‘Yes.’
‘He was a wonderful man. It is terrible, terrible, and for you especially. You were like his son, I know.’
‘We wondered,’ Andrew began, uncertain about what words to use. ‘We wondered whether anything might have happened to him in Israel?’
There was silence from the other end of the line. For a moment Andrew thought that he might have been disconnected. Then Michal Dagan asked, in a cautious tone of voice: ‘Why? Why do you ask?’
The doctor thought that perhaps the sun, or some sudden shock of some kind …’
Again there was a pause and finally Dagan asked, in a tone of voice even cagier than before: ‘It was a stroke, was it? Are you sure?’
Andrew blushed as he lied. ‘Yes. They seem to think so.’
‘There is no question of foul play?’
‘Foul play?’ He repeated the odd, old-fashioned words while looking at Anna.
‘It was only a thought,’ said Michal Dagan.
‘Do you mean, was he killed?’
‘No. It is far-fetched.’
‘Who would have wanted to kill him?’
Again there was a silence. Then the Professor said: ‘Listen, Andrew, there are things I cannot talk about on the telephone.’
‘But should we tell the police that Father Lambert might have been murdered?’
‘No, no. I should not have said it.’
‘His notebook has gone,’ said Andrew.
‘Ach.’ Another pause.
‘Can he have left it in Jerusalem?’
‘I don’t know. Not here, certainly, but perhaps with the monks. You should call them. It should be found definitely, it should be found, unless, of course, it has been taken …’
‘I’ll write to the Prior,’ said Andrew.
‘No. Better not. They may think that you know what is in it.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘There were many things. Many difficulties.’
‘About what?’
‘I cannot tell you now. Perhaps Ya’acov, if you see him …’
‘Is he in London?’
‘He is, yes. Let me speak to Anna again.’
Andrew gave the telephone to Anna who, after a few more words with her father, rang off. She seemed melancholy, as she often did when reminded of home. ‘Apparently Jake’s in London,’ she said.
‘Did your father say why?’
‘No. He sounded really confused.’
‘They were very good friends,’ said Andrew.
‘What was all that about foul play?’ asked Anna.
‘He seemed to think that Father Lambert might have been murdered.’
‘Then something did happen in Israel.’
‘It would be wonderful, wouldn’t it?’
‘What?’
‘If he had been killed.’
‘Wonderful?’
Andrew blushed. ‘No, not wonderful in itself, but wonderful that it wasn’t suicide.’
‘Only he’d still be roasting in Hell because he’d just jumped the old lady.’
Andrew blushed again before the first had faded. ‘At least he would have had the chance to repent.’
‘Sure. It doesn’t sound as if it was much fun.’
They reached the gates to the college. ‘Are you going home?’ he asked.
‘I guess so,’ she said. ‘Or I might go for a walk. Why don’t you come?’
‘I ought to get back to the monastery, and sort out Father Lambert’s affairs.’
‘You can do that later. It’s such a lovely afternoon.’
The clouds had cleared since the morning to show the blue sky above the buildings, and Andrew, as he looked up, suddenly longed to fly above the ground mist of fumes left by the traffic in the street. Thinking, with an inward shudder, of his dark cell and its morbid memories, he changed his mind and went with Anna on a bus to Chalk Farm.
From there they walked to Primrose Hill. Here, other people were sitting on the benches or lolling on the grass, but the two found a spot on the steep bank with its vast views over London. They sat down facing the spires and steeples and glinting glass towers rising from the mauve mist of carbon monoxide. The ground was dry, the air was warm, and Andrew, who had slept badly the night before, suddenly felt tired and sad. The fatigue undermined his control over his emotions and, while he did not cry, he sat, crumpled, with a miserable look on his face.
At first Anna did not notice his dejection – her eyes were on the view – but when she finally looked around and saw an almost old expression on her young friend’s face, she said in an unusually gentle tone: ‘I guess it is really hard for you – him dying and you not knowing how or why.’
