Father Elijah

by Michael D. O'Brien

  “I won’t be needing anything else tonight”, he said. “You may retire.”

  When Elijah did not respond, the President looked up and saw him standing in the shadow by the doorway.

  He stared at him for a full minute. Then he smiled.

  “I wondered if you would come.”

  “You killed her”, said Elijah solemnly.

  “They said someone was coming.”

  “Why did you kill her?”

  “Of course, I didn’t know who it would be. There was only a hint of disturbance among the guardian spirits. They must have been diverted by the rebel angels.”

  “You killed her husband too. How many others have you murdered?”

  “How did you get through?”

  “That doesn’t matter.”

  “What are you going to do? Shoot me?” The President uttered a short laugh.

  “Our side doesn’t kill people.”

  “You don’t know your own history very well.”

  “Men on all sides have done evil in the name of good.”

  “How nice to hear—a stroke of self-revelation.”

  “I have not come to harm you.”

  “Have you not? What do you propose to do? Convert me?”

  “I have come to speak to you.”

  “Speak to me? What do you wish to say?”

  “I bring you a message.”

  “Ah, tidings of great joy to men of good will?”

  “Yes.”

  “Not very original.”

  The President put the papers on a side-table and laid his glasses on top of them. His expression, which up to this point had been merely amused, revealing only a hint of concern, now grew serious.

  “You are tired, and you seem to have a few cuts”, he gestured casually.

  “I was once where you are.”

  “You were never where I am.”

  “I was on the path to the seat in which you are sitting.”

  “You were one of many who were cultivated for this position. There are hundreds like you.”

  “I was graced to see how empty it is.”

  “Empty? I sit atop the world. I cross it back and forth without any man stopping me.”

  “There is One who will stop you.”

  “No. He cannot stop me.”

  “He has already broken the power of darkness.”

  “Ah, theology”, the President sighed. “It is late. I am not in the mood for a long argument which, in the end, will lead nowhere.”

  “I was a boy during the War. I saw darkness visible. I saw its true face.”

  “Why, then, after all you had seen, did you go so far and rise so high, if you believe we are the powers of darkness?”

  “Because I thought that darkness had only one or two faces. It took me a long time to learn that it has many, and that its worst face masquerades as light.”

  “You are a gifted man. But you are trapped within your tragic past. Those experiences wounded you. You are not judging the present situation correctly.”

  “The sacrifice of Anna Benedetti disproves you.”

  “I did not kill Anna.”

  “I have seen the documentation. I know that you did.”

  The President shook his head. “You have been misled. Documents are the easiest things in the world to manufacture. Signatures can be forged. You are a victim of an elaborate deception.”

  “I know it.”

  “You don’t understand my meaning. I am not the one who has deceived you. I have tried to save you and to save your Church, for there is much good in it. There are atavistic forces at work in the world that men of reason must resist. You and I are not enemies, no matter what you may think.”

  “I know that you are master of deception. I have come here to warn you that your deceptions will plunge the world into a darkness greater than any before seen on earth.”

  “You are simply mistaken, my friend”, he replied with gentle severity.

  Elijah’s certainty faltered. It came to him that during the past year he had indeed been involved in a mirage of shifting horizons, illusory signs, and wheels within wheels-gyroscopes within gyroscopes, Anna had called it. Could he have misread everything, translating the cryptic events according to the dictates of his beliefs?

  You are blind; you are blind; you are blind; whispered the voices.

  The background chorus that had disappeared at the coming of the boy now resurged into his consciousness. He felt suddenly unsteady on his feet. He swayed and leaned against the wall.

  “Your ethical system is an image in the mind, an abstraction”, said the President quietly. “The people of our times are trapped within many such structures. Their mazes, their myths, their mental constructs, lead them to misinterpret the very shape of reality.”

  Myths, myths, myths.

  “And let me ask also, what are the fruits of your belief? Do Christians love one another?”

  Elijah felt a dart of shame for his flawed Church. “Two thousand years,” he stammered, “so many mistakes can happen in such a length of time.”

  “You are pinned beneath a limited culture. But you are one of the few capable of becoming free by your own efforts.”

  Now Elijah began to doubt his own mind. He had long ago learned to mistrust his senses, had counted on the power of reason to sort order out of the world of impulse, had found a template to measure against a disordered universe. Had he made a god of reason and given unquestioning allegiance to that most reasonable of religions, Catholicism, blinding himself to what was irrational in its makeup? Perhaps the President was right, and he had been fundamentally damaged by the experiences of his youth. Had he fled into the Faith in order to save his sanity? The human mind could not long endure the dismembering of reality. The child beaten to death by rifles in the ghetto—this rat was smuggling potatoes, said the soldiers—Ruth’s body mangled by a splinter bomb—as you can see she was carrying an embryo, said the morgue doctor. The many faces he had loved swimming frantically and hopelessly as they were sucked into the vortex of Treblinka and Oświęcim? The face of darkness materializing in monster forms? Had he coped with the horror by throwing himself into a dream of a world restored to Eden?

