Night of Fire Read online

  I have lost the habit that I had long ago, of sensitised self-scrutiny, let alone confession. I am no longer grateful to an ungraspable divinity for my blessings, nor feel that my troubles are his purposeful affliction for my good. There is no more personal relationship to the unseen. I am, in a sense, free.

  Lying in the dormitory at night, when the oil lamp had died beneath an icon of the Baptist, I had a foretaste of this severance, as though I had left some harbour for the open sea. I had been too self-conscious to kneel by my bed, even before colleagues, and the God that I usually invoked there, the God I felt tingling inside me at prayer, seemed suddenly to have withdrawn. When I tried to speak with Him in the dark, it was as if I had asked a question into silence, and I felt no pain, only a dulled bewilderment. I gazed across at the blanketed shapes of the others, and they were momentarily strangers. I closed my eyes. In the swimming blackness, nothing happened. Only gradually did this alienation ebb away, and God returned, seeping back through the windows with the dawn.

  I hoped to slip into the church after matins. In the courtyard, constricted by battlements and multi-tiered dormitories, the wind barely stirred. But I shivered in the cold. The whole monastery seemed thrust violently against the mountain, its keep and belfry jostling for air. A few monks were returning from matins to their cells, leaving silence.

  I sheltered in the church portico, enclosed by stained glass. Above the doorway a pilgrim had hung a faded icon of the Virgin. I was peering up at this, thinking of Ross and Vincent, when Julian’s voice behind me said: ‘It’s odd, isn’t it?’ He seemed as composed as usual, with no trace of the night’s rack. Perhaps he had no memory of it. ‘The Virgin’s whole cult is based on a mistranslation. St Matthew translates the Hebrew ‘young woman’ of Isaiah’s prophecy into the Greek ‘virgin’. An easy slip. And from there, of course, everything flowed.’ He gave his impish smile. ‘But in those days, of course, anybody who was anybody had to be born of a virgin. Alexander, it was rumoured, even Julius Caesar . . .’

  I couldn’t help laughing. ‘Julian, what on earth do you believe?’

  He answered sharply: ‘I believe Christ died to take away our sins, not our minds.’

  Sometimes I felt that his abhorrence of sentimentality arose from conscious self-discipline, a barrier against another, indulgent self. Perhaps there was a Julian somewhere else who dreamt of valid miracles and unconditional forgiveness; but I would never meet him. I may have been remembering my pre-dawn bafflement, because I found myself saying: ‘It must be easier to be Vincent . . .’

  ‘I’m not sure. Vincent wants to be his father. It must be a horrible strain. I met his father once, when he visited the seminary, did I tell you? At first I thought Vincent had gone a bit grey and got even taller. His father is huge. He’s chairman of something-or-other big. Vincent told me his paternal advice was: ‘Never say you’re sorry.’’

  Julian sat down on the bench under the stained-glass porch. He too was shivering. His habitual playfulness dropped away. ‘I’m not saying Vincent is seeking God because of his father. I don’t know why God calls people.’ He looked up at me. ‘Maybe He called you through your mother’s death.’

  I said: ‘I’d decided before that.’

  ‘Well then, I dare say your calling is as mysterious as mine.’ The old levity returned. ‘There’s nothing in my family to explain anything. My father works for the local council, perfectly boring. I have no desire to mimic him or replace him with a divine patriarch, let alone earn the grace of the Holy Mother’ – he glanced up at her icon. ‘My mother is rather plain and works in a bank.’

  ‘And Ross . . .’ I began, staring at the floor. Its black and white tiles spread away like a giant chessboard. ‘Do you think he is replacing his absent father with Vincent?’

  ‘Yes, in a way.’

  I marvelled then at how easily we all spoke now that we’d left the seminary. I’d discovered more about my companions during the past few days than in many previous months. In a sense the brotherhood of the seminary levelled us all; but now I realised that Vincent’s family was rather grand – he’d been to a small public school, like me – whereas Ross was the only child of a broken home, and his mother took in lodgers.

  Julian said: ‘With Ross it may be different. I’m not sure. He’s a sweet boy.’ He glanced at me, unsure what I understood. ‘I think he’s very ashamed. I don’t think he wants to be what he is. His background can’t be very understanding . . .’

