A house is burning. Its six tenants include a failed priest, a naturalist, a neurosurgeon and an invalid dreaming of his anxious boyhood. Their landlord’s relationship to them is both intimate and shadowy. At times he shares their preoccupations and memories. He will also share their fate.
In Night of Fire the passions and obsessions of these unquiet lives reach beyond the dying house that holds them. Ranging from an African refugee camp to the cremation-grounds of India, their memories mutate and criss-cross in a novel of lingering beauty and mystery.
Colin Thubron is an acknowledged master of travel writing, and the author of six award-winning novels. He has been numbered among ‘the current masters of the short novel’ (TLS), and called ‘one of our most compelling contemporary novelists’ (Independent), as well as writing the classic travel books, Behind the Wall (winner of the Hawthornden Prize and the Thomas Cook Travel Award), The Lost Heart of Asia, In Siberia (Prix Bouvier) and Shadow of the Silk Road (all available in Vintage). In 2010, Colin Thubron became President of the Royal Society of Literature.
Non-fiction
Mirror to Damascus
The Hills of Adonis
Jerusalem
Journey into Cyprus
Among the Russians
Behind the Wall
The Lost Heart of Asia
In Siberia
Shadow of the Silk Road
To a Mountain in Tibet
Fiction
The God in the Mountain
Emperor
A Cruel Madness
Falling
Turning Back the Sun
Distance
To the Last City
For Margreta
‘Just as there are phantom limbs there are phantom histories, histories that are severed and discarded, but linger on as thwarted possibilities and compelling nostalgias.’
Adam Phillips, On Balance
It began with a spark, an electrical break like the first murmur of a weakening heart that would soon unhinge the body, until its conflagration at last consumed the whole building. Years ago, at the end of the Victorian century, the house had been built in dignified isolation, but later developers split its storeys into separate flats, and the once-grand staircases now ascended past empty landings and closed doors. It was slipping into stately old age. Its balconies sagged behind their wrought-iron balustrades, and chunks of stucco pediment were dropping off on to the dustbins fifty feet below. The garden behind, which had once been the landlord’s pride, lay half forgotten, and its shrubs – photinia, daphne, rosemary – burgeoned unclipped over the lawn.
Somewhere in the bowels of the building, behind a damp wall, a kink in a carbonised wire had become a tiny furnace. Down this half-blocked artery it travelled to a worn Bakelite socket, and the tenant asleep in the basement – it was past midnight – never woke. The January night was cold. Far below, the sea made an angry rasping. Inland the town showed broken threads of light where it had gone to sleep.
The landlord was watching other fires. From his rooftop terrace the sky was so clear that he – an insomniac muffled in scarves and padded jacket – could write his notes by starlight. Hunched in the circle of his makeshift observatory, he watched his breath misting in the night air, and listened to the sea, and wondered if his wife was yet asleep. The tube of the telescope was ice cold under his palms. This refractive model was not like his old one, grown friendly over the years, but a computerised tyrant. In the dark his fingers would blunder uncertainly over its keypad, or jog the ocular as he coupled it with his camera. But after long minutes of fumbling, the focused sky would startle him with a revelation far beyond his ageing naked eyesight. A supernova would appear like a ghost in a zone he had thought empty, or he was transfixed by a nebula whose mist now splintered into a blaze of separated stars.
His gaze had changed over the years. As a younger man the remoteness of these galaxies had swept over him with an icy faintness, as if he were falling upwards. Their voids, their silence, sometimes left him physically trembling. He even wondered about his lapsed belief in God. But little by little this night-time hobby toughened into something more familiar. He observed all the prime objects catalogued by Herschel, and in the hope of making a small contribution to science, he embarked on a fruitless search for undetected dying stars.
Then an old passion for photography surfaced. With a single-lens reflex camera mounted on the telescope, he accessed even distant galaxies. After focusing on nebulae to the south, where light pollution faded over the empty sea, the results of his half-hour aperture exposures shocked him into something close to fear. On his sensitised prints the mammoth hydrogen clouds boiled in great articulated explosions of gas and dust, scattered with blue asterisks where new stars were shining. Each of these lurid turmoils, he knew, was an ungraspable ferment of new creation, often the birthplace of a million suns. The photographs were beautiful and petrifying. Whole galaxies turned like Catherine wheels silently in space. And most spectacularly his camera yielded crimson images that burst and spilled out like intestines on the blackness. He could not look at them without the illusion of some celestial wound. Whole seams of stardust – a hundred thousand light years across – undulated like arteries in space, or blistered up from nowhere. And the constellations shone so dense that scarcely a gap of night showed between.
But tonight, although the sky was full, he ignored his camera. He was expecting the annual meteor shower of the Quadrantids. A sharp wind had got up and was ruffling the sea into faint crests. Once or twice a solitary meteor flared and died across the sky. But the rain of fire he had anticipated – sixty Quadrantids could stream out in less than an hour – was still impending. They would come, he knew, from the radiant of Boötes, where in 1860 an enigmatic new star – a brilliant nova – had blazed and vanished within a week. This star would perhaps reappear – it survived in the charts as the invisible T Boötis – and it had taken on a stubborn significance for him, so that he had returned to its site again and again, like a mourner to a grave. Its void, far beyond the light of Arcturus, seemed to promise some mysterious epiphany. His computer-controlled telescope mount could lock on to its site within a single minute, and he did this obsessively now as if he must personally witness its resurrection. But when he refined the focus on it, there was only a circle of dark. And this deeper void, he knew, was seven hundred million light years from Earth.
