Williams Niall: John

Did I see such things as these?

Did I?

Did those words come from me?

I remember not.

Was there a vision so clear?

When Papias reads it to me, it seems familiar yet strange.

Dear Lord, remember your ancient servant. Have pity. Pages in the book of my memory fall away.

Did the angel come to me truly?

Did I see such vision? And then was blind?

But Jerusalem fell. The mountain Vesuvius opened with fire. Nero's Rome burned. Such things did happen.

And yet you did not come.

Papias reads to me: ' "And I, John, who have heard and seen these things. And after I had heard and seen, I fell down to adore before the feet of the angel who showed me these things."'

But now I am afflicted, Lord, and cannot remember.

My spirit thirsts for salvation.

John kneels in the rock chamber and confesses. Papias is gone to see what fish have been caught. The old apostle's head is bowed. The news of the death of Andrew has struck him like many blows. Though the crucifixion may have happened a long time ago and the news taken this time to travel, it is to him as though yesterday. Cut as wounds into his mind is the history of the suffering of each of the twelve. Accounts he has heard. Each of these return him to one moment on the road.

They were passing through Phrygia and the country of Galatia when they met a traveller in purple. He was a wizened creature, humped, with ragged beard. Sun blazed upon them. 'O Christians!' he called out, his head tilted upward, his rheumy eyes aswim. 'Come, buy from me!' He had a wife and a loaded ass, gestured with a long-nailed hook hand for them to pause. The Apostle and his followers had nothing to trade. And when he discovered this, the traveller spat into the sand. 'Ye are not worth spit,' he said, and waved his wife to stop unloading the goods. 'Ye will be dust soon,' he muttered for consolation, glare-eyed, blister-cracking his lips. 'Ye're heads will roll like the son of Zebedee,' he said with undisguised glee and turned away.

'Wait. Tell us,' John called after him.

The traveller stopped, looked back over his hump. 'For what profit?' he asked.

'I am a son of Zebedee,' John said and walked forward. 'Tell.'

And for the pleasure of pain, for the tale he could carry to the towns of Phyrgia and perhaps trade upon it, the traveller turned. 'I saw myself the head of James, son of Zebedee, cut from his body by order of Herod Agrippa. I saw the blade rise, the hair pulled back, the eyes wide like moons.' He came closer. 'I heard the bone snap,' he said, clutching his hooked hand to his own throat below a blister-smile. 'The head, it rolled,' he said, and rolled his hand in a tumbling fall. 'The brown eyes stared till dust blinded them.'

John fell to the ground and cried out. And then bowed down and scooped a handful of dust and pressed it into his mouth to keep from shouting out with sorrow. The wild lamentation that lacerated him he could not release in weeping, for the others of his followers he believed he could not show the feeling of abandonment by the Lord. Instead the wolf of grief he took inside himself and let it roam and savage freely.

In repeated dreams after came the sight of his brother bowed before the blade the traveller told. In such dreams always John stood among the assembled witnesses; powerless, he saw James refuse to deny the Christ and his prayers growing louder even as the blade rose in the air. Forever since, though blind, he sees still; he hears the terrible crack and sees his brother's head fall away.

Now, with news of Andrew, all such returns to him. The loss is so great as to be unutterable.

John kneels and confesses. He kneels so long on the bare rock of the cave floor that his knees lock, and the framework of his bones entire is turned solid. First he aches, and pain is everywhere. And then, slowly, slowly, he passes beyond the condition of pain, into an inner terrain where by himself he himself is forgotten. There, these his ancient hands held together, this his bowed head with white hair, are no more present to him, and he is become instead like an element or a timeless feature of that place.

He is away, and out of this world.

Water sounds. The cave where he kneels speaks with the sound of a thousand invisible streams.

On the far side of the island, Papias goes to visit one of the poor families of fishers that live there. On the eastern shore there is a small scattering of houses that existed before the Christians arrived. At first mistrustful of the band of men who were brought and released on to the island, the fishers grew to understand they offered no threat, and then to warm to them because they were hated by the despised Romans. Finally, some among them were converted by the stories of the Christ, Jesus. The kingdom everlasting was explained to them, and gave solace in the hardships of island life to those who felt abandoned on that bleak edge of the world. When sons and husbands drowned, the Christians were told and asked to come and pray.

So now, the youth Papias.

In the days after the storm one of the fishermen, Xantes, did not return. Then his broken boat washed up at the feet of his wife, Marina, who was watching from the shore. She went back to the house and held her two small children and said not a word. When the others came to tell her what she already knew, she did not weep. They said it was only his boat and Xantes might have lived. There was no body.

For the following three days there was none, and it was presumed destroyed on the rocks or eaten by the creatures of the sea. The fishers sent word to the Christians, and old Ioseph, feeling ill, had asked Papias to go and pray with the woman.

It is a morning bitter with cold. Grey seabirds claw on the rocks and do not fly. Dull oaten-coloured clouds travel the sky. Mercilessly the wind beats at the sea. While Papias hurries, he looks out at the small scars of white surf, the unsailed waters. His sandals are worn, the soles thin. His garments are dirty from the walls of the cave. He wishes it weren't so. He is honoured that Ioseph has asked him this first time, and he wants to appear as he imagines a holy man should. I should be clothed in light, he thinks, then chastises himself for such vanity.

'You bring the Lord,' he says under his breath into the wind. 'You are clothed in the Lord.'

He crosses up over the bare, smooth stone at the top of the island and descends toward the fishers' dwellings. In his haste the edge of a rock gashes his ankle. He cries out but does not slow down. He is thinking of the prayers he will say. He is thinking he is engaged in the most important business of life.

He has been told the house, and knocks on the rough timber of the door. There is no answer and he knocks again. The third time he knocks and opens the door. Inside in the dark sits the woman Marina and clutched against her, her two small children.

'I come to pray for your husband's passage into everlasting life,' Papias says, the door light framing him.

The woman does not move. Her fair hair is coiled on her head and tied with a headscarf, her dark eyes distant. Lain at her breasts the infants sleep.

'I bring the love of the Lord Jesus,' Papias tells her.

She turns to him. She is twice his age. Her face, planed with light, is sadder than any he has seen.

Walking swiftly in the sunlight that day. The dust.

The knowledge that all my life had come to this moment.

Andrew running back to tell Simon. 'The Messiah, we have found the Messiah!'

My eyes not moving from you as you walked forward. My mouth open, as if I had eaten the world. As if the world were round like a ball and I had taken it inside me and could not yet know how I might breathe again.