Brotherhood of the Tomb Page 2

  ... Then there’s a couple of words I can’t make out, then As far as I can interpret it, it reads: “This is the tomb of James son of Joseph, master and shepherd ... the community which is in Jerusalem - killed at the command of Hananiah the high priest in the days after the death of Festus the governor.” ‘

  Migliau said nothing. His breath caught tightly in his chest, but he was unable to breathe out. He was no scholar, but he knew enough to understand just what the inscription was about, whose bones it referred to. James, the brother of Jesus, first head of the Christian community in Jerusalem, had been stoned to death with some others in ad 62. By decree of the Sanhedrin. On the orders of Hananiah - Ananias.

  The bishop did not know what to do. He wanted to weep or shout or find some other means of giving voice to the emotion he felt, but all he could manage was to stare at the stone as though the very sight had struck him dumb. He breathed out at last and reached for Aharoni, grabbing him hard by the upper arm.

  ‘Are you certain?’ he demanded.

  The Israeli placed a hand on his, dislodging his fingers.

  Aharoni paused. ‘No, I’m not certain. The lettering’s poor, this light is terrible. But I think I’m right. When you see the other two, you’ll understand.’

  ‘Understand? Understand what?’

  ‘You’ll see.’ The Israeli stood and went across to the second ossuary. It was simpler than the first, but otherwise of the same design and quality. The outline of a tree had been carved on the lid, but the sides bore no pattern, only a brief inscription. Migliau knew how it would read. He had known for years.

  Aharoni read awkwardly, as though the words refused to surrender themselves to him.’ “The bones of Miryam, wife of Joseph, mother of Jesus and James. Peace be upon her.”’

  The light made ghastly shadows all across the walls and ceiling. Migliau thought he could hear them as they moved, like vast black wings flapping in the enclosed space, the wings of blind, outraged birds. He raised a hand as though to ward them off, but they grew still and left him in a vast silence.

  ‘There’s one more,’ said Aharoni, and to Migliau the voice seemed to come from the other end of the universe.

  Together, they walked the last few paces to the third and final sarcophagus. It was a thing drained of colour, white and delicately carved, yet very solid, as though it was not hollow at all but a single block hewn from living stone. Migliau watched as Aharoni ran a hand lightly along the lid.

  On the side, among the rosettes and incised patterns, a circle stood out in sharp relief. Inside it there was carved a seven-branched menorah, the Temple candlestick, taken by the Romans when they destroyed Jerusalem in the year 70. This was not a normal menorah, however. The six side branches were the usual shape, but the middle column was shaped in the form of a cross. Beneath the circle, a row of sharply-cut characters struggled for expression in the light.

  He read in a slow voice, meticulously pronouncing each word, not with the awkwardness of uncertainty, but with the precision of one who knows exactly what it is he is reading and what it signifies:

  He fell silent. Migliau had understood. Not every word, not every syllable, perhaps, but as much as was needful. Aharoni could not bear to look up, to see him watching him. There was nothing he could do, nothing. He had read the inscription. It only remained to translate it.

  “The body of Jesus, son of Joseph and Miryam, who was crucified at the command of Pontius Pilate, governor of Judaea, in the fourth year of his governorship. And he was the sacrifice which completes the offering of the Temple, and he is buried in this place to bring everything to fulfilment in our days. Peace be upon him.”

  For a long time, neither man spoke. Words were inappropriate, dangerous. Neither man could bear to look the other in the eye, Jew and Gentile, believer and unbeliever. Two thousand years of misunderstandings stood between them.

  Once, Migliau almost giggled out loud. A terrible tension had taken hold of him. He felt simultaneously

  euphoric and appalled, like a child brought suddenly into the presence of adult matters. In an instant, a lifetime’s doubts had been resolved and transformed to certainty. What had been mere belief had become knowledge. His search was over. And his mission was about to begin.

  Time passed as though it no longer had any meaning. Finally, Aharoni broke the silence.

