The Gospel Of Judas

by Simon Mawer

  Leo dreamt of Madeleine.

  Person or persons unknown was the official verdict of the inquiry.

  Later, much later, weeks later, months later, they discharged him from the clinic with assurances of cure and care, with recommendations for the future. He still wore gloves to keep pressure on the scar tissue on the back of his hands. He still used wax to soften the slick skin and did exercises to prevent contractions over the joints and round the neck. They gave him an address in Rome where he could find help with whatever was needed, and he walked out into the world abraded and burnished, shiny with polishing.

  Goldstaub drove him to the airport. ‘Why back to Rome?’ he asked.

  ‘Where else?’

  ‘England?’

  ‘But England’s not my home.’ Why should he have been surprised by Rome? The city was Leo’s home, or all he’d got of one. As overwhelmed by history as a bankrupt is overwhelmed by debts, and equally spendthrift, Rome was the perfect place. ‘I’m an exile,’ Leo explained. ‘Rome’s a place of exiles. It always has been, perhaps it always will be. Foreigners and exiles.’

  ‘And what’ll you do?’

  ‘I’ve no idea.’

  Goldstaub’s last words were these, just as Leo prepared to go through the security checks, just as he got into line for the ritual interrogation about whether you packed the bags yourself and where you were staying during your visit to the country and had you had any contact with people who lived here and that kind of thing: ‘Leo, did you do it?’ he asked.

  Leo paused. He had a bag slung over one shoulder and his suitcase on a trolley. With his gloved, clawed hands he could manage the two only with difficulty.

  ‘Did you do it?’ Goldstaub repeated.

  Leo smiled at him. ‘Saul, I’ve told you,’ he said. ‘I’ve told you before: I’ve no idea.’

  The plane rose up into a bright, burnished sky. He felt like Icarus, who had flown too near the sun for his own good and been burned. Like Icarus he had fallen; but unlike Icarus he had survived the fall. The stewardess did her rounds with plastic dishes and plastic smiles. ‘How are you doing, sir?’ she asked.

  Luck, chance, the random element in nature, these things had always disturbed him. If God resides anywhere, he thought, looking at his bland chicken salad, surely he shelters behind barricades of pure chance.

  ‘I was once in love,’ he told her. ‘But she died.’

  The stewardess looked embarrassed and keen to get away. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said.

  18

  Winter in Rome, the streets washed with rain, sodden leaves clogging the gutters and creating local floods, cars churning up bow waves. What else about this new Rome, newly drenched, newly washed from the sins of the past?

  Owing to restoration work

  the Palazzo Casadei

  is closed to visitors

  The portiere was out of his cabin, morosely sweeping water from the paving of the entrance archway. There was an ancient drainage hole in the centre of the arch, but the thing was clogged with leaves and small lake had formed. He looked round with scant attention as a taxi drew up outside. Perhaps he didn’t recognise me. Perhaps he didn’t care.

  ‘Signor Mimmo,’ I called to him, ‘can you give me some help?’ and the man rested his broom against the wall and came out on to the pavement.

  ‘Signor Neoman,’ he said. It was more a statement of fact than a greeting. He seemed indifferent to my appearance there outside the palace in the middle of a wet and wintry afternoon, devoid of surprise, devoid of any appreciable emotion.

  ‘Could you help me up with my things? I don’t think I can manage …’ I displayed my hands for the man to see, the white pressure gloves with their velcro fasteners. As though he might require evidence. ‘Burns, you see. I was burned.’

  He nodded, as though burning was the most natural thing. Perhaps he considered it appropriate for a man like me. ‘I heard something,’ he said. ‘I don’t listen to gossip, but I heard something.’

  ‘Is everything all right?’

  He gave a shrug, and uttered the Roman expression for the ineffable and the inevitable: ‘Boh.’

  ‘I was away rather longer than I intended.’

  He nodded again. With apparent reluctance he took up my suitcase – ‘I’ve got a bad back, you know? Shouldn’t really be doing this kind of thing’ – and made for the back stairs, the stairs which Madeleine and I had climbed in excitement mere months before. Maybe a year. Maybe as long as a year. In my reckoning now there seem to be two sets of time, two whole assemblies of events: before the flames and after the flames. Now was after and the world was a different place.

