For so it seemed.
The multitude.
O Lord, if it be thy will, send us your mercy that we may abide.
If it be thy will, send us a sign.
'Papias?'
'Yes, Master?' Papias still cannot call the Apostle by his name. It does not seem fitting. For the truth is he wishes him to be other than mere human, not merely an old man called John.
They sit outside the cave in the afternoon. It is some days since Matthias and his followers have left.
'You are well?'
'I am.'
'What I ask you will obey, Papias?'
'You have no need to ask me.'
'Nonetheless. Answer me.'
'I will obey you.'
'God be with you.'
The weather is broken, the island in bleak light. What was empty before is now more so. Where before the younger disciples carried out many of the chores of the community, catching the fish, drawing the water, such tasks are now fallen to the elders. In the aftermath of the departure there is renewed vigour in belief, but hardship, too. The Apostle is aware of this. More than ever now he wishes their faith might be rewarded. He wishes there might be something to avouch for their staying on, for their refusal to surrender though their number is diminished. Long since, he has accepted for himself that there be no obvious exchange, between heaven and earth no simple traffic of plea and response, whereby all that is sought is granted. But nonetheless he feels there exists always the listening presence. He feels love. Always the prayer is heard; the judgement of its merits is the Lord's. But now, in the bleak aftermath, John feels the urgency of the time. There is a turning. He can sense it in the air, in the fall of the sea. It must be now. Now nears the hour. So he says to Papias, 'I am to ask the community of our brothers to fast with me. We will fast that our spirits be made pure and our prayers ascend. I will ask this of our brothers, but not you, Papias.'
'Not me? But I am the youngest. I am the most able. I . . .'
'No. Not you, Papias. I command it.' John extends his hand, takes hold of the youth's shoulder. 'You have suffered and serve the Lord as he wishes. I am grateful for your love. But you should not fast. Bear with us. For forty days and nights we shall take only water. The time is near for our Lord.'
The disciples are told at communion. All consent. They eat the last bread and taste the last wine. Then quiet falls on them. Their faces are old and lined. The flesh of Ioseph's cheeks is white and sags from prominent bone. The bald head of Lemuel is wrinkle-creased, his brown eyes deep; Danil is in his sixth decade, narrow-jawed; Melitios, with the long face and blue eyes of Iconium, has forgotten his age; in his narrow chest Simon breathes wheeze. They are all in various manner infirm. In ordinary time they suffer the multitude of ailments visited on the aged — rheums and aches of joint, poorness of breath, wheeze and gasp and cough, vision blurry or marred with floating fish-hook nothings, dryness, deafness, flakiness, dolour of source unknown — and are poorly suited to the rigours of fasting. Nonetheless, each agrees without discourse. By nightfall they are begun.
The first days hunger comes for them. It comes like an unwelcome companion at mealtimes. Its teeth are sharp, its breath foul. It licks its lips with wet red tongue, spits aside the dust of the day and impatiently waits. It says the names of foods. Warm soup of lentils and beans. Pepper spices. Dipping bread. Pottage of sweet lamb with crushed herb of rosemary. Fat onions fried. Baked fish filleted with lemons sliced inside, drizzled over with honey. Touch it. Suck your finger burn. Taste the juices. Sip from the wineskin, pour and watch the beading bubbles, purple mouth swallow. Swallow in the gullet, for the good of it. Taste the sweetness of a honeyed cake, warm from the fire. Break its crust, go on, let free the scent, breathe it deep. Finger the soft food. Eat. Eat. Eat, the cruel companion urges. But the elders endure and do not relent. They sit with bowed head. Some pray the same prayer over and over so it curls about them and is cast like a cocoon. Others find a place, at first in the real, in the mid-distance, a rock, a minor landmark, and stare at this. They focus intently and do not move. They watch an hour, two; they watch while the stiffness comes in their necks and locks tight the vertebrae, they watch themselves into perfect stillness and on until through the place they see they see another, and this takes all their sight. To this other place they go, escape the unwelcome companion who cannot follow.