  But the next moment the two of them appeared, Vincent and Ross, stacked with their backpacks and trekking poles, and joking: ‘We thought you’d gone!’

  Within an hour the wild peninsula had changed again. By the time we reached a ruined watchtower on the shore, a hard, brilliant sun was playing over the sea. We sat in the scrub and munched our iron rations in silence. To our north, a curtain wall of mountains plunged sheer to the waves, appearing to seal us into the cove, before we noticed a goat track vanishing up its rocks. This happened again and again. Some giant spur or declivity would seem to put a full stop to our path, but minutes later an unseen passage would be worming around ravines, or finding a pass between precipitous ridges.

  Perhaps it is only in retrospect that I imagine some dynamic changed among our group, because I cannot identify it. Vincent still strode or clambered ahead, his eyes shaded by an old cloth cap, with Ross following, sometimes breathless, and Julian in cavalry twills and a paisley scarf, too dapper for this rough country. In my memory, too, I go light-headed behind them, young even for twenty-two, watching them make their unequal way along the cliffs, while the peninsula has coalesced around us all into a static blaze of rocks and sea. And here the open wound of my mother’s death begins to close a little, as if the bottled grief of the seminary were being cleansed in the clear light.

  We reached the monastery of Dionysiou by noon. From its plinth of coagulated rock, so steep that no shrub touched it, the sheer glacis of the monastery walls, slit with loopholes, burst into galleries sixty feet in the air. Some monks were tending olive trees on the terrace below; and beyond the entrance ramp, where the iron-bound doors stood ajar under frescoes of girlish archangels, the courtyard was mellow with birdsong and incense. Its gates and passages ended in vistas of mountain or sea, and a decrepit clock tower told the Byzantine hours.

  A courteous old monk welcomed us with coffee and Turkish delight, and escorted us to tiny cells with windows on to blankness. That evening we dined in the painted refectory, on pasta and lentils, while readings from the Church Fathers, intoned by a nervous novice, compelled us to silence. Afterwards, in the solitude of my cell, I got down on the cold slabs and prayed to the God who had eluded me the night before, and his feel was familiar again, palpable, so that I lay calm at last in the hard bed.

  The monastic semantron was an iron bar which a monk beat with a hammer to summon the brethren to prayer. At four in the morning its call to matins rang plangent in the dark, and I got up, after rare hours of insomnia, remembering how the liturgy had mystified me before, but curious again, and expectant.

  As I crossed the deserted courtyard to the church, scattering a mob of cats, I seemed to be the only worship-per. At first I could make out almost nothing. A few oil lamps dangled disembodied lights, and here and there a candle guttered under an icon. At long intervals black-veiled monks filtered into the sanctuary, while the lonely chant of cantor and reader started up its conversation in the dark. Sometimes I got up from my pew, as the monks did, and followed their leisurely itinerary into the side chapels among the grander icons, where they lit their votive tapers.

  As the hours wore on, I came to think that the timeless rite, for all its invocations to forgiveness, had already crossed some threshold into the beneficence of God. Julian had mentioned that these churches were a mirror of the celestial world, following a changeless scheme, and I began dimly to discern this. To the shambling and comfortable monks, I realised, the walls opened on to paradise, and the life-size saints and Fathers, unfu
rling their scrolls or unsheathing swords, were present with us in prayer.

  It was a strange realisation, aroused by the hallowing candles that now burned beneath the icons, and awakening the frescoes out of their other world. For a while, three or four late-assembled pilgrims – they looked like farmers – blocked my view into the inner sanctum, but at a ritual climax, as the Kyrie Eleison pleaded again for mercy, they knelt and laid their lips to the marble floor. Among them, with a jolt of fear, I saw and heard the sunburst of a blond head striking the marble, and as he withdrew, I glimpsed the glittering eyes of Ross, more distraught than I had ever seen him. His pink cheeks were streaming tears. He knelt again, almost prostrate, while the deep ‘O Lord have mercy’ re-echoed from the cantor. I felt a shock of sadness. I wanted to go over to him, but did not. I remained rooted to my pew, fearful of his privacy. Sometimes, in retrospect, I despise myself.

