asked, looking at Sophe’s nakedness, some wildness of her hair I’d managed to capture, perhaps what he thought was a piece of fruit in her hand but was just rock I hadn’t been able to pry from her fingers. He couldn’t have known it was her. That having reeled away from his notebooks it was Sophe I needed.
‘Mary,’ I said, expressionless. ‘Though I don’t know which one – whether it’s the sinner, or the mother of God.’
I paused before looking up at him and smiling, releasing him, turning it into a joke.
He smiled too, though uneasily.
‘Just mucking around,’ I said, to make peace. ‘Maybe it is Eve. I don’t know. It’s just a woman, any woman. Any woman you want it to be.’
A lie to keep Sophe to myself.
‘We don’t get many of them around here.’
There was still humour, but it seemed morbid, a relic of that easy charm he once had.
After dinner the monk disappeared to the chapel to pray.
‘Do you want to go with him?’
Jack hesitated.
‘I don’t mind talking,’ he said, as if keeping me company was a chore.
‘So, you want to die.’
‘That’s a strange thing to say, Bas.’
‘You don’t need to feel like that,’ I went on. ‘Because it wasn’t you who was responsible for her death.’
Jack stiffened. He pulled his hands from the table to his lap as his shoulders straightened and he sat back in the chair. He stopped breathing for long seconds – then his first breath caught, and he looked at me with eyes wide, nostrils flared.
This conversation had been so many years in coming. And now that it had finally arrived, how could he not fear it? I was anxious too, my heart racing, but I’d started it and there is a strength that comes from beginning things, a momentum. Jack waited. He would not venture out, my brave brother. He was waiting for me now.
‘You weren’t responsible,’ I said again.
*
That winter night so long ago, cold from the early-set sun, the valley preparing itself for frost. The sky was clear: stars and broken moon low on the horizon and pyres of chimney smoke rising from the town, house after house. Our fireplace was lit too. I remember Jack, nine years old, tossing a log in, old enough that our parents let him. I remember the burst of embers as the fresh log hit the burning wood, rolled along it, and settled cross-ways on top, the flame rising and wrapping itself round them both.
Our father had come in, and he had gone up. It was Mum putting us to bed. We had separate rooms by then. I remember Mum’s hand on my forehead after I finished the glass of warm milk she brought in, her thumb wiping drops of milk off my chin. Then everyone I knew was called forth in prayer, asking the Lord to keep them safe. Then Mum leaning over me and kissing my hair. I remember too, sitting up in bed to watch as she retreated from the room. I remember the door of the bedroom ajar, and the thin band of light between frame and door turning on its axis as I laid my head back down on the pillow. That ruler of light glowing like sunset on the horizon when I closed my eyes to sleep.
I can’t remember waking. I can’t remember climbing out the window. I remember only that I was standing on the footpath in pyjamas and bare feet and that I was not cold. Jack was beside me, and there were neighbours running, our father running, and the house a tower of flame, and beyond the terrible sound of the inferno – inside it – was Mum’s voice calling my name. Screaming it. Screaming my name over and over and over and over until it was gone.
*
‘You couldn’t have done anything,’ I said. ‘You couldn’t have saved her.’
These were the right words to say to my frightened brother. I believed that. They were the things I should say, because from where else could his death wish have come than from the burden of an older brother’s failed responsibility?
Yet Jack looked blankly at me, as though not comprehending what I’d said, not even listening. And in that blankness, his breathing calmed and his body began to loosen.
‘She got you out, Jack,’ I continued. ‘You were asleep, and she got you out. That was her responsibility. She went back in. There was nothing you could do about that.’
So, I uttered the words I thought might rescue him, might allow me to put my arm round his shoulder and lead him home. But in truth I didn’t believe them. It was just another arid formula.
This was what it was like to reassure one’s brother, something I’d never done, something that had never been necessary with
Jack. But when I uttered those words – you weren’t responsible – I did it without conviction. Because Jack was responsible. That’s how I’d seen it for years, something I’d repeated to myself so often I needed it in order to survive. It had become a foundation myth.
