by Vincent Czyz
“I’m not going to prison. Not for a million dollars.”
“Wait a minute.” Drew looked in the direction of the Sadat, but it was already too far away to signal. Why the fuck hadn’t he taken Ashraf up on his offer? “Nobody said anything about losing the cargo. You’re a smuggler. That’s a risk you take.”
Gürsel shrugged. “I agreed to take you to Turkey, nothing else.”
“If the case goes into the water, I go with it.”
Gürsel nodded. “Olsun.” Let it be so.
10: 2
DIVINITY UNJUSTLY ACCUSED
DREW IMAGINED EVERY SHIFT in shine on the waves, every speck on the horizon to be the Turkish coast guard. Well, the Turks were either coming or they weren’t. No use staring at the water until he began to hallucinate.
He pulled the worn copy of The Bacchae he had bought from Shimon out of the messenger bag and leaned against the gunwale. Fortunately, the water was unusually smooth. Unfortunately, he had all goddamn day on this boat.
The play’s introduction reminded him that Dionysus, the god of wine and fertility, was also the patron god of the theater. Drew knew well enough that Greek drama had begun with the Dionysian Mysteries, and that, coincidentally enough, the original chorus had consisted of twelve men who stood behind a single actor—the twelve apostles and Jesus.
The play itself, written more than four hundred years before Christianity was founded, was fairly simple. Dionysus is furious that his human family doesn’t recognize him as the son of Zeus. They believe that his mother, Semele, simply gave birth to an illegitimate child. Semele, who died before the child was born, is branded a liar and a blasphemer for insisting that Zeus was the father.
Disguising himself as a blond youth, Dionysus returns to Thebes to prove he is the son of God. Cadmus, Dionysus’s uncle, has passed the throne on to his grandson Pentheus, Dionysus’s cousin. Pentheus immediately bans the Dionysian Mysteries in Thebes. He also has the blond stranger, arrested but is persuaded by his prisoner to spy on the rituals being performed in Dionysus’s name. The god prevents the celebrants from recognizing Pentheus, and, in a divinely inspired frenzy, they tear him to pieces. Indeed, the name Pentheus—“Man of Sorrows”—was a kind of foreshadowing.
The parallels between Dionysus and the Christ of the Gospels were obvious enough: a long-haired, young man promulgates a new religion; the ruling authorities refuse to acknowledge him as the son of God; bread and wine are praised as the two supreme blessings given to man; and, after taking on human form to reveal himself to humankind, the son of God is arrested on false charges. In the Gospels Jesus’ Jewish accusers claim that his teachings are leading the people astray; in The Bacchae, King Pentheus is portrayed as a tyrant who refers to the Dionysian Mysteries as this new disease which fouls the land. Divinity is unjustly accused, arrested, and tried.
Drew came across other points of correspondences, including one that almost made him laugh. Cadmus, advising Pentheus, says, “Even if this Dionysus is no god, as you assert, persuade yourself that he is. The fiction is a noble one.” What Drew found most striking was that when Pentheus orders Dionysus to be chained, the god says, “You do not know what you do. You do not know who you are.” Euripides’s Dionysus sounded nearly identical to Jesus on the cross and James in the Temple.
The Bacchae was the tragedy of Dionysus bringing the Mysteries to Thebes; the Gospels were the tragedy of Jesus bringing Christianity, a variant of the Mysteries, to Jerusalem. The most important element, Drew realized, was not any of the similarities between Dionysus and Jesus, or between the Mysteries and Christianity, but the drama itself. The Gospel authors wanted to frame Christ in the context of a tragedy. What better way to deliver their message to the masses? What better way to popularize the themes of a fledgling religion?
Drew was so absorbed in the play, he didn’t realize Gürsel was standing over him with an automatic pistol in his hand.
“Sorry, my friend … a Turkish patrol boat.”
10: 3
INTO YOUR HANDS I COMMEND MY SPIRIT
HIS HEAD BUZZED with ricocheting thoughts. He voiced one: “Do you have diving equipment?”
Gürsel looked perplexed. “Below deck. Why?”
