Gospel (65 page)

The retsina arrived and, later, a Greek salad. Then Lucy automatically ate a stack of cellophane-wrapped, humidified crackers in a basket on the table before her, and she read lightly without attention. She glanced up to see a pleasant blond woman with a sunburned face laughing in her direction.

“No, I wasn't laughing at you,” she smiled, speaking in a twangy, singsong British accent. “But the book.”

“Well, it's not Plato, I admit—”

“No, I mean, I read it here last summer.
So Hot the Sun.
That bloody book'll be here twenty years from now, I'd wager.”

Lucy put it down and introduced herself. The woman's name was Tracy, she was from Birmingham, England, mid-twenties, doomed to stay untan because she'd burned herself so bad the second day and now she was condemned to long-sleeved everything. Down here with her boyfriend Derek, they weren't getting on, they'd had four major rows: one over how silly Derek was, spending an hour each morning getting his hair to go spiky, as if any of his mates were gonna see him down here, having a row over her sunburn and whether she did it on purpose so she could whinge about it the whole time, a row about Derek not eating any of the Greek food and being peculiar about it and not getting into the spirit of their holiday, and a row this morning about his watching a football match on Greek TV for two hours rather than do anything romanticlike with her, now how do you like that?

“I would never waste my vacation time,” said Lucy, assuming a pose, “with
my
boyfriend. You can have your boyfriend any old time, I figure, and my vacation is too short to throw away on him. I always go somewhere interesting by myself and do something I know will be fun.”

“Brilliant, that is,” Tracy said, scooting her chair closer, scraping the concrete floor. “You got the right idea there. Are you on holiday now?”

“Sort of.”

Lucy noticed that Stavros was approaching the promenade, shirtless and exposing a perfectly chiseled chest supremely, evenly tanned to a
caffè latte
shade—she suspected him of grooming his chest hairs—and tight jeans out of fashion two years ago in the United States. He spotted Lucy and directed his beauty in her direction, cantering, absorbing all the nearby female adulation.

“Loocy,” he said in his heavy accent, “you want to make to eat tonight?”

“I suppose so,” Lucy said boredly.

“I come in your room, eh?”

“Okay—I mean,
neh,
yes.”

Exit Stavros. Tracy was wide-eyed with admiration. “'Scuse me, love, but that one's a bleedin' Greek god! And I thought you said you didn't travel with your boyfriend.”

“He's not my boyfriend. I met him in Athens a few days ago.”

“Bloody hell…”

Then Tracy, imitating Lucy, said she needed a drink even though it was eleven
A.M.
Tracy went inside the cantina to get the waiter, which one did here even in the midst of dinner, the waiters not being devoted to service as the day wore on. Lucy mentioned she had been to Great Britain, specifically Oxford.

“Oh, Oxford's
dire.
Bloody horrible place, dreadful people. The student-types are so damn snooty.”

“How's Birmingham?” asked Lucy, pronouncing it as if it were the one in Alabama. Lucy felt she had been there by the time Tracy finished regaling her with its virtues; afterward, Lucy took a turn talking about Chicago. Then Derek the boyfriend, scowling, made an appearance:

“Oy, Trace. Thought we were going to meet for lunch.”

Tracy: “You didn't want to talk last night so we made no plans that I recall. Besides, my friend Lucy here … Lucy, this is Derek; Derek, Lucy … decided to have lunch since you up'n disappeared.”

Lucy stared at Derek. Concave chest, skinny, hairless legs burned on their backside like Derek's back, and though he was sort of cute in the face, the spiky hair needed a rock star under it to look convincing.

“This soddin' goat cheese again,” he said, looking at their salads. “Enough olive focking oil to stick you with the runs for days.”

Tracy refused to look at him. “Oh, lovely talk for the table, Derek. Do say some more pleasant things, we're only trying to bloody eat.”

Derek: “And this meat here. You know what this is, don't you? Heeeeere kitty kitty…”

“Oh I'm sure.”

Derek pouted. “I'm just saying worra bloody great mistake it was comin' here, that's all.”

Tracy, after a few more smart-ass remarks at her boyfriend's expense, gave in and started to follow Derek back to the hotel, whispering to Lucy, “It's time for our daily row,” before leaving with a wink.