Because Jack was older, more was expected of him. He was bigger, he was stronger, he had been privileged. And it had been Jack who’d taught me to leave the window open, so that some nights when our parents were asleep we could put our day clothes back on and climb out our windows to our bikes at the back of the house.
And yet. And yet. This flipping. That one event can carry two truths, bear two extremes. I’d come so far. I would bring Jack back whatever it took. Whatever he needed, whatever truth or duty.
‘She went in for me, and I wasn’t there,’ I said, ‘I’d already climbed out. If I’d been there, she would have saved me, as well as you. If I’d been there, there would have been enough time for all of us . . .’
This was also something I believed, contradictory but no less true. Perhaps it was even truer. I’d carried it close, lived with it, wrestled with it. I’d won, and I’d lost. I kept winning, and kept losing. Some eternal damnation in the variations.
‘If I hadn’t escaped,’ I continued, saying the words aloud for the first time, ‘Mum would have found me.’
The thought struck me for the first time that Jack might think that too, that I was responsible. Had he, in fact, always thought that?
‘If I’d been there . . .’
I wanted to weep, out of pity. It was me. It was Jack. These two beliefs had been night and day, each true, each overcoming and in turn being subdued by the other. Now the options were starker than they ever had been. Me. Him. Both. Neither.
‘It wasn’t your fault.’ As I spoke the words of ritual relief it struck me: perhaps both of us had reeled away from that childhood night, perhaps each of us had been flung out onto our different trajectories, chaotic and monstrous – but destined to meet here, this night. Suddenly I felt, in that hut in the mountains, the sun having set and the cold falling fast, solidarity. That Jack and I were united in something we’d carried silently through childhood, something neither of us deserved to carry. That it didn’t matter what we’d thought until now. That there was only now.
When our father left for work at the quarry each morning, the last thing he would say before closing the door behind him was look after your mother, boys. What did that mean? What did it mean to a kid? What did our father mean by it? Perhaps he was saying it for Mum’s benefit, not ours. But a kid doesn’t know that. I didn’t, couldn’t. To a kid, everything is true. And sons want to care for their mothers. I think we do, all of us. A primal instinct, for which we cannot be blamed.
‘We were kids, Jack. We couldn’t have been responsible. We weren’t responsible for our mother’s death.’
Our mother’s death. There, I’d said the words. Thirteen years of loss suddenly coiled around my heart and pulled tight, constricting me. I closed my eyes hard. It didn’t matter. I wept, scalding tears of release.
Then finally, through my tears, Jack spoke.
‘It is God’s will,’ he said.
I blinked.
‘What is?’ I said.
‘What happened that night. It cannot be changed. I’ve accepted it, Bas.’
‘God’s will that Mum die?’
Wasn’t he going to reassure me as I’d been trying to reassure him? Weren’t we in solidarity?
‘It is a mystery.’
‘God willed Mum to die? Wanted it?’
‘Allowed it.’
‘No you don’t. If it’s God we’re talking about it’s the same difference.’
‘God gave her life. He takes it too. It is the same for all of us. Only the time and the circumstances differ. Death is not to be feared. It is to be welcomed.’
‘Can you hear yourself?’
‘It is a mystery.’
A cold and heartless mystery.
I think I wanted to kill him. For his distance, and his coolness, and his heartlessness. His disloyalty. He’d left her. He’d turned his back on our mother, buried her with theology.
‘She was burnt to death, Jack.’ I said it as coolly as I could. Each word deliberate and fierce, each an effort to pierce him. ‘Have you forgotten that, Jack? Have you forgotten her screams?’
That quietened him.
‘Have you forgotten her screams of agony, Jack, as the flames melted her flesh, set alight her hair, burnt her alive? Burnt . . . her . . . alive. Have you forgotten that? Her terror?’
He was still.
‘You forget that, Jack, and you forget her. She’s our mother, Jack. You can’t forget your mother.’
He’d stopped looking at me. He was looking over me, through me.
‘Have you forgotten her, Jack?’ I asked, and then, when he didn’t answer: ‘Oh, Jack. You can’t forget your mother.’
For a long time he was silent, then, slowly at first, he began to weep.
