by Colm Toibin
‘Is that what it was for?’
They caught one another’s eye and for the first time I felt the enormity of their ambition and the innocence of their belief.
‘Who else knows this?’
‘It will be known,’ one of them said.
‘Through your words?’ I asked.
‘Through our words and the words of others of his disciples.’
‘You mean,’ I asked, ‘the men who followed him?’
‘Yes.’
‘Are they still alive?’
‘Yes.’
‘They were hiding when he died,’ I said. ‘They were hiding when he died.’
‘They were there when he rose again,’ one of them said.
‘They saw his grave,’ I said. ‘I never saw his grave, I never washed his body.’
‘You were there,’ my guide said. ‘You held his body when it was taken down from the cross.’
His companion nodded.
‘You watched us as we covered his body in spices and wound his body in linen cloths and buried him in a sepulchre near the place where he was crucified. But you were not with us, you were in a place where you were protected when he came among us three days after his death and spoke to us before he rose to be with his father.’
‘His father,’ I said.
‘He was the Son of God,’ the man said, ‘and he was sent by his father to redeem the world.’
‘By his death, he gave us life,’ the other said. ‘By his death, he redeemed the world.’
I turned towards them then and whatever it was in the expression on my face, the rage against them, the grief, the fear, they both looked up at me alarmed and one of them began to move towards me to stop me saying what it was I now wanted to say. I edged back from them and stood in the corner. I whispered it at first and then I said it louder, and as he moved away from me and almost cowered in the corner I whispered it again, slowly, carefully, giving it all my breath, all my life, the little that is left in me.
‘I was there,’ I said. ‘I fled before it was over but if you want witnesses then I am one and I can tell you now, when you say that he redeemed the world, I will say that it was not worth it. It was not worth it.’
They departed that night on a caravan that was making its way towards the islands and there was in their tone and manner a new distance from me, something close to fear but maybe even closer to pure exasperation and disgust. But they left me money and provisions and they left me a sense that I was still under their protection. It was easy to be polite to them. They are not fools. I admire how deliberate they are, how exact their plans, how dedicated they are, how different from the group of unshaven brutes and twitchers, men who could not look at women, who came to my house after my husband’s death and sat with my son, talking nonsense through the night. They will thrive and prevail and I will die.
I do not go to the Synagogue now. All of that is gone. I would be noticed; my strangeness would stand out. But I go with Farina to the other Temple and sometimes I go alone in the morning when I wake or later when there are shadows coming over the world, presaging night. I move quietly. I speak to her in whispers, the great goddess Artemis, bountiful with her arms outstretched and her many breasts waiting to nurture those who come towards her. I tell her how much I long now to sleep in the dry earth, to go to dust peacefully with my eyes shut in a place near here where there are trees. In the meantime, when I wake in the night, I want more. I want what happened not to have happened, to have taken another course. How easily it might not have happened! How easily we could have been spared! It would not have taken much. Even the thought of its possibility comes into my body now like a new freedom. It lifts the darkness and pushes away the grief. It is as if a traveller, weary after days of walking in a dry desert, a place void of shade, were to come to a hilltop and see below a city, an opal set in emerald, filled with plenty, a city filled with wells and trees, with a marketplace laden with fish and fowl and the fruits of the earth, a place redolent with the smell of cooking and spices.
I begin to walk down towards it along a soft path. I am being led into this strange place of souls, along great narrow bridges spanning gurgling, steaming water, like lava in the dying glow, with island meadows filled with vital growth below. Being led by no one. All around there is silence and soothing, dwindling light. The world has loosened, like a woman preparing for bed who lets her hair flow free. And I am whispering the words, knowing that words matter, and smiling as I say them to the shadows of the gods of this place who linger in the air to watch me and hear me.