  This is a good and noble man, said the voices. He will restore the world to sanity.

  Confusion swirled through his mind.

  You have misjudged him; you have misjudged him; you have misjudged him.

  “Sit down”, said the President. “Here, by me.”

  Elijah took the armchair facing him and covered his brow with a hand.

  “I am so exhausted”, he said. “I have not slept in two days.”

  “You can stay here. You can sleep. Tomorrow we will go to the Italian police. I will vouch for your innocence. I know that you did not kill Anna.”

  “You do?”

  “Of course. You could not kill anyone. I know who killed her.”

  “Who?”

  “The same people who liquidated Stefano Benedetti.”

  “Who are they?”

  “Mafia, working in conjunction with certain rogue elements in the Masonic Order.”

  “And you had nothing to do with it?”

  “I swear by all that I hold dear that I had nothing to do with it.”

  “You weren’t involved in any way?”

  “I won’t lie to you. I was unwittingly involved with some of these people on more constructive projects, but I had no idea they would do such things. I have remained in contact with them only for the purpose of determining the full extent of their crimes. I am not a criminal, Father Schäfer. My entire life has been devoted to the principles of civilization. You know this is true.”

  Elijah recalled that there was no blemish on the President’s public record.

  “Aside from the fact that violence is abhorrent to me, do you think I would compromise my work by associating myself with such activity?”

  “No, I suppose you wouldn’t.”

  “When you have rested, I wil
l advise the homicide bureau in Rome that you are making yourself available to them for questioning. This will be a gesture of good will on your part and will be interpreted by them as a fair indication of innocence. At the same time, I will turn over to them the facts which have reached me regarding Anna’s death.”

  “Can these people really be brought to justice?”

  “I think we can do it.”

  Elijah stared at the floor, his thoughts scattered.

  The President looked at him compassionately.

  “Have you eaten?”

  “Thank you, I am not hungry.”

  “Father Schäfer, you have been through trying experiences.”

  Elijah sighed heavily. “The worst of it is Anna’s death. How could it have happened! Why did it happen?”

  “We don’t know all the details. Almost surely it’s connected to her refusal to accept bribes from organized crime. Last year, when she was a justice of the Supreme Court, they wanted a certain decision in their favor. She refused. She sent some of them to prison. They delivered a punishment.”

  “I knew nothing about this.”

  “Her life was complex. She had many enemies.”

  They sat together in silence for some time.

  “You loved her”, the President said at last.

  “Yes, I loved her.” The words came from his throat strangulated, broken.

  “Who could not love such a woman?”

  “Did you love her?”

  “Yes, I loved her too.”

  Elijah heard the cessation of the voices as one might hear the hushed silence in a symphonic hall after the consummation of a long and difficult performance, in that moment which hangs between the final stroke of genius and the storm of applause.

  His hand slipped into his coat pocket. He felt a small round brass container and gripped it—an object he had once known and had forgotten.

  His mind was empty for those few seconds only, yet into it there came the face of the child who had led him on the impossible paths. Into it also came the fairy tale that Pawel Tarnowski had told to him on a night of darkness and numbing cold, more than fifty years before. He saw dragons spewing black pigment across the canvas of creation. He saw hearts laden with stones and larks instructing orphans about a missing king. He saw wind and trees and rivers of tears. Then other scattered fragments of his past blew into the skies, wheeling like flocks of birds: light splashing through the holes in Don Matteo’s hands; Gianna braiding the hair of an old discarded woman; yellow plastic flowers dropping from heaven, and purest snow on the earth like a blanket pulled over a bed sprinkled with the blood of birth. He saw storms at sea and doves planted like seeds in tombs, waiting to sprout, peaks and caves, leaves blowing down ancient streets and prayers going up like incense across the ravaged world. He saw an angel, armored and Byzantine, plunging through the clouds toward the cities of the night, and a dark archon rising to meet him in a clashing of swords. He saw the pantaloons of a buffoon and a shrivelled potato rolling ridiculous off the end of a soldier’s boot. He saw a heart pierced by a sword and a tiny womanchild floating in the glass sea of the womb; he saw his mother kneading bread, and his father stitching, stitching, stitching with the patience of ages, while his grandfather read from the tractates. He saw a chalice raised on a million altars, and a white horse scratched in stone, and blue horses rampant, slicing with their steel hooves into living flesh.

  Night fell and morning came. Night and day and night and day, centuries upon centuries, the moon speeding along its course, and a woman clothed with the sun, crowned with stars, standing upon it. Mercy and truth were in her eyes. She looked down, and there at her feet was Pawel’s gift, and the clean, wise love of Anna, the fat baker dispensing forgiveness as love, a one-eyed fool carving a cross from the olive wood of Bethlehem, and a man coughing smoke from his lungs, pleading, pleading that someone, anyone, would accept his disguised love, his single unselfish act. And all the burnt people drifting up into the sky as smoke. And with them went their songs and stories and supplications like ribbons of many colors encircling the fallen planet, and rising with them, the memory of the God of little men, kept alive from generation unto generation by the power of their sacrifice. He saw fire—and fire.

