Son of Man
by Yi Munyol
Translated by Brother
Anthony of Taizé and Chung Chong-Wha
Note: The text translated here
is that of the 4th edition, which was first published on June 15,
2004. The author has made many small changes—deletions, modifications and
additions—to the text of the 3rd (1993) edition.
After consulting with the
author, it was decided to eliminate the 335 notes. Such an aparatus is not a
usual feature of works of fiction published in English. In many cases, the
information has been introduced by
the translators into the body of the text, especially in the lists of gods and
brief accounts of polytheistic mythology and other religious details. In many
other cases, the information offered seems not to be needed for a full understanding
of the novel.
With the author¡¯s
agreement, the translators have omitted the text contained on pages 211 – 219,
which presents a series of notes on the life of Zoroaster and the main
teachings of Zoroastrianism. They consider that this section interrupts the
flow of the narrative to no purpose, and gives an over-detailed account of a
religion which is not destined to play any particularly significant role in the
novel as a whole. The same decision was taken by the translators of the French
version.
The translators have
deliberately sought to maintain the rhythms of the sentence structure of the
original, although the resulting sentences are sometimes far longer and more
complex than is usual in modern English. Stylistic editing, if it is found
necessary, is best left to the publishing house that takes the book.
1.
Rain falling on accumulated layers of dust had left the windows of the criminal investigations
office so mottled they were nearly opaque; beyond them roofs could be seen huddled grim beneath a lowering city sky.
When the Dongbu Police Station had first moved
here two years before, there had been nothing more than a hill on the city outskirts, recently
zoned for development; then houses had sprung up, and now the area was completely built over. As he contemplated the brightly colored roofs aligned in a
variety of shapes, seemingly indicative of their individual owners¡¯ vain fondness for things western, or their pretentiousness,
Sergeant Nam fell into the state of melancholy that was almost habitual with him. While those many houses stretched before
his eyes, the fact that there was no house of his own
among them, where his wife and children could live and take their ease, spurred him with a deep sense of failure.
Recalling the two rented rooms he would return to after work, unless something unexpected
occurred, Sergeant Nam reviewed with no particular feelings his career, over which an increasingly dark sense of
impending failure loomed.
Nam Gyeongho. Born in 1945. His parents had been ordinary, run-of-the-mill folk but, since they had been subjected to the poverty of the 1950s, his childhood had not escaped the average degree of misery that other children of his age had had to endure.
His middle and high school years, spent in a small
country town, had left no memories, sad or happy. As he neared the end of his high-school education, there arose a growing lack of proportion between their financial resources and the enthusiasm for further education that his parents were beginning to manifest. That finally took him away from their small town and turned him into a student enrolled in evening classes at
a second-rate university in this city, for a course of study he had finally
given up half way through.
Even after dropping out of university, he had naturally kept
trying to better himself, during the early years at least. The university he attended was so mediocre it had even been hard for him to get a part-time tutoring job; but still, he had been studying law. He had once shut
himself up in a rural temple for several months with the intention of
preparing the civil service exam. Another time, he had
suddenly become fascinated by writing, burying himself under reams of
manuscripts. Not one of his works ever got beyond the preliminary screening, but he wrote enough in the
course of six months to submit to every
newspaper that ran any kind of New Year literary contest. That extravagant passion for literature was perhaps ultimately a perverse way of
working off the frustration he had felt on finally
losing all hope of ever
passing the civil service exam.
Poverty never allowed him to complete
anything he undertook, as with his university studies. All the while, his elderly parents and his younger siblings, who had no one
else to look to for support, were waiting. They were all gone now. His
parents had died, one after the other, before he had even managed to escape from the single room they shared. His older sister had left
home suddenly, fed up with being poor, and had given
no news for the last nine years. Supporting his younger
sister had made the start of his own married life harder; after graduating from commercial high school,
she had married a
colleague working in the same bank as herself some two years before; his younger brother had studied at a technical college before going to work in the Middle East as a technician in heavy construction equipment as soon as he had finished his
military service the previous year. For their sake he joined the ranks of job seekers, who were having an
extremely difficult time in those days, and taking the easiest way he joined the police, where he had settled. Promotion was
neither rapid nor slow compared to the hard work he put in; the job afforded neither satisfaction nor regret, but his eight years
in the criminal investigations unit had gone speeding by, making
him feel as if each year was like a day.
¡®So why did you kick
a young lady on the backside as she passed, eh? Why?¡¯
Sergeant Nam came to himself at the abrupt sound of
someone shouting in a shrill voice, which penetrated his mind as if it had ruptured his eardrums. It was Detective Kim, who was sitting at the desk next to his. He was three or four years younger than Sergeant Nam, but he had joined the police earlier and
was senior to him by a couple of years in his career with the crime squad.
Judging by what he had just overheard, it seemed he was taking
down a statement for some kind of assault case, but on closer examination he was looking thoroughly rattled.
¡®Because of those damned leather boots . . .¡¯
The suspect replied imperturbably, as
if to say that Detective Kim¡¯s shouting did not
impress him; he was a youngish man, about twenty-four or five
perhaps, with a completely shaved head. If he had not attracted Sergeant Nam¡¯s
attention before, it must have been because he had been brought
in much too quietly for someone guilty of an assault.
¡®What about her leather boots?¡¯ Detective Kim asked, as if lost for
words, after glancing
in the direction the young man had indicated, pursing his
lips. The long, slender legs of the victim, who was still crying to
herself, were sheathed in brown boots high enough to hide her knees.
¡®Because they¡¯re too long.¡¯
¡®Are you drunk?¡¯
Detective Kim burst out so loudly, as if unable
to put up with the insolent way the young man was addressing him, that everyone
in the office turned to look. But the youth did not so much as flinch.
¡®Not in the least.¡¯
¡®This guy must be completely mad.¡¯
At that, someone sniggered in a corner. Detective Kim
turned and threw a furious glance in that direction, then went back to
questioning the young man, as if he was trying to provoke a
quarrel.
¡®So you kick some girl on the backside because you reckon her
boots are a bit too long?¡¯
It was rather obscene, but
from time to time Sergeant Nam had experienced an urge, if he came across a woman wearing long, fancy leather boots, to make love to her in extravagant ways
after stripping off all her clothes, leaving only her boots. It was not so much an urge arising from the perverted physical desires of a man in his mid-thirties as the effect of scenes
from a pornographic movie that had been
confiscated the previous autumn. Under the pretext of taking a reference for an enquiry, one of the staff who knew how to use the
video machine had played it through in a corner of the office, and in it the women never removed their boots
or stockings while things were being done
to them. Oddly, he had found that much more titillating than sex with a woman
not wearing a stitch.
¡®So you just felt like kicking her?¡¯
Sensing something slightly
strange, Sergeant Nam
began to scrutinize the accused youth more closely.
At first glance, he looked like a dim, stubborn kind of fellow, but the
deep furrows between his eyebrows and the dark shadows round his eyes suggested
intelligence. He felt there was a kind of detachment in his
gaze, that was directed vacantly at a corner of the room¡¯s
plastered wall; that
was not something you found in professional criminals with their bluff and bluster. Then, going on to examine his clothes, it was different again. A military jacket of a kind no one now wore, for fashion at least, dyed black and with sleeves shiny at the
cuffs from use and accumulated dirt, was accompanied by trousers
made of coarse, fawn corduroy, and plastic shoes so covered in dust it was impossible to distinguish their
color; his dress was so completely at odds with his face, it was almost as if he had deliberately disguised himself.
¡®One pair of boots
like that . . . could keep several pairs . . . of frozen feet warm. Just beside the road where that woman was passing . . . a kid was begging, wearing nothing but rubber slippers on bare feet, lying on the ground, shivering . . .¡¯
The young man began to speak haltingly, as if talking about someone else. Still crying, the girl fired back a reply as if she could not take any more:
¡®Is it my fault if a kid¡¯s begging in such a state?¡¯
¡®Of course, it might not be you
personally. It might be your rotten dad who bought you such expensive leather
boots but never gave so much as a penny to someone starving right beside him, or your old boyfriend crazy about your crotch.
Anyway, it makes no difference. After all, the fact is that a kid was shivering with bare feet because you were using up all that leather.¡¯
The young man spoke without once raising his eyes to look at the girl,
as if to show that replying was a nuisance but he was doing it as a special
favor. To Sergeant Nam, he seemed like someone who had committed a
crime of conviction, but more than that, he felt he must be either a psychotic, or putting it on in order to irritate the person they were addressing. Growing increasingly angry, Detective Kim rebuked him on
her behalf.
¡®Shut up! You idiot! I can¡¯t
believe it. Who asked you to interfere in things like that?¡¯
¡®I did it because nobody else was interfering.¡¯
¡®You! The more you go on, the worse it gets.
Here, do you want a taste of the national hotel?¡¯
¡®I¡¯ve already been there several times.¡¯
¡®How many times? How many stars have you got, then?¡¯
¡®As many as the Milky Way in the night sky. I only came out the day before yesterday, after a full year.¡¯
Detective Kim, whose quick temper and irascibility were well known in the office, seemed to be arguing with the accused, rather than taking a statement. In addition to Sergeant Nam, a few detectives relatively less
occupied had been observing the scene for some time with amusement. However, Sergeant Nam found himself unable to go on watching for long. The sudden ringing of a phone attracted his
attention. Lieutenant Lee, the head of the third division
to which he belonged and who
was sitting two desks away, could be seen picking up
the receiver, turning
away from the document he had been reading.
¡®Looks like a robbery—two or three wounded,¡¯ Sergeant Nam thought to himself as he watched him
answer the phone. Because he had been working with him for the past two years, Sergeant
Nam was roughly able to tell the seriousness of an incident simply by the
expression and tone of voice he adopted while taking the
phone call.
That day, too, his guess seemed not too far wrong. When he finally finished speaking, Lieutenant Lee called Sergeant Nam;
his expression was grave, as always when he was faced with a
violent crime.
¡®Sergeant Nam, follow me, with Detectives Im and Park.¡¯
¡®What¡¯s up?¡¯
¡®Looks like a murder.¡¯
¡®Where?¡¯
¡®Over in Yeongji county.¡¯
In terms of administration, Yeongji belonged to the neighboring county, but the local police came under their responsibility. A well-known mountain rose nearby;
the valleys were beautiful, the streams pure. Halfway up the mountain stood a large temple, called Donggak-sa. It was a popular picnic-spot for the people of Daegu in three seasons out of four—spring, summer, and
autumn.
As far as the police were concerned, that area was a constant nuisance, one that inspired a strong sense of grievance among them. Since
the place attracted large numbers of people, it was the site of a
correspondingly large number of crimes of all kinds. The fact that it was
located quite far away and they had not enough men made their work that much
harder. Especially during the high season, in the spring and autumn, in addition to the regular staff stationed there, they were obliged to send extra staff from the main station.
Now it was winter, when the men at the small local station had time to breathe, and for a violent crime, a murder, to happen there
was totally unexpected.
The body lay at the side of a mountain path a little way outside the
village. When the head of the investigation team removed the sheet
with which the corpse had been covered, the long, pale face of a man seemingly
in his early thirties appeared. The face was unharmed, the eyes were closed in a natural manner, there was almost nothing to awaken the sense of shock or repulsion that a dead body
usually provokes. However, even a brief glimpse of the rest of the body that then lay
uncovered indicated plainly that this was a
murder. Blood lay thickly clotted over the chest, seemingly from repeated stabbings with a sharp weapon.
The scene was relatively well preserved. The head of the investigation
team questioned the officer in charge of the local station, who was
already there.
¡®Nothing new, apart from what¡¯s already been reported?¡¯
¡®I found this lying on an oak stump down there.¡¯ The man showed
him a pair of bloodstained gloves wrapped in newspaper, as if he had been anticipating
the question. They were ordinary gloves, made of white cotton. He then went on to repeat with additional details what he had already said
on the telephone.
The body had been found about one hour ago, by someone from a
neighboring village going into the town. The
fact that the body had been moved a little way from the scene of the crime to a
place more secluded suggested that the criminal had tried to conceal the crime.
The time of death, which would only be known precisely after
the autopsy, seemed probably to be some time very early in the morning. A fruit knife had been left lying beside the body, and given
the sharpness of the blade the crime seemed to have been premeditated. Since
the scene of the crime was some way from any houses, it seemed that the criminal had persuaded the victim to come there and, judging by the location of the wounds and the posture of the body, there were virtually no signs
of any struggle.
¡®The victim¡¯s identity?¡¯ The lieutenant¡¯s question cut short the station head¡¯s flow of words that seemed likely to go on. With an apologetic air, as if to say he knew everything but that, he replied: ¡®Impossible to
tell. He¡¯s not got a single paper left on him. That could be the work
of the killer, of course.¡¯
¡®No name inside the jacket?¡¯
¡®I looked, but there¡¯s nothing there.¡¯
¡®Couldn¡¯t any of the local people identify him?¡¯
¡®I called some of those who live in the nearest village, but they all said they¡¯d never seen his face before.¡¯
Just then the patrolman in charge of preserving the crime scene, who was standing nearby, spoke hesitatingly: ¡®A while ago, after
you¡¯d gone somewhere, one of the villagers told me he felt sure he¡¯d seen him
in a prayer house.¡¯
¡®A prayer house?¡¯ The lieutenant repeated the words, staring at the man. The local station
head replied at once, glaring at the patrolman as if to ask why
he hadn¡¯t said so at once:
¡®There are several prayer houses and hermitages
around here. So which one did he mean?¡¯
¡®The one called the House of Eternal
Life.¡¯
¡®I know the place; it¡¯s just beyond this hill.
It¡¯s a comparatively clean place, with no problems.¡¯
The head of the investigation turned to his team: ¡®Is that so? In that case, Lieutenant Lee, you¡¯d better send one of your
men over there to enquire about the identity of the victim; the others can make
enquiries in all the villages around here. I¡¯ll set up a headquarters in the local station and that¡¯s where I¡¯ll be.¡¯
He was looking utterly worn out. He had not been
able to sleep properly for several nights on account of a series of violent
crimes following one after another recently, waiting as he was for promotion.
The forensic unit had been as quick as it could, but it was a little after two in the afternoon when Sergeant Nam arrived at the Eternal Life prayer house, carrying a still damp photo of the victim. The prayer house was plainly built of
cement blocks at the entrance of a valley on the far side of the hill to the
spot where the body had been found. Everything was so quiet, probably because it was winter, that the sound Sergeant
Nam made when he knocked on the door seemed to echo particularly loudly. A
middle-aged man who might be a handyman opened the door with
an unwarrantedly cautious air. Sergeant Nam, unsure of the hierarchies of a place like this, demanded randomly to see the
director.
He found the director, who he discovered to be an elder at a church in the city,
sitting by a stove with a youngster who seemed to be serving as an
errand-boy. He checked with a look of surprise the police identity card that Sergeant
Nam held out to him.
¡®Is there anyone from here
who went out between yesterday and today and hasn¡¯t come back?¡¯
¡®I can¡¯t be sure. We have very few
people at present. And we don¡¯t really control comings and
goings here. Why do you ask?¡¯ The director turned the question back on him. Sergeant
Nam took out the photo of the victim.
¡®Have you ever seen this person, by any chance?¡¯
After gazing at the picture for a long while, the director murmured, almost to himself: ¡®I have a feeling I¡¯ve seen him somewhere. Is it
that fellow who came for a while last autumn?¡¯
He abruptly turned to the young man who was standing
beside him.
¡®Look at this. Who is it?¡¯
¡®What, him? Why, isn¡¯t that Preacher
Hwang¡¯s friend?¡¯ Glancing at the photo, the boy replied in a flash. The director immediately assented.
¡®That¡¯s right. Now you
mention him, I¡¯m sure that¡¯s who it is. I only met him in passing,
so I didn¡¯t recognize him at once, but. . .¡¯ He turned to Sergeant Nam.
¡®But why does he look like that?¡¯
¡®He¡¯s dead.¡¯ Sergeant Nam
replied in a toneless voice, for by now such deaths inspired no special feelings in him, whereas the
director raised his voice in affected surprise.
¡®What? How did it happen?¡¯
¡®He was murdered. What¡¯s this man¡¯s name?¡¯
¡®Let me see, now. Min something I think.
Anyway, Preacher Hwang knows him well. He was the one who brought him
here a short time ago, saying he was an old friend. I only spoke to
him once, when we exchanged greetings that first day.¡¯
Intuition derived from long years of experience in the police told Sergeant
Nam that the man was not simply making excuses to avoid further inconvenience.
¡®This preacher Hwang—where is he now?¡¯
¡®He ought to be in the house
somewhere. He didn¡¯t tell me he was going out today. I¡¯ll have this young man go and fetch him.¡¯
At those words, Sergeant Nam felt vaguely troubled. He suddenly wondered if this preacher was deeply
implicated in what had happened, in which case he might already have disappeared. But before the boy could even leave the room, the preacher in
question came in. He looked about thirty-one or two. His face had a fragile, vulnerable look to it but overall he somehow made much the same impression as the
dead man.
¡®Why, here you are. Mr. Hwang, let me introduce you to this gentleman, from the police.¡¯ The director spoke in a deliberately calm voice, as if it would be a great help in the investigation. But Sergeant Nam,
seeing traces of tears on the man¡¯s cheeks, questioned him without bothering with
formal greetings.
¡®So you went to look before
you came. Did you go because you¡¯d heard rumors?¡¯
The preacher nodded, saying nothing.
¡®You must be very upset; you were friends.¡¯ Sergeant Nam intentionally spoke words of comfort; at the same time he slyly observed his expression. But he took the words at their
face value.
¡®Everything is God¡¯s will. But I felt so sorry
for him . . .¡¯
Once again, his eyes began to fill with tears. If pushed any
further, the tears would turn into sobs, so Sergeant Nam
deliberately adopted an official tone, drawing out his notebook with a rather
exaggerated gesture.
¡®First I am just going to ask some a few
questions for information. His full name?¡¯
¡®Min Yoseop¡¯
¡®His age?¡¯
¡®He must have been thirty-two.¡¯
¡®His profession?¡¯
¡®I don¡¯t know.¡¯
¡®His address?¡¯
¡®I don¡¯t know that, either.¡¯
¡®Weren¡¯t you friends?¡¯ Sergeant Nam spoke in a somewhat harder voice. It was because something didn¡¯t seem to make sense. The preacher seemed startled by the change but the tone of his
voice did not vary.
¡®Yes, a long time ago. But after nearly ten years without news, I only met him again about a month ago.¡¯
¡®What was your relationship before?¡¯
¡®We were classmates in our schooldays. He dropped out half
way through but we were pretty close for a while when we were students. To tell you the truth, he was more than a mere friend; I used to respect him deeply.¡¯
The preacher¡¯s voice had so far sounded like that of a little schoolboy answering his teacher¡¯s questions, but on reaching that topic it suddenly grew emotional. Vague memories of the old days seemed to be
welling up. Pretending
not to notice, Sergeant Nam continued with his questions.
¡®So you know nothing of what he¡¯s been doing
recently?¡¯
¡®Almost nothing. He didn¡¯t tell me, and I
didn¡¯t ask.¡¯
¡®But you say he¡¯s been here a month.
You must have been curious after not seeing him for such
a long time?¡¯
¡®It was for his sake; I thought I might only rub salt in his wounds to no
purpose.¡¯
¡®Then how did he happen to come here?¡¯
¡®I met him by chance in the street. He was dressed so shabbily that I enquired what he¡¯d been doing. He made no reply, only smiled sadly. Then he
asked me what church I was in charge of. I told him that so far I didn¡¯t feel I was up to serving as a minister
and that I was therefore praying here, and he suddenly said he¡¯d like to spend some time here too. Obviously, although I¡¯m only a guest here I accepted with pleasure. More than
that, I was delighted.¡¯
¡®Delighted? Why?¡¯
¡®It was as if a lost sheep was coming home.
In the old days, he had a deeper faith than anyone else and was a first-class theology student. He made such
sincere efforts to put into practice the teachings of our Lord that it would have been hard for
any of us ordinary folk to imitate him. He did not have so much as an
extra pair of socks or underclothes for himself. During the holidays he used to
do volunteer service in an orphanage or helped in a lepers¡¯
village. Only he went a bit strange, in the fall of his second
year, I think it was. It was not just that he distanced himself from us; he
seemed to distance himself from God and the church. Then, after a big row with the teachers, we never found out what it was about, he quit the seminary. I heard that he had not only given up studying at that time, but
had left the church and God too.
¡®Right. Enough about the past. Did he have
any money?¡¯
¡®So far as I know, he was practically penniless.¡¯
¡®What about his relations with women—his wife,
or other women?¡¯
¡®I¡¯ve never heard anything at all about that. If I were to hazard a guess, he seemed to have been wandering about
completely alone before arriving here.¡¯
Sergeant Nam found the reply deeply disheartening. In
his experience, nine times out of ten incidents that were not connected with
money or women turned into cases where he
made no progress but only developed a headache. Sergeant Nam asked his next question as if he was seeking confirmation from
the preacher¡¯s memory.
¡®In short, you¡¯re saying you know
nothing about his present life?¡¯
¡®That¡¯s about it. If I¡¯d
known something like this would happen, I¡¯d have questioned him, even
against his will.¡¯ The preacher muttered his reply, adopting an apologetic expression for no apparent reason.
¡®What did he do while he was here?¡¯
¡®Endless prayers and reading the
Bible to the point where he forgot about sleep, that was all. Even the
monks in the Middle Ages would never have mortified themselves as he
did.¡¯
¡®He never went out?¡¯
¡®Well yes; the day before yesterday he went out,
saying he was going into town, and spent the night out.¡¯
¡®He didn¡¯t say where he¡¯d been?¡¯
¡®I asked him, but he didn¡¯t answer, only smiled
sadly. He seemed to be counting the days recently, so I reckoned he
had an appointment with someone.¡¯
¡®When was the last time you saw him?¡¯
¡®Yesterday evening. We went to bed at the same time. But he didn¡¯t read the Bible or say any prayers, and he seemed unable to sleep. That was about as odd
a thing as could be, you know. At any rate, I opened my eyes from time to time almost until daybreak and could see
him curled up on his bedding, but when I woke up in the morning, he was gone. But he often used
to go for an early morning stroll in the nearby hills, so I didn¡¯t bother to go looking for him, but . . .¡¯
After that, Sergeant Nam tried asking a few more
questions but none of the replies was of any real help to his investigation.
There being nothing more he could do, he jotted down the necessary details in his notebook, then finally asked:
¡®Could I see his room?¡¯
¡®He shared my room. Follow me.¡¯
Preacher Hwang led the way without
the least hesitation.
The room he was brought to turned out to be a wood-floored
room, simple and clean, away from daily routine and
suitable for solitary prayer. Some books were lying on a low wooden desk and on the opposite,
plastered wall hung what seemed to be a charcoal drawing of the head of
Jesus in a simple frame. Nothing else could be seen, no bedding, clothes or other objects used in daily life. Everything must be
in the large closet that was built into the left side of the room.
Having once glanced around, Sergeant Nam set about looking for things belonging to Min Yoseop. As he had guessed, the preacher opened the closet door and produced a small, worn
suitcase. Looking through the open door, he saw some neatly folded bedding and another, larger suitcase. That apparently
belonged to the preacher, as did the clothes that were hanging on the wall. Sergeant Nam opened the case that he had pulled out. Except for a few tidily folded clothes, which seemed almost to have been prepared in advance,
there was not a clue to reveal anything about the owner. The absence of particular signs was so
total that it almost prompted a suspicion that he had deliberately set about
concealing his identity in order to help the
criminal.
¡®Is this all?¡¯ Sergeant Nam asked, looking rather disappointed. The preacher picked up
a Bible lying among the other books on the desk. The book was
new, apparently purchased recently, but portions were already darkly stained by frequent fingering. Sergeant Nam flipped through the Bible. There was no sign of the address he had hoped to find;
but on the inside of the back cover he noticed a scribbled phrase in a foreign tongue that he could not decipher.
¡®Desperatus, credere potes.
Mortuus, vivere potes. Now you can believe. Having despaired. You can live. Having died.¡¯
Such was the content of
the phrase the preacher
said was Latin and translated for him. Sergeant Nam found
the phrase hard to understand, even in translation.
