The Christos Mosaic

by Vincent Czyz

  On the buffet, Drew noticed a wedding photograph he’d taken with Yasemin and her parents; a scrap of silk was draped over one end so that his face was covered. Must’ve missed that.

  “He doesn’t have a key, does he?”

  “I’m not that stupid.” She took one of his hands in both of hers. “Cold as ice, same as always.”

  “So I’m excited. Or nervous. Or both.”

  She smiled and lifted one eyebrow. “There are other ways to tell.” Turning away, she let her arm dangle behind her as she led him toward the bedroom.

  They kissed again at the edge of the bed. Yasemin’s hands followed his flanks to his waist. Breaking off the kiss, she looked down to undo his belt. His pants dropped to the floor, buckle clinking.

  Stitches strained as he yanked at her blouse before getting a button fully undone.

  “Ea-zee.”

  Slipping his fingers under her bra, he stretched it up and over her upraised arms without unhooking it.

  He pulled his shirt over his head instead of unbuttoning it and tugged his hands through the cuffs. So much of her skin against his own raised goose bumps. This was all he needed: the curves of her body conforming by some weird trick of geometry almost perfectly to his. The hard nubs of her nipples pressed against his chest. Her mouth joined to his.

  He felt the anger, the bitterness—whatever would have resisted him—drain from her limbs.

  As she lay back and he eased into her, something inside him collapsed. From fingertips to toes he dissolved in the swarming sensation sluicing through his veins. He closed his eyes, and a thought at the back of his mind flared like a firefly almost too distant to see. It vanished against pure black before he could recognize it.

  He whispered her name hoarsely in her ear. She said something in Turkish he couldn’t quite make out—and didn’t care. Her arched neck revealed the underside of her jaw, the Mongolian swells of her cheekbones. Her mouth half-open, she began to moan. He kissed her and trapped the sound in his chest.

  He wanted to promise a thousand things—they would get married again, they would never leave each other again, they would make a home together, they would start a family, they would stop doubting each other—but they had achieved something as miraculous as levitation, and he was afraid that one wrong word and they would fall.

  Slipping in a broth of sweat—his hair clumped with it—they pressed against each other, the last of the space between them gone, and Drew’s muscles quivered in the final moment as though contending with some great weight. Dizzy, he tucked his head between her neck and shoulder.

  “Don’t move.” She tugged on his flank to keep him where he was and let her heels come to rest on the backs of his thighs. “Just for a minute.”

  The fears that began to rise even as his blood cooled and the rush of lovemaking receded she calmed by whispering, “I still want a baby.”

  6: 9

  UNMARKED GRAVE

  DREW HAD ALWAYS LOVED watching Yasemin sleep. Before drifting off, he’d imagined waking up next to her: ephemeral tan lines from last summer across the deeper caramel of her chest and shoulders, mascara an endearing smear under her eyes, her short hair a sexy tangle. He turned over.

  “It’s not going to work.”

  He hadn’t even been aware she was awake. He rolled to his back, pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes. He was well-acquainted with her habit of incubating problems overnight. The negatives seemed somehow allied with darkness and dreams, seemed always to outweigh anything good that had happened the previous day. “I thought … didn’t you say you still want a baby?”

  “What if you leave me again?”

  Despite her beauty, her intelligence, the confidence that glossed her gestures, there was this black hole of insecurity at her core that Drew had never learned to deal with. “I won’t leave, Yasemin.” He turned to face her again. “I promise you.”

  She was staring at the ceiling, refusing to look at him.

  “You broke your wedding vows, Drew.” She turned to him, her eyes distant, cold. “How can I still trust you?”

  He should have pulled her close. He should have reassured her, as a remote voice in him urged, but he was hollowed out, and anger shouted down the voice. He rolled out of bed, separated his underwear from his jeans, and slipped into them.

  “Of course you’re leaving. That’s always your solution.”

