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 4^th 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 3^rd (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, learning the letters of what was already a dead language would have been a completely meaningless activity.

The second of the sections of the manuscript Sergeant Nam read that night ended there. Having read that far, he began to fall into gloom. In the earlier part which he had read in the train, he had been able to detect without much difficulty the character of Min Yoseop behind the shadow of Ahasuerus, but not this time. The novel’s protagonist, Ahasuerus, was simply playing immensely dazzling intellectual games in antiquated spaces of history.

With a head dulled by his work as a detective, Sergeant Nam could not easily read the hidden meaning of Min Yoseop’s religious wanderings expressed in the form of a novel. Impressive incidents inserted here and there into an exotic atmosphere kept the story moving, but far more often dialogue and narratives demanded several re-readings before they made even a vague kind of sense. To make things worse, the names of hundreds of gods made his head ache, while explanatory notes scribbled in the margins of the pages in minute black letters left him giddy. Had it not been for a heartfelt conviction that his investigation was going in the right direction, Sergeant Nam would soon have closed the book.

‘The prize must be harvested where you put your trust’ – murmuring a proverb he had heard somewhere, he stubbornly opened that night’s third section.

9.

On leaving Karkemish, Ahasuerus’ next visit was to Babylon. Whether it was because by now traveling had become a habit with him, or whether he was being driven by an increasing sense of emptiness inside him, the idea of going back home to his parents had become distant and unfamiliar. He had now gone through Palestine, Phoenicia, Syria, and on as far as remote Asia Minor; yet he had failed to discover the god he was seeking in his heart, so he began to travel along the Euphrates and then turned toward Babylon as if that were natural. Time had passed, and it was now spring in the fifth year after he had left home.

There were ample reasons why Ahasuerus should head for Babylon, and it was only to be expected, if he did not decide to abandon his travels. Since the days when Seleucus I had founded Seleucia on the banks of the Tigris, the political and economic significance of Babylon had diminished to the point where it was showing signs of devastation, yet still it was known to many people as the place where the guardian divinities of the ancient Mesopotamian civilization, once so glorious, were still alive.

For Ahasuerus, this was the land to which his forefathers had been forcibly taken in exile by King Nebuchadnezzar and where they had wept, gazing toward far-away Zion. Going much further back in time, the land was inscribed with memories of Abraham, father of the entire Jewish people. There is nothing in the least strange in the fact that Ahasuerus nourished some kind of expectations regarding the gods of Babylon and Mesopotamia, once he had discovered that the shadow of Baal lingered clearly within the temple and rituals of his devout ancestors, though they attacked and cursed him violently.

Moreover, his decision to head east had been helped by the peace that was already established between Parthia and Rome. Ever since Augustus had recaptured the Roman eagle lost at the defeat of Crassus, the two empires had ceased their ancient hostility, establishing a buffer state along a frontier marked by the Euphrates. Thanks to that peace, it had become as safe to travel in Mesopotamia, as in any of the other provinces of the Roman empire.

There is no doubt that reports Ahasuerus had heard when he was still at home about the Jews living there played a part in his choice of Babylon, rather than Nineveh or Assur. For large numbers of his countrymen, whose forbears had not returned to Canaan at the end of the Captivity, after permission to do so was given by King Cyrus of Persia, were still living and prospering in and around Babylon. Perhaps, though not necessarily, the continuing hellenization of the city from the time of Alexander the Great was an additional attraction, in view of the need for communication. In those days Babylon had become the main center for Hellenism in Mesopotamia, and there Ahasuerus would be able to speak and understand using only Greek.

Ahasuerus reached Babylon slightly less than six months after leaving Muwatallish, after a journey by land and by boat during which he visited several ancient cities along the course of the Euphrates. But it was no longer the Holy City of the gentiles he had dreamed of from afar. Along with the ambitions of emperors and the greed of merchants, the gods too had abandoned the city.

The great shrine Esagil, dedicated to Marduk, the city’s main god, had fallen into disrepair, despite the six hundred thousand days’ worth of wages Alexander had given for its reconstruction, while the towering shrine to the north, which was said to have been modeled after the Tower of Babel, had burned down and collapsed into nothing but a heap of stones. A few other temples had survived but the gods no longer resided in them. All they were worth was a cursory glance from an idle passer-by, or at best they served to provide a living for false priests who jabbered a syncretistic doctrine. The statue with its pedestal, worth eight hundred talents of gold, before which a thousand talents’ worth of incense were burned at every festival, the days of former prosperity when countless animals large and small were sacrificed on the two golden altars, all that was nothing more than legends, even for those who still wore the ceremonial robes of those gods.

Yet Ahasuerus went searching in every corner of the city with unprecedented passion. As soon as he set off for Babylon, he had been seized by a conjecture that the Mesopotamian gods might prove to have a more fundamental relationship with the god of his people. For in so far as records remained, this land was the oldest starting-point of his ancestors.

Ahasuerus did not fail to explore anything that he found had once been a temple, no matter how ruined, or listen to anyone, not necessarily a priest, who might know something, no matter how little, about their ancient gods. There were even times when he spent hours standing silently in the courtyard of a ruined temple, in the preposterous hope that a statue, now broken into fragments, might suddenly rise up and provide some kind of answer to what he was seeking.

It was only three months after beginning his wanderings around the temples of Babylon that Ahasuerus suddenly recalled the method Muwatallish had employed. Realizing he would only be able to learn the truth about any god from someone who sincerely believed, then discovering it was impossible to find such people, he turned his attention to the records the ancients had left behind.

There too, the difficulty was the same. Ahasuerus had no sooner started to collect Babylonian clay tablets, under the assumption that they would be written in the same script as those collected by old Muwatallish, than he realized he was wrong. Despite some superficial similarities in the two writing systems, not only were the scripts different but no matter how hard he tried to match them with the fragmentary knowledge he had acquired from Muwatallish, he could make no sense at all of the Babylonian tablets.

Ahasuerus had no choice but to set off in search of someone who could read them. But the region around Babylon, like the rest of Mesopotamia, was entirely given over to either Greek or Aramaic; few indeed still knew how to read those cuneiform texts. Even the few people he discovered after great efforts could not satisfy him. Eager to learn from them though he was, their writing system, that employed several hundred different complex signs, drove Ahasuerus to gloom and despair, for he was accustomed to expressing himself with a couple of dozen letters, and even asking people to simply read and explain the meaning did not work. There were a number of different ways of transcribing the characters, which looked identical to one another, and there was no one capable of reading all the clay tablets Ahasuerus had collected. Therefore, while his efforts certainly added something to his knowledge about their ancient gods, it basically remained vague and fragmentary as before.

Ahasuerus was beginning to lose patience, when an apostate descendant of the Jews, who considered himself a great Babylonian, gave him some welcome news. The man had established a close relationship with Ahasuerus soon after his arrival in the city, driven by some strange sense of kinship, and as the Mesopotamian year was coming to an end, one day he whispered in his ear:

‘Go to the ruins of the Summer Palace on the hill to the north of the city. I’ve heard that the surviving fanatical followers of the god Marduk are to celebrate the New Year there. Perhaps you’ll find some real priests among them, someone capable of reading those characters you want to decipher.’

Ahasuerus knew the Summer Palace. It was a large ruin some eight miles to the north in an uninhabited region, remote and forbidding. It must have been an ancillary palace built on the outer defense wall, which had not been restored after the city’s destruction by the Persians.

However, at that moment Ahasuerus was brought down by an unknown endemic disease, possibly the same fever as had killed Alexander in that very city. Even without the sickness, his health had reached its limits. He had rested quietly for several months in Muwatallish’s house, but by now a full five years of traveling, with the accompanying poor diet and fatigue, had almost exhausted his last reserves of youthful strength.

Instead of staying in bed, resting quietly in order to allow his body to recuperate, Ahasuerus quickly got up and headed for the Summer Palace as soon as he heard those words. He went, not lightly equipped, but laden with an armful of clay tablets. Among those he had collected in the meantime, he chose some which he guessed were records of something to do with gods or rituals.

He hastened along, clenching his teeth and on the verge of collapse, but contrary to what he had heard there was no sign of anyone in the ruins of the Summer Palace. Just like on a previous visit, an eerie silence reigned and nothing more.

At that point, Ahasuerus suddenly felt all his energy ebbing away; refusing to give up, he began to search here and there among the ruins. Even without the rumor he had heard, if there existed a fanatical group dedicated to the ancient gods that no one now cared about, this ruin, some forty miles from the city, was an ideal place to celebrate elaborate ceremonies away from prying eyes. Furthermore, among the things that had begun to stir Ahasuerus’ intuition was a feeling that extraordinary things occurred in and around these ruins.

Soon it grew clear that this impression was no mere hallucination produced by the alternations of burning fever and cold sweats racking his sick, exhausted body. As he contemplated for a second time a partially ruined chamber and the entrance to a subterranean stone stairway, he became aware of the muffled murmur of voices, and a whiff of incense rising from a flight of stone stairs concealed behind a fallen pillar.

‘I’ve found them at last!’ Ahasuerus exclaimed inwardly as he hastily set foot on the stairs he had found with such difficulty. But the energy required for that first step downward was the very last drop of energy he had. His body wavered as if he had made a false step; a moment later he was rolling on the floor of the underground room as if hurled down by an awesome force.

How long did it last? When Ahasuerus opened his eyes, he was in a stone-walled room, burning with fever, unsure if it was day or night, and if what he saw was a dream or hallucination. Through what seemed a fog he perceived lamps fixed to the four walls. Then a relief of a monster combining a lion and a serpent, and another of an ox appeared faintly, before the ceiling came in view, seemingly slanting a little.

As those things grew distinct one by one, Ahasuerus became aware that part of the sights he had taken for dream or hallucination were real. People in glittering costumes burning incense, a murmuring of invocations, what seemed like the meaty smell of burnt sacrifices, the juice of some bitter-tasting herb that someone had poured into his mouth . . . but the most enchanting memory of all was the flickering image of a lovely, exotic girl, dressed in mysterious robes like a goddess, and her whisperings that sounded so sweet though he could not understand a word.

Ahasuerus tried to lift his head to see more clearly. Then he suddenly swooned, as if he had been struck hard on the back of the head, and he lost consciousness.

When Ahasuerus opened his eyes again, considerable time had passed. A middle-aged Babylonian was standing at his bedside, looking down at him with a ponderous, inscrutable gaze. The man was wearing one of the glittering robes he had seen in what he had taken for a dream or hallucination. He seemed to have come hurrying to the bedside shortly before, when Ahasuerus had first given signs of waking and had been waiting for him to wake up again ever since.

Seeing Ahasuerus open his eyes, he squeezed drops of wine between his lips with a sponge, murmuring a few incomprehensible words. Seeing that Ahasuerus indicated that he could not understand him, the man changed language and questioned him in Greek.

‘Who are you? Why did you come here?’

‘I came seeking the gods of Babylon.’

With difficulty Ahasuerus moved his parched lips in reply. For some reason the man’s face lit up with amazement.

‘Our gods? Then are you the one Marduk has sent as his servant?’

‘I do not know if the god Marduk summoned me here, but I am certainly not someone sent by him. I do not know him as yet.’

Ahasuerus was troubled by the man’s amazement, but he answered truthfully. The man questioned him again as if he was puzzled.

‘Then what about this Enuma Elish containing our creation myth?’

He pointed toward clay tablets, which lay neatly arranged at Ahasuerus’ feet. They looked like the tablets Ahasuerus had brought with him; those that had been broken by the shock of his fall seemed to have been put back together. Ahasuerus, guessing that the tablets contained something out of the ordinary, again replied frankly and simply:

‘If by Enuma Elish you mean those tablets, I collected them at the sites of various temples within the city. Some I purchased from self-proclaimed priests. Those tablets I brought with me came from near Esagil.’

‘And why did you come? What induced you to come wandering around this deserted spot? How did you discover the entrance to this underground temple, when it is not easy even for us to find?’

‘I was told by someone there was to be a New Year’s celebration here. Naturally, there are celebrations in the city as well, but I have heard that those are merely noisy, unruly games in which all kinds of old Babylonian gods, twisted beyond recognition, and foreign pseudo-deities are mixed. What I wanted to see was Marduk and the other gods who accompany him in their original, unadulterated form.’

After Ahasuerus’ reply the man paused in his questioning. Though his initial surprise had vanished, his expression seemed to show that he was still curious about many things.

At last he spoke again: ‘Too many things about you fulfil the predictions of the oracle for all this to be mere chance. But one thing is vital. Judging by your appearance, you are not of the same blood as us. Where have you come from? From what tribe and whose descendant are you?’

‘I am from the land of Judea. I am descended from Abraham and Isaac; you may have heard of them?’

Hearing him reply in that manner, the man frowned briefly.

‘Why, of all races, would a descendant of those who stole our myth . . .’ He broke off and remained sunk in thought for a while then slowly rose, talking as he did so.

‘Very well. You have come corresponding to our oracle, so I must discuss all of this with the elders. Take a good rest in the meanwhile. Your fever has fallen but the sickness has not yet been rooted out so you must not over-exert yourself.’

Once the man had left his bedside, Ahasuerus felt the fever come sweeping heavily back over him and closed his eyes. Soon a dazed sleepiness blurred his mind.

How long did that state last? Ahasuerus opened his eyes at a feeling that something like a soft ray of sunlight was caressing his face. It proved to be, not sunlight but the gaze of a young girl, who had been standing beside his bed for some time, beholding him silently. It was the girl he had seen in his fever and taken for a hallucination. Striving to control his pounding heart, Ahasuerus stared at her. Her dress was similar to the clothes of a woman he had seen in a relief in a small temple people had called the temple of Ishtar, located in an outlying region of the city. It was that which had made him recall her as being robed like a goddess.

Even more gracious than her dress was her face, which was beautiful and bright, endowed with an uncanny dignity. Her complexion possessed that light brown hue commonly seen among Mesopotamian girls, manifesting to eyes in the least attentive a purity like a glimpse of the most transparent flesh. Above graceful red lips her lofty nose expressed a certain human coldness which the depth and tranquility of her dark eyes transformed into a kind of sacred air. She was possessed of a strange beauty, such as he had not seen in the young wife of Asaph or the girls of his native land who had occasionally made his heart beat faster when he was a youth.

Although she knew Ahasuerus had wakened and was gazing at her, the girl stood without moving until their eyes met; then she bowed and silently held out to him the little jar she was holding. Judging by the smell, it seemed to be the same herbal juice that he recalled having drunk a number of times. Unthinkingly he raised himself to take the jar she was offering. Seeming relieved that she no longer had to help him drink, the girl turned and silently withdrew. She vanished like a phantom.

Ahasuerus was waking from the sleep he had fallen into after drinking the juice when the middle-aged man who had first addressed him came a second time. He spoke in a discontented tone, yet as if doing him a favor.

‘We have decided to accept you as the one sent by Marduk. You should understand that the god Marduk has sent you to be our king.’

His words were completely unexpected. Dumbfounded and unable to grasp at once what he meant, Ahasuerus simply gazed up at him in silence, while the man began to explain in suddenly excited tones things Ahasuerus had not asked him about.

‘We are people who have joined together to seek the restoration of the god Marduk and the former glories of Babylon. Contrary to what is often said, we were not conquered by the Persians but we merely let them in, opening the gates ourselves. Once Belshazzar, our last king, began to venerate Shin, the moon-god, alone and stopped serving Marduk, the people and the priests expelled him and welcomed Cyrus, who immediately celebrated in Esagil the ritual known as ‘taking Bel’s hand,’ for Marduk is also called Bel, not as conqueror but as protector of our faith. More than that, he brought back to Babylon the statues of the gods that had been taken to other cities and protected Babylon as a sacred center of faith.

‘But his grandson Xerxes betrayed us. He used as his excuse a series of revolts by Nebuchadnezzar III and others later, but in reality he had succumbed to Ahura Mazda, abandoning this city and its god Marduk. He sacrilegiously destroyed the temple tower and carried off to his own country the statue of Marduk like a prisoner of war. That was when the true downfall of Babylon began.

‘Yet Marduk is almighty and great. He brought Alexander from Greece to destroy sacrilegious Persia. Alexander offered sacrifice to Marduk and ordered the rebuilding of the ruined temples. If he had not died so unexpectedly while still very young, and if the Seleucid dynasty that succeeded him had not been so eager to be hellenized, Babylon would not have become what you now see.

‘But Babylon will not remain in ruins like this for ever. Marduk is everlasting and we Babylonians are still alive. We will not allow this sacred city to remain thus desolate; the great Marduk will not stand quietly by while his city becomes a spectacle for curious foreigners. In times past, we have repeatedly risen up from the midst of devastation and fought to restore the glory of Babylon and of Marduk; at present we are preparing another great battle. On the day when all Babylonians stand united in the name of Marduk, we will enter Babylon in triumph. We will restore the magnificent, great city gates of ancient times, made of white juniper clad in bronze, and give back to the Processional Way its former splendor, paved with sandstone and limestone. We will rebuild the ziggurats and Esagil; we will raise up again the hundreds of outdoor shrines, the pedestals for the gods, the thousands of pulpits. Then, in this splendidly restored sacred city, we will sing the former glories of Babylon . . .’

It was downright madness, but of another order than that which he had sensed in Muwatallish. It was a madness he had glimpsed in the zealots of his own land of Judea, a malignant madness, inspired by a passion that was more political than religious.

‘But when you say I am king . . .’ Feeling his flesh creep, Ahasuerus phrased his question carefully. The man acknowledged his question but his tone indicated that he was continuing what he had been saying previously, rather than replying to him.