  ‘Bishop Migliau,’ he whispered, ‘I think we should go. There may still be someone working late at the Museum. This will have to be reported. Arrangements will have to be made. You understand that this is ... monumental. We must take steps to ensure that news of this discovery is not leaked prematurely. You do understand? If word got out before there was time for a proper investigation ... I think there might be trouble. Newspapers, television - every newspaper, every television company in the world! We couldn’t cope with that, not without help.

  ‘And there may be political dimensions - do you understand me? Your church will naturally demand a say in what happens. No doubt it is exceptionally fortunate for them that you are here. But the Orthodox churches will want their say too. Then the Anglicans. The other Protestants. Everyone will want his pound of flesh.’ He winced, thinking he had chosen an unfortunate expression. ‘But look at the inscriptions, look at the sarcophagi: this is a Jewish tomb. Doesn’t it seem that way to you? You do understand, don’t you?’

  Aharoni knew that a Catholic bishop was as big a complication as anyone in his position could possibly have feared. Another archaeologist would have appreciated the need for caution, for tact. But Migliau would want to milk this for all it was worth. Aharoni had heard that the bishop was ambitious, that he had expectations of being made a cardinal. To be associated with a discovery of this order would no doubt secure all that and more for him. And he would, of course, want to be sure that his own church had total control over the tombs: they would not want another Holy Sepulchre on their hands, divided among warring factions like a bone between packs of squabbling dogs.

  ‘No, Doctor Aharoni,’ said the Italian. He looked up. All his diffidence had evaporated. He was coming to terms with their discovery at a rapid pace. ‘I don’t understand you. I don’t see what you’re driving at.’

  The big man took a step towards Aharoni. In the confined space, he seemed to tower over him. His tension was becoming anger. The Israeli could not understand it.

  ‘I merely meant...’

  ‘It seemed to me that you implied some sort of ownership for your people. “A Jewish tomb”, you said. Do you intend to take possession here as you have just taken control of the Temple Mount? You hold the third holiest shrine of Islam. Now, perhaps, you think you have some right to this.’

  ‘No. No, of course not. We just have to be careful. This is not a Christian country. If you think ...’

  ‘I have already thought. You want to make a fetish of your Jewishness. Isn’t that right? You want to wave it in front of me like a flag, until I nod and say, “Yes, this is yours. And this. And this. Take it all. Mea cul-pa. You have suffered enough. Take what you want in recompense.”’

  Migliau’s voice was growing guttural and menacing. He felt hemmed in by the walls, and as much threatened as uplifted by what he had found. More than anything, he felt an obscure resentment against Aharoni building in him like a tide. It was irrational, he hardly knew the man, had no reason to fear or hate him, yet it rankled to have him here.

  ‘Your Excellency, please ... you misunderstand.’ Aharoni sensed the bishop’s anger. It frightened him, here in this confined space, with so little light.

  ‘I think you should leave.’

  What...?’

  ‘I think you should get out of here. This is a holy place. I don’t expect you to understand that. But I do. You’ve no right to be here. No right at all.’

  But that was no good. If the Jew left, he would only bring more back with him. They ran this city now. They would just march into God’s inner sanctum and claim it for their own. He hated them for their self-righteousness, f
or their sanctimonious possession of the land where his saviour had walked. A stiffnecked people, that’s what God had called them. And now, here they were, about to lay godless hands on the mortal remains of God’s son.

  ‘I think we should both leave,’ said Aharoni. The Italian was over-reacting to their discovery. Perhaps it was understandable. Aharoni, who wasn’t even a practising Jew, let alone a Christian, had been deeply moved by what they had found. He appreciated its emotional charge. That was why he wanted the whole thing handled properly, before the wreckers and sloganizers and opportunists had a chance to move in. With a shudder, he remembered how an American company had offered to market pieces from the wreck of the Titanic as paperweights. What would Jesus’s bones fetch on the Stock Exchange?

  He took a step forward and put a hand on the big man’s arm. Migliau grabbed his wrist and pulled him towards himself.