“Let me go overboard with my case. I’ll keep my depth about twenty-five meters. I’ll stay directly under the boat. They won’t see any bubbles. When they’re gone, I’ll surface.”
Gürsel glanced over his shoulder, then tucked his pistol in the waistband of his pants. “Chabuk ol.” Hurry up.
Drew grabbed his satchel, pulled out The Jewish Wisdom of Ancient Alexandria, and tucked it under a bench against the gunwale. No one would care about a decrepit book written in English. The same couldn’t be said for a new messenger bag, which would have to go with him. The scroll, still in its box, was sealed in a durable plastic bag, the kind amphibious commandos used. His passport and wallet were Saran-wrapped with it, but his Bat money was still belted to him. Ashraf had waterproofed the scroll just before their rendezvous at Mustafa’s boathouse—”Just in case,” he’d said. But it wasn’t a random precaution. As far as Ashraf was concerned, Zafer had died for the scroll.
Silently thanking the big Egyptian, Drew scrambled below deck. He picked up a wetsuit and looked at the tag. Medium. He grabbed the other one. Medium. Shit. Choosing the one that looked less ragged (they both had holes in them), he stretched the rubber to its limits as he writhed into it. When he finally zipped it up, the suit resisted his joints at every movement. Bending an arm was a struggle. He could have gone down without one, but body heat dissipated something like thirty-two times faster in water.
Mustafa stuck his head below deck. Chabuk! Chabuk! Quick! Quick! Drew grabbed a mask and a pair of flippers, strapped on a weight-belt with about five kilos of lead on it, and with one hand yanked himself up the ladder. He felt like he had grown an exoskeleton.
Mustafa secured a tank to the BCD, a buoyancy control device, and connected the hoses while Drew struggled into the flippers—they were too goddamn small, too. Drew turned on the air and checked the gauge to make sure he had a full tank. Mustafa helped him on with the BCD and glanced over his shoulder.
The police boat was getting closer.
“Go! Go! Over the side!”
Drew sat on the gunwale, but before he could lean back, Gürsel planted a palm on his chest and shoved him. He fell into the water holding his mask in place with one hand, latching onto the messenger bag with the other.
The tank broke the surface of the sea like a wedge. A cloud of bubbles obscured his vision, cold water flooded his suit and, as always, there was that first panicked breath—he bit down on the regulator and sucked hard, half expecting to take in a couple lungfuls of water.
The second breath brought more trust.
With his BCD deflated and most of the excess air squeezed out of the sealed bag inside the leather satchel, he sank. Stiff-limbed in his overstretched suit, he went down like a dead crab while his regulator released huge pearls of air.
Swallowing relieved the pressure on his eardrums.
He put a little air into the BCD to slow his descent. Just below him, a fish flashed silver and disappeared.
He swallowed again to equalize the pressure in his ears. Down here, a pocket of air anywhere in the body could be a serious problem, even in a tooth that hadn’t been filled properly.
Above him, the hull of Gürsel’s boat was a long shadow on the water. And now he saw the coast guard ship spearing toward the much smaller vessel.
At twenty-five meters he adjusted his BCD so that he was more or less weightless. As long as he kept his breathing even, he would just bob in the current, neither rising nor descending.
All he could do now was wait. And pray the coast guard didn’t figure out he was right underneath them.
Drew tried to slow his breathing, to burn less oxygen, but it wasn’t easy with the prospect of a Turkish prison literally hanging over his head. He was using up air fast.
He clos
ed his eyes and tried to imagine he was completely alone.
Fish that had scattered after his splashdown now became curious. One, neither big nor particularly colorful, moved to within a foot of Drew’s mask. It looked as him as if it knew he was a harmless alien, and there was nothing he—ill-adapted land creature—could do about being gawked at.
Drew looked up at the two long shadows in the water. When the fuck are they going to leave?
After what seemed hours, but was only about twenty-five minutes judging from the oxygen he’d consumed, the patrol boat’s engines revved.
Drew breathed a bubbly sigh of relief.
Until Gürsel’s boat began to pull away, too.
Panic bubbled up inside him.