He smiled gratefully. There were tears in his eyes. ‘We’re trained to be detached,’ he said, ‘and taught to love God so much that we only love others for his sake, but it was always hard for me, with Father Lambert. He was such a wonderful man.’
‘Sure.’
‘He knew, of course, and so did the Prior and the novice-master, that I looked on him as an adopted father. Neither of them thought that there was anything wrong. St John, after all, loved Jesus in a special way. And I always knew that he would die – in fact I almost looked forward to the moment because I felt sure that he would die cheerfully and serenely. He was so sure of the life to come. What’s difficult now is not so much that he’s dead, as that his death was so ugly and his fate now … uncertain.’
‘But can you really believe, even for a moment, that he might be in Hell?’
Andrew clasped his hands and kneaded them together as if the twisting fingers were mimicking his contorted thoughts. ‘Of course, in a way, I don’t. I mean I believe, above all, in the mercy of God, and Father Lambert was so sure of God and so loyal to God for so long that it seems impossible that God would abandon him now.’
‘So doesn’t that mean he’s OK, scratching around in some archaeological happy hunting ground?’
‘No. Because I also believe – I have to believe – in the power of the Devil to tempt us, and in the possibility that we might succumb to that temptation and fall.’
‘Why do you have to believe that?’
‘If that wasn’t possible, then we would have no choice and without choice we would have no value.’
Anna gave a funny little frown, unseen by Andrew, as if ready with some squashing rejoinder, but again, if she had something of that kind in mind, she held it back and said simply: ‘I don’t know what’s so great about choice if you end up roasting in Hell.’
‘Well, of course, there are times,’ said Andrew, ‘when one would much rather not have that burden of living for ever and just settle down to the cosy life of an innocent beast. But having eaten the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, we cannot escape what we now know.’
‘Can’t we live in blissful ignorance?’
‘You can pretend to. You can even behave as if you do. But in the end even the atheist succumbs to original sin and suffers the more because he can’t recognize it for what it is.’
‘Give me an example.’
‘Well, there’s my brother, Henry. You met him that time …’
‘I remember.’
‘He takes the line that man is just a superior baboon and that any claims that he is anything more are pretentious nonsense. However he himself doesn’t behave like a superior baboon, but more like a fallen angel.’
‘In what way?’
Andrew hesitated. ‘I don’t want to betray his confidence, but … well, you don’t know him, and anyway, I don’t think he’d mind. You see, he has made a lot of money, just as the baboon might amass a lot of bananas, and he has had a series of beautiful girlfriends just as the baboon might accumulate mates; but while the baboon would go on, in obedience to instinct, to procreate his species, Henry has never married and never had children. His life is totally barren, and whenever it looks as if it might bear fruit in terms of a long-lasting love or a family, then he abruptly alters course …’
/> ‘He ditches the girls?’
‘He ditches them, yes, even if he still likes them.’
‘Why?’
‘Because they have come to the end of their three months.’
She frowned. ‘Their three months?’
‘As soon as he starts up with a girl he sets a timer and when three months are up he ends it.’
‘Even if they’re getting on?’
‘Especially if they’re getting on.’
‘Why?’
‘So as not to become dependent upon another human being.’
‘He sounds a cold fish.’
‘Of course he does, but what’s so sad is that by nature he’s so affectionate and so good.’
‘Some men don’t want to get involved,’ said Anna.
‘I know. But Henry has made his philandering into a kind of religion and it hasn’t really made him happy. And that’s really the point I want to make – that the Christian hypothesis makes more sense of our moral condition.’
‘For Christians, perhaps.’
‘And for Jews. The whole story of the Fall, after all, comes from your religion.’
‘It’s not my religion. I’m not that kind of Jew.’