  Tour Messiah came and you crucified him. And now you want to turn his bones into some sort of political toy, something your politicians can use to bargain with. You...’

  ‘Please, I don’t want some sort of religious argument with you. That’s not my problem.’

  All his life, Bishop Migliau had been waiting for this moment. He had never doubted that there would be a tomb, never doubted that he would be the one to find it. But in his imagination, he had always been alone at the moment of discovery. Aharoni had never figured in his calculations before this moment.

  ‘Please God,’ he thought, ‘tell me what to do. You have guided me here, you have given me this honour. I need your help. I can’t do this alone.’

  He looked round, at Aharoni, at the tomb. His whole life had been rewritten here, on a limestone box in an unlit sepulchre - an imperfect inscription by an unknown hand. In that moment, he knew what he had to do. What God wanted him to do. It was God’s will. The Jew wanted to tell the unbelieving world of this place. He could not be allowed to do that. God would not let him.

  Migliau looked once into Aharoni’s eyes.

  ‘Forgive me,’ he whispered. But he knew that God had already forgiven him.

  He pushed the Israeli hard. Aharoni stumbled backwards, losing his balance. He tripped and fell, striking his head hard on the sharp corner of the middle sarcophagus. He did not even cry out. There was no time between push and crushing blow, between fall and final agony. Death was instantaneous. Blood streamed across the white stone, bright and gleaming.

  Migliau watched the red stain spread and listened to his heart beating in the stillness. He felt the weight of the sepulchre all about him, and the air moving heavily through it without sound. He heard the rustle of shadowed wings again, harsh above the beating of his heart. Aharoni lay slumped where he had fallen, a scarlet pool forming beneath him among shadows on the floor.

  He lifted the lamp and shone it on the coffins. Aharoni lay unmoving at the Saviour’s feet. The blood had stopped flowing. Migliau turned and looked at the little opening through which they had entered. There was plenty of time. It would not be too difficult to put the entrance slab back as it had been. He could push it along the floor, up into the first tomb, then tilt it back into the opening.

  The generators would provide their harsh lighting again in the morning. No one would ever find the break in the wall. No one would ever know that another tomb existed. It had remained hidden all these years, it would remain hidden now.

  In three days they would rebury the bones of the dead and seal the tomb again. The bulldozers and cement mixers would return to work. Houses would be built, and shops, and car parks. Next year, he would buy the entire development through one of his family’s holding companies. He had come into his true inheritance at last.

  THREE

  Trinity College Dublin October 1968

  Her name was Francesca. His friend Liam had told him during Commons one evening. Francesca Contarini, an Italian. Her family lived in Venice, in a golden palace, so Liam said. With servants and painted rooms and a private gondola to go to Mass in. She had been sent to Dublin to improve her English, which was already fluent, and to study English and Italian literature. He had been madly in love with her for over two weeks now.

  Patrick Canavan had arrived in Dublin five months earlier. He was eighteen, American, and in search of a heritage. Twenty years before, almost to the day, in the summer of 1948, his parents had said goodbye to the city and set off for a new life in America. They had sent him back alone, a sort of ambassador to the past.

  He had found its frontiers and outposts everywhere: in the names of streets and theatres; in the river by night, ripening and spreading like a long, thin stain through the heart of the sleeping city; in the voices of beggars on O’Connell Bridge, young pale-faced women with paler babies wrapped in shawls, selling their poverty for the price of a wheaten farl.

  The summer had passed like a dream. He had stayed and got drunk on Guinness and cheap red wine, and late one night in August found himself on the beach at Dalkey, kissing his first girl and dreaming that he had found his roots. At eighteen, the Celtic twilight seemed full of promise.

  The girl had left two weeks later. Kissing on a beach and holding hands while the moon swept over a white sea had been fine enough for the time of year, she said. But those other things he was suggesting would only lead them both as sure as crikey to the fires of hell. He had yet to learn that virgins are Ireland’s oldest, largest and best-organized professional group.