Occasionally these numbers trembled out of the meaninglessness of their charts and lodged in the real sky. The near-infinite speed of light yet travelled so slowly through the firmament that it might reach humans thousands of millennia after its departure, transmitting the image of a star as it had been long ago. Sometimes it dawned on him that everything he witnessed up here was long departed. He was watching only the dead. He saw the Coma cluster as it had existed when creatures on Earth were still confined to the sea; and the light of dim blue galaxies, now invisibly touching him, had started out before the Earth came into being and might replicate for people’s eyes, as if in a time warp, the process of Earth’s creation. And time itself, of course, was not an absolute; it might be bent by the force of gravity, even reversed within a black hole. Given light and time, he imagined, his own past life could shake back into fragmented being.
The meteor shower stayed desultory, and the wind had hardened. He thought he smelt something burning. He imagined it a neighbour’s dying bonfire, and peered down into the garden. But he saw nothing. Another hour would pass before the rain of meteors reached its climax, so he descended the narrow stairs to his studio, pushing between heaped files and film cassettes, and eased open the bedroom door. His wife was sleeping. He could hear the harsh whisper of her lungs – the sound that had first distressed him four years ago – and saw the laboured rise and fall of her upper body under the blankets. She was facing the ceiling from a tangle of auburn-grey hair. Her slanted eyes were closed. He stooped and softly kissed their corners, then went out, shutting the door.
The faint stench of burning rose again. He assumed a tenant overcooking something, but the smell was acrid, unfamiliar. Sometimes the tenants themselves seemed alien to him. Immured in five storeys beneath him, most had been here on old leases almost as long as he could remember. Some rarely left their rooms. Others came and went seemingly at random. He saw them on stairways or in the corridors, where often the timer switch was defunct, and in the gloom he barely recognised them, while they, in turn, might not acknowledge him. One or two looked haggard and frail, as if life had discarded them. But over time his distaste for them had dissipated, and now he felt towards several a remote indulgence, even tenderness. Occasionally he asked them questions in passing (they did not always answer). He had come to think of them as uneasy acquaintances.
He could not sleep. Yesterday, trying to bring coherence to past disorder, he had assembled his old 8mm cine films – many still in their Kodak envelopes, shot over fifty years ago – and started splicing them together with the same thin brush and pungent glue left over from his youth. He began this as a night-time chore, with the feeling – nostalgic and uneasy – of reviving a practice abandoned long ago. He did not know if the lamp would blow on his obsolete projector, or if the acetate glue would still hold.
Tonight, in the darkened room, as he waited for the hour of the meteors, the first film strip bunched on its spool with a brittle crackling. He eased it free, started again and a yellowish light appeared on his screen. In its dust-framed rectangle, the image came up of a young woman on a bare stage. With the film’s celluloid flaking away, she seemed to move under black rain. It was a second before he recognised her, that elfin brightness. She was fooling about as usual, gesturing at nobody in sight. The theatre seats were empty. In a lull between rehearsals, she had lifted an auburn wig from her blonde-streaked hair and was addressing it like Hamlet his skull. The camera strayed playfully, affectionately, over her. Without cinematic sound, her mouth opened and closed in noiseless exclamations, and her laughter was a silent hiatus. Once she turned to the camera, complaining of its gaze on her. The next minute she was clowning again, mimicking the curtain calls of her fellow actors, curtseying coyly, bowing augustly. Then her hands lifted and splayed, blacking out the screen, and she was gone.
He threaded the reels more nervously now, unsure what they would resurrect. The subjects of old snapshots seemed to occupy a time irretrievably vanished; but in these cine films people moved unnervingly in the present. As they flickered into life, he found himself gazing back at a once-familiar past – his childhood home – that had yet turned strange. Those who were once old to him had grown magically younger, far younger than he was now. But as if he were seeing them bifocally, they harboured like a memory trace his early perspective. His father on the screen was barely fifty, yet sealed in his son’s memory now, impregnably senior. The woman walking among the fruit trees in the garden seemed vivid and girlish, but she carried the mother’s power of his remembrance.
Several film strips snapped inside the projector, or their sprocket holes tore and they jammed around its gate, where the lamp’s heat blistered them within seconds. Each time this happened he was touched by momentary panic. He had not viewed these pictures for decades, but now the loss of a few frames produced an incommensurate sadness. Each cassette seemed to enclose its own time capsule, where people continued in a bright-lit parallel existence. Yet like the light departed from a dead star, the life they projected was an illusion from years ago. And their celluloid inhabitants – loved or forgotten – were bitterly mortal. Their world could be destroyed by a pittance of glue, and each breakage was like a death. He noticed how his hands trembled as he repaired them, scraping away the emulsion to hold their cement: hands that he remembered as a child in old men, wondering at the corded delta of their veins, their liver spots, and had at once been repelled and fascinated by what could never, surely, come to him.