He had seconds in which to make a decision: surface and hail the coast guard or try to make his way back to land without knowing where the hell in the sea he was. Go up and be arrested or risk drowning. By the time he’d made up his mind, it was too late.
Breaking the surface, he saw that the coast guard boat was too far away to signal unless someone was looking directly at him. No one was even on deck.
While he watched, both boats disappeared from sight.
Nothing had ever paralyzed Drew like the sight of open sea in every direction.
He wasn’t cold, but his teeth began to chatter. Even if he hadn’t been wearing his rubber straightjacket, he wouldn’t have been able to so much as kick a leg. This was the meaning of I commend myself to God’s hands. He was going to die in a blue sea, under a blue sky, with a scroll that could rewrite Christian history sealed in plastic like a message in a bottle.
10: 4
DUE NORTH
ALL PRAYERS, HIS FATHER LIKED TO SAY, are answered, and sometimes, the answer is no.
Drew had lost faith in Jesus of Nazareth, but he hadn’t lost faith. Please, God, if I’m doing the right thing with this scroll, send a boat back for me.
What if Stephen had been half right? What if God existed, but there had never been a Jesus? Wouldn’t God be kind of ticked off that a fictional character in a faux tragedy had been raised up alongside Him? Maybe God wanted this scroll to come to light. To correct a two-millennia-old error.
Drew took stock of his situation. There was a compass on the back of the depth meter/air gauge. Turkey had to be due north of where he was. If he could float that way and sooner or later he would to run into the Turkish mainland. Or a boat. He had to. As long as he kept the compass needle pointing toward north.
The problem was, if it took too long, he would die of thirst.
Water water everywhere, nor any drop to drink. With that line from a Coleridge poem looping in his head, he began kicking.
How far was he? How often did patrols cruise by? How long before he died of thirst? Two days? Three?
Without Zafer or Ashraf to hold his hand, he was a fuck-up. What had he been thinking when he decided to go back to Turkey alone?
What the hell had made him think he could take on an elite mercenary like Raymond? He remembered how Hohenzollern had handled that wicked-looking knife in Serafis’s house and realized he’d be lucky if he only caught a bullet.
Drew stopped kicking and listened. He thought he heard a kind of thrum behind him. He let his feet sink until they were under him again. Paddling with a hand, he turned and lifted his mask, jeweled with seawater, to his forehead.
Fucking Gürsel. He’d circled around.
Drew watched the boat close in on him.
“Merhaba, Drew Bey!” Gürsel, shorts and sloppy shirt, captain’s hat and stupid smile, was waving.
Drew lifted an arm. He could have cried hysterically, but he kept the expression on his face impassive. Silently, he thanked God a dozen times. That was how Zafer had moved through the world—giving away nothing.
A chain ladder spilled over the side of the fishing boat with a clatter. To negotiate it, Drew first had to yank off the ill-fitting flippers and toss them on the deck. Slipping the strap of the water-soaked case over a shoulder, he grasped one rung with his hands and caught another with his bare foot as the boat rose on a swell. Without water buoying him up, the tank on his back felt like solid lead, and he almost fell backwards. He climbed a rung at a time. Near the top, Gürsel and one of his crew pulled him aboard.
“Sorry about leaving you there, but we had to make it look good. I knew if you had any sense you would go north, and … here we are.”
Drew wanted to throw him off the boat. What if he hadn’t surfaced? What if they were off by a few hundred meters in either direction? It would have been easy—very easy—to miss him. What if he hadn’t gone due north? If he hadn’t used the compass properly? “You could have missed me.”
Gürsel shrugged. “A few more miles and you would see the coast. Someone would have picked you up.”
Drew nodded, keeping his face as blank as a rivet head.
Wet, the diving suit seemed even less pliable. Gürsel had to alternately yank and peel to get it off him. Drew collapsed on a bench. The weather was warm this far south, but the breeze sent shivers through him. Sitting in the sun, dripping dry, he ran a hand through the remnants of his hair; salt had made it sticky and spiky.
