The Death of Jesus

by J. M. Coetzee

  You are an honest man, Simón, honest to a fault. Look into your heart. The bitter truth is: I was the one who stayed with the boy through his agony, while you were at home relaxing, having a drink and a snooze. I was the one who, when the night nurse came with the pills meant to put him to sleep, made the pills disappear. Why? Out of respect for him. Because he feared the pills, feared being put to sleep, feared he would never wake again. Despite insufferable pain (do you know how he suffered, Simón? I don’t believe you do), he did not want to die before he had delivered his message.

  Not wishing his message to die with him, he chose me to entrust it to. You he would never have chosen. It would have been a waste of time. ‘The trouble with Simón is, he does not have ears to hear’: that was what he said to me time and again. ‘Simón just does not recognize who I am, cannot grasp my message.’

  I recognized David and he recognized me. No doubt about that. We were a natural pair, he and I, like a bow and an arrow, like a hand and a glove. He was the master, I the servant. So when the time came for him to die, it was to me, faithful Dmitri, that he turned. ‘I am tired, Dmitri,’ he said. ‘I am done with this world. Help me. Cradle me in your arms. Make it easy for me to go.’

  I return to the main point. In one sense, David was carrying a message, though the content of the message is still obscure. Maybe he had not entirely formed the message yet. Maybe there was a cloud in his mind, out of which the message was going to be born. That is possible. But in another sense, whether he had a cloud in his mind or not is irrelevant, since David himself may have been the message.

  The messenger was the message: a blinding thought, don’t you agree?

  That the messenger or the message or both together should end up bricked away in a wall is outrageous. We cannot allow it. I want you to go to the orphanage and remove him. It is not a big job. A hammer and chisel should be enough. Do it after dark. Wait for a stormy night when you will not be heard above the clamour of the elements.

  He passed by like a comet. I am not the first to make this observation. A comet is easy to miss: the blink of an eye is enough, a moment’s inattention. We owe it to him, Simón, to keep his light alive. I know it does not come easily to you, robbing a grave. But it is not a proper grave, just a cavity in a wall. Look at it that way.

  You and I do not see eye to eye on many things, but we have one thing in common: we both love David and want to bring him back.

  Dmitri

  PS. My mail has to pass the scrutiny of a cabal of doctors, that is how things are run here, so do not address your reply to me. Address it in the care of Laura Devito, a trusted friend and—I might add—a spirited devotee of David. When this sorry business is over and we have a chance to relax over a glass of wine, I will tell you the whole story, the story of her and me. You will not believe it.

  He tears Dmitri’s letter in two, in four, and drops the pieces in the trash. Curious, Dmitri’s power to upset him—upset him and make him seethe with anger. Normally he is a placid man, placid to a fault. Does he seethe because he is jealous of Dmitri, of Dmitri’s claims to intimacy with David? He was the master, I the servant. Not the words that he, Simón, would use. He led the way, I followed: that is what he would say, in respect of himself.

  He does not believe Dmitri’s claim to be in possession of David’s message. If Dmitri indeed has a message, it will be one that he has made up to suit his own purposes—to discredit his judges, for instance, and set him free from the confinement (sister of reflection!) they have imposed on him. Thus: Blessed be the insolent, for to them it is given to speak the truth. Blessed be the passionate, for the record of their crimes shall be wiped clean.

  Three days after Dmitri’s letter there is a knock at the door. It is one of the children from the orphanage: Esteban, the tall, gangly boy with the raging pimples.

  Without a word Esteban holds out a letter to him.

  ‘Who is it from?’ he asks.

  ‘Señora Devito.’

  ‘Is señora Devito expecting an answer? Because I can tell you now that there is no answer.’

  Esteban utters no word; a flush spreads over his face.

  ‘Come in anyway, Esteban. Sit down. Would you like something to eat?’

  Esteban shakes his head.

