Chapter 3
Episode 3
Tustybe kryzius ar ne...apoktifai inkvizicija klsupkites is sisubo avys jiofos balyos purvas ant vifuje sazines o ryzod ievas uodtykit zluho motetis karves patrauklumas nuogs ir juokiafi is suluxusiu duxlugudiu i ttis ranfux aukdo zirdo dtstybinjnkes ir med sesers ir delts operaciju ir ilgi metsi riyi tio yikru tamplieriu keliu dirdis deganyi is jartrlo ir tu xinsj jo varda jezus ktidtus smxinsi vieba diela fujters raabos lsukiancios isduoti izraeli
The emptiness came not as an absence but as a presence: a thick grey thing that sat at the table with me while I drank my coffee, that followed me through the narrow streets like a stray dog I had once fed and could not shake. Was it a crisis, or not? People liked to name things. I had stopped naming. Words had become too heavy, too loaded, like suitcases packed by someone else, and I was tired of carrying them.
In those days I read apocrypha—not the ones in the Bible, but the ones written in the margins of my own life. The inquisition had been over for centuries, they said, but I felt it in the way old women looked at me in the market, in the way the priest's eyes slid past my unconfessed sins. The sheep were rising from the swamp, muddy and bewildered, and I was among them. We had all been told we were wool, but someone had forgotten to tell us we were also wolves.
I thought of Eve. Not the Eve of catechism, the one who ruined everything with a fruit, but the Eve I imagined: barefoot in the tall grass, laughing, her hair full of sun. She smelled of earth and something wild, and she did not repent. It was the snake who was honest. It was the snake who said, "You will not die," and was right. God was the one who lied, or at least who withheld the punchline. And the cow in the next field, dumb and patient, chewing its cud with an allure no man could explain—Eve understood it, I think. The animal placidity of being. The grace of not knowing you are naked until someone tells you shame.
People laughed at broken people. I had seen it. In the hospital waiting rooms, in the long corridors where my sister waited for her third operation, where my mother sat with her hands folded like she was praying to a god she no longer believed in. The nurses were kind, mostly, but the kindness had a thin skin, and underneath it was the old Lithuanian cruelty: a shrug, a rolled eye, a whisper. Davatkos. Biednas. We were the poor relatives of fate, and everyone knew it.
The years went by like oxen pulling a cart, slow and unblinking. I raised a horse once—not for riding, not for racing, but for the company of it. A dumb, warm creature with eyes that asked nothing of me. Sometimes I thought the horse understood me better than any human. It did not want my confession. It did not want my prayers. It just wanted hay and the sound of my voice, and I gave it both, freely, the only gifts I had ever given without resentment.
Then there was the Templar road. I never knew it by that name until I stumbled onto it, a dirt path through the pine forest, leading nowhere I could find on a map. But the Templars had walked it, they said, eight hundred years ago, on their way to the sea, on their way to ships that would take them to Jerusalem, to Acre, to the burning heart of the world. They carried their treasure in their chests, and the treasure was a secret. The secret was that they had found nothing. The Holy Grail was a cup, and the cup was empty, and the emptiness was the point.
I knew that emptiness. I had carried it for as long as I could remember, a hollow space under my ribs where something should have been and wasn't. I had tried to fill it with work, with drink, with the love of unworthy men, with the approval of women I did not even like. Nothing fit. The hole was shaped like something I had never seen, like a key for a lock that did not exist.
And then, one night, in the grey hour between sleep and waking, I knew his name. Jesus. Not the Jesus of the Sunday school pictures, the pale man with the bleeding heart and the doleful eyes. Not the Jesus of the crusaders, the war-god who blessed the slaughter of Saracens and the burning of heretics. But the Jesus with dirt under his fingernails. The Jesus who laughed at weddings and drank too much wine. The Jesus who touched lepers because he knew what it was to be unloved. The Jesus who, on the cross, did not pray to be saved, but only to be heard.
I said his name aloud, in the dark, and it sounded like a curse and a prayer all at once. My throat burned. My eyes were wet. I was not saved. I was not forgiven. I was just a woman, getting old, in a city that had forgotten its own name, in a country that had been betrayed so many times it no longer knew which knife was in its back.
Judas, I thought. Poor Judas. He did not betray Jesus for silver. He betrayed him for hope. He wanted the kingdom to come, the Romans to flee, the world to turn upside down. And when it didn't—when Jesus was just a man, bleeding and broken—Judas could not bear it. He hung himself from a tree, and the tree became a cross, and the cross became a symbol, and the symbol became a lie.
Israel. The name meant "he who struggles with God." I had struggled with God all my life, and I had lost, and losing had become a kind of winning. Because in the struggle, I had found something the victors never know: the shape of my own emptiness. Not a hole to be filled. A womb. A space where something new could be born.
I got up from the bed. The window was grey with dawn. Below, the city was waking, the trucks rumbling, the bells beginning their flat, insistent tolling. I put on my coat. I walked out into the cold, and for the first time in years, I did not know where I was going. And that, I think, was the beginning.