By the end of the first seven days they are already noticeably weaker, thinner, as Papias brings them water. How can they continue for another thirty-three?
The spring is coming to meet winter. Winds blow down off bright skies of swift white cloud. Seabirds in the twist of season fly low across the broken surface, search the first fish of season. The light changes by the moment. The heavens throw down fists of hail, darken the island then make brilliant with the sun. Light and shade compete across the stony shore, outpacing the flight of gulls. Suddenly the air warms. Up the coast of Greece come mild drafts, gusts carrying the scent of the lemon trees leafing. While the disciples fast, the sea turns blue before them. White sails cross. All is renewal. The plate of the earth itself seems borne upward toward the sun.
Whether the disciples note this or not, Papias cannot say. He comes and goes from each without word. They are both present and absent, their silence deep. The Apostle lies by night on the bed mat of dried rush, sits by day outside the cave, his face to the sun. What prayers he says, or whether he prays at all, remains a mystery. Does he sleep? Does he rest truly? The fasting is a purge of spirit, a paring back to the root. It is painful before it is purifying. In perfect stillness, their faces composed, some of the elders' eyes weep. Twin tears thinly gloss their cheeks, as though they mine a source. Then the water stops. They sit or kneel on, travelling further to another place in their soul, where some history of their weakness or failure awaits.
But the weather is clement, and clemency seems the coming mood of season. Papias himself prays thanks for his rescue; he does not know or understand yet the reason and prays to know his purpose. But for now that purpose is the care of these disciples. The words of the Apostle concerning love are with him like a white stole. God is love, he says to himself many times, and feels in this a vast illumination as though a rock has been pushed back and a bright revelation beheld. If he can hold on to this, if he cannot forget for one moment, then the world is easily lived, he thinks. Within the white aura of this radiance he can put aside any thought of Matthias and the others. He can banish the disturbing thought of the rupture in the community, the versions of his death and resurrection, and the evidence that evil exists.
The sun shines.
By the twentieth day the spring is truly come, but the disciples weaken visibly. Papias thinks to squeeze berry juice in their water, anything that may give strength. But then chastises himself for not trusting the Lord. He himself tries to eat little, but the hunger is fierce and he fears he grows weak and risks illness, so he takes a little more. As he brings the water from one silent old man to the next, he watches for signs they need more. But rarely do their eyes rise to meet his or is there the slightest indication they know he is there. They are as ones gone away, their bodies like cloaks cast off. Nonetheless, Papias can see the wastage. He can see the bones emerge, the skeletal features of Meletios, the sharp jawbone of Danil, and worries compete with his faith. How can there be twenty days more?
At sunrise each day he goes to the table rock alone. He has been asked to ring the bell for Lemuel, though none are to gather. And so he does, hand-beating the dull notes to the pale sky, where the birds turn over in surprise having forgotten men exist. After the prayer bell he rings again, one chime for each day of the fasting past, then he kneels alone and prays. Sometime across his prayer there comes to him the image of the greater world. He has a glimpse of places far away, the villages and towns where the ordinary business of markets and merchants continues, where the day is begun not with a bell but stalls and salutes and the cry of prices. He sees the world gone ahead without him and for mome
nts feels the melancholy of that loss. Out there is the life he might have lived, might be living now, with a family and neighbours, the joys and complaints of every day. On his knees by the table rock he must pray himself back to concentration. No, he has chosen this other life. Because he has a purpose. Because the Lord has a purpose for him, though it may be no more than to attend the Apostle. So be it. If that is his will. Amen.
By the thirtieth day, speech and food, company and discourse seem things of a lifetime ago. Never was so much loneliness. Here is the lone moving figure of Papias crossing the near shore, where the seabirds rise lazily before his approach and land not six paces further on, as though he will not come there. They alight and land, cawing, scuffing the sand, wing-brushing where sandflies stand. He goes with heavy heart to the path across the island, and hurries then to the place of his private grief and guilt. In this season of purge he returns to the burnt ground where stood the house of the fisher's wife Marina. His stomach turns as he approaches. He feels he might fall down, but doesn't, but in him breaks the cords in which are tied up his emotions, and his shoulders shudder. He sees the blackened stone mound of the grave of the children, and a wail is torn out from inside him like a line with jagged hook.
