“What is it?”
“The Arabs use it. It’s a stun-poison – it comes from Egypt. It only costs five new Israeli shekels a pack. I’ve developed a special recipe: a few handfuls of grain, a scatter of the powdered Tardimon, and some good olive oil – to bind the mix together and give it the right consistency.”
“And all the churches of Jerusalem are following this route?”
“No – I don’t think they would dare use it at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, with all the pilgrim groups about. They have too many competing religious orders there anyway, and the different factions can never agree on anything. And I believe the White Russians refused, too.”
“The White Russians?”
“Don’t you know about them? That lovely Russian church that you can see, standing out so prominently with gilded domes, on the slope above the Garden of Gethsemane. It’s a very interesting place; I go there, sometimes, when I feel the need for some flash of salvation in life. They don’t really approve of Catholics, but they let me in. It’s the quintessence of Jerusalem: menace and tranquillity. There’s no need for pest control over there, anyway: they’re fatalists. We, though, have an obligation to try to preserve life.”
“So why isn’t it working?”
“It works perfectly: on the pigeons, at least. It puts them to sleep for a while, and it’s certainly not a pleasant experience for them: they stagger around, looking distressed, and then they fly away and make their nests elsewhere. I would say it’s proved very effective – but it only lasts about four weeks – then fresh birds move in, and you have to repeat. The real problem, though, is with the smaller birds – the sparrows. They’re much more susceptible to the effects of the poison. It knocks them out, or they try to fly off but don’t have the strength. They flutter about or they’re just immobilised, and that leaves me very ill at ease. You see, the cats come to get them.”
“The cats?”
“The cats of Jerusalem! They have a banquet – those creatures from the mouth of hell.”
“Your love of animals doesn’t extend as far as them?”
“I like cats – but these are savage street cats. Surely you must have noticed how fierce they are? You never see a mouse or rat anywhere in Jerusalem: they eat them all. And they eat the sparrows too – they pounce on them. See,” – he gestured accusingly over at a thin, grey tabby that was stretched out on the far side of the church portico, sunning itself – “they’re waiting, just like vultures: they have come to associate me with death! The harshness of the natural kingdom!”
“I don’t know,” I said, retreating and trying to choose my words with a degree of care, “that life in a remote Aboriginal community would really have been ideal for you.”
“You’re going?” said Lamourette. “So soon? Don’t be put off by all the blood and slaughter.”
I was careful, in a few words, to reassure him on that front, and explain to him that I had other tasks, which went beyond the work of memory.
“Of course,” he said indulgently, a touch of sadness coming into his voice. “How close the past is, when we look for it. You almost made me feel that I was back once again in those lost days, standing in the shadow of the trees and peaks, on the edge of the world – at Kalumburu.”
*
Some weeks later, after assignments in Iraq, I came back to Jerusalem, and one of my first expeditions took me along the promenade beneath the walls of the old city, down into the Kidron Valley and its tombs. I paused at the walled enclosure of Gethsemane: a row of narrow, green-painted benches had been installed beneath the ancient, twisted olive trees. For much of the afternoon I stayed there, turning over the events I had witnessed in the days just passed, and leaving a space inside myself, to see if some mood or memory from biblical times could still be felt in that spot: some grief, some sense of vigil or nocturnal fear. I walked around the gardens and the religious buildings close by, and allowed my thoughts to roam unchecked. Despite these exalted surroundings, they unfurled down well-worn avenues: recollection, surmise, regret. I was on the point of heading back towards West Jerusalem when my eye was caught by a group of gleaming, gilded domes. I realised that I was near the White Rus sian monastery, which stands halfway up the mountain slope and looms above the buildings lining the valley floor. On an impulse, avoiding the trinket salesmen and clutches of sad-faced tourist guides, I walked up the steep, narrow road behind the garden, until I reached the wrought-iron monastery gate. It was still open: a handful of pilgrims and black-clad nuns were strolling about. I went in and made my way along a winding path, through the trees, up to a wide courtyard before the church entrance steps. There was a belvedere across Jerusalem: one looked down into the ravine and saw the Jewish tombstones, like a scree of barren, broken rocks upon the hillside, and, beyond them, the Arab houses in the valley, and the fall of the land towards the plains of Israel, and the distant sea. There was something fearful about that view; staring at it felt like falling: too long there would surely pull one over the precipice. I drew away, uneasily, and went into the church and buried myself in the story of its foundation. It was a tale rich in history’s familiar reversals: hopes crushed, intentions fulfilled in mocking fashion, the slow, unyielding advance of death and time.
