The Red Highway

by Nicolas Rothwell

  But on one of these walks, setting out from the gardens beneath the western fortifications, after several hours in the steep streets of the Jewish quarter meandering between museums and deep excavation digs, I came abruptly on a military checkpoint barring the way. Despite my best intentions, I had strayed too close to the compound of the Al-Aqsa Mosque – the scene, in those months, of frequent protests and confrontations. Suddenly, there was the noise of a crowd, like a wave surging, close ahead; there was running; voices shouting. I retreated down winding alleys, turning here and there, until I was quite lost. All was silence now, on every side. I noticed, then, an archway set in the stone wall close by me, with a heavy wooden door just ajar. I pushed my way inside and found myself surrounded by the lush, ill-kept beds of a formal garden, choked with flowering jasmines and climbing plants.

  Worshippers, announced a wooden sign-board, in several languages: Respect this place: dress modestly: leave all guns and weapons at the entrance.

  Before me rose the flank of an austere church. Its dome was low; its façade was sombre. Beyond this building, the land fell away in a series of embankments, until it plunged down into ruined pits of stonework. There were broken columns, and the remains of stairwells that ended in the air. Indeed, much of this enclosure was made up of cisterns and deep cavities in the ground, across which, at different heights, thin walkways stretched – and only then did I understand that I had come upon a new fragment of the Jerusalem map, though this became clear to me in the most gradual fashion, the way discoveries steal across one in a dream. It was – it could only be – the Church of St Anne, and the Bethesda pool: I had stumbled on a corner of the city linked by the by-ways of tradition with the Virgin Mary and her family home. These were sites that I had longed to see, as much because of the soft sound of their names on the tongue as for their religious charge, and indeed I had several times set out to find them, only to be defeated by the roadblocks and the labyrinthine turns and dead ends beyond the Wailing Wall. Out of the corner of my eye, as I inspected this lonely spot, I caught sight from time to time of a tall man wearing a white habit, moving somewhat stealthily about, peering on occasion heavenwards. So cryptic and curious was the demeanour of this figure that I was on the point of assuming he was no more than a vague emanation of the buildings, and I was startled when he swerved in his motions and came towards me, perspiring slightly, clutching a green tennis ball in one hand. He greeted me with an air of ecstatic enthusiasm.

  “Of course,” he inquired, “you are making a pilgrimage?”

  “What’s that in aid of?” I countered, pointing at the tennis ball.

  “Alas,” said the man, “it’s a long story,” and he gave an operatic sigh and produced a card, which he stretched out towards me.

  Fr. Jean Lamourette, it read: Missionaries of Africa – White Fathers. P.O.B. 19079 Jerusalem.

  I studied it in silence.

  “You have no visiting card?”

  “On the whole,” I replied, “it’s better, in some of the places where I work right now, not to advertise one’s identity too much.”

  “You are surely then a missionary as well!”

  “Not exactly.”

  I explained in greater detail.

  “But that makes you almost a social visitor!” declared the priest. “You can’t imagine how weary one becomes of religious guests, when one lives here in the holy city. Although, to be truthful, in these days of crisis hardly anyone comes calling on us any more. We must mark the moment. Some tea – something stronger?”

  He led me into a sparsely furnished dining room, dominated by a long refectory table. We sat facing each other there, as the cool light, broken by the shade of the jasmines, filtered in. He leaned back; there was an immediate curiosity between us, we began talking, we talked for hours, and though I returned several times, in the months ahead, to the Church of St Anne and became friendly with Lamourette, never did he speak again with the freedom he displayed that afternoon of our first meeting, as he described to me the trajectory which had brought him to Jerusalem at the mid-point of his life.

  He was born and raised, he told me, in provincial Quebec, in a religious family. There had not been any uncertainty in his mind about his faith: it had never wavered, it had been as clear to him as the pillar of cloud that led the Israelites from Egypt. How, though, should he fulfil his vocation? What was the precise task the Almighty had laid down for him? While he was still casting about for the answers to these questions, he received an unusual recommendation from a childhood friend of his, who had entered the Benedictine order, and, as part of his novitiate, had made a brief trip to its most distant outpost: an Australian one.

  I smiled a little at this, for I had been developing, as a result of just such coincidences, the thought that a link of some kind existed between the far reaches of the Outback and the country of the Bible, in the way that certain places incessantly call up memories of distant landscapes, to which they seem quite unconnected by either geographic resemblance or historic bonds – and I had come to feel that this pattern of links, like some doubling in nature, endures and even strengthens the longer one refuses to admit its existence.

  “Perhaps you yourself,” said Lamourette, “with your story, would even know the place: the mission of Kalumburu, in the Kimberley, on the north-west coastline? Perhaps it was that connection that guided your steps here?”

  It was one of the few communities in the North that I had not visited. I told him this: he received the news almost as if it was a personal betrayal.

  “You must go!” he insisted. “I was a young man when I went there: my life was changed by those experiences.”

  “It’s not a mission any more,” I said. “And it doesn’t have that great a reputation nowadays.”