‘As a means of uniting in Marduk, we have prepared the New Year’s festival of Akitu in the coming month of Nisan. But although Marduk is in the heavens, we have had no king to guide us in his place here on earth. We prayed ardently to Marduk. Fortunately he answered our prayers, sending down an oracle through various elders and priests. It announced that in the Days of Chaos at the end of the year, before the month of Nisan begins, our king will appear bearing a token given him by Marduk. And on the first of the Days of Chaos, you arrived, carrying the Enuma Elish engraved with the story of the foundation of the world and the genealogy of the gods . . .’

‘I only came here to learn, guessing that those tablets were records about the gods; I did not know what they contained. Besides, I am nothing more than a wanderer from a foreign land.’

Confronted with his browbeating, Ahasuerus for the first time ventured a timid protest. No matter how symbolic the role, he felt that for him to become the head of a band in which nationalistic fervor overlapped with religious fanaticism would be not only dangerous but also completely unrelated with his arduous quest. The man’s expression suddenly became fierce and his voice grew threatening:

‘Yet we have no choice. It troubles me that you are from a foreign tribe, but at present we only have a few days left before Akitu and there is no other way. We need a king to preside over the ceremonies for the New Year’s festival, even if only formally. For the sake of the many simple folk who believe in the oracle more firmly than I or the elders do, and who will be coming to witness the beginning of a new age of history, you have no choice but to become the king sent by Marduk. If you refuse to the end, I’ll simply hand you over to the people, who will be infuriated by disappointment, accusing you of profanity and blasphemy.’

‘Even if it becomes known that my blood is different in origin from theirs?’

‘I have already given thought to that. It will be enough to say that you are not Judean, but a descendant of Nebuchadnezzar III who died in a failed attempt to restore the Empire and whose family fled to Phoenicia, and have now returned home. You will have to say that, not only to the common people but also to the priests.’

Still Ahasuerus could not understand why the man was so determined to assign this odd role to him. He could have made an equally convincing show by designating someone suitable to be king from his own people to appear with an appropriate sign on the appointed day in the underground temple. For some reason Ahasuerus felt apprehensive at the crafty face and the searching gaze of the man, who seemed to be constantly plotting wicked deeds and watching people’s reactions. He finally summoned up the courage to ask something that had been intriguing him for some time: ‘But who are you?’

‘I am Himerus. I have sought out the scattered priests, restored the ceremonies of Marduk, convinced the most illustrious elders, and brought together the common people out of their despair for the glory of Babylon. Yet for the ordinary folk, I do not exist as yet. Only a name transmitted in legends . . .’

He smiled ambiguously as he replied, now employing a cajoling voice.

‘If you accept, you will not merely receive the name of king; you will really be treated as a king. You will spend all your days in abundance and comfort, in the midst of our veneration and the joy of having a beautiful living goddess for queen. What do you say? Will you do it?’

When Himerus mentioned the beautiful living goddess, Ahasuerus recalled the exotic girl he had seen a little earlier. His heart started to pound. Yet the densely conspiratorial feeling that emanated from Himerus’ preposterous proposition made him incapable of replying. Himerus rose, smiling in a sinister manner, as if he could read his every thought.

‘I trust you are not going to refuse and choose to be thrown to the angry mob to be burned alive! I’ll give you time to think. I’ll come back after the evening meal.’

With that he went out.

Left alone, Ahasuerus pondered over his proposition. He seemed to have no other choice. In the course of the past five years, while drifting here and there, he had seen many examples of ‘superstition for the sake of belief’ and numerous religious spectacles based on that by which priests had striven to procure their own advantage; and he had often witnessed people’s need for living, breathing symbols, even to the point that a prostitute could be made into a goddess. He likewise knew the terror of a collective madness inspired by belief; he had heard enough of the atrocities priests committed in the name of a god.

Moreover, this group which was forcing him to play a bizarre role combined political fantasy with a violent nationalistic fanaticism. With the horror he had experienced on seeing how the zealots of his own land were only too ready to take the sword and shed blood, Ahasuerus realized that he could not possibly refuse Himerus’ demand.

Ahasuerus, although he remained unwilling, had further reasons for undertaking the role of their symbolic king. One was his hope of drawing closer to the Mesopotamian gods more quickly through this role; another was the assumption that the girl who attracted him with such power might prove to be the ‘living goddess’ Himerus had mentioned.

‘Very well. If you really need me, I will do as you wish. But you must order your priests to teach me everything I want to know about the gods of your land.’

This was Ahasuerus’ response to Himerus when he came to hear his reply after he had finished his supper of light gruel and had more or less recovered his strength. Himerus accepted readily.

‘That’s not difficult. In any case, you are the person who will have to come closest to our gods. I will select only learned, scholarly priests to instruct you.’

He glanced at Ahasuerus and added: ‘But that will be after the festival of Akitu is over. The first thing you have to do is master the movements you will be obliged to show the people as king at the New Year’s festival, and the ancient words you will have to let them hear. Tomorrow I will send the priest who speaks the best Greek; you must memorize all the movements and words he teaches you.’

The words were spoken like an order, indicating to Ahasuerus that he had no choice.

From the next day onward, for several days, Ahasuerus studied the Babylonian New Year’s ceremonies like an actor in a Greek theater learning by heart his text and role from a script. Physically he was still not well, but by the time he had recovered and was able to get up a few days later, his exceptional intelligence and memory enabled him to recite the larger part of the ceremonies.

Two days after he left his sickbed, completely restored, the Akitu festival began. That was on the vernal equinox, the first day of the month they called Nisan. The first three days were celebrated among themselves. On the fourth day Ahasuerus, robed according to ancient rules, was led by the priests before the crowd that was beginning to enter a state of frenzy. With a hand on which he was wearing a ring of precious stones, he was grasping a scepter symbolizing royal power, on his head he wore a resplendent crown made after ancient models, and at his side hung a crescent-shaped scimitar. His robes were woven of rare silk, adorned with various ornaments.

Following the instructions he had received, Ahasuerus moved toward the priests, who were standing in a row, and knelt before them. Their leader stepped forward with an angry expression on his face, scolded him and tore from him the scepter and the scimitar, removed the crown. After he had ripped off all the ornaments attached to his robes, he made as if to strike his face and spit on him. This was the beginning of the ceremony of expiation the king had to undergo, celebrating the suffering of Marduk. Ahasuerus recited carefully the ceremonial words he had memorized so laboriously.

‘Oh Master of all that is in this world, I have not sinned, I have not neglected the worship of your holiness, nor have I been niggardly in making offerings to you. I have done no wrong in guiding my people toward you, I have not been slow to protect your lands. Greatest among the gods, forgive me . . .’

As Ahasuerus recited the words of the lengthy prayer of contrition in their still unfamiliar Akkadian language, the angry expression of the head priest began to soften. It had all been determined in advance. Still, Ahasuerus was obliged to repeat the words several times more before an expression of pity appeared on the priest’s face and confidence in the king was regained.

At last, the chief priest began to praise Marduk in a loud voice with arms opened wide, then spoke to Ahasuerus in gentle tones.

‘Fear not. Marduk will grant your prayers. He will increase your lands and multiply your people . . .’

Following that, after benedictions and promises had been repeated at length, the day was filled with the frenzied festivities of the impassioned, jubilant crowd.

The next day’s ceremony represented Marduk vanishing far away from the sun and light, then reappearing. On the following day, there was a ritual in which the various other gods came thronging round as Marduk on his return assigned to each of them a particular domain and destiny. In that ritual, Ahasuerus, acting as king on behalf of Marduk, carried each of the idols to its proper place. As if in a reduction of the ceremony celebrated in the days of ancient Babylon’s prosperity, when the statues of the gods were enshrined in their respective temples around the outskirts of the city in the course of magnificent, festive processions, the statues of the lesser gods were re-enshrined here and there in the underground temple.

The next day saw the ceremony representing the combat between Marduk and the evil gods. For this, Ahasuerus represented Marduk, leading a company of terrified gods in a violent battle against Tiamat, dragon goddess of the ocean. The solemn ritual ended with the scene in which, after killing and dismembering Tiamat, Marduk created the world.

The marriage rites that Ahasuerus had been secretly awaiting were held on the final day of Akitu. On the afternoon of the day on which the festival reached its climax, Ahasuerus took the living Ishtar to wife in rites where he, as a human being, was king while attaining a celestial holiness. The person playing the role of Ishtar was indeed the Babylonian girl he had seen at his bedside when he was sick. After he had accomplished the rites of sacred union with her, a series of benedictions for each month of the year marked the end of Ahasuerus’ role in the celebration of Akitu. He himself considered it to have been a remarkably flawless performance.

The priests, who had initially manifested distrust, even enmity toward Ahasuerus on account of his unconcealed foreignness, showed a quite different attitude after the end of the festivities. They now seemed to consider him one of their own race, home after a long journey in foreign lands. Himerus and the elders likewise seemed satisfied. Apart from a trace of incomprehensible pity he occasionally perceived in their eyes, Ahasuerus’ life there was no different from that of a real king.

His special delight lay in having received the girl impersonating Ishtar as his wife. Because of a fiercer flame burning within him, he had not until then suffered intolerable desires but he was, after all, a young man of twenty-four, already experienced with women. As soon as he had the lovely girl in his arms, he gave himself over to the cravings of inflamed love, as if his youthful flesh was determined to make up in a single moment for all the time during which he had forgotten it. Sometimes he felt that he would be content to spend the rest of his life in love for the girl, neglecting everything else and staying there for ever.

Nonetheless Ahasuerus did not settle down into that sudden new love. Somehow the passion for the gods that had taken hold of him and would not let him go set him studying the gods of Mesopotamia in the very midst of the fiery vortex of love. Although there remained an uneasy feeling caused by his inability to understand why they had obliged him to play the not particularly unpleasing role of king, Himerus had been true to his promises. The priests instructed him unstintingly about their gods and teachings whenever Ahasuerus wished, and in their attitudes they truly showed him the deference due to a king.

Some parts of what they taught he had already heard in the various temples of Babylon in the form of legends or absurd myths, but frequently their interpretations and their commentaries based on devout belief gave Ahasuerus the impression that he was meeting completely new gods. Among the priests were several who had mastered the cuneiform writing that Ahasuerus had so eagerly wished to learn. There were priests who could decipher not only old Babylonian but also Akkadian and Sumerian. Ahasuerus was already more or less familiar with those writing systems that had remained in use; that, together with his remarkable skill in languages and his intelligence, meant that in a few months he was capable of reading any kind of clay tablet no matter what writing system it employed. Despite the nights spent in fierce love-making with his young bride, by the time Tashritu, the seventh month, arrived he had learned not only about the gods of the Babylonian era that were still alive but those of ancient Akkadia and Sumer that had long since vanished.

An, the primal god of heaven; Nammu, the mother, the primal goddess of the sea; their offspring Enki, the god of the Earth, and Enlil, the god of the atmosphere; Ningursag, mother-goddess and consort of Enki; Aruru, the goddess who in some tales created the first human beings; Inanna, the planet Venus and the goddess of love later known as Ishtar; Dumuzi or Tammuz, figuring in a fertility myth; Nidaba, goddess of learning; Utu, the sun-god; Ereshkigal, goddess of the underworld and elder sister to Inanna; Ninshubur, the devoted friend of Inanna who helps rescue her from the underworld; Nanna-Suen, the moon god; Geshitinana, sister of Dumuzi who rescues him from the underworld; Nergal, netherworld god of destruction; Ninkura, the daughter of En-ki and Nin-gur-sag; Ninlil, goddess of wind; Nusku, son of Enlil and god of light or fire; Ishullanu, Anu’s gardener who falls in love with Ishtar; Sarpanitu, Marduk’s consort; Namtar, god of diseases; Asushunamir, the god who saves Inanna from Ereshkigal; Apsu, the god of the fresh water from which everything was made; Tiamat, a female dragon representing the ocean; Lakhmu and Lakhamu, offspring of Tianmat and parents of Anshar; Mummu, the craftsman son of Tiamat and Apsu; Anshar and Kishar, the parents of Anu who is the god of the firmament; Nudimmud, son of Anu also known as Ea, father of Marduk; Damkina, mother of Marduk; the nymph Siduri who offers Gilgamesh wine . . . In addition, among the clay tablets the priests had collected in various parts of Mesopotamia, such things as epic poems, proverbs, and moral treatises were of great help in giving him a better grasp of their gods and their cosmology.

As he had vaguely conjectured when he first traveled down the Euphrates, the region seemed to be not only the original homeland of his forefathers but also the birthplace of their god. The first thing that shocked Ahasuerus had been a series of myths surrounding the creation of heaven and earth. In the battle between Marduk and Tiamat could be discerned a remote archetype of the combat between Yahweh and Rahab or Leviathan before the creation of the world, while the manner in which the victorious Marduk had created the world with the dead body of his enemy revealed to him the origin of his ancestors’ division of the universe into three levels—heaven, earth, and sheol.

Concerning the creation of man, and original sin, too, Babylonian myths gave him much food for thought. Although there were myths which said the first man had sprouted from the earth like a plant or had been made by the goddess Aruru, mostly they told how he was shaped out of clay. On the other hand, human nature originally came to contain a sinful element by being contaminated with the blood of the Lagma gods. Moreover, the purpose of the gods in creating human beings was in order that they might be fed, clothed and served by them, which Ahasuerus felt helped him understand the coldness and ruthlessness of Yahweh. There were certainly the repetitions of ‘He saw and it was good’ after each act of creation, and his forefathers had declared in various places that the creation of humanity by Yahweh had been an expression of his mercy and love, but in what had happened in the past and what was now happening in the world, Ahasuerus had more often seen a Yahweh whose only concern was to be served and worshipped.

The Food of Life which Adapa did not eat during his visit to the heavens, and had he eaten it he would have enjoyed eternal life, seemed not unrelated to the fruit of the Tree of Life which Adam was deprived of as a result of his sin. Adapa was not the first ancestor of humanity as Adam was, but like Adam he missed the chance to become immortal, though less on account of his sin than because of Ea’s mistaken advice; yet the cold-blooded rejection of humanity’s ardent desire to overcome its limitations or the ruthless division of the domain of the gods from that of humanity was sufficient to recall the tragedy of Adam. In addition, the theme was repeated in the Epic of Gilgamesh in a similar form, when Gilgamesh lost to a snake the plant giving perpetual youth.

The story of Noah’s flood likewise could be found repeated down to the smallest details in the stories about such righteous men as Zisudra, recorded in Sumerian myths, or Utnapishtim in the Epic of Gilgamesh. For they were very often almost identical with the story of Noah, not only in their devotion and righteousness, but in the structure and size of the ark they were ordered to build by a god, the downpour lasting seven days and seven nights, even the consecutive sending out of raven and dove to detect the subsiding of the waters.

The distinctive hostility toward serpents too seemed to derive from Babylon. A great serpent had constantly disturbed the cosmic order and a cunning serpent had stolen from Gilgamesh the plant that rejuvenates. The Babylonians’ singular hostility toward serpents must certainly have infected his ancestors, so that in Eden the serpent was turned into a most evil seducer.

It was clear that their notions about the concept of sin and about atonement by means of a scapegoat must to some degree have influenced Abraham, who spent the earlier part of his life among them. Those concepts of sin and atonement, found only in later Babylonian ceremonies though not in ancient clay tablets, established a particularly strong link with his people, more than with any other.

Perhaps on that account, Ahasuerus found that there were a number of points in the clay tablets related to the books of Wisdom and Proverbs that corresponded to his forefathers’ records. It was the case with assertions of futility evoking the lamentations of the Preacher in the scriptures, and likewise the reproaches against Marduk with a final reconciliation in the ‘Poem of the Righteous Sufferer,’ so similar to the howls of Job. Even phrases such as ‘an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth’ struck him in no ordinary way. Forced to come here long ago, his forefathers had not simply spent seventy years gazing toward Zion and weeping; they must have learned a new kind of style and grammar for their god.

Although it was somewhat removed from the purpose with which he had left home, Ahasuerus grew more than ever fascinated by the ancient gods and doctrines of Babylon, on sensing that he was retracing the past history of Yahweh, whom he had given up and abandoned. Then, once night had fallen, another kind of love awaited him in the bedroom, growing deeper and more inflamed as the days passed, love with his young wife, who seemed to appreciate adults’ secret pleasures. These gods he was newly learning about, just like other gods he had come across here and there, were immersed in immorality such as betrayal and incest, and in such vices as cruelty, capriciousness, favoritism and self-righteousness. Yet what made it possible for him to draw closer to them with curiosity and hope, rather than disappointment, might well have been the fact that the wife he loved belonged to them.

However, at some point an incomprehensible change occurred in her. Once the moment of rapture and sweetness was past, her warm body at once became icy cold, and her eyes, full of passionate ardor a moment before, immediately grew dull with an unfathomable sorrow. Besides, there were moments when an unconsciously felt, inexplicable pity shone in the elders’ eyes, which would sometimes brim with an infinitely deep, desolate sorrow.

Finding that strange, Ahasuerus asked her the reason several times. Each time she quickly put on an awkward smile and gently shook her head, or responded by remaining stubbornly silent. But at last the riddle was solved by the woman herself, surrendering to her love for Ahasuerus, and making that the day when his stay there came to an end.

It was a night in the middle of the month of Tashritu not long before the autumn equinox. Returning early because the priests were busy preparing for the autumn festival, Ahasuerus drew her with him toward the bedroom, eager to release in a flash all the passion he had accumulated during the day.

Yet something very strange occurred. Usually, even though she seemed to be responding only because she was obliged to, she would take fire and wrap herself around him the moment his hand touched her but that day for some reason her body remained cold and rigid, unable to relax. Ahasuerus was ardently caressing her, like someone trying to revive a dying ember, when suddenly he noticed tears streaming down her cheeks.