  ‘There’s post,’ he called over his shoulder as I followed him up. ‘I’ve kept it down in my place. You can have it any time you want.’

  ‘Post?’

  ‘Letters, that kind of thing. Quite a pile.’ For a moment there was a glimmer of something beneath the dull exterior: interest, curiosity. He stopped and turned, and there was a hint of censure in his tone. ‘You created quite a stir, didn’t you, signor? One way or another.’ Then he fell silent again, plodding on up the stairs past the window where you could see out over a stretch of roof, stumping up to the landing outside the front door to the flat. I fumbled in my pocket for a tip. ‘I’ll bring the post up if you like,’ he said when he saw the money. He shuffled off down the stairs while I struggled with the door-key, turning it with difficulty, opening the door with caution, fearful of what I might find beyond it. But the vacant space of the entrance hall was more or less what I expected: dusty, empty, with a faint hint of mould on the stagnant air. There were no ghosts at large beneath the sloping ceilings, no ghosts walking across the creaking boards.

  I struggled the suitcase inside but I didn’t bother to drag it through into the bedroom, just opened it inside the entrance and unpacked it there. First I took out the photograph of Madeleine and placed it with care in the living room over the fireplace. She looked back at me with habitual irony and challenged me to feel sorry for myself. Then I unpacked my clothes and carried them through into the bedroom.

  Later I went through the bundle of letters that the porter brought up. He emptied them from a plastic sack that said Posta Italiana on it. They spread across the dining table, about fifty envelopes, a motley collection of sizes and colours. Some addresses were typed, some handwritten, one or two, the crazy ones, printed in a variety of colours. I sat at the table to sort through them. One, with a New York postmark, was addressed to The Beast 666. Another to The Antichrist. Most had Father Leo Newman, some plain Mr. And one was written in my own hand.

  I paused. Froze would be an apt word: the sight brought a sensation of cold, like a chill fluid flowing through my body. It was a heavy manila envelope, stiffened inside with card. It bore Israeli stamps and postmark. And the handwriting was mine, indubitably mine. I couldn’t be mistaken, not about that. I couldn’t write like that any longer, not with my stiffened, awkward claw (writing exercises had been part of the rehabilitation programme), but once that had been my own handwriting, a familiar, personal thing like a facial feature. I examined the date, and it was a date I knew well, a date of inferno, a date of flame, a time of burning. I turned the envelope over as though there might be clues on the other side, but I found nothing more. And memory offered nothing. Memory was an uncertain chart, with spaces devoid of symbol or character, gaps in the fabric of time like blank spaces on an ancient map: here be dragons. I recalled nothing.

  I sat looking at the envelope for a long while. Then with some care I slit it open.

  There was a ragged brown scrap inside, a mere fragment, stiff with age. I slid the sheet out on to the table: a piece of fibrous material that had long ago been spread out and beaten down and rammed and polished and pounded into an acquiescent surface. A few crumbled pieces followed, and a small shower of dust. I looked down on the sheet with something like amazement, something akin to fear. The letters taunted me, their precision making a mockery of the cha
os I felt. I read, tracing the letters with the forefinger of my clumsy, gloved right hand:

  The body that was taken was buried secretly by the town of Joseph that is Ramathaim-zophim beside Modin and to this day no one knows the place of his burial.

  I sat back and stared at the piece lying there on the table, the page that had stepped out of my nightmares, the page from the Gospel of Judas that had preceded me across the Mediterranean, that had followed the footsteps of Paul and lodged here in the Holy City itself to await my return. Almost as though it was imbued with some kind of inner intention, or guided by an unseen hand.

  The material evidence.

  Outside I could hear the rain starting again, the heavy and persistent drum of fingers on the roof tiles. From somewhere within the flat came the drip of water.

  And the night of his death they went to the tomb that was the tomb of Joseph and took the body away … The witness of this was Youdas who writes. Joseph and Nicodemus and the same Youdas were there, and Saul of Tarsus.

