Apocalypse Next Tuesday

by Safier, David; Parnfors, Hilary;

  ‘I am not going to cancel a planned appointment,’ Jesus said emphatically. ‘And I happen to enjoy spending time with Marie.’

  As soon as he heard these words, Gabriel’s heartburn made a reappearance. ‘But don’t you need to prepare for your task?’ he asked, in the hope that he might still be able to get Jesus to cancel.

  ‘You do not need to lecture me,’ Jesus replied cuttingly.

  Gabriel stopped talking. No one could lecture Jesus. He knew that much.

  ‘You should prepare for the final battle yourself,’ Jesus warned.

  ‘That’s… that’s what I’m doing,’ Gabriel stammered, suddenly very defensive.

  ‘No, you’re just having fun with that woman.’ The Messiah’s tone was a little critical.

  Gabriel turned red. He had indeed spent most of the last couple of days in bed with his great beloved. Had Jesus heard them? Silvia was not exactly quiet, which was irritating, but also quite nice, and sometimes, even Gabriel lost control of his own voice whilst they were ‘sawing’.

  ‘I, er… just want to convert her,’ Gabriel stammered. It wasn’t even a proper lie. He could never have lied to the Messiah! But Silvia could not be converted. She was determined not to let her life be dictated by the Bible.

  ‘What is lingerie?’ Jesus asked.

  Gabriel had a coughing fit.

  ‘I happened to overhear when you told this woman that you love lingerie.’

  ‘Erm… it’s a French dish…’ Gabriel replied. He was shocked to discover that he was more than capable of lying to the Messiah.

  ‘And what is a thong?’ Jesus asked.

  ‘Thong… that’s… that’s the name of her cat,’ Gabriel replied. It seemed it wasn’t all that hard to lie to Jesus. The Messiah then got up from the kitchen table: ‘I am off to see Marie,’ he declared.

  Gabriel didn’t want him to go. He was afraid that Marie was a bad influence. If she was only half as determined and well versed in the arts of seduction as her mother… then… they’d also do some s… Oh God! Had he lost his mind? Even to think such a thing! This was abominable! ‘Would you not rather have dinner with me tonight?’ he asked despairingly.

  ‘Haven’t you arranged to meet Silvia?’ Jesus countered.

  ‘We could all eat together,’ Gabriel suggested.

  ‘Lingerie?’ Jesus asked.

  ‘No!’ Gabriel answered, his voice cracking slightly.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Erm… it gives you heartburn.’ This lying business was quickly becoming routine.

  Jesus laughed. ‘Why would I be afraid of heartburn?’

  Before Gabriel could provide him with a halfway reasonable explanation, the doorbell rang. Jesus opened the door. It was Silvia. Gabriel seriously hoped that Jesus would not mention the lingerie or the thong. Silvia came in and gave Gabriel a kiss on the cheek. In the presence of the Son of God, the former angel found this incredibly embarrassing.

  ‘Is something wrong?’ Silvia asked, noticing that he was a bit nervous.

  ‘No… no,’ Gabriel said, trying to appease her. He realised that he actually wasn’t doing much other than lying.

  ‘Do you mind if Joshua spends the evening with us?’

  Silvia’s expression suggested that she minded a great deal.

  Jesus explained: ‘I have arranged to meet someone else tonight.’

  Silvia was relieved.

  ‘I’d like to try your lingerie another time,’ Jesus added politely.

  That really did surprise Silvia. ‘My lingerie? You want to try on…?’

  Gabriel quickly interrupted her. ‘Please let’s talk about something else, I have a spot of indigestion.’

  Silvia was very perplexed.

  Jesus turned to her and asked: ‘So, where is your lovely little thong?’

  Silvia couldn’t believe it.

  ‘Gabriel told me all about it.’

  At this moment, Gabriel suddenly regretted ever becoming a mortal.

  ‘Does it have a glossy coat?’ Jesus asked politely.

  ‘Erm… I’m sure there are thongs with fur, but…’

  She didn’t get any further. Gabriel was completely overwhelmed. ‘Aren’t you going to be late?’ he asked Jesus.

