by Bunn, Davis
“Abba. The Aramaic word for Father.”
Elena ran her fingers over the page. The sheet was very soft, yet thick and uneven. When she pressed down, the pages gave slightly, as substantial as a blanket.
“Vellum,” Miriam said. “Made from antelope hide. This book is a replica of a much older version. There are four such replicas, each older than the last. This particular replica is four hundred and thirty-one years old. Each is an exact duplication of the original, down to the type of vellum used to make the pages and the book’s cover and the hinges.”
Miriam walked back over and settled into her seat. She went on, “In the very early days of Christianity, most of the population of new believers could neither read nor write. Symbols were fashioned that they could understand. Carvings of favorite Bible stories, such as Jonah and the whale. The cross of our Lord Jesus. Symbols worn as jewelry, such as the sign of the fish. And paintings, known as icons. These were carried from place to place by pastors and missionaries. Stories were told from the Scriptures that related to these images. And over time, many of them became linked to miracles. Spontaneous healings. Visions. Hearing the voice of God. Entire cities coming to faith in a spontaneous outflowing of the Holy Spirit. The stories are myriad. It became accepted throughout Christendom that any miracle associated with one such image was linked to all true copies. Why? Because the image itself was not the source.”
Elena traced the letters on the page. “And this?”
“The original document formed three scrolls. Or so the legends claim. In the fifth century, the first book was supposedly fashioned from those scrolls. By that point, such bindings had become a common means of preserving the most precious scroll manuscripts.”
Elena repeated, “The fifth century.”
Miriam nodded. “So my great-grandmother told me. The original now rests in a safety deposit box with the other duplicates.”
“How old were the scrolls?”
“They dated from the second century.” Miriam smiled. “That is, if you believe in legends.”
“What am I supposed to do with this? I mean, other than keep it safe.”
“The tradition is simple enough. Study one page until it speaks to you.”
“Speaks,” Elena echoed. “Speaks how?”
“How should I answer that, since it never spoke to me at all?” Miriam’s tone seemed to mock her own words. “Either you will find the answer for yourself or you will not.”
Elena’s professional abilities were based upon a carefully honed objectivity. She had been trained to hold patients and issues alike at arm’s length. And yet here, in this moment, she felt an almost giddy desire to dive straight in. Elena stared at her friend. She had the sudden sensation of unseen faces crowding in behind Miriam, smiling at her. “When do I move to the next page?”
“The common way of referring to them is plates. And to answer your question, if one plate does not speak, what can you expect from the next but more of the same?” Miriam studied the book in Elena’s hands. Elena had the distinct impression that her friend was not sorry to let it go. “That was the answer my great-grandmother gave me. Out of respect for her memory, I have never turned the page.”
6
SUNDAY
Elena greeted the Sunday dawn seated on the bench she had often shared with her husband. Her home was on Boars Hill, the highest mount in Oxfordshire. Jason had set the bench in their rear garden where two sugar maples rose to frame the city below. The leaves were just appearing now, a green as fresh and sharp as the morning chill. The maples had been Jason’s favorite. Their leaves went through an astonishing change of color, turning so dark as to appear black in the afternoon shadows of high summer, then brandishing an almost comic autumn color. Each season was so vital to these trees, Jason explained, that they needed to shout the changes in the only voice they had. Elena set her coffee mug on the grass beside her bench and wished the memories did not carry such a woeful edge.
The book sat on the bench next to her. Elena had studied the first plate for over an hour the previous night. The image had danced behind her eyelids all night.
Other than that, she had sensed nothing.
In the strengthening daylight Elena stared at the cover and recalled how, as she had prepared to depart the previous day, she had asked Miriam how long it would take for the book to speak to her.
“Days. Weeks. Months. Years. Perhaps never.” Miriam had smiled. “You must understand. Time held a vastly different meaning to those who studied this book before you.”
Elena settled the book in her lap. Using one finger, she traced the olive wood’s whorling design. The petrified wood had been darkened over the centuries. The rings were little more than ink stains upon a shadow background. Elena felt the same compounded energy she had known the previous night. She wondered if there really was such a thing as telemetry, where an inanimate object absorbed the energy of those who handled it and transmitted this force to someone sensitive enough to be aware of the impossible.
She opened the cover. The first plate was yellowed with age and stained with other fingers that had traced the single word, the cursive Aramaic letters fashioning the name Abba. Aramaic had been the language of Jesus, the common tongue spoken throughout Judea. The word’s most common translation was Pa, or Papa, or Daddy. It was the way Jesus had referred to his heavenly Father, with loving familiarity. In doing so, Jesus had gone against the traditions of the epoch, when Jehovah was considered so distant from his Judean followers that the holy Name could only be spoken once each year, by the temple’s high priest, who entered the innermost sanctum and whispered the word to an empty chamber.
Elena turned the page. This was as far as Miriam had ever come. Elena wondered how her friend must have felt. A bearer of secrets two thousand years old, passing the book on to another, never having come to understand the true significance of what she held.