¡®Despair here seems to signify
despair concerning one¡¯s self and the essence of one¡¯s being. It is a compelling situation, one in which we cannot help but turn to
the Absolute Being, God. Death, too, here suggests something spiritual
rather than physical death. Intellectual pride, self-righteousness, prejudice, vanity, all the poisons that have to be banished from the heart in order to attain true faith. I can¡¯t quite recall where, but I think you¡¯ll find something like those words in the epistles of Saint Paul. In them, it looks as though Min Yoseop is confessing a sincere conversion and expressing a decision.¡¯
To Sergeant Nam, who was still scrutinizing the Bible closely, the explanation sounded like a sermon. For him, whose life had long been spent among statements written in a clichéd style full of Chinese characters, the words were barely comprehensible. But even if he had understood them
fully, they hardly seemed likely to be of very much help in his investigation. Finally, Sergeant Nam left
the prayer house feeling rather discouraged.
Returning to the investigation unit, he found that the head of
the investigation had been called to the main station and none of the others
were to be seen, with the exception of Lieutenant Lee, who was going through a list of petty criminals from the neighborhood with the second-in-command of the local station. A few of those had already
been called in for questioning and were quarrelling with the patrolmen over their alibis. The continuing inquiries
of Detectives Im and Park in the nearby villages seemed not to have produced any
clues.
Lieutenant Lee looked extremely disappointed on hearing Sergeant Nam¡¯s report. He had intended to speak at length but the lieutenant hurried him up; after getting the main points, he muttered more or less to
himself: ¡®So we¡¯ve got his identity,
but there¡¯s no knowing what he¡¯s been doing for
the past eight years . . .¡¯
He remained sunk in thought for
a brief moment, then gave Sergeant Nam orders in a manner befitting an experienced investigator with more than twenty years of service.
¡®Sergeant Nam, go back to the main station and prepare to take a trip.¡¯
¡®Sir?¡¯
¡®Report to the chief, then
go up to Seoul. To that seminary. If you search their academic records, you should find his old address at least. Try that first.¡¯
It felt rather vague but Sergeant Nam likewise thought
there seemed to be no other way.
2.
The seminary Sergeant Nam visited the next day on arriving in Seoul was a small, old building in antiquated style located
incongruously in the very center of the city. Initially built on a modest scale on a hill outside the city limits marked by the four
gates, the expansion of Seoul had resulted in its
present appearance. The
building could only have held about thirty classrooms at most
and the front yard seemed no bigger than a large primary
school playground. Still, the red brick walls of the main building,
covered in leafless creepers, and the girth of the old trees scattered here and there suggested a particular weight of
tradition and an antiquity demanding devotion and reverence.
It being the winter vacation, the place was so deserted that it provoked a melancholy feeling. Passing the empty janitor¡¯s room, Sergeant Nam
crossed the yard and encountered a student near a gnarled old tree in front of the main building, whether an undergraduate or a graduate assistant
he could not tell, whom
he asked to show him the office of student affairs. The student kindly led him to a room where a few clerks were chatting around a large oil stove. The office was so poorly furnished that as he came in Sergeant Nam wondered for a moment what on earth he could hope to find there. Yet the records on Min
Yoseop that he found with the help of one
of clerks were not only better preserved than he
had expected, they yielded some interesting information.
Judging by his age, Min Yoseop must have been left an orphan while still a child, during the Korean War; he had been adopted by a
foreign missionary called Thomas D. Allen. He had graduated from what had been in those days first-class middle and high schools, the names of which were immediately familiar, and for almost two years had studied philosophy at a university as prestigious as his secondary schools, before moving to the seminary. His grades there were equally outstanding. Those in the first year, in
particular, amazed the clerk who found the dossier. He was nearly certain
that no one had done so well since then. Yet in the second
semester of the second year, his grades had dropped and soon after beginning the third year he took leave of absence, then left the seminary for good.
Sergeant Nam noted down what seemed relevant to his inquiries in his notebook, then asked if he could meet any of the faculty who had been teaching at the school in the days when Min Yoseop was a student
there. There were
several, it seemed, but not many had come in that day. Sergeant Nam decided to visit the professor whose room was nearest, and left the student affairs office.
It was in the same
building, but in so secluded a corner that he lost his way briefly; he knocked on the door and was received rather
reluctantly by a middle-aged professor. He barely recalled Min Yoseop and could
remember nothing that might be of use in the enquiry. If there was anything
strange, it was not so much that he had never
had memories but rather there were signs suggesting he had deliberately eliminated them, as people often do with unpleasant or painful recollections.
Apparently feeling sorry at Sergeant Nam¡¯s disappointed air,
he added: ¡®If it¡¯s that student, Professor Bae will know much more. He was very fond of him.¡¯
¡®Where could I meet Professor Bae?¡¯
¡®He¡¯s probably in his office now. If you follow this corridor all the way back, his office is the second room from the end.¡¯
Following his directions,
Sergeant Nam arrived at Professor Bae¡¯s room. The door was opened quietly by an elderly professor with completely white
hair, who must have been well past retirement age.
He gave the impression of having long been a pastor as well as a professor. This was because of the
rather particular aura emanating from his old but respectable black suit, his voice that tended to grow increasingly soft, and his posture, that manifested
such modesty it might be thought exaggerated.
¡®Yoseop is dead?¡¯ On hearing the
news, Professor Bae fell into a heavy silence for a while. After Sergeant Nam repeated a number of questions, however, the professor gradually began to speak. His voice was oddly tremulous, possibly on account of the shock caused by the news of Min Yoseop¡¯s
death.
¡®Yes, certainly I prized him; there¡¯s no doubt about it. His adoptive father was someone I respected
deeply ever since I was young; in fact we were graduates, many years apart, from the same American university.
Besides, he was the brightest student I ever taught in the ten or more years I¡¯ve been here. But I don¡¯t think that I
have the kind of information about him that the police would need.¡¯
¡®Still, tell me just one
thing. For what reason did Min Yoseop leave the seminary?¡¯
The professor peered at the police officer, who seemed to be hanging on his every word. It was as if he was
weighing something up, probably his interlocutor¡¯s intellectual capacity. He finally made up his mind and replied in a voice filled with sorrow.
¡®Faith does not always go well with knowledge, you know. He was more fascinated by the pursuit of
knowledge than by faith, and inevitably he ran out of energy. He went out
with Kagawa and came back on the tail of the Ophites. We
could not accept him under those conditions. Even if he was intellectually
brilliant, we could not allow him to shake the foundations of belief. That angered him and he left, never to return.¡¯
Sergeant Nam could only understand about half of what he said. Suddenly more keenly interested in Min Yoseop as a person than in the needs of the investigation, he asked: ¡®What¡¯s Kagawa? Ophites?¡¯
¡®To put it more simply, shall I say radicalism
and heterodoxy—or something like that.¡¯
¡®It would be better if you could explain simply, so that I can understand.¡¯
¡®Kagawa Toyohiko was a Japanese practical
theologian, a social reformer, a member of the workers¡¯
movement, an evangelist and a writer, too. The scion of an aristocratic family, that disowned him when he became a Christian. Yet he did not yield but kept the faith. He graduated from Kobe Theological
Seminary and went to study at Princeton Theological College. After his return from Princeton, still aged only twenty, he went to live in the Shinkawa slum in Kobe and
began to be active among the workers, playing a leading role in the Kobe docks
strike, as well as leading the farm-workers¡¯ union movement and
the co-operative movement. During the war he was imprisoned by the military police for having apologized to the Chinese for the Japanese invasion of their
country and became widely known as a writer for his novel Across the Death Line. He was an extraordinary person in many ways.
Min Yoseop appeared to have been fascinated by his practical theology.¡¯
He closed his eyes wearily, then slowly continued: ¡®The Ophites were heretics in ancient times who did not consider
the serpent in the Bible as a messenger of Satan charged with humanity¡¯s
fall, but instead venerated it as an apostle of wisdom. The ideas of Min Yoseop did not correspond to theirs exactly, but his way of viewing Satan as a spirit of wisdom or as an alternative attribute of God was something we could never approve. Do you see now?¡¯
¡®Yes, a bit . . .¡¯ Sergeant Nam replied in some confusion, having listened to every word with intense concentration. It had been better than the explanation he had heard
a little before, but his
long years in the police constituted a considerable
handicap to understanding Professor Bae¡¯s words fully. Professor Bae quietly stopped talking, as if to say that was enough.
¡®I think you¡¯d better go now. I am very tired. I do not think I have anything more to add.¡¯
As words designed
to dismiss a visitor without upsetting him, they could not have been more determined. Sergeant Nam still had points that were unclear, but he had no choice.
After speaking, Professor Bae had closed his eyes
gently and fallen into a deep silence such that it seemed no word could break it, no matter how strong. Just as Sergeant Nam was going out of the door, he heard him murmur: ¡®Dr. Allen, it¡¯s truly a great pity. But at least, he said he was on his way back.¡¯
After a simple lunch near the seminary, Sergeant Nam went to the address where Min Yoseop had lived eight years before. It too was now in the center of the city, but the area must have been a remote suburb in
those days. The single-story, flat-roofed
house, scarcely more than a hovel, stood wretchedly amidst recently constructed, luxurious dwellings.
Luckily, a person connected with Min Yoseop was still living
there. She was an elderly woman in her sixties who said she had spent more than half her life as housekeeper for Doctor Allen. It turned out that it was mainly she who had
raised Min Yoseop after his adoption while he was still just an infant.
On hearing the name Min Yoseop, she immediately
burst into tears, although she knew nothing of his death. She clearly felt for him as if he were her own son.
¡®And where is he now?¡¯ Her voice was filled with the tender affection of an elderly mother
longing for her far-away son. Even without knowing how much contact there had been between them during the past eight years, it was
easy to imagine what profound shock and grief his death would cause her. Wishing to spare her, Sergeant Nam prevaricated:
¡®He¡¯s in Daegu now.¡¯
¡®What¡¯s he doing? Is he well?¡¯
¡®Yes. But where is Dr. Allen nowadays?¡¯
A gleam of doubt showed in the old woman¡¯s tear-filled eyes.
¡®Why, he went back home more than ten years ago,
a year after Mrs. Allen died. At that time, he asked me and Yoseop to go
with him but when the boy refused, I stayed here too. But who
are you?¡¯
¡®A friend of his. How are you nowadays?¡¯
Again Sergeant Nam avoided telling the truth, glad that he had not revealed his police
identity. This time it was less for her sake than in order to
do his job. He had so far only exchanged
a few words with her, but he had a feeling that her strong attachment to Min Yoseop
might end up hindering his inquiries. If ever she decided to stay silent, thinking she might harm him if she spoke, his visit would have
been useless.
Apparently reassured by Sergeant Nam¡¯s relaxed attitude, she replied with an expression slightly less suspicious: ¡®Not too bad, thanks to the boy. Though things are not as they were before, of course.¡¯
¡®Before what?¡¯
¡®You call yourself his friend, and he hasn¡¯t
told you about it? But of course, he was always obedient to the Lord¡¯s words: ¡®Do not let your left hand know what your right hand
is doing.¡¯¡¯
¡®I haven¡¯t known him all that long, you see. And
he doesn¡¯t talk very much, either. What happened?¡¯
Recalling what he had heard from Preacher Hwang and
Professor Bae, Sergeant Nam paid careful attention to her words. He seemed somehow to have overcome her doubts and she began to
tell him everything, with an expression that showed she was quite glad to be
able to talk about it.
¡®Doctor Allen left him well provided for when he
went back, all he had accumulated in the more than thirty years he
had lived here. But once Yoseop moved to the seminary, he began to share it with others. Later, he even went so far as to sell the big house up in Seongbuk-dong. We wouldn¡¯t even have kept this shabby little house, if it hadn¡¯t been for me.¡¯
¡®Why, who did he give it all to?¡¯
¡®To those with nothing, of course. Isn¡¯t that what there¡¯s most of in the world—cold, hungry folk?
To those in lepers¡¯ villages, in orphanages and rehabilitation centers. You wouldn¡¯t believe how many places there are to give money away!
Once you start, it¡¯s soon all gone. In less than two years he
was obliged to work to pay his tuition. At first, I tried to stop him. But after all, it had been given to him, hadn¡¯t it? I thought of letting Doctor Allen know, back in his country, but I might as
well be blind as far as writing goes.¡¯
¡®Then what happened?¡¯
¡®When there was nothing more to give away,
he left. He said that once you have nothing to give, you have to serve with your own body. Still, he never forgot me. During the past seven years
he¡¯s always sent me enough to buy food.¡¯
¡®Still, did he really give away all that money just to the poor? Might he not have spent it in
other ways?¡¯
Sergeant Nam¡¯s question was a sincere one. He
simply could not believe that such an act of charity, unlike anything he had ever read about in the social pages of newspapers, could
happen in reality.
¡®Don¡¯t say such things! God might punish you. That kind boy . . . As soon as he was old enough, he went through the winters
without ever putting on a pair of socks. It was from thinking of his poorly dressed neighbors. Once he came home
shivering in his shirtsleeves, on a day when it was snowing hard, because he
had given his jacket to a beggar huddled on the roadside. He went so far that even moderately tolerant pastors used to tell him off. It¡¯s true. So kind a boy . . .¡¯
The old lady looked thoroughly upset.
Sergeant Nam felt a deep emotion surging up from his heart for no apparent
reason. He suddenly recalled the long-forgotten Sunday
school he had attended for years as a child for the sake of the maize flour and the powdered milk distributed there, and the noisy festivities on Christmas Eve. Later, after he had stopped going to church, he used to look up from time to time at the white cross
on the pointed spire with a vague sense of longing, almost until the end of his youth. But at some point he had found himself thinking that the world those things symbolized was not part of life here, where the only things left were rituals
and systems corrupted and debased by human greed and hypocrisy. As a
result, the past life of Min Yoseop that the old woman was describing filled
him with a kind of sense of mystery.
¡®Ah! I knew he was good, but I couldn¡¯t believe he went that far. Have you not heard from him lately?¡¯
¡®Some money came about a month and a half ago, from Daegu.¡¯
¡®But no letter?¡¯
¡®No. He rarely writes letters.¡¯
¡®You¡¯ve got his address, though?¡¯
¡®No, I don¡¯t have that. The
boy never writes his address.¡¯
¡®Will you let me see the envelopes?¡¯
¡®I know I kept them, but everything¡¯s so
topsy-turvy, I wonder if I can find them.¡¯
She burrowed into the drawer of an old dresser and pulled
out a bundle of envelopes. They bore postmarks from almost all the main cities,
beginning with Seoul, then Gwangju, Busan, Daejeon, Incheon. Only three were postmarked from Daegu, including the one she had mentioned from
the post office near the Dongbu Police Station. Sergeant
Nam noted down the names of all the post offices from which Min Yoseop had mailed more than
three money orders.
Feeling that that was
still not enough, he
examined the letters inserted in some of the envelopes. There was one letter for every five or six envelopes, written, it appeared, each time that
he was preparing to move from one city to another,
though he hardly ever indicated any reason or purpose. In them he would ask how she was, specify
how much he was sending, and indicate approximately when he was going
to send the next. Sergeant Nam felt that if he
had made any new discovery, it was that, corresponding to
the maternal affection the old lady harbored toward
him, Min Yoseop considered himself indebted to her, more or less duty-bound to support her.
¡®Isn¡¯t there anything left that belonged
to Yoseop—books or notes, for example?¡¯
After he had done with the letters, Sergeant Nam asked again. It might prove important for the investigation to understand what kind of a person Min Yoseop was. This thought occurred to him from his intuition as a detective, not merely from personal curiosity.
¡®As far as books go, Doctor Allen left a lot but Yoseop
got rid of them all. He sold them to second-hand bookstores for the money, I suppose. He took a few of his own books
with him in a bag when he left. There ought to be quite a few notebooks
somewhere, though.¡¯
¡®That would do. Can I see them?¡¯
¡®The box over there is full of his notebooks; but you¡¯ll not have time to go through them all.¡¯
Seeming to sense something out of the
ordinary, she asked in doubtful tones again: ¡®Why are you asking all this? Has something happened to our Yoseop? Who
are you, anyway?¡¯
She seemed to have become suspicious when Sergeant Nam began noting down the postmarks on the envelopes and scanning the letters. He thought for a moment of saying
who he was, but instead, he made something up again, in the hope of hearing more.
¡®Actually, Yoseop asked me to find him a job
several months ago and yesterday I got good news. But there¡¯s been no sign of him for a month now. I thought he
must have gone to work somewhere else but I just wondered if he hadn¡¯t come back here by any chance and that¡¯s why I came. I examined
the envelopes and letters because I reckoned I might be able to find him if only I knew what town he was in. As for the books and notebooks, Yoseop told me about them some time ago.
He said that one day he would come and fetch them. I thought I could
take them, since I¡¯m here. I¡¯m sure to meet him soon, one
way or another.¡¯
Even Sergeant Nam himself was amazed how naturally he was able to relieve the old lady¡¯s doubts. The tale
didn¡¯t hold together very well when he thought about it afterwards, but it seemed to work. The old woman¡¯s expression, which had suddenly
hardened in doubt, gradually softened again. Noting the fact with a sideways glance, Sergeant Nam felt quietly pleased and
set it aside for future reference.
¡®But if Yoseop takes this job, he¡¯ll
have to travel a long way away. It¡¯s a country called Saudi Arabia and it takes
months to get there and back. It¡¯s going to be hard for him to send news for quite a long time.¡¯
¡®I somehow guessed he might be going to leave
for a far-off place, from a letter I received about two months back. But why
should he go abroad? He resisted so stubbornly when Dr. Allen asked him to go
with him.¡¯
¡®Still, that¡¯s the way it
is now. Look, I¡¯ll just
take what¡¯s needed.¡¯
¡®Do as you like, if he asked you to. There¡¯s
nothing I need.¡¯
She finally agreed, still looking rather reluctant
although her suspicions had lifted. Sergeant Nam opened the box and set about examining the notebooks. It was a jumble of lecture notes,
documents in files, a personal diary, and manuscript pages. Among all the rest, Sergeant Nam picked out the volumes of his
diary that corresponded to the time when he left home, and a pile of
manuscripts in a separate bundle.
¡®I heard about what happened from some neighbors
while I was looking for this house. Do you know if he¡¯s kept in touch with that woman?¡¯
As he was about to leave, he allowed himself to be greedy. He spoke in a
low, natural voice, as if he knew all about something that was in fact blind guesswork. He invented a woman because, in the light of all he had heard, he felt sure that Min¡¯s death had
nothing to do with money. Sergeant Nam was no
different from any other detective, in reckoning that every crime was invariably connected to either money or a woman.
The effect exceeded his expectations. Before he had even finished talking, the old lady¡¯s eyes narrowed, and her face hardened more than ever.
¡®Who dared repeat those worn-out old tales? I swear to you that Yoseop is not
like that at all. Try to expose people¡¯s stinking backsides, and they¡¯re so wicked they¡¯ll make up any kind of story. Besides, Elder Mun and his wife left
the neighborhood years ago. Don¡¯t talk to me about that again. And don¡¯t say
you¡¯re any kind of friend of his, if you believe stories like that.¡¯
Her reaction convinced Sergeant Nam that he had just discovered a definite
clue that might shed some light on the cause of Min Yoseop¡¯s death.
Cowering before the old lady¡¯s stubbornness, as she stood there staring into
the distance with her arms crossed and her lips compressed, he left without asking anything more. After all, apart from her
there were other old acquaintances of Min Yoseop he had to meet.
3.
With the help of the local ward office, and after a few enquiries, Sergeant Nam succeeded in finding a man who, eight
years earlier, had known Min Yoseop quite well, and from him he was able to hear about a quite different side of Min Yoseop¡¯s character from what he had just been
hearing. Needless to
say, quite often in the course of an investigation into someone¡¯s past he
ended up by bringing to light ugliness and baseness hidden
behind gentle, noble appearances, but the case of Min Yoseop was proving to be rather unusual. The next person Sergeant Nam
met was a deacon at the
local church, an older man who had been living there for twenty
years, who had no hesitation in calling Min Yoseop ¡®that breed of
Satan.¡¯
¡®He came into our church wearing a sheep¡¯s mask. In the sacred church building, he
committed adultery with the wife of another and struck God¡¯s faithful minister on the cheek. More than that, he tempted the simple flock by the cunning wisdom of the Sons of Darkness, finally sowing division among them, setting people at each other¡¯s throats, turning the church upside down . . .¡¯
There was no end to his tirade, once he had started. The woman with whom
he had committed adultery was no less than the young, second wife
of one of the church¡¯s elders; he had slapped the cheek of the
minister, an outrage committed after he had surrendered to ¡®heretical doctrines,¡¯ when he dragged the
minister down from the pulpit while he was preaching. He said he had tempted and
divided the flock, because he had intervened in the church¡¯s financial problems, accusing
the minister and the elders so that some of the church members, taking his side, had risen up and demanded an enquiry into irregularities in building their new church, leading to a fight for control, against those who
supported the minister.
¡®On account of all that, our church was devastated. The shepherd left, abandoning the sheep, who
then scattered. While Elder Mun, unable to show his face on account of what was said about his wife, left the area, a broken man. Later, fortunately, a shepherd and the sheep finally
came together again and the church was restored to life. But God will never forgive that man, that cunning child of
Satan. I don¡¯t know what brings you here, but since you say you¡¯re a
policeman perhaps something bad has befallen him. That would be a sign that
God¡¯s judgment is upon him.¡¯
In the deacon¡¯s voice he heard faint echoes of a curse.
Whenever he discovered traces of ugliness and baseness behind gentle,
noble appearances, Sergeant Nam usually experienced a feeling of pleasure on finding what he had been expecting, and an inexplicable sense of relief. In the case of Min Yoseop, however, it was different; he rather felt a kind of bitterness, as if he been betrayed by someone
he had trusted. He even found himself wondering if Min Yoseop had
not fallen into some kind of trap.
If Sergeant Nam set off to meet another of Min
Yoseop¡¯s former acquaintances, it was entirely on account
of that personal feeling he had, almost unconnected with the investigation as
such. This time, having deliberately searched in that
direction, he met a former
member of the church, whose memories were quite unlike those of the deacon.
¡®I remember that student quite well. He had a radical streak to him, but he was a good churchman and a devoted
Sunday-school teacher. As for his alleged adultery, I really don¡¯t know . . . Everyone was talking about it at
the time but there were aspects that were very hard to understand. He was, I suppose, barely twenty then—certainly not the age to know much about that kind of thing. Even if he had been so depraved at such an early age, why would he have seduced a married woman
approaching thirty, with two children into the bargain? There
were plenty of pretty girls of his own age he could easily have associated with if he¡¯d wanted to. If there was someone fishy, she was
the one. She was supposed to be the daughter of some church¡¯s elder, but she didn¡¯t seem to have much real faith. Besides, the fact of having married a man over forty who had already been
married once, when she was only twenty-four, was enough to make you wonder. Her
behavior after her marriage with elder Mun was definitely far from
perfect. She had two children, but it wasn¡¯t sure they were both his—at least, that¡¯s what some
people were saying. If
ever something happened between the student and that woman, he¡¯s not the one who should be blamed. The people who sympathized with him
claimed he was the victim.
¡®The fight in the church? I don¡¯t know about
other things, but as far as the minister goes, frankly I¡¯m on the side of the
student. I¡¯m not sure what people will
think of me talking like this to a stranger, but to all appearances, the minister seemed
an extraordinary man. In those days, that neighborhood was a shantytown outside
the city limits. The minister arrived with just an army tent that could hold thirty
people, but within five years he¡¯d succeeded in building the present church. I¡¯ve
been told that he had already built two other churches in the same way. If
building big, elaborate churches is the only way for someone to be a
faithful servant of God, then he was certainly the most faithful servant of all. The problem was that the new building and the land it stood on
had been registered in his own name. He had bribed some of the leading members of the
church in order to do that. Later we learned that he had registered the
other two churches, those he had built before, either under his own name or
that of his wife. Once he had built those churches, he had employed ministers to serve in them, then moved to our area with his rolled-up tent
and started a new church here.
¡®In other words, erecting a
church offered him a fully legal way of making a fortune. He would take all the money offered by the believers in the first two churches, claiming to be using it for the
costs of the new building, leaving only enough to pay barely sufficient living expenses to the minister in charge and to cover minimum maintenance costs. While at the same time he
could demand, with all
his authority, the maximum in offerings from the faithful in our church. Only think! When it comes to building a
church, the house of God, what believer wouldn¡¯t consider it important?
