Jerusalem Poker

Joe thought she was drunk. He tried to quiet her but she was screaming so wildly he had to slap her and slap her a second time, a third time before she stopped. She began talking feverishly then and her voice was terrible to hear.

She was evil, she said. For a year before Joe had met her she'd been sleeping with every man she could find in Smyrna who had a beard. Because she was obsessed with Christ, she said, laughing hysterically.

Because she was obsessed with finding Christ and all she could remember from the paintings in the convent school of her youth was that Christ had a beard. A beard. I've lost His face, shrieked Theresa, laughing hysterically.

Well none of those men in Smyrna had been Christ, she said. Until in the flames and the smoke of the massacres she'd seen a vision, and that's when she'd collapsed. She'd seen Joe standing over her with his beard and his burning eyes, the fires of Smyrna burning in his eyes, and she thought she'd found a face for Christ at last and that's why she'd come to him tonight. To make love with him, to use him to fulfill her twisted vision.

And how do you like that? she screamed. How do you like that?

Joe moaned.

Let it go, he whispered sadly. Let it go.

But she wouldn't. She kept on screaming and taunting him until finally he could stand it no longer and in another moment he was screaming too, calling her wicked, saying she was evil, shouting that she was damned forever. Damned forever.

Theresa heard those words and suddenly she was sober, her face grave. She looked up at him.

I am damned forever, she said simply. And then all at once she was a small naked woman huddled on his narrow iron cot, cowering and terrified and whispering naked words, terrible naked words.

Normandy. The chateau where Theresa and her brother had been born. Their father, a count, was a fanatically religious man, their mother a plain and quiet woman. Theresa would one day look like her.

A whore, shouted their father. That's what you were when I saved you.

Little Theresa and her brother crouching in a corner hearing the same dreadful words shouted over and over, their mother with a bowed head never saying anything. Then their mother began to stay in bed all day, and in the kitchen they heard the servants whispering of opium.

Their father dismissed the servants from the chateau. He told his children his shame before God was too great to allow anyone to see their mother in such a condition. They would live alone in the chateau and pray for her redemption, which would come if they prayed hard enough.

But it didn't come. Instead the children were out playing one afternoon when they heard pounding in a tool shed. They peeked inside. A cross made out of old lumber was leaning against the wall. Their father was nailing their mother to it.

They threw themselves at him and he knocked them down. They attacked him again and he drove them off with a hammer. They ran across the fields to the nearest neighbor, a curate, who ran back with them.

Their father was sitting at the foot of the cross, weeping. Their mother's head had fallen. She had already suffocated.

The curate went to his bishop and it was decided the scandal had to be suppressed because of its religious nature. The bishop made arrangements with a magistrate and it was agreed the count shouldn't be sent away for fear he might talk about what he had done. He would remain in the chateau and the curate would move in to live there. The children were made to place their hands on a crucifix and swear under threat of eternal damnation never to say anything about what they had seen. A certificate of death by natural causes was issued for their mother.

The curate moved into the chateau. Theresa and her brother almost never saw their father, who went to church seven times a day with the curate, observing the canonical hours. Other than that, obeying the curate's orders, he stayed in his rooms.

Their father did penance but no one knew he had carried his fasting to the point of giving up food almost entirely. For sustenance he had turned to raw Calvados, and over the years the small amounts of wood alcohol in the Calvados slowly ate away his brain.

The sudden outburst of submerged decay occurred five years later in the family chapel on the anniversary of the murder, at the special mass performed each year by the bishop for their mother. During the final benediction the emaciated old count shrieked and suddenly rushed forward. Before anyone could stop him he had climbed up on the altar. His arms were open to the crucifix on the wall and the words he screamed were those of the leper on the shores of Galilee.

Lord, if thou will thou can make me clean.

He leapt to embrace the crucifix and missed it, crashing through a window at the side and shattering the richly stained colors that had depicted a garden below Jerusalem, and the meeting there of two kinswomen who would one day know sorrow, Mary and Elizabeth.

The window was gone, the old count's throat was severed, the chapel was rendered into the silence of its candles.

Theresa and her brother returned to the chateau and went on living as they always had, alone with each other in a private world, secluded in their love. And gradually under those gray skies of Normandy, far from the black twisted roots of the past, there was born within them the dream of another and timeless land by the Nile where the blue heavens were unbroken and the distant horizons limitless, an ancient dream of an eternal pharaoh wed to his eternal sister.

One day Theresa threw herself down the stairs. Her brother carried her to her room and that night he went out into the drenched forest to dig deeply the grave of their hopeless love in the loose stinking earth, there to bury the tiny bundle of unborn flesh wrapped by Theresa in her own Confirmation dress, once spotlessly white and flowing and now bloodied to the ends of its delicate lace, soon to rot in the undergrowth of fallen vines and blind nibbling creatures.

That winter the howling winds of trapped memory had come to haunt her brother. In the tool shed where their mother had been crucified he soaked himself with kerosene and struck a match.

And so at the age of nineteen Theresa had left everything behind and fled south to the Mediterranean, by chance to beautiful Smyrna where kindly Sivi had taken her in and where she had known a few peaceful years because of him, only to find the horrors of the past were inescapable, abandoning herself then to her sins and spiraling downward in a life of degradation.

Until a terrible massacre descended on Smyrna and Sivi was raving in pain, and a wizened ageless man abruptly appeared to defend them, an apparition in a rusty helmet and a faded yellow cloak, trailing a long sword.

Who is that? she had screamed, and a soft Irish voice had whispered near her that it was all right, the old man thought he was the archangel Gabriel now, come to smote God's enemies.

She had turned. She had looked up and seen a small dark man standing over her, a man with the beard and the burning eyes from the paintings on the convent walls of her childhood.

Christ in the gloom and smoke with a pistol in his belt. Christ in the fires of Smyrna.

Dawn had come to the roof in the Old City by the time Theresa had finished speaking. Joe stroked her head and wrapped another blanket around her naked body. She had refused to dress until she had told him everything. He rose and went to the door, leaving her sitting on the narrow iron cot. He opened the door and stood there gazing north in the gray light.

Joe?

Yes.

I've never told anyone before. Never. Do you mind my having told you?

No, he said sadly. No. It's better to tell someone.

Joe? That stained-glass window in Normandy? The garden beneath Jerusalem where Mary went to meet Elizabeth?

His shoulders suddenly sagged in the doorway. He leaned against the wood and sighed.

Yes I know it, Ein Karem. I've been to the village. And yesterday was St Elizabeth's feast day. You chose that day to come here, to come to me. Why?