For half a minute the camera panned across parched scrubland. In a settlement like an improvised village, a woman is sitting on a rough bench. He feels the hard sun again, the smell of dust, and torpor. It is hard to look at her now. She no longer exists in the context of the refugee camp, alongside others less than herself. She is alone, on his screen, gazing back at him. His throat has gone dry. She does not smile. Maybe it is not the custom (he cannot remember). Her face is young now, of course, although she was older than him. She looks shy and unexpectant. Her black skin is lighter than he remembers, the illusion of dark silk. She remains perfectly still (she does not understand the cinecamera) so that his film has the stasis of a portrait. It carries with it the bitter pathos of something long ago. Aeons, lives, ago. He whispers: ‘Forgive me . . .’ She goes on staring.
In the cramped studio the smell of burning has intensified. He thinks it comes from the projector now, and switches it off. Then he remembers the Quadrantid meteors predicted after midnight. He climbs the staircase to the rooftop, where their fire is falling from the sky.
How quiet it is here. Sometimes at night you can hear the waves falling and receding on the shingle, like a slow-beating heart. The sound becomes sadder as you listen, and at night, as now, it grows inexorable, as if a cosmic clock were beating out time to its end.
The tenant felt this melancholy while slipping into sleep, and at first, when the smoke began rising through the floorboards, he covered his head obliviously with the duvet. His ground-floor flat should have been simple to escape. But over the last hour the basement below had become a contained furnace, its explosion delayed by an old fire door and fast-disintegrating plaster. In the end his flat could offer little to the flames. He was a lean, rather ascetic man, and he kept things clean and spare. His clothes barely filled one wardrobe, and his books had been pared down to those he remembered having loved. Only that morning his gaze had travelled over the familiar shelves, wondering at their fleeting knowledge. He had put on an old LP record of the St John Passion, and was listening with agnostic pleasure when out of its sleeve fell the yellowed photograph of the seminary.
And there they all were. Standing self-consciously on the chapel steps, they looked dated and formal in their jackets and ties, with their hair combed forward or neatly parted. This was not as he remembered them. Their faces looked pale and enclosed, but their different smiles – intent, open, prim – seemed to coalesce in a bland happiness whose secret he had mislaid.
He wondered what had become of them all. After he left, their mutual correspondence had lapsed through a distance that was more than geographical, and they had faded into the past. Except Ross, of course. How embarrassingly innocent he looked, with his sunburst of hair and cherub’s cheeks! The child of an infantilising God. Yet his imagined purity had once exerted a quiet moral force on his fellow ordinands. Beside him Vincent looked twice Ross’s age: a figure already of lean authority. Even now it was hard to believe that this louring presence, with the caved-in cheeks and the black focus of a Byzantine saint, was then only twenty-seven. Vincent often talked of the unending spiritual journey, but he had already arrived at his changeless convictions.
Alongside Vincent there was a gap where the photographer – himself – had stepped from the group to record it, and he had playfully inscribed ‘Stephen’ in the empty space. And smiling there beside it was Julian, sporting fashionably wide lapels and a perky bow tie. Among all their chaste smiles, only Julian’s looked equivocal. His head was a different shape from everybody else’s – it was enough to convince you of phrenology: a triangle dwindling to a little cusped mouth that sometimes emitted qualms of mistrust. Of all of them, Julian was the one he most wondered at. He had never understood him, and even in the snapshot his expression was indefinable: amused, perhaps cynical, in a way ungiven to priests.
The problems and passions in those cramped lecture rooms and seminars, the intellectual ferment around the Gospels, the suppressed doubts, the strained questioning of his foremost teacher – a man huge in rhetoric and learning, but without human sympathy – all these belonged to a civil war from which Stephen had been invalided out. Now he wondered, baffled at his past belief, how he had created God in private prayer. Yet this thought came to him always with the ringing of an alarm bell – faint and harmlessly far away – as if perhaps, after all, he had once been right, and now, in his half-examined life, he had fallen from the grace of self-judgement.
Sometimes in the seminary at night he tried to imagine the prayers that were rising from those darkened rooms: not the communal worship of chapel or even the impromptu petitions at study meetings, but the night fears and confessions of men kneeling alone by their beds.
Often he felt extraordinarily light and happy. It seemed to him that he had discovered the only meaningful life. Sometimes he felt he loved his fellow ordinands, with their earnest smiles and confidences, their reticent ardour in workshops. He imagined compassion even in his teacher, whose rubicund jowls and bursting waistcoat contradicted the implacable rigour of his mind, and identified a discreet sweetness in the seminary principal, who looked like an ancient boy. And he thought gratefully of his chosen friends, with their conflicting integrities. At such times they seemed all to be living in a charmed circle, a brotherhood of revelation and trust. It was easy to pray for them. These were the blessed nights.