Late in the nineteenth century, during the last years of his long reign, Emperor Alexander III of Russia, a ruler of the most authoritarian instincts, had formed a resolve to commemorate his mother by raising a church in her name in the Holy Land. He put this plan into practice: his agents set out for Jerusalem. The olive groves above Gethsemane were bought, and the church that stands there to this day was built in their midst, and consecrated, in 1888, in honour of the gentlest and most appealing character in the gospel narratives, Saint Mary Magdalene. To preside over the ceremony, the emperor dispatched his brother, Grand Duke Ser-gei, and the German-born Grand Duchess Elizaveta Fedorovna, who found herself much inspired by the austere landscape and the flash of the new domes against the grey-leaved olive trees. “How I would like to be buried here,” she exclaimed on first seeing the prospect from the church across the valley, which was untouched, then, by the marks of war and nation-building. Her experiences in Palestine moved her to convert from the Protestantism of her homeland to the Orthodox faith. When, some years later, her husband was assassinated by a terrorist, the grand duchess decided to withdraw from court society and abandon all worldly concerns. With her fortune, which was considerable, she founded a convent in the heart of Moscow, dedicated to the sister saints, Martha and Mary, and founded upon the twin principles of mercy and love. Those principles, though, were not in the ascendant in the wake of the Bolshevik uprising, and in 1918, the grand duchess, together with her faithful cell attendant, the nun Varvara Yakovleva, was dragged from the monastery, held captive by revolutionary forces and eventually transported to the Ural mountains. Here, in the vicinity of the town of Alapayevsk, together with other members of the royal family, the prisoners were thrown down a deep mineshaft to their death. But this was far from being the end of their displacements. Reports of their fate soon reached White Russian forces, which gained control of the district and were able to retrieve the corpses. For some months the bodies of the victims lay in state in the cathedral of Alapayevsk, until the balance of the civil war turned definitively. The White armies retreated, bearing the slain members of the royal family in their baggage train. They were carried all the way to the south-eastern Siberian town of Chita; from here, across empty steppes, they were transferred to Peking, and thence, by the most circuitous of routes, after further delays and negotiations, two of the coffins – those of the grand duchess and Varvara Yakovleva – were conveyed to the Holy Land. It was 1921 before their remains were at last laid to rest, in the crypt beneath the Church of St Mary Magdalene, and in this tortuous way the wish of Elizaveta Fedorovna, first expressed three decades earlier, was fulfilled.
Sunk in this story, I quite failed to register the presence of a young nun, who was in attendance inside the ch
urch, performing her devotions, kneeling before the altar and gazing up towards the icons displayed in their precious frames. After some while, she rose, adjusted the incense-burners, then came towards me.
“It’s closing time,” she said, “for visitors.”
I felt a sudden yearning to stay there, in the low entrance chamber of the church, in the glow of that late, soft light.
“You seem to be a little agitated,” she said, and stared at me, frowning a little, her brow furrowed, her expression strengthened by the framing blackness of her veil.
“It’s just the normal setting on the dial, Sister,” I said.
“Sophia,” said she. “Sister Sophia.”
“That’s a striking name.”
“Yes – it was given to me by the abbess.”
“And what were you called, before?”
“We leave all that behind, you know,” she said, with a look of vagueness, as if she found it hard to remember, and then, more enthusiastically: “Would you like to pray?”
