Miss Garnet's Angel

by Salley Vickers

  ‘But those are not gods,’ I protested.

  At this Azarias stopped stock still and Kish stopped beside him. I remember a long loose chain of flamingo flying behind his great curly head. They looked like flaming angels in the rose-coloured evening light.

  ‘Tobias, for heaven’s sake, what do you think a god looks like when he works in men?’

  And to that I had no answer, so we hurried on without more talk towards Nineveh.

  4

  It was past midnight when the Monsignore’s boat drew up by the wide, weed-covered steps which led up to the Chiesa dell’Angelo Raffaele.

  Stepping out Julia Garnet looked aloft to see the group of stone figures: the fish, the dog, the boy and, over and behind all, the figure of the Angel Raphael.

  She thanked the Monsignore’s boatman and watched his shoulders square as he took the boat up the rio and round the corner out of sight.

  In the light of the moon she could see the wrinkled stockings of the Archangel and looking up she winked at him, ‘Ciao, Raffaele!’

  The moonlight fell especially bright and unable to sleep, or to shut the beams from her room, Julia rose and made herself a cup of tea. What was the meaning of the Monsignore’s story tonight? To distract her? How he loved to talk about women’s breasts! Perhaps it had no other meaning.

  Opening her notebook she read what she had written on the plane home, after the twins’ wedding: Despite the hazards the Magi trusted their vision and followed it, even to a strange land (and a stranger god!).

  The Magi, the ‘wise men’, had followed the star where it took them, and, in the persons of Nicco and his friends, she had followed them. So perhaps she was an honorary Parsi after all?

  Long ago she had decided that history does not repeat itself; but perhaps when a thing was true it went on returning in different likenesses, borrowing from what went before, finding new ways to declare itself; and always there were the Nasu, and the Nasu’s accomplices and inheritors; but always too, beside them, the Angel Raphael. Even old Tobit saw him in the end.

  There was the end of a pencil by the telephone and taking it she wrote in her book: Let the dead bury the dead! Maybe that was the point of the Monsignore’s story: a belief in your own rightness was a kind of death.

  Sleep seemed to be eluding her that night: her arm had begun to ache again and she was overcome by a restlessness in her limbs, making her want to stamp them. Outside the Chiesa dell’Angelo Raffaele shone obliquely. Across the way she saw a shape and, imagining at first it was a cat, she made out at last a small dog nosing around the wellhead.

  Still there was no desire to sleep and her legs felt so restless she almost wanted to dance. Setting the notebook aside she slipped her tweed coat over her nightdress and pulled on the green wellingtons. Then, recalling her father’s dictum, as a last-minute gesture to health she put on Harriet’s hat.

  Outside the dog had vanished, but alone in the square it was peaceful with the moon for company.

  ‘I will walk around the campo three times and then back to bed,’ she announced to herself. But after the third perambulation, still feeling unusually wakeful, she stole over to the bridge which crossed the rio by the church.

  The peculiar moonlight must have brought others out from their beds, for, across the bridge, she saw an old man with a beard.

  The old man lifted his hand and waved to her as if he knew her and she waved back—companions in the night.

  Ah, the dog must have been his, for suddenly she saw it, a black shape pattering noiselessly over the bridge, and walking across the bridge herself she saw Harriet.

  ‘Harriet?’ she said.

  Behind Harriet, in the blue shadow, framed in a brightening doorway, stood another figure; and looking into his eyes she beheld myriads of infinite whirlpools pulling her towards the end of time.

  I knew already, before Azarias told us, before he made the revelation. All the things he had spoken of on our journey, all the strange events which had transpired, dovetailed in my mind before he spoke the words.

  ‘I am Raphael,’ he said, ‘one of the seven holy angels which go in and out before the glory of the Holy one,’ and he said it so lightly, casually you might say, that I wanted to laugh. But my heart hurt, as if it was melting in a fire.

  He took us, me and my father, apart to tell us; while my mother was embracing my wife and weeping and asking questions about the journey and her parents in Ecbatana. Kish was there too. Kish howled as Azarias left us, a great yearning howl, and then whimpered and fell silent. I think Azarias might have been sad at leaving Kish.