  He just wanted to put an end to all this and saw no option but to throw the Messiah out. He didn’t even care that the Messiah was going to see Marie.

  Jesus nodded. ‘You are right, my loyal friend.’

  He bid farewell and closed the door behind him. Gabriel breathed a sigh of relief.

  Silvia watched Jesus leave through the window. She was rather bewildered. ‘Is he gay?’ she asked Gabriel.

  Gabriel closed his eyes. It was all too much for him. He had made the Son of God utter the words ‘lingerie’ and ‘thong’. And he had lied to him.

  And above all, he’d allowed him to go and meet up with Marie again!

  Chapter Twenty-One

  ‘So what do you wear for a date with Jesus?’ I asked myself after I’d had a shower and brushed my teeth. I stood in front of my wardrobe and looked for the most demure and high-necked garments I could find. A shirt, a jumper over the top and a pair of black wide leg trousers. I hadn’t looked this prim since I was confirmed. So I’d solved one problem, but not the other. Where to go with someone like Jesus?

  I would have loved to discuss this issue with my sister, but she’d left me a note saying that she’d gone to the lake to draw. And that I shouldn’t worry, the test results had been fine.

  Who knows what Kata would have suggested anyway? Probably something like, ‘Hey, why not show Jesus a couple of people who have a tumour and ask him about God’s love of humanity?’

  Part of me wanted to ask him about that. And, if Jesus existed, whether hell did too. And whether you should even think about things like that if you wanted to be able to sleep at night.

  Then Dad came into the room. ‘Can we talk?’ he said.

  ‘Dad, I have to go soon,’ I replied, hoping to avoid a ‘Svetlana is not like you think she is’ conversation.

  ‘Svetlana is not like you think she is,’ Dad said.

  I sighed, ‘Oh, is she even worse?’

  His eyes filled with sadness. My God, old men have such an amazing ability to look sad.

  ‘She loves her daughter very much.’

  ‘How lovely,’ I snapped. As if that would change anything.

  ‘Is it so hard to imagine that someone loves me?’ he demanded.

  ‘No, just that someone like that loves you,’ I replied, a little too honestly.

  He didn’t say a word. He seemed to know that I was right. But then he said: ‘Well, what if she makes me happy? Does it really matter whether she loves me?’

  I wasn’t sure if I’d ever heard a more desperate statement.

  I would have loved to shake Dad until the part of his brain where he’d stored Svetlana plopped out of his ear. Instead I just stroked his old, wrinkled cheek. But he pushed my hand away. ‘If you can’t be friends with Svetlana, then you need to leave this house,’ he said emphatically.

  He left. I was stunned. My own father was threatening to throw me out.

  As I went outside I walked past the kitchen, where Svetlana and her monster child were playing Ludo. Svetlana looked happy and much less uptight than she’d seemed before. It was as though a she was relieved about something. Either because she and her daughter were now able to deplete my father’s bank account, or because her child’s epilepsy had been cured. It was probably a combination of the two. I paused. I now realised that we’d all been witnesses to a miracle yesterday. I was overcome by a profound feeling of awe. Perhaps I should tell Svetlana that her daughter was cured forever. That would surely create a human connection between us. We could put all this strife behind us. This miracle would have forged a union between us forever…

  Then the little girl saw me and stuck her tongue out. I gave her the finger and left.

  Jesus and I had agreed to meet by the pier where we’d
sat this morning. For many people, such an encounter would have been a fantastic experience. But I was just Marie from Malente. What on earth was I going to talk to him about? I felt completely overwhelmed.

  I stepped onto the pier. Jesus was already there, standing in the evening sun. It was such a wonderful sight. I’m sure that it would have made Michelangelo rethink his concept for the Sistine Chapel. Jesus was still wearing the same clothes that never got dirty. This was probably one of the more practical aspects of being the Messiah. This morning, my feelings would still have been all over the place at the sight of him, but now I was just extremely intimidated.

  ‘Hello, Marie,’ Jesus greeted me.

  ‘Hello…’

  I had trouble saying ‘Jesus’, so I left it at ‘Hello’ and did up the top button of my shirt. My feelings for him were still out for the count.

  ‘What shall we do?’ he asked.