  There was fear there, of course. I recognised it now. I was practised in it. Not fear of anything. This was a generalised fear, fear without a focus, the plain fear of existence. How did this page come to be here? How had it escaped the holocaust?

  The floorboards creaked. I glanced round at the dusty room. Was there anyone there? It was growing dark now, the day sliding into twilight. The tick of rainwater, the soft creak of wooden boards was all around me. Absurdly I called out, ‘Madeleine?’ and as though in answer she looked at me from the mantelpiece. Her eyes followed me as I rose from the chair and moved round looking for somewhere to put the envelope. ‘What would you do, Maddy?’ I asked out loud. I had never called her Maddy. That was Jack’s nickname for her. But now she was as much mine as his. ‘What would you do?’ I asked her. ‘What would you do, Maddy?’

  There was my trunk, the same trunk that had followed me from school to seminary, from seminary to my first parish, and from there to every other temporary home I had ever possessed. I opened the lid. There were papers inside: my mother’s will, the deeds to the house in Camberwell, the statements from the bank in Switzerland, the diaries she had kept, the letters. I slid the page of papyrus back inside its envelope and laid it on top of all the things in the trunk and closed the lid. Then I went to look for the leak in the roof.

  A Train Journey

  A train in wartime, a halting, crippled thing, with every seat taken and passengers crouching in the corridors, lying in the corridors, jamming into the connecting passage between the carriages. People are lying in the luggage racks over the seats, people are bedded down in the luggage car, people are crammed into the soiled lavatory. People and the press of people. The smell is rancid in the close air, the smell of unwashed clothes, of unwashed bodies, the stink of ordure and urine and cigarettes.

  ‘Guardate come siamo ridotti,’ someone remarks. Look what we’ve been reduced to.

  The train stumbles through the night and halts for hours outside stations with no more explanation than the paltry reason of rumour: an air raid, the track damaged by terrorists, the engine broken down, no coal, no crew, no sense. Frau Huber sits crushed into the corner of a first-class compartment, beside the window. A window seat is the last luxury the embassy could provide for her. Her face rushes by in the darkness at her side and through it she watches the shadowy world beyond, the hills and the villages fading into an autumnal dusk, the rivers, the bridges, the forests all disappearing into the night; while the other passengers in the compartment watch her, knowing she is German, not knowing what this means any longer. Her maid, an anxious woman from the Alto Adige who has been persuaded to make this journey with the promise that it will get her home, sits opposite and moans. There are eight other people crammed into the compartment: two naval officers, a businessman with the slick, affluent look of the black market about him, a woman with two children, and two young men who ought to be in uniform. The passengers eye each other with suspicion in this world of suspicion, where motives are always mixed and loyalties are various. The woman beside Frau Huber has been visiting a hospital in Rome. Her husband is dying, so she explains to anyone who will listen, of cancer. It seems absurd that in the midst of war someone should be dying of mere disease. She explains the details of his illness but doesn’t explain the point of having him in Rome, where nothing will be done for him, rather that at home where nothing can be done for him. ‘At least he’s near the Holy Father,’ she suggests with a shrug, as though proximity to the Pope plays some part in the cure of malignant disease. ‘And where are you going?’ she asks Frau Huber. She uses the familiar form tu as though speaking to a child: ‘E tu, dove vai?’

  ‘I’m going home.’

  ‘Germania?’

  ‘Germania.’

  From Florence the train begins its climb into the mountains. The air in the compartment grows chill. There is no heating, or if there is no one has turned it on. The train slams into a tunnel, the noise thrown back from the walls with a sudden ferocity. Frau Huber thinks of bombs falling, of landslides, of entrapment. Then there is the blessing of release and rain dashing like pebbles against the matt black of the window. She sleeps fitfully. In the snatches of sleep she dreams her own personal nightmare, only to awaken and discover this impersonal one, the packed bodies, the condensation running down the windows, her fellow passengers shifting and groaning in their discomfort. The journey over the watershed of the Apennines takes three hours, and when finally the train slides down out of the hills it comes to a halt in the periphery of a city, in the darkness, somewhere amongst the apartment blocks and the ruined factories.