‘Of course. I know. You don’t believe it. And sometimes I envy those like you or Henry who don’t have to worry quite so much about whether what they are doing is right or wrong. But if you do believe – if you look at humanity and sense that there is much, much more to it than a herd of animals of different species – if you see in it such extraordinary extremes of beauty and ugliness, virtue and idleness, such inhuman cruelty and at the same time such equally inhuman unselfishness and self-sacrifice – then one is bound at least to consider that there is more to our condition than the cosy life of an animal.’
‘You can think there is more, can’t you, without swallowing the idea of eternal damnation?’
‘One could, yes, if one could explain away what Jesus had to say. I promise you, Anna, if it wasn’t for him it would be easier, much easier, but there he is. He lived and died, and he said he died to save us from the consequences of our sins, and when you think how he died and what he suffered and how easily, even in human terms, he could have avoided it, then he must have felt that he was saving us from something unbearably dreadful.’
‘Sure, he may have thought so, but his delusion doesn’t have to become your delusion.’
‘But was it a delusion?’ They had had discussions of this kind before, but now, since the fate of Father Lambert seemed to depend upon the conclusion they reached, Andrew spoke with an anguished urgency. ‘You see it is easy enough with our knowledge of the human mind to dismiss Jesus as a neurotic and a hysteric with, perhaps, some kind of hypnotic power over his followers. That’s certainly what Henry would do. But then you read the Gospels and you realize that such a hypothesis won’t stick because what he said is so subtle and so convincing, and it is not only backed up by miracles which show an extraordinary power over nature, but by the final miracle of his resurrection from the dead.’
‘Sure,’ said Anna. ‘If you can swallow that, you can swallow the whole caboodle.’
‘And if you can’t swallow it, then clearly Jesus is no more than another Jewish prophet.’
‘I don’t see what’s wrong with living decently and hoping for the best in an afterlife, if there is one, without taking on board the whole paraphernalia of Heaven, Hell, judgement, resurrection, and the Catholic Church.’
‘There’s nothing wrong with it as far as it goes, and it is what most of us do, but fundamentally it is irrational because it implies that if there is a God who has created us, he is either unable or unwilling to communicate with us – in other words, that he is neither the jealous God of your Bible nor the loving God of ours, but a lazy or indifferent God who, having made us, leaves us to our own devices.’
‘In a way that seems safer,’ said Anna, ‘because whenever people do believe in a God who communicates his will, they start slaughtering the people who appear to defy it. Jews stoned the Christians, Christians burned the Jews and the Muslims massacred everyone.’
Andrew shook his head sadly. ‘I know, I know. But that doesn’t mean that he isn’t there, or that he doesn’t wish us to know him and love him and go to him when we die.’
‘Or to the Devil.’
‘If we so choose.’
They were back to where they had started – the death of Father Lambert – and the very fact that they had come full circle deterred them from going on. It was also time for Andrew to make his way back towards Paddington. ‘I’d better go,’ he said, looking at his watch. ‘I’ve got to meet Henry.’
‘Don’t forget your long spoon.’
He looked puzzled. ‘My long spoon?’
‘If you’re supping with the Devil.’
He laughed. ‘I’m only going for a drink. He’s supping with someone else.’
Six
While Andrew travelled back towards the centre of London, Anna returned to Belsize Park where she lodged with her aunt – her father’s sister – Miriam Lilien. She lived in a substantial Victorian house which she had bought after the war with compensation paid by the German government to the children of those killed in the concentration camps. The Liliens had never occupied the whole house – they had always let the top floor as a flat – and now that Peter Lilien was dead and their two children had homes of their own, Miriam had retreated into the ground floor and the basement. The entrance was still through the front door at the top of a flight of steps; but the main staircase now went up to the flat above. A second door led into an inner hall beyond which was the drawing-room. This was sparsely furnished and rarely used, serving as a gallery for the modern paintings which Anna’s uncle, Peter Lilien, had collected in the 1960s.
