The Thirteenth Apostle

by Michel Benoît

  Three keys. The longest of them, exactly the same as his, was that to the central wing – the two others must be those of the north and south wings. The special bunch of keys, the one which only the librarian and the Abbot possessed. Perturbed by the dramatic events affecting his abbey, the Father Abbot had not yet thought of recovering these keys – which he would hand over to Andrei’s successor when he had made up his mind about this delicate appointment.

  Nil hesitated for a while. Then, in his mind’s eye, he saw the face of his friend sitting opposite him on this chair. “The truth, Nil: it was to find the truth that you entered this Abbey!” He slipped the bunch of keys into his pocket and walked the few yards down the corridor to the north wing and the library in it.

  Historical Studies: if he crossed this threshold, he would become a rebel.

  He glanced behind him: the two corridors of the central wing and the north wing were empty.

  Resolutely, he inserted one of the two little keys into the lock of the north wing: silently, the key turned.

  * * *

  Father Nil, the peaceable professor of exegesis, the observant monk who had never infringed the slightest rule of the Abbey, opened the door and stepped forward. By entering the north library, he was making himself a dissident.

  16

  Gospel according to Matthew

  “What are they doing up there?”

  They were sitting on one of the stone benches in the impluvium. The day was just dawning, the Sunday of Passover; the house was silent. Like his host, Peter was exhausted. “Two sleepless nights,” he thought, “we haven’t had a proper meal since Thursday evening, in the upper room with Jesus. Then, the arrest and death of the Master. And Judas eliminated.”

  His face was hollow, there were deep shadows under his eyes. He repeated his question.

  “What are they doing up there?”

  “You should know: didn’t you spend all of yesterday locked away here, while I was busy negotiating with the Essenes?”

  The Judaean did not mention the brief sortie that Peter had made the morning before. When he had seen him slipping out into the street, his hand flattened against his left thigh, he had understood. Later on that day, he had heard the rumours sweeping Jerusalem: the Galilean murdered by a Zealot was the man who had called God to witness between Caiaphas and himself the day before. His death was in the run of things: God had judged, and had chosen the Iscariot.

  “I think…” Peter smiled bitterly, “that most of them are asleep right now. Tell me, are the Essenes inclined to help us?”

  “Yes, I’ve had some good news. They consider that Jesus is one of the Just of Israel, and are ready to offer him a place of burial in one of their cemeteries. The transferral cannot take place until the sounding of the shofar to announce the end of Passover. You know that the Essenes are real sticklers when it comes to questions of ritual impurity; they’ll never touch a body until the festival is officially over. In an hour’s time.”

  Peter shot a sidelong glance at him.

  “Where are they going to bury him? Qumran?”

  The Judaean took his time answering. He looked Peter straight in the eye.

  “I don’t know, they haven’t told me.”

  They will tell me – he thought – but you’ll never know.

  Not you. Never.

  17

  Nil gently closed the library door. Once he had been able to enter this place freely. But when the theology college had been set up, they had changed the locks: he hadn’t set foot in this part of the north wing for four years.

  He recognized the familiar smell, and at first glance he had the impression that nothing had changed. How many times had he come here to pick up a new book! And that meant making the acquaintance of a new friend, striking up a new dialogue. Books are companions you can rely on: they give themselves totally, without reserve, to anyone able to question them with tact but also with persistence. And Nil had been extraordinarily persistent.

  From his earliest years he had been brought up in a completely materialist environment, where the only god venerated was social success. But one day he had glimpsed the light. How? His memory had lost all trace of how it had happened – but that day, he had known that reality is not limited to what we can perceive of it, to mere appearances. And the realization had dawned on him that finding out what lies beyond appearances constituted the most difficult of undertakings, the one that justified a man in mobilizing all the strength at his command.

  This inner venture seemed to him, from this moment on, to be the only one capable of justifying the life of a free man. And the quest for what lay beyond appearances seemed the only quest not subject to any pressure from outside.

  What he does not know, at the moment he enters the library in the north wing, is that he is wrong – wrong because it is against the rules that he is crossing this threshold, and because his only friend in the Abbey is dead – perhaps for crossing it too often.

  In front of him, the world’s historical knowledge was lined up within dozens of book stacks.

  “Books don’t give us knowledge,” Andrei had told him. “They’re a form of raw food. It’s your task to digest it, in other words to deconstruct it as you read it, and then to reconstruct it within yourself. I have studied a lot, Nil, but I have learnt little. Do not forget what you are seeking: the very mystery of God, which lies beyond words. The words and ideas contained in books will lead you in very different directions, depending on the way you put them together. It’s all there, present in these books – but most people simply see them as stones scattered in disorder on the bookshelves. It’s up to you to build a coherent edifice out of them. But beware: not all architectural designs are acceptable, and not all are accepted. So long as you cling to what is ideologically correct, you won’t have any problems. Repeat what people have said before you, rebuild the same edifice that has already been consecrated by the past, and you will be honoured. But if, with these same stones, you erect a new building, then beware…”

  Nil recognized the nearest book stacks: twentieth century. The post-war librarian – he now rested in the cemetery – had not rigorously followed the Dewey Universal Classification, but one that was more convenient for the monks: a chronological one. The book stacks that interested Nil were thus at the very far end. He moved towards them.