  When the pilgrims moved away from the sanctuary arch, there was nobody there any more – I even wondered if I had imagined him. The two monks beside me were fast asleep, and the others barely stirring. The church, in this inflamed light, was becoming as they wished: the refraction of God’s universe, inhabited less by men – who had grown small in His worship – than by the supernatural populace looming from the walls and columns, ignited by human prayer, and growing minute by minute closer and more alive.

  At the end of the service some trestle tables were assembled, and I feared a funeral. But instead three relics from the treasury were displayed for pilgrims’ worship. I was glad that Ross was not here, nor Julian, to witness this credulity. In their enamelled frames lay a splinter of the True Cross, a bone of St Paraskeve (sovereign against blindness), and the left arm of John the Baptist, still dangling some skin.

  I hung back from these, while the farmers fell on their knees again, and the monk in charge ushered them forward one by one to gaze and kiss, before ordering the relics away. I noticed this monk watching me – a man still young but in some authority (the others kissed his hand) – and before I left he came over and said in grave, deliberate English: ‘You understand we do not adore these things for themselves. They are not idols. God’s grace is in them.’ He had seen me recoil from what was precious to him, and he wanted me to understand. In his sallow face the eyes looked black and anxious, but the mouth spoke donnishly from a silken beard. ‘You are one of the Protestant group, are you not?’ He murmured a welcome. ‘Do you believe in the resurrection of the body?’

  ‘Of a spiritual body . . .’

  He looked relieved. He touched my forearm, like a blessing. ‘St Paul said the body is the temple of the spirit, and the righteous will rise clothed in it. Even in this world the body is holy. So the relics too are holy.’ He was smiling. ‘Our bodies wait for redemption. That is why we bury our brothers in the earth. All things will be freed from the chains of corruption.’

  I heard myself say: ‘The earthly body doesn’t matter.’ My mother had wanted cremation. ‘It’s gone to ashes . . .’ But I still found this hard to say.

  He clicked his tongue. ‘I think that in Protestantism you are very separate from your dead. I’m told you do not pray for them.’

  ‘No, we don’t.’ I heard my own regret. Perhaps he heard it too.

  ‘That is very wrong. You do them wrong.’

  I didn’t know what to say.

  ‘We pray for our departed. We pray for them while they are being purified before the Last Day. And I think they pray for us. That is an important thing.’ His eyes flickered to the fresco above us, where Christ was pulling Adam and Eve astonished from their graves. ‘Every week we eat the koliva cake in memory of our brothers, as a petition for their souls.’

  I thought then: how strange. In the seminary we were taught that the dead were beyond our help, and we beyond theirs. The chasm was absolute. But now a cold ache opened in my stomach. Was it only a chance of history or geography – or a theological text – that separated us from the Orthodox belief?

  The monk said: ‘My father is dead, but we pray for one another. I feel it.’ He crossed himself, and lifted his head. ‘You may even pray for the Devil if you like!’ This brought on a sudden uproarious laugh. It echoed incongruously around the now-empty sanctuary; then his expression recomposed, as if he had regretted his thought.

  We walked from the church and into the dawn-lit courtyard. In parting he said: ‘I think the dead are sometimes alive among us. There are miracles that have happened.’

  I did not want to hear these miracles – they might stain his fleeting authority – and I was glad when he said goodbye. I went out for a while to a little kiosk beyond the gates. It overlooked an empty sea. A narrow stream, swollen by spring rain, was clattering down the ravine behind, and I watched it glimmer in the thin light, feeling a faint sickness.

  That night I prayed for my mother’s soul.

  This was our last day. On our way down to the shore we passed the chapel that the monk had spoken of, where the bones of the dead brethren were heaped in an open-air ossuary. We gazed at them numbly, so impersonal did they seem, reduced almost to mineral: femurs, tibias, pelvic girdles all stacked together in kind, and the skulls in bleached ranks, yet each painted with a name.

  By mid-morning, as we climbed the cliffs, the coast unfurled again below, and the sky was blazing. Vincent and I exchanged trousers for shorts in the sudden heat, and Julian put on a jaunty straw hat. We slipped into our accustomed places as though into a natural order: Vincent’s lean-muscled legs preceding Ross up the scarp, Julian dabbing at the sweat under his hat, I following dreamily behind.

