by Vincent Czyz
The morning after Stephen had been murdered, Drew had found his way to the roof of their Sirkeji hotel before sun-up. As though being just a little closer to the sky made a difference. As though he could press himself against Atlas’s burden—no, Atlas had shouldered the Earth, so who was propping up the heavens? He scanned the dark sky over the Sea of Marmara, but no god had been sufficiently moved by Stephen’s death to reach down, gather up his lanky shape, and place it among the constellations.
He missed Stephen’s voice almost as much as the man himself. It wasn’t the sound of it so much as the tenor, its bearing as it conveyed Stephen’s impeccable word choice. Exquisitely rational. Even reconstituted from an e-mail, his voice expressed something that was quintessentially Stephen. It was the voice of Jung’s Wise Old Man. Whether commuting on the bus or feeling the weight of another night without Yasemin in his Istanbul flat, Drew had often turned to that voice. The professor had become like the familiar silhouette of a mountain looming in the distance. No matter where Drew went, it was there, a marker from which he could always orient himself.
The last time he’d visited Stephen at his summer house in Antakya— ancient Antioch—they’d spent the evening on the rooftop terrace. The flagstones held the leftover heat of the day, and there had been the blood-warm gleam of wine. Jasmine wound around a trellis overhead scented the sultry breeze. From there they had an inspiring view of the valley.
“I don’t miss my youth any more than, I imagine, this city misses its own.” Stephen was gazing toward an uneven horizon of hills. “Of course, I can’t say I wouldn’t be pleased no end if this old body of mine were somewhat more like yours.” He glanced over at Drew. “The ancient Greeks were right, you know. The body is as beautiful and sacred as anything that might be called intellect or soul—assuming the latter actually exists.”
“Seems to me one isn’t much good without the other.”
“Well said, Drew, well said. But I’ll tell you this also: these visits, from you and a few of my old students, are what keep me from feeling as though I’ve mishandled my life. Yes, of course, I’m still involved in my work. I publish the occasional article or review, but I also experience a certain vicarious living. What I am driving at, I suppose, is that I … I see myself reflected in small ways in all of you, and I can’t say that I regret never having had children of my own.”
He started to say something else, something that Drew instinctively felt he’d kept to himself for a long time, but he turned away and gazed off at the hills.
“The Gnostics, you know, would not have much cared for this view.” Stephen had changed the subject.
“Their concept of the visible universe … they saw it as the opposite of a ghost more or less … a rather poor material copy of a perfect realm of pure spirit.”
Drew shrugged. “Platonism revisited. Just like Christianity.”
“Yes, but with such elaborate and rather poetic departures.” Stephen swirled the wine in his glass to stir up its bouquet. “What I particularly like about the Gnostics is that they believed in a spiritual resurrection of Christ, not a physical one.”
Smiling, Drew shook his head. This was their perennial bone of contention. Drew was a believer while the professor was an atheist.
“To the Gnostics, all doctrines—be they pagan, Christian, or Jewish— were merely approaches to truth. But the truth itself, they insisted, was beyond words or even symbols.”
Drew shrugged. “It makes sense if Gnosticism evolved out of the Greek Mystery religions. Didn’t initiates in the Mysteries eventually learn that the myths and stories about their gods were allegories and metaphors?”
The professor grinned. “Studying literature isn’t so far from studying religion.”
So Drew had often said.
And now he was supposed to believe that Jesus Himself was a metaphor. He was supposed to wipe heart and mind clean of the Jesus he’d grown up with, the teacher, father, brother he’d come to believe in. As though his heart and mind were a couple of blackboards he carried around inside him. But even on blackboards, the ghost of erased letters remained. What was he supposed to do with the … could he call it love? The love he’d projected toward heaven when he’d felt the presence of a Jesus who cared about him—him, Drew Korchula? Had he been setting human warmth loose in a vacuum? The same as the ancient Greeks and Sumerians and Hopi and Dogon and all the rest who had imposed shapes on the constellations? Jesus had been Drew’s comfort when there had been no one else. The voice inside him when there was no other voice—not even the professor’s. All knowing, all forgiving, ever patient, ever tolerant. How was he supposed to give that up?