  “Fulfilment,” said Lamourette, “lurks in strange locations. I still remember the journey I made there, even though it lies thirty years away in time. How dense and harsh the country was: those twisted, ragged mountains; the unmoving rivers that were no more than pools of standing water; the mocking, turquoise sea! It wasn’t the landscape, though, that drew me there.”

  “What, then?”

  “This was a time, remember,” he said, his voice somewhat distanced, “when I was still on the brink of committing myself to the missionary life – a path that is not without its rigours. I’d heard about the Spanish monk who served for many years as the Superior of Kalumburu: Dom Serafim Sanz. He was well known, once, he was a commanding personality – though doubtless he died many years ago, and has long since been forgotten. I had heard such wondrous things of him. It occurred to me that I could learn from the example of such a man! You could almost say it was a kind of youthful pilgrimage that I made, in those days, to the farthest corner of the earth, to test myself. I spent months there. I came to know the people of the mission well, and now I look back, I realise I had the sensation, all the while I stayed in Kalumburu, that I was staring into the heart of life.”

  “And what did you learn?” I asked him.

  He shrugged and made a little gesture with both hands, as if to suggest the elusiveness of all inward experience. Then he began to describe the mission, to paint it with his words: its lines, its colours, the folds of the valley, the broken cliffs and crenellations of the ranges all around. I half-closed my eyes, drowsily, as if I could take wing on his breath and travel there, and steep myself in the far North Kimberley, and not return.

  “The monks had made it their first task, of course,” said Lam-ourette, “to build a little church: a structure with its own simplicity and elegance. And I still had a young man’s fervour; I prayed there, a great deal, seeking for some guidance. Everything made the strongest impression on me: the heat of the day in the buildup season; the smoke plumes from the fires in the bush that burned for weeks on end. I spoke to Sanz, and listened to him, whenever I could claim his attention. He was very fit. He loved arm-wrestling: it was one of the great passions of his youth, in Spain. He used to challenge me t
o contests: ‘Ready?’ he would say, and give a little smile, and slam my hand down on the table as if his life depended on it: he beat me every single time. But he loved work above everything: he was a typical Benedictine! He had the dream of building up a cattle station, in hard country on the plateau to the south of Kalumburu, and often I would drive out there with him. There was no road to speak of; no shelter – we slept in swags beneath the stars: they were so clear and close you felt you had to brush them from your eyes. And it was there that Sanz told me about his adventures during wartime, when the mission was attacked by the Japanese Air Force, and several members of the congregation were killed by the bombs dropped at point-blank range. It was very late one evening, when at last I plucked up the courage to put to Sanz the question I had come so far to have answered. I asked him if he felt he had chosen the right path in life: if service among the Aboriginal people had met some need in his heart.”

  “I think I can guess the reply,” I said.

  “I wonder! He leaned towards me: I saw his eyes glitter in the light of the fire. He told me that it was not the need of his heart that mattered to him, of course, but God’s will. And what he said next determined the path I chose to follow from that day. I remember the exact words: ‘It is the intent that God sees, before the act. Even if I had failed to convert a single Aborigine, to save a single soul, I would regard my life as well spent.’ We spoke no more that night.”

  “That’s a hard line to take,” I said.

  “Religion is an extremism. Hasn’t being in Jerusalem taught you that? When the morning came, I saw another side of Sanz. He loved exploring through the bush, and seeking out the traces of vanished cultures that had once flourished in that landscape: he was a great aficionado of rock art …”

  “I think that’s almost a universal condition for missionaries and men of God in the Kimberley,” I put in – but Lamourette ignored this and continued, in phrases of mounting sweep and poise, to tell his tale: how the two of them had hiked through the ranges above the Carson River, through gorges and ravines where unknown waterfalls came tumbling down, until they reached a valley, deep, surrounded by red, granitic cliffs. Sanz led the way up, along the flank of a tabletop peak; beneath its crowning mesa was the slightest of overhangs, guarded by white gum trees, and there, cut into the rampart wall, was a piece of rock art unlike anything that Lamourette had seen.

  “That country must be full of Bradshaw figures,” I interrupted, a touch impatiently. “They’re extraordinary the first time you catch sight of them: lithe, precise, mute, mysterious.”