  ‘I… I’ll just start by showing you around Malente,’ I suggested in a fluster.

  ‘Lovely,’ Jesus smiled.

  So-so, I thought.

  I took Jesus to the other church in our little town, the one in which my parents had got married. A house of God, I thought to myself, seemed to be fitting for our rendezvous. And surely better than a visit to the local salsa club.

  ‘Do you come here often?’ Jesus asked, as we stepped into the small, modest church.

  What was I supposed to say to that? The painful truth? Or should I lie? But it was probably not appropriate to lie to Jesus, particularly if hell really did exist.

  ‘Sometimes,’ I replied. A wishy-washy answer seemed the right approach to tackle this situation.

  ‘So what’s your favourite prayer?’ Jesus asked inquisitively.

  Oh God, I didn’t know the texts of any prayers. I racked my brains and answered: ‘Come, Lord Jesus, be our guest and bless what you have given us.’

  Jesus was surprised. ‘Do you eat in the church?’

  God, this was so embarrassing. I decided to shut up before I put my foot in it any more. We slowly sauntered towards the altar. Jesus was not really pleased at the sight of all these crosses – they must have brought back painful memories – but he seemed to be quite happy that people paid homage to God in this place.

  The only thing was that I wasn’t exactly great at doing so myself. So I felt pretty awful. How was I going to get through this evening?

  Jesus looked at the pictures on the walls, while I frantically stared at the floor, and noticed that it was high time that someone ran a mop over it.

  Suddenly Jesus started laughing.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked inquisitively, shifting my gaze from the ground to look at him.

  ‘My mother looked very different.’ He looked at the pictures of the Madonna, in which she had a halo and seemed as though she was carved out of ebony. Mary was in the manger with the Baby Jesus in her arms.

  ‘She had more frown lines,’ Jesus smiled.

  No wonder with those family relations, I thought to myself.

  ‘And her skin was darker.’

  ‘It was difficult for her back then,’ Jesus continued. ‘Very difficult. At first everyone thought she was mad.’

  I looked at Joseph, who was standing next to Mary, and thought to myself that he must have been high on the list of people who thought Mary was mad. Just imagine this woman saying to this man, whom she has never had sex with: ‘Hey, Joseph… erm… you’ll never guess what happened to me…’

  Jesus had noticed me staring at Joseph. ‘Initially Joseph wanted to dissolve the engagement quietly and secretly, to avoid shame being brought on Mary. But then an angel appeared to him in a dream and explained who was growing in Mary’s womb. And then he took her to be his wife.’

  A man who marries a pregnant woman. Noble. Not everyone would do that these days.

  ‘From that moment he embraced me lovingly and raised me as though I were his own child,’ Jesus continued.

  ‘How do you bring up Jesus?’ I asked.

  ‘With a firm hand. For a while, Joseph would not allow me to leave the house.’

  ‘What did you do to deserve that?’

  ‘At the age of five, I fashioned twelve sparrows out of clay on the Sabbath.’

  ‘And why was that so bad?’

  ‘Because you are not allowed to do that on the Sabbath. And because I brought them to life.’

  Imagine Mary and Joseph explaining something like that to the neighbours.

  ‘I also withered the son of Anna like a willow branch.’

  ‘What?’ I shouted aghast.

  ‘We were playing by a stream. I diverted the water into small ponds with my willpower, and he then destroyed these pools of water with a willow branch. So I cursed him and he withered away.’

  Gosh… If Joseph only grounded him for that he got off pretty lightly. I’m sure that mothers in Nazareth weren’t busy arranging playdates with Jesus.

  ‘But when I was six I also saved a child’s life. My friend Zeno fell off the roof and died, so I brought him back to life.’ He smiled and added, ‘I was scared that people would blame me for his death.’

  Jesus clearly did not develop selflessness until later in life.

  ‘I also argued with a teacher.’ He really was in a storytelling mood now. ‘This man was not good at teaching. I told him so, and he scolded me…’

  ‘Did you wither him as well?’ I asked nervously.

  ‘No, of course not.’

  I breathed a sigh of relief.

  ‘I made him faint.’