What was he supposed to think now? That his prayer to God without Jesus as intermediary had worked? That the hand of God was helping him toward his goal? He didn’t want to make the mistake human beings, particularly the ignorant and desperate ones, had been making for centuries—interpreting favorable events as “signs” of God’s will.
He sighed and stared out at the sea. He could just make out the hazy lump that must be Turkey.
An hour later, they were gliding past cliffs ranging in color from tawny to burnt honey. Antalya’s harbor was a small oval gouged out of the shoreline. It was crowned by well-preserved fortifications—crenellated walls and towers—built by the Romans and rebuilt by Seljuk Turks. Plants had taken root in the interstices between stone blocks and hung down like green beards.
Gürsel’s boat cruised into the harbor, where dozens of boats were already moored.
Drew exchanged polite farewells with Gürsel and his crew but nothing more. He went ashore by simply stepping off the boat when it pulled up to a quayside gas station. Harbors, he noticed as he walked along a quay, stank almost as much as boats. On this one, the overpowering smell of diesel mingled with the reek of rotting fish.
Because Zafer had had the foresight to bring the stamps used by passport officials in Egypt and Turkey, Drew had already stamped his own exit from Egypt. Now, adjusting the date, he used the Turkish entry stamp.
From a public phone, he called Yasemin’s landline and left a message telling her he would be back in Istanbul in a couple of days.
He took a cab to Antalya’s bus station. It was a typical terminal with enormous sheet-glass windows, a web-work of steel supporting a distant ceiling, and departure announcements echoing in the cavernous space. The ride would be ten hours, but traveling by bus was a lot safer than flying into an airport.
Fortunately, Turkish buses were comfortable and modern. The one he boarded was a Mercedes-Benz.
As the driver pulled out of the row of slanted buses, Drew opened the sun-dried messenger bag and took out The Jewish Wisdom of Ancient Alexandria. Once tar-black, the rough cloth cover was now worn at the edges, revealing a terra cotta-colored material that made a handsome if uneven border. This book had been carried by ship or plane—maybe by horse or camel—until it had found its way to an unlikely shop in the Egyptian desert. Between its aging covers was perhaps the last piece in the Christ mosaic: the wisdom literature compiled by Jesus ben Sirach, the grandfather of the man who had written Sayings of the Savior—an Aramaic version of Q1.
According to the bow-tied, bespectacled scholar whom Drew imagined had written the introduction to the book, some time during the first or second century BC, Alexandrian Jews, looking for common ground between Greek religious thought and Judaism, had identified the Jewish personification of Wisdom with the Greek concept o
f the Logos.
The Logos was originally thought of as the mind of God and the laws by which the universe operated. However, under the Platonists, who insisted that God was not part of the material universe but lay somewhere outside it, it was necessary to have some sort of intermediary between humans and God. Hence, the Logos. Similarly, Wisdom in the Jewish tradition acted as a go-between for humans and God.
But that was not all wisdom was good for. The introduction quoted Proverbs 3:19:
The Lord founded the Earth through Wisdom, and by understanding He established the heavens.
The author also singled out Proverbs 3:22:
I am Wisdom. The Lord created me in the beginning of his words, before his works of old. I have been established from everlasting, before there was ever an Earth. When He prepared the heavens, I was there. When He marked out the foundations of the Earth, then I was beside Him, as a master craftsman.
No one familiar with the New Testament could fail to see the parallel to the Gospel of John:
In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him, and without him nothing was made that was made.
But as Drew was well aware, Philo had already had this idea with his heavenly Adam. Writing a century or so before the author of John, Philo cast the heavenly Adam as the model of an ideal man who inhabited a heaven consisting of God’s thoughts—a heaven corresponding to Plato’s dimension of perfect forms. Sure enough, Philo called this celestial being Logos, “the first-born of God.” Adam, the mortal husband of Eve, was merely a copy of the heavenly Adam, once again corresponding to Plato’s concept that all material objects are vastly inferior copies of their flawless, eternal counterparts.
John’s idea of Jesus as the Son of God and the Logos was a perfect match. Borrowing from Philo, John had created a heavenly Jesus— through whom the material universe was created—who would be followed by the human one who suffered and died on the cross.