¡®In a poor shanty-town like ours, the faithful were mostly ignorant, uneducated folk who did all they could to contribute to the construction of the church. People living from hand to mouth would labor without pay at least once a week
to cut into the hill and level the ground for the new building.
Since it was being done for God, there was no question of resting even on Sundays. The minister urged them to make
the work go faster, even reducing the
length of the services. And do you know how much he demanded in offerings?
People who had just enough for that day¡¯s evening
meal gave the money for their next day¡¯s breakfast to the church. Obviously, some people did that out of a deep faith, but
most of them did it on account of the minister¡¯s threatening descriptions
of the wrath of God, with the fire and brimstone of Hell. Most of his
sermons would begin, ¡®Do not lay up for yourselves treasures
on earth¡¯ and ¡®Man does not live by bread alone, but by the Word of God,¡¯ and end with
descriptions of the Last Judgment and the terrible punishments God had in store
for those who did not obey those commands.
¡®By the time that student moved into the
neighborhood, the church had already taken shape. At first, he was extremely
polite to the minister, as docile as could be. But as time passed he became increasingly critical; in the end, once he realized what was going
on, he began to demand that he repent and that corrections be made. The minister probably viewed that as youthful rashness and did not take his demands seriously. Once the
young man had denounced the minister¡¯s behavior publicly to the faithful and
begun to gather support, the minister reacted with every means
at his disposal. He tried to control the faithful by asserting his pastoral authority; he tried to threaten them in God¡¯s name, coaxed them with small advantages, anything to keep them on his
side. The claim that he had tempted and divided the simple flock was an accusation the minister¡¯s supporters made in response to the situation.
¡®It was then that the incident occurred that I
feel ashamed to talk about, since it involves our
church. It happened one
Sunday, shortly before the student disappeared from our neighborhood.
That day, as usual, the minister was preaching in such a way as to put himself in an advantageous situation, quoting ¡®Man does not live by bread alone.¡¯ That student, who had
been sitting in the front row, rushed toward the pulpit, pointed his finger at
him, and shouted, ¡®Shut up! What can the Word give us? Misused by someone like you, the very bread is being snatched out of our
mouths!¡¯ Up in the pulpit, the minister cried, ¡®Get thee hence,
Satan!¡¯ and the student, unable to take any more, climbed up to the pulpit,
grabbed the minister by the neck, and forced him down while
denouncing all his corruptions. The minister responded equally vigorously, accusing the student of adultery—that was the first anyone had heard of it—then those who
supported the minister rushed up and tried to throw the student out while
those who believed him and thought he was right rallied
round him. The church found itself in utter turmoil.
¡®Because of the fight, the police were brought in; since his actions were about to become public knowledge,
the minister abruptly transferred ownership of the church and land to the church
members, and resigned. Many, disgusted at the ugly fight, left to join other churches, far away but peaceful. I was one of them. At
that time the situation in our church was absolutely appalling. It took four or
five years to recover to the state you can see today. Seeing how the church was devastated, you could say that that student
did not act in the best possible way. But it would not be fair to blindly
take the minister¡¯s side and blame no one but the
student.¡¯
He had spent nearly one
hour listening and the short winter¡¯s day was already drawing to a close. Sergeant Nam still
hoped to meet Elder Mun and catch at least the night
train back to Daegu. He had spent a long time listening to a story that did not
seem directly helpful to the investigation, but he was feeling much relieved.
The idea that he had to meet Elder Mun was a quite commonsensical one, since he
was included among the suspects. Elder Mun had opened a cereal company on moving to the city of Seongnam. Sergeant Nam felt rather disappointed as he pushed open the door of a run-down shop that might be more accurately
termed a rice store than a cereal company, having imagined him to be quite rich. It took
more than two hours for him to make the journey from Seoul and then have supper
and it had already been dark for some time; there was nobody in the store, as
if the owner had gone in for a late evening meal.
He called in a loud voice toward the door at the back that led inside. He was obliged to call several times before an old man with a gloomy face and of uncertain years emerged. It was Elder Mun. The moment Sergeant Nam saw him, he smiled
bitterly to himself, because he knew his true
age and realized how foolish his suspicions had been. Still, he had to be cautious because of the way crime often refused to follow the dictates of
common sense.
Sergeant Nam asked him at once about his young second wife. Elder
Mun replied calmly: ¡®She left home a long time
ago.¡¯
¡®Did you get a divorce?¡¯
Feeling slightly tense, Sergeant Nam enquired. If she had lived with Min
Yoseop after leaving home, it might not have been so foolish to suspect Elder
Mun.:
¡®No. How should men put apart those whom God has
joined together? I even moved here for her sake, but still she left in the end.
But what do all these questions mean? Why are you looking for her?¡¯
His voice was full of gloom. After a moment¡¯s hesitation,
Sergeant Nam revealed the death of Min Yoseop in a few words. Elder Mun¡¯s face
hardened for a second.
¡®I hate to say it, but he was already a dead man.¡¯ Sergeant Nam offered the hint casually, without taking his eyes off Elder Mun, whose face quickly returned to its
normal calm expression.
;No, I don¡¯t hate him. Looking back, I reckon he
too was merely a victim. I forgave him long ago, and forgot him.¡¯
¡®What do you mean, he too?¡¯
¡®She was Satan¡¯s agent in all that.
I did everything for her, but less than a year after we got here, there was already another man . . .¡¯
His voice died away and his face creased with lines of deep anguish.
¡®Another man?¡¯
¡®The man working in this shop. But God forgive
me, I feel sure it would take more than the fingers of one hand to count the
people she had been with in this street alone.¡¯
It was the same story as Sergeant Nam had heard in Seoul. There was no
reason why Elder Mun should have directed his resentment against Min Yoseop in
particular. Besides, even if he had possessed such animosity, it hardly seemed possible he would have been capable, with his body
like a withered old tree trunk, of using a knife to kill
young Min Yoseop. But on
the basis of what he said, he could not draw any definite conclusions regarding
the young wife. He felt he had to meet her in person to confirm for sure that
the unfortunate couple had had nothing to do with Min Yoseop¡¯s death.
¡®Do you know where your wife is now?¡¯
¡®I have no idea. I¡¯ve not had any news of her for the past five years.¡¯
¡®How many children do you have?¡¯
¡®Two—a girl who¡¯s just started middle school and a boy in the fifth year of primary school.¡¯
¡®Are they both her children?¡¯
¡®Yes, my first wife died without having any
children. Why are you asking about them?¡¯
¡®No particular reason. You must have had a hard
time.¡¯
¡®Please, I beg you, don¡¯t let the children
hear anything about their mother. To them she was a good
mother. I¡¯ve told them she died in an accident. Last autumn I took them to visit her grave; of course, it was actually that of my first wife . . .¡¯
Elder Mun¡¯s request sounded sincere. Yet the more he
listened to him, the more Sergeant Nam felt a stubborn conviction
growing inside him that he had to meet that wife who had left home, even if she turned out to have had
nothing to do with the death of Min Yoseop. It was for that reason that he had
asked about the children. He knew that, even if separated
parents break off all contact, the children usually stay in
touch with both. Especially if the first child was already in middle school, no matter how carefully Elder Mun tried to hide everything, he guessed she was bound to have at least a vague idea of what had become of her
mother and have some kind of contact with her. Sergeant Nam nodded his acceptance of Elder Mun¡¯s request as he went out, but felt he had to meet the children and ask
their mother¡¯s address.
Sergeant Nam¡¯s guess proved correct. He spent the night in a nearby inn,
then early in the morning went to wait at the corner of a cold alley, where he was able to
meet Elder Mun¡¯s daughter on her way to school at about eight, and obtained her mother¡¯s address without much difficulty. She was living in Seoul.
Returning quickly to
Seoul, Sergeant Nam found the house, which proved to be a neat, traditional-style
house in the Insa-dong area. From the outside it looked like an ordinary private home, but once inside it seemed to be an unlicensed entertainment house. On the branches of the well-kept trees in the yard a number of sea-fish—cod and pollack—were
hanging to dry to be served as snacks. In a large aquarium in the wood-floored hall were swimming flounders and squid,
certainly not there for decoration. However, the clearest indication of the nature
of the place came from the women. Although it was past ten in the morning, young women of a particular type were
bustling around in their nightdresses with puffy faces.
Sergeant Nam enquired for Elder Mun¡¯s wife, giving her name to a girl
who was filing her nails at one end of the veranda, her hair wrapped in
a towel, as though she had just finished washing. Without any special caution, she called toward the inner room: ¡®Madam Jin, a visitor!¡¯
Without any reply, a door slid back and a woman emerged. The wife of Elder Mun looked less than thirty, although he knew she was really in her late thirties.
Perhaps because she had already applied makeup, to Sergeant Nam she looked more youthful and sensual than the other girls.
But at her age she could not be an ordinary employee, she must
be the manageress.
To Sergeant Nam¡¯s surprise, at first she could not remember Min Yoseop
at all. He reminded her of certain events and showed her his photo, at which she finally recognized him: ¡®Oh, that student!¡¯ She registered no
more feeling than if she had been shown the photo of a not particularly close classmate from primary school. It was the same when she heard of Min Yoseop¡¯s death. She not only displayed no surprise or sorrow,
she did not utter a single word of regret.
As she later explained, Min Yoseop had not been the only man with whom she had had
illicit relations at that time. It had been the same when she left Elder Mun,
and judging by the overall atmosphere Sergeant Nam had the impression she was
still involved in a giddy tour of the available men. If her relationship with Min Yoseop had been so scandalous for the members of
the church, it was
because he was a seminary student and a Sunday-school teacher in the church where
her husband was an elder, and their secret meetings had mainly taken place in the course of church activities.
Sergeant Nam, although no churchgoer, was taken aback to hear her relate what had
happened one evening during
a revival meeting one year. When everyone was in
the church engaged in all-night
prayers, they had slipped out surreptitiously and made love in a shed behind the minister¡¯s house so noisily that a neighboring dog had begun to bark in surprise. As a result they had been discovered by the minister¡¯s cook, who must have
told the minister; she related the events of that evening in considerable
detail.
Sergeant Nam was lost for words on hearing her tell not only that, but a lot of other things
women do not usually discuss, without any embarrassment. She struck him as being a mindless doll, the very incarnation of carnal desire. But strangely enough, in spite of the way she behaved almost like a born whore, he could not sense any indecency or depravity in her way of speaking and behaving. It all suited her so well, like a well fitting
dress, and even served to highlight her almost bewitching
freshness.
As time went by, Sergeant Nam increasingly felt that he was on the wrong
track. Yet in one corner of his mind he stubbornly felt that something would
come out. Therefore, although knowing the obvious answer, he asked a question: ¡®Have you heard from him recently, by any chance?¡¯
She looked incredulous and laughed to herself as she replied:
¡®You really don¡¯t believe me? Even now, I don¡¯t
leave anything behind with men. Once our bodies separate, I take my heart back.
Why drag things out, once you¡¯re apart? And in any case,
with that student, it only got physical a few
times. One evening there was a power cut and the sight of him praying under the oil lamp tickled
my appetite, like a fresh fish, so I just took him once. He was a greenhorn; his talents were not so
wonderful as to leave any memories . . .¡¯
She pulled out a cigarette from inside her dress and lit it. The way
she sat there with her legs crossed, carelessly exhaling the smoke, made her look like an arrogant queen. As he watched her, Sergeant Nam felt the hope he had so far stubbornly nourished of
finding in her a clue for his investigation snap miserably. His intuition, resulting from the last ten years¡¯ experience as a
detective, told him
that she had no direct relationship with the death of Min Yoseop. Sergeant Nam hurriedly parted from her. If he was to get to the police station before office hours were over,
he would have to catch the midday train for Daegu at the latest.
4.
Sergeant Nam barely caught the train and once
he was seated he closed his eyes for a moment, feeling dispirited.
Then he set about examining one by one the notebooks he had taken from Min Yoseop¡¯s house. As things
stood now, they were the only hope he had. Sometimes, the personal
notes or the diaries of a culprit or a victim could provide significant
information for an investigation. But, on the other hand,
he was equally beginning to develop a personal
interest in Min Yoseop.
The first thing he opened was the bundle of diaries. The one he picked up
happened to begin just after he had entered the seminary. The first parts were full of the ardent faith and an ambition to attain true goodness that had motivated his decision to quit university and enter the seminary. Soon, though, his
interest shifted to the material conditions of
human life and to social
problems, and he went on to formulate doubts about the Christian
religion itself. Particularly after returning from a lepers¡¯ village, days had gone by filled with religious doubts.
¡®How can misfortune befall humanity, indifferent
to considerations of good or evil?¡¯ ¡®Words of Jesus declare that those who are
rich, strong, and powerful are nothing. Then why are they
everything in this world? According to the words of Jesus, the poor, the sick, and the rejected are everything. Why then are they
nothing in this world?¡¯ ¡®The world is full of superstitions designed to foster belief. Religion is perhaps in some way nothing more than the most skillful form of superstition.¡¯ Although the contents of
the diary were almost constantly abstract and conceptual, Sergeant Nam was able
to keep on reading thanks to such poignant questions inserted here and there.
The train was passing Yeongdong Station by the time he had finished perusing the whole diary. Although Sergeant Nam scanned quickly through the abstract parts, he
paid close attention to the sections dealing with his daily life, but the diary ended on the day of his expulsion from the seminary, without
providing any definite clues that could shed light on events afterward.
Sergeant Nam next opened the remaining bundles of manuscript. It was written in the form of a
novel, but to Sergeant Nam¡¯s limited knowledge, his rusty brain dulled by repeated daily routine and
professional modes of thinking, it was just as hard as the diary. As the train approached Daegu, he would probably have given up before the
end of the second page had it not been for the sense of frustration arising
from the way he was bringing so little back from his trip, combined with the
fact that he had nothing else to do except go on reading.
In the days of Octavius Augustus, in the early years of the Roman
Empire, the Three Wise Men from the East must have been an immense
disappointment to Yahweh, who had until then only
been the God of Jacob and his descendants. Later generations invariably
considered Caspar, Melchior and Balthazar to have been wise men, but it seems extremely doubtful whether they were truly wise and their actions were really worthy to contribute to ¡®Glory in the Highest¡¯ and ¡®Peace on Earth.¡¯
No matter how faithfully Yahweh may have been fulfilling the prophecies made by the servants he
had sent previously, he must have been highly embarrassed when they arrived so noisily, seeking the birth-place of his son, bearing extraordinary gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. For Yahweh, the occasion was destined to be a lamentable mistake for long ages after. Because Mary was another man¡¯s espoused wife, her son was later mocked as a god who ¡®demolished the gates of the prescriptive law he had himself erected¡¯ and had ¡®come in by a short cut,¡¯ and because she was
a human being, controversies about the status of her son drove the early Church into conflicts so terrible that Arius, that lofty ascetic, was condemned to the humiliation of expulsion from the
Church, while
Nestorius, austere and faithful servant though he was, was obliged to succumb to the fatigue of exile.
It would have been so much better if those irresponsible prophecies of Isaiah—¡®Behold, a virgin will conceive and bear a son¡¯ and ¡®the Messiah will be born of David¡¯s line¡¯ and the rest—had been ignored. It would have far
better if the Son of God had come down in a flash of lightning or sprung from a
rock. He might even have fulfilled a prophecy of Daniel and arrived borne on a cloud.
Further doubts as to the wisdom of those men
from the East arise from the immaturity of their words and deeds
prior to the moment when Yahweh arrived in the humble
stable that served as a delivery room for his son. Because they kept
asking everywhere they passed where the King of the Jews was going to be born, Jerusalem was stirred, and the intention of Yahweh, to keep the birth of his Son secret until the proper moment, was betrayed. Presumably that was why he sent down angels, when the birth of his Son was imminent, and announced it in haste to shepherds as lowly as tax collectors or tanners.
The foolishness and indiscretion of the
three men from the East did not stop there, since news of the amazing birth finally reached the ears of
the tyrant. While his darling son was making the dangerous journey to that unfamiliar, far-away land of Egypt, passing
through a forest of swords, Yahweh must have felt such anxiety as he watched over him. How vexed he must have been on seeing Limbo suddenly crowded with
the souls of all those Jewish babies massacred by Herod¡¯s troops, and what regret he must have felt at all those reproaches through later ages that he had brought about his son¡¯s
birth on the basis of the
sacrifice of innumerable innocent lives.
Blessed be the Evangelist who, ignorant of all that, discretely praised the three for their
simplicity. Likewise whoever it was who later created the legend that they were the kings of some oriental lands, finding no better way to glorify them. To say nothing of the apostle Thomas,
reputed to have traveled so far to visit the three men in their old age; and Saint Helena who made such efforts to recover their remains; and Fredrick Barbarossa who did all he could to transfer those relics into the great cathedral of Cologne, uncertain though it is if they were authentic or not. Sancta simplicitas!
Moreover, the story of the three
men from the East did not end with their controversial
veneration of the baby. Yahweh, fearful that on their way home
they might drop in on Herod and tell him truthfully where his son was, belatedly intervened by sending angels. That very night, avoiding Herod and following a different road as the angels had told them,
the three men arrived
in the Plain of Esdraelon, where they beheld another star that inspired them, a great, dark red star, possessing all the attributes of every star, known to astrologers as the Star of Disaster.
At the sight of a
star so utterly in contrast with that which they had been following eagerly all those months, they stopped in their tracks, at first only vaguely intrigued. But then they found themselves
seized with an inexplicable fear and trembling. It was above all
on account of the strange light emanating from it, rather than on account of any preconception inspired by their knowledge of oriental mysteries. Boding ill yet darkly tempting, the light
seemed directed at their hearts like a myriad black
arrows, and at the same time it soothed their souls
like a warm blessing.
Their beliefs and knowledge meant
that they saw everything only in terms of good or evil, darkness or light, and therefore they
trembled all the more in fear before the unfamiliar ambivalence and
complexity of the light from this star. Caspar in
particular, with his weak heart, shocked by his own conclusion that it was a trick of Satan directed at them,
would have fallen from his camel if Melchior had not held him up.
Even Balthazar, the eldest of the three, with the widest experience of the
world, came out in a cold sweat and set about reciting all the prayers people of those times reckoned effective in such a case.
But impervious to every kind of threat, be it an eternally burning pillar
of fire or a blazing lake of molten rock, the frozen ocean that will extinguish
the sun or the hell of flogging more agonizing than all the whips of the
Assyrian tyrant Ashurbanipal, the heavenly warrior of lightning and thunder,
the swords of the Zoroastrian divinity Spenta Armaiti, sharper than all the
weapons of the Hittites, or the chains of adamant that bind for a thousand
years, that star did not vanish until the morning sun rose bright. As a result of their prejudices, equaled by their
blindness and ignorance, the three men from the East merely took the star for a sign of calamity, whereas in fact it shone for another great providential event;
at that hour, in a house near Bethel belonging to a
teacher of the school of Shammai, a true Son of Man had been born, Ahasuerus.
No surviving record tells how
Ahasuerus avoided wicked Herod¡¯s swords. One malicious legend tells that he was easily able to deceive the soldiers of Herod,
who were only looking for infants of less than two years old, because
with the assistance of an evil spirit he was able to walk and talk from
the moment of his birth. Still, it seems more reasonable to conjecture that he was able to
avoid death thanks to
his father¡¯s cunning art of social survival, rather than accept such nonsense. According to the known facts, while his father appeared publicly to belong to the party of the Pharisees, secretly he had from an early age been linked to the Sadducees and the supporters of Herod.
At any rate, while the son of Yahweh was
growing up in wretched poverty in Heliopolis, Ahasuerus was able to enjoy a
peaceful childhood in his father¡¯s small but charming house.
Apart from that detail, most of his childhood, like that of the son of Yahweh, is buried in the darkness of history. As a result, in
order to reconstitute his youth we are obliged to rely on
fragmentary, uncertain legends just as people rely entirely on apocryphal gospels for stories about the son
of Yahweh.
According to them,
Ahasuerus was from infancy extremely thoughtful and intelligent. The malicious claim that he was able to walk and speak from birth
was probably an embellishment based on those remarkable
talents. Above all, he had such an exceptional memory that by the age of about ten he could virtually recite
the Torah by heart. His father, although he considered
himself a master of the Law, had spent his whole life carefully repeating the words of others, and dreamed of raising his amazing son to become the greatest rabbi in
Judea. Indeed, his dream might have been realized, if it had
not been for the call of a greater providence.
The first sign of providence revealed
itself when Ahasuerus was twelve. For the Passover that year, he set out with
his parents to worship at Jerusalem. They entered the city, after a long journey, as the sun was setting and people were already slaughtering the sacrificial lambs and anointing their thresholds with a branch of hyssop dipped in the blood.
They made their way through streets bustling with preparations
for the Feast of Unleavened Bread that was
about to begin and headed for the house of an uncle of Ahasuerus
who lived in the eastern section of the city. Unlike his scholarly brother, his uncle had early gone up to Jerusalem and
begun life as a
merchant, going into leather
trading, that everyone despised, and was currently doing very well in
shoe-making.
After initial greetings, the grown-ups busily set about preparing for the festival. Taking advantage of that,
Ahasuerus went outside, where suddenly an odd sight attracted his attention. A
crowd of neighborhood children was following a man, mocking him and
shouting:
¡®Thedos, Thedos,
Thedos the Braggart!
Thedos, Thedos, Thedos fake Messiah!¡¯
Some naughty children threw handfuls of sand at the man, or poked
him with a long stick. The man walked on, not scolding them and
showing no anger. He did not look mad, or possessed, but his unsteady gait, his
projecting cheekbones and the pallor of his face all indicated how exhausted
and hungry he was. Ahasuerus felt sorry for him for some reason and quickly fetched from his
uncle¡¯s house some leavened bread and unclean meat that had been put aside to be
thrown away.
When Ahasuerus came running back to the man, he
was resting with his back against a wall in the open space at the end of the village. Slumped on the paving stone he had
carefully chosen, he quickly glanced round
at the children who had been following him. His expression was one of slight
annoyance, not of anger, yet it somehow intimidated the crowd of children, so that they ran away in all directions.
¡®Child, what do you
want?¡¯
The man, noticing Ahasuerus, who was still lingering there when all the other children had left, questioned him.
¡®There¡¯s some bread and meat here . . .¡¯
Ahasuerus replied cautiously, showing him the basket he was carrying.
¡®Really? That¡¯s
very kind of you. Did you bring it for me?¡¯
¡®Yes, but it¡¯s
leavened bread.¡¯
¡®That doesn¡¯t
matter. The Feast of Unleavened Bread hasn¡¯t begun yet.¡¯
The man took the basket and hungrily ate the bread and meat. Then he drank from a nearby well before slowly examining
Ahasuerus. Finally he asked him: ¡®Do you live hereabouts?¡¯
¡®No, I¡¯m here visiting my uncle.¡¯
¡®I suppose you came
with your parents to worship in the Temple?¡¯
¡®Yes.¡¯
¡®Thank you, anyway.
I feel stronger, thanks to you.¡¯
Ahasuerus could see nothing particular about
him that might have made the children follow him, mocking. He plucked up his courage to ask the question that had been preoccupying
him for some while.
¡®Say . . . what did you do?¡¯
¡®What? Oh, you mean the children . . .?¡¯
¡®Yes. Why were they
following behind you and teasing you?¡¯
¡®It was because . .
. ¡®
He paused and smiled sourly.
¡®It was because I
commanded the walls of Jerusalem to collapse.¡¯
¡®Why?¡¯
Unable to understand, Ahasuerus repeated his
question. Again the man smiled sourly and replied as if he were talking
about someone else.
¡®In order to
manifest my power to all the Jews; I made out that I was the Messiah.¡¯
Hearing that, Ahasuerus
felt he somehow understood what the man
meant. Although only a child, he had already heard, through the whispers and
sniggers of grown-ups, rumors of the false messiahs who were causing such a stir. One false messiah had assembled a crowd beside the Jordan, claiming to be able to walk on water like Moses, but then he sank.
Another self-proclaimed messiah had summoned people to gather in the plain
where he would reveal to them the face of God, but only ended up covered in sand. Ahasuerus thought he had heard
something of what the man before him had done. But on meeting him,
instead of finding that amusing as grown-ups did, Ahasuerus felt mystified and curious.
