by Boris Akunin
“How good that we have met like this!” Emmanuel exclaimed. “You are the man I need!”
He took another step forward and threw his arms open wide, as if he was about to embrace the murderer.
The round-faced man stepped back and lifted the gun barrel higher, so that it was aimed directly at the prophet’s forehead. The expression on his face changed from mockery to wary suspicion.
“Ah-ah …” he began, but Emmanuel interrupted him.
“I need you, and you need me! I came to see you, for you!”
“In what sense?” the killer asked, completely baffled.
I waited, terrified, quite certain that he would shoot now, at this very moment. But Emmanuel did not even look at the gun, I do not think that he was afraid at all. Now, with hindsight, I realize what an absolutely incredible sight it was: an unarmed man stepping toward a man with a gun, and the armed man backing away with tiny little steps.
“There is no one in the world more unhappy than you. Your soul is crying out for help because the Devil has completely crushed the God in it. The good in the soul—that is God, and the bad is the Devil. Surely you were told that when you were a child?”
“Ah,” said the killer, baring his teeth in a scowl. “So that’s it. A sermon. Well, you’ve got the wrong man here …”
I heard the click of the hammer and cried out in terror. Emmanuel turned to me and spoke as if everything was quite normal: “Watch, now I’ll show you his child’s face.”
I did not understand what he meant. Neither did the assassin.
“What are you going to show her?” he asked. He lowered the gun slightly, and his small eyes blinked in confusion.
“Your child’s face,” the prophet said enthusiastically. “You know—at any age, every man still has his first face, the one with which he came into the world. Only this face is hard to see. Well, how can I explain it to you? Two old school friends, who haven’t seen each other for thirty or even fifty years, meet by chance. They look at each other, they recognize each other, they call each other by their old funny nicknames. For an instant their old faces become the same as they were many years before. The child’s face is the most genuine one. It doesn’t go anywhere, over the years it is hidden under wrinkles, creases, beards …”
“Any other time I’d be glad to chat with such an interesting talker,” the murderer said, gathering his wits and interrupting Emmanuel. “But now turn around.”
I realized that something had happened to this terrible man. He was no longer able to shoot the prophet while looking him in the eye. And in my mind I cried out to Emmanuel: Don’t stop, keep talking!
But he did stop.
He slowly raised his hand with the palm outward, moved it from left to right, and a miracle happened. The killer suddenly froze, the hand holding the pistol sank down, and his gaze followed the hand, spellbound.
I have read about hypnosis and I do not think it is miraculous, but this was a genuine miracle that took place before my very eyes. The man’s face began to change. The puffy cheeks became tauter, the nose became more pert, the wrinkles smoothed out, and I saw the face of a boy—the round, funny, trusting face of a seven-year-old mama’s boy with a sweet tooth.
“Yasha, Yashechka, what have you done to yourself?” Emmanuel asked in a high voice, like a woman’s.
A tremor ran across the killer’s face, and the strange vision disappeared. There once again was the face of a man who had lived a hard and sinful life, but the eyes remained wide open, like a child’s.
He waved at Emmanuel with the hand still holding the gun. He waved the other hand, too, as if he were trying to drive away some ghost or phantom.
Then he turned around and dashed headlong out of the tomb.
“Won’t he come back to kill you?” I asked, shaken by what I had seen.
“No,” Emmanuel replied. “He will be too busy with other things now to bother about us.”
“How do you know his name?” I asked. “Is he really called Yasha?”
“That was what I heard. When I look into a man’s face, I hear and see many things, because I am ready to hear and see. He is a very interesting man. Absolutely black, but still with a white spot. Everybody always has at least a tiny little white speck. And it’s the same with those who are the whitest of white—only a tiny drop of black, but it’s still there. That’s more advantageous for God.”
That was what he said—“advantageous.”