Maybe he didn’t have to. Maybe all he had to do was find out who, if Stephen was right, the real Savior had been.
Christ, he said to himself without meaning to invoke the Savior. Hadn’t giving up Yasemin two years ago been enough? Drew closed his eyes and massaged his brow.
If the professor had enjoyed picking through the charred remnants of pagan beliefs, Drew had a penchant—like constantly sticking a tongue in the bloody gap left by a pulled tooth—for rooting around in painful memories.
The morning after Stephen had been killed, he’d gone through photocopies of the letters he’d written to Yasemin. One he found particularly painful and, true to his peculiar brand of masochism, he’d reread it not once, but twice.
He let his head rest against the window. Sunlight reflecting off the fluffy clouds beneath made him squint. Closing his eyes, he saw luminous red. Blood did that, he knew. And it seemed he was sinking into a lake of it.
4: 2
A MILLENNIA-OLD COVER-UP
DREW STIRRED AND RUBBED an eye with the heel of his hand. His face was numb where it had been pressed against the window.
Kadir elbowed him in the ribs. “The man stewardess is looking to you when he passes this way. I think he is wanting a long-hair boyfriend.”
Drew’s tray table was still covered with papers and books.
Kadir glanced around at the other passengers though he couldn’t take in much since he couldn’t see over the seat in front of him. Lowering his voice to a whisper, he asked, “What about Tariq? You said …” He gestured with a hand instead of completing the sentence.
The night of Stephen’s murder, Drew had said he knew who had killed both the professor and Tariq. But when they’d gone to Timur the Lame’s for a drink, he’d put off Kadir by telling him that he didn’t have specific names. “Give me a couple of days,” he’d said. Now, he supposed, he had to give Kadir something more solid.
“The uh … the last phone call from the professor, he was trying to tell me … I’m not sure exactly what, but he insisted that there’s no historical documentation of Jesus’ existence.”
Kadir looked confused.
Drew lifted a pair of books and shuffled through some of the pages. “The main source of history for Palestine in the first century is Josephus, who’d been a Jewish Zealot before he went over to the Romans.”
“A Zealot killed Tariq?”
“Do you remember that Stephen said the Essenes wanted to cleanse the land of Romans and install a high priest who was of the same blood-line as Aaron? A Zadokite?”
“Tamam, okay.”
“So did the Zealots. When Josephus and his band were defeated by the Roman general Vespasian, Josephus surrendered, insisting that Vespasian himself was the Messiah. He predicted Vespasian would be the next emperor of Rome and swore loyalty him.”
“Eh-eh?”
So what? was about right, Drew thought.
“Josephus is the only historian who wrote more than a sentence about Jesus, but look at what he supposedly wrote.” Drew handed a photocopy to Kadir.
About this time lived Jesus, a wise man, if indeed one ought to call him a man. For he was the achiever of extraordinary deeds and a teacher of those who accept the truth gladly. He won over many Jews and many of the Greeks. He was the Messiah. When he was indicted by the principal men among us and
Pilate condemned him to be crucified, those who had come to love him originally did not cease to do so; for he appeared to them on the third day restored to life, as the prophets of the Deity had foretold these and countless other marvelous things about him.
“Chok sachma.” Kadir held the paper out to Drew, but Zafer took it from him.
“Exactly—pure nonsense.”
“If Josephus was being a Zealot Jew, then he does not believe Jesus was the Messiah.”
“Exactly. Since he lived in Vespasian’s house, it’s hardly likely he’d call a man the Romans executed as an enemy of Rome the Messiah. The passage isn’t in Josephus’s writing style and it doesn’t fit in the rest of the narrative. This is an interpolation, something added to the original text by a Christian scribe.