¡®So what happened?¡¯
¡®Well, not a stone moved, of course.¡¯
The man continued to speak as if it had happened to someone else. Ahasuerus found his way of talking very strange.
¡®So you¡¯re not the Messiah and you did what you did knowing that the walls were not going to fall down?¡¯
¡®Right. And I did
it after gathering tens of thousands of people on the Mount of
Olives.¡¯
Once again, the man smiled strangely. Bewildered, Ahasuerus asked again: ¡®But why did you do it? ¡®
¡®More importantly,
you¡¯re listening to what I say and not laughing. Why don¡¯t you laugh
like the rest?¡¯
Suddenly looking serious as he spoke, the man gazed intently into Ahasuerus¡¯ face. He then looked sterner as he asked another question, to
which he had no answer: ¡®Child, how old are you?¡¯
¡®I¡¯m twelve.¡¯
¡®What do you want
to become in the future?¡¯
¡®I would like to
become the most respected rabbi in the country.¡¯
Ahasuerus gave the reply he had learned from
his parents and the teachers in the synagogue.
¡®In that case, you
must already have learned many things.¡¯
¡®I can recite the
entire Torah by heart, almost without missing a
line. I have also
learned the Nebi'im, the Prophets, and
the Kethubhim, the other writings, as well as the commentaries of the Midrash,
the Hallaka, and the Mishnah.¡¯
With a childish pride, Ahasuerus reeled off
everything he had ever studied. But unlike the teachers of the law and the scribes, the Sophrim, who
had instructed him previously, the man did not seem
surprised, neither did he show any interest in testing his knowledge. Ahasuerus had wanted to boast that he likewise knew the Haggada from the Talmud, and the apocryphal books,
that he could speak Aramaic fluently, and that
he had begun to read and write Greek, but he said nothing more, rather disappointed.
¡®You have indeed
studied difficult texts, hard even for grown men to master. I believe
you. But tell me, what can all those words give us? ¡®
The man, who had been observing the boy for a while in silence, questioned him
with a watchful look. Ahasuerus hesitated, unsure of what the man was
asking, then finally repeated the reply he usually gave to his parents and teachers.
¡®Why, everything—blessings and peace, and the strength
capable of awakening the love and compassion of God.¡¯
¡®Really . . . ?¡¯
On hearing Ahasuerus¡¯ reply, the sad smile of a short while before returned to the man¡¯s face. He
murmured, as if lamenting: ¡®Your father seems to have entrusted the formation of your wisdom to the priests and rabbis too soon.¡¯
What he said was
too hard for a child in his twelfth year to reply to. The man
remained silent, apparently absorbed in his own deep thoughts. An awkward silence settled between them.
¡®Child . . .¡¯
The man finally addressed the boy in a firmer voice, as if he had just come to a
difficult decision. His gaze, too, was not
that of the starving,
exhausted vagrant he had been only a short time before.
¡®Will you meet me again tomorrow?¡¯
¡®Why?¡¯ He asked, feeling apprehension for
some reason, mingled with a strange sense of expectancy.
¡®I¡¯ve not answered the question you were curious about yet. I¡¯ll give you an answer. But first, there¡¯s something I want to show you.¡¯
¡®What is it?¡¯
¡®Things that will
teach you what the Word and the Law are. Anyhow, will you come to me tomorrow?¡¯
His eyes seemed to be burning bright
with a myriad small flames. That, together with his low, powerful voice, was more than enough to overwhelm the soul of young Ahasuerus.
¡®Yes. I¡¯ll ask my parents.¡¯
¡®No, you must say nothing to them. You can go with them to the
Temple, then steal away secretly while they are busy worshipping. I¡¯ll be waiting for you in front, where the moneychangers sit.¡¯
The man rose abruptly and hobbled away. The words he had spoken were like an order that Ahasuerus could not
disobey.
The next day, drawn by an unknown power, he duly went to the appointed place to meet the false messiah Thedos, who
first of all took him into a slum on the outskirts of the city. There, naked children without so much as a stitch
of clothing were weeping for hunger, while beside them women were rolling on the ground, tearing at each other¡¯s hair, hurling coarse
insults at one another over a scrap of bread, in a scene that showed to what extent material penury
causes people misery and pain. Next, they visited a workshop manned by slaves.
There, men were treating other men in a way no animal,
no matter how fierce and brutal, ever treated its like,
harshly harnessing them and dominating them with whips. Reduced to slavery after being defeated in war, or for not paying
debts, yet prisoners of a superstition known as hope, they endured an existence worse than death, and would only escape from
the bonds of misery and
pain on the day their souls finally left their bodies. After
that came an underground prison. It was not clear how Thedos managed to enter with the child into a place so strictly guarded, but Ahasuerus was deeply shocked by what he saw in that dark, dank gaol. Theft, robbery, murder, rape . . . people guilty of such crimes, dreadful when heard of outside, proved to be no more than his wretched fellow men who had lost the battle with their own flesh; what had turned the scales
against them was
generally the times and the social system.
In addition, ever since the miserable end of the
Hasmonaeans over thirty years before, some had been awaiting a Messiah from the family of David, one who would establish a political regime, others from among the
descendants of Levi, the priestly caste with their religious, otherworldly
vision. When it came to zealots who had fought and been taken prisoner in the resistance against Rome, there might be apprehension concerning their
fanaticism, but not the least shadow of evil could be found in them.
Thedos did not stop there, but led
Ahasuerus outside the city walls. He wanted to show
him the Hill of Crosses, the main place of
execution, and then the Valley of Lepers. On the Hill of Crosses, several Galileans were being executed; they
had killed a Roman centurion and a tax collector. The man most recently
crucified was screaming in pain, while others, having already spent long hours there, were slowly dying, calling the name of God or Elijah. Inside a cave in
the Valley of Lepers, worse than any pig sty, lepers, whose only crime
was to have been born with a body capable of
being infected with such a terrible disease, addressed unending prayers to Heaven, lifting up disfigured faces and truncated
limbs.
It is hard to believe that a boy of twelve, no matter how
intelligent and thoughtful, would be able to comprehend fully the true implications of such scenes. But it seems clear that some kind of power, that went far beyond mere curiosity, was somehow vaguely leading him, for he continued to follow Thedos to the very
end of that strange pilgrimage without turning away, although at such an age it was bound to provoke abhorrence and fear. Indeed, more than that; for, at the very moment when Ahasuerus
was plumbing every recess of the misery and
misfortune that befall human beings with
their physical bodies,
the son of Yahweh was in the Temple discussing the Word with famous priests and
teachers, in which we cannot help but sense an intervention of
Providence.
The day was drawing to a close by the time Thedos and Ahasuerus had visited all those
places and returned to
the city. Thedos walked ahead of the boy from beginning to end, not speaking, merely guiding, and it was only when
they reached the vacant lot where they had met on the previous day that he looked at Ahasuerus and spoke
as if resuming their previous conversation:
¡®Child, you are
intelligent, so you will remember what I say, even if you do not yet understand
fully the meaning of what you have seen today. Listen, and then think about it all for yourself, when your mind and
intelligence are fully grown. Yesterday, you said that the Word
can give us everything. But today you have seen for yourself that the Word can give us nothing. Were not people suffering and dying
at the very moment when the priests and teachers were proclaiming at the top of
their voices the Word in all its beauty and hope? The Word was unable to fill the hungry or clothe the naked. It was unable to
protect people from crime and from disease; it was powerless against misery and misfortune. At this very moment, many thousand times
the number of people you have seen today are dying pointlessly in pain, believing in the superstition of the Word.¡¯
Although Ahasuerus could understand almost nothing, his words
penetrated deep into his soul, like rain soaking parched
ground. Thedos briefly observed the boy with piercing eyes,
as if to check how deeply his words were engraving
themselves on his soul, then went on, his tone growing more passionate.
¡®Listen well. I feel that a critical moment is approaching. Someone is coming. But he must not simply be an incarnation of
the Word. The one who comes must be able
to give us everything we desire.
¡®For that, he must bring three keys with him: first, bread, to save our wretched bodies from famine; second, a miracle to protect our feeble minds from evil; and third, worldly power, to impose the order of justice and love on the history of blindness and cruelty. If any of those three are lacking,
that person cannot be our Messiah.
¡®What I did on the
Mount of Olives was designed to teach people that. I initially promised to give bread to my followers, but I could not keep my word. Then I declared that I would drive out the Romans, establish the kingdom of God in this land, and defend righteousness with the royal scepter and the sword, but that too I was unable to
achieve. Finally, I revealed to the people on the Mount
of Olives, through the memory of their disappointment, that the last of the
signs a Messiah must bring with him is a miracle. Be sure to remember: bread, a miracle and power.
The mere incarnation of the Word, just like the Word itself, can give us nothing.¡¯
After speaking, with a piercing gaze Thedos again looked at Ahasuerus, who was moved for a reason he could not fathom. At last Thedos smiled in satisfaction, as if confirming that his words were safely lodged deep in the boy¡¯s memory,
then rose determinedly.
¡®Night has fallen,
child. Go home now. I must be on my way, too.¡¯
Thedos hastily bade
Ahasuerus farewell, while he was still standing there vacantly. He disappeared down an already darkening alley without
once looking back. His words of
farewell were spoken in the tired, weak voice of their first meeting, perhaps because of a sense of emptiness arising from
a feeling that he had done what he had to do in life, but there was a mysterious aura about him as he walked away.
Ahasuerus only came to himself long after
Thedos had disappeared into the dark alley. The anxious expressions of his parents, searching everywhere for him, suddenly came into his
mind and his heart slowly filled with anguish as to what excuse he could find to explain how he had spent that day, for they could never understand if he told them the truth. He began to run as fast as he could toward his uncle¡¯s house, and the world of a twelve-year-old awaiting him there, forgetting Thedos and the rest.
The memory of that strange day, engraved forever
within his mind, would suddenly come rising in later days, steering his life in uncommon
directions, but as yet his youth was utterly powerless to deal
with the problem of God
or of spiritual experience.
5.
Time passed; time recorded nowhere, remembered by no one, known only to the soul of legend. Now Ahasuerus was in his eighteenth year, in the
full springtime of his life.
Meanwhile, his body had fully matured. He was nearly a full span taller than his father and as broad-shouldered as
the laborers engaged in felling the cedars of Lebanon. His face, where blond sideburns had begun to grow, was so handsome that girls would lie dreaming of him for several nights after a single
glance; his brown eyes had lost their boyish sparkle and had taken on a darker, brighter sheen.
Like his body, his knowledge had
matured. No other youth had studied and
committed to memory as much as he had about the Word of Yahweh and his Law, the teachings
of the prophets and their prophecies, the faith and exploits of kings and
judges, the exegesis and commentaries of all the doctors of the Law,
all the hymns so full of faith and the various apocalypses,
the rituals and services of the Temple and the synagogues, all the rules and customs that determined the life of his people and much else beside. His skill in mastering
languages was so exceptional that beside the written Hebrew
inherited from his forefathers, he could speak
Aramaic with the merchants arriving with caravans from exotic, eastern lands
as with hometown friends. He had learned Greek so well through the translation of the Septuagint
that his mind would have been capable of getting to the
heart of Greek culture if the strict traditions of the Pharisees had not held him back.
Legends even claim that he knew every tongue from the land where the sun rises to the land where the sun sets.
That rumor probably arose from exaggerations intended to prove that he had been
assisted by Satan, but in view
of the fact that Judea was situated at a crossroads of trade coming from all
directions, where caravans arrived from many countries, it is quite probable
that he might have known a few other languages in addition to Aramaic and Greek.
The learning that Ahasuerus had inherited from his ancestors in his own
people¡¯s tongue as well as the learning borne in from other regions in strange
tongues filled his mind and overflowed, casting a striking shadow across his
face. It was a shadow deep and calm, resulting from the addition of
intellectual charm to a man already handsome. But in years when he should have
been whispering bashful feelings of love to girls of his own age, the spring of
his adulthood sought him out in an unusual form.
One night in August, the month of Elul, Ahasuerus was prowling the
dew-soaked garden surrounding Asaph¡¯s house. Asaph was extremely rich, owning
several caravans and with a wharf of his own as well as a warehouse in the
nearby port of Jaffa. Ahasuerus was waiting for the immense mansion to be
asleep.
Soon the lamps in the windows went out one after another and the servants,
who had been bustling about until it was late, coming and going as they
finished washing the last dishes, finally seemed ready for sleep. Still
Ahasuerus lingered in the shadow of the trees in the well-tended garden; only
when the entire household had fallen into a deep silence did he move at last
toward the house. Approaching the single window from which a bright and
peculiarly voluptuous light still shone, he knocked lightly several times at
regular intervals, as if tapping a signal.
Without any other sign the curtain lifted and the window opened silently.
Ahasuerus climbed skillfully over the marble sill and into the room.
¡®Oh, Ahasuerus!¡¯
He was welcomed joyfully by Asaph¡¯s young wife, wrapped in a silk robe,
eager to embrace his dew-soaked body. After his first wife died, his immense
wealth had enabled Asaph to take a new wife, a beautiful young woman from an
illustrious family. That was several years ago; since then she had become the
mother of a boy and a girl, and she was approaching thirty with her beauty
still quite dazzling.
¡®I don¡¯t know how I could have got through so long and dreary a night if
you hadn¡¯t come. It¡¯s been five days since he left for Parthia to open up a new
caravan route. I was waiting for you yesterday and the day before, with the
blue veil hanging at the window.¡¯
She kissed Ahasuerus passionately, then whispered to him without releasing
him. That blue veil at the window of her room was a signal they had adopted to
indicate that her husband was absent.
¡®I knew, Sarah, of course I knew.¡¯
Ahasuerus stammered, giddy with the fragrance of the woman¡¯s flesh, a
fragrance he had been deprived of for some time. He had in fact spent several
days in agonies of indecision, ever since he learned that Asaph was away. The
guilt he felt at having broken Yahweh¡¯s commandment and committed adultery with
another man¡¯s wife, combined with an overwhelming remorse, had for some time
now grown stronger than his reckless passion. He had already sworn to himself
on several occasions, as he staggered from the deep shadows of Asaph¡¯s garden
in the early morning light, that he would not come to her again.
Yet it had only taken a glimpse of the blue veil at her window for him to
be swept away by an uncontrollable desire. No dreadful warning as to the wages
of sin, no verse from any of the books of Wisdom teaching the vanity of carnal
desire, had been of the slightest help to him. This time he had spent three
whole days in an intense struggle with himself. After those wide-eyed,
sleepless nights, in which each moment had been like a cruel whiplash, he found
himself brought to his knees before her or rather before his own immense
desire, finally defeated, shuddering with a greater ardor and excitement than
on any previous nights he had spent with her.
¡®My beauty, my love! Why did the Lord not send you into the world a little
later? Why did he not place you among our neighborhood girls so that I might take
you for my lawful wedded wife? Why did he give you into the arms of that ugly
old merchant? Why does he not allow us to spend every day and night in love
together?¡¯
Ahasuerus stammered out his words, in the throes of a deep sorrow for
reasons he could not grasp, lying like a child in the woman¡¯s arms with his
brow pressed between her warm breasts. The torment and agony he had experienced
in the course of those nights now turned into uncontrollable tears that flowed
down his haggard cheeks.
¡®My poor dear! You¡¯re crying like a fool. Here we are together, and can
feel love for each other like this.¡¯
¡®That¡¯s not what I meant, Sarah. Why has God . . .¡¯
Sarah loosened her embrace and placed her soft white hand over Ahasuerus¡¯
mouth.
¡®That nonsense again! Now, take me in your arms. Hold me tight,
passionately. The morning star and the cock that will crow at dawn are jealous
of us as they await their hour. Stop hurting yourself with pointless worries
and regrets. We should simply enjoy the cup that is before us. All we have to
do is drink and enjoy it when we can. Come, quickly.¡¯
With those words, she warmly embraced Ahasuerus, who was caught in the
throes of a strange blend of passion and torment, and drew him toward the bed.
The luxuriously adorned bed and the memories of the pleasures they had shared
there kindled him instantly, body and soul. It was a fire of intense carnal
desire that burned clean away every other thought.
As on previous occasions, they fell on to the bed in a tight embrace and
lay rolling there. They were fierce waves and a boat rocking to the movement of
the waves; a mighty waterfall, an inextricable swamp, wild stallions, tenacious
serpents. They each gave themselves unsparingly at the same time as each
greedily took from the other, tormenting and enduring torments. It was at the
same moment a focusing and a releasing, a suffocating act of coming together,
then pushing away in surprise.
The bed creaked despite the skilled carpenter¡¯s boasts of how solid it was;
strange groans that might be shouts or might be sobs burst out in spite of
every caution and effort to restrain them, and a storm of passion swept over
them amidst a rustling of bedding. Bathed in sweat, Ahasuerus lay as if dead on
top of the woman, without the least movement. She gently pulled him down to lie
at her side and whispered as she snuggled afresh against his breast:
¡®Could Heaven be more delightful, more blissful than the place we have just
passed through together? Could Heaven be more beautiful or more resplendent?
Oh, beloved Ahasuerus, when I saw you for the very first time in the olive
grove at Shekhem on the feast-day of Purim, I recognized that you bore a heaven
within you. In your red, warm lips, your profound gaze, in your soft hands, and
above all in your body, so well proportioned and so strong, like a Greek
statue, I saw . . .¡¯
Her voice was moist, thick with the sensations of pleasure still thrilling
and flowing through every part of her body. For Ahasuerus it was otherwise. He
was blankly staring up at the ceiling with a vacant gaze. He tried to stifle
the voice of guilt and repentance rising from deep in his heart by the memory
of the rapture of the previous moments, but to no avail. Rather, as the fire of
desire subsided and the palpitations of his body slowed, the voices grew
louder.
¡®Why has the Lord not allowed us to enjoy ours bodies freely, after giving
them to us? Why did he send his Word belatedly to name this joy a sin? Why is
it that as soon as I¡¯ve finished making love to you, so many helpless tears
flow like this?¡¯
Unable to endure any longer the tormenting voices in his heart, Ahasuerus
murmured sadly. His murmur vexed Sarah, who was intent on savoring her pleasure
for as long as possible, regretting only that it was already fading, but she
spoke with a gentle, caressing voice as if to soothe him:
¡®Ahasuerus, you should forget all that. Those commandments are for old men
and for priests, not for us. They were handed down to Moses by the cantankerous
ghost of Horeb, intent on forbidding for no reason at all anything that might
give us joy or pleasure; it¡¯s not something demanded by the almighty El
Shaddai, God of Abraham.¡¯
¡®They¡¯re one and the same God, not two. Besides, ever since that Word was
received by our forefathers and placed in the Ark of the Covenant, it has
become the object of our faith and worship, virtually equivalent to God¡¯s
presence. Sarah, we mustn¡¯t deny the Word and the Law in order to deny our sin.¡¯
At that, she finally manifested her feelings of displeasure. She drew
Ahasuerus¡¯ head toward her, and gazed into his eyes as she spoke sharply:
¡®You¡¯re afraid. What you really fear isn¡¯t the Word of God, or his Law; it¡¯s
being dragged into the street and being struck by the stones people throw, isn¡¯t
it? But I¡¯m not afraid. If I am to be rewarded with the moments of ecstasy I
have just experienced, no flying stone, however sharp, could ever hurt me.¡¯
¡®I fear the stone that is flying toward my conscience.¡¯
¡®A stone flying toward your conscience? My mother¡¯s a daughter of the tribe
of Levi and my brother¡¯s a well-known rabbi, but I don¡¯t believe in all that.
Did you know what sin was from the moment you were born? Isn¡¯t it because
people have told you certain things are sins that now you regard them as sins?
Nothing in this world is a sin from the beginning. It¡¯s the same with adultery
. . . What¡¯s turned that into a sin is a mean trick invented by men uncertain
of being able to keep control of their wives by the power of love alone, as a
way of binding them to themselves. Only think for a moment! What harm have we
done, except to the vanity of an ugly old merchant and his warped self-esteem?
We¡¯ve simply been happily enjoying the bodies that the Lord gave us.
¡®Besides, even if it is a sin, I don¡¯t regret or fear anything. Because
between knowing nothing of this pleasure or of the pangs of conscience, or
knowing it and suffering, there¡¯s almost no difference. It¡¯s better to eat both
sweet and sour figs than not to eat the sweet fig for fear of the bitter fig
that may follow it.¡¯
To Ahasuerus, who had only chosen celebrated masters, only heard orthodox
forms of teaching, Sarah¡¯s reasoning was new and artful, and it therefore felt
strange to him. Still, one thing he could not comprehend was the light that
seemed to be shining from her flushed face. Not the gloom of sin and death but
the fullness of beauty and life, it was a light he had never before seen
emanating from her or from anyone else.
Ahasuerus gazed at her in astonishment. But only for a moment; flowing in
his people¡¯s veins, faith in the Word and the Law had accumulated like
perpetual snows in their souls as generation followed generation, and it
quickly transformed his astonishment into a strong sense of guilt. Instead of
contradicting her, he slowly rose, feeling even grimmer than before, and went
to where his clothes lay strewn.
¡®Ahasuerus, wait. Will you leave before you drain the cup poured out for
you? There are still many hours before the first cockcrow.¡¯
Presumably her still unfulfilled desires were urging her, for Sarah now
moved toward him on her knees, preventing him from getting dressed. Her beauty,
shining in a bewitching manner from her totally unclothed body, served to
stimulate Ahasuerus afresh. He stopped briefly, then pushed her hand away. He
struggled to control his thoughtlessly reviving desire by imagining the vulgar
coquetry of the prostitutes on the streets.
¡®Sarah, you must let me go. I need to reflect alone. If I find the
self-confidence, I will come back.¡¯
He stuttered. Yet he knew full well that this was the end. Sarah, awakened
now from the dizziness of her passion by the humiliation of having been
rejected, seemed to have realized it too. Her renunciation of him was so quick
and clean that Ahasuerus was puzzled when he later recalled the moment. Rising
with a little sigh, Sarah drew on the silk nightdress that Ahasuerus had so
hastily torn from her. Going to a mirror, she straightened her clothing and
arranged her disheveled hair, then she addressed Ahasuerus calmly as he was
about to climb out through the window:
¡®Goodbye, Ahasuerus. What was nothing special for me was highly painful for
you. But now I am giving you your freedom. Don¡¯t yearn for me. What I loved was
a healthy man in the fresh flush of youth, not some particular person with your
name and your mind.¡¯
Her words might have seemed a form of revenge but nothing in her face
suggested that she was lying or exaggerating.
So Ahasuerus found himself back in his own world, that he had paid no heed
to for some time. Yet it was no longer the world of the Temple or the
synagogues where his former teachers were still to be found; nor that of his
father¡¯s library with its smell of parchment, or the world of the Word. Ridding
himself of all the preconceptions and prejudices he had acquired by his studies
and learning, he focused on an aspect of human life that he had newly
discovered by himself through Sarah. He had only detected a vague shadow of it
here and there in a few verses of the Psalms and the Song of Songs, but there
were no writings he had read, no words he had heard, that explained the light
full of beauty and life he had glimpsed during the last night he had spent with
her. Yet despite his constant scrutiny and repeated sleepless nights, the true
nature of that light remained unfathomable. No matter how hard he tried to
suppress it, his carnal desire came surging back whenever there was a chink and
his longing for her grew ever stronger.
A few months passed. One day Ahasuerus went for a walk through the streets
to clear his mind, exhausted by sorrowful musings, and noticed, on some open
ground in front of a synagogue, a strange commotion among a crowd gathered
there. Approaching unthinkingly, he realized from their threatening eyes and
the stones they were carrying that it must be one of the impromptu street-side
trials that occasionally happened. He was about to leave before the cruel
spectacle began; but when he saw the woman who was being dragged into the
center of the crowd he stopped in surprise. It was Sarah, Asaph¡¯s young wife.
But although she was surrounded by a furious mob, she had the appearance of a
noblewoman. She seemed to have been awakened from slumber by the noise of a
crowd and come out to see what vulgar activities they were up to, rather than a
sinner trembling before her imminent death.