But there were other nights when a dark restlessness descended. After struggling with a piece of exegesis or a doctrinal essay, he would find himself rereading Bible texts without faith or consolation, trying to absolve God of everything he found inequitable. Then the surety of Vincent and Ross seemed far away. Obsessively he would alight on those passages that had never featured in the comfortable parish sermons of his childhood, but which were here confronted head-on. Even the fate of the blasted fig tree or the Gadarene swine could surface to unsettle him. Above all he agonised over every Gospel inconsistency, culminating in the differing accounts of the empty tomb, where the holy word seemed to contravene itself at its heart.
Sometimes he wrestled with the texts far into the night. It was as if there was some chamber of divine grace that he could not enter. So he kept building intellectual edifices to resolve his misgivings. He fell into the sin of judging God. Sometimes, for comfort, he remembered the works of faith that had awed him as a youth – Bach’s St Matthew Passion, the great rose window of Chartres – and felt a fleeting reprieve.
In the end, exhausted, he confronted his God in prayer. He lit a candle to obscure everything but the wooden cross beside his bed, and this shadowy concentration through the cross – the focus of all redemption and love – would start to calm him. He imagined his fellow ordinands kneeling likewise at this hour, and sensed their prayers massing in the night around him. His supplication and thanksgiving felt warm and answered in the candlelight. Often he whispered aloud, and the words took on a free-floating power. God was beating like a drum in his brain. This was the grace beyond which logic crumbled, the ferment of Christ caring for his flock against all reason, the Christ whom arguments could not wound.
But then came confession. Its lonely self-scrutiny filled Stephen with despair. It had settled into a grinding cycle of contrition and repentance in the recurring wake of sin. He repented his scriptural doubts and his failure to love, his too-great sensitivity towards himself, and the vanity of his unfocused ambition. He repented his harsh parting from his former girlfriend. And abjectly he repented that he masturbated remembering her, the lissome smoothness of her legs. He would caress himself in half-sleep, as if the deed were unconscious, and afterwards would fall into drowsy remorse.
Once he dreamt strangely that he was making love to a woman on a summer hillside. Coppery butterflies rose from the shrubs and shimmered above their naked bodies, then alighted on her face, her breasts, as though enacting a private sacrament, and he awoke to wetness and the memory of ecstasy without sin, and the after-scent of asphodel.
Whenever he left the sanctum of the seminary, the world outside barely jarred on him. He detected God at work even in the ordinary country town nearby. The everyday had become the theatre of divine grace. Twice he was allocated weekend chaplaincies in a neighbouring parish, but he took his visions and anxieties with him, and plagued the overworked vicar with questions that went unanswered. For hours one night he walked in the church graveyard, as if the dead might still him, while the winter sky opened in a blaze of stars. It was years since he had seen such a sky. Those tremendous galaxies glittered down in silence on the graves: a fathomless order where trillions of suns and planets spun in their orbits, suspended in an open miracle above him. He was astonished by their colours: golden, silver-white, pale blue. And once a comet flared like Lucifer across the dark.
He went back into the church with wincing eyes. He was shaking. He slotted Sunday’s hymn numbers into their place above the pulpit, then subsided into a choir stall. Behind the altar a dark green drapery shifted in the cold air. It stirred in dim columns. He wanted, for some reason, to part it, and got shakily to his feet. It could only conceal a stone wall, he knew; but he hesitated, as though there were another possibility, as though behind the curtain was something unimaginable. Perhaps it would merely open on a memorial plaque; but perhaps – he was feeling faint now – on a landscape he had never known, the door to lost grace. Then he laughed out loud, a clatter of self-deprecation in the silence, and sat down again. He thrust his head between his knees to revive his circulation. The curtain had gone still, as if the mana had departed from it, and he closed his eyes.
A week later, the seminary was shaken to its roots. The principal did not often give addresses, but when he did, the lecture was attended by all staff and eighty students. He spoke with clipped precision on Heidegger’s ‘primordial thinking’, but nobody later could remember a word. What no one forgot was the third-year student, Bradley, who stood up to speak afterwards. Everyone imagined that he was about to ask a question, or even to offer a sycophantic thank-you. Instead he announced that he was quitting the seminary because he had ceased to believe. He thanked his tutors for their care and scholarship, and was sad that their trust in him had been misplaced. His decision was no reflection on them, he added, but was the result of a long inner conflict which had now resolved itself, he said, with a feeling of release and cleansing. This last he spoke with a hint of defiance, and as he looked round at his erstwhile friends, his face seemed tinged disturbingly with pity.
Shock waves of disbelief went through his audience. Most of them froze where they sat. They simply stared back at him with drained faces. Some of their mouths had fallen open, but one or two retained leftover smiles. The effect was only deepened by Bradley’s lack of anything distinctive. He was a sallow, slimmish man in a tired cassock: he might have been any of them.
As the meaning of his words sank in, two of the teachers rose to their feet in half-suppressed alarm. The principal, usually aloof, seemed overcome by fatherly concern, as if Bradley were ill, and left his lectern to go to him. But the student was already walking to the door. The dignity of his retreat was marred only by his shoes, which squeaked like mice across the floorboards. Stephen never forgot how he half turned to look back at them all, then disappeared under the Exit sign.
