The Gospel Of Judas (9 page)

In the shop there is a dusty crucifix on the wall behind the cash desk, a plastic thing of curiously exact anatomical detail – carefully delineated muscles, tendons like cords, blood of autumnal hue running down from palm and foot and lacerated side. So far I have never observed anyone in the shop take the faintest notice of this icon. Certainly it hasn’t seen a duster in the last decade. But there it is, a crucifix in this city of crucifixes.

Magda eyes the cross circumspectly. What does she know of it? From her childhood of institutionalised atheism, what has she picked up of the religion of her ancestors?

The True Cross was found by Saint Helena (b.
c
. 248 Bithynia, modern Turkey, d.
c
. 328 Nicomedia, now Izmit, modern Turkey), the mother of the Emperor Constantine. The finding is,
was
, celebrated by the Church with the Feast of the Invention of the True Cross, a title that has within it both the etymological history of a word and a pungent, unintentional irony. The feast may have been cancelled (by Pope John XXIII) but the relic remains, housed in the Church of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme. Pious legend? But pious legends in this city are almost as old as the events they describe. The remains (mere splinters now) are kept in a modern chapel at the back of the main basilica, but from the main church you can still go down to where the lumps of wood were, presumably, first housed: the chapel of Saint Helena. This and the adjoining chapel of Saint Gregory are rooms of the original Sessorian Palace, where Helena
actually lived. Not legend, that. It was this woman who journeyed to the Holy Land (not legend), found the True Cross (legend) and brought it back to Rome, where it was divided up, and fragments were distributed to the churches of Europe as a modern merchandising company might distribute items to franchise holders: baseball caps with the company logo, plastic figurines, that kind of thing.

Helena also brought back the nails of the crucifixion, part of the titulus that was posted on the cross over Jesus’ head, the stake to which He was tied when they scourged Him, some rock from the tomb, some rock from the cave at Bethlehem, the stairs from Pontius Pilate’s palace, and part of the cross on which the good thief hung. She must have been like an eighteenth-century Englishman on the Grand Tour shipping art treasures back in crates to his stately home.

I took Magda to see the relics. She looked at the bits and pieces with a mixture of atavistic wonder and modern scepticism. ‘How did they know?’ she asked.

‘How did they know what?’

‘It was the good thief’s cross? You said good thief. How did they know?’

The Church has an answer because the Church always has an answer: it has been around too long to be caught out that easily. I explained: ‘Rather conveniently one of Helena’s workmen injured himself. So they put the wound against one of the crosses they had found … and the wound didn’t heal. So that must have been the cross of the wicked thief. Then they tried the other cross, and as soon as the wood touched the wound it closed up and the pain went away and not even a scar was left. So that was the good thief’s cross.’

The plank of wood in question was sealed in a recess
in the wall, behind thick glass and an iron grille. Would it still stand the test? Magda thought about my answer for a while, and then shrugged. But when we got back to the flat she began to paint – thorns, spears, blades, a forest of things that pierce and cut, and pieces mixed up with the paint, bits of thorn, a scattering of sand, toothpicks, sharp, abrasive things. And amongst it a man on fire.

In Jerusalem, in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre at the heart of the Old City, you may also walk down steps from the upper church into a chapel of Saint Helena. You go down steps past rows and rows of crosses scratched into the rock by mediaeval pilgrims, down into a bare, chiselled space like the bottom of a well. Light filters down into the depths from a window high up in the roof.

The chapel was originally exactly what tradition claims for it: a rock-cut cistern of the early Imperial era. It would have been here when Helena was around. There’s a
terminus ante quem
, a date before which it must have been constructed, of 44 BC. The story is that after the crucifixion they just threw the cross into a nearby well, where it was discovered three hundred years later by the Empress on her Grand Tour. Light comes down from the high window to illuminate the dusty space and it’s not difficult to imagine, really. If you’ve seen labourers at work, it’s not difficult to imagine. There would have been swearing, of course. Fucking this and sodding that as they struggled with the rough beams, dragging them this way and that and finally dumping them over the edge into the pit. There is always swearing. Obscenities take on a strange semantic neutrality on the lips of such people but I suppose they would have made a satisfactory counterpoint to the sound of splintering wood.