  Why didn’t we get taught about these stories in confirmation class? This would give teenagers something to relate to.

  Jesus looked at the picture of his parents again and mused, ‘Joseph’s face was much more furrowed by the sun… and the hardship…’

  I looked at Mary and Joseph a little more closely. It was actually the first time that I’d looked at a picture in a church this carefully. These parents must have had a hard time bringing up Jesus. But how hard must it have been for this little boy? He’d already noticed that he was different from all the other children at the age of five. And at some point he must have realised that this furrow-faced man was not his real father.

  I felt really sorry for junior Jesus.

  Something that senior Jesus immediately noticed. ‘Is there something wrong, Marie?’

  ‘No… no… It’s just that it must have been hard for you as a child. So alone. No friends.’

  Jesus was clearly surprised that someone felt sorry for him. Normally it was he who expressed sympathy, even to people who raided mobile phone stores. But my comment really confused him for a moment. Then he gathered himself and said: ‘Well, I did have siblings.’

  ‘Siblings? I thought Mary was a virgin!’ I blurted out.

  ‘Is it not impolite in your society to talk about older people’s love lives?’ Jesus said reproachfully.

  In my opinion, the older people in our society – in particular my mother – spoke a little bit too much about their love lives, but I decided that I’d better keep that to myself.

  Instead I meekly said, ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘My siblings were born after me.’

  ‘So it was afterwards that Mary…’ I was just able to stop myself before the words ‘had sex’ crossed my lips.

  ‘You think very logically,’ Jesus said, and I thought that it almost sounded a little sneering. Then he told me that he had both sisters and brothers. He’d also save one of their lives. His brother James was bitten by a viper and Jesus rushed to the scene and blew on the wound. James stood up and was healed. The viper exploded.

  The viper exploded? Jesus was probably the world’s coolest big brother back then.

  ‘So why doesn’t the Bible say anything about your siblings?’ I asked.

  ‘They are mentioned briefly, but…’ Jesus hesitated.

  ‘But…?’

  ‘They did not follow me on my path,’ he said sounding disappointed.

  So Jesus h
ad abandoned his siblings to fulfil his mission. It still seemed to sadden him even today. I would have loved to hold his hand to console him. But that was obviously ridiculous. He was the Son of God. He didn’t need to be consoled. Particularly not by me.

  ‘Do you always spend evenings at church?’ Jesus asked, when he had suppressed his sorrow again.

  ‘Well… not every evening,’ I replied, which was technically not a lie, since ‘not every evening’ could also mean ‘no evening’.

  ‘I want to spend the evening with you doing what you would normally do,’ Jesus explained.

  Fine. But what did I normally do in the evening? I’m sure that Jesus didn’t want to zap through the TV channels with me, getting irate about paid-entry phone quizzes. What is the capital of Germany? a) Berlin or b) Lufthansa?

  I also didn’t think that it would be a good idea to take him to my favourite hangout. How would I explain the ‘over 18s only’ section in Michi’s video store?

  So I had to think of something innocuous, like having an ice cream at the world’s best Italian ice-cream parlour, right in the centre of Malente. The owner had even scattered some sand to create a Mediterranean feel, which led to frequent altercations with dog owners.

  ‘This is the best invention of all time,’ I said pointing at banana split.

  ‘This does not say much for your times,’ Jesus explained. He could certainly have done with a few lessons in irony.

  We gobbled the ice cream without saying a word. For quite a while. I found this awkward. So I casually tried to get the conversation going again. ‘So you’re living with Gabriel?’

  ‘Yes,’ he answered, in a short but friendly manner.

  ‘Do you have a nice room?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I had to stop asking yes-no questions. So I asked, ‘How do you like Malente?’

  ‘Lovely.’

  Ahhhhh! The conversation was, like earthly beings, destined to die. The silence grew ever longer. Every minute became unbearably drawn out. I would have loved to have gone home, as I had no idea what else I could possibly talk about with a Messiah. But then I would probably have been the first woman who’d ditched Jesus on a date. Or maybe I wouldn’t? It would be interesting to know whether someone had done that before? Mary Magdalene perhaps? But this was not really an appropriate topic of conversation.