  He stood and pulled his pants on, aware that he was doing exactly the wrong thing—reinforcing her fears—but he couldn’t stop himself. He turned to face her. “What else is there to say? You’ve made up your mind.” He could at least try, but he was tired. He was frustrated. He was angry. Maybe if she had waited a whole twenty-four hours before pulling this shit.

  “Go ahead then, leave!”

  Her words turned into a screech, and she hurled a pillow at him as he bent over to grab his socks and shirt. It bounced off his back.

  He went to the hall, collapsed on a chair, and pulled on his socks. The living room was aglow with sunlight spilling through windows he couldn’t see from where he sat.

  She was out of bed now, too. Her shape under a thin robe was disarming, but her face had that ugly set to it—as though it were composed of shards of glass that didn’t quite fit together.

  He stood up to put his wine-stained shirt on.

  “I was wrong last night. I was wrong to think you had changed.” She stabbed him in the chest with an index finger as she spoke.

  He looked down at her finger. “Why are you doing that?”

  “Does it hurt?” She poked him some more. “Am I hurting you with my little finger?”

  “It’s insulting, Yasemin, and you wouldn’t like me to do it to you.”

  “And what are you going to do about it? Punch me? Throw me on the coffee table like you did in our first apartment?”

  He wanted to go in with a clean move and lift her over his head—just to scare her a little. But that was how he’d dropped her on the coffee table. “That was an accident and you know it.”

  “My back hurt for a week.”

  “You know I didn’t do it on purpose.”

  “You’re …” (poke) “a man. And you …” (poke) “should know …” (poke) “your limits.” Poke.

  He couldn’t stand her poking him. “You’ve made mistakes in this relationship too, but you can’t admit it, so you’ve never apologized for them, and it still hurts.” He tapped his chest. “Yeah, more than your finger.”

  “Don’t forget this.” She pulled Zafer’s leather jacket off a peg and held it out it to him.

  He snatched it, swooshed his arms through the sleeves angrily. “Well now you can go back to your twenty-year-old.”

  “Siktir git!” Fuck off! She started slapping at his chest and arms, which made loud smacking sounds against the leather. “Siktir git!”

  He closed the door behind him.

  “You just couldn’t help it, could you?” he said to himself as he dropped down the stairs. “Pride. Spiteful, fucking pride.”

  He hit the buzzer to unlock the door and stepped into stunning September weather. The kind for a sweatshirt and shorts. He squinted in the sun as a mild breeze stirred fallen leaves. They were like sepia-stained photographs whispering against the paving stones.

  Drew walked toward the Sea of Marmara. Hardly thirty yards ahead was a sparkling view. The land fell away steeply just beyond the sidewalk. He had to use his hand for a visor. Maybe there was enough sun-beaten water to wash away the pain of a failed marriage, the guilt he felt for the disrespect both he and Yasemin had shown their love. It was still there after all the bickering, the pride wars, the smashed glasses and broken furniture—like a child looking up at them with uncomprehending eyes. This child would forever wonder how two people who loved each other so much could hurt each other so often. The child would eventually die of neglect—the most beautiful thing either of them had ever held or felt or seen. There would be no funeral, but one day they would know that somewher
e inside each of them was an unmarked grave.

  His phone rang. He prayed that it was Yasemin, that she had calmed down enough for him to apologize and talk her into going out to breakfast in a tea garden overlooking the water. Why else had they been given this absolutely perfect weather?

  The number on the screen was Zafer’s.

  “How’d it go?”

  “I was winning up until the twelfth round. I got TKOed with about a minute left.”

  “Sorry to hear that, dostum. You on your way?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’ll meet you in Karaköy, the ferry station.”

  “I’ll call when I’m on the boat.”

  He pressed the red icon to terminate the call and stared at the phone as though he could make it ring. He could call her now, put on his most charming persona—the manic one that courted extravagance and always had something witty or funny to say. He could promise her a champagne brunch on the Bosporus. They could erase this morning and go back to last night.

  He shook his head and put the phone in pocket. There had been too many this mornings, not enough last nights. It was time to let go.

