“That’s going to be complicated…,” he murmured, deep in thought, tugging at his beard again. “That crypt is the property of the Greek Orthodox Church. Just a few Catholic priests—you can count them on one hand—have seen it. Only your brother, Guardian Salina, could get permission.”
“I didn’t even know it existed!” my brother said, disconcerted.
“I haven’t seen it either, Father,” Murphy replied. “Like your sister, I would be delighted to do so. You can ask permission from the Orthodox patriarch of Jerusalem; a phone call ought to do it.”
“Is this absolutely necessary?” my brother asked, clearly put off by the idea of asking for politically compromising favors.
“I assure you it is.”
Pierantonio headed for the exit. Sheltering himself from the multitude outside the doors in a corner of the atrium, he took his cell phone out of the pocket of his habit. He was only gone a few minutes.
“Done,” he announced happily. “Let’s go find Father Chrysostomos. Let’s just say it wasn’t easy! It seems there is a secret vault, hidden in the deepest part of the basilica. You should have heard the surprised and incredulous exclamations that came through the phone. How do you know about it?”
“It’s a long story, Pierantonio.”
My enthused brother approached the first Orthodox priest who crossed his path. A few minutes later we found ourselves before a pope with a gray beard who wore the “chimney stack”–style hat, just like men wore in Florence during the Renaissance. Father Chrysostomos, whose glasses hung down his chest from a thin chain, looked completely disconcerted. His expression very clearly revealed that he still hadn’t recovered from the phone call that warned him of our arrival and the reason for our visit. Pierantonio introduced himself, citing all his offices, and Father Chrysostomos held out his hand with respect, still with a look of surprise that seemed frozen on his face. Then the rest of us were introduced. Finally the Orthodox priest expressed the anguish weighing on his heavy heart.
“I don’t want to be rude, but can you tell me how you knew of the existence of the chamber?”
“From some ancient documents that described its construction,” replied the Rock.
“Is that right? If you don’t mind, I would like to know more. Father Stephanos and I have spent our whole lives watching over the relics of the True Cross preserved in the crypt. We had no idea that it was known, nor that there were documents that spoke of its construction.”
As we descended, step-by-step, into the depths of the earth, Farag, the Rock, and I told him what we knew about the Crusades and the secret chamber, but we didn’t mention the Staurofilakes. After going down hundreds of stone steps, we came to a rectangular enclosure used for storage. Paintings of ancient patriarchs hung on the walls, and furniture covered by sheets of plastic seemed to sleep a slumber of the righteous. There was also an old Orthodox habit on a hanger, immobile as a ghost. In the back, an iron grate protected a second wooden door that seemed to be our objective. An old man with a long white beard got up from a chair when he saw us enter.
“Father Stephanos, we have visitors,” announced Father Chrysostomos.
The two curates exchanged a brief dialogue in a low voice and then they turned to us. “Go ahead.”
The old Orthodox curate took a ring of iron keys from inside the pleat of his soutane, turned toward the grate, and opened it in slow motion. Before doing the same with the wooden door, he pressed an antediluvian button located in the lintel.
I was really surprised when I entered in the Staurofilakes’ secret vault, built around the year 1000 to protect the True Cross from the destruction ordered by the crazed caliph, al-Hakem, and I found myself in a type of military barracks furnished like a kitchen. After taking a second look, I made out a small altar in the center of the room, along with a beautiful icon bearing the image of the Crucifixion. Directly across from it was a pair of small crosses that turned out to be reliquaries holding the holy sliver. To my left, some old metal file cabinets, folding chairs, and wooden tables were scattered throughout the room. It was just a mess. If the Staurofilakes could see that! After thinking it over, maybe it was the smartest way to protect something so valuable.
Father Stephanos and Father Chrysostomos crossed themselves repeatedly in the Orthodox style. With great reverence, they pointed to tiny pieces of the Cross behind the windows of the reliquaries. We all then kissed those objects, except the Rock, who turned his back and stood as still as a statue. When Father Stephanos saw that, he slowly walked over to the Rock to see what the captain was studying with such interest.