‘What’s wrong? What’s happened?’ Surprised, he questioned her. Suddenly she began to sob. Bewildered, Ahasuerus tried to comfort her but she went on sobbing for some time, then swallowing her tears with a deep sigh she asked: ‘Poor man! Can you still not guess what’s ahead of you?’

‘What do you mean?’

Ahasuerus was perplexed. She silently gazed back at him for a moment, with eyes still full of tears, then asked: ‘Do you know who Himerus is?’

Indeed, that was something Ahasuerus had been curious about from the very beginning. Himerus ordered the elders and priests about as he pleased, yet almost none of the ordinary people seemed to know him.

‘Who is he? I’ve been wondering about that.’

In response to his question, she suddenly lowered her voice and whispered: ‘He is Himerus the Second.’

‘Himerus the Second?’

‘Yes. Himerus the First, who he claims was his grandfather, is supposed to have liberated Babylon from the control of the Parthians with the help of the priests of Esagil. It’s said he was King of Babylon for a time and even issued coins bearing his name, but he was soon driven out by the Parthians.’

‘So this Himerus has the same dream as his grandfather regarding those now ruling Babylon?’ Ahasuerus asked, as if suddenly realizing something about him. She nodded silently. Ahasuerus went on:

‘But there’s something I still don’t understand. If that’s his dream, shouldn’t he become king himself and lead the people? Why has he forced a foreigner like me to play the king’s role?’

‘You’ve learned and read many things about our gods in all this time. Don’t you know about Tammuz, or the substitute king?’

‘It’s the first time I’ve heard of a substitute king. Of Tammuz I know a little, but what has he got to do with me?’

Again she sighed gently and replied in a low voice: ‘The substitute king is the sacrificial offering for the true king. Common people can offer a lamb or a calf in place of the disasters destined for them, but a king is different. A king can only avoid disaster by offering a man like himself in sacrifice. And that victim is the substitute king. I’ve heard it said that the Assyrian king Esarhaddon was able to avoid calamity by establishing a substitute king and having him die instead of himself.’

Her words appalled him. At last he was beginning to understand Himerus’ sinister smile and the pitying looks of the elders. But he was still curious.

‘Now I see. But what connection is there between Tammuz and me?’

‘Tammuz is a god who spends six months above the ground and six months underground. The period he is permitted to spend above the ground lasts from the spring equinox until the autumn equinox. Tammuz is the husband of Ishtar. And since you are the husband of the living Ishtar, that is to say myself, that means you are the living Tammuz. Now when the autumn equinox comes, you have to disappear underground; you see what that means? You are to descend ceremonially as Tammuz into the underworld, and at the same time as victim you will die as Himerus’ substitute king. Then Himerus intends to lead the people, who will be convinced of his immortality, and march against Babylon. He has not revealed himself directly to the people yet, but through the priests and elders he is spreading news of his imminent coming as a sure prophecy. Now do you see?’

‘But you are still young. How do you know all this?’

‘Himerus is my adoptive father. I was roaming the streets of Babylon begging after I lost my parents; he took me in and raised me.’

A dark shadow spread over her face, provoked by the inner pain of betraying the man who was at the same time her benefactor and her adoptive father. Quite forgetting the approaching danger, Ahasuerus embraced her with a sudden emotion and delight. For now he had felt her love for him, not just with ears and eyes but with his very heart—a love that transcended an affection and gratitude formed over many years and was not afraid even to die for him.

‘Is it really so? Really . . .’ Ahasuerus murmured as he covered her tear-stained face with burning kisses. She briefly surrendered herself to him, then pushed him away gently, whispering: ‘There is no time to lose. You must leave at once. Tomorrow you will have to preside over the ceremony of purification for the autumn festival and it will be impossible for you to escape. Quick! Hurry up!’

But Ahasuerus heard nothing of what she said. His heart, already strongly ablaze, craved for her body with a more heated passion than ever before, though it had almost nothing to do with carnal desire. She resisted him for a while, then seemed to change her mind and suddenly began to respond to him with passionate abandon, as if she wanted to absorb him completely into herself, body and heart.

When Ahasuerus’ mind returned to dark reality, he was lying beside her half-dead, in a lethargy as intense as the violence of their love-making. Someone seemed to be calling him, knocking faintly on the door.

‘It’s Himerus.’ She whispered into Ahasuerus’ ear as he was coming to his senses, then she quickly added: ‘Don’t get dressed. Go and meet him without even wiping off the sweat; only cover the front of your body.’

Still feeling dazed, Ahasuerus did as she told him. It was indeed Himerus at the door.

‘What’s the matter?’ Ahasuerus asked, in a voice suggesting weariness and exasperation. Himerus examined Ahasuerus briefly, then spoke with the treacherous smile that was characteristic of him:

‘I have disturbed the bed of the king and the goddess. At the Persian court, I would have been beheaded. Excuse me. I will come again tomorrow morning.’

Watching Himerus turn away with a strangely satisfied air, Ahasuerus realized that he was already being watched and understood why she had made him appear before Himerus in that state.

‘All right. Quickly, prepare to leave now. Himerus will feel reassured until tomorrow morning at least.’

When Ahasuerus returned to the bed, she was already dressed and she urged him impatiently. Yet Ahasuerus could not free himself from a lingering attachment to her, though she was pushing him by the shoulders with a sudden sense of urgency.

‘What about you? What will you do?’

‘I have to stay in bed here until tomorrow morning. As if you were still asleep . . . No matter which way you go in the space of one night, Himerus’ people will easily catch up with you. Get as far away as you can, quickly; don’t stop for two or three days.’

‘Will you be safe?’ Ahasuerus asked, standing there frozen. Again a dark shadow crossed her face briefly, immediately replaced by an equally bright smile as she replied: ‘What harm could come to me? Himerus is my adoptive father; he’s looked after me like his own daughter for more than ten years.’

‘No, it’s not so. I want you to come with me.’

Remembering the cruelty and heartlessness lurking in Himerus’ insidious smile, he urged her. With a disgruntled expression she retorted: ‘Do you want to have your throat cut on the altar? Together, we would be stopped after a few steps. Do you still not know Himerus?’

‘I am asking because I know him. Do you really believe he will leave you alone when he knows you have helped me escape?’

‘But will he dare kill me for something like that? I know how things stand between him and me better than anyone; you must leave now, as quickly as possible.’ She replied with a yet more confident smile. It was not so much that he really believed her, but forced to recognize that there was no other way, Ahasuerus slowly dressed and prepared to leave.

Once he was ready, Ahasuerus abruptly asked, as if struck by a new idea:

‘Supposing I were to go to the authorities in Babylon, denounce Himerus and save you?’

‘You mustn’t!’ She replied suddenly in a piercing cry. Then, fixing him with an icy glare, she added: ‘If you did that, I would never see you again. More than that, I would curse myself eternally for ever having become your wife.’

‘Then are we parting forever?’

‘There may be another way. But in any case, I cannot love you if you kill Himerus.’ There was a kind of desolation echoing in her voice. Ahasuerus hesitated, then asked: ‘Couldn’t you get away?’

‘Yes, I’ll try. I don’t know when, but I’ll surely get out of here and go looking for you.’

‘When you do, come to Jerusalem and ask for Zachiah of Shekhem. He’s my uncle. Since he’s the biggest shoemaker in Jerusalem, he won’t be hard to find. I’ll be waiting for you there.’

‘Very well. But you must not set out in the direction of Jerusalem straight away. Himerus knows which country you are from; he’ll pursue you all the way. Head east first, rather, then go by boat, taking a roundabout way.’

‘Right. That’s what I’ll do. You must remember: Zachiah of Shekhem in Jerusalem.’

That promise made, Ahasuerus made haste to leave. But the promise proved to be in vain. Escaping from the underground temple along a secret passage she told him about, Ahasuerus headed eastward and, less than three days later, heard shocking news. The army and officials of Babylon had raided the ruins of the Summer Palace, killing or capturing several hundred of the followers of a certain Himerus, who had been plotting an insurrection using an underground chamber there as his base. He heard the news at a ferry on the banks of the Tigris, where a road branched in the direction of Susa, then the capital of Persia.

‘The most shocking thing was the end of that Himerus. He slashed his own throat before the soldiers could capture him, and they say that beside him a beautiful girl, not yet twenty years old, was lying dead with her body full of stab wounds. I don’t know exact details but they say she was his adopted daughter, and was somehow connected with the fellow who reported the rebellion.’

The traveller who gave the news to Ahasuerus ended by adding those last details.

It was well past midnight when Sergeant Nam finished reading the third section of the manuscript. It took him a long time, less on account of its length than because he was trying to comprehend the contents.

The long-suffering sergeant felt slightly discouraged to find Ahasuerus still wandering incomprehensibly in foreign lands. Compared to the exhaustion of his body and mind, he was getting too little out of it and in addition to the section he had just been reading, there were still several left to read.

‘Perhaps all this really has nothing to do with the crime after all, as Lieutenant Lee thinks. Maybe they’re nothing more than the clumsy scribbles of a failed theology student trying to write a novel . . .’ With that thought, he pushed the pages aside and shut his eyes. The urgent visit he was going to have to make to Daejeon the next day prevented him from staying up all night reading Min Yoseop’s manuscript.

10.

As he had expected, Sergeant Nam was able to discover more about Min Yoseop and Cho Dongpal in Daejeon. As most people remembered them being together from the beginning, it seemed to suggest that Mr. Cho’s suspicion of Min Yoseop having led his son astray was not entirely unfounded. But about lunchtime Sergeant Nam happened to meet someone who had known them well, from whom he heard a more precise account of their reunion.

‘In those days building-work was in full swing in this neighborhood. The older of the two came first and got work on the building site. Although he looked delicate, he did his share of work quietly; then about a fortnight later a boy who looked like a high-school student came searching for him on the building site. Min Yoseop seemed quite at a loss; I got the impression that he wanted to calm the boy down and make him go home. But it didn’t work out as he hoped, I suppose, because a few days later he asked us to give the boy a job. Workers were in short supply in those times, so we got him carrying the sand used to make cement, and he did his work very well . . .’

That was how one elderly man recalled their reunion; he had been foreman of a gang of laborers working on the site of a government building, then had been employed as a guard in the building when the construction was finished. But once again their story ended badly. After less than a month, the two of them set about denouncing every case of abuse by the supervisors and tricks by the foremen concerning allowances for food and refreshments, break periods, little things that one finds on any building site; in the end they were beaten up and kicked out.

Next, Min Yoseop and Cho Dongpal had taken up residence in a poor neighborhood on the outskirts of the city where there were still shanty-towns. Apparently they had rented a site on a slope and erected a wooden shack to live in; according to neighbors who were still living in the area, it had been barely more than a tent, and there had been from five or six up to ten or more people living in it, in addition to the two of them. Beside shoe-shine boys and chewing-gum-sellers, it was a collection of homeless old beggars who roamed the city, youths who were obviously feeble-minded, and crippled peddlers who could not earn a living for themselves, let alone for their families.

There was no trace of malice in their tone when people related this, and what he knew of their past offered no basis for it, yet oddly enough Sergeant Nam still sensed a faint whiff of something suggesting a band of criminals. But any suspicions of that kind were at once strongly rejected by the neighborhood people.

‘Gang of exploited kids? Don’t say such things. We’ve got eyes to see and ears to hear with. What gang-leader ever comforted run-away kids, then sent them back home? Or provided boxes of chewing gum for begging children to sell, and even paid for their evening classes? It rather looked as if the children were sponging on the young men, not the other way round.’

‘Did they take money from the shoe-shine boys or the peddlers? Sunni’s mother, from the house down below, used to be employed to do the cooking and washing for them when there were too many of them, and she said they didn’t. She told me that each of the boys old enough had a savings book. It was the two young men who provided food for those who couldn’t earn anything.’

‘I know exactly how they earned a living. If they could earn money, it made no difference how menial or dangerous the work was. When there was no work, they never hesitated to go begging at rich houses or in government offices, despite people’s abuse and suspicions. Sure, the younger one had a sharp temper and was good with his fists, but that was at some other place . . .’

Still not fully convinced, Sergeant Nam searched the local police records. But there was not so much as a single minor misdemeanor involving Min Yoseop and Cho Dongpal. Rather, one senior detective who remembered them had formed such a favorable impression that he had even sent in a report recommending them for a citation. A journalist from a local paper had visited them, planning to write an article on their good work, but had not been able to do so on account of their stubborn refusal; the City Hall even had a record of their having received food aid to distribute.

Yet before two years had passed the two suddenly disappeared from Daejeon and transferred their residence registration to the city of Incheon. If he went back to Daegu before heading for Incheon, that would pointlessly double or triple the length of the journey; so Sergeant Nam made a brief report to the investigation office by telephone, then boarded an express bus.

Min Yoseop’s life in Incheon was similar to that in Daejeon. Sergeant Nam was able to establish that a small band had once again formed around him and Cho Dongpal.

‘The kids those two had with them? What shall I say? You could call them deprived youths. They included street urchins who used to hang out around the docks . . . some would go their own way, others would join, the numbers varied, but the total was always about twenty. The two took them in and helped them study. Those who were young enough they sent to school; for older ones without even a basic education they offered evening classes. I used to teach them math five hours a week.’

When Sergeant Nam went to see a man who had rented to Min Yoseop and Cho Dongpal a shed some eight feet square on the flat roof of a building, that was what he heard from the man’s son, who had been a university student on friendly terms with them then. The way the group was assembled implied a hidden purpose rather than a simple relief operation. Suddenly suspecting something, Sergeant Nam asked:

‘I bet they didn’t only teach them school subjects?’

‘I don’t know exactly, but at night I think they used to hold some kind of religion classes. That young Cho was mainly in charge . . .’

‘Weren’t they associated with a church?’

‘I thought so at first, but when I got to know them better, it seemed to be something quite different. One of the things I remember is the way they often used to repeat: ‘Do not offer me worship; do not build altars for me and do not waste your precious resources and efforts in holding ceremonies and making offerings.’ ‘Save yourselves first.’ ‘Love your neighbors. Not in order to please me, but because if you do that, your neighbors will love you.’ ‘Do not seek to own too much. Not because it’s evil to have much but because it is evil for your neighbor to become poor on that account.’ It was more or less along those lines. Seeing that there was no sign of any cross or Bible, and they didn’t sing hymns, it couldn’t have been any kind of church.’

Surprisingly enough, Sergeant Nam could understand just what he meant. Yet although they had given up the church and its teachings, it was quite clear that their group had all the characteristics of a religious sect. Sergeant Nam was particularly curious to know how Min Yoseop and Cho Dongpal had together managed to finance such a community. Unlike in Daejeon, none of the boys was engaged in menial work, shining shoes or selling gum. According to the testimony of the house owner’s son, although there were a few who had proper jobs as messenger-boys in government offices and private companies, those with regular employment were less than half the total number.

‘How do you think they covered their living expenses? It must have cost a huge amount to feed and clothe as well as educate at least ten boys?’

‘They both gave private lessons to a few groups of school children but I think that was far from sufficient. Money seemed to be coming in from somewhere else.’

‘They were receiving money from somewhere?’

‘I think it was the younger one who provided it. At least, I heard he came from an enormously rich family. His people in Busan seemed to send him money from time to time.’

The middle-aged house-owner hesitatingly added to what his son had said.

‘Still, since you ask, there’s one strange thing. A few days before they left here, one of our neighbors who happened to call in at the police station said he’d seen the younger one there in handcuffs. He was dressed like a beggar and although he was trying hard to make out he was someone else, he was certain it was that young Cho fellow. Surprised, I told Mr. Min about it, but his face instantly hardened and he flatly denied it. He said he’d gone home to Busan. And when I urged him to go to the police station to make sure, since you never could tell, he grew furious, which was not at all like him.’

But in the end Mr. Min left here before the younger fellow came back. Furthermore, he left in a rush as if he were being pursued without claiming the remaining few months’ rent they had paid in advance.

It was incomprehensible. Thinking he had found a clue in what he had heard, Sergeant Nam went hastening to the police station, but there was no trace of a record involving Cho Dongpal. In the month of August of the year the man had been talking about, there had been a total of five cases of assault in that precinct, but none involved Cho Dongpal; likewise with petty crimes, and his name did not even figure among those who had been detained briefly.

Letting himself be carried away, Sergeant Nam even requested a check of the list of repeat offenders at the National Police Headquarters. The result was the same. Despite the strong odor of something criminal that aroused his suspicions, neither Cho Dongpal nor Min Yoseop had any connections with crime at the legal level at least.

Even stranger was the question of their residence registration. Until Incheon, they had faithfully registered each time they moved, but from then onward they had reported no new address. For precisely three years and six months their activities became impossible to follow, their whereabouts having disappeared in thick darkness. Sergeant Nam went rushing in all directions, trying to meet at least one of the boys who had been with them, but it was no use. Finally, exhausted after spending most of the day on his feet, all he could do was load his exhausted body onto a train for Daegu and fall fast asleep.

The situation at the investigation office was in a similar state to Sergeant Nam. The person corresponding to the Identikit portrait produced by Detective Im had presented himself to the police and turned out to be a hiker with nothing in the least suspicious about him, and Detective Park came back shortly after, empty-handed, having investigated the wife of elder Mun for almost a week. The investigation, that had been progressing actively in various directions, seemed suddenly to have come to a complete standstill.

Yet amidst all the rest, there was one thing in particular that aroused Sergeant Nam’s curiosity. That was the attitude of Detective Park while he was making his report to Lieutenant Lee. Though he had only been with the detective squad for a short while, the inexplicably flustered and embarrassed way he replied to his chief’s questions, that were nothing out of the ordinary, struck Sergeant Nam as unusual

‘So what did you find out?’