  My father has gone ahead now. He has crossed the Bridge of Separation and I know he will be judged fairly—Azarias will see to that. He was a good man, my father, and tried to live by his own lights. Today, for the first time, I found myself able to read what I know it took him all the remainder of his days to find a way of writing down.

  My belief is it changed him: for one thing, from that day he recovered his sight, the day when Azarias charged him to write down what he had seen, my father left the dead alone.

  For myself it changed everything: I gave up the idea of a jealous god (for I had walked and slept and talked and argued with Azarias, and the god who had Azarias to serve him could not be jealous). I have come to think that the only true god must be one who allows for all manner of ways of worship and who fosters all parts of creation: after all—fish, dog, man, woman and angel—I met each of these on my journey, and in the end each proved their necessity.

  And also this changed nothing for me—for I have come to see there will always be the same things in this world—the water, the land, the skies, and fish, flesh and fowl to inhabit them; and humankind which mis-takes things.

  And until time ceases altogether there will be the spirits ready to take us from ourselves, and, if we are fortunate, those as well to aid us in recovery.

  5

  Extract from the Last Will and Testament of Julia Ann Garnet:

  To my friend and comrade Vera Kessel Flat 2 36 Harswell Road Hastings Sussex I bequeath my collection of books on the Socialist Movement

  To Signora Beatrice Mignelli of Dorsoduro 1710A Venezia I bequeath a year’s rental for the apartment in the Campo Angelo Raffaele where I have passed such happy times

  To Niccolo Concetti of Dorsoduro 1728 Venezia I bequeath the cost of two return air tickets to London together with the sum of one thousand pounds for his stay there

  To Cynthia Cutforth of Whitelands 1169 Franklin Boulevard Philadelphia USA I bequeath my hat with the veil To Saskia Thrale of 12 Wells Rise London SW10 I bequeath my copy of The Magi of Persia with thanks for an invaluable meeting

  To the Venice in Peril Fund I bequeath in trust the remainder of my fortune in monies and in shares the Fund to oversee its appropriate allocation to works which contribute to the shoring up of the foundations of Venice to delay its decline into the sea in small thanks for all they have done for the city which has taught me to learn and enjoy at this late stage in my life

  Further I request that my body be cremated the ashes to be scattered in the lagoon of Venice and that Sarah and Toby Traherne of Elm Cottage Summerton Devon be commissioned and reimbursed to carve on a stone to be placed in Putney Vale Crematorium beside the stone of my companion Harriet Josephs a likeness of a dog together with these words

  UT MIHI CONTINGAT TUO BENEFICIO POST MORTEM VIVERE

  Valde te rogo, ut secundum pedes statuae meae catellam pingas…ut mihi contingat tuo beneficio post mortem vivere.*

  PETRONIUS

  * I ask that you paint a small dog at the foot of my statue…that by your kindness I may find life after death.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  The Book of Tobit has been part of Jewish literature for over two thousand years. Although it is set in the aftermath of the first Jewish holocaust, when the ten lost tribes of Israel (a separate country from the longer-surviving southern kingdom of Judah) were deported to Assyria in 722 BCE, it was probably not wri
tten down in its present form until the last quarter of the second century BCE. Speculation about its likely date varies: some scholars believing it was composed during that early period, some seeing it as deriving from the time of the later, more famous, exile from Judah to Babylon, and yet others seeing it originating from the Jewish Diaspora in Egypt.

  The Apocrypha (from the Greek word meaning hidden or stored away) is made up of those books of Jewish scripture which the translators of the 1611 King James Bible, the ‘Authorised’ version, excluded from the Anglican Old Testament. In this the translators followed the Hebrew Bible which had come to place these books outside the Jewish canon. But there exists an older version of the Jewish scriptures, the so-called Septuagint, the ancient Greek translation of around 250 BCE which predates the much later Masoretic (traditionalist) decision to keep certain well-established books from the Hebrew Bible. Many of these ‘apocryphal’ books were part of Jewish Wisdom literature, often considered too holy or precious to be made commonly available. That the Book of Tobit was certainly in use as a holy book among the Jews around the first century CE is confirmed by its discovery among the Dead Sea scrolls finds. As the Eastern Orthodox Church still uses the Septuagint translation for its Old Testament, the Book of Tobit remains in currency there; as it does in the Catholic Bible, which, following St Jerome’s translation, has Tobit blinded by swallows’ rather than sparrows’ dung!