I am not able to convey his distinctive manner of expressing himself, and so I smooth it out, but Emmanuel’s speech is extremely colorful. In the first place, he lisps in a very funny way. He speaks smoothly, but he likes to put in bookish words at appropriate and also inappropriate points—you know, like a self-taught peasant, who devours books one after another and understands what he has read after his own fashion.
For a few minutes after the terrible man ran away, I was not myself, and I babbled all sorts of womanish nonsense. For instance, I asked him, “Weren’t you afraid to walk toward a gun like that?”
His answer was funny: “I’m used to it. Such is my occupation, talking to the misérables.”
Strangely enough, I understood him perfectly. He must have come across the French word misérables in some eighteenth-century book and been captivated by its lovely sound.
“Good people do not need me,” he said, “but bad people—misérables—do. They’re dangerous and they can hurt you, but what’s to be done about that? You go in to them like a lion tamer entering the lion’s cage.” And then Emmanuel’s eyes suddenly lit up. “I saw that in Perm, in the Ciniselli Circus. What a brave man the lion tamer is! The lion opens its jaws wide, its teeth are like knives, but the lion tamer just twirls his mustache and cracks his whip!”
He forgot all about the misérables and started excitedly telling me about an animal trainer in a circus, and as I looked at him I did not know what to think, I was overcome by doubt once again.
Now that I have told you how Emmanuel dealt with the murderer, and you have understood that he is a truly exceptional man, the time has come to broach a subject that I have avoided so far, in order not to provoke your indignation.
You know, during my trip to Sodom, as soon as I heard the words ‘Friday’ and ‘garden’ together, everything fell into place. I realized where and when I would find Emmanuel. My hypothesis proved correct.
Well, then, now I will tell you this hypothesis, which is so absurd that I only dare to state it now.
One moment. One moment. Let me gather my courage.
Very well.
What if this is the second coming?
I can just see your bushy eyebrows raised in anger, and so I hasten to correct myself.
No, of course I did not think that the “prophet Manuila” was Jesus, sent to man again after two thousand years. But what if this individual genuinely believed that he was Christ?
His entire way of life, all his words and deeds, his very name (you remember, of course, that the Savior’s given name was Emmanuel) prompted this thought.
Not a preacher inspired by the truth of Jesus, but a man who felt himself to be the Messiah and therefore reshaped the laws and basic principles of Christianity in the same way Jesus would have done, for He is His own maker and transformer of laws.
During the days spent wandering the Holy Land I grew so accustomed to this fantastic hypothesis that there were times when a blasphemous thought would creep into my mind: What if he really is Jesus?
Where had he come from, this “wild Tartar”? How was it possible for a peasant from Vyatka or Zavolzhie to know ancient Greek and Aramaic?
Completely confusing reality and fantasy, I told myself: If he is a man from ancient Palestine, transported to our time by some miracle, he could not have mastered Russian so well in three years. And then I shuddered: Did I mean that He could not have? If it were He, then He could do far, far more amazing things than that!
When I heard that Emmanuel had to be in a certain garden on th
e night before Friday, I immediately remembered the Friday night when the Savior was betrayed and seized in the Garden of Gethsemane.
So that was where I had to go.
And that was where I found him: in the Garden of Gethsemane!
WHEN I HAD recovered somewhat from my fear, I took a grip on myself. I interrupted the story about the lion and the lion tamer and asked him point-blank:
“Are you Jesus Christ?”
I trembled inside as I asked the question, afraid that now my companion’s face would be distorted into a mask of insanity and I would hear the feverish ranting of a madman whose mind can be tripped into a maniacal fit by a single word—in this case, the name of the Savior.
This is what he said to me (I repeat that I am only conveying the content, for I cannot reproduce the full originality of his speech):
“My parents named me Emmanuel, which means ‘God with us.’ The name Yehoshua was given to me by my shelukhin—in Russian it means ‘the help of Jehovah—but I heard the word ‘Christ’ for the first time here, in this world, and for a long time I could not understand who he was, this crucified god to whom everybody prayed. But when I learned Russian and read the New Testament, it was like being struck by a bolt of lightning. Many things in that book are confused and distorted, there are a lot of tall stories, but the more I read, the clearer it became that it was about me, that I am the Crucified One, I am the Crucified One!”