On their way out, Sergeant Nam casually caught up with Park and questioned him in an offhand way. Detective Park looked surprised as he muttered:

‘Wow . . . what a woman!’

‘In what way?’

‘In five days, I found eight men involved with her. They had all had or were still having regular physical relations with her.’

Detective Park blushed slightly as he spoke. He was a bachelor, only twenty-six. He tended to be shy for his age. From the time he joined the police he had always worked in the general administration until the previous spring, when he had somehow got transferred to the crime squad; he had been a detective for less than a year. Sergeant Nam nodded as if to encourage Detective Park.

‘She’s that kind of woman.’

‘At first, I felt there was something indecent, blatantly criminal about her. Frankly speaking, I was convinced that she’d definitely had something to do with Min Yoseop’s death. But after getting to know her, oddly enough I began to feel that she was innocent.’

‘Know her?’

At that, Detective Park’s face went sufficiently red for it to be visible even under the streetlights. It seemed to have been as Sergeant Nam had guessed.

‘Something happened!’

‘To tell you the truth—you must be the only one to know—yesterday evening, I went to meet her one last time before giving up . . . she offered me a drink, and then . . .’

‘It didn’t end with just a drink?’

‘You too, boss?’

Although they had an official boss in the detective squad, a man in his forties who was reputed to have spent his whole life in the police, the younger ones generally called Sergeant Nam ‘boss.’ It felt awkward to address him informally, but in the presence of outsiders they were reluctant to refer to his relatively low rank, so they had adopted that for convenience and it had become a habit.

‘Heavens! Talk about accusing the innocent . . . Sex is equal to a bribe. It’s not for that reason you’ve given up the inquiry, is it?’

‘Not at all! It was after I’d already given up.’

Detective Park retorted with a start. Even without his denial, Sergeant Nam could understand fully. If something had happened, it no doubt meant that Elder Mun’s wife had been playing with him. At the thought that Detective Park had been her victim, he could not avoid a bitter smile.

‘It comes naturally to her . . . like eating . . . or like breathing. When I woke up the next morning I was so dazed I couldn’t believe what had happened the night before.’

Detective Park stammered in embarrassment as if remembering what had happened. Trying to put him at his ease, Sergeant Nam deliberately made a joke:

‘Such a pure heart—it won’t do!’

Detective Park seemed reassured by that and smiled as he tugged at Sergeant Nam’s sleeve:

‘Don’t keep on at me, boss. Let me buy you a big drink.’

‘I’m worn out . . . very well, then—just one glass.’

As he replied, Sergeant Nam suddenly recalled Asaph’s wife, who had figured in Min Yoseop’s story.

One big glass was followed by another, the second by a third . . . in the end Sergeant Nam returned home that evening quite drunk. Yet the drinking caused him to take up Min Yoseop’s notebooks again. Detective Park, who was easily affected by drink, gave unrestrained descriptions of Elder Mun’s wife in a way that made her resemble closely the wife of Asaph.

After his visits to Daejeon and Incheon, Sergeant Nam had already been reflecting with increased curiosity as to the nature of the ‘god not of Christian origin’ who had guided them in their actions. The resemblance of Elder Mun’s wife to Asaph’s wife once again revived his conviction that Min Yoseop’s story was not unrelated to his life; he therefore took up the manuscript at the part he had been reading. For if at the end of his wanderings Ahasuerus had found a new god, then that would be the god of Cho Dongpal and Min Yoseop, and that new god would surely serve as a background to their next actions.

Nothing is known in any detail about how Ahasuerus was able to rise up from the shock and the sorrow caused by the death of the Babylonian girl he had loved so much; or how he could easily quit those gods of Mesopotamia to which he had devoted so much effort with a feeling that he had at last found the original home of his own god, whom he had abandoned. The legends simply portray Ahasuerus as a Zoroastrian monk after he left Mesopotamia, as if to show he was a man possessed by an evil spirit who had been led in that direction from the beginning.

To see Ahasuerus burning sandalwood incense before the altar, a miter like that of a magician on his head, nose and mouth masked to prevent his breath defiling the sacred fire, with golden tongs in hands sheathed in long gloves, was to be reminded of an evil-minded sorcerer rather than a monk. Even if not viewed with deliberate malice, his transformation is bound to seem not just abrupt but incongruous, even to people long accustomed to the unusual course of his life.

Yet if Ahasuerus’ life up to that point is considered in a more sympathetic light, his transformation does not necessarily have to be seen in that way. What had originally driven him away from home, family and friends and sent him wandering in unknown lands was a passionate desire to find a new god, and the gods of the Zoroastrians were undoubtedly new for him. In retrospect, his interest in the gods of Mesopotamia had been in many ways exaggerated because of his love for an exotic girl. The feeling that he might have found the hidden origin of Yahweh and the Scriptures definitely awakened in him a strange curiosity, but the gods of Mesopotamia were essentially unable to satisfy his long and painful quest.

Therefore, as he recovered from the shock and sorrow provoked by the girl’s death, he was equally able to recover from his blind obsession with those gods. So there is nothing particularly strange about the way he quickly set off in quest of new gods with a revival of his previous passion. In any case, after a brief period of desolate sorrow and grief when Ahasuerus frequented groups of Magi, he soon quit their complex form of syncretism and immersed himself in the teachings of Zoroaster, the cult of the fire worshippers, who were secretly elaborating their teachings and ceremonial rituals prior to the revival at the start of the Sassanid Dynasty.

It seems that what first attracted Ahasuerus’ interest, more than anything else, was the dualism found in Zoroastrianism. ‘Why do disasters befall us irrespective of good or evil? How can the love and mercy of God be manifested as human pain and sorrow?’ For Ahasuerus felt that here he might to able to find answers to the painful questions that had in times past driven him away from the God of his forefathers. In addition, their eschatology and their notion of ‘savior’ came to him now with different feelings from when he had heard people speak of them back at home, and awoke Ahasuerus’ strange passion, that had kept its flame despite repeated disappointments.

Driven by that kind of concern and passion, Ahasuerus once again prostrated himself before the altar of a new god as if that were natural. That occurred in an ancient Persian city that had survived like an isolated island in the midst of the wild waves of Hellenism that had swept in unceasingly after Alexander the Great’s eastward expedition. Generous toward foreigners, the religion accepted Ahasuerus as a priest without requiring harsh ascesis or formation; as a result, less than two years after he had left Mesopotamia he was transformed into a Zoroastrian priest.

Yet once again his priestly days did not last long. One day only a few months after he had been invested with the miter and the long white robe, a high priest who had been living as a hermit in the historic temple of a distant town and happened to be passing through, unexpectedly visited the altar where Ahasuerus was tending the sacred fire. When he arrived, Ahasuerus was reciting a long prayer, as one of the eight monks presiding over the ceremony.

Lord, I humbly ask you; I beg you, reply truly.

Who made the earth so firm that it cannot crumble?

Who upholds the sky so firmly that it is kept from falling?

Who created the streams and forests?

Who gave the winds their refreshing power and yoked the floating clouds?

Oh, Ahura Mazda, who brings good thoughts into this world ?. . .

Ahasuerus, while he was reciting the prayer, noticed that the fire on the altar was diminishing and hurriedly brought it to an end. For among the eight it was his task to tend the fire that day. As he was approaching the altar with golden tongs to revive the flame, an angry cry suddenly rose behind him:

‘Stop! who permitted you to tend that sacred fire?’

Turning in surprise, Ahasuerus saw a stranger, an old man in the gown of a high priest, staring angrily at him.

‘I am Melchior, the high priest. Answer me. Who granted you that miter and robe?’

The old priest pressed Ahasuerus for an answer in an even louder voice The head priest in charge of the temple, under whom Ahasuerus was serving, replied in a voice that sounded intimidated for no obvious reason.

‘I did. He belongs to Ormazd, not to Ahriman, to the god of good, not the god of evil. He is no evil spirit but a human being. I feel sure he is a creature of Ormazd, not of Ahriman.’

‘Not so. I know him. He does not belong to Ormazd but to Ahriman, to the god of evil, not the god of good. He is no human being but an evil spirit. He is a creature of Ahriman, not of Ormazd. He has not come to tend our sacred fire but to extinguish it.’

Staring at Ahasuerus again, Melchior the high priest cried out:

‘Away with you! I do not know you, but at least I recognize the evil light surrounding you. It is the very same light as shone from that Star of Disaster that Caspar, Balthazar who is dead now, and myself saw more than twenty years ago out in the desert on our way back from our journey to worship at the birth of a Jewish king.’

It was as if suddenly the fear and trembling Melchior had experienced twenty years before in the Plain of Esdraelon were coming alive again. His voice and face strove to express authority and anger, but his aged shoulders were visibly trembling. Ahasuerus could not understand why.

Nonetheless, on account of Melchior’s enraged insistence, Ahasuerus was banished from the fire altar. After Melchior had left, the head of the ceremonies summoned Ahasuerus quietly.

‘I believe that you belong to Ormazd. But the high priest Melchior is not only a great elder of our religion but also a renowned scholar. There is no one who can or may oppose his will. Now you must leave the sacred fire and its altar. But even if you are far away, Ormazd will not bestow on you any less the light of wisdom and goodness.’

The order left no room for appeal. Ahasuerus had no choice but to give up his robe and leave the sacred fire. Still, that did not mean that he had abandoned belief in the providence of Ahura Mazda and the teachings of Zoroaster as such. His as yet unsatisfied desire for knowledge about this new doctrine and his newly revived, and not easily subdued, passion for all the gods of the world, meant that he continued to turn about the altar of sacred fire as an ordinary believer.

There is no precise indication of what he gained there, but it is not impossible to surmise what it was, given the link between his ancestors and the peoples practicing this fire worship. That is shown by several aspects of the two religions that display such close analogies that one cannot help wondering if that land was not one of Yahweh’s other homes.

For example, the teachings Ahasuerus had inherited from his ancestors concerning angels and spirits, despite differences in detail, undoubtedly had their roots in this eastern religion. Such topics as the six archangels and the minutely graded ranks of angels, the various roles of angels as a god’s companions and intermediaries, elaborate notions about evil spirits, as well as the existence of a supreme being controlling the power of evil could all be considered to have arisen through its influence; in particular, the notion of guardian angels had been unknown to his ancestors before the Babylonian captivity.

Likewise, the eschatological notions that in his own generation were increasingly gaining in fervor and precision could hardly be unrelated to those of the Persians. Though there was no equivalent to the bridge Chinwad where the dead were judged or the test for sin by means of molten iron, when it came to believing that their eschatology based on the immortality of the soul and the resurrection of the body had fundamentally prepared for and underlay his own people’s characteristic prophetic concept of a ‘Day of the Lord,’ there were far too many Persian features for it not to be so.

It would have shocked the teachers and scribes of his native land, deeply absorbed in their own discussions, but their ‘Son of Man’ could not easily be separated from Saoshyant, the archetypal savior announced from the earliest times by the fire worshippers. Although there were differences in that the one had existed as a purely heavenly being even before the creation while the other would only be born on earth without previously existing, the similarity of their functions reduced those differences to something trivial and insignificant. The prophecies that the Son of Man would be born either in the family of David or, equally widespread, in the tribe of Levi, were not unconnected with the claim that Saoshyant would be born in the family of Zoroaster.

Such notions as essentialism, from a philosophical viewpoint, the concept of god one step further removed from man in consequence, and a cosmology establishing an end by the use of a fixed unit of time, cannot be wholly separated from their Persian origins. All these things kept Ahasuerus there several months longer with a force of attraction no less than the fresh impact of the dualism that had first fascinated him.

Yet in the end he had to leave the land and its gods. After nearly two years’ immersion in the teachings of Zoroastrianism, the day came when he began to shake his head thoughtfully and murmur:

‘The wisdom capable of grasping so early the dualistic nature of god is quite amazing, and dualism as a way of elucidating the world’s contradictions arising from that is a device sufficient to prove the religious genius these people possess, but there is nothing that differs essentially from what is in Yahweh. If what forms the link between the two conflicting principles is nothing but opposition and struggle, surely at some point the victory of one of the two over the other will lead to monism. Is not their dualism only a stage laying the foundations for a far stronger monism, a mere momentary phenomenon emerging under a far higher principal?

‘The problem of free will and choice is far worse. Such questions must have seemed quite astounding to our ancestors in their exile, which is why they borrowed those ideas and introduced them at the very beginning of Genesis. But isn’t such a subjective fantasy imposed on humanity merely a good excuse for the capricious way God torments human beings?

‘I have obviously been much too dazzled by the glittering light of novelty and strangeness, rather than the aura of truth, emanating from the goodness and wisdom of Ahura Mazda. It is not this god and his teachings that I have been seeking in my wanderings through half the world. Now that the glitter of novelty and strangeness has vanished, all I can see here is a faint image of my old, irrational god.’

So Ahasuerus finally packed his bags. It was a spring day almost seven years after he had left his native land. A malicious legend reports something that he is supposed to have murmured as he was leaving the ancient Persian capital:

‘Originally Yahweh was nothing but a god of shepherds who lived secluded in the mountain of El Shaddai. Then, once the spirit of Mount Horeb had become fiercer on combining with the ravings of Moses, Yahweh was turned into a merciless martial god intent on taking control of Canaan. Later, Elijah and Hosea bestowed on him the powers of an agricultural god, and from being a tribal god he rose to become the absolute, unique god of the cosmos with the help of Amos and Isaiah. Finally, plagiarizing Babylonian theories of creation and cosmology while living there, and introducing Persian notions of Satan and eschatology, our Yahweh was complete. That means it was not Yahweh who made us but we who made Yahweh.’

In the eyes of those devoted to Yahweh, these words may seem to express without regret blasphemy and sacrilege on the part of Ahasuerus, but the legends have not added any comments to that effect. In fact, if he had wished, Ahasuerus could have denounced Yahweh in far more violent terms:

‘Bastard progeny of Mesopotamian gods! Early abandoned in Canaan, carried off into Egypt and fornicating with Aton, then returning and coupling illicitly with Baal! Later hauled off to Babylon and there inseminated by both Marduk and Ahura Mazda! It is hard indeed to foresee what half-breed this whore will produce.’

Such a conclusion would hardly be surprising. Since he was finally turning away from Ahura Mazda in disappointment, his way of looking at Yahweh might have been severer than before; moreover, with all his past religious experiences moving in a single direction, some such conclusion can easily be drawn.

11.

Leaving Persia, Ahasuerus next headed for India in his quest for a new god. He had left his native Judea almost eight years before. Once again, instead of turning homeward, he headed toward a foreign land considered then to be the end of the world, driven by an unflagging passion more like possession by a fearsome evil spirit than mere madness.

India was in a certain sense a land Ahasuerus had obviously to visit once he had come as far as Persia. Anyone hearing that the gods of India shared a common origin with the most remote and ancient gods of Persia in the Aryan gods was bound to wonder how those gods had been transformed and developed after crossing the high plateau of Iran and the Ganges. Perhaps one last echo of the teachings of the fire worshippers, provoking an increasing confusion between goodness, wisdom and the divine, had awakened in him a new expectation regarding India.

Ahasuerus seems more or less to have followed the eastern route to enter India, open since Alexander’s expedition. Whether because that land, in which he wandered for just over a year, is so remote, or because the year he spent there was too brief a time for the size of the land, the details of the period he spent in India are lost, veiled in a particularly thick fog. No record has come down, and the legends only report a few comments on the land’s gods and one single hymn. Inevitably, the best that can be done is to reconstruct his time there by inference and guesswork on the basis of those comments and the hymn.

‘There, too, the gods were born amidst human fears and ignorance; they grew amidst helplessness and yearning. They matured by a process of synthesis and they reached their fullness by personalization, but they grew old because of logic and died because of knowledge.’

That is the first of Ahasuerus’ remarks on the gods of India that can be cited. Judging by those words, Ahasuerus had undoubtedly once again begun by studying the gods of ancient times. From mere deifications of the powers of nature such as Dyaush, the Vedic sky god; Varuna, lord of cosmic order; Mitra, the Vedic deity of wisdom and light; Surya, the god of the sun; Ushas, goddess of the dawn; Savitr, another Vedic sun god; Indra, god of thunder and supreme defender of gods and men; the Maruts, storm deities; Agni, the god of fire; Yama, the god of death; Gauri, the goddess of purity; Rudra, a Vedic god of wild storms; or Bayu, god of breezes, he had gone on to the divinisation of abstract concepts or functions such as Durgha, the goddess of truth; rta, the embodiment of moral order; Vach, the god of eloquence; and Kubera, the god of wealth. Not one of the gods, in all their birth and growth, was capable of refuting Ahasuerus’ assertion.

His comment on the synthesis of the gods and their personalization can perhaps be considered his summary of the origin and development of Brahmanism. Gods numerous enough to be termed polytheistic, after competing for position almost in the manner sometimes designated as Kathenotheism underwent a synthesizing of their functions. Such were Indra, Agni, Mitra, and Varuna. Here there is a process by which multiple functions are united under a single name. In the end, they all took personal identity as Vishnu, before leadership was transferred to the popular god Shiva. He was finally synthesized and personalized into Brahma, source of prayer.

Naturally, in the process, there were times of transient synthesis and role-sharing. Such was the stage in which the two-headed Harihara, a combination of Shiva and Vishnu, united with Brahma to form the three-faced triad, Trimurti, and the time when the role of creation was assigned to Brahma, preservation to Vishnu, and destruction to Shiva. However, the perfection of Brahma was achieved in the synthesis in his one body not only of the other two gods but of all beings and non-beings.

After that, when he is reported as saying that these gods ‘grew old by logic and died by knowledge,’ it seems that he is referring to one of the Six Schools, particularly that known as the School of Sânkhya.

‘They set out in quest of god with the net of logic and knowledge but ended up strangling their own gods with that net.’