He had worked in the modern paintings department of the auction house, Christie’s, and seeing the rapid rise in the value of some contemporary painting, had backed his own judgement by buying the works of living artists. Unfortunately, his judgement was not shared by the market, and the paintings he had bought were now uniformly worthless. They were also, in the opinion of his widow, uniformly bad, but she could not bring herself to burn them or give them away and, having nowhere to hide them, had left them hanging on the walls of this large room while she herself retreated into the kitchen on the floor below.
Here she concentrated all the Gemütlichkeit of which her husband, when he was living, had disapproved – a plump sofa, an upright piano, a Welsh dresser with cups hanging from the hooks and, in place of the saucers, a large library of paperback thrillers. The room next to the kitchen, once the dining-room, was now her bedroom. Like the kitchen it looked out onto the garden. Anna had one of the four bedrooms on the floor above which had been that of the Liliens’ daughter, Rosie, now married and living in Bristol.
When Anna got back that afternoon she came in at the front door at the top of the steps, left her books in her bedroom, then went down the inner staircase to find her aunt sitting at the kitchen table – a small, beetle-browed woman who looked quite unlike her brother Michal. She was now over sixty but in no way decrepit, and followed Anna’s life with as much interest as she had shown in the lives of her own children. Hearing Anna come down the stairs, she immediately filled the electric kettle and, when it had boiled, made tea as Anna told her about the death of Father Lambert.
‘The poor man,’ said Miriam. ‘Michal will be sorry.’
‘We called him from the college,’ said Anna. ‘He asked if he might have been murdered.’
‘Why should anyone want to murder him?’ asked Miriam in an undramatic tone of voice.
Anna shrugged. ‘It seems crazy, but that’s what he told Andrew.’
‘It’s because there’s so much violence in Israel,’ she said. ‘They cannot imagine anyone dying of natural causes.’ She poured tea into a cup and gave it to Anna.
‘Andrew actually wants him to have been murdered because suicides go straight to Hell.’
/> ‘Well, I wouldn’t pay too much attention to his opinion.’
Miriam Lilien had met Andrew on a number of occasions and she disapproved of him – not because she disliked him, or because he was a Catholic monk, but because she felt that his friendship distracted Anna from finding a man she could marry. She was, in this way, somewhat old-fashioned – she felt that a woman’s destiny inevitably lay in a husband and a home. However, she knew her niece better than Anna knew herself and understood that in her case this destiny might be difficult to achieve.
‘Did Jake call?’ Anna asked her aunt.
‘No. Why should he?’
‘Dad thought he might be in London.’
She shook her head. ‘I’ve heard nothing.’
‘Doesn’t he usually stay here?’
‘He prefers not to. He feels uncomfortable.’
‘Why?’
‘He doesn’t feel it should be like this.’
‘Like what?’
‘Like a home, here in England, with his aunt English and his cousins all English. He doesn’t like it. He’s like a caged lion, pacing up and down. He’s only happy in a kibbutz or in a tent.’
Anna smiled. ‘With a rifle under his bed.’
Miriam nodded soberly. ‘You laugh, Anna, but, last time he came, he had a gun – not under his bed but in his bag in the wardrobe. I saw it when I was cleaning his room.’
‘He sees the PLO behind every lamp-post.’
‘He frightens me, Anna.’
‘He frightens me. The whole thing frightens me. That’s why I left.’
Miriam sighed. ‘But to do what, Anna?’
‘A degree.’
‘Yes, a degree.’ She sighed again as if to pass judgement on higher education.
Anna smiled. ‘Just because you got married when you were twenty doesn’t mean that we all have to do the same thing.’
‘It certainly won’t happen to you if you spend all your time with that priest of yours.’
‘He’s cute, and a good companion, faute de mieux.’
‘And how are you going to find the mieux if you’re always with him?’
Anna took her aunt’s hand in hers and patted it fondly. ‘Don’t worry, Auntie. I’ll find a nice Englishman just as you did. In fact I’ve got a date tonight.’
On the Third Day Page 6