Elena decided she would probably find out eventually.
Her initial eagerness had worn off. The one emotion she could identify just now was a sense of concern. Just exactly what had she let herself in for? Was she to spend the rest of her life responsible for a collection of books and empty legends? Had anyone other than her oldest friend spoken of these things, Elena would have dismissed the tale as the dust of past centuries. Nothing more than a collection of mysteries from an era before modern medicine and clinical analysis. Merely an instrument of secret hysteria.
Elena lifted her gaze. Boars Hill was a steep incline that rose just beyond Oxford’s ring road. At this time of day, the university spires appeared close enough to touch. The dome of the Sheldonian, the medieval hall used for all formal convocations, gleamed like a crown of Cotswold stone.
She returned her gaze to the plate. The previous day, Miriam had walked her down the lane, as though seeking to shelter Elena as long as possible from whatever was yet to come. Miriam had explained that the plates contained the Lord’s Prayer. One phrase per plate.
Unlike on the book’s introductory page, the words on the next page were not written with ink. Instead, the letters appeared to be fashioned from pure gold. Elena thought they had been beaten into the surface of the vellum, but she could not be certain. Though the vellum was yellowed, there were no stains upon this page. Elena wondered if anyone had ever dared touch it. In four hundred and thirty-one years.
Our Father, who art in heaven.
The four letters of the introductory page had filled every square inch. A shout of ink and age. Abba. The letters had been surrounded by accent marks and hyphens.
This plate was very different indeed.
The previous evening, Elena had thought the golden letters had formed a flower. They had appeared to her like a tulip at the brink of unfolding, the tips not yet curved open.
Now, however, in the strengthening dawn, she realized that her initial impression had been wrong.
The words did not form a flower. But rather a flame.
Our Father, who art in heaven.
The words seemed to find shelter in the morning breeze, as though chanted by the leaves overhead. As though the birds sang them in time to Elena’s own heart.
She had spoken the words her entire life. But in this moment of a new dawn, it seemed as though she was discovering a new meaning. A new power. Elena realized the artist had fashioned the script in order to drive home a specific point.
Elena felt her heart begin to sing these words, Our Father, who art in heaven. She felt herself filled with passion and hope and longing, strong as an eternal flame. Held to earth by the candle shaped by the Maker’s own hand, a human form intended to burn incandescently with longing. Seeking ever to leave the source of its burning passion and rise up to the Maker.
The words were no longer ancient but utterly new. Utterly now. So great was the burning desire, she found herself whispering the words. She spoke in English, a tongue unknown at the time that this page had been fashioned. She whispered the words along with the two thousand years of followers who had gone before her, guided into prayer by the holy Teacher himself.
And in that instant, everything changed.
It was not so much a realization as a vision. And yet not so much a vision as a door.
There was no sound, and yet the images that swept through her mind and heart seemed to carry with them the song of ages past. Elena fell onto her knees, the book spilling to the grass beside her.
7
MONDAY
The city of Oxford was a living contrast. The inner city was dominated by the university and its thirty thousand students. Ringing this core, however, was some of the worst urban sprawl in England. The factories to the city’s northeast produced one-third of all the country’s motor vehicles. Most inhabitants of this outer city loathed the university and everything it stood for.
The Oxford city council bitterly resented the university and its privileged status. The university had been granted a quasi-independent status some eight hundred years earlier. This had been strengthened in the sixteenth century, after the university granted the royal family shelter during the Cromwellian civil war. Since the city council could not touch the university, they snipped at the edges. The traffic system was abysmal. Parking was nonexistent. Even the most senior don was forced to pay the university-area rate of five dollars an hour. Which was why most dons, no matter how elderly and no matter how bad the weather, endured public transport or cycled to work.
Because Elena’s clinic was open to patients from the city at large, however, their building was granted one parking permit. For her part in renovating their offices, Elena’s grateful colleagues had given this to her. She had once been offered thirty thousand dollars for the slip of paper attached to her windshield.
For the first time in years, Elena was late to the office that Monday. Elena locked her car and hurried down St. Giles, only to discover her first appointment was already waiting. Sandra Harwood’s limo was pulled up in front of the office, a bodyguard standing sentry by the front door. Elena waited for the bodyguard to open Sandra’s door and said, “I am so very sorry.”
“Max will need to check your room before I can come up.”
“Of course.” Elena watched the bodyguard seal her patient back inside the bulletproof limo, then said, “Come with me.”
Fiona greeted her. “I invited them inside but that man refused.”
“It’s okay.” She hurried up the stairs, unlocked her office door, and repeated to the bodyguard, “I apologize for making you wait.”
“No problem, ma’am. We just wanted to be sure we got here on time.” The bodyguard gave both rooms a quick sweep, then said, “I’ll just go escort Ms. Harwood.”
Elena followed him back downstairs and stationed herself by the outer door. As Sandra entered, Fiona asked, “Would you care for a coffee?”
“Please. White, one Sweet’N Low if you have it.”
Elena lifted two fingers to Fiona and said to Sandra, “Won’t you come up?”