Ahasuerus expounded this thought in detail elsewhere, undoubtedly mocking the school of Sânkhya, which had grown fascinated by mathematical principles, losing the gods in the process. Still, even if their atheism can be expressed in this way, it is highly doubtful whether they can be considered to represent Indian philosophy as a whole.

Some claim that what Ahasuerus said refers to the teachings of Buddha. To his Hebraistic eyes, Buddhism too must have seemed a disguised form of atheism, but at least Buddha did not strangle Brahma with logic and knowledge. There exists a separate phrase that seems to indicate what Ahasuerus said about Buddhism:

‘The Buddha transformed those ancestors’ faith, that had been perfected as an abstract pantheism, into a disguised atheism. If Brahman and Atman are one and the same, how does that differ from elevating the self to the place of the Absolute? Then again, consider that method of choosing desire that he called emancipation. He rejected a thousand little desires but attained a desire greater than the sum total of all those. What can be made of a craving for emancipation that blazes so fiercely? He extinguished ten thousand anxieties, but what can be made of his anxiety for emancipation, blazing more fiercely than all ten thousand, though it be only one?’

Ahasuerus may well have felt that Brahma, with a personalization far weaker than that of the gods he had encountered previously, represented an abstract pantheism. Since he was familiar with the teaching that God is God and man is man eternally, the Buddha’s teaching that humans have a transcendental potential could have struck him as a form of disguised atheism. But to view emancipation as a choice of desire is a most unusual way of interpreting it. To him, even a noble wish to attain Buddhahood could only be understood as simply one more human desire originating in selfishness.

Ahasuerus’ questionings of Buddhism continued:

‘Wise Vaccha! Was not what you guessed lay beyond Nirvana only the solitude and emptiness remaining after a fire has gone out? Malunkyaputra, was healing possible without knowing the nature and origin of the poisoned arrow that had struck you?’

Ahasuerus’ allusions to Buddhism end with a song that seems to be the inversion of a hymn:

The human body is no vortex,

its sensations are not foam.

Its appearance is no tongue of fire,

its resolve does not resemble a plantain.

How could its consciousness be mere illusion?

In addition to this, although no precise texts have survived, Ahasuerus is said to have spoken of belief in avatars and the future Buddha Maitreya, both of which could be termed metempsychosis, cyclical eschatology or reincarnation, a technical and complex transformation of rebirth.

What is problematic in all this is the far too short a period he spent in those regions, compared to the quantity of learning he acquired there. For judging by the preceding comments on the gods of India, brief though they are, he may be considered to have been deeply versed not only in the teachings concerning all the gods of the region, but in the systems of thought that had developed from them. One year spent in India is far too short for that.

Even if he had joined a religious community or become a monk with direct access to such learning through books without moving around, the Buddhist scriptures together with the Vedas, the Brahmanas and the Upanishads represent a quantity of texts far greater than one person can hope to read in an entire lifetime. Among the Vedas, the Rig Veda alone contains a thousand hymns with more than ten thousand verses, whilst the Buddhist scriptures of the Hinayana and Mahayana schools already amounted to several thousand volumes. Moreover, Ahasuerus had not learned the Sanskrit employed in the Vedas and Upanishads, let alone the Pali in which the earliest Buddhist scriptures were composed. It would be difficult in consequence to claim that Ahasuerus gained access to the gods of that land through books when he could barely communicate; an alternative explanation will therefore have to be found.

Here too the malicious legends have not the least hesitation in referring to the transcendent power of the evil spirit which guided and protected Ahasuerus throughout his life. They maintain that it was some kind of superhuman capability bestowed by the evil spirit that endowed him with such vast knowledge in so short a time. At the same time, as if that were not enough, they subtly imply that while in India he undoubtedly worshipped innumerable spirits and received special favors from them.

However, on scrutinizing his steps with a little more care, it becomes quite possible to explain this without bringing in evil spirits at all. By this time, Ahasuerus had already been travelling all over the world for close on ten years and had learned about thousands of gods and doctrines. He would have been able to discover certain schemas or universal forms in the relationship between gods and men, and recognize that there were rules governing the birth and death of the gods. Then that might have opened the way for him to gain direct approach to teachings or philosophies whenever he wished, without being distracted by excrescences such as rituals and ceremonies.

Add to that his extraordinary linguistic skills already seen, and the matter becomes simpler still. After studying their language for a few months, he would only have to seek out reputed sages and learned monks, ask coherent questions, listen to their sincere replies, and half a day would suffice for him to grasp the essential doctrines of any school. It sometimes happens even to ordinary folk that a few simple words can make clear in a flash some abstruse and recondite fundamental truth. One year, although it may not have been sufficient, was not too short a time for him to learn what he wished to know without relying on any supernatural power.

Ahasuerus’ visit to Rome came as the last station in his long pilgrimage. But this was the only time he had not decided on his destination from the beginning.

He had heard while in India that beyond a range of great snow-covered mountains other peoples were living, each with their own gods. He still had unresolved questions and unquenched desires remaining within him, so he was tempted, but this time he could not yield to the temptation. Perhaps on account of the almost ten years of exhausting travel, his body felt ten years older than it really was, and his heart has slowly grown sick from long years of loneliness and homesickness; that finally made him choose to turn homeward, rather than cross those high, rugged mountain ranges.

Once he had decided to go home, Ahasuerus suddenly became impatient. Feeling that the streets of his home and his parents were sorrowfully calling him, Ahasuerus speedily left India and headed back the way he had come. Crossing the Indus and the highlands of Iran, he arrived one day on the banks of the Euphrates, three months after leaving India. As he was waiting for a boat that would carry him across the river, an ageing Roman appeared, singing to himself some lines by Virgil:

If god let me choose the life I wished,

I would choose a life in the saddle . . .

Those verses and the way he rocked on his horse seemed to suggest a leisurely journey. As he learned later, he was a truly lucky tourist who, thanks to the friendly relations currently reigning between Rome and Parthia, had gone to visit Babylon and was now on his way back to Rome.

Possibly on account of the long years he had spent travelling among foreign peoples, for some reason Ahasuerus found himself feeling close to him as if he were a relative from back home, although in earlier times he had not had a good opinion of Romans. The man seemed to feel the same. He revealed that he had served as governor-general in a number of provinces, and taking a liking to Ahasuerus at first sight he proposed that they should travel the rest of the way together, to which Ahasuerus willingly consented. After traveling together for a fortnight or so, they reached Damascus, where they were to part, one heading southward and the other westward. The Roman was to go on to a port in the west, where he would board a boat taking him back to Rome; Ahasuerus was to take the road leading south to his home.

It was in the evening prior to the day before they went their separate ways that the Roman suddenly suggested to Ahasuerus, who was feeling sad at the thought of their imminent separation:

‘Won’t you come to Rome with me? We have gods as well, you know.’

‘As for those gods, I’ve known them well from long ago. And if there’s still something I don’t know, I can learn about it in my own land.’

Ahasuerus replied without much enthusiasm. The other responded with a quiet smile: ‘Are you fully acquainted with the gods from Miletos?’

‘Gods from Miletos? You mean the Greek gods?’

‘No, I mean a new god, called Love of Wisdom, Philosophy, nurtured in Miletos. I hear that nowadays large numbers of our young folk have become believers in that god.’

Now Ahasuerus grasped his meaning. Sure enough, the man’s invitation had touched him considerably.

On reflection, the last ten years had been spent on a quest that had been more like a penance, from which he had gained nothing. He had been unable to discover any new god, and yet he had not succeeded in bringing back to life the god he had inherited to begin with but then lost. For the Hebraic concept of god flowing in his veins had been too strong to allow him to accept any new deity, while none of the questions he had harbored concerning his former god had found a satisfactory solution, allowing him to come back to life.

In addition, although there was a strain of mockery in them, the Roman’s words about a new god called Love of Wisdom led him to consider in a manner different from before the Indian way of verifying the nature of god by knowledge and logic. Belatedly he realized that although there might be a risk of falling into pantheism or atheism, that might well prove preferable to blind faith.

In any case, the Greek philosophy that had taken up residence in a corner of Rome, was by no means unfamiliar to Ahasuerus. Before he had abandoned his former god and his teachings, when he was plunged in studies with a pure and fiery ardor, he had occasion to hear about Greek philosophy from a number of learned rabbis. But since from the start they only spoke to criticize and reject it, there was a considerable distance between what they said and what it truly was like.

Right. Why not visit Rome? To draw on the wisdom of the Greeks who had settled there. Having finally reached that decision, Ahasuerus asked with a somber expression:

‘But the Emperor Tiberius’ order expelling our people from Rome is still in force.’

‘I know. But so long as you are not absolutely determined to reveal that you’re a Jew, I have enough power to protect you.’

The Roman, who for some reason had grown very fond of Ahasuerus, spoke confidently. With that, Ahasuerus had no further reason to hesitate. The lamenting cries of the streets of his hometown and of his parents that he had heard in his heart before had vanished. On the following day, instead of going their separate ways, he and the Roman headed for the Syrian port of Seleucia, where they boarded a boat for Rome. So Ahasuerus unexpectedly turned toward Rome.

Once in Rome, Ahasuerus drew on his last reserves of energy as he immersed himself in the study of Greek philosophy. The Roman proved as good as his word. He owned a large mansion in a suburb not far from the Via Apia and he looked after Ahasuerus with the same kindness as when they had first met in that remote foreign land. He not only provided him with food and a room, he would write letters of introduction allowing him to meet easily the most self-important philosophers, and supplying without hesitation the required fee, no matter how outrageous.

Yet the day came when they were finally obliged to part. It came about one summer’s day less than a year after Ahasuerus arrived in Rome. Perhaps because he had begun to incline toward Apollonian rationalism, he was murmuring to himself that there might well in fact be no other god than an abstraction within our mind, as he went to meet a philosopher who claimed to have inherited the true doctrine of the Greek materialists. He paused in the shade of a tree along the way. A group of lower class citizens was engaged in a noisy discussion with remarkably earnest expressions.

Drawing closer to listen, Ahasuerus understood that it had begun when a young cripple who had manifestly never set foot outside the city affirmed that the sun rose from the roofs of the city. A blacksmith from a mountainous region who happened to be there declared that the sun rose from mountains and valleys; thereupon a mortician who had been a galley-slave until he was freed asserted that the sun rose out of the sea far to the east, and that gave rise to an increasingly heated discussion about the sun. A great variety of opinions emerged, not only as to where the sun rose, but also concerning its size, color and even its shape, until the shade beneath the tree was in complete uproar.

Ahasuerus, having grasped the subject of the quarrel, was about to leave the spot with a sour smile. He was not going to waste his time sitting there until this curious debate among unlettered folk ended. But just as Ahasuerus was about to start walking away, a blind man who had so far listened silently while the others shouted attracted his attention with a very different opinion.

‘The sun does not exist. The sun you are talking about is all a lie.’

Ahasuerus examined him quietly; his clothing was scarcely better than a beggar’s but there was in his face a trace of something suggesting a man of no little learning. The people who had until now been bellowing at one another, perhaps unable to make anything of his outrageous utterance, paused in their debate and stared at the blind man. But he ignored them all and continued to speak in a voice more incisive than anyone else’s.

‘I’ve spent my entire life studying the sun. There was a time when I used to think of the sun in the same way as you do, though with far greater knowledge. But I was so intent on learning more about the sun, and with greater certainty, that I finally lost the sight of both my eyes. I gazed up at the sun too often and for too long, until the scorching sunbeams burned my eyes out.

‘It was only after I had lost my sight that the very existence of the sun began to become a subject of doubt to me. Yes. If there is indeed a sun, it cannot be what you now know; it can only be some kind of abstraction bearing that name. For I have realized that the external appearance of things is simply a sensation, temporary and subjective, that our imperfect senses receive at a particular moment and in a particular way, far removed from their true nature.’

‘Then what do you think this external appearance of things is?’ Some moments passed before one fellow who had dimly grasped the sense of the blind man’s words spoke up with his question. The blind man’s reply was yet more incisive.

‘It’s like a rag hung over that name. Let me give you an example. Concerning the color of the sun, most of us affirm without any particular doubt that it is white, or red, or something and yet that is really only an arbitrary sensation received from our eyes, that are incapable of real precision. Assuming there were a creature having a cornea like a crystal thick with soot, it would say that the sun was pure white like the moon in winter, while if it were looking through a cornea of pale amethyst it would say it looked red as blood; one with eyes equipped with corneas like well polished emerald would insist it was green, one seeing through a cornea cut like a diamond would say it shone with the five colors of the spectrum. I cannot be sure, but to some creatures it might appear as merely a vague brilliance, to others it might well be felt not as light at all but only as heat. In other words, the colors we are talking about would not apply, in just the same way as they do not for me, now I am blind.

‘The sun has no color for me now. If it has, that is nothing but the memory of an impression received in the old days when my eyes were open, or an abstraction implied by a word. The same could be said of the sun’s size or shape or attributes. We frequently talk about how big the sun is, what it looks like, what its attributes are, and so on, yet the truth is that none of that is anything more than a subjective judgment yielded by our five senses. Suppose, with our supreme capacity of reason we could become free of our imperfect, whimsical, and at time frankly deceptive senses, we would realize that there is nothing more to any being than a pure abstraction of which the only certain thing is a word, especially a name.

‘It was in fact only after I had lost my sight that I came to realize that. Then once I had the sensations of my five senses closed off by the power of reason, the sun that you are all talking about ceased to exist for me. If anything remains, it is nothing but the pure abstraction attached to the word ‘sun’.’

Yet at that very moment the sun was in fact blazing as usual, bright and hot, a patent reality. Virtually everyone there was unlettered, incapable of understanding correctly what the blind man was saying, but even they could at least grasp the contradiction.

‘Then what’s that up there? Your eyes aren’t the only thing you’ve lost, it seems.’ Someone sneered, pointing at the sun, and immediately raucous laughter burst out in approval.

But Ahasuerus quit the shade of the tree, feeling solemn for some reason. For while he was listening to the blind man’s strange sophistry, an unexpected flash of illumination had traversed his mind.

‘Why, just as that blind fellow has lost his eyesight, quite clearly so too has my heart. Traveling to the ends of the earth for ten years and encountering such a host of gods as I have done is perhaps similar to that blind man’s endeavor, staring up at the sun far too often and for far too long. Just as the blazing sunlight burned out his eyes, so the doctrines and myths of the countless gods that I have seen have veiled the eyes of my heart. Now I too have reached a point where I doubt the being of god as anything more than an abstraction produced by human ideas.

‘Yet god exists. The sun is blazing at this very moment as a quite clear reality, and in the same manner god’s providence is penetrating the infinities of space and time as the sublime light of existence . . .’

With that, a sudden feeling of desolation took hold of him. If the last ten years of absorbed traveling had simply been a lamentable waste of effort, his present attempts to grasp hold of god by logic and knowledge seemed equally likely to prove a very foolish dissipation of his physical and mental resources.

All those philosophers! Those spiritual masters he had been infatuated with and fascinated by in those years! They had all hoped to achieve something in the name of mankind, had set out to challenge the mysteries and enigmas of the cosmos that have for so long overawed humanity, but what could they do for him regarding the god he was seeking? All they were capable of giving was either a dogmatism detached from reality, with people so intent on gazing up at the stars that they fall into the well beneath their feet like Thales, or a series of hypotheses based on a distortion of reality, with people putting out their own eyes in order not to be dazzled by the appearances of things like Demokritos. Some absurdly clung to the precision of numbers while at the same time attaching strange superstitions to things such as kidneys and hearts like Pythagoras; others under the influence of a Dionysian frenzy hurled themselves into volcanic craters seething with molten lava like Empedocles; some teetered on the brink of the cliff of materialistic theory, others floundered in bottomless swamps of doubt.

Although some philosophers had earnestly debated the question of god, with Jewish followers of Aristotle such as Philo of Alexandria and Aristobulus of Paneas daring to graft Hellenistic speculative approaches onto the Hebraic concept of god, what could such a conceptualized god, pallid and smelling of sheepskin parchment, have to do with living, breathing human beings? What Ahasuerus had more often seen in them all was the solitude and futility of people destined to live in a godless world, such excessive faith they had in themselves.

‘I must go home. That’s enough pointless wandering. Now it’s time to turn inward, wait for a new revelation, and encounter god as he truly is. It’s not the time for me to set out in search of god; it’s time for god to come looking for me. It’s not the time to go chasing after god; it’s time to go out to welcome him. God will undoubtedly respond to my long, yearning cry, the unceasing quest that has occupied one half of my life so far.’

At last Ahasuerus had decided to return home. His Roman friend was sad to see him go; realizing that he had no choice but to accept their separation, he arranged his sea journey to Tyre as a last favor. They parted one midsummer’s day in the thirteenth year of the reign of Tiberius, when Ahasuerus was thirty.

The last portion of the story Sergeant Nam had been reading came to an abrupt end. It was no easier to read than before, but perhaps because he was now used to the style, he was able to spot a few things apart from the contents, as he read on. Compared to the activities of Ahasuerus in Egypt and Babylonia, what he did in India was far less intense both in the development of the story and in the details of descriptions. And he had the impression that Ahasuerus had been forced to go to Rome only for the sake of the final episode.

What rather disappointed Sergeant Nam was the fact that Ahasuerus was heading back home without having encountered any new god. True, he had added the phrase ‘alive within the heart,’ but having read thus far there seemed no guarantee that this god was not Yahweh but some other god. Rather his honest feeling was inclined to be that he had been deceived once again, that those few hours had merely given him a headache.