The atmosphere in the seminary changed that evening. Several formerly quiet students became boisterous and voluble, as if to stress their firmness of faith, while others had turned sombre. Two of the teachers moved solicitously among them, speculating that Christ in His mercy would redeem Bradley after this inexplicable crisis. Stephen’s group huddled instinctively into his room for privacy. Vincent was angry. ‘Why did he have to do that in front of the whole seminary? Why couldn’t he just sneak away? I think he wanted to drag us down with him.’
Ross’s eyes were darting between them all, almost in panic, he so rarely clashed with Vincent. But he said: ‘There wasn’t evil in him. Bradley was eaten up by something. I don’t know what it was. Once he asked me: “Can a person walk on water?” He was strange.’
Their dialogue lurched into talk of Hell and the afterlife. It was as if Bradley’s exit was a prefiguration of death, as if he had gone out into the dark, leaving them all behind in the wan light of speculation. Nothing seemed stranger to Stephen than the contrast between Vincent and Ross as they talked: the gaunt handsomeness of the one, and the other like his acolyte, frail and shocked. Ross would have seemed comical had he been less distressed. His blond hair lapped around his head like a disordered halo. Several times he murmured to himself: ‘I’ll stand on the promise of Your word’, as if dropping anchor in a storm. Vincent, meanwhile, seemed ever harder and more secure. He spoke with gravelly authority, his bible in his hands. Occasionally he tried to make a joke, but it came out wooden, as if the language was foreign to him, and he was the only one who laughed. And between them sat Julian, suave and apparently unruffled, his triangle of a head registering alternative amusement and objection.
Around the critical doctrine of Hell, the seminary had left unwonted latitude. In trembling tones Ross maintained that the damned were not tormented for ever, but simply fell into extinction.
But Vincent shook his head with a tinge of regret. ‘Christ’s sense of justice isn’t ours, Ross. Punishment isn’t evil. It’s the cancellation of evil.’ He returned remorselessly to the Gospels. There was already a bookmark in the passage, Stephen noticed. Then shall he say also unto those on the left hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire . . .
Ross murmured: ‘Let us pray for him.’
A familiar tension had started up in Stephen. Cold air seemed to be blowing through him, and his stomach contracting. He had combed through the New Testament verses on the fate of the lost – there were more than two hundred and fifty such verses. He heard his own voice out of the blue: ‘How can evil and good coexist in God’s universe for ever, Vincent? That would be divine failure. “Christ remains on the Cross as long as one sinner remains in Hell.”’ He couldn’t remember which Church Father had said that, but he knew Vincent would.
‘God permits evil, Stephen. He permitted the greatest cruelty of all, in the Crucifixion.’
‘But surely not evil for ever, Vincent.’ Stephen was surprised by the harshness in his own voice. ‘Not in the hereafter.’
He stopped as suddenly as he had begun. He wondered if he had slipped into heresy. The breath was beating up inside him in a hot, tearful agitation. He knew its cause but was helpless to stop it. He let his head sink down, as if acquiescing in whatever Vincent was saying, but he did not hear a word. He clenched his eyes shut and choked back the pity engulfing him.
Sometimes her hand returned his grip, as it had done since childhood. Each time he felt a rush of hope. But increasingly her fingers stayed lax in his, or – far worse – they twisted away. He knew she was sunk in a sedated dream, and that this repudiation was only the instinct of a wounded brain. But every time, it hit him with new anguish, so that he massaged her fingers tensely in his, willing their grip to return.
There was no hope of real return, he knew. But his mother’s face was still her own, fair and high-boned. A massive stroke, at forty-seven, with no time for a coherent thought or prayer. Yet he did not think about her repentance, although fervent from his first year in theology. The chasm between saved and damned had faded before her, who had never pretended Christianity. Some agitation travelled through her in unpredictable waves. She murmured things he could not catch, and imagined visitors who were far away, or dead, or unknown to him. She never called his name.
At night, the nurses allowed him to sit beside her, unable to share her sleep. The ward groaned in the dark. Dim-lit machines purred and beeped by the bedsides, keeping the dying alive. His eyes grew used to no light. Hour after hour, compulsively, she raised a leg as if to climb from the bed, threatening to sever her intravenous tubes and catheter. Gently, again and again, he lifted the leg back to lie beside the other. But he hated himself for resisting her, because he had the idea that she knew where she wanted to go, and was trying to break free.
After two more days she had slipped further away from him (they had injected morphine). Her hands were no longer clasping anything. He held one for comfort, in case it was still feeling something. They drew a curtain round the bed. Near the end he whispered in her ear, ‘All will be well.’ He had read that hearing was the last of the senses to fade, and perhaps, for a little, survived death.
When he raised his head again, Ross was talking to Vincent. He might have been going on for an hour or a minute, Stephen did not know. The afterlife, Ross imagined, might not be of the body or even of the soul, but in the memory of God. He had been reading Tillich and Hartshorne. The book of life would be closed, but its pages remained perfect for ever in the cosmic mind.
Stephen thought only: What resurrection is that? God’s memories are not living people.
Julian, scenting false consolation, asked: ‘And will evil still exist?’
‘It wasn’t my idea.’ Ross looked alarmed. ‘But the theory says that evil will be forgotten by God.’