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” he said in very correct English.
The rest of us walked over, too. What a surprise! We saw a beautiful Constantine chrismon painted on a large dark wooden board; a long Greek text was inscribed on it. The board rested on the ground, leaning against the wall.
“It’s my favorite prayer. I’ve meditated on it for fifty years. Believe me, each day I find new treasure in its simple wisdom.”
“What is it?” Farag asked, and bent down to get a better look.
“Thirty years ago, some English scholars told us it was a very old Christian prayer, from the twelfth or thirteenth century. The text contains many errors, so the penitent or artist who did the work probably wasn’t Greek. The scholars told us it was probably a Latin heretic who visited this place. In gratitude he presented this beautiful board to the basilica, inspired by the True Cross.”
I squatted down beside Farag and, in a low voice, translated the first words: “You have overcome pride and envy, now overcome wrath with patience.” I stood up and gave the captain a meaningful look.
“‘You who have overcome pride and envy, now overcome wrath with patience.’” I repeated in Italian.
Understanding what I was saying, the captain’s eyes widened. Any Staurofilax aspirant who passed the tests in Rome and Ravenna must have known that the message was meant for him.
“That is what the first sentence says. Its ancient letters are outlined in red.”
Father Stephanos looked at me fondly. “Has the young lady understood the meaning of the prayer?”
“Forgive me!” I apologized quickly. “I didn’t realize I’d switched languages. I’m deeply sorry.”
“Oh, don’t worry! The emotion in your eyes when you read the text makes me very happy. I think you have grasped the importance of the prayer.”
Farag stood up and the three of us exchanged meaningful looks. Not wanting to miss a thing, the three of us immediately looked at Father Stephanos… Father Stephanos or Stephanos the Staurofilax? I wondered.
“Do you like it?” the old man wanted to know. “I can give you a pamphlet printed shortly after the scholars visited. It includes a fulllength photograph of the tablet and several smaller detailed photos. Unfortunately, the publication is rather old and the photos are in black and white. But it contains a translation of the prayer.” He added with a proud smile, “I must warn you, I was the one who translated it.” Deeply moved, he started to recite from memory. “‘You who have overcome pride and envy, can now overcome wrath with patience now. Just as the plant thrives through the will of the sun, implore God that his divine light falls on you from the heavens. Christ says: fear nothing but the fear of sinning. Christ fed you in groups of one hundred and fifty hungry souls. His holy word did not say groups of ninety or two. Then trust justice as the Athenians did and do not fear the grave. Have faith in Christ as he had faith even in the wicked tax collector. Your soul, like the soul of the bird, races and flies to God. Do not hinder your soul by committing sins, and it will arrive at Christ’s side. If you conquer evil, you will reach the light before dawn. Purify your soul, bow down before God as a humble supplicant. With the help of the True Cross, strike down your earthly appetites without mercy. Cleave to the Cross alongside Jesus with seven nails and seven blows. If you do this, Christ, in his majesty, will receive you at the sweet door. May your patience be filled to the bri
m by this prayer. Amen.’ Beautiful, isn’t it?”
“It’s… beautiful, Father Stephanos,” I murmured.
“I see it has touched you!” he exclaimed, happy. “I’ll go look for those pamphlets and give one to each of you!”
And in a slow, unsteady step, he left the crypt and disappeared.
The tablet was indisputably very old. The wood had been darkened by the smoke from the candles that had burned before it over the centuries, though it held no candles at the moment. It was about a meter high and a meter and a half long. The letters were ancient Greek, and the text was written in black ink; the first and last sentences were decorated with a red border. At the top, like a shield or a crest, was the emperor’s chrismon and its faithful horizontal bar.
My brother quickly detected that this was something important. He struck up a trivial conversation with Father Murphy and Father Chrysostomos so Farag, the Rock, and I could talk.
“This tablet,” the Rock observed, “is what we are in Jerusalem for.”
“The message couldn’t be any clearer,” agreed Farag. “We will have to study it carefully. The content is very strange.”