  ‘Well, I am going to make you a sandwich anyway. If you don’t want to eat it here you can take it back to Las Manos. I am sure you don’t get enough to eat there.’

  Cautiously Esteban takes a seat as instructed. He, Simón, slices bread, spreads jam on it thickly, sets it before the boy with a glass of milk. Still blushing, Esteban eats.

  ‘You were a friend of David’s, weren’t you, Esteban. But you weren’t part of the football team. Football is not your sport, I would guess.’

  Esteban shakes his head, wiping sticky fingers on his trousers.

  ‘What is your best sport? What is your favourite thing to do?’

  Esteban shrugs helplessly.

  ‘Do you like reading? Is there a library at Las Manos? Do you get many chances to read stories, made-up stories?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘And what are you going to be when you leave Las Manos, when you grow up?’

  ‘Dr Julio says I can be a gardener.’

  ‘That’s nice. Gardeners are good people. Is that what you want to be in life: a gardener?’

  The boy nods.

  ‘And Maria Prudencia? You are friends with Maria Prudencia, aren’t you? Is Maria going to be a gardener too? Will you be a gardening couple?’

  The boy nods.

  ‘Do you remember, Esteban, what you said at the memorial event for David, when you and your friends marched into the Academy carrying the empty coffin? You said that you wanted to pass on David’s message. What was the message you had in mind?’

  The boy is silent.

  ‘You don’t know. Everyone is convinced that David had a message for us but no one knows what the message is. Tell me, Esteban, what was it about David that attracted you? What made you and Maria Prudencia come all the way to the hospital to visit him day after day when he was sick? What gave you the courage to stand up and make that speech from the stage? Because I do not think making speeches comes easily to you. Would you say it was friendship that inspired you and gave you strength? Is that the term you would use? Maria is your friend, anyone can see that, but was David your friend too, would you say?’

  The boy contorts his shoulders in a fit of embarrassment and confusion. How he must be ruing the day when he agreed to deliver a letter to the old geezer who pretended to be David’s father!

  ‘All right, Esteban, I will stop quizzing you. I can see you do not enjoy it. For years, you know, I was David’s closest friend. His welfare was my sole concern, to the exclusion of everything else. It is not easy when a friendship like that is broken off all of a sudden. That is why I ask you about him. So that I can have a chance to see him through your eyes. So that he can come to life again, for me. Don’t be cross. Tell señora Devito there is no reply. Here are some chocolate biscuits for you. I will put them in a bag. Share them with Maria Prudencia. Tell her they are from David.’

  When Esteban has left he tears up the letter without reading it and tosses it in the trash. Half an hour later he recovers the pieces and lays them out on the kitchen table.

  Simón:

  I made a simple request, which you have not responded to. You have until Saturday to act, then I will have to ask someone else.

  Dmitri

  PS I am sure you are aware how unimportant names are. I could just as well have been named Simón, you could just as well have been named Dmitri. And as for David, who cares now what his real name was, that he made such a fuss about?

  Things do not work by name, in this hospital or anywhere else in the world. Things work by number. Number rules the universe—that, I can now divulge, was part of David’s message (but only part).

  You have no idea how casually bodies are disposed of here in the hospital, post mortem.
Our profession is life, not death: that is our proud motto. Let the dead bury the dead.

  David’s failing was that he did not have a number, a proper number that he could be tied to reliably. Being without a number is not unusual among orphans. Dr Julio confides to me that now and again he has to invent a number for a child in his care, since without a number you cannot access social benefits. But consider what happens in the dead room (that is what we call it here, the dead room) when a cadaver arrives without a number, or with a number that turns out to be, shall we say, fictional. How do you close a file when there is no file to close? You have a body on your hands, an indubitable physical body with height and weight and all the other attributes of a body, but the person, the being, the entity to whom that body belonged does not exist, has never existed. What do you do, when you are just a lowly corpse-handler, at the very bottom of the hospital ladder? I leave it to your imagination.