  The origins of the tale remain obscure. Although set in Nineveh, in the period of the Assyrian Empire, the most dramatic and mysterious part of the story takes place in Media and many scholars agree that key features contain strong hints of Zoroastrianism, the old Iranian religion adopted by the Magi of Media and later by the powerful empire of the Persians (from whom the Parsis of today are descended). From my researches into the story I formed the view that the dog, which in its positive representation is unique in Judaic/Christian literature, could be explained by an earlier Zoroastrian foundation to the story, a supposition which is borne out by the fact that Raghes, to which Tobit travelled in his youth, was known as ‘Zoroaster’s city’.

  For the Zoroastrians the dog was a sacred animal whose function was twofold: the dog was one means by which the bodies of the dead were disposed of, a practice which makes good practical sense in a hot climate but which, for the Zoroastrians, had the more important religious function of sparing human contact with dead matter. The Assyrians, in fact, like the Jews they took into captivity, practised grave burial. Tobit’s preoccupation with burial of the dead is made more intelligible if seen to be set against the Magian practice of exposing the corpse to wild dogs and carrion-eating birds of prey.

  More crucially, the dog was used in Magian ritual to exorcise the ‘corpse spirit’, or ‘spirit of corruption’, and to help guide the departed soul across the Bridge of Separation. In the Zoroastrian religion this defines the moment of judgement, when the sum of a person’s good or bad deeds is weighed. It seemed to me likely that the dog might equally have been used to heal the mortally sick, or in cases of psychological possession, such as that of Tobias’s Sara.

  This idea was reinforced when I discovered that Asmodaeus, the evil spirit who inhabits the body of Tobias’ eventual bride and has caused her to strangle seven men before him, probably takes his origin from Aesma daeva, the arch demon who is given ‘seven powers’ to destroy humankind in Zoroastrian demonology and whose principal feature is wrath or anger. Just as the Archangel Raphael is pitted against Asmodaeus, the counter or opposite to Aesma is the immortal being Sraosha, who is central to Zoroastrian angelology.

  Both Judaism and Christianity owe much to the vision of Zarathustra (more commonly known to us by his Greek name, Zoroaster); not least among the ideas we have inherited is the concept of a hierarchy of ‘Bounteous Immortals’, supranatural beings who aid mankind in the fight against destruction and evil and towards health, happiness and right conduct. These are almost certainly the originals of our Judeo/Christian angels. Among them is Sraosha, whose remit was specifically to protect the body and to escort the departed soul to the ‘Bridge of Separation’, where he also acted as a benevolent final judge of a person’s life. Sraosha seems to be associated with a dog (as are other psychopomps, or soul guides, in ancient literature) and this not only reinforces the parallel with Raphael in the Book of Tobit but also provides another explanation for the presence of the dog in the story.

  The Talmud tells us that when the Jews returned from their exile in Babylon (encouraged by their tolerant new masters, the Persians) they brought with them from captivity the names of the angels. My hunch is that Raphael, whose name in Greek means ‘God’s healing’, was imported then into Jewish lore, but that he appeared first as Sraosha, one of the Bounteous Immortals, and that the Book of Tobit is really an old Magi tale which has been overlaid with Jewish pieties and strictures. Nor is it commonly known today that the three ‘wise men’ (who, in Christian mythology, followed the star to Bethlehem) were in all likelihood Zoroastrian priests, their famed gifts of myrrh and frankincense being typical of the sweet woods and resins used in the ritual practices of the religion whose founder, perhaps fifteen hundred years before the birth of Christ, had predicted the virgin birth of a world saviour.

  Salley Vickers

  1

  Chartres

  The old town of Chartres, around which the modern town unaesthetically sprawls, is built on a natural elevation that rises from a wide, wheat-growing plain in the region of Beauce in central France. Visitors and pilgrims, who since earliest times have made their ways to the ancient site, can see the cathedral of Notre-Dame from many miles off, the twin spires, like lofty beacons, encouraging them onwards.