  And his eyes opened wide in amazement.

  Four years previously, two book stacks had been enough to contain the first-century materials, catalogued by geographical origin: Palestine, the rest of the Middle East, the Latin West, the Greek West… But now he had half a dozen book stacks in front of him. He moved along to the ones devoted to Palestine: almost two entire book stacks! Texts that he had sought in vain in the only part of the library to which he had access, the Midrashim of the Pharisean epoch, the Psalms and wisdom texts that appear neither in the Old nor in the New Testament…

  He moved along a little further, and came to a book stack on which the only label was: “Qumran”. He started to leaf through the books, and then suddenly stopped. There, catalogued between the different editions of the Dead Sea Scrolls, his finger had just come to rest on a thick volume. There was no name of author or publisher on the spine, but simply three letters in Father Andrei’s handwriting: M M M.

  Nil, his heart beating fast, pulled the book out. M M M… the three letters Andrei had written just before he died!

  In the faint gleam of the ceiling lights, he opened the work. It was not a book, but a bundle of photocopies: Nil immediately recognized the characteristic calligraphy of the Dead Sea Scrolls. So M M M simply meant Manuscrits de la Mer Morte, “Dead Sea Manuscripts”… Where did these texts come from?

  At the foot of the first page, he spelt out a rubber-stamp mark in faded blue ink: “Huntington Library, San Marino, California”.

  The Americans’ manuscripts!

  One day, Andrei had told him the story – lowering his voice even though the door to his office was closed.

&nbs
p; “The Dead Sea manuscripts were discovered just before the creation of the State of Israel, in 1947–48. In the turmoil of those chaotic days, there was a free-for-all in which everyone tried to buy – or steal – as many of those scrolls as possible, since it was suspected that they would revolutionize Christianity. The Americans got their hands on a significant number of them. Ever since then, the international team entrusted with publishing these texts has gone out of its way to delay their appearance. Seeing this, the Huntington Library decided to publish everything it possessed, in photocopies, and available only to a select few. I hope that one day” – and here he smiled maliciously – “we will be able to possess a copy here. These are in samizdat: just as in the worst Soviet period, we’re obliged to circulate these texts surreptitiously!”

  “Why, Father Andrei? Who is blocking publication of these manuscripts? And why are they frightened to reveal them?”

  As sometimes happened in their conversations, Andrei had withdrawn into an awkward silence. And started to talk about something else.

  Nil hesitated for a moment: in the normal run of things, he was not allowed to borrow this work. Every time a monk takes a book from the bookshelves, he is supposed to leave in its place a “phantom”, a slip bearing his signature together with the date of borrowing. This system means that books do not get lost, but it also means that the intellectual work being done by the monks can be kept under surveillance. Nil knew that for some time this surveillance had been strict.

  His mind was soon made up. “Andrei’s replacement has not yet been appointed. With any luck, nobody will notice that a book has disappeared for a single night without being replaced by a ‘phantom’.”

  Like a thief, clutching his booty to his chest, he headed to the exit and slipped out of the library: the north-wing corridor was deserted.

  He had one night: a long night of secret labour.

  In the “Qumran” book stack of the history library, a big empty gap without its “phantom” signalled that a monk had today violated one of the strictest rules of St Martin’s Abbey.

  18

  A few miles away, in the middle of the night, as Nil turned the pages of the M M M under the lampshade of his cell (he had blocked his window with a towel, the second dissident thing he had done that day), two men silently climbed out of a dust-covered car. The driver, blowing on fingers stiff with the November cold, gazed at the little church whose alabaster stained-glass windows glimmered in the night. Feeling a powerful wave of excitement surge up in him, he shivered, and his face suddenly became set.

  The other passenger took a step forwards and inspected the environs: the village was asleep. Before them, the loose planks cordoning off the building site would be easy to shift, and it would be no trouble getting the stone slab out. Child’s play!

  He turned round.

  “Bismillah, yallah!”

  “Ken, baruch atah Adonai!”

  A few minutes later they re-emerged, dragging along a heavy stone slab. As they wriggled their way between the planks of the fence, the driver tried to stifle the beating of his heart. “I must calm down…”

  The village square was as silent and deserted as before. They hoisted the slab into the boot, then he took his place at the wheel and heaved a sigh: they faced a long journey to Rome… Before he pulled the door shut, the little roof light lit up his blond hair, and the scar that stretched from it down to his left ear.

  The jasper on Mgr Calfo’s finger, with its red highlights and silver frame, glinted briefly, while with his chubby hand he stroked the girl’s lovely hair. He wished he could have mimicked, now, in the last years of the twentieth century, some of the refinements of Antiquity: the remains buried under Rome show that brothels and temples always formed a single organic unity. The same door led to the sources of one and the same ecstasy.