Was there, one wonders, an element of cover-up about the whole thing, a desperate desire on the part of the politicians to dispose of the evidence and to pretend that whatever it was that had happened, hadn’t happened at all? Politicians haven’t changed, have they? And there was politics in this, sure enough. That’s the thing that has got lost amongst the piety – the politics of it all.

The workmen would have been from the very bottom of society because merely handling such things as a crucifixion tree was a defilement. Probably they would have been slaves. One thing is quite certain: they wouldn’t have had any idea of the significance of what they did, or that one day, either in legend or in reality, an emperor’s mother would come searching for the planks of wood. Or that two thousand years later men would still be picking over the event like vultures picking over a skeleton in the hope of finding a scrap of flesh.

So, they threw the bits down a well. And the body? Ah, that’s the crucial thing, isn’t it? What did they do about the body?

“His disciples came during the night and stole him away while we were asleep”
…
And to this day that is the story among the Jews
(Matt. 28: 13, 15).

And to this day?

Do you need a resurrection? I ask the question in a Socratic sense, knowing my own answer and not willing to give it away. Do you need a resurrection
nowadays
, I mean. Oh, they needed one then, sure enough. Everywhere you go in this city you find relics that attest to the fact that the Romans and the Greeks and everyone of the time needed a sacrifice and a resurrection. Look at Dionysus. But now?

*     *     *

Magda paints, and she possesses what she paints: scarlet like the sunset, crimson like a lake of blood, black as betrayal: Leo on fire, crucified by fire; a blasphemy.

An elegant evening in the ballroom of the Villa, a long room with a lucid wooden floor and marble-framed windows and curtains of yellow silk. Chairs are arranged in rows. On the shallow stage at one end is a Bechstein grand piano. Seated at the piano in long, black evening gown, blonde hair gathered up so that her neckline is exposed to the gaze of all (something startlingly intimate about that) is Frau Huber. She is not quite beautiful. Her face is a trifle too long, her nose possessed of an angularity that distracts from what one might call (many do) a classical profile. She sits erect, with her left foot forward to the pedals, her right tucked beneath the stool. Her back is curved slightly, like a bow.

She is not quite beautiful; but she is potent. Hands poised over the keys, angular talons dipped in blood, head held erect and brow faintly creased, she is potent. The audience is hushed. Then, tentatively and softly, so softly as almost to be inaudible to those at the back of the room, she begins
to play. And the notes fall like tears into the spacious room, carefully chosen tears, the place of each one determined with care and precision – Liszt’s setting of the Schubert song
Gretchen am Spinnrade
. Gretchen at the spinning-wheel, Gretchen at the keyboard, the notes drifting out over the audience like living things, each with a finite life of its own, each with a birth and a death. And the men in the audience, many of them in shark-grey uniform, one or two in black, most of them distant from home and full of
Gemütlichkeit
, feel their eyes glisten with tears; while at the same time (men are capable of such emotional gymnastics) they try to picture the woman stripped of that dress, her limbs lean and white, typical Aryan limbs, her breasts small and loose, her belly swelling slightly, a gleaming blonde floss between her thighs – an image that goes with Liszt and Schubert well enough.

The piece rises to its climax in great waves and then dies away into silence. There is a moment of stillness into which a storm of applause seems almost reluctant to intrude. ‘
Brava!
’ they call. ‘
Brava!
’ The
principe
Casadei, one of the few Italians in the audience, rises to his feet and creates a small tide amongst the others, so that soon all are standing and applauding. And Frau Huber too rises to her feet and looks back at them distractedly, as though surprised to find them there at all. Her head inclines towards the audience slightly, her expression one of faint amusement. When the applause has finished and the guests have subsided, she sits once more, and Liszt takes over completely from Schubert, the
Years of Pilgrimage
flying past, the hands pouncing on to the keys, ambushing them, striking chords from the gleaming lacquered box, snatching notes from the instrument like thieves plucking jewels from a casket, darting with sudden runs up and down the keyboard, great
swirls of sound coiling out into the expectant room, racking the audience, racking her slim body, racking the body of the young man who sits in the third row from the front, over on the right-hand side of the room.