‘I know,’ he rasped as he began crying uncontrollably. ‘I know.’
SEVENTEEN
Never had I slept like that. A sleep stronger than cold and hardness and distance. Jack’s tears and mine, and our long embrace, had delivered justice and forgiveness.
‘Let me show you something,’ Jack whispered, close to my ear, waking me.
It was still dark. By the light of the single candle Jack had set on the table, I pulled one of the blankets tight around my shoulders and laced my boots. He opened the door onto the stars, fierce against the night sky, so bright I blinked.
We left the sanctuary of the hut. It was cold outside and I was happy for Jack to lead me. He traced a way through the chill night to a ledge, a natural platform where we stopped and looked out at the world. The twisted volcanoes and the towers of unsheathed stone below were barely visible. Instead, everywhere were stars, in front and above and below us too, sharp, prickling needle-points of white. Holes in the firmament, bright as the belief that this would last between us.
Then, from the midst of that absolute silence, there was a crack so loud and clear I thought it was a rifle shot. I dropped to the ground, flattening against the rock. It had come from somewhere below, but where exactly I couldn’t tell. My heart thumped as that almighty sound still resonated – yet Jack remained unmoved on the ledge, as if he would accept a sniper’s bullet should it come.
‘Jack,’ I hissed, and he turned and saw me on the ground, and laughed.
‘It was just a rock cracking in the cold, Bas. There is nothing to fear. Come, get up. Let us pray.’
I was too surprised to answer. Rising, I listened silently as Jack began to intone.
I can’t remember at what point I realised that, while I’d slept, Jack’s bleak vision had reclaimed him. I know he offered thanks, made petitions on my behalf as well as his own, though he had no authority. I cannot even say to whom his prayers were directed, what god he spoke to. None I recognised. Not the god of our shared childhood, nor the god of wrath. Not the god I’d encountered walking the seams of sandstone back home. Perhaps it was simply the god of that one night, raised up from those mountains to overwhelm Jack. The vanquisher abroad.
‘Lord . . .’
I listened in the deathly cold. And have forgotten his prayer.
Because in that desert night I could not believe Jack’s medicated hymn to freedom, his plea for escape, for liberation. Rage welled in me, that it was not enough we were two brothers united, that he insisted God interpose. That he insisted on God despite everything. That he preferred God. I listened as day shook itself free of night, and could not believe him. Bullshit, I thought, with vehemence. Bullshit to Jack’s account of his life, bullshit to his grand philosophy of abnegation, bullshit that Jack had embraced it, bullshit to his myth of Jesus. A rising,
sweeping bullshit-fuelled fury.
The extremes Jack was prepared to go to, to escape, and I had been made to follow him – my weakness, his coldness. And now Jack would prefer this coldness to me. He left me utterly alone, and, ignorantly, instead chose to pray.
Finally the east loomed, and Jack’s long incantation faded. The new day began to form, flushing the sky and its stars into oblivion.
Jack stepped forward into this. He stepped to the very edge of the rock platform, his feet over it. I saw him as a boy readying himself to dive from a cliff into a rock pool. He raised his arms from his side, and lifted them out to form a cross. He flung his head back. I sensed him closing his eyes. I heard his intake of breath, guessed the shape of the ecstatic smile on his face. The transportation. He stood there – a statue – his chest filled with breath, his arms flung wide, his head facing the heavens.
‘The beauty,’ he whispered, ‘the beauty!’
I saw myself at the edge of that boyhood cliff too, trembling with fear, not so many years before. I’d asked for mercy. Instead Jack had pushed me. Knew what was needed, what was right. Now Jack sought death there in the mountains of the desert. The two of us on that cliff: there he was, his back to me, his arms outstretched to greet death, the thing he sang his lullaby to. I could do it, I could. The compass-light of the east. The direction of the sun, of light, of clear-sightedness.
I might have stepped forward. I don’t know, today, if I did. I might have. Might’ve inched closer to Jack and his back, and his Messianic embrace of the dark and silence and nothingness and the god of nothingness. I might have moved closer in my rage, and my blindedness. My breathing might have quickened. I might even have spoken. But I cannot be sure. Blood had overpowered me –
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