Moreover, the stress and mental burden demanded for even that level of comprehension of Min Yoseop’s text was such that Sergeant Nam, despite the slender hope he still retained, was unable to turn to the remaining section. For a detective always pressed for time, it was a difficult feat to have read that much in a single sitting. Although Detective Park’s frank confession had awakened Sergeant Nam’s unusual literary interest, he found it impossible to go on reading..

12.

The investigation was going round in circles. The police had been trying to trace Min Yoseop and Cho Dongpal by every method they could mobilize, but they were unable to find out anything about their lives during the past three years or so. That the whereabouts, not of one person but of two, should remain undetectable over such a long period of time was quite incredible, unless they had crossed over into North Korea together as spies. Finally, the crime was classified as ‘unsolved’ three months after it had occurred, and the investigation team was disbanded. Spring had come, bringing with it a series of new crimes, and their limited manpower could not be tied up indefinitely in a case with no solution in sight. The continuation of the investigation fell willy-nilly on a team consisting of Detectives Im and Park headed by Sergeant Nam.

Yet only six days after the affair had been classified as unsolved, Sergeant Nam received news of Min Yoseop. The fliers and posters that had been distributed in the neighborhood of the post-office from which money had last been sent produced a belated result. A report came in that the wife of the owner of a boarding house near the railway station claimed to know Min Yoseop. As soon as he received the report, Sergeant Nam pushed aside what he was doing and hurried to the boarding house. Judging from the landlady’s statement and various other indications, it seemed that Min Yoseop had indeed stayed there. But in many ways his actions there had been very unlike those they had traced prior to that.

The first striking difference was the way the little group of followers he and Cho Dongpal had hitherto headed had vanished. According to the landlady, Min Yoseop had stayed almost seven months in her house, entirely on his own. With the exception of a monthly visit to a nearby bathhouse, where he had his hair cut and took a bath, he spent the whole time in his room; during that period, he had not once had a visitor or received a single letter.

Another thing that had changed was his way of living. According to Sergeant Nam’s previous inquiries, he had so far always lived somewhere not far from a place offering proper work, whereas for some reason he had persisted in a deathlike inactivity after his arrival there. The landlady said he had been so immobile and withdrawn that she had wondered if he wasn’t contemplating suicide, or else was a spy from the North. But she could not report him to the police; her poor excuse was that he had regularly paid his rent in advance, and whenever she peeked through a hole in the door he was merely lying there, either on his back staring vacantly up at the ceiling or flat on his stomach apparently asleep. It was not very pleasant to hear his sniffling or what sounded like sobs and incomprehensible muttering coming from his room from time to time, especially late at night . . .

Then some four months previously, he had abruptly left like someone pursued, taking a single bag with him, and she had heard nothing of him since.

‘You really mean to say that absolutely no one ever visited him?’

After hearing the talkative landlady’s account, Sergeant Nam asked the question as if reconfirming. He found it hard to believe that Cho Dongpal, whom he had assumed would have accompanied Min Yoseop, had suddenly disappeared. Their separation was not entirely unforeseeable, but according to the impression of Cho Dongpal that Sergeant Nam had fixed in his mind, he had seemed like someone who, even if Min Yoseop had fled to the deepest pit of Hell, would have gone after him.

‘That’s right. But there was someone who came after he’d left.’

‘Who was that?’

‘A Mr. Kim. When he was going, Mr. Min had left a bundle for him together with a note.’

Sergeant Nam, who had assumed it would surely be Cho Dongpal, felt quite disappointed. Then driven by a flash of inspiration he produced Cho Dongpal’s photo. It was a picture taken during his high school days that he had obtained in Busan.

‘It wasn’t this fellow, was it?’

The landlady took the picture and examined it for a while before replying.

‘Well, it does look quite like him . . . why, yes, it’s him. I recognize those big, bright eyes and that strong chin.’

‘What did he say when he came?’

Sergeant Nam quickly asked, with a voice that quavered despite himself. Her reply was immensely disappointing

‘He looked at the note, rummaged in the bundle Mr. Min had left without saying a word, then staggered out of the house like a zombie.’

‘Without a word?’

‘I asked him what I should do about the rest of Mr. Min’s things and he gruffly replied that he would be coming back later to collect them.’

‘Apart from that, was there anything else odd?’

‘Yes, there was. His look made me shudder. Especially just after he’d read the note . . . I even wonder if Min didn’t leave so as to avoid meeting that man.’

There was no basis for what she suggested, yet it occurred to Sergeant Nam that she might be right. Cho Dongpal had stayed close to Min Yoseop to the very end. But what could have been the reason that had led him to live apart from him? What had led him to change his name to Kim, and where was he now? Why the strange relationship between the two men? Amidst all those questions, at a given moment Sergeant Nam’s suspicion began to change into an increasingly firm conviction that there was a direct link between Cho Dongpal and the death of Min Yoseop. As if to reinforce that conviction, the landlady added something more she had recollected, although he had asked nothing:

‘By the way, that fierce looking young man—his head was completely shaved. I suppose that’s what made him look even fiercer.’

Her tone suggested that she was convinced he must be some dreadful criminal.

At those words, Sergeant Nam recalled Daejeon and the conviction already lodged firmly within him found a more convincing basis. In Daejeon, the owner of the house where they had rented a room had told him:

‘A few days before those two left here, one of our neighbors said that he’d been at the police station and had seen the younger of the two there handcuffed. He was shabbily dressed like a beggar and he was trying to pretend he was someone else, but there’s no doubt it was that Cho fellow.’

At that, Sergeant Nam hastened to examine Min Yoseop’s belongings. But apart from two bank-books under false names, which had once contained a considerable sum of money but were now virtually empty, there was nothing particularly remarkable. Two plain suits, a few sets of cleanly laundered, neatly folded underwear, a miniature transistor radio, a safety razor, as well as a few of the trifling objects a bachelor usually carries about with him. If there was anything odd, it was the fact that there was not a single book to be seen. Even supposing that Cho Dongpal had taken away any notebooks, for Sergeant Nam, who always imagined Min Yoseop as a man of books and writing, it suggested a big change.

Still, no matter how certain and how big that change might have been, it was unrelated to what Sergeant Nam was after at that moment. Nothing that Min Yoseop had left there offered the slightest indication of Cho’s present whereabouts. Sergeant Nam had stopped what he was doing and come rushing all this way, but all he had been able to see were the phantoms of Cho Dongpal and Min Yoseop jump out of three and a bit years of darkness, flicker briefly, then vanish again without trace, as if mocking him. It equally suggested to an exaggerated degree that the relations between the two men had taken a most unexpected turn.

His mind leapt across those three years. ‘I’ve managed to find where those two were only a few months ago; soon, I’ll get to meet Cho Dongpal. I’ll find out just how the strange relationship between the two ended, how one of them ended up as a corpse while the other disappeared into the darkness of total absence.’ When he first confirmed that Min Yoseop had stayed in that boarding house, Sergeant Nam’s heart began to beat faster with a kind of hope; but as he left the house his shoulders were drooping. His disappointment and sense of desolation were more than a detective normally feels.

‘Is the novel going well, then?’ As he entered the criminal investigations section, Lieutenant Lee questioned him with a mocking smile. He had been watching Sergeant Nam when he had hurriedly left the office, and seeing him come back with a less than cheerful expression, he let fly with his sarcastic remark. Sergeant Nam felt a burst of anger well up, repressed it with difficulty and responded in a dry voice:

‘Yes. I’ve just met Cho Dongpal.’

‘What? Cho Dongpal? Isn’t he the suspect we’ve been looking for?’

Sergeant Nam replied with a straight face, so Lieutenant Lee was taken in and questioned him with an expression from which the sneer had vanished. Sergeant Nam’s tone did not change as he responded:

‘That’s right.’

‘Then you should have brought him in for questioning. Where is he?’

‘How do I know where someone with two legs goes running?’

This time Sergeant Nam replied in a sarcastic tone, but Lieutenant Lee failed to catch on and raised his voice: ‘You mean you just let him go? Did you question him in detail? You think you can locate him any time you want?’

The moment Lieutenant Lee shouted like that, Sergeant Nam wondered if he had not gone too far. But there was no going back.

‘And so solve an unsolved case? What’s the use of solving a case that’s already been classified as unsolved? First of all, I’d be sorry to startle you.’

With that, Lieutenant Lee seemed to realize that Sergeant Nam was fooling him. His face suddenly flushed deep crimson; he slammed his fist on the desk and stood up as if unable to put up with it.

‘Sergeant Nam! What’s all this about? Making fun of me?’

‘Why, boss, what about you? Even if you had lost all hope, surely you’d go to check if some new information came in?’

Sergeant Nam replied, determined not to be outdone. His resentment at the way Lieutenant Lee, from the very start of the investigation, had for no reason mocked the direction he was taking, came bursting out in an uncontrollable fury. It was an acceptable joke but cracked at the wrong moment, and from Lieutenant Lee’s point of view Sergeant Nam’s insubordination was intolerable and infuriating. A few officers who happened to be there intervened, and the head of investigations came in just then, ending the matter; otherwise, it was a quarrel that might unexpectedly have gone a long way.

It was perhaps on account of the quarrel with Lieutenant Lee that later that evening Sergeant Nam once again pulled out Min Yoseop’s notebooks from the drawer into which he had thrust them. A curious obstinacy in him making him more determined to continue in that direction, the less confidence Lieutenant Lee showed in it, together with the impetus given by his mockery, compelled Sergeant Nam to delve once again into the text. It was true that he felt the remaining, unread portion of the story to be a burden like some kind of homework that had been started then abandoned.

Casting aside with some effort the memory of the previous day’s reading, which had brought no result except a headache, he set about reading with an attitude as if he was hearing a suspect’s statement for the first time. More than that, summoning up all his attention and endurance as if he were examining a vital piece of material evidence, he set about pursuing traces of Min Yoseop hidden between the lines on the pages.

During the ten years Ahasuerus had been away, his native land of Judea had changed considerably. Mountains and fields were the same as ever, but the Roman domination, that had grown more blatant since the time of Herod, could plainly be felt in the towns. Arenas and theaters modeled on those in Rome had sprung up in every city, while, worse still, temples housing statues of Roman gods struck the eye. But what he felt to be far graver than any of those things was the way people had changed inwardly.

The discouragement and resignation of the people of Judea, weary of waiting for a Messiah under Roman oppression, were causing them to divide in various ways. The Pharisees had confined themselves within a shell of appearances more hypocritical and exclusive than ever; in contrast, the Sadducees who had originally been conservative and fundamentalist had rapidly become hellenized, forfeiting their autonomy. Meanwhile, extremists on both sides, zealots and supporters of Herod, made the common people frown by their blind patriotism or their shameful submission to the conquerors, and sometimes went so far as to defile the blessed land with blood, feuding with one another.

The synagogues with their rabbis and the Temple with its priests were likewise caught up in graver tensions than ever before. Just as in their political views, in matters concerning the worship of God too, the land of Judea was full of mutual criticism and repudiation, while the people’s faith, that had originally been one, was now wavering between the crooks of two opposing shepherds.

The Roman domination was merely nominal; there was effectively no real policy. Wearied by the scheming and calumnies provoked by veiled enmity between different parties, Pilate, the new governor, spent more time in Rome than at his post. Rather than rule over a highly troublesome colony, it was not only more agreeable to attend lavish banquets held at the imperial palace, it was also advantageous for promotion. As a result, the land of Judea was blessed with the oppression and extortion carried out by local magnates and tax collectors in collusion with his subordinates.

No doubt under the influence of all those factors, Ahasuerus’ hometown too was no longer the welcoming, bountiful village of his memories. As it happened, the day of his return was the day of Purim and from every house drifted the sound of the megillah, the story of Esther, being read but there was no trace of the boisterous merrymakers or the gleeful, festive excitement he had known in the old days. He himself was an almost forgotten figure in those streets, and if any recalled him at all, it was most of the time as the name of someone who had died. His parents were no longer alive. His mother had departed this life, heart-broken and grieving at the loss of her son, while he was still wandering in the east; his father had lived longer, and had sorrowfully breathed his last breath at about the time when he was boarding the boat that would take him to Rome. All that remained to him was the old family house, virtually a ruin, and faint memories of childhood that rose up at every turn.

He must have needed some time to recover from the homesickness that had accumulated in deep layers within his heart in the course of ten years; yet Ahasuerus does not seem to have spent much time in the streets of his hometown or in his former home. Less than one month after his return, he followed the example of many other seekers and ascetics of those times, leaving behind the towns and human society and going out into the desert. That was the region known later as Quarantania.

There are many explanations as to what led him into the desert. The legend that simply dismisses him as an agent of Satan affirms that this time too the evil spirit was calling him. If the ghostly voice he seemed to hear while he awaited a new inner awakening in fasting and meditation, shut up in his old home, is interpreted as the voice of Satan, that would be a plausible story. According to another interpretation, some see the reason for Ahasuerus’ journey into the desert in the sect of the Essenes that had gradually come closer to the general public by way of John the Baptist. Rumors about the Teacher of Righteousness, that had stealthily become widespread, might have come to the ears of Ahasuerus and awakened a new interest. Finally, there are claims that he went into the desert because the streets of his home town and his old home were not particularly suitable as places in which to await a new inner awakening. Relatives who had thought him dead but now learned he had come back alive and neighbors, curious on hearing he had returned home after travelling to the very ends of the earth, came to visit him in the name of enduring attachment. Questions of inheritance and the vexations of a settled existence that he had to deal with by himself aroused carnal desires and material greeds that had long been forgotten. Since his soul was constantly disturbed in this way, while he was waiting for a new revelation through self-immersion, he had no choice but to leave.

All three are plausible explanations. Or rather, it is more correct to say that all three summoned Ahasuerus out into the harsh desert. Whatever the cause, once he was in the desert he spent his days sustained by a diet of locusts and wild honey, like the other hermits and recluses of his time; he began by removing from his soul the thick layers of worldly dust and the dirt of knowledge that had accumulated over the past ten years. Then, once he judged his self-purification to be more or less complete, he entered a stage of total fasting and meditation, awaiting the call of the true god, a face-to-face encounter with the ‘Great Spirit’ he had so far not found despite all his earnest seeking.

For forty days he was alternately tormented by a desert sun so hot it seemed capable of desiccating one while still alive and night winds and dews so chill they seemed to freeze one’s very bones; then at last, early in the morning, he was shaken into wakefulness by a shout like thunder.

‘Son of Man! The time has come. Your prolonged and woeful supplications have drawn me from inaction and namelessness. Now the eagle of your wisdom will soar high into the heavens while that serpent will plunge deep beneath the ground.’

Startled, Ahasuerus stared at the owner of that voice; something, a being quite indescribable, was standing before him, veiled in a dazzling cloud that was neither light nor darkness. Meanwhile, the shout continued.

‘In days gone by you invoked me by a multitude of names but I made no reply; you bowed down to my many faces but I did not accept your worship. It was all for today, so that your soul, weary with thirst, would be able to see me more clearly, hear my voice more distinctly, as dry ground absorbs rain.’

Finally regaining his senses, Ahasuerus cautiously enquired:

‘Unknowable One, who indeed are you?’

‘I am the beginning and the end, eternity and instant, the complete and the probable, the absolute and the relative.’

The blood circulating in Ahasuerus’ body was Hebrew blood. Hearing such words, he automatically responded:

‘Are you Yahweh himself?’

‘I am he and his negation too.’

‘I do not understand. How can such a being exist?’

‘Son of Man! You are too much ensnared by the bad habits of the soul, dividing, comparing, measuring and weighing. It is all the fault of the poisonous knowledge you have accumulated by chopping up time and dividing space. First empty your mind. Then open wide the eyes and ears of your soul to welcome me.’

Following that, the Great Spirit spoke to Ahasuerus face to face, at great length, spending one whole day and one whole night with him. He started with the story of Creation, which had been distorted and falsified, then turned to the origins and ultimate end of the cosmos, and human destiny with its directions and essence. It was a teaching of which only the rough outlines survived, on account of the limits of language and the poor expressive skills of its exponents, in an esoteric order of ancient times that had early been considered an enemy of the Christian church and exterminated.

Another, deeply significant aspect was the first encounter in the desert of Quarantania of two worlds that had originally been one but had become irrevocably remote. As the sun was rising, Ahasuerus parted company with the nameless Great Spirit; as he was on his way out of the desert he came across a young man at the foot of an arid, rocky hill, as deeply immersed in fasting and meditation as he himself had been the day before. He appeared weary and feeble, yet as he sat there, perfectly motionless in the already burning sunlight, a kind of celestial dignity emanated from him. The light that had enveloped him until a moment before, then had suddenly vanished, was undoubtedly the reflexion of a more than human holiness.

Without thinking, Ahasuerus paused in front of the young man. He had no way of knowing that this young man was Jesus, son of Yahweh, who eighteen years previously had been debating with the teachers in the Temple and disconcerting them, while he, likewise still a child, had been led by Thedos on an extensive tour of human misery. An inexplicable, ominous foreboding had brought Ahasuerus to a standstill before him with a sudden shudder of dread.

The young man soon emerged from his prolonged meditation and opened his eyes. His face was framed by flowing side-locks and disheveled brown hair, while his newly opened eyes were clearer and bluer than the Sea of Galilee.

‘What are you doing in a place like this?’ After waiting for the young Jesus to look in his direction, Ahasuerus questioned him in an interrogatory tone. Without the slightest hesitation he replied:

‘I was listening to my father’s Word telling me to save the world.’

‘Who is he?’

‘The God of Abraham and Isaac, Yahweh, the one Lord of all that exists in heaven and earth.’

His words took Ahasuerus aback. He had been expecting that they would meet one day, after something the Great Spirit had said, but he had not thought it would happen so soon. Striving to conceal his surprise, Ahasuerus questioned him again:

‘The moment I saw you, I immediately felt something of that kind. I am inclined to believe what you say. But by what means will you save them?’