Tennis. The tennis court lies behind what were once the stables of the Villa and are now the garages and flats for the more senior of the servants. Tennis. A rectangle as red as the surface of Mars in the shadow of the ruined Roman aqueduct that runs diagonally through the gardens. The scuff of tennis shoes on the dirt and the sweep of two white figures, virginally white, as white as any pair of androgynous angels. She throws the ball high into the air and serves. As her arm sweeps up and over there is a glimpse of the secret curve of her armpit with its glistening flock of hair. The ball speeds efficiently over the net. He returns it with a neutral stoke. She runs in from the baseline, her feet beating on the dirt, her body poised over the bouncing ball, her racket arm swinging back like a loaded catapult. The drive sweeps forward through the ball, sending it hard into the waiting net.

‘No, no, no! You must not make fall your racket head.’ She teaches him English, he teaches her tennis. ‘You must try to keep firm your wrist. Let me show you.’

An excuse this? He skips over the net and takes up his position behind her, holding her right wrist and her left shoulder, pressing his body against hers so that they almost become one moving unit. ‘Like
this
, and
this
, and
this
,’ he says, pulling her back and then sweeping her whole body forward into the stroke, time and again, rhythmically, flowingly, the tempo marked
con brio
. She can feel him firm against her buttocks as he sweeps her forward, pulls her back, sweeps her forward. ‘You keep the racket head
up
and you sweep
through
the ball. You will practise the shot as a punishment.’

He releases her slowly and returns to his side to chip balls over the net for her to sweep regally, imperiously down the tramlines and into the netting at the far end. ‘
Brava
,’ he cries at each successful shot. ‘
Brava!
’

Then the game continues, she tossing the ball high into the bright air (that glimpse of moist hair) and sweeping through the serve, he returning into the mid-court so that she can practise the flowing, graceful drive again. ‘
Brava!
’ again, and she smiles in delight, while high overhead (they barely pause to look up) a cluster of silver crucifixes draws white lines of vapour across the sky.

He allows her to win her service game, and then he serves (a mere swipe of the ball, but it is clear that the whole thing could be much more hostile, much faster and more angled) and lets her return the ball before sweeping it far cross-court to send her running for it along the baseline and end up in the netting at the side of the court where she hangs for a moment, laughing and panting.

‘Where is Leo?’ The sudden voice is an intrusion. Her husband has appeared at the side of the court, a tall and elegant figure in a pin-striped suit. How long has he been watching? What has he seen, and more important, what does he
think
he has seen?

‘My dear, I didn’t notice you.’ Gretchen laughs, although there is nothing to laugh at. ‘Leo? Leo is in the schoolroom. He is working on …’ She glances at her opponent for a clue.

‘Charlemagne and the Holy Roman Empire.’

Herr Huber’s face is narrow and finely sculpted. His smile is ornate. ‘Why is Herr Volterra not
teaching
him about Charlemagne and the Holy Roman Empire?’

‘Hansi, you know this is the time when we have our tennis lesson,’ she says reproachfully. The use of the diminutive is
lèse-majesté
. Herr Huber frowns.

‘Herr Volterra is employed as a tutor, not as a tennis coach.’

‘Are you proposing to drive him away from me just when I am winning?’ She has her hands on her hips, petulantly, almost (but not quite) defiantly. But the young man is already gathering up his things, clipping his racket into its press, picking up towel and spare racket and gathering up the stray balls. ‘Perhaps later, Frau Huber,’ he says. ‘Now I must go.’ Herr Huber watches him hurry away from the court towards the small wooden pavilion which is the changing room, before glancing back to his wife.

Herr Huber’s office, on the first floor of the Villa, above the reception rooms with their tapestries of scenes from the life of Christ from the Beauvais factory. The office has tall windows looking out over the formal garden at the back of the Villa. There are heavy drapes and heavy Bavarian furniture that might be more appropriate in a hunting lodge somewhere north of the Alps. A great desk gleams in the light from the window. A portrait of the Führer in the dun-coloured uniform of the SA looks down from the wall behind the desk. It contrives to look over the shoulder of Herr Huber as he sits at the desk and examines the young man before him. He himself is more discreet in his avowal of allegiance than the Führer: his display of loyalty takes the form of a simple lapel button, a bright enamel blossom of red and white and black, the
Hakenkreuz
.