¡®What has that woman done?¡¯
Ahasuerus questioned an unknown bystander in a shaken voice. The man spat
out a reply, his face expressing an insidious mixture of instinctive disgust
and incomprehensible jealousy:
¡®She has broken the Law, committing the sin of adultery.¡¯
¡®Who was her partner?¡¯
Quailing inwardly, Ahasuerus questioned him again urgently. The man¡¯s face
twisted with reinforced viciousness as he replied:
¡®A young groom in the service of Asaph. He¡¯s already been killed by his
master.¡¯
¡®Where is Asaph?¡¯
¡®He¡¯s over there beside the priests. Since she¡¯s no slave, he¡¯s handed her
over to the Law and to us.¡¯
The judgment must have been pronounced as they were speaking, for someone
shouted and then stones began to fly from all sides. Abruptly paralyzed by a
sudden dread and an awareness of his own helplessness, Ahasuerus stared dumbly
at Sarah. At that very moment, her eyes seemingly drawn in his direction by
some force, Sarah saw Ahasuerus and threw him a look. Their eyes met for a
second. Despite the hundred cubits separating them, he felt that she was
standing just in front of him. Blood was flowing from her forehead, wounded by
flying stones, but still she remained erect; strangely, there was the hint of a
smile in her eyes. It was a frightening, mysterious smile, suggesting mockery
or compassion. But that was all. Then a sharp stone from near at hand slammed
into her back and brought her down, without so much as a single cry, and she
lay crumpled on the ground. Then stones rained down and in next to no time her
bloodied body was covered.
Ahasuerus remained standing there, unaware of anything, his body and mind
frozen; when he came to his senses, the crowd had already scattered. All that
remained were the stifled sobs and lamentations of relatives who had come to
take away the body, and the insoluble riddle of a corpse buried under the
stones of the Word.
In the time following, Ahasuerus devoted himself to an arduous pursuit of
human reality, which clearly originated in the riddle posed by Sarah¡¯s death,
the misery and misfortunes of every person endowed with a body and desires.
Legends report of him at this period that he was ¡®a friend to thieves and
beggars; a brother to prostitutes, slaves, the possessed, and lepers.¡¯ That
might seem to have little connection with the shock caused by Sarah¡¯s death,
but at least one thing can be asserted definitely: he had rid himself of the
traditional view according to which the misery and misfortunes of all who
suffer are to be considered the wages of sin. And there is no doubt that
somewhere deep within him, he was driven on with continuing force by his memory
of that vagabond Thedos he had met in Jerusalem as a child.
¡®Father, do you really believe in the sin of Cain?¡¯
One evening in his nineteenth year, Ahasuerus,
returning home after a lengthy absence, went to see his father in his study and
without preliminaries abruptly questioned him. His father considered him with a
look of deep solicitude and carefully rolled up the megillah scroll he had been reading. Six months had passed since
his son had left home and family, following with difficulty his own unknown
path. He had been worried about his perilous wanderings and wild giddiness, but
such things could happen to anyone at least once in their youth, and since he
felt fully confident of his son¡¯s unique intelligence and good character, he
had never allowed himself to scold him. However, the rumors that had recently
come to his ears were such that he could not remain indifferent. He was deeply
anxious, at a loss where to begin, even if he wanted to; now here was his son,
breezing in and asking preposterous questions:
¡®Father, who would you punish more severely, the perpetrator of a crime or
the instigator?¡¯
This time Ahasuerus
asked a different question, perhaps unaware of
his father¡¯s inner perplexity. Unable to sense the
intention behind his son¡¯s first question, he had hesitated to reply; he
reluctantly replied to the second, more obvious question.
¡®The instigator, of course.¡¯
¡®Then is the perpetrator always innocent?¡¯
¡®Not necessarily. Even a mere perpetrator, if he knew or might have known
the evil of the action or the wrongness of the outcome, should be punished.¡¯
The father answered his son¡¯s question warily, but with all the sincerity
he could muster. His son pursued his questioning, as if he had expected that
answer.
¡®What if all the feelings and the will of the perpetrator were entirely
under the control of the instigator, or if he had been compelled to act by the
irresistible power of the instigator?¡¯
¡®In such a case, no. Are you suggesting that Cain was a perpetrator of that
kind?¡¯
¡®Exactly. He was the Lord¡¯s perpetrator. Just a poor agent, betrayed by the
instigator, who cursed him instead of rewarding him.¡¯
At that point, his father began, though vaguely, to sense the drift of his
son¡¯s words. He had no wish to enter into a lengthy discussion. It was not so
much that the complexity of the topic troubled him, but because he feared his
son¡¯s knowledge and sagacity, of which he had not yet sounded the limits. He
pretended not to understand his words, though it was not the case. He made him
go on talking alone in order to avoid the risk of a conflict of opinions
between them.
¡®I don¡¯t understand what you mean.¡¯
The son was not prepared to let his father off so easily. Instead of
resolving his father¡¯s doubts, he tried to draw him into the argument he was
formulating by asking a new question.
¡®Father, do you think that the will of a creature can ever transcend that
of the Creator?¡¯
¡®Of course not. Every hair on our bodies, our every breath, all without
exception derive from him, and likewise our minds too are all under the will of
the Lord our God.¡¯
¡®From whom, then, did Cain¡¯s murderous intent originate?¡¯
¡®This is rather sudden . . . The Lord who is the Origin of everything must
have given it to him, of course. But that went together with a prohibition.¡¯
¡®Then what about a will that ignores the prohibition and proceeds to kill?¡¯
¡®What a tough exegesis! But I never considered it significant, so I haven¡¯t
thought about it deeply.¡¯
Again his father tried to escape from the discussion, that he was being
drawn into without any preparation. As he had hoped, Ahasuerus continued to
present his ideas, but he did not let his father off the hook.
¡®There¡¯s no need to think so deeply. There can only be two solutions. The
first is to say that it did not come from God. In which case, like the
Persians, we are bound to acknowledge an aspect of humanity that escapes his
control, with some other Mighty Being controlling that part. Then his Word and
the Law express an abuse of power, an excessive self-confidence, or a
misunderstanding about human nature. But you cannot accept that, since you
believe in God and serve him as omniscient, absolutely perfect, unique.¡¯
¡®Naturally. And what is the other?¡¯
¡®The conclusion that every aspect of human nature comes from the Lord. The
result remains the same, even if you invent a shield called Satan. In that
case, Cain is not answerable for any sin. He merely carried out the prearranged
plan of the Lord with the instrument of the will he received from him. The
all-knowing Lord allowed Abel to be struck down before his very eyes, because
he had an intention higher than forgiving Cain¡¯s homicide. We might say that he
instigated Cain¡¯s act for a certain purpose. For example, to show through Cain
a type of crime, murder, and its wickedness, and through his punishment impose
a psychological constraint and threat on everybody, all potential criminals.
¡®In that case Cain, having fulfilled his task to the letter, ought to have
been rewarded rather than punished. Besides, what the Torah implies is God¡¯s
hidden goodwill toward Cain. Though Cain is reported to have appealed to him,
the Lord promised anyone who persecuted him a retaliation seven times as great.
For what earthly reason does everyone constantly consider Cain, as far as
humanity is concerned, to have been simply a wicked sinner?¡¯
When Ahasuerus reached that point, his father sensed that he could no
longer avoid taking a stand. The discussion was growing increasingly serious.
¡®My son, you are seeing the matter too one-sidedly. Questions about God and
Heaven cannot be clarified by petty human wisdom. There is something in what
you are saying, but it somehow reminds me of those Sophists who used to go
wandering across Greece in groups at one time. You are deliberately confusing
the nature of the law that forbids and the law that commands. Your defense of
Cain would be correct if he had fulfilled God¡¯s command. Why do you only stress
the evil hidden in human nature, and ignore the existence of the good will that
is capable of opposing and conquering it? Has the Lord not given us strength
enough to resist all the temptations of evil? Between those two wills, we are
free to choose one as the motivation of our actions. That is why Cain should be
blamed, because he paid no attention to the good side and dared to take a
forbidden course.¡¯
¡®You talk like a Roman judge. So, father, you believe in that freedom of
the will that we¡¯re supposed to have been given since the days of Adam? Do you
truly believe that any aspect of our actions or our thoughts is free of the
Creator¡¯s all-inclusive providence?¡¯
¡®I believe that to be the testimony of all the scriptures and the prophets.¡¯
¡®While knowing that everything concerning us was made according to the
Creator¡¯s plan and therefore we can never in any case be his equals?¡¯
¡®Yes indeed. Insofar as he has foretold the Last Judgment; insofar as he
has promised to reward good and punish evil . . .¡¯
¡®That¡¯s not freedom; it¡¯s irresponsible laissez-faire
on his part. Do you really believe that a being who stays silent while people
struggle and bleed, caught between two contradictory wills, and then, after
they have been defeated, pursue a course of depravity and ruin, has the right
to judge and punish the sins of people, resulting from that? Can you truly call
such a being not a heartless jailer but a God of Love and Mercy?¡¯
¡®But the Lord did not remain silent all the time. He has given us many
Words and many Laws, while many prophets and righteous men have been sent to
fortify our good will.¡¯
¡®But isn¡¯t the choice to believe them or not included within our freedom?¡¯
¡®Any soul who believes in him and does his will is able to believe and
follow his Word and those he has sent.¡¯
¡®It¡¯s a circular argument. Couldn¡¯t the choice whether or not to believe in
him and obey him be included in our freedom since the time of Adam?¡¯
¡®But what do you understand by freedom?¡¯
¡®I reckon it never existed from the very start. That freedom itself is part
of his preordained plan, and likewise our salvation and our fall merely follows
that plan.¡¯
¡®What about all the sincere intentions and endeavors we offer up to him in
this world?¡¯
¡®They are merely the mark of a small elect remnant whose destiny it is to
be saved according to his plan. While bestowing sorrow and despair on the
majority, who are not chosen, without knowing when that will be revoked . . .¡¯
When he heard Ahasuerus speaking in such terms, his father felt an
unidentifiable fear and an indistinct sense of helplessness. It was a maximized
form of the concern he experienced, simple and honest as he was, every time he
listened to the radical new exegeses of young rabbis obviously influenced by
Persian dualism and eschatology, together with an intellectual inferiority at
being unable to beat them in logical argument.
¡®I do not think so. And even if I agreed with what you say of that plan, I
cannot think that the plan of the One who loves us could be so narrow and
capricious. He would rather wait thousands of years, tens of thousands of
years, until we had all saved ourselves.¡¯
His father, after a silence, stammered out a reply in which he slyly
attempted to draw love and mercy from behind a traditional God of punishments
and rewards. But that only served to open up the floodgates of whatever dark
passion had swept over his son. Suddenly bringing a new, malicious and
aggressive energy to his sarcastic, mocking tone, Ahasuerus retorted:
¡®That¡¯s a foolish belief. If our God was so merciful, so full of love, he
should never have given us that undefined freedom to start with. Then Adam
would not have dared pluck the fruit of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and we
could have avoided the yoke of original sin. Moreover, if freedom had to be
given to us, he should not have established any proscriptive laws. In that
case, even if Adam had picked the fruit it would not have been a sin.
¡®But God, loading our feeble wills with those two heavy burdens, is
determined to impose on us responsibility for our choices; on us who are mere
creatures and are bound ultimately to be irresponsible. Worse still, as time
went on the number of proscriptions increased more and more, whereas in Eden
there had been just one, in all the different edicts from before the time of
Moses, the more than four thousand teachings in the Torah and the Hallaka,
and the countless proscriptions hidden in the Midrash, the Mishnah, and
goodness knows what else. I really cannot understand why they are needed, or
what essential relation they have with our salvation or our eternal life. Why
did such a long, meandering and painful way have to be imposed on us, his ¡®dearly
beloved children¡¯?¡¯
¡®My son, you must not try to attack the works of the immeasurably profound,
almighty Lord with puny, simple human logic. There is no light without
darkness; a straight line would be meaningless if there were no curves. I don¡¯t
know, but if the proscriptions have made our path a long and painful one, and
if for that reason the world has become wrapped in sin and darkness, there must
be a sufficient explanation for it. It may be that through the sin and darkness
of the world he intends to make his goodness and his light more clearly
manifest . . .¡¯
¡®That¡¯s precisely the point. What you are saying employs the logic used by
the priests in the Temple and the teachers in the synagogues. According to
them, Satan and sin exist by God¡¯s will. But in that case, why must they be
cursed and condemned and why must those humans who follow them fall into Sheol
or Gehenna? At least, why must they be hurled into the eternal flames of
torment, when they exist by permission of his will, and while they have
fulfilled the role given them in order to contribute to his glory? If we go
back to the problem I started with, the case of Cain provides us with an example.
He sincerely did the will of God with the instrument he received from God, so
at least the ¡®Mark of Cain¡¯ ought to have been a mark of trust, of a promise
showing he had been chosen by God for a particular purpose, not a mark of
forgiveness and mercy to a sinner.¡¯
¡®My son . . .¡¯
His father rose abruptly as if alarmed, recalling something.
¡®I¡¯ve just remembered . . . when I was young, there was a group of
blasphemers who used to make assertions similar to yours and troubled people
for a while. Unable to form a distinct sect of their own, they vanished under
the curse of God and the wrath of the people, but I heard that their origins
were very ancient. Some said that they had first arisen at the time of the
division of the tribes after the death of Solomon, or during the Babylonian
captivity, and that if they ever appeared again and received a name, it might
well be ¡®the sect of Cain.¡¯ Also, I seem to have heard that there is a heresy
that sees Satan as the Spirit of Wisdom and venerates the serpent that tempted
Eve as the Apostle of Wisdom, and the basis for what you are arguing seems to
me to be the same as for those two groups. Where in heaven¡¯s name did you hear
those ideas? Does it mean that group of blasphemers still exists in today¡¯s
world?¡¯
His father¡¯s face manifested clearly fear and anguish as he questioned him.
He was in the grip of an ominous premonition that, rather than seeing the day
when his son would be respected as the finest rabbi in Judea, he might rather
be seeing the day when he would be obliged to drag his corpse from under a
mound of stones after his execution. Fortunately, his son¡¯s reply was
sufficient to alleviate, if not totally allay, his grim premonition.
¡®It¡¯s not something I¡¯ve learned from anyone, or read. These are simply
doubts that are bound to confront you as soon as you free yourself from the
superficial exegeses of the scriptures or the prejudices and fallacies that are
so popular nowadays. Father, have you really lived your entire life with the
faith and devotion you have now?¡¯
The father detected in his son¡¯s tone a strong desire to be freed from an
agonizing doubt, rather than a wish to impose his opinions.
¡®So much the better. I thought you¡¯d been bewitched by some evil heresy. In
my younger years, I too spent many a sleepless night in insoluble doubt over
what God¡¯s will might be.¡¯
¡®And did you overcome all those doubts?¡¯
Ahasuerus asked, his eyes suddenly filling with expectancy. Eager not to
disappoint him, his father quickly replied:
¡®I think I can say so. I recall that I did experience doubts similar to
those you¡¯ve been mentioning. But the pity of it is that I don¡¯t seem able to
express things to you clearly in a few words.¡¯
His father was feeling deeply perplexed. It was clear that the difficult
questions over matters of faith in days gone by, long transformed into
indifference and inertia, were an unspeakable burden weighing on his shoulders.
Despite his son¡¯s deeply disappointed expression, the best he could do was,
after a long silence, imitate the high priest Annas when he once scolded some
young atheists who had been polluted by Hellenic thought.
¡®My child, you seem to have too much trust in human knowledge and wisdom.
But always remember; no matter how great, knowledge and wisdom cannot solve the
problem of God¡¯s Providence as if it were arithmetic; it is not by wisdom that
we come to believe in God, it is by believing in him that we become wise; too
much learning often harms our faith and devotion. Through ardent prayers with a
humble heart and by sincere efforts, reading his Word and putting it into
practice, it is possible to perceive the true mind of God and, in that way, I
feel sure you can finally have part in spiritual knowledge . . .¡¯
The father was clearly aware that vacuous arguments of that kind could never
move his son. He, in turn, was
still looking at his father¡¯s face but his thoughts were clearly elsewhere, as
if he had lost interest in further conversation. The father looked at his son
with a new anxiety, and concluded quickly.
¡®Never let small doubts confuse you; always maintain a broad judgment and
wise perseverance. I firmly believe you will without doubt become the finest
rabbi in Judea. Now I am tired. Kiss me. It¡¯s past my bedtime.¡¯
At that, Ahasuerus rose without a word, lightly kissed his father¡¯s already
withering cheek, and went to his room. That evening¡¯s serious encounter was to
be the last between the father and his son. After that, the father found
himself almost overwhelmed by a flood of letters and messages from far and
near. Mostly they came from teachers of his acquaintance, from scribes in
synagogues, old friends who had retired from the world or become priests, and
they were all about the heretical opinions and blasphemous acts of his son. He
had left home and was wandering through Judea, having become Satan¡¯s hireling,
trampling on everything sacred that came his way.
As Ahasuerus denied original sin and took Cain¡¯s defense, solidly armed
with youthful sharpness and his own, individual logic, many aged priests and
hermits withdrew from before him, shaking their heads and lamenting. Orthodox
teachers and scribes exploded in fury. One day, Ahasuerus was driven out under
a hail of stones for having dared to criticize the way Abraham had acquired
wealth by selling his wife and the trick by which Jacob had stolen the
benediction destined for his elder brother; another day, he was denounced for
having mocked the cruelty of Yahweh who had provoked the massacre of the
first-born of Egypt, and had incited their ancestors to slaughter every living
creature in a host of cities. In addition, he was thrown out of a synagogue
after accusing the sons of Korah, authors of a number of Psalms, and David
himself, of being sycophants; and he was beaten up by a mob in the street for
having laughed at the cunning way Job had endured those unjust torments because
he believed he would be rewarded, and also at the capriciousness of Yahweh, who
sent calamity on Job without consideration of good or evil.
In the end, his negations were a search for affirmation and acceptance, but
the world could not understand him. The insincere responses of the formalists,
who surrendered to higher authority, and the way the world persecuted him
indiscriminately, made him more perverse and resolute.
¡®If all that the Scriptures say about God is true, it was he who received favors
from us, not we who received favors from him. No other tribe paid any attention
to a god of such jealousy, wrath and capriciousness; our ancestors alone
accepted him. More than that, it might even be said that we created him, not he
us.¡¯
The legends report that such was Ahasuerus¡¯ final conclusion at this time,
while busily exaggerating his subsequent fall. It was all presumably caused by
the sense of desolation of someone who had finally lost the God he had firmly
believed in and had passionately wished to believe in. He was rolling drunk in
broad daylight; he shamelessly mixed with the women of the back streets. He
haunted gambling dens and had taken part completely naked in violent combats in
the Roman arenas; sometimes he would fight bloody brawls with thugs in the
streets. Then at last, one day, Ahasuerus vanished completely from his native
land. It happened just as his despairing parents, giving up all the hopes they
had nourished for him, had been considering sending him off as an apprentice to
his uncle, the Jerusalem shoe-maker.
Min Yoseop¡¯s manuscript broke off there. The text provoked a strange
emotion despite its difficulty. The question of God, which had briefly arisen
in days long past and had then been forgotten amidst the complications of
everyday life, suddenly took hold of Sergeant Nam like a kind of nostalgia. At
the same time, he grew convinced that this was no mere fabrication, but rather
a reformulation of Min Yoseop¡¯s own vivid experiences of life. Sergeant Nam was
curious to know what developments followed, in that they might reveal Min
Yoseop¡¯s inner journey. He was about to pick up the next section to read when a
glance through the window showed that the train was already entering Daegu
Station. He reluctantly bundled together the notebooks and manuscript,
resolving to read more later, and prepared to disembark.
All the way from the train to his office, Sergeant Nam remained unable to
cast off the strange impression his readings had produced, but it all
evaporated the moment he began to make his report to Lieutenant Lee.
¡®You¡¯re writing a novel, aren¡¯t you? Are you going to publish it in the Police Gazette?¡¯
Carried away by his emotions, Sergeant Nam was evoking Min Yoseop¡¯s personal
details at tedious length, when Lieutenant Lee, who had been listening
patiently, brusquely burst out:
¡®You haven¡¯t discovered anything new about the last eight years? What are
you going to do with a few letters postmarked several years back? Really! I don¡¯t
know how someone like you has managed to stay a detective for so many years!¡¯
He was flipping roughly through the notebooks and manuscript Sergeant Nam
had brought. His expression suggested that he would have laid into him with his
hands, if he let himself go. Suddenly coming to his senses, Sergeant Nam realized
he was making his report in the wrong order and pulled his notebook out of his
pocket.
¡®I forgot to tell you that I made enquiries in the local ward office. Six
months after he left, Min Yoseop transferred his residence registration to this
address in Busan.¡¯
Sergeant Nam had completely forgotten about the address the moment he had
noted it down, as if bewitched in some way. The lieutenant¡¯s expression relaxed
a little.
¡®It¡¯s the most important detail. Why didn¡¯t you tell me that first? Don¡¯t
lose a minute; go to Busan straight away. Detective Im is now at the hardware
store where the fruit knife was sold. And Detective Park will have to go to
Seoul . . .¡¯
¡®Why to Seoul?¡¯
¡®We¡¯re going to have to question again that wife of Elder Mun or whatever
she is, to find out if your fortune-telling was right or not.¡¯
Lieutenant Lee was obviously far from satisfied with the way Sergeant Nam
had simply given credence to the woman¡¯s words and loosely wrapped up his
investigation. Strangely enough, there was a general tendency among the police
to be obsessed with any woman connected with a crime. In addition, the
distorted picture of the woman that Sergeant Nam had presented, somewhat
carried away by his feelings, had seemed to the lieutenant insufficient for the
investigation.
By nature Lieutenant Lee was incapable of harshness; feeling sorry for
Sergeant Nam, who was looking thoroughly dejected as he turned to leave, he
called him back before he had gone more than a few steps.
¡®Look, it¡¯s already past five now. Go home and get some rest this evening
and leave early tomorrow. But don¡¯t waste your time digging into every kind of
pointless detail again. Be back here with your report tomorrow before we go off
duty.¡¯
6.
Sergeant Nam must have been thoroughly exhausted after the two-day trip and
it was nearly eight in the morning when he woke, although he had gone to bed
early the previous evening. Beside his pillow, Min Yoseop¡¯s manuscript lay
scattered in disorder; he had taken it out to read but then put it aside,
unable to finish even the first section, overwhelmed by sleep. He washed
hastily, had a quick breakfast, then picked out the section he had been reading
the night before and hurried to the station.
In Busan, unseasonable winter rain was falling. The place he was looking
for was close to Number Two Pier and he found it easily, with the help of
directions given by an officer at the nearby police substation. It turned out
to be a small rooming house at the side of a four-lane road that had been
recently built as part of a redevelopment plan. Sergeant Nam pushed open the
iron gate with its scaling paintwork and found two men who looked like
dock-workers sitting drinking soju, perched on the edge of the veranda
at the center of the old, Japanese-style house. He asked for the landlord and
one of them shouted something in a slurred voice toward a room inside. In
response to the shout or because he had heard Sergeant Nam¡¯s voice, an
older-looking man who seemed to have never once smiled in his entire lifetime
slid open the door, with an expression suggesting that everything was too much
bother.
Sergeant Nam briefly identified himself and produced Min Yoseop¡¯s photo.
The furrows in the man¡¯s grim face grew deeper still, indicating that he recognized
him at once.
¡®That bastard . . .¡¯ The man spat out the word in almost a groan. His voice
seemed to reflect a deep grievance.
¡®You remember him?¡¯
Indifferent to the man¡¯s feelings and pleased that he recognized Min Yoseop,
Sergeant Nam pressed on with his questions. With an expression plainly
suggesting that he was struggling to control some strong emotion, the man
replied.
¡®Remember him? I¡¯ll never forget him, not even when I¡¯m dead and buried.¡¯
¡®Why so?¡¯
The old man briefly clamped his mouth shut and his eyes, that had flushed
red, looked up at the leaden sky from which raindrops were still falling. He
seemed to be trying to suppress feelings that were growing increasingly
violent.
¡®He led my son . . . my only son . . . astray.¡¯
The reply was completely unexpected. Sergeant Nam found himself becoming
tense.
¡®When was that?¡¯
¡®About six years ago.¡¯
¡®How old was your son at that time?¡¯
¡®If he¡¯d stayed on, he would have been in his last year of high school. He
was eighteen.¡¯
Despite his anguished expression, Sergeant Nam felt his own tension
relaxing while the man grew increasingly distrustful. People whose son or
daughter had left home long before sometimes deliberately made false reports or
statements. For example, if a corpse was found that was so decomposed or
disfigured as to be unidentifiable, they would swear blind it was their child.