  Five successive cathedrals have stood on this site; all were burned to rubble save the present cathedral, which grew, phoenix-like, from the embers of the last devastating fire. On June 10, 1194, flames sped through Chartres, destroying many of the domestic dwellings, crowded cheek by jowl in the narrow medieval streets, and all of the former cathedral save the Western Front with its twin towers and the much more ancient crypt.

  As the fire took hold, the forest of roof timbers crashed, burning to the ground amid frenzied clouds of burning cinders; the walls split, tumbled and collapsed while lead from the roof poured down in a molten stream, as if enacting a scene of eternal damnation in a Last Judgement.

  The reaction among the citizens of Chartres was one of uniform horror. According to contemporary reports, they lamented the loss of their beloved cathedral even more than the loss of their own homes. Perhaps this was in part because, as today, their livelihoods depended on the many parties of pilgrims visiting the town to pay reverence to its most venerated relic, the birthing gown of the Virgin Mary, a gift to the cathedral by the grandson of Charlemagne, Charles the Bald.

  Three days after the fire was finally quenched, some priests emerged from the crypt with the marvellous cloth still intact. As the fire took hold, they had apparently snatched it from its hallowed place and retreated for safety into the most ancient part of the cathedral, the lower crypt, the province of Our Lady Under the Earth, incarcerating themselves behind a metal door which had held firm while the fire raged destruction outside. The missing men had been presumed dead. The holy relic presumed lost. When it was seen to have been restored, and its rescuers returned to safety, it was agreed that this was a miracle, a sign from Our Lady that the town should build in her honour an edifice even finer than before.

  The new cathedral was completed within twenty-six years, thanks to the devotion and hard labour of the townspeople, who pulled together to create a building worthy of the Mother of God with whom their town had so fortunately found favour. The bishop and his canons agreed to donate the greater portion of their salaries to aid the cost of the building works. Sovereigns of the Western world were approached for funds, and many dug deep into their coffers to ensure that their names were attached to the noble enterprise, which would gain for them fitting rewards in the life to come. People from neigh
bouring dioceses brought cartloads of grain to feed the citizens of Chartres, who were giving their labours for nothing more than the love of God. The whole astonishing structure was conceived, designed and accomplished by a series of master builders, men of clear enterprise and shining genius.

  But of them and their companies—the scores of talented sculptors, stonecutters, masons, carpenters, roofers, stained-glass artists and manual labourers who implemented their plans—nothing is known.

  Nor was anything known of Agnès Morel when she arrived in Chartres nearly eight hundred years after the building of the present cathedral commenced. Few, if asked, could have recalled when she first appeared. She must have seemed vaguely always to have been about. A tall, dark, slender woman—‘a touch of the tar brush there’, Madame Beck, who had more than a passing sympathy for the Front National, chose to comment—with eyes that the local artist, Robert Clément, likened to washed topaz, though, as the same Madame Beck remarked to her friend Madame Picot, being an artist he was given to these fanciful notions.

  As far back as Philippe Nevers could remember Agnès had been around. She had been an occasional babysitter for himself and his sister, Brigitte. Brigitte had once crept up with a pair of scissors behind the sofa, where their babysitter sat watching TV, and hacked an ugly chunk out of her long black hair. Philippe had pinched Brigitte’s arm for this and they had got into a fight, in which Brigitte’s new nightgown was ripped by the scissors, and when their mother came home Brigitte had cried and shown her both the nightgown and the pinch marks.

  Although their mother had punished Philippe, the boy had not explained why he had set about his sister. Agnès was odd, with eyes, he might have suggested, had he overheard Robert Clément, more like those of the panther he had seen at the zoo, pacing up and down its cage in a manner the crowd found amusing. Philippe liked Agnès in the way he had liked the panther and had hoped that it might escape and get a bit of its own back on the laughing crowd. With the sensitivity which, even at age six, was a hallmark of his character, he knew their mother would be quick to blame Agnès for the episode with the scissors. So he bore the unfair punishment in silence.