Couples, thought Lucy.

Do I really want this? All men are more or less Derek, some smarter, some smoother, but all big babies who want their own way. And this male vanity thing …

At this juncture, Lucy turned to the harbor to see Stavros strutting about the German compound, all the healthy-looking German girls with white-blond hair and good tans enjoying Stavros's broken German, poking him with a rowboat paddle, one of them hopping to her feet, her perfect body covered with coconut tanning oil, bouncing and gleaming, trying to lead Stavros over to the windsurfing rental. Stavros put up a fake fight, pretending not to want to, so there could be much physical contact and tickling and dragging and a naughty threat concerning what the
Fräulein
was going to grab hold of to lead him away. I suppose, thought Lucy disinterestedly, that Helga (or whatever) will get Stavros to a deserted lagoon and have Eurosex in an aquamarine cove. Until the shark comes by to eat them, Lucy invented to render it poetic justice.

Lucy regressed into her romance novel but the heroine was being whiny and downtrodden and Lucy found herself yawning and wishing for the cool linen sheets of the hotel room and an afternoon nap.

*   *   *

The Athonite bureaucracy frees the pilgrim around one
P.M.
, which gives him four hours to reach an accommodation. Doors slam and medieval bolts close the impregnable gates around five which is suppertime followed by bedtime for the monks, as in ancient days.

O'Hanrahan had been walking for about three hours and to his relief the golden onion-shaped dome of Skete Prophet Ieremiou poked above the trees ahead. O'Hanrahan, hot and short of breath, admired it: a monastic outpost for 1600 Russian monks in its heyday, the turn of the century. The Russians virtually supplanted the Greeks in the last century on Athos; the Russian Skete of St. Andrew had some 5000 monks and outnumbered any monastery of the peninsula, but Greek authorities wouldn't upgrade these houses into full-fledged voting monasteries for fear the Russians would take over. Which they would have done gladly.

Closer to the skete, O'Hanrahan smiled to see the many onion-domes, plated in a faded, dull-gold brass, and the whitewashed, crumbling cathedral-sized church beneath them. To the Russians, the first Rome had fallen in heresy and decadence. The second Rome, Constantinople, had fallen to the Moslems. And so the third Rome, Moscow, would assume Rome's role, and the Duke of Muscovy assumed a title fit for a Roman: Caesar, or
tsar
in Russian. But history also brought the Bolsheviks. And where there were once thousands of Russian aristocrats' sons and peasants here, eager for God, the numbers dwindled to ten here, seven there. Monks and religious leaders were put in Siberian concentration camps and the survivors on Athos began the task of praying for their unfortunate brethren. What had been a continual hymn of praise, a celebration, had turned into a requiem for the dead church of Russia.

Perhaps their prayers this very decade will be answered, thought O'Hanrahan. With state atheism and communism itself on the wane, the Orthodox Church again is sweeping the steppes, congregations are again returning to the
katholikon
; how soon before Athos populates itself again with ex-Soviet holy men? Or is it too late? Is this way of Eastern Christianity now too old-fashioned for the young of Russia and Romania and Bulgaria, so long kept from the modern world they yearn for? Have the old men who have fanned the small censers in the dark, abandoned chapels of Athos kept the candles burning for nothing?

O'Hanrahan stood before the two-story medieval gate to Prophet Ieremiou. O'Hanrahan pulled the bellrope. At last the door creaked open and O'Hanrahan recognized the man he had met forty years ago, Father Sergius.

“Father Sergius,” said O'Hanrahan slowly. “You do not remember me—”

“Patrick O'Hanrahan, isn't it?” The father stroked his silver beard and squinted. “I told you when you left, we would meet again. Was I not right?”

“You were correct,” said O'Hanrahan, marveling at the memory of the man in his eighties. He had last been here in 1950 and then in 1968—twenty-two years ago! “Do I have permission to enter your skete,
Pater
?”

“You betcha, come on in … I'll get the fellas up from the field.”