Vincent said: ‘It sounds like universal salvation to me.’ This was a concept he hated. Salvation for all cheapened the severity of sin, he said, and gutted Christ’s atonement of its meaning. ‘This doctrine is a fallacy of modern humanism. Nothing in scripture supports it.’
Watching the points of colour rise in Vincent’s cheeks, and the way his eyes focused unseeing, and his long hands interlace as if for future prayer, Stephen was surprised by an upsurge of anger, an anger that left him unashamed. Who was Vincent to deny her salvation? For the first time, he thought he hated him. Yet nothing Vincent said perturbed him deeply, or marred his mother’s decency. In the voice that was still not quite his own, he said: ‘Christ died on the cross for all. It was a universal act.’
Vincent began sifting his bible. But Stephen did not wait. He felt a perverse desire to annoy him. He brought up the old riddle of pagan conversion – a subject Vincent disliked – and wandered through its tired questions with feigned naivety: would all those from pre-Christian history be doomed to everlasting torment? And all those who lived and died in distant countries and cultures?
Julian inserted a moment’s mischief: ‘Rousseau called religion une affaire de géographie.’
Or would Vincent agree with the Papal encyclical that ignorant humans may be saved by grace without knowing it?
For once Vincent did not instantly reply. Instead he went to the basin and dabbed water over his eyes. It was odd. He had even laid aside his bible. Perhaps Julian’s quip had irritated him; but Stephen felt rather that his austere friend had sensed a particular sorrow in him, and did not know what to do. At last Vincent sat down again and said: ‘I know I’m too much sometimes. I’m sorry . . . I’ve no business to preach. But I’ve always thought the act of choosing was crucial. That’s how I was brought up. But certainties change . . .’ He made one of his laboured jokes, and his lonely laughter was echoed by Ross. He looked strangely crestfallen. ‘Sometimes I think we’ve all been here too long. It’s time we were out in the world, doing God’s work.’
It was at this moment, Stephen remembered, that the idea of the journey to Mount Athos took hold. They had each mentioned it from time to time, but only now did it seem practical. In two weeks’ time, at the term’s end, they could take the train to Thessaloniki in northern Greece, then reach Athos by ferry. Its other-worldly solitude appealed to them all at this moment. Its high peninsula was a theocracy within the Greek state, an ancient Orthodox precinct confined to monks and a few travellers. For more than ten centuries it had existed in its own sealed authority, like a time warp in Christian faith.
Stephen thought: perhaps its transcendence will revive us all. Yes, we need to leave here for a while. Maybe it will calm Ross, loosen up Vincent. I need this too. I need other voices, other rites. Perhaps the Orthodox way with death is better than ours. They seem to lay less weight on the human agony of Christ. The torment of atonement is swallowed up in triumph and resurrection. We’ll forget all this theological turmoil for a while, the endless questioning. Perhaps I’ll find some very old monk, and imagine that I’m closer to divinity. (It helps that they have beards.) Perhaps the mountain will even be beautiful, and we will find peace.
That Sunday, the sermon concerned the denial of St Peter. It was delivered trenchantly by Howell, Stephen’s tutor, whose chest heaved under his rhetoric, his red jowls quivering with authority. Denial was different from betrayal, he said, as Peter was from Judas. One was the result of momentary terror, the other of premeditated perfidy. One man, of course, would return to sainthood, the other hang himself. Even while invoking the parables of the lost sheep and the prodigal son, Howell made no mention of Bradley; but the ex-student loomed like a ghost in all their minds.
* * *
For thirty miles the spurs of the peninsula receded into haze, repeating themselves in fainter echoes until they fused with the sky. Beyond the ferry’s bows the land fell in forested walls, split by ravines where winter torrents had swept down orange scree. To the west the twin peninsula of Sithonia left a shadow on the sea.
A few gulls wheeled in our wake, crying. We had all grown quiet. A brisk wind was in our faces, and we felt its purging. None of us had been in such country before. Julian was humming a song to himself, trying to remember the Greek words, and the rest of us were smiling into the wind. The only other passengers were a group of Orthodox pilgrims, whose language we did not know.
Ahead of us the promontories unfurled ever more steeply. In this unaccustomed brilliance – the rinsed Greek light – a sense of other-worldliness descended before we even set foot on the holy mountain. The only noise was the weak blend of gulls and waves and the guttural murmurs of the crew. And then out of the sky the scarp of Mount Athos emerged in a snow-streaked pyramid – more precipitous and remote than anything we had imagined – streaming with cloud, six thousand feet above the sea.
After a while, some signs of life began. We could make out the landing stages for hermitages invisible in gullies beyond, then monasteries appeared, one by one, along the shores. Above their ancient walls, fortified against piracy, a crowd of pink-stoned cupolas and filigreed crosses jostled against clock towers telling unfamiliar times. Not a soul was in sight. Once bells sounded quaintly over the water, like the tinkle of a musical box. As we neared the promontory’s end, the spurs steepened into cliffs. The walls of the monasteries rose in blank escarpments for fifty feet or more, then burst into precarious windows and galleries. We all stared up in astonishment. We forgot even to take photographs.
