Lars Sveen - Children of God

“They don’t want us here anymore,” said David. “After what we’ve done, we’re like grasshoppers in the fields. I told them to follow me when you led me here. I said they’d find everything they want to drive out of their holy city.”

Saul looked at the others and asked if anybody understood what he was talking about.

“They’re coming now,” said David. Just as Saul was about to cut him off, the guards stormed around them. They grabbed the young ones and threw them to the ground, pulling them by the hair and bellowing at them. Saul pulled out a knife, but two of the guards ripped the knife out of his hands and punched him so hard that he was left lying there.

David stood completely still, with his hands raised up to the sky. He couldn’t feel or hear anything. Everything had been made ready. David closed his eyes and didn’t open them again, even when the guards took all the young ones, King David, King Saul and his band, and led them out of Jerusalem to Golgotha, toward a pit that had been dug in the ground. There they were all led to the Lord, through a great and powerful darkness.

My brother Simon and I had been following the Master for some time when Anna found me. We were already a small band of women, men, and children who didn’t belong anywhere, whom we gave food to and looked after. I was with the Lord, his words were alive inside me. But even though I had all faith, so that I could move mountains, I was nothing. Everything was still in pieces. I understood in part, and it was only when Anna came that I was able to know even as also I am known by God.

I did all I could to be close to her. When I touched her, I swear it was as if I were no longer one person. I was no longer Andrew: I was Andrew and Anna. Her dark hair curled up, her brown eyes and little nose, her fingers so clean and cool, and her pale neck when she lifts up her hair, rolling it all up together. Even the battered ear she always hides: it’s like a soft, sacred stone. She showed it to me the first evening we slept together. Her small toes that almost turn white when she washes them in water, that small mark on one leg. We belong together. I’m bound to her; she’s mine.

Simon was glad that Anna found me. He still remembers the time, before we met the Master, when I left him. We had only each other, and I think he thought that if he lost me, then he lost everything he was too. I left to find something else, something else than what we were. On my journey, I met Anna, and that was when I abandoned her too. I couldn’t find peace. I searched and searched, but my route led me back to Capernaum and the Sea of Galilee again.

Peter didn’t say much when he met me, he just put his arms around me. “I won’t let you leave again,” he said. “I shouldn’t have let you leave.”

Since then, he’s said that the Lord led me back to him, and that perhaps it was the Lord again who led Anna here to me.

Jesus found us by the Sea of Galilee. There are many of us in Capernaum now; he was there often. But when everybody talks about everything that happened, I don’t say much. Neither Simon nor I wish to remember the evening Simon came back with our father’s body, or all the mornings when the two of us waded with the water up to our knees, drawing up the net. Nobody was there then. Nor all those evenings we lay hungry and full of doubt and uncertainty. We come from nothing; all we had was the water. Sometimes I froze so much that my fingers felt detached.

When I’m with Anna, it’s as if my fingers glow.

When she came back, at first I thought she was another woman, but one who reminded me of the one I’d left. There had been days when I’d seen her walking ahead of me, there had been nights when I’d heard her waiting out in the darkness. But that evening, when I came walking up the road toward Nazareth and she stood there with Orpah and little Esther, it was all like a dream. I had the sun on my back, and they were bathed in the warm light. Anna didn’t say anything, she just stood there. I had to touch her, I had to be sure that it was really her, in flesh and blood.

I did all I could to be close to her those first days. I walked with her and carried the tubs when it was her turn to fetch water from the spring. I rounded up the children in the evenings and took them to the women, simply in order to see her and be with her. I sang with Judas for the children. My deep, low voice and his sharp, high voice. I did woodcutting and tried to make small animals, but I couldn’t do it until some of Jesus’s brothers showed me. I think Anna liked it when I carved something resembling a chick, a bear cub, or a lion cub, for the children trying to sleep.

It was a new life for Anna; it was a new life for both of us. We came closer to each other, trying to get used to the way we slept, the way we woke, the way we said our morning prayers and ate, the way we washed in the evening, and the way our hands fit together. We sat together for our evening meals, her leg against mine, fingers touching fingers, nobody noticing. The weave that binds us together now was woven at that time as we circled around and around each other.

Once, one evening when I couldn’t find her and got Simon to come and look for her with me, we found her sitting cold and crying next to a pile of stones, some distance from where we were gathered to sleep. I asked what was wrong, but she didn’t answer. She just got up, took hold of me, and put her arms around me. I told her to come back to the others.

“It’s night,” I said. “Sitting here and freezing won’t get us anywhere. Come on, take my hands, and then we’ll go back.”

Anna told me only later what was wrong with her, why she would wake up in the night screaming and shouting, where that small, pale mark on her leg came from, and how her ear had been crushed. I’d never asked her; I had no desire to hear how she’d been hurt. But I understood that the evil she was carrying had become part of her. It wasn’t something that would go away, it wouldn’t disappear, she carried it with her every day, and it throbbed and beat and pushed away at her every night. Anna told me everything because it was the only way she could cope with carrying it and holding on to it. Transforming it with her own words stopped her wounds and memories from turning into an illness setting into her skin, her blood, her bones. They just stayed small scars, small signs that evil won’t triumph, signs that the Lord God has given us a body to live in, to be alive in. Painful and heavy, soft and light.

As we were joined together, so our stories were also joined together. When I told her about our father and how Simon and I lived alone, it was Anna’s tears that came falling. When Anna told me about her sister, Ruth, and about her other men, I was the one who became furious. But Anna didn’t tell whole stories. They were broken off at the ends, they began suddenly, they never ended, they just kept on going, and I couldn’t understand what she was telling me. Sometimes she might mention a name and say that it was number two, or three, or five. One time, she told me about Ruth and how they’d taken care of each other, how she sometimes still thought her elder sister was out there somewhere, living a happy life. Sometimes Anna might be singing, and as soon as the song ended, she told a story about how Ruth had taught her the song, where it had happened, and what the weather had been like then. Everything was told separately, and everything was connected. Or rather, I wished that everything were connected. I wanted to hold Anna tightly, shake away all the bad things, and let her see the brightness of day that always lies waiting behind the darkness.