‘By every means. All that they need; all they have prayed for and longed for.’

‘You speak with assurance but how can you affirm so confidently that what you bring corresponds to that?’

‘Because that is the intention of my Father’s supremely vast and exalted love.’

Jesus replied to Ahasuerus’ questions in a voice full of conviction. After a brief, thoughtful pause, Ahasuerus abruptly pointed at one of the stones littering the ground before them.

‘First, let me ask you something. What people need most of all at present is bread. Can you turn these stones into bread? Can you do something to ensure that they will never again suffer from a lack of bread?’

‘It is said that man shall not live merely by bread but rather by the Word of God. For, as was long ago written in the Scriptures, this body, formed of dust and ultimately destined to return to dust, can be nourished with a scrap of bread, but the soul, instilled by my father’s breath and destined to live eternally in union with him, can only live by his Word. Do not attempt to reduce the vast depths of my father’s love to a simple material gift.’

‘Really? Is that really his will? Are the hunger and thirst people have endured for so long are still not sufficient? Are dearth and yearning alone to be their bodies’ eternal destiny? Those bodies are the clearest proof of their existence; they save their souls from aimless wandering as disembodied ghosts. Individually, there is no escape from short-lived repetitions of life and death, but all together, they are thereby united in an unending stream . . .’

‘The life of the soul is far greater. No matter how much you exaggerate its value, what is the life of the body, like chaff before the wind, like dew on a blade of grass, compared to that true, everlasting life? Moreover, the promised day is close at hand. Soon those who hunger will be filled, those who thirst will have their thirst quenched. How could it be that their want and the resulting pain will endure forever?’

‘Aha, you mean that cruel Day of Judgment? You mean the tiny number of ‘just’ souls that will laugh on that day? On that day of doom, when for one of them ninety-nine others will be hurled into the fire?’

Ahasuerus’ words had begun as a lament but gradually changed into ridicule. Yet he was unwilling that this unwonted encounter should end in a heated debate before it had even begun. There were still a number of questions about which he wished to receive clarification from this incarnate god.

‘Instead of these useless disputes, let me go on to the next point. Again I would like to try to find out if indeed you have brought what they truly long for. I pray you to follow me.’

Thus preventing Jesus from making any rebuttal, and without even waiting for his consent, Ahasuerus strode swiftly away.

Ahasuerus led Jesus to a place where one slope of the rocky hill ended on the brink of a precipice. From the spot where they stood to the ground below must measure at the very least a hundred cubits.

‘If you are truly the Son of God, throw yourself down from here. It is written in the Scriptures, ‘He has given his angels orders to keep thee in all thy ways; they shall bear thee in their hands, that thy foot strike not against a stone.’ Surely that indicates your power?’

‘But it is likewise written, ‘Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.’ What you are bidding me do is what the acrobats or magicians of this world would do to demonstrate the wiles of evil spirits. Do not try to weigh the will of the one Lord God by shallow human standards.’

Once again, Jesus responded without the least hesitation, as if his reply was prepared in advance. Again Ahasuerus spoke in a lamenting tone.

‘Having heard your reply to my first question, I guessed you would reply in that way this time. But alas for human blindness! You will never be able to believe anything without the clear testimony of your five senses, inclined to believe one miracle rather than a hundred sacred words! How many more years of delusion and wandering will you have to spend, groping your way in tears and groaning?’

‘Yet what is compelled by a miracle. like something bought with material wealth, is not true faith or submission. It is only a choice overcoming human unbelief and doubt, one made in the Word and the love of God, that can guide people to the Kingdom of Heaven.’

‘But was not that already difficult for Job the Just or Jonas the Seer? Job ceased his laments and complaining only after he had heard the voice of the Heavenly Lord himself in the storm; as for Jonas, didn’t he have to visit the stomach of a big fish before he set off for Nineveh? Now you have come, the only son of the Heavenly One, and yet people are still obliged to make the choice on their own? You mean to tell me that you still intend to leave that heavy burden of choice to their less than perfect judgment and their tiny knowledge?’

Ahasuerus, rendered increasingly vehement by the cold answer Jesus had made, again forced himself to be silent. In the light of their second exchange his expectations had grown exceedingly slight, but there was still one topic about which he wished to receive confirmation from Jesus’ own lips.

Ahasuerus bowed his head briefly in deep thought, then straightened himself and gazed directly at Jesus as he slowly began to speak. This time his tone was less that of a question than of an earnest attempt at persuasion.

‘Now I understand what you say about the will of the One who is in heaven. I have a proposition to make. If you truly intend to work as the Son of Man, you are going to encounter it in innumerable ways in future, so think well before you reply.’

What most people land are ardently awaiting is not a spiritual Messiah but a Messiah who is powerful politically and militarily. Let’s organize and arm them, then set out to recreate the former glories of David. If we put together my wisdom and your powers, there is nothing that we cannot accomplish. We must first deliver them from Roman oppression, seize the royal scepter and take control of the country. If the proclamation of the Word comes afterward, it will not be too late. By following this course of action you will be able to transmit the Word of the One who is in heaven more easily and more powerfully; at the same time, you can expect to see them put it into practice more definitely. And why should that be all? The human body you were born with can enjoy to the full all the splendors of this world, while your mind savors to the utmost the pleasure of ruling over and commanding others.

‘Earthly power can never be anything but an illusion, unless it derives from Him; such splendors can never be anything but sin, unless they are permitted by Him. I have come into this world in order to save it, not to rule over and dominate it; I have come in order to reduce its sins and sufferings, not to enjoy pleasures.’

‘Yet people were more faithful to the Word in the days of the Kings, who bore swords, than in the days of the Judges who had no swords. Throughout history, the god most widely believed in has always been the god invoked by the tribe possessing the strongest army.’

As regards the splendors and delights of this world, you have never had personal experience of anything of the kind. You have never walked among forests of beautiful women, never been intoxicated by glistening jewels or fragrant wines, the pleasures of resplendent banquets and opulent fare. Whereas in times past I have more than once seen such a world and the people who inhabit it; on occasion I was able to become one of them. At least to my eyes they looked undoubtedly happy. To reject that happiness as vanity and sin is mere self-righteousness on the part of the Word; for definitions of human happiness and unhappiness have always ultimately depended on the viewpoint of the one experiencing them.

Faced with Jesus’ icy rebuff, Ahasuerus had gone on speaking, but to no avail. Totally unshaken, Jesus simply shook his head heavily as he replied:

‘What you say seems convincing, but to begin with, the objective measuring of time is missing. If you once recall that worldly powers and pleasures are temporary whereas heavenly power and bliss are eternal, you will come to realize the evanescence of this present world.’

‘But there is something that you should remember, too. ‘Eternal’ is hardly different from ‘meaningless.’ Everything is temporary; eternal happiness, like eternal unhappiness, does not exist. For instance, someone who eats fine white bread and soup of cuckoos’ tongues every day can experience none of the pleasures of the gourmet. Such a menu can only yield pleasure for a few days at most, to someone who first tastes food of that kind after long making do with dry bread crusts and water. All the rest is nothing more than thoughtless habit or unfeeling repetition of repletion.’

‘You say that because you do not have faith in the One, my Father. There is nothing that he cannot do. When the Day he has promised comes, he will fill eternity with a happiness that is renewed at every moment.’

‘The promised Day? But that is for some far distant time, and we have no way of knowing if such a day will ever come. How many people do you think would sacrifice their one and only life here on this earth for such a day? Who would be prepared to give up possible and assured joys here and now, small though they are, for a day that will not come, even if we wait a thousand years? Come with me, let us go down together. I will help you take the scepter of this world into your hand. Even supposing that earthly splendors and pleasures are as you say, it seems to me that you will still need that scepter. I believe that if you only have kingly power, you will be able to subject these people to the Word even without bread or miracles. Saving humanity is best done in human ways.’

‘Not so. It’s the maker of an object that knows it best. Since it was my Father who made humanity, he knows human affairs best. It is right to follow what he has ordained. When he subjected the descendants of David to the power of other nations, he put an end to any faith in scepters and swords.’

In the middle of his reply, Jesus suddenly fell silent and gazed intently into Ahasuerus’ face. Then, as if acknowledging whatever it was he had seen there, he nodded heavily and addressed him in solemn tones:

‘Now you have tempted me with carnal desires, with the vanities of the spirit or the mind, as well as with the follies of earthly power and pride, but all to no avail. I think I know who you are. Trouble me no more; be off with you. Follow the wicked path laid down by the wisdom you derive from the teachings of the evil spirit that is now inciting you. I fear the Rod of Wrath may fall on you at any moment, smashing you like a clay vessel.’

His eyes seemed to glow dimly with a deep inner fury. Under his gaze, Ahasuerus felt the hopes he had pinned on him crumble completely. He looked at him for a while, and with a light sigh took a step forward and spoke quietly:

‘I sensed what you were like from the very beginning. You really are the perfect embodiment of the Word. You may have borrowed a human body, your heart is the very Word itself. I’m leaving you now. But do not think that everything will happen as you wish. Now you are shaping lumber to build a palace for God using the same chisel and plane that you once used to build human houses, but I tell you that you cannot build such a palace on this earth. If you are the arrow of self-righteousness shot at people, I will become their protective shield.’

All the disciples who in later times heard from Jesus of that meeting without exception depicted Ahasuerus simply as Satan. Such is the origin of the story of the Temptation in the Desert found near the start of more than one Gospel. It is because they took quite literally Jesus’ personal interpretation of their encounter and the metaphor or parable in which Ahasuerus figured.

13.

After that, once again nothing about Ahasuerus can be found in the records of the time. His life is entirely left to the legends that consistently express the malevolence of the Christians, so that the only way to follow the course of his life is to reverse everything they say.

According to those legends, Ahasuerus is supposed to have been a lowly cobbler. It sounds at first like something made up in order to reduce him to an insignificant social rank, but that cannot be affirmed too definitely. For it would be quite possible to say the same thing if, after his return from the desert, he went to stay with his uncle whose business was shoe-making.

His uncle had made no small profit by shoe-making to begin with, and during the ten years in which Ahasuerus was traveling through foreign lands he had prospered more than ever, his business growing until he was now an officially appointed merchant supplying military boots to the Roman army. In addition, he was outwardly close to the Roman officials as well as to the household of Herod, while secretly he was a zealot maintaining links with the Sicarians, which made him incomparably necessary to Ahasuerus. It was the worldly power he wielded, rather than any idea of earning a living, that led Ahasuerus to turn to his uncle at a moment when he was preparing for large-scale future combats. In fact, careful examination of Ahasuerus’ later activities reveals signs that he had recourse to his uncle’s influence on a number of occasions.

The legends, however, offer no further information. Apart from the claim that he was a cobbler, where he was or what he did during the next three years, while Jesus pursued his tumultuous preaching journey, has left no trace even in the legends. Then came the discovery in recent years of documents from certain heretical sects that had somehow escaped the cruel Inquisition and the witch trials of the middle ages which, though fragmentary, make it possible to trace him to some degree. These are documents in the form of apocryphal scriptures composed of oral traditions which were only given written form much later.

According to them, Ahasuerus confronted Jesus directly five times in the course of those three years. The approach and point of view of those who composed the written texts vary slightly, and the contents are scattered in various places, but if the parts on which they agree are brought together and arranged into a coherent narrative, the result is as follows.

After the desert, Ahasuerus next met Jesus in Capernaum. It was the occasion of the miracle depicted in the gospels following the Marriage of Cana, where Jesus had performed his first miracle, changing water into wine.

One day, as Jesus was penetrating deeper in Galilee proclaiming the Word to amazing acclaim, Ahasuerus once again sought Jesus out and tried to warn him.

‘Jesus, man of Nazareth, why have you come again to interfere with us? Do you intend to expel us from the land we have cultivated with tears of sorrow and the sweat of labor? I know who you are. You are the false Son of Man, Son of the Most High Self-Righteous; you have come to kindle an even greater fire on this already charred land; you have come as heir to one who lays an outdated claim to ownership of our vineyard, that we have cultivated in the sweat of our brows; you have come as proxy for an unjust creditor to demand repayment of a debt of five hundred denarii that we never borrowed.

‘I beg you to go back now. Go and tell your father: there are no debts for him to collect in this land, there are no rights for him to claim; leaving us alone as we are now would be a greater act of love and blessing to his glory. If you refuse to do as I say, for fear, and stay here longer, I’ll have my brethren gather stones to hurl at you for your foolishness.’

At that, a sudden command unexpectedly issued from Jesus’ lips:

‘Be silent. You vile spirit. Be gone from this man.’

Jesus obviously recognized Ahasuerus, and understood his words, that were bound to bewilder the onlookers. Instead of engaging in a troublesome quarrel with him, Jesus had designated him a madman, a person commonly said in those times to be ‘possessed by spirits.’ And as the command rang out, an invisible force lifted Ahasuerus’ body up and hurled him to the ground. Whereas Ahasuerus was an ordinary son of man, Jesus, son of god, had been invested with superhuman power from the very beginning. The unenlightened people whispered to one another in amazement:

‘That Word is marvelous indeed. He no sooner commands with authority and power than impure spirits flee.’

Thus Jesus not only closed Ahasuerus’ lips by force, he overawed the simple onlookers. His unenlightened disciples, intent only on taking Jesus’ side, wrote in the gospels that it had been his second miracle.

The next time Ahasuerus and Jesus met was on the day of the Sermon on the Mount. It is not clear if Ahasuerus had been following him deliberately, hidden in the crowds and observing him, or if he had merely happened to get caught up in the crowd following him on that particular occasion. At all events, Ahasuerus emerged from the crowd and went up to Jesus while he was resting after his lengthy sermon.

The other disciples were away preparing the journey down the hill; only Judas and Thomas were near Jesus, guarding him while he rested. They were keeping off the anxious swarms of people suffering from incurable diseases who believed the inflated rumors that had arisen in the course of his wanderings and were eager to touch him, just once at least, to say nothing of crackpot debaters full of vanity at their own knowledge intent on holding a great debate with Jesus. Seeing Ahasuerus approaching silently, they challenged him.

‘Are you sick too? If so, please wait a little while. The master has just begun his prayers.’

‘I am not sick. Or at least, if I am, it’s a disease that your master can do nothing about. I simply came because I want to talk to him.’

On hearing him reply in that way, Thomas came, blocked his path and addressed him in stronger tones:

‘In that case, all the more reason for you to wait. Our master takes no pleasure in hearing people boast about their paltry human knowledge. He would prefer to prepare the Word of God he must proclaim tomorrow, rather than hold a pointless disputation with you. You must wait until you have permission.’

At that moment, Jesus suddenly opened his eyes, and spoke quietly:

‘Send him to me. He’s someone I know.’

As Ahasuerus drew near, Jesus examined him closely and asked:

‘You’ve come again? Has the evil spirit still not left you?’

‘You know perfectly well that from the very beginning no evil spirit has ever possessed me. If anything is guiding me, it is uniquely the resplendent light of wisdom. Don’t treat my justified affirmations as the ravings of one possessed, as you did at Capernaum. Don’t try to elude my sincere questions by any crafty violence this time.’

Ahasuerus, as he spoke, struggled to blot out unpleasant memories of their previous meeting that suddenly began to come crowding up. This time Jesus showed no sign of wishing to avoid him. It seemed clear that the success he had achieved in the course of his preaching journey had given him greater tolerance.

‘What do you want to hear?’

‘Are you still unable to give up your attachment to humanity and this world? Do you still believe that you can bring us back to the two of you by that self-righteous Word and empty promises of paradise?’

‘Indeed I do. As I believe my Father in heaven, so too I believe that they will come back to us. What makes you affirm that my teachings are a self-righteous Word and the promise an empty one? Haven’t the crowds been moved to tears of repentance and dispersed full of an ardent thirst and longing for the coming Kingdom of Heaven?’

At that, Ahasuerus’ voice abruptly grew vehement.

‘That’s nothing more than a momentary phenomenon brought about by a combination of their stupidity and despair with your slippery, agile tongue. I am sure that some of them at least must have realized as soon as they turned away that your teachings, stripped of their surface layer of striking parables and sparkling rhetoric, contain no truth, no grace.

‘You proclaimed the Beatitudes as if you were doing us a favor but how can they be true blessings? Are they not simply an arbitrary diminution in the unhappiness that weighs so unjustly upon us, booty that we’ll later be forced to give back in shame? Why can people only become truly blessed if they are sorrowful, starving, thirsty, persecuted? You have come at the end of thousands of years of waiting; don’t you have any blessings for us without those painful conditions attached? If those are the gifts of one who claims to be the God of love and grace, just look how paltry they are. Have you never thought of simply abolishing all the sorrows of this world, so that people do not need consolation? Can’t you make a world in which people do not hunger and thirst for justice, without need of satisfaction? Can’t you make the world a place where we don’t need to be merciful to others, without need of mercy to be received in return? Can’t you give us a world where we don’t need to strive for peace, even without becoming sons of God in the other world?

‘Then you told us to lay up treasures in the kingdom of heaven. You taught us not to worry about our lives, what we eat, what we drink, or about how to clothe our bodies, but first to seek the kingdom of God. But you know nothing of the real misery that the flesh is heir to, although you’ve come in the borrowed body of a man. When did we ever have a chance to feed to the full on this world’s bread and lay up spiritual treasures in heaven as well? What abundance of materials did we have that allowed us to build houses to keep off this world’s wind and rain and be able to build the kingdom of heaven too? What abundance of cloth did we ever have that we could use it to protect the body from the cold and then give you glory? Thanks to your Father’s curse, hasn’t the land yielded only thorns and thistles, and we have had to wait decades to find wood for so much as one good pillar? It might have been different if sufficient bread, abundant supplies to nourish our bodies had come down to earth together with you. You too must remember how our faith was firmest when manna fell like snow in the desert, how we served the Word most faithfully when it promised us the land of Canaan flowing with milk and honey? But you refused that in response to my first question back there in the desert. You were nothing but the proxy of an uncaring father who only stresses filial obligations and rejects the duties of a father toward his children.