  In the tranquillity of his apartment near Castel Sant’Angelo, from which if you leant forward you could see the majestic dome hanging over the tomb of Peter, he was happy on this particular evening to be wearing nothing other than his bishop’s ring.

  “The union of the divine and the carnal… If God became man in Jesus Christ, it was to make this union real. So, my beauty, make me rise up heavenwards!”

  19

  Gospels according to Mark and Luke

  From the Temple, the guttural blast of the shofar greeted the sun, marking the end of Passover on this Sunday morning, 9th April. Four young men strode resolutely to the cemetery situated outside the west gate of Jerusalem. One of them was carrying a lever: a tombstone would need to be rolled away, and tombstones were always extremely heavy. But the young men were used to it.

  On entering the tomb, they found the body of an executed man placed simply on a central slab, bearing the deep traces of flagellation and the marks of crucifixion. On one side, an open wound was still slightly bleeding. They uttered a groan.

  “Eternal One! See what they do to your sons, the prophets of Israel! May the curse of this spilt blood fall on their heads! So much suffering for this just man!”

  After reciting Kaddish, they slipped on their long white robes: transferring a corpse into pure earth represented a religious act for them, and it was obligatory to wear white. Furthermore, it would identify them to Jewish pilgrims – who were used to seeing Essenes transporting certain corpses for reburial in their own cemeteries.

  Only two of them made ready to lift up the body. Everything had happened very fast on Friday evening, and the dead man’s relatives would certainly be coming to finish preparing the body for burial. If they discovered an empty tomb, panic would ensue: they needed to be warned.

  So the other two men, still wearing their white robes, settled down comfortably, one at the head and the other at the foot of the burial slab, while their companions took up the body and started out on the long journey towards one of the Essenian burial grounds in the desert.

  The two who had stayed behind did not have long to wait: the sun was still low on the horizon when they heard furtive footsteps. Women from Jesus’s entourage.

  When they saw the heavy tombstone rolled to one side, the women gave a sudden start. One of them took a step forward and screamed in terror: two beings dressed in white were standing in the dark cave mouth of the tomb and seemed to be waiting for them. In her terror she stammered out a question to which they calmly replied. When the white apparitions started to come out, to explain further, the women turned on their heels and fled, screeching like a flock of birds.

  The two Essenes shrugged. Why had Jesus’s apostles sent women instead of coming themselves? Anyway, their own mission was over. They simply needed to tidy the place up before leaving.

  They took off their white robes and tried to roll back the tombstone – in vain. There were now only two of them, and it was too heavy. So leaving the tomb open, they came out of the garden and sat in the sunshine. The Judaean who had organized it all would be coming to see them: they just needed to wait for him.

  20

  Calfo twirled the whip again and then lashed his shoulders with it. The metal discipline, which he prescribed to the Society only on rare occasions, is a skein of small cords with small aluminium balls threaded along them. Normally, drops of blood should start to appear at around verse 17 of the psalm Miserere – which thus acts as a kind of hourglass for this penance. At the twenty-first and final verse, it is seen as a good thing for a few red drops to spatter the wall behind the flagellant.

  This mortification recalled the thirty-nine lashes received by Jesus before his crucifixion. When administered by a sturdy legionary, the Roman whip, with its balls of lead each as big as an olive, dug into the flesh and laid bare the bone: it was often enough to kill its victim.

  Alessandro Calfo had not the slightest intention of succumbing to the flagellation he was inflicting upon himself: it was another who would soon be dying, and to whom this suffering offered a mystical witness of fraternal solidarity. He did not even have any intention of breaking the delicate skin on hi
s chubby back: the girl would be returning on Saturday evening.

  “Three days before the ‘end of the mission’ of our now senile brother.”

  When he had sent the girl to him, his Palestinian agent had informed him:

  “Sonia is Romanian, Monsignor, she is a reliable girl. With her, you need have no fear of the problems caused by the previous one… Ah yes, bismillah, in the name of God!”

  His years as Apostolic Nuncio in Egypt had taught him how to carry out the necessary negotiations when faced with contradictory and urgent impulses. With a grimace, he prepared to give his shoulders another lashing: to negotiate does not mean to give in. Despite the weekend of pleasure that he could look forward to with Sonia, he would not suppress the exercise of the discipline, tangible proof of his solidarity towards one of the members of the Society. He would compromise between his fraternal love and that other imperative, the integrity of his velvety skin: the penance would last no longer than a De profundis.

  This is a penitential psalm, like the Miserere, and it conferred a very satisfying value on the suffering that he was inflicting upon himself out of Christian virtue.

  But there are only eight verses in the De profundis, which lasts merely a third of the time taken by the interminable Miserere.

  21

  Nil took off his glasses, rubbed his sore eyes and smoothed down his short-cropped grey hair. He had spent a whole night working his way through the photocopies of the M M M. He pushed back his stool, rose to his feet and went over to pull away the towel blocking his window. Lauds, the first office of the morning, was about to be rung: no one would be surprised to see light in his cell.