O Lord, hear thy servant.
O Lord, if it be thy will, send us your mercy that we might abide.
Forgive us our trespasses.
If it be thy will, send us a sign.
Forty days and nights of fasting. Forty days and nights of prayer ascending. John remains as he was in the beginning. The Apostle is as ever, some part distant, as though a portion of him is perpetually engaged elsewhere. He suffers the fast without evidence of decline. It is as if for him food and sleep have already been abandoned and the necessities of life for others are for him idle. He remains. His great age matters not. He may live for ever, or until the Lord Jesus comes for him. So it seems. In his blind silence he sits, a rock of faith. He touches the water to his lips only; they flake and scab, but he pays them no attention. His praying is like the instrument of the gifted. He knows its form and features so well that it is become his second nature. He is more than comfortable within it. He sees the words in his mind without saying them. He sees the distance between heaven and earth in terms of height and tilts his head slightly backwards as if in his darkness he will see the light coming. The prayers flow from him. Sometime he finds in himself the words of the psalms, and twenty, thirty of them flow past his mind; other times a single one recurs and repeats until it becomes like the noise of a wind blowing upwards. He prays. The forty days and nights pass over him.
18
The springtime comes all about the island as the disciples fast. It announces itself in light and air. Warm breezes play at the cave entrance. The sea sings lightly. What sign is expected, what the community seeks, has not been said. The fasting was for each not for reward, and God is not to be bargained with.
But as he rings the bell for the fortieth day, Papias feels there will be something. Something will happen. He knows it. He has food prepared for the supper after midnight. All day he feels the strange exhilaration of imminence. The disciples have come through. Though they have weakened, their faces gaunt, their flesh a yellowish hue, and the eyes of many shot red with blood, they have endured. He rings the bell as loud as possible. Let the sound peal out! Let the heavens hear! It is the final day.
He walks the shore with quickened step. The sky is perfectly blue, the light thrilling. Papias's belief in miracle is such that anything could happen. It might come from the sea or the air, he thinks. The waves themselves could stop in mid-fall and then curl back as they did for Moses, or the blue canopy overhead open, amber-fringed, and golden chariots with angel charioteers appear. Winged horses could thunder down the sky, trumpets herald the Almighty. It could be so. It could be. At any moment the Lord might come for his beloved disciple. So the day has been made lovely, so the sea glistens like polished glass.
Papias walks the full length of the curved sand to the rocks and then back again. He prays to be worthy to witness. He prays that our Lord of Infinite Mercy forgive him his sins. The tender skin of his ear wound burns with the sun. He holds a palm against it as he walks, as though to keep in something he hears. His footprints parallel those of earlier days. Birds are in the sky. He watches these, too, for the possibility of signs. Anything can be used as the language of the Lord, for he created all. Just so, even flies. The world is thus to the youth as he comes along the shore, it is charged, loaded with meaning; just beneath the surface of all is this pulsing sense of advent. It is the fortieth day.
He returns the full length of the eastern shore to where he left the handbell in the sand. He goes along the stone-way and looks back over the island edge. Not yet, he thinks. He does not come yet. But it will be soon. With light, swift stride he goes back the dry scarp to the dwelling of Danil, where rainwater brims a trough, and he dips two buckets and brings these back to the cave. He empties the water into a large earthen pot and returns to the trough with the buckets to fill again. All the time he keeps his eyes on the sky. Is the blue made thinner? Is the sky in some manner stretched? The color seems less, as though a white albumin has been pressed on to a palette and worked into the blue. Does all now not seem whiter? Is there not a milky opalescence? Look, how the distant rocks are softened in light! How pearled is the very air!