  ‘Where are we?’ she demands as though she has a right to know. ‘What place is this? Why are we stopping?’ Her maid is useless, reduced to mere whimpering and moaning. The carriages sit in the darkness and seethe, while beyond the windows the sky lights up with distant flashes that may be autumn lightning, may be bombs. The name Bologna is passed from mouth to mouth like a rumour. Bologna.

  At last the train shifts, jolts, moves again through the desolate suburbs towards the station and rumour becomes fact and the signs saying BOLOGNA slide past the windows and steam rises in great gusts beneath the roof, like the vapours of inferno.

  At Bologna there is a change of plan. Frau Huber has it all carefully worked out. She stands amidst the currents on the platform and holds her maid’s shoulders tightly as though to squeeze the stupid woman into comprehension. ‘You will continue on to Bozen,’ she says. Men in uniform push past them. Announcements are made over the loudspeakers in Italian and German about trains being delayed. ‘You will continue on to Bozen,’ Frau Huber repeats. ‘You will go home just as we have planned. But I will not be coming with you.’

  ‘Not with me, gnädige Frau?’

  ‘You understand me, girl. Don’t be obtuse.’

  ‘But Frau Huber—’

  ‘I have other business to attend to. I may follow on later. Now get me a porter and then get yourself to the Bolzano train.’

  ‘But gnädige Frau—’

  ‘Do what I say!’

  People do. The maid does, so too does the young transport officer, a pallid asthmatic youth who doubtless will only make it into the front line when all else is lost. He has probably never seen a diplomatic passport in his life but he is shrewd enough to guess that to argue with it is to invite more trouble than any number of shouting Italians, and sharp enough to recognise a woman who demands what she wants and gets her way. A seat on the next train to Milan? He will write the rail pass himself. Of course it is not necessary for him to ring the embassy. The gnädige Frau may do whatever she pleases. A soldier will see to the luggage. And if the gnädige Frau wishes she may take shelter in their office, away from all these Italians with their noise and their smell and their sense of defeat.

  ‘We will win, won’t we?’ the soldier asks her in a sudden wavering of conviction.

  ‘Of course we will.’

  So there is a wait, a long and tiresome
wait amongst the stench of cigarettes and the furtive smell of schnapps. The station is a seething ferment of rumour: the Allies have landed on the Italian mainland, the King has run away, Mussolini, sequestered in a mountain prison, has been spirited away to Germany by special troops of the SS. Frau Huber dismisses such rumours as ridiculous fantasies when she hears them. She scolds the soldiers for listening to such stories and for diffusing them. ‘Such behaviour does nothing but damage to the German people’s morale,’ she tells them and they feel chastised, like resentful schoolchildren. She waits for hours in the fug of the movements office while people come and go and phones ring and cups of ersatz coffee are consumed and, as a thin dawn begins to draw the platform outside in tones of grey and ochre, a train slides into view.

  ‘This is it,’ the young officer exclaims. His tone suggests surprise and relief. Orders are shouted and soldiers come running. People, a struggling mob of people, are pushed aside and Frau Huber is handed up into her carriage. Doors slam and whistles blow and at six o’clock the train leaves Bologna, bound for Milan, and beyond Milan for the town of Chiasso on Lake Como.

  Magda

  The newspapers talk of a weeping Madonna. ‘I saw her shed tears of blood,’ one witness claims. ‘I held her in my arms as she wept,’ says another. The Madonna in question is a statue bought by a pilgrim at the shrine of Medjurgorje in Bosnia, and presented to the altar of some chapel near Rome. It is a glistening white plaster thing of no artistic merit, the product of an industrial process rather than a sentient human being. Works of artistic worth never attract the grasping mind of popular devotion. You can visit an ancient church in this country of ancient churches and gaze in awe at works by Perugino, by Pinturicchio, by Piero della Francesca – the tourists do, in their millions – but you’ll never find such works attracting the adoration of the pious and the penitent. The glimmering flock of candles are always ranged before an ill-proportioned painting of crude primary-school colours, a meretricious thing with an incongruous and ill-fitting silver crown pasted to its head like a paper hat from a Christmas cracker. Pilgrims always pay homage to a piece of kitsch.