  6: 10

  BETRAYAL

  DREW FILED OFF THE FERRY with a throng of impatient Turks and walked along the quay.

  Zafer spotted him and his smile turned to laughter. He pushed back a flap of black leather. “What happened? She stab you in the twelfth round?”

  “Nah. Her little boyfriend showed up. Threw wine on me.”

  “Did you wreck him?”

  “Yasemin wrecked him.” Drew tapped his left breast with a finger. “In here. Besides, he’s twenty and half my size.”

  “Turning into an Ebionite?”

  Drew shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  They walked past half a dozen waterfront restaurants with professional hawkers waving and trying to talk them inside even though it was way too early for lunch.

  “I got a box for you back at the Office.”

  “My books?”

  Zafer nodded. “Couple of my boys picked them up. They know what they’re doing.”

  “What a way to live.” Drew shook his head. The upside was he’d sneaked his much-thumbed-through Thoreau, collected Emerson, and a Whitman compilation onto the list of books to be rescued from the apartment.

  “Don’t worry,” Zafer said. “We’ll have the scroll sold in a few days.”

  Drew had almost forgotten about the scroll: how the hell was he going to keep it out of Serafis’s hands? Nabil was a minor player on the black market; Serafis was somewhere near the top of the hierarchy. If the scroll was worth five million dollars, Serafis could offer four million and still sell it at a profit of a million. How would Drew’s opportunistic pal be able to resist? Serafis would be offering Kadir his boat and his dream life on the Mediterranean. No matter how many times Drew turned the problem over in his mind, there was only one solution: at some point, he was going to have to betray them.

  6: 11

  SIX WORDS THAT REWROTE HISTORY

  DREW WANTED TO PULL out his hair, scoop up dirt, and pour it in fistfuls on his head the way King David might have after hearing about the death of his rebellious son, Absalom. He was grappling with a two-thousand-year-old riddle. Worse, some of the evidence had been deleted, false information had been inserted, cryptic allusions made—allusions that might be impossible to track down in the historical accounts that had survived Christian book burnings and the glacial grind of the centuries. He didn’t have Stephen’s training or the knowledge he’d accumulated after a lifetime in this field. What he had before him was a palimpsest of texts, histories, and scholarly commentaries—often conflicting—from which he was supposed to separate the ghosts of previous passages from later overwrites, truth from spin, likelihood from falsehood. A single word could mean a turn in an entirely wrong direction.

  The most famous example of one-word derailment was the Immaculate Conception as it occurred in Matthew. Matthew didn’t know Hebrew and read the Book of Isaiah in the Greek Bible. What Isaiah wrote in Hebrew, however, was a young woman shall conceive and bear a son. Young woman (almah in Hebrew) was translated into Greek as parthenos, which generally meant virgin. The Old Testament mentioned a virgin some fifty times but always using the word betulah. So the concept of a virgin birth in Matthew hinged on a mistranslation—and the milieu of the first century Levant, which was rife with the miraculous births of various demigods and heroes.

  Drew pulled out the list of keywords Stephen had mentioned the night he’d been killed. “Two thousand pigs?” What did they have to do with anything?

  “Eh?” Kadir looked up from the TV.

  “Nothing.” Drew skipped the pigs and typed in James the Just.

  James was barely mentioned in the Gospels, and when he was, he wasn’t particularly distinguishable from the other brothers. Which was very odd since he was important enough for Josephus to write about, and—as one article pointed out—there was as much or more extra-biblical literature devoted to James as there was to Jesus.

  Drew pulled Eusebius’s History of the Church out of the box of books Zafer brought back. He found the passage on James, which Father Hawass had quoted, by the second century historian Hegesippus, an Ebionite whose works, except for a few fragments, had mysteriously disappeared.

  He did not anoint himself with oil, nor did he go to the baths. He alone was allowed to enter the Holy of Holies, for he did not wear wool, but linen and he used to enter the Temple alone, and was often found upon his bent knees, interceding for the forgiveness of the people, so that his knees became as callused as a camel’s because of the constant beseeching he did and kneeling before God and asking forgiveness for the people.