As a general rule, a thorough check showed that the missing person was alive
and well. In that way, taking advantage of an intensive investigation, people
found their long lost child. Strictly speaking, they could have been charged
with conspiring to obstruct the police in the course of their duties, and they
caused no little confusion and waste in investigations, but at the sight of
parents and children meeting after years of separation, hugging and weeping
copiously, it was difficult to charge them with even a minor misdemeanor. What
Sergeant Nam suspected now was just such a false report or statement.
¡®Look, you must tell me the truth. If it¡¯s because you want to find your
lost son, file a separate report. Then we¡¯ll look into it as carefully as we
can.¡¯
¡®What are you talking about?¡¯
¡®Only think for a moment. Your son was no longer a child. Don¡¯t you think
it odd to say that someone in his nineteenth year was tricked and led astray?¡¯
At that, the man burst out in a rage. It was no ordinary rage; he trembled
and screamed:
¡®What? You think I¡¯m lying to you because I want to find that
good-for-nothing son? That¡¯s going too far. I¡¯ve worked with the police. At
least I know you¡¯re not allowed to use tricks like that.¡¯
¡®Still, when a boy¡¯s eighteen he¡¯s an adult . . .¡¯
¡®There¡¯s no doubt about it; it was that fellow who led him astray. My son
left me the very next day after that bastard went away. And he blamed us for
having driven him out. That¡¯s not all. Later on, someone plainly saw my son in
his company.¡¯
At that Sergeant Nam¡¯s doubts vanished. In view of the man¡¯s unflinching
attitude and firm, unhesitating tone, he did not believe he was lying.
¡®I understand. I believe you. Now, about this man, can you show me some
proof that he really lived here?¡¯
Sergeant Nam brought the talk back to Min Yoseop, partly to calm the man¡¯s
agitation. He reflected for a moment, then replied:
¡®Yes, there is something. There¡¯s a bundle that he forgot when he went away
in the middle of the night. I felt like burning it but I didn¡¯t.¡¯
Since Min Yoseop had officially registered this house as his new address,
it was unnecessary to look for further confirmation. Sergeant Nam began to
question the man regarding things he felt curious about, starting from the
beginning.
¡®Tell me step by step what happened. How did this man come to be staying
with you, what were his relations with your son, why did your son leave home to
follow him, what happened after that . . .?¡¯
The man calmed down and seemed to be recollecting old memories. He drew
from his pocket a cigarette holder made of artificial ivory with blackened
cracks from which tar was seeping, inserted a cigarette stub and lit it.
¡®I hate even thinking about it all, but I¡¯ll tell you for my wife¡¯s sake.
If ever you come across any news of our son, you really must let her know; she
never stops crying, day and night.¡¯
When the stub in the ivory cigarette holder had completely fallen into ash,
he began his tale with a sigh that issued from the depths of his heart.
. . . Seven years previously, when the neighborhood had not yet been
touched by redevelopment, it was full of cheap bars and brothels for dock-workers
and sailors. In those years, Cho and his wife had been running an unlicensed
rooming house and one day in late spring Min Yoseop had arrived at the door,
scruffily dressed and carrying a heavy suitcase. He had claimed to be a
stevedore and had asked for a room.
Cho had agreed at once to take him in because he was ready to pay the rent
in advance, but from the start there were all kinds of odd things about him. In
an unlicensed rooming house like theirs, it was not normal for a dock-worker to
take a room of his own, while the books he took from his case and piled in one
corner of the room did not at all correspond to what he claimed to be. His
regular features, his untanned skin, and his slender body rather like a woman¡¯s
were all very unlike the appearance of an ordinary dock-worker. That first
impression had given Cho something of a fright, almost a kind of inkling of
what was to come later.
On that account, he had suspected Min Yoseop of being a spy on a special
mission, but as time passed those suspicious aspects had gradually diminished.
Not only was Min Yoseop really working as a stevedore, but his outward
appearance began to be more like that of all his fellow-dockers.
By the end of three months, nothing much distinguished him from the others,
except that he would read until late at night and mingled on familiar terms
with clerks in the port authority office, with whom he would not normally have
had a close relationship. When he saw tough dockers being as docile as children
and as readily submissive before him, or when university students who had
shared his room briefly later visited addressing him respectfully, he would
feel proud and happy. An unlicensed pier-side rooming house is at best a place
where drunken sailors spend a night giggling with cheap bar girls, or unmarried
dockers spend a few nights with passing whores who take their fancy. Min Yoseop
was an exceptional customer, equal to the clerks from the port authority office
who occasionally spent a few days there while looking for more respectable
rooms.
At that time, Cho had a son who was in the junior year of high school. His
two older daughters had already got married; his son was the only child left at
home. At some point he had begun going to Min Yoseop¡¯s room, then one day out
of the blue he told his father that he wanted to stop attending the private
institute where he was preparing to take the university entrance exam and learn
instead from Min Yoseop; in return, his father should stop taking rent from
him.
It was his only son¡¯s wish, and the father was sure of Min Yoseop¡¯s ability
to coach him; yet for some reason he could not readily agree. It was hard to
put into words but he had a premonition that the link between Min Yoseop and
his son was a kind of evil bond that ought to be avoided if at all possible.
Min Yoseop¡¯s feelings seemed to be much the same as those of the father. He
was unable to repel the boy coldly as he followed him with such respect, but
had for no apparent reason seemed apprehensive at the reckless zeal with which
he pursued him. It was the same when the father, pestered by his son¡¯s
requests, asked him to take charge of the boy and tutor him. Min Yoseop had not
only replied bluntly that he was not qualified to do it, he had even given him
to understand that it was not good for the boy that they should become close.
Yet in the end neither of them had any success in preventing the boy from
coming closer to Min Yoseop. He pestered his father and Min Yoseop by turns,
like a person possessed, until he finally obtained permission from both of them
and even managed to move his desk into Min Yoseop¡¯s room.
The matter having been thus settled, his father tried to see everything in
the best possible light. At least, his son seemed to be studying much harder
since he had moved. The light invariably stayed on in the room until late, and
sometimes Min Yoseop could be heard teaching the son in a low voice until the
early hours of the morning. Knowing no better, his father even came to believe
that their meeting had been a stroke of good fortune. Apart from anything else,
he came to believe that thanks to Min Yoseop, his son might be able to enter a
far better university than they had previously expected.
It was late in the autumn, when there was a strike at the docks, that his
doubts returned. He never knew what role Min Yoseop had played in the strike,
which had been accompanied by unprecedented violence, but he had been arrested
in connection with it and harshly interrogated for more than two weeks; he
returned in a terrible shape. The head of the local police substation, with
whom Cho had been on friendly terms, had said that Min Yoseop was not only one
of the strike leaders, but was ideologically suspect. All that he knew, from
his experience of the years of social confusion and conflict after the 1945
Liberation, was that strikes and labor disputes were all the work of the Reds;
for him, the information was deeply shocking.
From that moment, unlike before, he set out to observe his son and Min
Yoseop more closely, on account of the fresh caution and suspicions awakened by
the police officer¡¯s words. One after another, really strange features began to
strike him.
The first was his son¡¯s books. He might have been so poorly educated that
to him reading any book was a form of study, he could still see that the books
his son was reading in Min Yoseop¡¯s room were no ordinary textbooks or
study-aids. Then there was Min Yoseop¡¯s attitude and the contents of what he
was teaching. The father had peeped through a chink in the door several times,
but he never found Min Yoseop sitting opposite his son at his desk in a posture
of serious teaching. Instead, he would invariably be half-reclining or leaning
against the wall, occupied with his own work, and only responding when the boy
asked a question; if ever he was teaching seriously, he detected after a moment¡¯s
listening that the things he was saying had no bearing on preparations for the
university entrance exam. There were times when they seemed to be studying
English, but on careful listening, what Min Yoseop slowly translated seemed to
be seditious materials that would never be part of a school textbook.
Cho¡¯s apprehension manifested itself in visible signs, no longer mere
suspicions, when his son moved up to the senior year of high school. One of the
changes that he noticed around that time was that his son had at some point
stopped going to the church that he had previously been attending devoutly. He
had started going to church in his middle school days, becoming so enthusiastic
that he even disappointed his parents before Min Yoseop appeared by insisting
that he wanted to study in a seminary.
When their only son expressed his intention of becoming a minister, they
vehemently tried to dissuade him but did not attempt to take him away from
belief as such. Even though they were not believers they felt, simple folk as
they were, that there could be nothing wrong in believing the teachings of a
holy man like Jesus. Now this same son had not only stopped attending church,
but he had turned the minister and the leader of the church¡¯s youth club out of
the house, his face crimson with rage, when they visited him. As he did so, he
swore at them as ¡®those who have imprisoned God in churches¡¯ and ¡®those who
have separated Jesus from the poor and abandoned¡¯—insults that his father could
not understand.
The next change to reveal itself came in the son¡¯s grades at school.
Previously, he had always received excellent grades, invariably among the top
ten of his year in a high school that was reckoned to be one of the two best in
Busan. But at the start of his senior year, his class teacher could not hide
his disappointment when he summoned his father and informed him that his son
had moved up, but with such poor grades that he had only narrowly escaped being
held back.
Returning home shocked, he had closely questioned his son and Min Yoseop in
turn. Min Yoseop, looking startled, had reminded him of his initial
unwillingness to tutor the boy, and insisted that he was ready to stop at any
time. His son¡¯s attitude had been different. He calmly reassured his father
that it was simply because, for various reasons, he had missed exams in several
subjects at the end of the previous term. When his father told him he was going
to have to send Min Yoseop away, his son became threatening and showed his
teeth. So long as he went on working with him, he would soon regain good grades
and certainly go to a good university, but if he was sent away, he would give
up everything, starting with school.
Cho realized that the situation was going from bad to worse, but he had no
choice in the face of his son¡¯s response. One reason was that this was his one
and only son, and even if things were bad now his hope was that it was just a
passing phase and he would improve with age. So far, although he had grown up
in an environment where nothing was favorable to education, he had never once
given his parents any grounds for worry, which made them feel optimistic.
Yet finally, disaster struck. Less than three months had passed when the
father received notice that his son had been expelled; he went rushing to the
school. He had been absent for seventy-six days since the start of the term;
what made his father more furious still was the fact that that very morning he
had left home saying innocently that he was off to school, wearing his uniform
and carrying his bag. It was not difficult to understand without further
inquiry that the five or six messages and warnings sent by the school had
disappeared.
Looking back after careful thought, it was not that there had been no
grounds for suspicion. First, his son¡¯s delicate face had recently become
sunburned and swarthy, while his rather feminine hands had grown rough. That
was not all; seen from behind as he was coming home from school after dark, he
seemed exhausted, worn out like someone who has been engaged in hard labor. His
father had assumed it was because he was working hard at his studies all day
long; yet, feeling that something was strange, he had taken his son to task on
several occasions. But in addition to the excuse provided by his studies, he
always had some extra reasons—either a school foundation day sports event,
extra-curricular farming activities, or two successive periods of physical
education—things that explained not only his fatigue but also the sunburned
face and the blistered hands.
Moreover, he had been struck at the same period by frequent conflicts of
opinion between his son and Min Yoseop. He did not know what it was all about,
but his son seemed to be doing things that Min Yoseop did not approve of, and
that he angrily tried to stop him doing. Sometimes, accidentally opening the
door of their room, he found Min Yoseop scolding his son in a subdued voice but
then abruptly stopping, and his son protesting quietly with a flushed face.
After careful consideration, Cho finally came to a decision. After an
altercation that had the whole neighborhood in a tumult, he succeeded in
separating his son from Min Yoseop, but it was too late. Having severed his
relationship with Min Yoseop, he likewise broke with his father. He declared
that he was an adult, although he had barely turned eighteen, and would live
his own life. Refusing the transfer to a private high school that his father
had managed to arrange at the price of a big donation, the son set about doing
openly what he had already been doing in secret with Min Yoseop. He often
stayed idle in his room, lost in his thoughts, or went looking for work as a
stevedore on the docks where Min Yoseop had been blacklisted after the strike,
or as a laborer on the building site for a new export-goods factory. The father
regarded his son¡¯s conduct as sheer madness.
Reaching that point in
his story, he let out a long, bitter
sigh. His reddened eyes were moist. Sergeant Nam waited in silence, not wishing
to distract him from what he was saying. With a trembling hand, he inserted another cigarette into his holder and inhaled several
times; then he went on, exhaling a
cloud of smoke.
¡®But . . . worse was to follow. Not content with that, at some point that wretched son of mine began demanding money, never explaining what it was for. He even asked for an advance payment of the inheritance he would receive later. To tell you the truth, in those days my wife and I had a fair amount of spare money. Business here was doing at least as well as it is now, and my wife was making a go of it, lending money to the girls in the neighborhood. If I¡¯d realized all my assets, there would have been enough money to buy a big house in a classy neighborhood. Until then we¡¯d considered our son to be too young to know anything about that. Whereas in fact, I don¡¯t know how, he knew everything right down to the smallest details—how much we¡¯d lent and at what daily rate to such a girl in such a house. I suppose it was that goddam Min who told him. In earlier days, he used to glare at my wife whenever she came in with personal possessions she¡¯d taken in place of money.
¡®Of course, we turned down his request. I can¡¯t disclose details, but the origin of that money was in some sense the price of my blood. It was capital I was able to obtain at the cost of a knifing from a wartime comrade with whom I had risked life and limb. But my son had his own ways too. He used to go in secret to those who owed us money, write off half the debt and ask them to give him the rest; or else he stole the IOUs from us and gave them back to the people in exchange for a reduced amount. With his build, his strength, there was nothing I could do. My wife¡¯s tears and her threats that she would kill herself were no use at all.
¡®So in a few months almost
all our spare capital had vanished. When you¡¯re in money
lending, there are times when you borrow a little from others and lend that out on a
daily basis; but with him chopping
off half the capital, regardless of whether it was my money or what I¡¯d borrowed, how could
I go on? In the end my wife gave up
lending altogether, reckoning herself lucky to have managed to pay back at least what she had borrowed . . .¡¯
¡®What do you think your son did with all that money?¡¯ Sergeant Nam could not help asking, detecting the Min Yoseop of earlier years in the son¡¯s actions described by his father. He spat out in a voice trembling with hatred:
¡®Whatever that goddam fellow told him to do, I
suppose.¡¯
¡®You mean you let Min Yoseop stay on in the house?¡¯
At that, his tone changed, filling with resentment.
¡®Thinking of it now, I
regret not having had it out with him. In fact .
. . being more afraid of my son than of him, though I¡¯d managed to separate them I could not put him out of the house. My son kept the promise he made, not to set foot in his room if I did
not turn him out.¡¯
¡®So it¡¯s only your guess
that Min Yoseop told him what to do?¡¯
¡®He¡¯d already spent several
months sharing the same room, hadn¡¯t he? If he told him what to do, it must have
been during that time. Besides, there¡¯s no knowing if
they met secretly outside of the house after that.¡¯
¡®What do you think they were up to?¡¯ Sergeant Nam asked the question to verify something he had already guessed.
¡®To tell you the truth, I¡¯m
curious, too. That goddam Min always went about
looking like a beggar, never drinking so much as a glass, and my son too, although he squandered all that money, I never saw
him going around with any girl .¡¯
¡®Can¡¯t you even guess?¡¯
¡®Oh, he must have spent it in some wrongful cause, and with his usual heroism. He went to a girl owing us money, who was sick in bed, and handed back the IOU without taking anything. Once I saw
some student who came on a visit looking up at my son like some kind of Buddha, so I guess . . .¡¯
¡®Isn¡¯t that better than just
squandering it?¡¯
¡®I wouldn¡¯t have minded so
much if he had made merry with drinking or girls. Think what kind of money it
was . . . how could anyone take him for some kind of Buddha?¡¯
¡®Ah, I understand. How did he finally leave the house?¡¯ Wishing to avoid pointless arguments, Sergeant Nam asked for the end of the story. The father¡¯s voice again grew distorted with hatred.
¡®That was also the work of that goddam
bastard. Haven¡¯t I already told you? He led my son astray.¡¯
¡®You must tell me more precisely. I can¡¯t understand . . .¡¯
¡®Once there was no more money available, my son started stealing our things
and finally pestered us to sell the house. But that was not possible, even if he was
our only son. My wife is still heart-broken that we didn¡¯t do it, but this house was our last source of livelihood.
Day after day there were scenes about it between our
son and the two of us. When things reached that point, even that jerk seemed at a loss. He tried to reason with my son quietly, and calm him
down, then one night I¡¯m glad to say he quit the house
without saying a word. The two of us felt relieved. But
then the next day, my son disappeared too. He¡¯d gone after the
bastard. I suppose he might not have deliberately led him astray. But even if my son acted on his own, for us how was
that different than if he¡¯d misled him? And that¡¯s not all . . .¡¯
Cho seemed to hesitate for a moment. But then he went on, as if determined to tell everything.
¡®A few days after my son
left, someone broke into the house. He took a little money, that we¡¯d carefully hidden, and the ring my wife had when we got married. That was really odd. When it happened, we were too confused to think straight, but the
way he knew the house so well, and the hoarse voice
he deliberately put on, all seemed to
suggest it was undoubtedly our son. My wife felt sure of it too. So we never reported it to the
police, just in case . . .¡¯
By the time he had reached that point, Sergeant Nam felt he could to some extent grasp the son¡¯s psychological state. That eighteen-year-old had become bold in his desire to imitate. At least, the final burglary drama he had put on was certainly not a crime done for profit. . .
¡®Have you had any news of
your son since then? You said that someone had seen him.¡¯
¡®Yes, someone I know said
he¡¯d seen him at Daejeon with that jerk. Then he visited the
ward office here without me knowing in connection with military
service. He hoped he¡¯d be exempted as he¡¯s an only son. But
when I followed up the rumors and went there, he had
already gone.¡¯
¡®What¡¯s your son¡¯s name?¡¯
¡®He¡¯s called Dongpal.¡¯
¡®Please can I take a look
at the bundle the other guy left behind?¡¯
Sergeant Nam decided to bring the conversation to an end there with his request. Cho replied curtly, went inside and brought out a dust-covered bundle. At a quick glance, it seemed to be books. Just then, Dongpal¡¯s mother emerged from somewhere, her eyes full of tears.
While trying to comfort her, the sergeant untied the bundle her husband had brought out. Apart from a few books in Korean, with recognizable titles like Comparative Religion and Mystical Theology, almost all were foreign books. There were a few note-books but, despite his hopes, there was no diary, no personal writing, only vocabulary lists and passages copied from books. Sergeant Nam jotted down the titles and authors of the foreign books in case it might be of use. Since his grasp of even basic English vocabulary was vague, he identified the letters one by one and drew the words rather than wrote them, but still among the names of the authors a few were already familiar. Fumblingly deciphering them, he recognized that some of the names had often figured in Min Yoseop¡¯s diary together with that of Kagawa Toyohiko—Karl Barth and Moltmann, for example.
¡®Apart from yourself, is
there anyone else in the neighborhood who knew Min Yoseop then?¡¯
Sergeant Nam asked that, after having gone through Cho Dongpal¡¯s belongings, in the hope of gaining more information. He felt that the father¡¯s lopsided account might be insufficient.
The man racked his brains for a while, counting off this person, then that, before speaking as if doing him a favor:
¡®There were quite a few who
kept company with him in those days, but they were
all migrant workers; there¡¯s no knowing where
they¡¯ve gone . . . but that white-collar worker
would do. Shin Hyeongsik he was called; he worked in the port authority office. When
he was newly assigned here, he boarded in our house for two months. He often
went around with that goddam guy, though we
never really knew why.¡¯
¡®Is he still working there? Which section?¡¯
¡®I don¡¯t know which section
he¡¯s in but I¡¯m quite certain he¡¯s still
there. I met him in the street only a few days ago and we exchanged greetings.¡¯
Judging from what he said, it seemed that Shin Hyeongsik had occasionally used his inn later when he was moving from one boarding house to another or when he had several friends visiting at the same time.
Sergeant Nam went straight to the port authority office and had no difficulty in finding Shin Hyeongsik. Over thirty, he was still unmarried and looked good-natured. He readily recalled Min Yoseop.
¡®Min Yoseop? I know him very well. We spent barely two months under the same roof, but I reckon I¡¯ll never forget him so long as I live. He really knew so much! I¡¯ve never met anyone who knew so much about so many different things. Of course, maybe it was nothing so special, but I felt like that about him because I haven¡¯t studied much myself . . . and what was interesting was the way he was always drunk without ever drinking a drop. Sometimes I got worried about how drunk he was, although I was the one who¡¯d drunk half a pint of cheap soju. Yet he hadn¡¯t drunk a drop, mind you. What sort of a person was he? Well . . . In those days, I was utterly fascinated by him, he was like a god in my eyes. But a few years later, putting two and two together to complete the picture, I reckoned he would end up as some kind of revolutionary, in the good sense or the bad, or the head of a religious sect.
¡®As for the
details of his private life, there¡¯s not much I know.
We met in the evenings, after we¡¯d finished work and gone back to the boarding
house. We mainly talked about abstract aspects of religion and philosophy concerning God, man,
and salvation, about history and politics.
¡®Mr. Cho¡¯s son? Ah, I
remember that student. I don¡¯t recall his name clearly but he was
outrageously precocious and clever. He was only in the junior year of high school, but he made a
better partner in discussion with Min Yoseop than I did. He used to ask hard questions, and listen hard, too. But soon after he joined us I moved to
another rooming house and I don¡¯t know what
happened after that. I wonder if he didn¡¯t become a little Min Yoseop . . .¡¯
But that was all. What he said was of almost no help in the investigation, apart from serving as indirect evidence that what Cho had said was no groundless exaggeration.
Mindful of Lieutenant
Lee¡¯s rebuff the previous day, after quickly leaving Shin Hyeongsik Sergeant Nam hurried to the train station, as soon as he had obtained Cho Dongpal¡¯s new address from the records at the ward
office. If he was not going to obtain any significant new information, he was anxious to get back by the time his
boss had specified.
But the trains were so crowded for some reason that
he ended up taking an express bus, barely making it in time.
On his return, he found the investigation team full of excitement. Detective Im had managed to obtain a montage of a young man who had bought a fruit-knife, after visiting a hardware store on Lieutenant Lee¡¯s orders; Detective Park, who had gone up to Seoul, was continuing his inquiries regarding the wife of Elder Mun after reporting he had uncovered new grounds for suspicion. Recently a young man resembling Min Yoseop had often been seen in her company. Now that Sergeant Nam had succeeded in obtaining information about two of Min Yoseop¡¯s eight lost years and the address he had moved to, a solution seemed to be not far off.
Still, concerning the information about Min Yoseop¡¯s activities that Sergeant Nam had brought back from Busan, especially the changes in his mental attitude and lifestyle, totally different from before, Lieutenant Lee was as cold as before. He listened to Sergeant Nam¡¯s words abstractedly, refusing with a scornful remark when he suggested consulting a specialist about the books whose titles and authors he had noted.
¡®Do you think the criminal¡¯s
name may be written somewhere among all
those crooked letters? If you have time to waste like that, you¡¯d better go home and get some sleep. You¡¯ll have to search Daejeon tomorrow.¡¯
That was where Min Yoseop
and Cho Dongpal had moved after leaving Busan.
7.
After his return from Busan, Sergeant Nam was strongly convinced that this case could never be solved by pursuing motives of greed, jealousy or ordinary personal animosity. He felt a strong enmity toward Lieutenant Lee who was recklessly trying to steer the investigation in that direction. It was in reaction to him that he started to read Min Yoseop¡¯s manuscript that evening, prior to leaving for Daejeon.
Arriving home, he had a late supper then looked for Min Yoseop¡¯s notebooks. He had left them scattered randomly on the floor of his room that morning but now they lay neatly arranged on the table according to the numbers written on the top of each. It must have been his wife¡¯s doing. Sergeant Nam had no need to search his memory; he picked up the bundle starting where he had left off reading the previous night.
Having left his parents¡¯ house and the streets of his home town, it was not long before Ahasuerus also left his country and his god completely. It was the beginning of a long journey, lasting more than ten years, that led him to wander in every corner of the world. It was a quest for a new god and a new truth that could console him for the despair he felt about the old god of his people, and also bring solutions to questions about the world and life that had entangled his existence from the beginning and had finally been transformed into a fury and rage that made him spend part of his precious youth staggering about in swamps of falsehood and evil.