Once back inside her office, Elena said, “I can’t tell you—”
Sandra waved her apology aside. “Do you have anything for me?”
Elena waited while Fiona brought in the two coffees and asked, “Should I offer one to the gentleman?”
“You can,” Sandra replied. “I doubt he will accept.”
Elena said, “Shut the doors, please.” When Fiona had sealed them in, Elena asked, “How have you been?”
Sandra tasted the coffee, grimaced. “The same.”
“Is there something the matter with the coffee?”
“The coffee is not the problem. I had another attack just before dawn. It always takes a while for the nausea to pass.”
“The dreams have persisted, then.”
“Persist is too light a word. They brutalize me. Last night it attacked four times.”
Elena decided to forgo the protection of her desk. She did this occasionally to emphasize some approaching transition. Other times she wanted to present dreaded news with a compassion that required closeness. This time was different, however.
She settled her coffee on the edge of the desk next to Sandra’s. She pulled over a second chair. Seated herself. Tasted her coffee again and confessed, “The reason I was late was that I did not fall asleep until dawn. I was so far gone I fit the alarm clock into my dream.”
Sandra did not respond. The woman clearly found nothing remarkable in a sleepless night. Up close the woman’s tension was much more evident. Despite her faultless makeup and perfect hair, the strain was etching itself deeply into her features. Tight crow’s-feet extended from her eyes and her mouth.
Elena said, “I couldn’t sleep because I was struggling to decide how I should speak with you today.”
That brought the woman around.
Elena went on, “Dream analysis is one of the most controversial issues within psychoanalysis.”
Sandra replied, “I know all that. I’ve read your book.”
Elena covered her wince by settling her cup back on the saucer. As she did so, she was struck by a sudden image. Elena found herself recalling the day Miriam had urged her to write the book. She had forgotten entirely that the idea had originally come from the old woman, which was hardly a surprise, given Elena’s state of mind at the time.
That particular day, Miriam’s sunlit porch had overlooked a frozen world. It had been early January, seven months after Jason’s death, and Elena had been struggling futilely to reknit her world. Miriam had urged her to renew a personal interest, one shared with almost no one. Within the realms of clinical psychology there were many who scoffed at dream analysis. Elena had wanted to make it the basis for her doctoral thesis, but her adviser had rejected the proposal out of hand. He had then described dream analysis as one step removed from medieval mystics.
That frozen January day, Miriam had said a study of dreams was precisely what Elena needed. A personal passion brought to the light of day, one she had not ever shared with her departed husband. A new reason to heal and enter a future without Jason.
Elena realized Sandra was watching her. She stammered, “I-I was remembering something I have not thought of in years.”
“Does it have to do with my nightmare?”
“I don’t know … perhaps.” She took a long breath and searched for the thread of what she had intended to say. “Dreams often reveal very deep issues that the conscious mind seeks not only to avoid, but to actually flee from. Yet the unconscious mind realizes that this repressed emotion and memory must be confronted. It expels the putrid mess with the same steady insistence with which the body forces out pus from an untreated wound. Either the wound is cleared, or the individual will suffer from an increasingly serious infection. This is as true with mental and emotional wounds as with the physical. If the individual refuses to accept this need, and represses the issue, then fragments are often released in the dream state.”
“But this is not what is happening here,” Sandra declared. “I am not repressing anything.”
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br /> Elena had often heard such claims. Normally she treated them as just another indication of repression and denial. But this time, she said, “I agree. I do not think this is the case with you.”
Sandra visibly relaxed. She tasted the words: “Thank you. That means a great deal.”
Elena went on, “Repressed emotions and memories will often follow certain patterns within the dream state. These patterns are hotly debated. Some analysts follow upon the work of the psychiatrist Carl Jung. They believe that the patterns are based upon what are known as archetypes, structures that are universal to all of mankind, as though they were part of our genetic code. Others, including the father of modern psychiatry, Freud, suggest that most repressed images have to do with a more fundamental and physical-based pattern.”
The woman seated next to her listened with a singular intensity. “If you don’t think I am repressing an issue, why are you telling me this?”
“Because what I am about to say,” Elena replied, “is so unprofessional, I need to preface it with something that establishes my credentials.”
The woman was a true professional at masking her emotions. The only sign of what she held back was a slight quiver to her voice. “Tell me everything.”
Elena said, “Your husband is the American ambassador to Great Britain.”
Sandra Harwood shook her head. Not in denial. But in impatient rejection. “You could have discovered this any number of ways.”
Elena said, “Next week, the Vice President of the United States will announce that he is not going to be the President’s running mate in the upcoming elections.”
The woman’s professional facade weakened. “How do you know this?”
“For the moment, I need you to set such questions aside. If what I say is of use, we can discuss them at a later time.” Elena carefully framed the words she had practiced and debated through much of the night. She was no clearer on whether it was right to say them as she had been at dawn. “I do not intend to hide anything from you. But how this has come to me is less important than whether or not it helps you deal with your nightly trauma.”