Several times, as he comes and goes with chores readying for the end of the fast, Papias thinks the moment is at hand. He stops. One time he drops to his knees so certain is he that he hears trumpets clarion. But the noon passes without event. The day remains strangely bright, but nothing more transpires.
'It will be hereafter,' he counsels himself. 'The fast will end at midnight when I ring the bell, and then, then . . .' He does not finish. Although there are none listening, he does not want to say aloud the words lest he be guilty of presumption and upset the order of things.
The afternoon is long, the evening longer.
The disciples continue as before. As Papias brings to each a beaker of water, none show sign of even knowing it is the last day. They sit or kneel in silence. He wants to tell them. His mind flutters with a hundred thoughts, caged birds. It is nearly done, he wants to say, and the day shines brilliant with thanksgiving and God's glory. The hour is near. It is near at last. But Papias can do nothing but pour the water and bow and leave and visit the next.
The sun weakens. He comes inside the final hours and kneels by the Apostle. On the face of John, too, there is no sign of the nearness of the end. He is away in himself and has passed beyond the suffering of time.
Across the darkness, at last, Papias goes. Sky is million-starred, moon-lovely. He goes first to the furthest dwelling, that of Lemuel, and rings the bell. Then he hurries back along the ledge walk, where are Meletios and Simon, and beats the clapper there, then — his excitement making slip his sandals on the rocks — to Danil, Ioseph, and Eli. He cannot move quickly enough. It is as if an instant after the bell sounds the heavens may open, the stars fall away down the sky. His heart races. It will be now. They have done it; they have fasted forty days and nights and are as pure as any of God's creatures walking on the surface of the earth. They are as lights lit. From the highest point in the heavens our Lord could see them shining, and at their centre his beloved disciple.
Come. Come now.
Without word — absence from speech making the muscles of their mouths tight — without the slightest show of victory, through the glittering dark the disciples move. They gather into the cool air of the cave. John reaches out a hand for Papias.
'Help me to stand, Brother.'
Papias takes the thin fingers. The Apostle is bent down, his head low, and at first can raise only his arm above him. It is as if he has prayed himself into the earth, and his knees and torso are as a tree grown into a stone.
He makes a small groan as Papias crouches down to place his left arm around him and ease him into standing.
'Thank you, my brot
her.'
'I have water here readied.'
'Good. Bring me to it.'
Into the tall water pot Ioseph dips the scoop and empties it into the cupped hands of the Apostle. John washes his face, his hands, and then his feet. The others do likewise. Cleansed so, they come and sit in a circle.
'Let us give thanks,' John says, and when they have, he says the psalm, ' "Behold how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity." '
The disciples pray together for an hour before coming to share the supper Papias has prepared. They can eat only little, but take of the communion bread and wine. They say almost nothing. None refers to the fast or utters any hope of what may transpire. They have about them a quiet, radiant contentment, but Papias wants more. Twice he leaves the table to go outside and watch the sky.
Now. Surely it will be now.
But moon and stars retain their places in the firmament. The face of night is unchanged. After the communion supper the disciples take the hands of one another in love and thanksgiving and return to their dwellings.
No angels come. No trumpets sound.
But soon after sunrise the following morn the thin figure of Eli comes. He hurries up from the fishers' huts, where he has gone to bargain for salted fish.
'Come. Come, there is news!' he cries out, waving the other disciples to follow him to the cave. 'Good news! Come!'
He is in his sixth decade, but with the short, wiry strength of the Bereans. Papias comes out to meet him.
'What is it? What is it, Eli?'
'Good news. Good news.' He stops, waits for his breath to catch up with him. The others are approaching across the stone-way. John comes out into the full of the sunlight.
'Tell, good brother Eli,' he says calmly.
'I went to bargain for salt fish, and there was a boatman come from the mainland. "O Christian," he said, for he had been told of us. "Good news for Christians." "What news?" I asked him. "You have not heard?" said he. "We hear nothing of the outside world," I told him. "The emperor is dead," he said. "But before his death he did decree that all persecution of Christians should be ceased, and banishment lifted herewith." '
John Page 13