  In spite of his disappointment - and perhaps even because of it - he decided to stay. The city spoke to him in whispers of things he barely understood. It revealed itself to him slowly, nervously, in quiet, distracted gestures, in unexpected moments of intimacy. Suddenly, Brooklyn seemed a universe away, a noisy place full of noisy people.

  Once, on a long afternoon as summer drew to its close, he lay on the cricket pitch at the back of Trinity and watched a student fly a red kite against a pale blue sky. The moment entranced him: at eighteen, a kite in the wind can seem as substantial as a kiss. At the beginning of September, he enrolled at the College to study Semitic languages.

  Autumn was turning to winter now, and an elaborate stillness lay across the grey expanse of Trinity’s inner courts. Inside the 1937 Reading Room, a dim, academic light fell across endless rows of books. He sat two tables away from her, glancing up from time to time to catch a furtive glimpse of her face. Even when he looked away again, pretending to read, her image swam across the page: long, dark hair falling in a stream against her shoulder, grey eyes opening in the book-warm half-light, small white teeth pressed against her lower lip, the slope of tiny breasts against thin fabric.

  Strictly speaking, he should not have been here but in the main library. The Reading Room was reserved for literature students, and it had no books on his own subject. But a large part of Ireland’s attraction for him lay in the country’s literature, which he had begun to discover. He had already become a regular theatregoer, attending performances at the Abbey, the Peacock and the Gate. On one occasion, he’d travelled up to Belfast to see a trilogy of plays by Yeats, directed by Mary O’Malley at the tiny Lyric Theatre.

  Now he was reading Yeats’s collected poems, partly because they matched his romantic mood, but mainly because they gave him an excuse to sit in the 1937 Reading Room stealing glances at a girl he might never meet. He looked at the page.

  O cloud-pale eyelids, dream-dimmed eyes The poets labouring all their days To build a perfect beauty in rhyme Are overthrown by a woman’s gaze.

  There was a play at the Abbey tonight, Yeats’s Deirdre. He had bought two tickets with the intention of asking her if she would like to come; but the longer he sat and watched her, intently reading in the pale green light, the more his resolution faltered.

  Suddenly she closed her book and stood up. She had not been in the library more than half an hour, surely she could not be leaving already. He watched her guardedly, knowing he could never summon the courage to ask her out. She went upstairs to the balcony and began looking along the shelves. Five
minutes later, she came down another set of stairs and began to make her way back to her table.

  As she passed behind him, she glanced down at the book he was reading.

  ‘Scusi. Excuse me.’

  She was standing beside him, speaking in a whisper. He looked up. His heart was beating disagreeably fast and his tongue had turned to lead. Cloud-pale eyelids, dream-dimmed eyes...

  ‘You are reading Yeats. Yes?’

  ‘I... I... Yes. Yes, Yeats. W.B. Yeats.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry. I was looking for a copy. I have one, but not with me. When you are finish, maybe I can borrow this one.’

  What? Oh, no, it’s okay, you can have it. Really. I was just... sort of filling in time. I really should be reading something else.’

  She hesitated, but he closed the volume and pressed it into her hand. She smiled and thanked him, then returned to her seat. For what seemed an age, he did not move. She had spoken to him. She had let him lend her a book. Not his own book, admittedly, but a book of poems he loved.

  For the next hour he tried to concentrate on Deirdre, as though reading it might make it possible she would go with him tonight. But the mournful stanzas only saddened and distressed him.

  What’s the merit in love-play, In the tumult of the limbs That dies out before ‘tis day, Heart on heart, or mouth on mouth, All that mingling of our breath, When love-longing is but drouth For the things come after death?

  ‘Thank you.’

  She was standing beside him again, holding out the book, smiling. He took a deep breath. His mind had filled with palaces and gondolas and sheer, blind terror.

  ‘I ... I was going to go across to the buttery for a coffee. Would you like to come?’

  She put the book down.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘But I have an essay to finish. They take me a long time.’

  He saw her turn to go and thought it was all over. But she hesitated and turned back.

  ‘Maybe tomorrow,’ she said. ‘If I finish my essay on time.’