When I heard how angrily he repeated: “I am the Cwucified One, I am the Cwucified One,” I was certain that the man in front of me was mentally ill. But even if he was psychologically damaged, I liked him and found him interesting. In an attempt to restore clarity to his clouded reason, I asked cautiously: “But how can you be Jesus? Were you crucified?”
But this question only agitated him even more.
“I was not, I was not! I didn’t realize at first, but then I understood! It’s all a terrible mistake that has lasted two thousand years.”
“Who did they crucify?” I asked even more gently.
“I don’t know. Perhaps Didim, or perhaps Yehuda Taddai. Ever since I realized what happened, I’ve been trying to guess who they killed. Didim looks exactly like me, that’s why he was called that—in Greek the word means ‘twin.’ And Yehuda Taddai looks like me, too, he’s my cousin. (I remembered that the disciple Judas Thaddeus was indeed the cousin of Jesus). Didim is so reckless! And stubborn … But no, it wasn’t him. I laughed a lot when I read in the Gospel about him putting his fingers in the holes from the nails. That’s exactly what Foma-Didim would have done, so it means it wasn’t him they crucified. It must have been Yehuda, my mother’s half-nephew. Or perhaps Nafanail? He has blue eyes, too. Not many people in Jerusalem knew me to look at, so any of the shelukhin could have pretended to be me … No, I can’t guess which of them was executed. But I do know for certain who thought the whole thing up—the other Yehuda, the one from Keriot. He’s a Judean, and they’re more cunning than we Galileans. Yehuda, son of Shimon, persuaded Kifa, and he talked the others into it. They always listened to him! You know, they were the ones who brought me here and shut me in, Kifa and Yehuda.”
He gestured around the cave.
I will tell you the rest of what he said in brief, omitting my questions, his exclamations, and my thoughts concerning the events described. It will be best if you form your own opinion of the plausibility of this story.
And so, if the narrator is to be believed, he (that is, the wandering preacher Emmanuel-Yehoshua, who lived in Palestine nineteen centuries ago) came to the city of Jerusalem on the eve of the great festival of Passover. He was accompanied by twelve disciples who had attached themselves to him in the course of his travels. Most of them were fishermen from the Sea of Galilee, and the others could be categorized as misérables—Emmanuel obviously always had a weak spot for “dark people.”
In Jerusalem, where Emmanuel had never been heard of before, he followed his usual habit of talking to various people, and some abused him, while others listened attentively. Eventually someone reported the heretic to the municipal authorities for undermining the principles of the Jewish faith, and the preacher was forced to go into hiding. On Thursday night he and his disciples gathered outside the city, in the Garden of Gethsemane, and consulted on what to do next. Flee from the city? But all the roads were covered, the mounted guards would easily overtake the fugitives.
Then the senior member of the shelukhin, Kifa, said: “Teacher, there is a place nearby where you can hide. You can stay there for two or three days, until those who seek you cease their searching.” Kifa and another sheluakh called Yehuda, son of Shimon, whom Emmanuel called “very clever and cunning,” took their leader to the summit of the Mount of Olives, into the yard of a certain poor widow, where an ancient cave had recently been uncovered. It had once been used to bury the dead, until there was no more room left in the chamber.
The disciples left Emmanuel a lamp, water, and bread, and went away. After a little while, however, he was overcome with remorse (how could he wait for things to pass over in a safe sanctuary while his shelukhin exposed themselves to danger?) and tried to go back to the garden, but it turned out that his disciples had blocked the way out with rocks.
And then something like an earthquake happened. Emmanuel lost consciousness for a moment and when he came around he heard a little girl’s voice repeating a strange word: “Bel-yan-ka! Bel-yan-ka!” It was Durka, the girl from Stroganovka, looking for her hen.