At last, as the headland’s tip slid behind us, there sailed into view the mother monastery of Athos: less a building than a whole fortified settlement crossing the heights in battlements and turrets, dark with cypress trees. By the time the ferry crunched against the jetty, the place had withdrawn five hundred feet above us. We were the only ones to disembark. The pier was empty, and I wondered if the monastery too might be deserted. For twenty minutes we toiled up the track to its gates. Behind us the slopes dropped to grey rocks above the sea. My breathlessness rose more from excitement than strain – the place so alien and silent – and we all seemed curiously small with our rucksacks and improvised pilgrims’ staves, which made a lonely clinking on the path.
Ross murmured: ‘Are we in the right place? Can this be it?’
Above the entrance gate a frescoed Virgin and Child lifted their hands in faded blessing. The stones underfoot were indented by generations of booted and sandalled feet. Three massive iron-bound doors and a curving ramp steered us into what seemed to be an abandoned village.
The courtyard was filled with chapels and dormitories. We didn’t know where to go. Wonky stairways climbed to shut doors, and other, half-timbered buildings sagged under slate roofs like English barns. We gave up searching for anyone, and wandered in mystified peace. I started taking cine film. We passed alcoves which we took to be abbots’ tombs, each carved slab resting beneath the gaze of a painted Christ. The silence was touched only by the piping of unseen birds and a faint chanting from somewhere. The place had the feel of a sleepy hamlet, but clouds were streaming off the heights above.
At last a young monk found us and led us to a balcony where the guest master – a genial patriarch who spoke no English – welcomed us with traditional ouzo, coffee and Turkish delight. Other monks were now gathering for vespers below. They looked too few for the spaces round them. In their soft black caps and black cassocks they walked like shadows. Their hair was drawn back and twisted into buns, but gushing grey beards turned everyone over forty-five into a Methuselah. When we descended to join them, the eyes that stared back at us looked guarded and overcast. I wondered what they were seeing, or if these men knew any language but their own.
The sun was setting. The domed church, painted in faded rose, gave no hint of what was inside. In the porch a stately elder asked us: ‘Roman Catholic?’
Vincent said: ‘Protestant.’
Gently the monk ushered us to seats in the narthex: high, creaking pews where we propped ourselves awkwardly and could glimpse the service only through an archway into the sanctuary. We had, I realised, been relegated to a zone for heretics; but as the rite proceeded, any anger faded. We were spectators of a ceremony utterly mysterious. For hours two bodiless voices in the sanctuary carried a thread of prayer in lonely antiphony. Often the only sound was a thin patter, as if the readers were chattering to God, and we understood no word except an endlessly recurring Kyrie Eleison, ‘O Lord have mercy’.
Even in this gloom, by the waning light, I saw that every wall and ceiling was covered with frescoes. Unfamiliar saints held up their books and swords in threat or blessing. They filled the dark with their gaze. Inside the sanctuary the giant candlesticks and chandeliers and gilded thrones and icons were fading to glimmers. Among them an old wood-burning stove sent a rusty flue pipe into the cupola. Meanwhile the cowled monks shuffled in and out at random, pausing to light candles, stooping to kiss the icons one by one, or to press their lips to a frescoed foot or hand. Sometimes they murmured together, or fell asleep in their pews.
I could only guess what the others were feeling. Vincent was craned forward in his seat with a concentrated scrutiny, as if to wrench out some meaning; Julian lounged a little, detached but interested; Ross looked scared. The only pilgrims were a pair of Greek pensioners and a violent-looking youth who embraced the icons with shivering fingers.
As the chanting continued, I lapsed into baffled wonderment. A monk in a crimson chasuble strode into our narthex, censing the icons, censing us, in gusts of blue perfume. I stood up to receive this, copying the monks around me. My bewilderment was painless, almost peaceful. This plainsong descended from ancient Byzantium, I knew, and its language had barely changed from that of the New Testament. I heard no Protestant yearning in it, only a timeless monody, as if all the questings of our distant seminary were useless, even arrogant, before some unknowable grace. Here the sacred and the secular had become conflated, and I imagined the monks moving casually in the anteroom of God.
Julian murmured to me: ‘Reverence is immaterial here . . .’
In the dying light the painted martyrs and angels were dimming from our sight. But the amber haloes still glowed around their darkening faces, until at last nothing but this disembodied sanctity survived, like so many golden coins scattered over the walls.
I think this was the last time we were happy together. Some spell had enveloped us all. Julian and Vincent even imagined that the monks’ vespers reflected the certitude and liturgical austerity of the early Church. Its celebrants might have been revenants from another time. That evening we ate in the refectory – a frescoed chamber built half a millennium ago for several hundred monks. Watched by the gaunt saints limned on the walls, we supped in silence to the drone of a novice’s reading, seated with other pilgrims at chunky marble tables. Our fare was a thin vegetable soup – it was the fasting time of Lent – with bread and olives.