  The point I make, Simón, is that David need not be dead. Something passed through the dead room that signified the advent of an absence in the world, a new absence, but that absence was not David’s, not necessarily, not indubitably. There are ashes, indubitable ashes, in a hole in a wall near the river, but who can say whose ashes they are? Possibly just any old ash swept up off the bed of the furnace, once the furnace had cooled down, and put in a vase. David was wheeled into the dead room: you saw him there, I saw him there. What happened next is all a muddle, a muddle and a mystery. Was he wheeled out? Did he walk out? Did he vanish into thin air? There’s no knowing, just as there is no knowing the cause of his death. Atypical was the word the doctors settled on: an atypical something or other. They might just as well have written, A malign conjunction of the stars. Anyway, the file is now closed (there is a big black seal they stamp on a file when it is closed, I have seen it with my own eyes: FILE CLOSED). But whose file is that file, philosophically speaking? Maybe it is just the file of some phantom conjured up in Dr Julio’s office for reasons of convenience, in which case it is, philosophically speaking, no one’s file. Do you see my point? Lots of confusion. Lots of unanswered questions.

  As I said, you have until Saturday.

  PPS You have never been confined, Simón, so you have no idea what it is like to be cooped up with no promise of freedom. And the company I have to keep! I, Dmitri, among a troop of white-haired old men, crook-backed, slobbering, incontinent! You think the closed wing of the hospital is a better fate than the salt mines? You are wrong. I am paying dearly for my mistakes, Simón. I pay every day. Bear that in mind.

  What we want, what all of us want, is the word of illumination that will throw open the doors of our prison and bring us back to life. And when I say prison I don’t just mean the closed wing, I mean the world, the whole wide world. For that is what the world is, from a certain perspective: a prison in which you decay into crook-backedness and incontinence and eventually death and then (if you believe certain stories, which I do not) wake up on some foreign shore where you have to play out the rigmarole all over again.

  What we hunger for is not bread (that is what we have for lunch every blessed day, bread with baked beans in tomato sauce) but the word, the fiery word that will reveal why we are here.

  Do you understand, Simón, or are you beyond hunger as you are beyond passion and beyond suffering? I sometimes think of you as an old shirt that has been dragged through the ocean so many times that all colour, all substance has been washed out of it. But of course you will not understand. You think you are the norm, señor Normal, and everyone who is not like you is crazy.

  Have you any conception of who the child was who lived under your care? He says you agreed he was exceptional, but have you any idea how exceptional he truly was? I don’t think you do. He had a quick brain and was nimble on his feet: that was what exceptional meant to you. Whereas I, Dmitri, formerly a humble museum attendant and now who knows what, in other words no one special, knew from the moment my eyes alighted on him that he did not belong to our world. He was like one of those birds, I forget the name, that descend from the skies once in a blue moon to show themselves to us mere terrestrials before taking off again on their eternal wanderings. Excuse the language. Or like a comet, as I said last time, gone in the blink of an eye.

  The streets are full of crazy people with a message for mankind, Simón. You know that as well as I do. David was different. David was the real thing.

  I told you that he entrusted me with his message. That is not strictly true. If he had entrusted me with his message I would not be here in the closed wing writing a letter to a man who bores me and has always bored me. I would be free. I would be a free being. No, he did not entrust me with his message, not quite. During his last days he had plenty of opportunities to do so. I would sit by his bedside when my duties allowed and hold his hand and say, Dmitri is here, and when his lips moved I would incline my ear, ready for the fiery word. But it did not come. Why am I here, Dmitri? Those were the words that came instead. Who am I and why am I here?

  What could I say? Certainly not: No idea, young fellow-me-lad. Mis-sent, if I had to say, if it were up to me to hazard a guess. Dispatched to the wrong place at the wrong time. No, I was not going to spoil his day like that. You were sent to save me, I said—me, your old friend Dmitri, who loves you and reveres you and would die for you at a pinch. You were sent to save Dmitri and bring back your beloved Ana Magdalena.

