Scott Mariani - The Martyr’s Curse

Finally, one cold midwinter’s evening by the glow of a crackling wood fire, as the snow fell silently outside over the mountains and layered the roofs and walls of the monastery buildings under the silver moonlight, without being asked, Ben had told the Father Master of Novices what was in his heart.

Jeff Dekker, the former SBS commando who had been his business partner and closest friend, would have thought Ben had lost his mind. This was the guy who’d never once turned away from trouble, even when the odds were at their suicidal craziest. Who’d taken down the worst of the worst and protected the innocent as if he’d been born to it. Adventure and risk were in his blood.

But not any more. Those days were now over for good.

Ben had said, ‘I want to stay.’

It had been after that discussion that Ben had been taken to see the prior. The head of the monastery lived in just the same kind of humble quarters as the other members of the order. His name was Père Antoine. He was over eighty, with a face deeply etched by wrinkles and what would have been a leonine mane of pure white hair if it hadn’t been for the monk’s tonsure shorn into it, symbolising the crown of thorns worn by Christ.

The first thing Ben noticed about Père Antoine was his eyes. They didn’t belong in an old man’s face. They seemed to glow like those of a happy child, as if filled with some kind of inner light that poured out of him. Ben found them mesmerising.

The two men spoke in French, after Ben explained that his was fluent and he had lived in France for a while. The old man smiled at the discovery that ‘Ben’ was short for Benedict, and addressed him by the French version of the name, Benoît. He gently invited him to talk about himself, which was something Ben found difficult. Secrecy was second nature to him, instilled by years of covert military operations and the work he’d done since leaving the army. But that wasn’t the only reason it was difficult for him to speak openly. Here, now, in the presence of the old monk, Ben felt a sense of shame.

‘I’ve done a lot of pretty bad things,’ he confessed.

‘Père Jacques tells me you were once a soldier. For how many years was that your occupation?’

‘Too many.’

‘During those years, Benoît, did you kill many people?’

Ben said nothing.

‘The memory of your past pains you, I see. But you atoned for your sins by leaving that path.’

‘I’m not sure if that counts as atonement, Father.’

‘It depends on the reason why you left.’

‘I didn’t like people telling me what to do.’

‘You have a problem with authority?’

‘It depends on who’s giving the orders. If it’s someone I respect, that’s one thing. If it’s some government stooge with a secret power agenda who expects me to do his dirty work for him on the pretext of protecting the realm, that’s another.’

‘You did not find your realm worth protecting?’

‘Not if it meant taking the lives of innocent people whose countries we invaded simply for reasons of territory and economics. That troubled me then. And it troubles me even more now, when I think about the things I did.’

‘And if your order came from God?’

‘I’m still waiting for that one,’ Ben said. ‘That’s the truth.’

‘Perhaps it has come already, but you do not see it.’

Ben didn’t reply.

The old monk nodded thoughtfully and reflected for a few moments. ‘By choice, I know little about the modern world. But history, I do know. These things you tell me – it was always so. This monastery was built during the time of the First Crusade. It is convenient for us to forget that the Christian forces who established the Holy Kingdom of Jerusalem, in so doing, carried out the wholesale massacre of thousands of innocent Muslim lives. It was not an act of faith, but of pure murder.’

Ben looked at him.

‘The Church’s past is tainted by many sins, and to force good men to do evil in the name of God is but one of them.’ Père Antoine smiled sadly. ‘It surprises you, to hear me speak this way.’

It did.

‘You speak of your shame for the things you did then,’ the monk went on. ‘But the goodness in you prevailed, Benoît. You left that life behind.’

‘I tried to,’ Ben said. ‘I wanted to use what I’d learned to do some good.’ He paused as he tried to find the right words. ‘Things happen in this world. Things you couldn’t even begin to imagine from up here. K and R is just one of them.’

‘You are right. I have no idea what that means.’

‘Kidnap and ransom,’ Ben explained. ‘It’s a business, and a big one. The trade in human misery for money. The men who do it are pure bad, and too often, there’s nobody there to stop them. That was something I wanted to change.’

‘And did you?’

Ben thought of the kidnap victims he’d removed from the clutches of their captors. A long list of names and faces that he’d never forget. Many of them had been children, snatched from their homes, from schools, from cars, so as to extort ransom from their families. He wondered where they all were now. Getting on with their lives, he supposed. He wondered if they too were haunted by old memories.

‘Saving the lives of the innocent is not something of which you should be ashamed,’ Père Antoine said.

‘Yes, I saved people. But to save them, sometimes unpleasant things had to be done.’

‘Violence?’

‘Yes.’

‘Killing?’

Ben shrugged. He nodded. He glanced down as he did it. It was the first time in his life he hadn’t been able to look another man in the eye.

‘I did what I had to do to resolve the situation. Or that was how it seemed to me at the time. Perhaps there might have been another way.’

‘Perhaps. Or perhaps this was the duty that God set in your path. He has many purposes for men of courage and integrity.’

Ben smiled darkly. ‘Next you’ll be telling me that He moves in mysterious ways.’

Père Antoine was silent for a long time, reflecting. ‘We have talked about the past. Now let us talk about the future. You have been here long enough to have seen a little of our life. The institutional framework by which we live is somewhat rigid, some might say uncompromising.’

‘Believe me, Father, I’ve been used to that.’

‘Very well. Then consider our vocation to solitude. It requires a strong will and a balanced judgement. It is not for everyone.’

‘I love this place,’ Ben said. ‘I feel at peace here.’

‘Because of what you have found here, or because of what you believe you have run away from?’

Ben didn’t reply.

The old man smiled. ‘You may wish to dwell a little longer on that question. And ask yourself how truly you would be suited to life here. It takes time to adapt to it, learning to still the mind, quiet the senses and calm the spirit. It is a purely contemplative life, leaving behind all that we have known previously. He who remains in the Charterhouse has felt in the very centre of his soul a call so profound that no words can truly describe it. It is the revelation of the Absolute. But even this is only the beginning of a quest to which one’s entire life, in all its aspects and for however long we may continue in this world, shall be utterly devoted. We seek only God. We live only for God, to whom we surrender body and soul. “You have seduced me, Lord, and I let myself be seduced.”’

‘ Jeremiah , chapter twenty, verse seven,’ Ben said. He hadn’t forgotten everything from his past theology studies, even though they’d been scattered across the course of twenty-odd years – a dismal stop-start pattern of failure and indecision. There’d been times in his life when he’d wanted nothing more than to enter the Church, convinced that was the only way he’d find the peace of mind he needed so much. At other times that notion had seemed ridiculous, a crazy and irrelevant pipe dream. In any case, life had always got in the way of his plans and he’d found himself being dragged around the world instead, with people endlessly trying to shoot him, stab him, or blow him up. Routine stuff. You almost got used to it eventually.