  Toward midday we ate a frugal picnic, bolstered by two bottles of local wine, which Julian had bought from the monks of Dionysiou. On Vincent it had no discernible effect, but Ross gulped down whole cupfuls, as if he had never drunk before, and joked that it might cure his vertigo. After a while Julian pronounced it undrinkably sweet, and poured the second bottle into the rocks.

  As we started north again in the noon hush, there was no more birdsong. Even the waves were silenced by distance. Underfoot, white lichen splashed the stones, and unknown flowers grew. The light was so clear that a ship far out to sea was as distinct as the trees beside us.

  We reached a pass where a wayside shrine, painted white and blue, sheltered a flame-blackened image and a melted candle. On either side the mountains poured to the sea. I have wondered sometimes what might have been averted had there been no bench there, where we sat for a while, or if Julian had not bought wine. As it was, we propped our rucksacks against a boulder and slumped down, three of us panting a little. The light was dazzling. A hawk circled us in the breathless air. Far below, a red-roofed monastery was nestled above the sea.

  I remember now Ross’s flush as he sat beside Vincent – the wine, perhaps, mounting to his neck, his cheeks. He seemed in a sort of ecstasy. The land’s beauty, the dazing light, the alcohol: I don’t know what released him at this moment. But he turned to Vincent beside him and exclaimed at nature’s power in a voice turned loud and high in its own rejoicing. The memory of his delusion still tightens my throat when I think of it. One of Vincent’s legs was spread carelessly against him – the lean thigh flecked with black hairs – and Vincent’s gaze, released by the sun, indulgently met Ross’s own.

  It seemed such a slight thing, in the end. Wretchedly slight. I cannot remember precisely what Ross said. But his gaze on Vincent was rapt and unflinching. I noticed he had an erection. Then he leant forward and clasped Vincent’s thigh with his hand, squeezing its sinew. His mouth had fallen open.

  I felt cold with apprehension. Something known but unacknowledged had surfaced into the light. I saw Vincent’s cheeks tauten, and his jaw. Very deliberately, he reached down and disengaged Ross’s hand. Grasping his wrist, he carried the hand clear across Ross’s body and laid it as far away from himself as he could. Then he stood up, hoisted his backpack and walked on.

  A terrible shock came over Ross’s face. All the joy – the rush of intoxicated ecs
tasy – had drained from it in an instant. He had turned chalk white. His head sank and his hands were trembling. For a long time nobody made a move. At last he murmured: ‘You go on, go on . . .’ So Julian and I followed Vincent along the levelled path, and down to the last monastery, in silence, while the heat ebbed out of the sky.

  One other memory survives from that journey. In the small port from which a bus would return us to Thessaloniki – Mount Athos now far out of sight – we spent the last hours on a deserted beach. A few gulls were pacing along the tideline, and grey pebbles shone under the waves. From childhood I had loved to bathe in a cold sea, and that morning the spring heat, and perhaps recent events, nerved me to wade in.

  Vincent and Julian remained on the shore, thinking me mad. Then I saw that Ross, standing on a ledge beneath them, had stripped to his underpants. He plunged into the freezing water, crying out: ‘It’s fine! Come on in!’ and revolving his shoulders above the waves in hectic bravado. The damp yellow helmet of his hair turned him for a moment into a different man. But close to, I saw that he was pink and shaky, and the stroke of his crawl was an uncoordinated flailing. Yet he continued to match me stroke for stroke in the icy sea.

  It’s hard to think of the following days with detachment. And I cannot trust my memory. I know only that an odd depression descended on me. I couldn’t locate its precise cause, or slough it off. The seminary now seemed dark, physically dark. I ascribed this to the contrast between an overcast England and the remembered clarity of Athos, but my eyes never again filled the place with light. Our holiday receded in my mind into its own country, and became a little unreal. Few of the other ordinands showed any interest in it. Many were still haunted by Bradley’s defection, and the dedication noticeboard was plastered with prayers for his return to the light. My supervisor, I think, felt momentarily wary of us, mistaking my bewitchment at Greece’s scenery and my curiosity at its liturgy as a drift towards Orthodoxy, and even Howell, in his bluff way, joked: ‘Don’t go muttering mystic prayers instead of studying your bible!’ When I read about Orthodoxy, trying to understand those distant monks, I imagined that the gulf between West and East was due less to theology than to a profound difference in temperament, which a thousand years had deepened, and I could imagine no bridge across.