  But that was not what he wanted to hear. That was not enough for him. He wanted to hear something else, something grander. What exactly, you ask? Who knows. Who knows.

  The fact is, authentic sinners like old Dmitri were too easy for him. It was types like you that he wanted to save, types who presented him with more of a challenge. Here is old Simón, with his more or less unblemished record, a good fellow though not excessively good, with no great hankering after another life—let’s see what we can do with him.

  He was too weak, at the end—that was the conclusion I came to after much inner wrestling. Too weak to bring out the fiery word, for you or for me. By the time he realized the end was nigh, the sickness had taken too much out of him, and he no longer had the strength for what was required.

  Do you know that at the height of his illness I offered him my blood? Offered a complete transfusion: his blood out, my blood in. They refused, those doctors. It will not work, Dmitri, they said: wrong blood type. You don’t understand, I said. I am ready to die for him. If you are ready to die for someone, your blood will work every time. The passion in your blood burns up the little blood corpuscles, incinerates them in a flash. They just laughed. You don’t understand blood, Dmitri, they said. Go back to cleaning toilets. That is all you are good for.

  I blame them. I blame his doctors. I would never have entrusted a child of mine to Carlos Ribeiro. Good enough with broken bones and appendicitis and stuff like that, but in an atypical case like David’s completely uninspired. That is what you need, as a doctor, in these atypical cases: inspiration. No use falling back on the textbook. No textbook will help you when you face a mystery illness. I am not a doctor’s backside, but I could have done better than Dr Ribeiro.

  Until next time.

  D.

  CHAPTER 25

  ‘THERE IS something I have been meaning to tell you, Simón,’ says Inés. ‘Paula and I have decided the time has come to sell the shop. We have already had an offer. Once the sale goes through we will be moving to Novilla. I thought I would give you advance warning.’

  ‘You and Paula? What about Paula’s husband and children? Will they be moving to Novilla too?’

  ‘No. Her son is in his last year of school and doesn’t want to leave. He will stay behind with his father.’

  ‘And in Novilla do you and Paula plan to live together?’

  ‘Yes. That is the idea.’

  He had guessed long ago that Inés and Paula were more than just business partners. ‘I wish you every happiness, Inés,’ he says. ‘Every happiness and every success.’ He could say more, but he le
aves it at that.

  So this is how the story ends, he reflects afterwards, the story of their little project in being a family: with the death of the child followed by the departure of the woman, leaving the man alone in a strange city, mourning his losses.

  He has not been intimate with a woman since the early days in Novilla, when he was working as a docker. For Inés he has never felt physical desire. There are no easy words for what their relation has been: certainly not man and wife, nor brother and sister. Compañeros may come closest: as if, from their common purpose and common labour, there had grown up between the two of them a bond not of love but of duty and habit. Yet even as a companion, even in the narrow range of companionship she allowed him, he has never proved good enough for her, never been what she deserved.

  When he arrived on the shores of this land, the official who processed him imposed on him the name Simón and the age forty-two. At first it had amused him: the age seemed as arbitrary as the name. But by degrees, with the passing of time, the number forty-two has taken on a fatality of its own. It was under the hopeful star of forty-two that his new life was inaugurated. What he cannot yet see, what is hidden from him, is when the astral sway of forty-two will come to an end and the sway of another number, perhaps darker, perhaps brighter, will commence. Or has that already happened? Did the day his son died mark the closing of forty-two? If so, what is the new age he has graduated to?

  He is familiar enough with the mathematics of the Academy to know that forty-two need not be succeeded by forty-three, forty-four, forty-five. As the stars of the Academy’s skies dance to their own tune, so do the numbers. The question is: What sort of man will he be—the he who goes or used to go by the name Simón—under his new star? Will he cease to be tame, prudent, dull? Will he become (too late!) the man he should have been to be the right father for David: volatile, reckless, passionate? And if so, what will be his new name?