  For James to have had the rights of a high priest to enter the Holy of Holies, to have been one of the leaders of the Church after Jesus’ death, and yet, in the Gospels not to have been so much as one of Jesus’ apostles, to be nowhere present at his brother’s trial before the Sanhedrin and Pilate—someone had to be lying.

  The simplest explanation was transference: if James had been the Teacher of Righteousness and had been viewed, at least until his death in 62 AD, as the Savior, then it made sense to strip him of his stature in the Gospels and transfer his saintly qualities to Jesus. That is, assuming Jesus was a fiction the Gospel authors needed to elevate well above any other messiah figure of the first century.

  James was mentioned in the Pauline letters as a pillar of the Jerusalem church—and yet Paul was his lifelong enemy. That Paul and James were enemies was clear in the Letter of James: Don’t you realize you Empty Man that Faith without works is useless? Paul, whose emphasis was always on faith alone, was a ringer for the Empty Man.

  Drew supposed scholars could argue that James was not a believer or follower of Jesus during the latter’s ministry but only became a devout Christian when his resurrected brother appeared to him. The problem was that by all accounts James was, as Saint Hegesippus had put it, Holy from his mother’s womb. Moreover, while Paul claimed that the resurrected Christ appeared to James, it wasn’t mentioned in any of the Gospels—the process of diminishing his importance had already begun. Drew recalled John the Baptist’s words in the Gospel written by another John: He must grow greater while I must become less.

  James played a much larger role in Acts of the Apostles than he did in the Gospels although he doesn’t even appear until chapter 12. Oddly, he shows up without introduction as if the reader were already familiar with who he was. Some scholars theorized that James had been written out of earlier chapters of Acts to downplay his importance.

  Like Jesus, James was condemned by the Jewish high religious court, the Sanhedrin, and suffered a wrongful death. Rather than being crucified, he was stoned. The real reasons for James’s execution had been recorded by Josephus. The Roman governor of Judea had died in office. While awaiting the arrival of the new governor, Ananus the Younger, then high priest, saw an opportunity to eliminate a rival for power. Convening the
Sanhedrin, he had James and a number of his followers condemned on charges of blasphemy.

  Ananus, high priest for only three months, was himself murdered and his body desecrated.

  Of particular interest to Drew was a passage in Josephus’s account that had been recorded by Saint Origen, Eusebius of Caesarea—the Father of Church History—and Saint Jerome. According to all three men, Josephus states that the reason for the fall of Jerusalem was the murder of James the Just. This passage, however, couldn’t be found in any existing copy of Josephus.

  “I wonder why,” Drew said sarcastically and typed in the keywords for a web search. Saint Origen, writing in the third century AD, had paraphrased Josephus.

  So great a reputation among the people for Righteousness did James enjoy, that Josephus, when wishing to show the cause for why the people suffered such great misfortunes that even the Temple was razed to the ground, said these things happened to them in accordance with the Wrath of God in consequence of things which they had dared to do against James …

  Later Church fathers fulminated against this passage as an outrageous lie, insisting that the crucifixion of Jesus was the reason for the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple. Which, of course, made no sense since the Church held that Christ was crucified in 30 AD, and the Temple wasn’t destroyed until 70 AD. This was eight years after the death of James, but there were hints that the stoning of James was one of the reasons for the revolt of 66 AD, only four years after James’s death.

  Much more interesting, however, were some of the details surrounding James’s death. Saint Hegesippus and a third century Church father named Clement of Alexandria had written that, while addressing the Temple crowd on the Passover of 62 AD, James proclaimed the Son of Man sitting in Heaven on the right hand of the Great Power and coming on the clouds of Heaven. This was what Jesus supposedly said at his trial—in Mark, which was written after James’s death. More intriguing still, in the accounts given by Hegesippus and Clement, James was not stoned to death but thrown from a pinnacle of the Temple.