Ahasuerus first headed for Egypt, often called ¡®the home of the gods.¡¯ Viewed casually, what drew him there might seem to have been that. But in reality what attracted him was not that land¡¯s other name, which seemed to have been inspired by its numerous gods and temples, its multiple, mysterious doctrines and ceremonies, but rather something heard from a hermit he had met as he was traveling through Judea in an agony of doubt. The hermit, rejected by his family and neighbors on account of his heretical opinions, lived alone in a hovel he had built at the desolate foot of a stony hill and as soon as he heard Ahasuerus¡¯ doubts and despair about god, he explained their cause without hesitation.
¡®It¡¯s natural. Since they made one god by combining the shepherds¡¯ god El Shaddai with Horeb¡¯s warrior god, it¡¯s hardly
surprising that they don¡¯t fit together!¡¯
What he meant was that the god of Abraham and the god of Moses were different. Seeing Ahasuerus taken aback by such an amazing statement, the hermit went on to explain his reasons with an increasing passion:
¡®Not only was Moses himself not circumcised, he did not have his son circumcised either, until he was visited by the wrath of god. He found no inconvenience in living among the Egyptians; his wife Sephora and his father-in-law naturally took him for an Egyptian. From the very start there were plenty of odd things about his encounter with our ancestors, who all belonged to the same race. He killed an Egyptian soldier who was mistreating some of them, but instead of thanking him they used that as a weak point to threaten him. That¡¯s not all; later, when he had become their leader, Moses performed a host of miracles and displayed great power in a short space of time, yet within the barely forty days he was away from them in the desert, our forefathers were already making the golden calf. That shows a fundamental distrust of him. The next suspicious point is the way he is reported to have had a severe stutter. It suddenly became pronounced when he made an official appearance before our forefathers, whereupon his brother Aaron appeared from nowhere and spoke in his place.
¡®Putting all this together,
the truth becomes obvious. Moses was not descended from Israel as our
forefathers were; he was an Egyptian. He approached our forefathers with some
particular purpose in mind and became their leader, but obviously they always
distrusted him because he was from another
race. As for the problem of his stutter—he did not really stutter at all, he
simply did not speak our language very well; Aaron was not his older brother but an interpreter.¡¯
¡®I cannot believe that Moses, who gave us the Torah, was really an Egyptian. Why did the God of Abraham and of Isaac set aside their descendants and choose a foreigner as the recipient of His promise?¡¯ Ahasuerus asked, astounded and in the throes of doubts he could not repress. The hermit replied quite readily, as if to say the question was a natural one.
¡®You¡¯re right. When I went down to Egypt and first heard these things, I could not
believe them either. But then, once I studied and compared their history and
legends with our own records closely, it all became
clear. On account of which my life suffered many handicaps, grew full of
solitude and hardship as it is now; but my conviction about all that is still
unshaken.¡¯
The hermit had gone on to tell him in ardent tones a portion of the story he had put together using facts drawn from both Egyptian and Jewish histories and records.
. . . It was long ago,
in the days when their forefathers were living in Egypt in painful slavery. The Egyptian pharaoh of the time, Amenhotep IV,
set out to abolish all the many gods of the country and establish Aton, the god of the sun, as the only god, to unify the faith of his entire kingdom. He was so determined
to carry out this new religious policy that he even
changed his own name to Akhenaton; with that passion and his immense power
behind him, it seemed for a time at first that he had succeeded to a
certain degree at least.
But greater still,
behind the supporting clique composed of
courtiers who bowed and scraped before him and generals who depended on the
salary he paid, was an opposing force, situated far away
and out of sight. The heart of that opposing party was found among the priests in the temples scattered across the land, whose lives
were dependent on the gods worshipped there, as well as the local nobility whose interests were closely bound up with theirs.
They decided to defend their old beliefs and their vested interests before the pharaoh¡¯s policies could put down deep roots among the common people, and initiated a violent resistance. Rebellions and uprisings broke out here and there, and blood-soaked battles were fought between those intent on defending and those intent on overturning. In the end, victory went to the rebellious forces, those claiming to be defending the old beliefs. Defeated, Amenhotep IV was driven from the throne and executed; those who had supported and followed his religious reform were scattered, dispersed.
However, there was a high priest of the religion of Aton, or perhaps a member of the family of Amenhotep IV, who escaped and went into hiding in the land of Midian. After the immediate threat to his life had passed and he had acquired relative peace, having become the son-in-law of a local landowner, he began to nourish an ambition of reviving their religious vision, that had been so wretchedly destroyed. Before embarking on action to bring about that ideal, however, feeling a need for self-assurance, he embarked on a program of ascetic mortification. Steep, rocky hills swarming with deadly snakes and deserts full of thorny bushes were places perfectly suited for such mortifications. As he went wandering through such places, he must have kept invoking his god and seems to have received a reply or a revelation from that god somewhere on Mount Horeb.
Having received self-assurance, he quit his land of exile and first went to his own people in Egypt. Once more, he tried to effect a reform of their primitive, irrational religion through the one, unseen yet supreme god he had encountered. Not only the reactionary nobles and priests who had successfully opposed the reforms of Amenhotep IV, but even the simple people, long immersed in polytheism, paid no heed to his teaching.
He then turned his
attention toward a group of foreigners who in those days were living wretchedly
as slaves. There were two reasons why he was especially attentive to that
tribe. The first was their tradition of monotheism, already deeply rooted in
their minds. Considering that he had failed
among his own people entirely on account of their age-old polytheism, that foreign group¡¯s
religious tradition must have struck him as a truly irreplaceable possibility. The other reason was the wretched condition into which
those foreigners had fallen. Given that slaves want
freedom most of all, he must have reckoned that he could gain their support and submission by promising freedom.
The man in question was none other than Moses and the foreign group was composed of the descendants of Israel who had been brought by Joseph to live in Egypt. There is nothing strange about Moses pretending that his origins were the same as theirs in order to gain access to them. For nothing is stronger than bonds of blood to bring people together quickly and easily. Likewise, the change of names from Aton to Yahweh should not be too rigidly regarded as an unacceptable concession. Because in exchange for Moses¡¯ concession concerning the name, their ancestors made a compromise regarding some part of their belief. In short, the ancient promise-centered thought of the Hebrew people simply took on a more concrete expression in the form of the so-called Covenant with an ambitious, heretical priest from Egypt . . .
Such was the gist of the hermit¡¯s story. He gazed for a long moment at Ahasuerus, who was shocked, still reluctant to believe him, and went on:
¡®Naturally, that is hard to
accept readily. But how else are we to consider the
passive, defensive god of Abraham with his quest
for comfort and plenty, even to the point of offering his wife to an enemy, as
one and the same god as the god of Moses who urged our forefathers ¡®not to leave one stone on top
of another and to destroy every living, breathing creature¡¯ when
they were taking possession of Canaan? Indeed, those of our forefathers who
remained in Canaan and those who came back from Egypt used different names for their god for a while. The ones used Yahweh, the others used Elohim.
¡®If you were to go down to Egypt and enquire, the true picture would emerge
more clearly. The things that the scholarly priests there learned and remembered, or the historical facts I¡¯ve been telling you on the basis of ancient records written on papyrus, may have been preserved
in a slightly distorted form. In the myths of the Isis
cult there are things reflecting those events too, though in a
symbolic form. After he was defeated in battle by Horus, Seth was obliged to flee for one whole week, day and night, before
finding a safe hiding place; there he is said to have had two sons, who were Jerusalem and
Judea. It¡¯s not possible to be categorical, but the
monotheism that was driven out by the
polytheistic cults is certainly concealed within our religious traditions; the way we left Egypt with that god, finally
succeeding in settling in Canaan and establishing the kingdom of Jerusalem and Judea, undoubtedly underlies the myths they
fabricated.¡¯
Still, in those days Ahasuerus was seeking all the answers to his questions within the traditional doctrines of his own people. The shock verging on horror that he had experienced while listening to the hermit only lasted a moment, then finally adopting the gentler of the two attitudes manifested by his compatriots toward the hermit, he left him. He did not attack him as a blasphemer as a way of defending their god, or treat him like a crazy lunatic; instead, he adopted the approach of ¡®even it were true, so what?¡¯ Even if he accepted what he said completely, Ahasuerus¡¯ doubts about the world and life and his disappointment concerning Yahweh could find there no fundamental solution.
The months of intense emotions that followed made Ahasuerus utterly forget all that. Those were times given over entirely to human desires, competing in violent contests in the arenas that the tributary dynasties were building in order to encourage the Hellenization of the Jews, or rampaging through the streets. Then one day, on waking from that meaningless intoxication, he resolved to leave both his land and his god; thereupon he recalled the hermit and finally decided to make Egypt his first destination. It was not that he wanted to find out if the hermit¡¯s words had been true or false; rather he simply wished to encounter directly the gods of that country.
There is no way of knowing what route Ahasuerus took on his journey to Egypt, nor in what city he first set foot. With the pax romana, those were years when traffic by sea and by land had developed fast and he would have experienced no great difficulties, no matter which route he chose. If he did face hardships, they mainly arose after he had been traveling around Egypt for about two years.
The first thing that troubled him was finding the necessary funds for his journey. He had left on an impulse, without consulting his parents, without being able to prepare any money; even if he had, it would not have been enough. Besides, he did not stay in one place but was constantly on the move, so there could be no thought of finding a job; it would have been difficult in any case, since he had nothing to sell except his not very useful knowledge. As a result, during the time he spent in Egypt, despite assistance he occasionally received from Jews of the Diaspora, his life was basically little different from that of a tramp.
Communication, too, was
far from easy. The Latin and Greek which Ahasuerus spoke, thanks to hellenizing policies which had reached their
height in the days of Herod the Great, were of little help
once he left Alexandria and a few other major cities of Lower Egypt, and
Aramaic, close to the communal Semitic tongue, was of no use except among
merchants and a few privileged classes. Unless he really could speak every dialect ¡®from that of the land where
the sun rises to that where the sun sets, with the assistance of the Evil
Spirit,¡¯ as the malicious legends claim, he must have faced a host of
difficulties in communicating freely, even in Lower
Egypt, to say nothing of the remote regions of Upper Egypt. In addition,
whenever he arrived in a new town, the place
he would first visit and spend most time exploring was the
temple of the guardian deities, which tended to be closed to
foreigners; that created even greater difficulties
The loneliness he felt while wandering through unknown lands among foreign faces, having left home, family and friends, certainly contributed to his sufferings. Despite the indefinable passion within him urging him on, he must have spent many nights with the arm pillowing his head soaked with tears, having just turned twenty, the age of intense affective emotions,
For nearly two years, Ahasuerus roamed the four corners of Egypt in the midst of all those difficulties and hardships, as if possessed by a wandering spirit. All the way from Thebes, Coptos, and Hermontis in Upper Egypt to Memphis, Sais and Mentellis in Lower Egypt, and on into the regions of Libya and Nubia, his feet never failed to linger wherever the gods had a shrine or a temple. A hope drove him, like a strong, irresistible wind; a hope that, among these gods and teachings, he might perhaps be able to discover a new god and a new teaching that could soothe the wounds caused by his disillusion with the god of his people.
There was such a host of strange gods: Amen, Ament, Menthu, Tefnut, Nau, Mestha, Tuamutef, Ra, Mut, Herukhuti, Sekhet, Amen-ra, Bast, Khensu, Hapi,
Ptah, Khnemu, Satet, Bennu, Atet, Hershef, Aten, Merseknet, with a host of other ancient gods, lost
or surviving, to say nothing of Osiris
with his nearly two hundred names, and Isis, Horus, Set,
Nephthys, Her-hepes, Shu,
Anubis, Usert, Seb or Geb, Nut, Tem, Heru, Khent-Maati, Uatchet, and the other
gods included in the Great Company of the Gods of Heliopolis, in addition to foreign gods
such as Neith, Anthat, Baal, Baaleth, Reshpu, Sutekh, Bes, Aasith, as well as the various animals that had been deified and were
worshipped. For Ahasuerus, who had only ever known and believed
in one god, the multiplicity made
him almost faint.
But Ahasuerus could never shake off the god of his people, even if he wished to, with the teachings centered on that god that his forefathers had refined through thousands of years. All that had settled like a sediment deep in his soul, preventing him from opening his heart to any of the new gods he encountered in Egypt. They all invariably seemed to him to be nothing more than mere idols, fashioned by people¡¯s pain and want, fear and rancor, while the hymns and prayers addressed to them sounded to him like nothing more than the cries of people harassed. The blessings or the miracles believed to proceed from these gods seemed to him to be nothing more than an echo of those human cries, bouncing off the walls of an empty universe, or a magnificent human illusion about that echo.
With the passing of days, while the number of gods still to be encountered in the land diminished Ahasuerus fell into a strange impatience. His dissatisfaction with the god of his people, that had formerly been a cause of distress and torment, began to fade under the impact of his repeated experiences of disillusionment with these foreign gods. This led to an anxiety as to whether his dissatisfaction had not simply been a way of complaining, and his present wanderings might turn out to have been a waste. On the other hand, the somber, inborn passions of negation and doubt were certainly growing more intense.
¡®Even if there is something
more ugly, that does not make what is less ugly beautiful. Equally, even if there are more irrational gods, it does not make the less irrational god of my people perfect. Moreover, I am seeing other
gods with eyes accustomed to the god of my people; I am hearing teachings about
other gods with ears trained by the Word of my god. That should
not be so. First, let me free myself completely from
the god of my people and his Word. No, more than that, I must enter more deeply into those gods. So far, I have only been observing them
from one step away, like a kind of spectacle; I was listening to their teachings as if it were mere knowledge . .
.¡¯
Ahasuerus finally came to
that decision when he was visiting
Heliopolis for the second time. To his surprise, he found that he had been heading in that direction swayed by an inner temptation to go back home, although there remained a few more places to visit; from then on he kept himself under a tighter reign.
Coincidence or not, Heliopolis was the perfect place for Ahasuerus to carry out his decision. It was the topmost religious city of Egypt, the site of the sycamore tree sacred to Nut, the home of Aton, and the place not only where the spine of Osiris was buried but also where he first began to be venerated; it had once been the center of the cult of the sun god Amon-Ra but now it was the center of the fast-growing cult of Isis.
For his last Egyptian passion, Ahasuerus joined the temple of Isis at Heliopolis, no longer as an onlooker, as previously, but as a brother in the same faith, who had sworn a formal oath of conversion before a priest. If it were possible he hoped to become a priest of the cult and so approach mysteries that were not easily accessible to lay believers. Yet despite appearances at first sight solemn and grandiose, their doctrines struck him as incomparably feeble with the exception of a few moving verses in the hymns; he longed to find what it was in them that sent such crowds of people into ecstasy, driving them to such a rapture that they no longer feared death.
Though he exaggerated his faith and devotion, and made desperate efforts to make up for being a foreigner, especially a Jew, all Ahasuerus was able to gain after several months of intense effort was a position as an acolyte to an old priest. Even that was not because the hierarchy had been impressed by his efforts and his devotion, but because the venerable priest had intervened on his behalf. One day the old priest happened to see him sweeping the temple yard; surprised for some reason, he observed him for a while, and it was presumably an impression he formed that day that led him to defy the hierarchy.
The tasks assigned to him were trivial, following the old priest carrying the ritual vessels, bearing sacrificial offerings, or keeping the temple clean, nothing more. But at least there was something he could see, having become one of them.
What first touched Ahasuerus most was the maternal nature of Isis. The god of his people in whom he had believed until now was a god with a paternal nature; he weighed human good and evil on the scales of his strict Word, and strictly punished and rewarded accordingly. But Isis was different. She was a woman who had twice known the sorrow of cruelly losing her husband, and had gone to the ends of the world in search of his body, that had been cut into more than ten pieces and scattered in various places; as a loyal wife she reassembled it and gave it burial, then as a mother she admirably brought up her husband¡¯s posthumous son, whom she had conceived without physical contact, and shielded him from merciless enemies. Behind the motherhood of suffering and sorrow lay a motherhood of mercy which even saved her husband¡¯s enemy from being killed by her son¡¯s spear. With her, it seemed, human weakness could be sufficient excuse for sin, and moreover, unconditional love and forgiveness could be sought from her.
Formed under a strict, paternal God, Ahasuerus¡¯ mind was deeply moved by the attributes of Isis, even if he insisted that she was only the deification of undisciplined, irrational maternal love. They were all strands knotted in one myth; Isis was clearly below the paternal gods in power and rank, yet it was obvious why the cult was called by her name, not that of Osiris or of Horus; it was also easy to see why the religion had spread far beyond the Mediterranean. What comfort and encouragement this maternal being could offer people, someone they could entreat, grumble to, presume upon, irrespective of good or bad. Whenever a priestess with her head closely shaved sang the ¡®Lament of Isis¡¯ with tears flowing down her lovely cheeks, tears would also flow helplessly down Ahasuerus¡¯ cheeks, though he fully realized it was all nothing more than an expression of human pains and sorrows,
What moved Ahasuerus next was the incarnation or human embodiment of the divine. In the teachings he had so far followed, god was for ever god and man for ever man. Just as men could never transcend the wall of their humanity, so too god as such never came down to the human level, except as Word or pillar of fire. Several prophets had alluded to the advent of a man vested with the power of god, whom they termed the Messiah, and especially Daniel had come near to suggesting an incarnation of the divine under the name ¡®Son of Man,¡¯ but no one had ever spoken of the incarnation of Yahweh as such; and even if they did, that lay in a future that his people had not yet experienced.
In Osiris and Horus, Ahasuerus for the first time saw gods that were born with human bodies. A god who dies, one born as a man, suffering on account of evil, and dying powerless, such a touching image! After fully experiencing human pain and sorrow, weakness and want, he dies then rises again, and judges us, what a close, affectionate deity! Despite the immaturity of the imagination that brought Osiris back from the dead and set him over death, and despite traces of primitive religion, Ahasuerus felt as if he had perceived a ray of dazzling light. He even found himself thinking that the notion of ¡®the Messiah¡¯s foreordained suffering¡¯ that had in recent years appeared and been discussed cautiously among rabbis in his native land could not be unrelated to the Osiris myth.
Equally new to Ahasuerus
was the concept of parthenogenesis in order to distinguish the birth of a god
from that of humans. He had always considered the phrase in his people¡¯s
scriptures ¡®Behold a virgin shall conceive and bear a child¡¯ as a kind of symbol or parable, but it had already happened in the myths of
the Egyptians. A teaching that was more inclined toward
death than life also provoked a strange feeling in Ahasuerus, for he had grown up in a religion that laid
more emphasis on life. Since the wars of the Maccabees,
his people too had begun to talk much about death, but that death was still connected with life. In
addition, though it was not directly related to the cult of Isis, the concept of the Word of Ptah shocked Ahasuerus. For he too was said to have created the heavens and the earth by his Word alone.
Still, the day of departure soon arrived. Although he still occasionally experienced a fresh shock at this or that point, the further he penetrated into their doctrine, the more Ahasuerus discovered absurdity, immorality and corruption. The inferiority of the imagination and logic revealed in their entire mythic system, the lack of morality that undermined the foundations of their doctrine, the overfrequent, extravagant ceremonies and rituals, the vulgarization of the sacred giving the impression that it was not the priests who were there for the gods but the gods for the priests, the corruption of the priestly caste who took advantage of the hedonism of the common people, the absurd superstitions and the improper use of talismans, all these soon destroyed the fresh emotions and shocks Ahasuerus had encountered in that religion.
Before he had lived in the temple for even a year, he realized that staying there longer would be nothing but a waste of time. What had hypnotized him and kept him close to their gods was merely the novelty of a few ideas produced by a time-worn religion with its last reserves of wisdom, fearful of being completely rejected by the masses, parasitically dependent as it ever had been on the powers-that-be, sharing even their corruption and degeneracy. All the efforts he had made in the past to be part of that ingenious agglomeration of religious techniques and devices, when they had no connection with his own quest, made him feel sorry for himself.
What he found quite incomprehensible was the common people of that country. The entire truth that had become so clear to him after little more than two years of observations seemed not to be in the least visible to them, who had lived there for thousands of years. Not only they seemed far from suspecting or protesting at the corruption and degeneracy that lay beyond the altars, that a sharp eye could see at a glance, they even averted their eyes from the overt immorality and wrongdoings practiced before the altars. They almost seemed to enjoy submitting to the priests¡¯ blatant threats, allowing themselves to be exploited without anything in return.
Ahasuerus, having more or less decided to leave, quietly sought out the old priest, perhaps on account of those doubts he harbored about the people as a whole. One night when the Nile had begun its flood and the festival of Isis was at its height, he took advantage of a spare moment and went to find the old priest who was resting alone.
¡®The people believe that
the flooding of the Nile is caused by the tears of Isis, and considering it a blessing, are celebrating ceremonies of thanksgiving and worship. But I know
the truth. Since we are a long way downstream, we cannot see it, but it is the
rainy season far upstream which causes the flood. It is not at all on account
of Isis¡¯ tears, which could never be a blessing in any case.¡¯
¡®We know that, too.¡¯ To his great surprise, the old priest replied without any sign of being troubled. Feeling sorry that he might be hurting a man who had shown particular kindness toward him, Ahasuerus had spoken in a trembling voice and the reply amazed him.
¡®You mean you consciously
mislead the people? That this sacred, solemn festival is in fact nothing but a
great deception?¡¯
¡®No. They know, too.¡¯
¡®They know, too?¡¯
Ahasuerus was even more bewildered by that reply, made in exactly the same tones as before. The priest briefly looked at Ahasuerus in silence, then calmly went on, without seeming to think he was revealing anything particular.
¡®Of course. Or rather, they
want us to deceive them. The flooding of the Nile, a blessing and a catastrophe at the same time, has long been
explained in a variety of ways. In the distant past, it was attributed to the
power of Nun or Hapy and at other times it was seen as a
blessing from Serapis. Nowadays we consider it as the tears of Isis, but there
are some who say it is caused by semen resulting from the liaison between
Nepthys and Osiris. Yet even in days when there were no roads like those we
have today, and no one had heard of the rainy season in the region beyond the
First Cataract of the Nile, very few people really gave credence to such
explanations. It was just that people wanted to believe something like that.
Only think for a moment; rather than believe that the world was entirely given over to the
violence of a cruel and unpredictable nature, how
much more consolation and hope it would give them to believe that such a fury could be appeased by offerings, and that it was an order
governed by gods of whom they could beg blessings through worship and prayers.
¡®All we did was simply not
to put obstacles in the way of their faith or try to destroy it. Even when we
propagate and encourage their false beliefs, it¡¯s simply in the hope that we
can thus prevent them from falling into despair out of fear and inertia. People often say that we deceive them, either for
our own sake or for the sake of pharaoh and his courtiers, but in fact those who speak thus are themselves deceived by the
masses.¡¯
The old priest¡¯s reply came as a greater shock to Ahasuerus than any he had previously received from their teachings. The teachings of his forefathers always began with an Absolute Being beyond human approval or perception. Therefore for him, long immersed in such teachings, the idea of a ¡®superstition for the sake of faith¡¯ was bound to seem strange and astonishing.
But unlike the other shocks, this one only served to hasten Ahasuerus¡¯ departure. Even though he could understand the old priest by human logic, such a system of belief was far removed from the idea of a new, true God he had been resolutely seeking.
¡®What I hoped to find here was a real God, not some kind of illusory image produced by a coarse mixture of necessity and imagination. I have reached the end of my days in this land.¡¯ Murmuring those words to himself, Ahasuerus left the old priest, who still seemed to have more to say, and that very night he packed his bags.
The next morning, while day was just breaking, Ahasuerus was taking a last, farewell look inside the temple to which he had briefly entrusted his body and heart, when he heard someone walking toward him out of the darkness inside, then a voice called out to him in the solemn tone used for the ceremonies:
¡®Stay a moment, son of
Judea and Jerusalem.¡¯
Turning in surprise, Ahasuerus saw that it was the old priest who had taken care of him. He approached in a rustle of robes, stopping when he was near enough for his features to be clearly visible, and gazed closely at Ahasuerus as he had done before. He asked in a halting voice as if he felt uncertain:
¡®Did you not come to this
city long ago, with your parents? If you cannot remember, have you never heard them mention it? You came as a newborn baby and left when you were four or five.¡¯
His attitude was no longer that of a priest addressing his acolyte.