“What’s worse, the oldest copy of Josephus is from the tenth century, about nine-hundred years after it was written. The first Church historians, looking at earlier copies, never mention this passage—it couldn’t have been there. No one noticed it until the fourth century.”
While Drew had no doubt this argument held up, it was almost like patting himself on the back for correctly diagnosing himself with cancer. He didn’t want to believe Stephen, but he desperately wanted to know the truth. Had Christians, along with the rest of the world, been duped for two thousand years?
Zafer handed the page back to Drew.
There was an announcement first in Turkish then in English: “The plane will be landing in a few minutes. Please return your seat to an upright position …”
Drew’s ears popped as the plane descended. Glancing out the window, all he could see was desert.
“Eh-eh? Josephus is the one who killed Tariq?”
Drew shook his head. “Christians added Jesus to Josephus’s history. Scribes must have been involved, and there must have been men who gave the scribes orders. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of these men eventually formed a kind of shadow organization within the Church. If their organization is still around, then a Q document older than Jesus is a threat to them. And to the Church. If they have the Vatican’s backing—”
Zafer finished his sentence.”They’re well-financed and well-equipped.”
“So the interpolators of hundreds of years before are Tariq’s enemies?”
“Yes.”
The stewardess checked their seatbelts. The three men smiled at her in unison.
After she was gone, Kadir whispered hoarsely, “I am not caring about Jesus. If he lived or not, he is dead now. I am caring about Kadir.”
Zafer patted the dwarf on the shoulder. “That’s the problem, Kadir. We’re looking at a new breed of Zealots.”
Drew nodded.
Kadir looked first at Zafer then at Drew. “I am thinking you two have pumpkins instead of heads. Just some false writings in an old book. This is unrelated to assassinators.”
“Listen, Kadir, there’s more. Mark was the first and simplest of the Gospels. It doesn’t mention the virgin birth, Joseph, or Bethlehem. The oldest copies of Mark’s Gospel all end at chapter 16, verse 8, where several women are terrified to discover Jesus’ tomb is empty. The new ending, which is now standard, shows Jesus alive again. Someone added those eleven verses to make Mark more like the other Gospels.”
Kadir shrugged.
“Okay … here’s one more for you: Matthew and Luke both had access to Q, but no copy of it has ever been found. Except for the one Tariq photographed, and that one isn’t in Greek. Why do you think that is?”
Kadir shrugged. “My sister lost her virginness after she is married. No one ever found that either.”
“Did anyone look for it?”
“Defol git.”
Piss off yourself, Drew wanted to say. Instead, looked over Kadir’s head at Zafer. “I wish I could talk to Stephen. I wish I had at least written down what he said that night …”
Kadir reached into a pocket of his flak jacket and pulled out a micro-cassette recorder. He hit a button and Drew heard the professor’s voice, far away and metallic. “I’m retired after all. I’ve given you nearly two dozen keywords tonight. Put the pieces together for yourself …”
Click.
For a second Drew couldn’t talk. Taking the recorder out of Kadir’s hand, he looked at it as though he were a primitive who believed Kadir’s little machine had captured Stephen’s soul.
“That’s the clicking sound I heard that night. You sneaky little bastard. Who even uses microcassettes anymore?”
“If my phone is closed, still I can record.”
“Why the hell didn’t you say something?”
There was a jolt and a bounce as the plane touched down.
“Eh-eh. I say it now.”
4: 3
CAIRO
LEAVING THE AIR-CONDITIONED arrivals hall of Cairo International Airport was like walking into a wall of heat. Drew had to squint even with sunglasses on. Decorative palm trees waved in the hot breeze. A granite obelisk incised with hieroglyphics—an enormous compass needle pointing skyward—rose from the parking lot. Drew remembered it from his first visit to Cairo a couple of years earlier.
A taxi driver accosted Drew, insisting, in English, that there was no bus to the city’s center and that “feefty Egybtian pounds ees good brice.”
Zafer snarled at him in Arabic. The cabbie shrank back and disappeared in search of more gullible customers.
