The Collected Stories

more particularly. ‘You see that group of eight big olives? Just off the road, where the church is?’

Francis thought he did, but was not sure. There were so many olive trees, and more than one church. He glanced at his brother’s pointing finger and followed its direction with his glance.

‘The Garden of Gethsemane,’ Father Paul said.

Francis did not say anything. He continued to gaze at the distant church, with the clump of olive trees beside it. Wild flowers were profuse on the slopes of the valley, smears of orange and blue on land that looked poor. Two Arab women herded goats.

‘Could we see it closer?’ he asked, and his brother said that definitely they would. They returned to the waiting car and Father Paul ordered it to the Gate of St Stephen.

Tourists heavy with cameras thronged the Via Dolorosa. Brown, barefoot children asked for alms. Stall- keepers pressed their different wares: cotton dresses, metal-ware, mementoes, sacred goods. ‘Get out of the way,’ Father Paul kept saying to them, genially laughing to show he wasn’t being abrupt. Francis wanted to stand still and close his eyes, to visualize for a moment the carrying of the Cross. But the ceremony of the Stations, familiar to him for as long as he could remember, was unreal. Try as he would, Christ’s journey refused to enter his imagination, and his own plain church seemed closer to the heart of the matter than the noisy lane he was now being jostled on. ‘God damn it, of course it’s genuine,’ an angry American voice proclaimed, in reply to a shriller voice which insisted that cheating had taken place. The voices argued about a piece of wood, neat beneath plastic in a little box, a sample or not of the Cross that had been carried.

They arrived at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and at the Chapel of the Nailing to the Cross, where they prayed. They passed through the Chapel of the Angel, to the tomb of Christ. Nobody spoke in the marble cell, but when they left the church Francis overheard a quiet man with spectacles saying it was unlikely that a body would have been buried within the walls of the city. They walked to Hezekiah’s Pool and out of the Old City at the Jaffa Gate, where their hired car was waiting for them. ‘Are you peckish?’ Father Paul asked, and although Francis said he wasn’t they returned to the hotel.

Delay funeral till Monday was the telegram Father Paul had sent. There was an early flight on Sunday, in time for an afternoon one from London to Dublin. With luck there’d be a late train on Sunday evening and if there wasn’t they’d have to fix a car. Today was Tuesday. It would give them four and a half days. Funeral eleven Monday the telegram at the reception desk now confirmed. ‘Ah, isn’t that great?’ he said to himself, bundling the telegram up.

‘Will we have a small one?’ he suggested in the open area that was the bar. ‘Or better still a big one.’ He laughed. He was in good spirits in spite of the death that had taken place. He gestured at the barman, wagging his head and smiling jovially.

His face had reddened in the morning sun; there were specks of sweat on his forehead and his nose. ‘Bethlehem this afternoon,’ he laid down. ‘Unless the jet-lag…?’

‘I haven’t got the jet-lag.’

In the Nativity Boutique Francis bought for his mother a small metal plate with a fish on it. He had stood for a moment, scarcely able to believe it, on the spot where the manger had been, in the Church of the Nativity. As in the Via Dolorosa it had been difficult to clear his mind of the surroundings that now were present: the exotic Greek Orthodox trappings, the foreign-looking priests, the oriental smell. Gold, frankincense and myrrh, he’d kept thinking, for somehow the church seemed more the church of the kings than of Joseph and Mary and their child. Afterwards they returned to Jerusalem, to the Tomb of the Virgin and the Garden of Gethsemane. ‘It could have been anywhere,’ he heard the quiet, bespectacled sceptic remarking in Gethsemane. ‘They’re only guessing.’

Father Paul rested in the late afternoon, lying down on his bed with his jacket off. He slept from half past five until a quarter past seven and awoke refreshed. He picked up the telephone and asked for whisky and ice to be brought up and when it arrived he undressed and had a bath, relaxing in the warm water with the drink on a ledge in the tiled wall beside him. There would be time to take in Nazareth and Galilee. He was particularly keen that his brother should see Galilee because Galilee had atmosphere and was beautiful. There wasn’t, in his own opinion, very much to Nazareth but it would be a pity to miss it all the same. It was at the Sea of Galilee that he intended to tell his brother of their mother’s death.

We’ve had a great day, Francis wrote on a postcard that showed an aerial view of Jerusalem. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre, where Our Lord’s tomb is, and Gethsemane and Bethlehem. Paul’s in great form. He addressed it to his mother, and then wrote other cards, to Kitty and Myles and to the three Christian Brothers in Mrs Shea’s, and to Canon Mahon. He gave thanks that he was privileged to be in Jerusalem. He read St Mark and some of St Matthew. He said his rosary.

‘Will we chance the wine?’ Father Paul said at dinner, not that wine was something he went in for, but a waiter had come up and put a large padded wine-list into his hand.

‘Ah, no, no,’ Francis protested, but already Father Paul was running his eye down the listed bottles.

‘Have you local wine?’ he inquired of the waiter. ‘A nice red one?’

The waiter nodded and hurried away, and Francis hoped he wouldn’t get drunk, the red wine on top of the whisky he’d had in the bar before the meal. He’d only had the one whisky, not being much used to it, making it last through his brother’s three.

‘I heard some gurriers in the bar,’ Father Paul said, ‘making a great song and dance about the local red wine.’

Wine made Francis think of the Holy Communion, but he didn’t say so. He said the soup was delicious and he drew his brother’s attention to the custom there was in the hotel of a porter ringing a bell and walking about with a person’s name chalked on a little blackboard on the end of a rod.

‘It’s a way of paging you,’ Father Paul explained, ‘Isn’t it nicer than bellowing out some fellow’s name?’ He smiled his easy smile, his eyes beginning to water as a result of the few drinks he’d had. He was beginning to feel the strain: he kept thinking of their mother lying there, of what she’d say if she knew what he’d done, how she’d savagely upbraid him for keeping the fact from Francis. Out of duty and humanity he had returned each year to see her because, after all, you only had the one mother. But he had never cared for her.

Francis went for a walk after dinner. There were young soldiers with what seemed to be toy guns on the streets, but he knew the guns were real. In the shop windows there were television sets for sale, and furniture and clothes, just like anywhere else. There were advertisements for some film or other, two writhing women without a stitch on them, the kind of thing you wouldn’t see in Co. Tipperary. ‘You want something, sir?’ a girl said, smiling at him with broken front teeth. The siren of a police car or an ambulance shrilled urgently near by. He shook his head at the girl. ‘No, I don’t want anything,’ he said, and then realized what she had meant. She was small and very dark, no more than a child. He hurried on, praying for her.