¡®Until three years ago, I had never gone outside my own land. I have never heard anything different from my parents.¡¯
The old priest
scrutinized Ahasuerus, who had been taken aback by such an odd question, then sighed for
some unknown reason as he murmured: ¡®That is fortunate. Then the time has not yet come
. . .¡¯
¡®What do you mean by that?¡¯ Ahasuerus asked, unable to contain his curiosity. The old priest began to speak slowly, taking his eyes off him and raising them to the eastern sky where dawn was just breaking:
¡®You are not that child,
but you seem somehow not unrelated with him, so I want to tell you the story. It happened fifteen or sixteen years
ago. A young couple from your nation came into this city, bearing a newborn baby. For some unknown reason, on witnessing their arrival, I got the impression
they were fleeing from something. They settled
among people of the Diaspora not far from this
temple; the husband worked as a carpenter and the wife did odd jobs for their neighbors for about five or six years.
¡®One strange thing was the child, that had arrived as a newborn baby. Perhaps because his parents
were busy working, he started to toddle around the courtyard of our temple when
he could still barely walk; until he left the city
with his parents when he was five or six, he
grew up constantly hanging about our temple.
Sometimes he watched the ceremonies all day long; on days when there were no ceremonies he would play in front
of the altars and statues; he was particularly
fond of the statue of Isis. Whenever there was no one
before it, he would stare at it watchfully with
a gaze unlike that of a child; sometimes he would stretch out a hand and stroke
it, incapable of leaving.
¡®But my
position at the time did not allow me to regard that as
something charming. In those days I was still young, more like the temple¡¯s
caretaker than a priest, and on several occasions
I tried to drive him away. Even if he was only an innocent child, there was no
forgiving the disrespect involved in thoughtlessly touching the
statue of Isis. But I never succeeded in driving that child out of the temple
until the day he left the city. No matter how
firmly I steeled my heart as I approached, I would completely forget what I had
been intending to do as soon as I saw his clear eyes, feeling a strange chill. Rather, I would smile unintentionally and go
off to some other task that I would suddenly remember.
¡®It was the same, though to a lesser degree, with his young mother who used to come in search of him as night was falling. Intending to give her the warning I could not give the child, I would go running toward her, leaving preparations for the evening prayers, but it was no use. A kind of sacred aura faintly surrounding her used to freeze my lips.
¡®One day, this happened: for some reason I was sitting with that child in the shade of the fig tree in the courtyard, exchanging a few words. After talking about this and that, I happened to ask him about his father; without the least hesitation, the child pointed at the sky, and said that his father was the One who dwelt there. Thinking that he had literally believed something his parents had said, I asked him about his mother. He replied that although he considered the young woman as his mother, she had conceived him as a virgin after an annunciation from god. According to his words, they were a living Isis and Horus. As you know, Isis bore Horus without having received the seed of Osiris.
¡®What I still cannot understand is the way I reacted to what he said. Here was disrespect, the most extraordinary disrespect, blasphemy, utter blasphemy, yet there I was sitting listening without a word, as if bewitched. I felt as if some kind of inexpressible power was weighing down on my body and my heart, and I simply sat there paralysed until he had gone; then I was just about able to walk, trembling for no reason . . .¡¯
The agitation he had felt then seemed to come flooding back into the priest¡¯s face. Ahasuerus, likewise feeling a strange agitation, asked:
¡®But why did you think that
I was not unrelated with that child on seeing me?¡¯
¡®On account of a dream. One night, I dreamed a strange dream. The child was going somewhere, pulling the statue of Isis along by the wrist. I followed them, summoning up all the energy and courage I possessed. With great difficulty, I managed to seize the statue of Isis by an edge of its clothing and she turned her face towards me. To my great amazement, it was the face of the child¡¯s young mother. Moreover, this new image of Isis addressed me: ¡®Henceforth, I am leaving this land; I am going to all the peoples of the world. The traces of my past that I leave behind here will be utterly overthrown, burned and destroyed by my son when he comes again.¡¯ Then she coldly shook off my hand and went on her way.
¡®Waking from my dream, I ran to the statue of Isis to calm my startled, trembling heart. Nothing about it had changed but still I stayed awake all night, burning incense and praying. As dawn broke, I walked to and fro in the yard, waiting for the child to appear. Once I was somewhat calmer, I had decided never again to allow him anywhere near the statue.
¡®For some reason the child did not come that day. After I had spent much of the day waiting for him, I went to the Jewish neighborhood where he lived, feeling incomprehensibly impatient. After asking here and there, I found their hut, but the young couple and child had already left. According to their neighbors, they had set out for their own land very early in the morning, just at the moment when I was having that strange dream . . .
¡®That incident caused me a great shock. For a time, I thought of laying aside my priestly robes and going to look for the mother and child in your country. In the end, I stayed in this temple wearing these ceremonial robes. The shock naturally lost its sharpness with the time I spent hesitating, but more important was a reason similar to that for which you could not accept our Isis in spite of all your exceptional devotion and efforts over the past year. I simply could not believe that there might be a god and a teaching transcending a particular race and territory.
¡®Then you arrived. The
first time I saw you, I trembled, strangely shocked. You were obviously not
that child, yet the mysterious power that overwhelmed me was very like that
radiating from him. When I realized that you were from the same country, I
arranged for you to be accepted in our temple, filled with a mixture of fear
and inexplicable curiosity. Somehow it seemed to me that you must be not unrelated with that child; I even went so far as to
wonder whether you had come as his representative. I wanted to see how the
prophecy I had heard in my dream so long ago would be fulfilled, just how you were going to overthrow, burn and destroy the statues of our god.
¡®It was the same when you came to see me yesterday evening. I interpreted what you said as meaning that you were finally going to destroy our statues. That was why I took the initiative and tried to break the idol first, contrary to the teaching of my forebears. I blasphemously overturned all our teachings, leaving only humanity on this earth. In doing so, I was hoping to see you raise up a new god and a new teaching in their place . . .
¡®But you were only surprised
and disappointed by what I said, making no
attempt to set up something new. It was rather as if you too were seeking a new
idol.¡¯
¡®It¡¯s true. I am simply the
son of a man. Despairing of the god of our people, I have been
seeking a new god and teaching.¡¯
¡®I know. As soon as you
left I felt sorry not to have enlightened you about our god and teaching with
more skill and sincerity. I finally came to
realize that you were without any relationship with that child, and I suffered from having so readily destroyed before you the
image of our god.
¡®Do you know what dream I awoke from in fright
just now? I was dreaming that the statue of Isis was
collapsing. No one was breaking or burning it; it was collapsing and crumbling on its own, like grains of sand, together with this temple, turning back into
soil. Awakened from my dream by amazement and
fear as I was ten years before, I ran toward the statue. I burned incense and
began to pray, but before I had finished
praying, I heard your steps as you were leaving. Who on earth are you? How could
such a thing happen? What inspiration provoked such a dreadful dream?¡¯
The old priest was
becoming increasingly breathless and he was trembling. But Ahasuerus could answer
nothing to his questions. After a long, awkward silence, he could
only repeat what he had said previously: ¡®I was born, without the least doubt, the son of a man, inheriting my
father¡¯s vital spirit and my mother¡¯s blood. I am simply seeking, never wanting to break down or destroy.¡¯
¡®To seek new things is to destroy the old. But oh, who are you really?¡¯
The old priest murmured
in a voice from which anxiety had still not been banished. His anxiety transferred itself to
Ahasuerus in the form of a vague premonition as to the future destiny of his own people¡¯s god.
As a rule, gods willingly take on a martial role in times of growth or at periods of reform; and, although some aspects of Yahweh were a transformation of Aton, such problems hardly constituted a serious response to his quest. Still, what had first directed his attention toward Egypt had been precisely the past history of Yahweh. Yet after nearly three years of wandering, all he had gained in that country was a premonition of Yahweh¡¯s future history, though that was unexpected. Yet that had almost nothing to do with what he was seeking at that moment. Not wishing to be detained any longer by the old priest¡¯s questions, Ahasuerus hastened to take his leave.
¡®In any case, I am not the
child you say you once knew. So, farewell.¡¯
He set off, leaving the old
man standing lost in thought in the darkness that
precedes the dawn.
8.
Leaving Egypt, Ahasuerus headed for home, as if it was the natural thing to do. But as he gradually approached his native land, his thoughts began to change. In the end, the awareness that he had gained nothing, together with a sudden decision that he was not going to fill the remaining years of his life cowering before a god and a Word he could neither believe in nor respect, blocked his return home. Moreover, his experience of direct physical contact with strange gods and teachings had awakened in him a new interest in the various idols of the land of Canaan that had, previously at least, been the objects of his habitual contempt and ridicule. Designating them as idols had no doubt been nothing more than the result of the self-righteousness and prejudices of his forefathers.
He therefore went on past his home and quite naturally first spent some time travelling in the region of Canaan and on the coast of Phoenicia. In those regions, in addition to the gods imposed by Rome, there were numerous gods alive amidst the ruins of towns that had been destroyed, as well as in the memories and oral legends of gentile tribes who still rejected Yahweh; those gods had flourished in the days before Yahweh, transformed into a merciless, martial god, brought back Ahasuerus¡¯ forefathers who had been renewed in cruelty in the course of their nomadic existence. Among all those gods it was Baal, whose name has become a synonym for every kind of idol, who first attracted his attention, together with his father El. Then there was Dagan, god of harvests, Asherah and Anath, wives in turn to El and Baal, Yam, the eldest son of El, a sea god represented as a dragon, who had been killed fighting against Baal while attempting to take revenge on his father¡¯s enemy, and Mot, god of death, who finally took revenge on Baal. Around them were Athtart, the goddess who assisted Baal in the battle with Yam together with Koshar-wa-Hasis the blacksmith and Shapash, Athar, the goddess of the sun who tried to sit on Baal¡¯s throne after his death but failed, as well as the seventy gods born from the union of El and Asherah. Ahasuerus sought out descendants of the old priests, who stubbornly kept guard over the ruined temples of those gods, as well as the fragmentary records that had survived and restored their teachings and ceremonies. Through the myths transmitted from mouth to mouth among the older people, no longer a religious system so much as a series of tales, he tried to understand the view of the cosmos and of life of those who had once served those gods.
Yet at the end of months
and years of painful, difficult seeking,
collecting materials and deciphering them, all that Ahasuerus was able to gain
from his partial reconstitution of the teachings and ceremonies of Baal was a disappointment greater than that which he had experienced in Egypt. All he could see was the deification of fears arising
out of the simple hopes and ignorance of peasants, and the corrupt, chaotic morality of a
stagnant culture, obviously resulting from a
sedentary life.
The battle between Baal
and Yam, for example, was merely a myth designed to explain
that in farming, rain was far more useful than sea water or spring water; the revenge of Anath on Mot
proved to be nothing more than a description of the processes of the cereal
harvest. When Anath caught Mot, who had killed
her husband Baal, then ¡®cut him in pieces,
winnowed them, roasted them, ground them in a mill and sowed them in the
fields,¡¯ what else was it but a dramatization of the process of harvesting the ripe
grain at the end of the year?
He was dumbfounded to discover episodes marked by an inverted morality when Baal, the chief god in their mythological system, had driven out his old, weak father El and taken for himself the two wives of his father. It was a mystery to Ahasuerus that, no matter how much it owed to skilful and lavish embellishments, a cult based on all that absurdity and immorality could have been endowed with such magnificent temples and ceremonies both sumptuous and solemn, and have stood up to other gods and cults with a strong resolve to defend their faith on the part of its people.
Yet all the efforts
Ahasuerus had invested in that task were not completely wasted. The greatest
gain had been the way it enabled
him to understand the circumstances under which the god of his people had acquired the power of an agricultural deity.
Yahweh had possessed only the power of a shepherd¡¯s
god and a martial god until the entry into Canaan, where he had become almighty
by assimilating the power of an agricultural god on encountering Baal.
Certainly, even before that he could do as he wished with
the rain, the wind and the sun, but there was almost no sign of him using his power for the sake of agriculture, until the victory of Elijah, when he finally
manifested a power superior to Baal by bringing down rain, defeating four
hundred of his priests.
It was at that point too that Ahasuerus discovered that the temple and the holocausts of his people had developed through contact with Baal. It was only when they had settled in Canaan that the Sanctuary, which had originally accompanied them in their wanderings in the form of a tent, was transformed into a temple built of wood and stone, putting down roots; the irregular sacrifices of nomads had obviously been established as holocausts under the influence of the ceremonies of an agricultural people, that had grown sophisticated by long, regular repetition. As he explored the ruined temples of Baal and imagined what they must have looked like at their height, he was surprised to find that the form of the altar, the wooden pillars and the vessels for the offerings were very similar to those in the temple of his own people. Their word for priest and that in his own tongue had a common origin and he was bewildered to find signs that the gods had been mixed and worshipped together.
As he listened to tales of the ancient prophets of Baal, who were said to have prophesied in a state of ecstasy, he recalled how, in the days evoked in the Torah, there had been none of the crazed prophets who filled the roads of present-day Judea, nor the inflamed prophets of the past such as Amos, Elijah, or Jeremiah. It was also during this time that he learned that the cultic prostitution that had been current in the days of the Kings had its roots in Canaan at the time when Baal had been venerated in that way. Though it showed a bad influence, he even wondered if the wife of Jael, who had killed Sisera in violation of the absolute law of the nomads that required protection for those who came in search of shelter, had not been corrupted by the cunning of the farmers who worshipped Baal. The fact that his people had poured out fiercer denunciations and curses on Baal than on any other god might perhaps even prove to be the expression of a corresponding fear of assimilation or fusion.
As he made his way along the Phoenician coast, then passing through Abilene heading for Syria, Ahasuerus encountered many more gods beside Baal—Chemosh of Moab, Moloch of the Ammonites, Cybele a cereal god and Atys a shepherds¡¯ god from Asia Minor, Elgabal the sun god of Emesa, Jove identified with Zeus in the eastern regions, Hammon from Carthage, Mot and Anath of Phoenicia, Athena Aphaea venerated in Aegina, Milkom of the Ammonites, Nergal of Cuth, Ashima of Hamath, Nibhaz and Tartak of the Avites, Adrammelech of Sepharvaim—starting of course with the gods still worshipped in the various regions, as well as those mentioned in the Scriptures, or gods of which he heard from the caravans, Ahasuerus spared no effort to find out at least a little about each of them. Yet although his mind was now free of the prejudices and dogmatism of his forefathers, none of those gods attracted so much as a second glance from him, let alone taking hold of his heart.
Ahasuerus¡¯ encounter with a series of new mythic systems came as he reached northern Syria, turning southward again after going as far as Asia Minor. As he was passing through the region of Karkemish, he came across a young man of his own age digging among the ruins of an ancient city and gathering up some kind of objects. Finding it odd that anyone should be digging on the slopes of what merely seemed a barren hillside in a deserted region several miles from the nearest village, he went to investigate; it turned out that what he was collecting were dried clay tablets buried there. They were closely inscribed on both sides with characters that looked like caterpillars and were presumably an ancient system of writing.
¡®What are you going to do with those things, once you¡¯ve dug them up?¡¯ Ahasuerus asked the young man, stopping in a sudden burst of curiosity. He had occasionally seen similar clay tablets before, but since no one could read them, they received almost no attention. Their usual fate was to be left lying around until they finally crumbled back into dust. Seeing the effort he was making to dig them up, anyone would have asked the same question as Ahasuerus. The young man who, though he was about the same age, was clearly not of the same people, stopped working and replied reluctantly:
¡®I have no idea. I¡¯ve been
doing this for several years now, simply because my father told me to.¡¯
Fortunately, he not only understood Ahasuerus¡¯ Aramaic but was even able to speak it quite fluently. Delighted by that, Ahasuerus pursued his questions:
¡®You mean you don¡¯t know why your father is collecting these objects?¡¯
¡®Well, he says he¡¯s seeking to restore the glory of the gods of our ancient forefathers. He claims that the stories of those gods are written on these clay tablets.¡¯ The young man answered with an expression suggesting that he found what he was doing disagreeable. Ahasuerus pricked up his ears at the mention of gods, and asked in a voice that quavered without his realizing it:
¡®Those ancient forefathers
. . . what kind of people were they?¡¯
¡®Hittites, he said, or Hattians . . . anyway, father insists that he¡¯s descended from their royal family.¡¯ As he replied, a slight sneer appeared at the corners of his lips. But Ahasuerus reacted differently. If he meant the people of Hatti, they were identical with the Hurrians about whom he had read in the Scriptures. They had suddenly vanished from history long before, after causing his own forefathers many difficulties with their sharp iron weapons, and their strong, speedy chariots and now, quite unexpectedly, he was enabled to encounter their gods.
Thrilled by this uncommon stroke of good fortune, Ahasuerus set off after the young man, ignoring the looks that suggested how odd he found him. They shared between them the load of undamaged tablets, which was more than one person could carry, and reached the young man¡¯s home after walking a good eight miles.
Contrary to Ahasuerus¡¯ worries, unsure as he was if his father would not prove to be senile or cranky, he turned out to be a sound-minded man of no great age, not yet sixty by his looks. Even greater cause for rejoicing was his Aramaic. Nowadays he was settled as a farmer with land and cattle, but in his youth he had traveled far and wide, accompanying caravans to every corner of the earth, and as a result he had learned to speak and write Aramaic more fluently even than Ahasuerus.
¡®Why, you¡¯ve picked out nothing but a load of useless stuff to bring back. All they deal with is soldiers¡¯ wages and ways of training horses. Didn¡¯t I tell you to hurry up and learn the letters?¡¯ Examining the clay tablets they had brought back, the old man scolded his son, then looked up at Ahasuerus:
¡®You¡¯ve come to learn about
our gods, you say? A strange young man indeed. Don¡¯t the people of your tribe refuse to acknowledge any god apart
from your own?¡¯
He seemed to have recognized at a glance what blood flowed in Ahasuerus¡¯ veins. He responded curtly: ¡®I have left my tribe and its god. It is in the hope of filling the empty place that I am traveling about like this in search of a new god.¡¯
¡®Nonetheless, the blood
that flows in your veins is Jewish blood. Your god is one and the same as your blood. Still, you¡¯ve
come seeking our gods that no one ever seeks; no guest could be more welcome.
Come in. I am heartily glad to welcome you.¡¯
Having spoken thus, he led Ahasuerus into the house without further questions. However, after supper, when he began to talk of his past history, there was a trace of madness about him.
¡®I am Muwatallish. Have you
ever heard of King Muwatallish? There¡¯s no reason why you should. Judging by
the records I¡¯ve seen, he could be reckoned the last glory of us people of Hatti. Well over a thousand years ago, he defeated the
Egyptian army led by the Pharaoh Rameses II near the River Orontes. My late
father deigned to suggest the hopes he nourished regarding me, by bestowing on me the name of such a great man.¡¯
¡®What relation is there between you and King Muwatallish?¡¯ The air of incipient madness in the man¡¯s eyes made Ahasuerus apprehensive but he could not help asking the question, unable to resist the curiosity that had taken hold of him. Old Muwatallish replied as though he had been expecting the question.
¡®Unless my father¡¯s
recollections are mistaken, he was one of our distant forebears. After the king¡¯s
death, our Hittite kingdom experienced disturbances on account of sea-borne peoples, originating from the Aegean
Sea, and finally ceased to exist about a thousand years ago. The kingdom vanished, but some of the last king¡¯s
descendants moved into this region of Karkemish, where they continued to survive in a number of small kingdoms for several
centuries. Some of those kingdoms are said to have survived until Alexander came sweeping down and my late father¡¯s forebears are said to have been the rulers of one such kingdom. In which case, it¡¯s
incomparably more likely that the blood flowing through my veins derives from that of Muwatallish than that yours comes from Abraham or
Jacob.¡¯
¡®But why are you going to
such pains to rediscover gods that have vanished so totally?¡¯
¡®It is natural for you to ask that. In fact, until I was forty that was my thought, and I paid no attention to
what my father said. Just the same as my own son now . . . It was only after
father had died and I was growing older that I gradually began to grasp what he
had been saying while he was alive. Father used
to say that when a nation perishes, it is
not because its gods have abandoned it, but because it has abandoned its gods.
Defeat in warfare or the rise to power of another, mightier nation is a secondary problem, he would say, and in
reality a nation that keeps faith with its gods has always survived. He even
used to quote your people as an example. Since the day when you crossed the
river and came into Canaan, any number of mighty nations have arisen and
established empires; yet where are they now? The fact that you alone have
resisted and survived through the centuries is due to the way you have never
abandoned your god.
¡®Despite the fact that he gave me such a great name, all that my father wanted was that I should restore our gods to life. That meant completing the work that he had nearly finished by the mysteries he had received from our forefathers. He firmly believed that if only our gods could be brought back to life, then the former glory of our clan would be restored, no matter how scattered they might now be, and irrespective of how few remained. So long as we had preserved a pure Hittite pedigree, we would once again gather before those gods, drawn by the blood in our veins.¡¯
Despite the ever more intense strain of folly and the logical incoherence, Ahasuerus had already been confirmed in the rightness of his decision to learn about the man¡¯s gods. The reason was his thought that, if gods were still capable of inspiring such a degree of passion in men although they had vanished completely many centuries before, then they must be worth learning about at least briefly, even if finally he did not stop but continued on his way.
Muwatallish made
Ahasuerus welcome with a depth of feeling that went much farther than words.
There might be an element of misdirected
affection, made greater by his disappointment with a young son who did not understand him; there was equally at times a sense
of pride at being able to teach a young man from another tribe about his clan¡¯s gods
and their religious system. As a result, Ahasuerus was able to study more comfortably and quickly than at any time since leaving home, as he learned
about the gods of the Hittites. According to Hittite mythology, Alalu was the original king of heaven, served by Anu who later replaced him, only to be replaced in turn by the god Kumarbi. Teshub was the storm god, leader of the three gods born to Kumarbi. Hebat was
the wife of Teshub, Sharruma was their son, as
was also Telepinus, a god whose
wrathful withdrawal caused the earth to become a waste land. Wurusema was the sun
goddess of the city of Arinna. Shanshka was the equivalent of the Babylonian goddess Ishtar. The goddess Inaras helped the storm
god vanquish the dragon Illuyankas by
following the advice of a human who was
then permitted to sleep with her. Ullikummi was known
as ¡®the diorite giant,¡¯ born of a rock. Ubelluri
bore the world on his back . . . swept along by his passion, Muwatallish revealed those many gods one by one, explaining
their genealogies and sometimes their tribal origins.
But as the days passed Ahasuerus grew increasingly frustrated. In spite of Muwatallish¡¯s enthusiasm, he soon felt that he was wasting his time without being fully convinced, learning about a mythical system that was far coarser than any he had previously encountered. Heavenly power seemed to be a series of betrayals; Alalu, the pitiful high god, banished from heaven to beneath the earth by his followers was finally caught and devoured by one of them after wandering for a while; the extraordinary virility of Kumarbis was such that he begot a posterity by ejaculating semen onto a rock; desultory combats kept recurring between dragons and gods. In a word, there was nowhere a trace of the sacred, or of anything solemn to be seen, certainly no mercy or love, not even the least concern for human beings. Telepinus, the ¡®god who disappeared,¡¯ might have provided some freshness by his symbolic role. But their understanding of the cosmos and humanity was extremely crude, while their notions of ethics and codes of behavior were almost non-existent. Ahasuerus¡¯ total impression was of something suggesting the debauched and noisy gods of the Greeks, with the abruptness and violence typical of peoples that shine briefly by power of arms then vanish in ancient history.
In such a case, there was no other choice than to leave. It was not that the affection and care manifested by Muwatallish during his stay did not weigh with him, but one day, less than three months after his arrival, Ahasuerus expressed his intention of leaving. The disappointment and fury of Muwatallish were considerable; he had intended to transmit to Ahasuerus not only the oral traditions but even the secret of how to read the ancient writings. He tried to tempt Ahasuerus by offering to adopt him and bestow on him a share of his considerable wealth equal to that of his own son if he agreed to follow in his footsteps. Then he threatened to invoke the wrath of Kumarbi and Teshub, before finally letting Ahasuerus depart in a shower of curses he could not understand. Ahasuerus regretted having to part from Muwatallish in that way, but he felt that he had no choice. Having given up any expectations regarding these gods,