Our dormitory was whitewashed bare. An icon of the Virgin hung in one corner, with her oil lamp lit beneath it. The guest master crossed himself in silence, then left us alone. I had brought a camp stove with me, and we lit this for warmth, huddled on the edge of our beds. There, locked in my failing memory, we remain unageing, and are conversing together softly, although there is nobody to overhear. Vincent’s hands are outstretched to the gas flame. His hollowed cheeks and dark eyes still look grimly medieval, but he is smiling. Julian has cowled himself in a blanket like a music-hall monk; and Ross, with his odd, reticent sweetness, is passing us cream chocolates from his backpack. We are unmoored from everything familiar, drawn closer by our isolation here, and I sense the mountain silence all around us like an embalmment: for Athos is a closed theocracy, a country without women, where nobody was ever born, but only dies. Even time here is strange. The monks follow the Julian calendar, abandoned elsewhere four centuries ago, and they tell the hours in the old Byzantine mode, starting the day from sunset. In the cells around us they must be praying alone, reading their canon of Church Fathers unknown to us, or perhaps murmuring the Jesus prayer, whose solitary exercise brings them to salvation. We can hear the waves beating on the rocks far below.
As for myself, I looked like a boyish replica of Vincent in those days: lean and strong, but too sensitive for my own peace – and very ignorant. In truth, we all were.
The Revelation of St John the Divine was a mystery never studied in the seminary; but along the muralled arcades of the monastic church its Apocalypse unfurled in meticulous detail. Here were the trumpeting angels and the four destroying horsemen, the nameless Beast of the Sea and the lion-headed horses puffing brimstone; and the monk who showed us round next morning, reviving some half-forgotten English, pointed them out with stentorian authority as if the rolling-up of time were imminent.
We gazed in perplexity. All through the church and refectory the severe and brilliant frescoes seemed to return us to a primitive, purer time, closer to scripture. Gospel episodes – Christ’s baptism, the Nativity, the raising of Lazarus – became newly unfamiliar to me. In their bare economy, they took on the force of sublime facts. And a sense of triumph suffused them. The Crucifixion barely featured, and when it did, the agony of Western portraiture was absent. Instead, angels were flying in to collect Christ’s blood in a chalice. Even the scenes of martyrdom were not fleshly tragedies but divine celebrations, in which the executioners too were going about the business of salvation. Their expressions were no different from those of their victims, which remained mild and pain-free even as their heads were flying off – with haloes still intact – at the swing of a sword.
As the ranks of alien saints multiplied – St Basil the Great, St Gregory Palamas, St Maximus the Confessor – Vincent became impatient and irritated: the murals were crude, he said, without depth or perspective. But Julian scrutinised them with fascination. Their artists, he guessed, were not inept, but simply had no interest in perspective. Their frescoes did not draw a spectator in, but projected themselves as living presences. They were sacred propaganda.
Our guiding monk spoke of them matter-of-factly. Here, for him, was all the meaningful past and the promised future. He stopped before a huge fresco of the Last Judgement. His face was nested so deep in beard that only a pair of soft hazel eyes shone through, and seemed to contradict the booming majesty of his voice. From the throne of God a river of fire carried the damned into the mouth of Hell, where Satan writhed (a pilgrim had scratched out his eyes). The monk answered Ross’s qualms with implacable certainty: no, this was not extinction but eternal torment. ‘This is what God has said. There are sheep, there are goats . . .’
Damnation always troubled Ross: he, who seemed least destined for it. Enclosed by the stained glass of the portico, the Judgement was inflamed still further by blocks of reflected purple and green light. As the monk pointed out the figures drowning eternally in fire, Ross said: ‘These are only symbols . . .’
It is strange, in retrospect, what power we accorded these aged monks, with their ascetic robes and God-like beards. For our guide, nothing scriptural could be symbolic. He repeated remorselessly: ‘This is what will happen.’
Ross turned away. ‘I think in Orthodoxy,’ he said, ‘you don’t believe that people inherit Adam’s sin. But in the West we follow St Augustine. He said that we’re damned from before birth and our passions are turned to one another instead of to God.’ He looked oddly wretched. ‘We’re always in sin.’
The monk frowned back at him, not quite understanding, but repeated: ‘We are always in sin.’ The next moment he was declaring: ‘The Apocalypse is not far now. The world is turning to Lucifer. His agents are warring against Mount Athos. They mean to destroy us.’ The hazel eyes still shone mildly out, as if severed from his words. ‘But our trust is in the Virgin. You’ve seen her icon in the church. She has promised to feed and protect us always . . .’
He began to ramble, sometimes talking about world destruction, sometimes about his cats, and his momentary and delusive power leaked away. Only Ross went on seeming troubled. In the painted refectory, reaching the alcove where the high table stood, I found him staring up at the mural of the Last Supper that overarched it. He smiled weakly at me, then asked: ‘Who do you think was “the disciple that Jesus loved”?’
‘I’m not sure, Ross.’ Many think that the unnamed disciple who rested against Christ’s breast at the Last Supper was the youthful St John. But why he was singled out as Christ’s beloved, nobody knew.
Tensely Ross asked: ‘Can it have been different, do you think? I mean, what He felt . . .’
I answered unthinking: ‘The Gospel doesn’t say.’
We lingered a moment longer. Ross said out of the blue: ‘I’m sorry.’
Above us in the dark the fair young head inclined across the chest of Jesus, while Ross went on gazing up. But still I did not understand.