“Strange?” I exclaimed. “Extremely unusual! We’ll fry our eyes trying to understand it!”
“What do you two think about Father Stephanos?” asked the Rock.
“Staurofilax,” Farag and I answered simultaneously.
“Yes, definitely.”
Father Stephanos reappeared, holding his pamphlets tightly so he wouldn’t drop them. “Pray this prayer every day,” he said as he handed them to us, “and you’ll discover the beauty hidden in its words. You can’t imagine the devotion it will inspire if you recite it patiently.”
An absurd anger toward that cynical Staurofilax was growing inside me. I rejected the fact that he was an old, old man and couldn’t be a member of the brotherhood. I wanted to grab him by the soutane and tell him to stop mocking us, for we had nearly died several times on account of his strange fanaticism. Then I recalled that the new test dealt with wrath. I tried to stifle my fury, brought on, I was sure, by physical and mental fatigue. I wanted to cry when I realized that those diabolical millenary deacons had devised that initiation process meticulously.
In a daze, we left the crypt with the old priest’s affection and Father Chrysostomos’s friendship and thanks. We promised to send him the historical documentation on the crypt. It was late in the afternoon, yet waves of tourists were still entering the basilica of the Holy Sepulchre.
We were given a modest office in the delegation so we could work on the prayer. The captain insisted on getting Internet access, while Farag and I requested several dictionaries from the library of the Biblical School of Jerusalem on classical Greek and Byzantine Greek. After a frugal dinner, Glauser-Röist settled down in front of the computer and began tapping away. To him, computers were like musical instruments that must be perfectly tuned or powerful machines that should be well oiled. While he began furiously typing on his new toy, Farag and I spread the pamphlets out on the desk and got to work on decoding the prayer.
Father Stephanos’s translation could be called meritorious. His reading of the Greek text was irreproachable; however, grammatically it left a lot to be desired. The old man had clearly done his best, given how deficient the material was. Its author didn’t seem to have a command of the Greek language: Even considering that Greek verb tenses are extremely complicated, some verbs were misspelled and some words were in the wrong place. Normally, one would have deduced that whoever wrote the prayer had put his soul into expressing his thoughts in a language he didn’t know well, driven by some social or religious need. But knowing this was in fact a Staurofilax message, we couldn’t overlook those errors. The first thing that got our attention was the sentences that contained numbers, partly because they didn’t make contextual sense and partly because we were almost positive they were some sort of code. “Christ fed you in groups of one hundred and fifty hungry souls. His holy word did not say groups of ninety or two. Cleave to the Cross along with Jesus with seven nails and seven blows.” We were pretty clear that the number 7 wasn’t a coincidence, but 100, 50, 90, and 2?
That night we didn’t get much farther. We were so tired we could hardly keep our eyes open. So we went to bed, convinced that a few hours of sleep would do wonders for our intellectual capacities.
The next day we didn’t get good results either. We went over the text front and back and analyzed it word by word. Except for the first and last sentences outlined in red, nothing in the prayer directly alluded to the Staurofilakes’ tests. Late in the afternoon, however, we figured out something that further clouded the few ideas that had occurred to us. The sentence “Christ fed you in groups of one hundred and fifty hungry people” could only refer to the evangelical passage about multiplying the loaves and fishes. The evangelist Mark talks about the multitude “placed in groups of one hundred and fifty.” * Once again, we found ourselves empty-handed.
We soon outgrew the office the delegation had given us. The reference books, our notes, the dictionaries, the reams of pages printed off the Internet were peccata minuta in comparison to the boards we set up over the weekend. Farag thought we might see something—or see more—if we worked on an enlarged photograph of the prayer. The captain scanned the image from the pamphlet at high definition. Just as with the silhouette of Abi-Ruj Iyasus, he printed out sheets and taped them to a piece of cardboard the same size as the original tablet. He placed that reproduction on a large tripod that simply didn’t fit in the office. So on Sunday we moved all our gear to a more spacious room with a large chalkboard where we could draw diagrams or analyze prayers.