  “Of course there were Bradshaws. There were so many of them in those rocks we stopped noticing them. And there are the famous Wandjina sites as well, in the stone platforms further south. This was something different. It was a single carving engraved in the hard rock: a human figure, in profile, blurred, as though it was being copied from some distant pattern in the memory – but it was clear at once to my eyes what it was. Ever since, I have described it to myself as the carving of the armoured knight: a man in armour, wearing a helmet and breastplate; I see it now as an emblem, in the harsh world, of enduring faith. Sanz told me he had found it several years before, on a trip along that escarpment – and it was as if someone had guided his path to that very overhang, for how else could he have found it, in all that unending wildness of thorn and rock? We inspected it very closely. To both of us, it seemed old. Who knows what hand placed it there? I used to turn over in my mind whether some lost explorer carved it, or whether it was the last trace of a forgotten empire, some civilisation vanished in the pits of time. But soon enough I realised there were many things about that silent world that I would never know. When we retraced our route, along the valley floors and river channels, we barely spoke; I had the sense that both of us felt crushed, then, by the intensity of being in those ranges. It was hard not to have strong intimations of some presence, some force greater than the purely human, there. Back we drove down the dirt track to Kalumburu. How neat, and clean, and frail the mission seemed, after that spell in the wilderness! The stone buildings set at right angles, the lawns and flowers, the herd of cattle by the lagoon. I was very quiet within myself for several days: I had taken those words from Sanz as a kind of emblem for my life. I wondered, even, if I should stay there, and fulfil my vocation in the North Kimberley, so far from the world I knew. One afternoon, when these internal storms were at their height, I drove out in the truck, alone, to Pago, near the beach where the early settlement was built. The ruins are still there; and beyond them, the coastline, the mangroves and the curve of the bay. You look out, and you seem to look at nothingness: the shape of the low islands in the distance merges with the water and the sky: the view becomes an abstract space. I stayed there until late that evening, turning over many things. I was afraid that pride would always stay with me; that it would prevent me from doing the will of God. I felt life’s futility at every turn. I knew I was too weak to help those for whom a hopeless future stretches ahead. I wanted a sign to come to me. There I was, waiting, at the end of the world, unknown, unseen by any eye.”

  I found it hard not to be affected by this recital, which had gained greatly in pathos as he spoke. In fact Lamourette’s voice, by now, was trembling.

  “And did any sign come?”

  “Of course not!” He laughed, and shook his head. “No! These are modern times. But as the hours passed, I remembered what had brought me to that point in my journey: I saw that self-doubt is itself a form of pride. I remembered the grace in life that balances its bleakness. I trusted once more in forces greater than myself. I was resolved: I was at peace – and then, as I was looking upwards at the strange stars of the southern sky, I saw a point of light.”

  “A meteor?”

  “No – it was a satellite: slow-moving, very brilliant. It passed above me, and I felt singled out.”

  “Not exactly the most conventional way for a divine message to be passed.”

  “In this world, where signs of God’s presence are so infrequent, I don’t think we should rule anything out. But the whole story has become for me a set of symbols and resonances; a parable about finding a true path ahead – otherwise I would never have thought of telling it.”

  At which point, there were footsteps, hurried, the door was thrown open. A young man appeared, clutching the bloodied carcass of a small, brownish bird, and laid it, without a word, on the wooden slats of the table between us, then took a step back and stared, somewhat reproachfully, down. Lamourette covered his eyes with his hands and let out a groan.

  “Not another of these cursed annihilations! Take it away, Yusuf – and give it a Christian burial like all the rest.”

  “Is that the orthodox approach to animal fatalities here?” I asked, after a few moments.

  “We seem to have fallen into a spiral of blood sacrifice,” said Lamourette, with a note of drama in his voice. “Come with me.”

  He led the way out towards the church, outlining as he went in vivid terms the dilemma he confronted: a plague of pigeons, fast-multiplying creatures, had descended on the holy city, and St Anne’s, lying as it did so close to the Crusader Wall, with its convenient roosting places, had become one of their favourite spots.

  “I know they’re unsightly, unappealing birds, but is that really such a disaster?” I asked.

  “It isn’t their unsightliness that vexes me,” replied Lamourette.

  “Not at all. We find ourselves troubled by a cascade of unintended consequences: of collateral damage, in fact, if truth be told.”

  “A very Middle Eastern kind of problem,” I could not refrain from saying.

  “That’s not a helpful response! It’s unavoidable.”

  The seeds of this crisis, as he explained, had been sown long before, in the Middle Ages, in fact, when the church was built, with eyelet windows piercing the high reaches of its bare white walls: apertures ideal for avian ingress, and much used by the newly arrived flights of domestic pigeons, which had develope
d the habit of perching on the broad ledge of the cupola, directly above the altar of the church.

  “And it is here that they choose to defecate, of course,” Lam-ourette exclaimed. “I know they are God’s creatures – but what acidic excrement they have! The moment it lands, phht! – it burns right through: you have to throw the altar-cloth away. I promise you, there’s no humane remedy we haven’t tried. I had the idea of disturbing the birds by throwing tennis balls up at their roosting perch – but they know very well how safe they are, so far up and out of reach. I brought in a speaker system and played recordings with the hunting calls of birds of prey – but the calls were from European falcons, and the pigeons didn’t recognise them.”

  “So you had to escalate your reaction? That’s the way it always goes.”

  “It was a dark night of the soul! I could see no alternative to a strategy of pest eradication. You can imagine I don’t approve of taking life: I couldn’t even kill a chicken. That was when I first heard about a non-lethal solution. I went to a meeting of the churches of the city: we have informal talks, from time to time, about the challenges we face in common. And I learned there that the Franciscans across the valley, in the Church of All Nations, had discovered a chemical technology. Maybe you’ve heard of it?”

  He rummaged in his pocket and produced a little packet, bluish in colour, with a beatific image on it of a sleeping, sleek-winged bird, its long eyelashes closed.

  “Tardimon,” he said, dramatically. “The answer!”