Father Sergius was one of the last males to be oblated to Athos, left to a monastery as an orphan to grow up and serve the monks. He remembered as a child in the 1910s the Christmas treats courtesy of the Tsar and Tsarina, the despair at the destruction of the state church, the slow dwindling of monks through death, disease, and those who went back to Mother Russia to fight the Germans or Stalin. He had outlasted them all. And his English was pure Brooklynese. The only monks these days in the Russian sketes were Russian-American, grandsons of the original Russian-born Orthodox who had emigrated to America. It was from his seven monks, all from Brooklyn, that he had learned his English, tinged with the nasal street talk of Sheepshead Bay and Greenpoint.

O'Hanrahan was led into the quiet courtyard, where he could sense the stillness of a place meant for thousands, now down to seven. He was brought cool well water, and offered an ouzo from the still. O'Hanrahan put down his cup to peek inside the church. This sanctuary and the one at nearby Skete Prophet Eliou were the last great works of Russian ecclesiastical art patronized by Tsar Nicholas II.

O'Hanrahan beheld the
ikonostasis,
an icon wall from floor to ceiling of the vast whitewashed cathedral, every disciple, scores of Russian saints, the Tsar and Tsarina humbly kneeling in another panel, all bordered and decked out in gold leaf upon intricate woodwork. With what confidence the Romanovs built these great churches, never imagining that most would be in ruins within a decade, themselves executed, and God driven from the Russian heart with bureaucracy and secret police as the crushing substitute.

“Ah, there you are,” said Father Sergius, discovering him in the chapel. “If you're praying don't let me stop you. Uh, hands off the ikons, though. I'll have to reconsecrate and that's a pain.”

“I won't kiss anything, I promise,” assured O'Hanrahan. “It's a beautiful church.”

“You remember my showing you last time the samovar Tsar Nicholas gave to the skete? We almost got so poor that we had to sell it, but I couldn't do it.”

The two men walked to the refectory to find O'Hanrahan something to eat. The Russians, as a rule, ate better than did their Greek counterparts. O'Hanrahan recalled there was mutual disrespect on Athos: the Greeks were a bunch of illiterate, lazy peasants, according to some Russians; the Russians lived like kings, the Greeks would accuse. O'Hanrahan preferred the Russians. The decay, the swarms of flies and open sewers that characterized, say, Pantokrator Monastery, were unknown in the Russian houses.

A brother set down some beet soup before O'Hanrahan, and after that a plate of lentils, no oil, no salt, a few chopped spring onions for flavor. Simple, so as to divorce the diner from the pleasures of the stomach and to better concentrate on God. Father Sergius had explained on O'Hanrahan's last visit that he had moved his, then, ten charges from their cells every few weeks, throughout the thousands of rooms. This kept up the whole place, and furthermore prevented the men from getting attached to the way the sun fell against the wall, the comfort of a particular bed.

O'Hanrahan ate the simple fare gladly and watched the monks, speaking only when it was necessary. Two Russian-Americans in their late-20s he could not tempt with tales of a World Series, the newest movies from Hollywood, what girls were wearing, who was president, whatever. They didn't care. Though raised in America they were able to walk away from the 20th Century. Of course, thought O'Hanrahan, as we end the 20th Century a lot of people might like the idea of walking away, since the United States is going to hell in a handbasket, but nonetheless, to commit themselves so young …

(Just as you committed yourself once.)

Yes, thought O'Hanrahan, just as I turned away from the world of marriage and career and normal American life when I took vows. He briefly tasted some of the high resolve, remembered the elevation he once hoped to attain.

“Brother Victor,” Father Sergius then said happily, “this is the learned professor, Patrick O'Hanrahan, alas, a Roman Catholic—still an embracer of heresies.”

Victor nodded hello as he made the tea by the fire.

The other brother set the table for the visitor and the abbot to have tea. O'Hanrahan imagined what it must be like to spend decades with other young men and never form a friendship, for this was forbidden. If one found oneself too fond of a fellow monk, one separated oneself—one's only loyalty was to God.

“What brings you to Athos again, my son?” asked Father Sergius, tearing at a hard piece of unleavened bread. “What are you hunting for this decade?”

“I am searching for the key to a new gospel I have found but it is in a very obscure language. I am hoping the
Pseudo-Clementines
may reveal the alphabet. If not that, then Megistri Lavra has some commentaries on the
Sermium Compendium.
”

“Of 357?” Father Sergius asked while pouring some of their homemade olive oil onto a piece of rough bread.