Sunday afternoon I deserted my companions—desperation had dampened our spirits—and went alone to the Franciscan church in the Old City where Pierantonio celebrated Mass every Sunday at six. I couldn’t miss something that special while I was there. (Besides, my mother would have killed me.) Since the Franciscan church stood next to the Basilica of the Holy Sepulchre, once I got out of the delegation’s car just outside the walls, I walked the same route as the first day to get refocused. Where better than Jerusalem? I felt truly blessed to be elbowed and shoved on the Via Dolorosa.
According to the directions Pierantonio had given me over the phone, the Franciscan church was directly across from the entrance to the basilica. I didn’t need to go all the way to the plaza but veered a couple of alleyways to the right before I took a strange roundabout route, all by myself, to reach my destination.
I piously attended Mass and received communion from Pierantonio’s hands. Afterward, we went for a stroll and talked. I told him the entire story of the theft of the Ligna Crucis and the Staurofilakes. When it grew dark, he offered to walk me back to the apostolic delegation. We retraced our steps—I saw the Cupola of the Rock, Al-Aqsa Mosque, and many other things. We stopped in the plaza of the Basilica of the Holy Sepulchre, drawn by a small crowd gathered to take pictures and videotape the daily closing of the doors.
“It’s incredible! Anything gets people’s attention!” my brother said ironically. “How about you, Miss Tourist? Do you want to see it too?”
“You’re very kind,” I answered sarcastically, “but no thank you.”
Yet, I headed in that direction. I suppose I couldn’t tear myself away from the enchantment of nightfall in the Christian heart of Jerusalem.
“So, Ottavia, there’s something I’ve been meaning to talk to you about, but I hadn’t found the right time.”
Like a circus performer, a little man climbed up a very tall ladder that leaned against the doors. He was lit up by the lights and flashes from the cameras below. The man toiled away with a heavy iron lock.
“Please, Pierantonio, don’t tell me you have more disturbing news for me.”
“No, this has nothing to do with me. It’s about Farag.”
I whipped around to face him. The little man on the ladder began his descent. “What about Farag?”
“To sa
y the truth, there’s nothing wrong with Farag,” he said. “You’re the one who seems to be having problems.”
My heart stopped. The blood rushed to my face. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Pierantonio.”
Some shouts and an alarmed murmur arose from the spectators. My brother spun around to watch, but I was paralyzed by Pierantonio’s words. I’d tried to keep my feelings in check, I’d done everything I could to hide my emotions, but Pierantonio had found me out.
“What happened, Father Longman?” I heard my brother ask. I looked up and saw he was addressing another Franciscan monk passing by.
“Hi, Father Salina. The Guardian of the Keys fell off the ladder. He injured his foot and was knocked out. Fortunately he was close to the ground.”
I was so numb by the pain and shock it took me a few seconds to react. Thank God my brain started functioning and a voice repeated in my head: “The Guardian of the Keys, the Guardian of the Keys.” I struggled to come out of the fog as Pierantonio thanked his fellow Franciscan.
“The man on the ladder took a tumble. Now, let’s get back to our talk. I promised myself I would talk to you today without fail. If I’m not mistaken, you have a serious problem, little sister.”
“What exactly did that monk from your order say?”
“Don’t try to change the subject, Ottavia,” Pierantonio rebuked me sternly.
“Enough of this foolishness! What did he say exactly?”
My brother was very surprised by my sudden change of mood. “That the basilica doorman tripped and fell as he was climbing down the ladder.”
“No!” I shouted. “He didn’t say doorman!”
A light must have switched on in my brother’s mind. The look on his face changed and I saw he understood. “The Guardian of the Keys!” he stammered. “The one who has the keys!”
“I have to talk to that man!” I exclaimed as I left him standing there open-mouthed and the tourists made way for me. Someone called the “Guardian of the Keys” of the Basilica of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem had to be pretty close to “the one who has the keys: the one who opens and no one closes and closes and no one opens.” It wasn’t exactly right, sure, but I had to give it a try.
The Last Cato Page 30