“You were just praying a moment ago.”
“That’s true: we do a lot of praying here. We pray for the world, constantly, to ward off its fate. ‘Watch and pray,’ we tell ourselves. But I didn’t really mean me: I meant you. I thought you might like to pray alongside someone.”
We knelt down; I closed my eyes. A silence ensued. Folds of colour drifted across my darkened field of vision. There were birdcalls in the trees outside; the noises from the city filtered in.
“I’m afraid it’s not really working for me, Sister,” I said, after a few minutes.
“Truly? It was fantastic for me. I love praying beside other people, especially if they have good souls. I find it gives me freshness, and strength.”
She had a Bostonian accent, which was becoming more noticeable as we spoke on.
“You don’t sound very Russian,” I said.
“Being Russian isn’t an entry requirement of the Russian Orthodox Church,” she replied, a touch reprovingly.
“So then – how did you find your way here?”
At this question, Sister Sophia stood up, in rather regal style, and began walking round the church, preparing for the evening service, letting fall, in the midst of this activity which she performed with gestures of the utmost ease and grace, a detail or two about the shaping moments of her life, and I made attempts to answer her with brief stories of my own. Soon, as this exchange, which was tentative in the extreme, drew on, the light began to shift: we went outside and watched the mauve haze of sunset spread across the horizon, and I pieced together the fragments of her tale. It seemed marked by spasms of the most baroque disaster – deep sicknesses, nightmare car crashes, all of which Sister Sophia had learned, in retrospect, to read as so many urgent, prompting signals from the divine. After much questing and searching, and fruitless study of the world’s most recondite religions, at the very moment when she stood upon the verge of entry into the race of life, she visited an Orthodox church and encountered an abbess, whose influence guided her. And then it was as if a strong wind began blowing, deep inside her being: she was swept onto a new path, she felt chains lifting away.
“You were free?”
“It was simply that I realised: I wanted knowledge of the truth.
Not the surface knowledge that flows freely and cheaply through the world – I wanted reality.”
“And everyone who doesn’t follow a religious life is lacking reality?”
“I’m sorry to say so, yes! And there’s something about being here, in the holy city. Don’t you feel it? A special atmosphere: a sense of calm that reaches into you.”
“I find it troubling and oppressive,” I said. “In fact, when I’m walking through the old city, and catch that mood of bleakness that it has, I sometimes imagine that all the crimes and horrors of the world began here, and they’re still radiating and spreading outwards.”
Sister Sophia listened to this outburst with an even, slightly pained expression.
“My experience has been the opposite,” she said. “If you stay here, things start coming out. Your power becomes unhidden, it becomes revealed: all the passions and emotions that you’ve hidden in your life.”
“Really?”
“Really. The deepest emotions.”
Even as she said this, she swooned and swayed back beside me, before recovering herself.
“Forgive me,” she said. “I didn’t get much sleep: that’s one of the drawbacks of deep meditation and nocturnal prayer. And I have low blood sugar – ever since … ever since an incident, some while ago, in Jericho. My pulse sometimes just seems to fade away.”
I reached over to her wrist, which she had raised up demonstratively, as if to check it. She pulled her hand away from my touch, rubbing it gently, as though it had just undergone some faint contamination, and smiled.
“That’s kind of you,” she said. “But it’s not really recommended. I am a nun, you know. And this is a convent. We endure intrusions from the outside, rather than welcoming them.”
I said nothing, and allowed this crushing remark to echo in my thoughts. Sister Sophia stood up, hands clasped, and surveyed me.
“There’s something I’d like to show you,” she said. “Before you go. Something that comes from your part of the world. It’s in my cell.”
“Your cell!”
“Yes – what did you think? That we have luxury accommodation? Wait here a moment. Ping will keep you company.”
“And who exactly is Ping?”
“The monastery cat – right there.” She pointed to a large, indolent-looking grey cat, which had been moving stealthily about, much like a small-scale version of a stalking panther, all through this conversation.