“At first I thought that I had died in the earthquake and gone to the world of the dead,” he told me. “Everything there is different from the land of the living: different nature, different people, different language, different customs. But I just couldn’t work out if it was heaven or hell. It seemed different to me at different times. Sometimes I thought it must be heaven: so many trees, so much water, no heat. But sometimes I thought: no, this is hell. It’s only in hell that it gets so cold and the earth turns as white and hard as a dead body. Then I decided that it wasn’t hell or heaven, but a different world where you go after death and you have to live the same way as in the previous one—do what is pleasing to God and overcome the Evil One in yourself. Afterward, I thought, you probably died again, and then there would be another world, and then another, and so on until the soul reached the end of the journey destined for it by the Lord.”
I told you that I experienced something similar in the Stroganovka cave. The ground shook there, too, and something strange happened to time. As an old treatise that I discovered in your library says: “And there are also caves that are called Special, in which there is no passage of time, and a man who enters into them may disappear for centuries or be cast out into a different time, or even into another Special Cave.”
I recall I was absolutely fascinated by these Special Caves. According to the treatise, in them “there is no passage of time.” But Emmanuel, being an individual of a completely different temperament, was not at all surprised by the supernatural quality of what had happened, and not even particularly interested in it. “God has many marvels,” he remarked in passing, and then went on to talk about something else—how unjust the Gospel was to his beloved shelukhin. This subject was much closer to his heart:
“Yehuda from Keriot did not betray me! Nobody ever betrayed me! He invented this whole adventure”—that was the word Emmanuel used—“in order to save me. He went to the high priest and said: ‘I will show you where Yehoshua from Nazareth is hiding, give me the promised reward.’ He did that deliberately, so that they would crucify someone else and be satisfied. And he deliberately hanged himself afterward, so that no one would doubt his betrayal. Oh, you have no idea how cunning he was, my Yehuda. And how noble! And now everybody curses him and spits on his memory! It’s insufferable!”
“Yehuda showed the guards one of my shelukhin—either Didim or the other Yehuda, or someone else—and he said: “Yes, I am Yehoshua from Nazareth,” and the others confirmed it. It was probably Taddai after all, b
oth of us were like our grandfather—the same features, the same height. Did they really crucify him? That is the most terrible form of execution. Even death on a stake is less painful, life drains away with the blood then. But in a crucifixion you keep trying, over and again, to lift yourself up with your feet so that you can get a breath of air, and the sun pierces straight into your brain, and the executioner holds up a damp sponge on his spear. You know that you must not drink—it will only prolong your agony—but your parched lips reach out of their own accord … and it lasts so many hours, until the crowd and the guard get bored. Then they break your shinbones, so you can’t lift yourself up anymore, and soon you suffocate …”
Then he started to cry, and I had to comfort him. He smeared the tears across his face and kept repeating: “I have to go back. I have to go back to my own people. But the cursed cave will not let me! Three years I wandered around the land of Russia. At first I didn’t understand a thing about what had happened. Then I realized, only I didn’t know what I ought to do. But just recently I heard a voice. That happens sometimes, I hear a voice. His voice. (Emmanuel pointed up at the ceiling of the cave.) The voice said to me: ‘Go back. They have crucified the wrong person, and so the people have failed to understand anything. Even worse than that, they have understood everything wrongly! And for almost two thousand years they have been tormenting one another. And I realized that I had to go back and put everything right.
“I left Russia, hurrying to get here in time for the festival of Passover. I managed to find the cave. It was fortunate that the house was abandoned and nobody lived there. I dug for a long time before I found the entrance—in two thousand years it had sunk seven cubits under the ground. On Thursday night I went down into the cave to wait for Friday and stayed there until morning, but nothing happened
“The next Thursday I decided to follow my exact route from the garden—perhaps that was the important thing? But again nothing happened. I tried again several times, but my own time would not take me back again, its gates were closed. Then I set off to walk around my native land—to look and think and talk to people.