“Drivers here have to pay a fee to get inside the airport,” Zafer explained, “so they charge a lot more than the ones outside the gate.”
Arabic, Turkish, and English. Drew wondered what else Zafer had up his sleeve.
They crossed the parking lot, each carrying a single piece of luggage.
The taxis lined-up outside the fence were black with white quarter-panels, generally Fiats that looked as though they’d logged most of their miles in war-time Beirut.
Ignoring the shouts of other drivers, Zafer picked out an old man with a white skullcap and a gaunt face.
The Egyptian smiled and motioned them toward his car; he was missing several narrow, brown teeth. His skin, the color of Turkish coffee, contrasted sharply with the skullcap and the silver stubble on his chin.
He and Zafer spoke briefly—bargaining?—before nodding amiably. The fare turned out to be twenty-five Egyptian pounds, about five dollars.
The taxi’s black interior smelled like the abandoned cars Drew had played in as a child—a musty odor browned at the edges by countless afternoons in the sun. Amazingly, the air-conditioning worked, although the draft it created was noticeably dusty, and like the rest of the car, it rattled incessantly.
On the way to the airport’s exit, Drew saw a traffic sign that almost made him laugh out loud: You are going in a wrong way. The warning had been written below the Arabic.
The freeway into Cairo was hemmed in by apartment blocks twenty or twenty-five stories high and sidewalks lined with trees. Every so often, a spectacular mosque would dramatically part the high-rise monotony. While mosques in both Cairo and Istanbul consisted primarily of domes and minarets, there was no mistaking one for the other. The façades of the Egyptian mosques were far more ornate and, with their emphasis on arabesque designs, more suggestive of the Oriental. Turkish mosques tended more toward what Drew thought of as solid, Greek lines.
An enormous statue of Ramses II towered over traffic from an island of palm trees and lush tropical plants that divided the freeway.
As they edged into Cairo’s car-clogged downtown, the city took on a more European look. Neoclassical architecture prevailed: fluted pilasters, balconies with wrought-iron railings, floral flourishes carved into the stone. The buildings, however, were not the four or five narrow stories fitted for Istanbul streets—many hardly wider than alleys—but upwards of eight floors with enough breadth they looked somewhat squat. Crumbling cornices, fading paint, and exposed stone stained the color of mourning, these relics of European colonialism stood along wide avenues cluttered by overpasses.
The city it
self was not, as was commonly assumed, ancient. Founded at the end of the first millennium by the Islamic conquerors of Egypt, it was hardly more than a thousand years old. The pharaohs’ capital had been farther south, in Memphis, and until the twentieth century the pyramids had belonged to the desert. The suburbs of Cairo, however, spreading like an absurdly slow tsunami, now lapped at their feet.
The Samar Palace Hotel, where Zafer had booked rooms, stood in an alley blocked off to cars. Zafer considered this a selling point. “Nobody can pull up to the door,” he said looking both ways. The odd thing about the hotel was that it didn’t occupy the whole building; it only took up the third and fourth floors.
The building’s lobby, as dark as a cave, led to a spacious staircase with granite steps wound around an elevator shaft. All wood and glass with a few tarnished brass fittings, the elevator could barely fit the three of them. Drew made sure he was in front of the doors. If the lights went out, he’d panic in such a small space, but with the way out visible and inches away, he felt nothing but a slight uptick in nervousness.
They stepped out on the third floor where they were greeted by a manager with a limp and a cheerful grin.
“Welcome to Egypt!” He held out his arms like he was going to grab them up in a group hug.
The room to which he led them had a stunningly high ceiling equipped with a fan, plastered walls in need of a fresh coat of paint, and a set of glass doors that opened onto a narrow balcony but no window. There were two beds, a small desk, and a hardwood floor whose finish had been stripped off by years of foot traffic.
The manager said something to Zafer in Arabic and handed him two sets of keys. Then he limped off.
Zafer closed the door.