“I bet he’s killed a few sparrows in his time,” I said.
“What a dreadful thought,” said Sister Sophia. “We feed him well. Don’t we?”
The cat approached, purring beatifically.
“Anyway, Ping’s fifteen years old: I think his hunting days are over.”
She turned and went down the winding path, holding her habit to her body, breaking after a few steps into a light, skipping, bird-like run. I let my eyes rest on the domes and spires across the valley. The routines and patterns of my life hung before me in those silent seconds: they seemed like arcane shapes in some strange script. Soon Sister Sophia was back, panting slightly and holding in one hand a small square of canvas, wooden-framed, no larger than a hard-backed book.
“Surprised?” she said. “It’s a painting!”
She was beaming: she gazed down at the canvas, then lifted it up and held it close before her eyes.
“It’s an image that’s come to mean a great deal to me. I stare at it, and travel into it; I can get lost in it for hours. It was given to me by an abbess, and she was given it by one of her sisters, who travelled very widely. I keep it on the mantelpiece, next to my icon of Saint Nicholas. And that’s a real place of honour.”
She fell silent an instant, then began reciting in a low voice: “Oh blessed Nicholas, show compassion to me who fall down praying to thee; and enlighten the eyes of my soul, O wise one, that I may clearly behold the Light-Giver and Compassionate One …”
“I’m afraid I don’t know very much about icons, Sister,” I said.
“But this isn’t an icon! It’s a landscape. I call it ‘The Promised Land’ – it’s like an image of paradise for me, an austere and lovely paradise, and I’ve always longed to find out what it shows: where it really is. Maybe you can help. All we know is that it came from northern Australia.”
“That’s quite a large area,” I said. “Would you actually go and make a visit, if you could pin it down? I thought everyone agreed that paradise wasn’t a place on Earth.”
“It’s just to know. Remember, we like knowledge.”
She stared down at the little canvas with a slight, appraising frown, then spun it lightly with her fingertips, until the painted image was facing me.
“So,” she said. �
��Do you recognise it?”
I looked at the painting. I laughed, and smiled. I felt a slight pressure at the corners of my eyes. I glanced away. It was a Kimberley horizon – red ranges, sand, bright flowers, the blue vault of dry-season sky.
“I know the artist,” I said, “and I know the place – I know both of them well.”
“I was sure of it: I had an intuition. I understood, the moment you walked into our church, that your steps were being guided: that there was something you were sent to give us.”
“God’s will in action?”
“We see signs of it everywhere: we can tell: a whisper on the wind; a gleam inside the light.”
“I would have to say, Sister, it was pure coincidence that brought me here.”
She looked at me with wide, sad eyes.
“There are never coincidences that seem full of meaning in your life? It’s all just the movements of colliding atoms? Even this?”
Her voice softened: she drew one hand across the surface of the canvas.
“Perhaps there are times,” I said, “when life’s course seems to take on a shape and definition, and chance cues point you in a certain way: when memories rise up and lead you back to times you’ve lived through, or people far away whom you know and love – or even stretches of country that live inside your heart. Of course I often think that: it would be inhuman of me not to – and maybe this is such a time.”
I took the little canvas in my hands. In a few words, I sketched the story of the painting for her. It was by Daisy Andrews, an artist from Fitzroy Crossing, whose works, which are much sought after, always depict a single landscape: blood-coloured ranges that rise up sharply like domes, shimmering in the desert light. They show the country known as Lumbulumbu – obscure, ill-charted, lying beyond easy reach, down bush tracks on the fringes of the Sandy Desert. For Daisy, a woman of Walmajarri parentage who was born in exile on the banks of the Fitzroy River, close by old Cherrabun Station, this has always been a landscape with special resonances, though she had not even seen it when she made it the chosen and constant subject of her work, and years later, when I travelled in her company out to those silent ranges, the voyage proved almost too much for her to bear.
The Red Highway Page 9