  Elijah looked up, feeling that he had been away from the room for many hours, though it had been only seconds.

  “Stefano Benedetti?” he said. “What did you feel for him?”

  “Stefano Benedetti was my friend.”

  Then a shadow passed across and through and behind his eyes. Elijah saw the thing Anna had described. He saw hatred. He understood then the magnitude of the lie that was encircling his mind.

  He removed the brass reliquary from his pocket and opened it on his lap.

  The President stared at it, betraying no emotion. There was no curiosity, neither antipathy nor attraction. It was this masklike, neutral expression that convinced Elijah that the President recognized it.

  “Put that away”, he said.

  “You know what this is.”

  “No. I don’t.”

  “You know very well that it contains a splinter of wood soaked in Christ’s Blood. Here also are beads from Africa, where holy blood was spilled. And here too is Anna’s blood.”

  The President reached across the space that separated them and picked the reliquary off Elijah’s lap. He held it in his fingertips with an expression of distaste.

  “If you are ever going to progress beyond your pathetic fallacies, you must cease to clutch these amulets.”

  He tossed it into the fireplace where it came to rest on a bed of live coals.

  Elijah watched as it turned brown, seared with darts of green and blue flame. The heraldic cross embossed on its surface smouldered.

  He knelt and picked up the reliquary in his right hand. He barely noticed the scream of protest from his palm, the stench of burning flesh.

  The President barked at him: “What are you doing!”

  Elijah stood.

  “This is the sign that has defeated you and will continue to defeat you until the end of time.”

  The President rose up and faced him, his mouth twisting with disgust.

  “You are insane.”

  He plucked a black device from the inside pocket of his sweater. A miniature red light flashed on its surface. His finger hovered over the button.

  “Listen to me, Schäfer. You are a doomed man. I can turn you over to the police instantly. My servants can be here in a minute, and they will throw you over the cliff if I order them to do it.”

  “Like your forefather before you. Like Tiberius.”

  “Shut up, you fool. You think you can come against an army with that trinket. The former age is over, I tell you. There is no power in that thing you cling to. Your only hope is to throw it back into the fire and listen to me.”

  “I will not listen to you. From your mouth comes only deceit.”

  “You will listen.”

  “I bear you a message from the King. Will you not listen?”

  “There is nothing he can tell me that I do not already know. He is of the former age, and I am of the one which is beginning.”

  “Christ is One. There is no other Christ. In Him everything in heaven and on earth was created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones, dominations, principalities or powers; all was created through Him and for Him.”

  “Silence!” the President roared.

  From his mouth there poured a stream of blasphemies. Elijah averted his head and prayed the name of Jesus until the flow was stemmed, and he could cut through it with the authority rising up within him.

  “The Lamb is the firstborn and the height of everything. It is through Him and by Him that all creation is reconciled to the Father, by the merits of His sacred Blood!”

  In reply, a voice roared from the President’s mouth. It shouted denial of the primary and singular sonship of the Lamb, denial that this Jesus was the Christ, denial of the victory of the Cross denial of
the One who had come into the world.

  “There is no light left in the world save one,” he concluded, “he who is the light-bringer, the angel of light who was cast down by the jealousy of God!”

  “The jealousy of God? Think of what you are saying. Are your words not insanity itself?”

  “I and no other shall bring mankind into the fullness of its destiny”, he shouted. “No other!”

  The President’s eyes were focused with a distillate of malice that shot across the room toward Elijah like a jet of black fire.

  He felt the force of it in his spirit, and shock waves passed through his body.

  The President took a step toward him.

  “Do you wish to degenerate to a hurling match of magic tricks”, he sneered. “Shall we play a little knight facing Dracula! Will you play the hero-martyr and end as a notation in a dusty Vatican codex? Shall I be your monster, your bogeyman? Is that what you think this is all about? Do you really think that a display of conjuring could stop the work for which I have been destined from birth, from before the beginning of the world? Your tricks are nothing compared to what I can do. By the power of him who is darkness and hath the form of black flame, I command thee to fall!”

  Elijah trembled, and he felt many presences swarming around him, screeching in chorus, spitting blasphemies, cavorting, throwing horrors into his imagination and unearthly sounds into his ears.

  He felt himself fading, and the strength of soul by which he had spoken began now to fall back toward powerlessness. Then he spoke the name of Jesus. The word echoed throughout the room, and there was a silence in heaven and on earth for the space of a heartbeat.

  “Jesus”, said Elijah, “Jesus.”

  “Speak that name no more! I tell you to leave the Nazarene. Why do you stand looking back to what is past and shall never come again? Come to me and stand with me. We shall look together toward the future. You who would play the prophet, I shall make you into a prophet the like of which has never been seen before, nor will ever be again.”

  “If I am a prophet, I am a little one. I do not want to be a great one. My only task is to bear witness to the Lamb of God, He who was, who is, and who is to come. He is the First and the Last. He is Alpha and Omega. He comes swiftly, riding upon a white horse, and His name is Faithful and True. He has conquered you.”