‘Still, you have made several hopeful promises today, though you are not very sure. You said: ask and you will receive; seek and you will find; knock and it will be opened. When the children ask for bread, you said, would any father give them a stone? When the children ask for meat, would any father ever give them a serpent? But you must be keenly aware that that is just a huge imposition. After we were driven out from the Garden long ago, was there ever a time when we did not ask and seek? So many souls went knocking in tears at heaven’s gate, yet how many of them gained entry? In the days of Elijah there were many widows, yet your father sent Elijah to just one of them, in the village of Sarepta near Sidon; and in the days of the prophet Elisha there were many lepers, yet the only one to receive healing was Naaman from Syria. By now we’re weary of asking and seeking, of loitering in tears before a door that never opens. Yet now you’re telling us to abandon this land we have cultivated with such difficulty for these vague promises?

‘After that, you told us to become the light of the world, the salt of the world. You said we should not act in retaliation and should love our enemies. You said that if someone slaps our right cheek, we should offer the left as well; if someone asks for our outer garment, we should give our underwear as well; if someone bids us walk one mile, we should go two.

‘I ask you sincerely: do you believe we humans can possibly put all those teachings into practice? Do you believe that the creation of humanity was entirely the work of your Father’s goodness? I assure you that of all who have ever been born of woman, you are the only one capable of fulfilling those teachings. A tiny number of people may set out to follow you, but not one of them will be able to reach the goal.

‘Then for all the rest, for the great majority of humanity, those precepts will merely become an impracticable burden for the soul, a source of guilt and despair from which there is for ever no escape. In you, the Law will be fulfilled, but that will be a self-righteous perfection having nothing particular to do with humanity in general.

‘Once again I say, leave us alone. Before despair and guilt at not being able to put your teachings into practice turn into a furious hail of stones falling on your head. Allow us to enjoy to the full what has been given to us. Freedom from the Word. We’ll not be submerged in that confusion and darkness you seem so concerned about, even if they are not mere empty promises or blood-curdling threats. Various worldly advantages together with the goodness of your father that has not been corrupted but remains, will regulate our actions, while our wisdom will enable us to apprehend a minimum of morality and ethics.’

Jesus, who had been listening with close attention, replied in a voice that was quiet but no less passionate than Ahasuerus’ had been.

‘I understand. That will do. Open your ears that are blocked by wicked wisdom, and hear what I say. You are full of conceit as though you had discovered some great truth, but there is nothing new under the sun. Those things are all nothing but contentions of Satan, repeated countless times by the lips of false prophets with wicked wisdom. They are all part of a ruse full of envy toward my one father and of malice toward humanity, nothing more than word-play intended to deny his great love girded about with justice, and humanity’s spiritual development. In the end, what is there in your claims beside a straightforward diminution and distrust of human nature? How does it differ from saying that people should be left to exist in meaninglessness and blindness, from opening the way to Satan and leveling the ground before him?’

‘Is that all that leaving the world to humanity means to you? Is that why you have to remain in this world, for that magnificent salvation?’

‘Just so. Until my Father gives permission, until the day the Paradise they have lost is regained.’

‘You mean you’re sending us back to that glittering stud farm? Until that day of salvation so remote no one knows when it will come, and at the price of observing your teachings that are impossible to put into practice, as well? But we’re worn out and exhausted. If you were offering it here and now, we’d say thanks and take your Paradise; but we’re not capable of waiting for ever under those harsh conditions. Rather, we’ll keep the land we have cleared and cultivated so arduously and the freedom made more precious by our ordeals.’

With that Ahasuerus brought to an end a dispute that he felt there was no point in pursuing any further. Immediately, without leaving Jesus time to say anything more, he took his leave.

‘I’m leaving now. Farewell. May all you intend to do be for the sake of humanity.’

Still, that encounter was not entirely vain from Ahasuerus’ point of view. For Judas, who was later to play a role for Ahasuerus, and Thomas, who did not hesitate to express human doubts although he stayed at Jesus’ side to the end, were both there listening to their dialogue. Especially, the gaze of Judas Iscariot switched back and forth apprehensively between the departing Ahasuerus and Jesus who seemed plunged deep in thought.

The third meeting between Ahasuerus and Jesus occurred on the day of the miracle of the five barley loaves and two fish. By that time the ruling class of Judea had begun to be on their guard regarding the advent of Jesus. Particularly Herod, who had cut off the head of John the Baptist, had been inwardly troubled on hearing rumors that Jesus was John the Baptist come back to life and was making every effort to meet him.

Hearing that from his disciples, Jesus sensed that his activities had reached a new turning-point. In preparation for the approaching trials and in order to strengthen his own and the disciples’ belief and reinforce their resolve, he called them together and addressed them:

‘Come away to a secluded place and rest with me for a while. The long day will soon begin when there will no chance of rest.’

Thereupon he and the disciples boarded a boat and set out for a remote lakeside village named Bethsaida. They had left as quietly as they possibly could, but a report that Jesus and his followers had left for Bethsaida spread widely through the neighboring villages by the lips of the few who had seen them go.

When Jesus arrived at his destination, he found a dense crowd of people who had walked from the nearby villages, sitting there waiting. It was a large gathering, more than five thousand adults alone. Jesus considered them with pity as sheep without a shepherd, so he put aside his idea of resting quietly with his disciples, and instead set about teaching again.

As day was drawing to a close, the disciples approached and said: ‘This is a remote spot and it is already late. You’d better send the people gathered here to the farms and nearby villages to buy food.’

Jesus seemed to hesitate for a moment, then spoke slowly: ‘Give them something to eat yourselves.’

‘Are you saying we should go and buy two hundred denarii worth of bread to feed them?’ The disciples replied, taken aback. Jesus for some reason hesitated once again, then spoke solemnly like someone who had finally come to a decision.

‘Go and find out how much food they have brought with them.’

Hearing that, the disciples went toward the crowd, inquired, and coming back replied: ‘The only food they have with them is five loaves of bread and two fishes.’

‘Bring the bread and fish to me and make the people sit down on the grass in groups of fifty.’

Once his disciples had done as Jesus directed, he took the bread and fish into his hands, and offered a prayer of thanksgiving.

‘Now divide this bread and fish and give it to the people.’ On completing his prayer, Jesus returned the bread and fish to his disciples and told them what to do. The disciples, who had already seen Jesus’ superhuman powers on other occasions, did as he commanded. Something similar to what had happened at the wedding feast in Cana repeated itself. Though they divided the bread and fish time after time, they grew no less, and soon, after everyone had eaten their fill, twelve basketfuls still remained.

The crowd was filled with admiration and excitement by such an amazing miracle. Going beyond the previous rumors claiming that Jesus was John the Baptist or the prophet Elijah come back to life, they now believed that the long awaited Messiah had finally come. What was strange was the attitude of Jesus. Among all his successes thus far, this was the greatest and most brilliant; yet as he watched the excited crowd his expression was full of mixed feelings. At a quick glance, he seemed perplexed and troubled by some terrible mistake he had made.

‘Get into the boat and cross to the other side first. I’ll send the people away then follow you.’

With those words, Jesus hurried the disciples into the boat. Left behind on his own, as he tried to calm and send away the crowd, who were unwilling to disperse, he seemed to betray something of the agitation of a criminal hastily eliminating the traces of a crime.

It was after Jesus had sent, almost driven the crowd away and had climbed a hill with the intention of praying alone, that Ahasuerus appeared before him. Having selected a suitable spot, he was just bringing his hands together when Ahasuerus silently approached and spoke:

‘Many thanks. At last you have changed your mind. Today you gave them a miracle and bread together. Now none of them will harbor any doubt as to whether you are the son of Yahweh.’

Unlike on previous occasions, his words bore no trace of mockery or provocation. Looking anguished, Jesus shook his head heavily.

‘Not so. You have misunderstood. I did not feed those five thousand people with five loaves of bread and two fish in order to show off my power. I had absolutely no intention of coercing them by that miracle. I simply made use of my father’s power in order to relieve their fatigue and gain more time to proclaim the Word.’

‘Still, it will have been the miracle that moved them today, far more than any word you spoke. Now they will believe anything you say and follow you wherever you go. If you do not limit yourself to those five thousand but manifest the same marvelous power to everybody in the world, you will be able to turn this land into the Kingdom of Heaven. The goodness of Yahweh will be fulfilled on earth as it is in heaven. Even if that is in fact only a half truth, nothing more than the fulfillment of his self-righteousness, still it will be considered a form of salvation from a human point of view. Not a single person will oppose the Word, if only out of fear of your power. Yet you still want to ignore that shortcut and take the long way round?’

‘It is not my will but the will of my father in heaven. No matter how long or how rugged the way may be, I shall take the road my Father wishes. I refuse to coerce people’s wills by any miracle. My father may be a jealous God, he has no wish to receive merely outward worship and service under the constraint of his amazing power.’

At that, Ahasuerus’ tone, which had previously been infinitely gentle, began to grow harsh.

‘In that case, what was it you did just now? I could not contain my happiness on seeing you manifest your power like that. I thought that our age-old illusions had vanished, that the days of our wanderings were over. Even if it proves ultimately to be nothing more than the fulfillment of an immense self-righteousness, I thought that from a human point of view a sure salvation was being achieved through you. I thought that our hope, communicated to you, was returning with the approval of the One who is in heaven . . . . If that is not so, what do you really want? Why did you so rashly show a miracle you will not employ again? Don’t you realize that you will only be able to impress them again by an even greater miracle? Don’t you see that the result has been to drive yet more people away from the grace of the Word?’

‘It was in order to do my father’s will more perfectly. My father will be more gracious to souls that are able to choose first the truth and justice of the Word, while knowing that there are also miracles. In future I may often do as I did today, but when it comes to the basis for their choice I shall always offer only the Word.’

Ahasuerus was stunned by what he said. He stared at Jesus for a while with glittering eyes, then sighed as if he had no more energy even to be angry:

‘A finely meshed sieve of self-righteousness, indeed! You have already separated out ninety-nine from a hundred as sinners by preaching a love we cannot practice; now you have decided to screen out nine hundred and ninety nine from a thousand as sinners by your capricious miracle. First you make us excited by petty miracles, then you ground salvation uniquely on the self-righteousness of the Word, determined to punish our guiltless unbelief . . .’

Without any word of farewell, he walked off down the hill, where night was falling.

Their fourth meeting took place in the Temple in Jerusalem. It was just when the teachers of the Law and the Pharisees had dragged before Jesus a woman taken in adultery. Seeking a pretext to accuse Jesus, they asked him:

‘Master, this woman was taken in the act of adultery. The Law of Moses condemns a woman guilty of such a crime to die by stoning; what is your opinion?’

Jesus had bent down and was writing something on the ground. Impatient, they kept repeating the question, demanding a reply. Jesus at last stopped writing and answered: ‘If there is someone without sin among you, let that person first throw a stone at the woman.’

It was a truly ingenious answer. Hearing his words, they began to withdraw one by one, beginning with the eldest, until the woman who had been standing in the middle of the crowd was left there alone. Jesus looked up and asked her:

‘Where have they all gone? Is there no one who condemns you?’

‘No one, Master.’

The woman replied in a trembling voice and Jesus quietly said:

‘I too do not condemn you. Go home. And in future, sin no more.’

At those words, the woman quickly disappeared. There is no mention of him in the Gospels but one other person was still there, in addition to Jesus, and that was Ahasuerus. He had been hidden in the thick of the crowd and when it had dispersed, he had not left the place but had observed what Jesus did; now he approached Jesus, who stayed bent over writing on the ground after the woman had gone away.

‘Look. You forgave her, but weren’t you the only one capable of condemning her? All those who dispersed, they’re the real face of the humanity you have to redeem.’

When Ahasuerus spoke, Jesus sighed lightly as he replied:

‘I am sad, but not in despair. Rather that is all the more reason for having to redeem them.’

‘How can that be achieved?’

‘By my father’s great love.’

‘Will you grant unconditional forgiveness? Will you accept that all their wickedness was natural? Will you ask nothing more of them but simply promise salvation and go away?’

‘That’s not salvation, it’s mere neglect. You’re asking me to abandon humanity with all its sins and this defiled land?’

‘What in the world is sin? Isn’t it simply a needless concept invented by the Word? If goodness does not exist, how can evil exist alone and how can sin exist in isolation in a place without commandments? Since there is beauty, ugliness stands out; because cleanness exists, it makes filth look worse, doesn’t it? If the Word had not stressed one so much, the other would not have grown so bad. Still, the Word only made nine sinners for one just man; now ninety-nine sinners are going to be condemned for one just man.’

‘Yet there is nothing that my father’s power cannot accomplish. Those ninety-nine will surely repent and come back. I have come above all for them.’

‘In that case, all the more reason why you should simply go away. They would prefer to keep their lands, painful though it may be, rather than set out along the road of repentance troubled by a notion of sin they can’t understand and shedding tears they don’t feel.’

‘What then of the purpose of my father who created them? His will of attaining a greater glory by them? Or the submission and praise they are rightly to offer him?’

‘God is great in himself, holy and glorious in himself. Why should God wait for their poets to make him great? Will he be any more holy and glorious with their submission and praise? How much can those little ones add to or subtract from him? Moreover, I have heard it said that in all creation only human beings are born with their purpose in themselves, receiving most and permitted most. In which case they should be able to enjoy all those things. Nothing whatever should ever use them as a means; there can be no question of depriving them of them or forbidding their enjoyment for any reason.’

‘You mean that in the end not interfering with them is the best way of loving them?’

‘Of course there is another way.’

‘What is that?’

‘Didn’t I tell you when we met in the desert and at our last meeting too? Comforting them with bread, coercing their wills with miracles and might, and so bringing them back to him. Never giving them a chance to sin again. Withdrawing their painful freedom.’

‘That again? How is that different from unconditional forgiveness? In that case, what use is the spirituality and the wisdom they’ve been given?’

‘At least it’s better than a pretext for gruesome punishments.’

Just then Jesus, who had shut his eyes and was plunged in some kind of deep thought, abruptly gazed at Ahasuerus with sparkling eyes.

‘Now I remember precisely who you are. Your words are identical with those of Satan when he pestered my Father in heaven. You are clearly his son.’

‘You curse whatever displeases you with that name; I am unfortunately a son of man. Unlike you, I have never denied my parents or siblings, have no celestial memories, and no power to make wine out of water. I merely spoke as a human being.’

But Jesus had shut his eyes again and seemed intent on recalling memories of a far distant kingdom, of a time when he had disputed with Satan in union with God.

‘You have no need to cling on to false memories. The day is done and you are obliged to leave here. Please convey our wishes accurately to Him then. May your Father’s blessing be with you . . .’

Reckoning that he could expect nothing more from Jesus and parting from him with those words, Ahasuerus left the darkening Temple.

Their fifth meeting came immediately after the Last Supper. In those days all Judea was seething with violent movements of opposition to Jesus, far exceeding the brilliant successes that he had enjoyed at first. They came from roughly four different directions.

The first were the religious leaders—Pharisees and priests. They scorned his humble origins and social status and abhorred his teachings, that demolished mercilessly their prejudices and principles. They resented the scorn and lack of respect he showed for all the things they had been taught were sacred, all their solemn ceremonies and venerable customs. With the self-righteousness of the Word deep in the very marrow of their bones, Jesus appeared to them to be nothing but someone tempting the people in collusion with the powers of darkness. In short, Yahweh was wounding himself with his own sword.

Next came the worldly Sadducees and the followers of Herod. For a long time they had shown no interest in the religious movements arising among the lower classes of society. The only thing they cared deeply about was the preservation of the wealth and power they enjoyed. But as time passed, with increasing numbers involved, they began to be on their guard against their power. For they feared the reprisals and punishments of Rome if ever it developed into a political insurrection. They had misjudged Jesus, but in fact their sword was to prove the deadliest of all.

Third came various nationalists and patriots, with the party of the zealots at their head. Many of the underground groups they directed had initially welcomed Jesus with exceptional interest. They had expected that Jesus, at the head of the crowds following him, would save the country that was groaning under the Roman yoke, like many other national heroes of the past. More than that, some of them even excited themselves with glorious dreams of marching to Rome, turning the entire world into a theocracy, and attributing the glory to their one god. Infiltrating James openly and Judas in secret among the disciples of Jesus had been done with the aim of having them serve as links between Jesus and themselves if the need arose. Contrary to their expectations, his teachings of love and forgiveness weakened and enervated the crowds who should have been united by hatred and hostility. They were disappointed and angry. A clear expression of that came later before the tribunal of Pilate, when Barabbas was freed rather than Jesus.

Finally, there was the awakening of certain wise minds, though they were few in number. It was caused by a disappointment that the salvation awaited for thousands of years came with so many unattainable conditions attached; with sorrowful hearts they closed the Book of Enoch and banded together in rejection of the salvation that it said was about to come. The shadow of Ahasuerus loomed darkly behind their awareness.

While the opposition movement comprising all those groups was moving toward a decisive meeting behind the Temple, Ahasuerus decided to make one more visit to Jesus.

He was alone on the Mount of Olives, deep in prayer.

‘This will be our last dialogue. I know it’s pointless—but I will urge you once more. Won’t you go back of your own accord? Won’t you go and ask him once again what his will is?’

Emerging from his long prayer, Jesus quietly answered:

‘I have already asked.’

‘What is his will?’

‘He told me to give them my body and blood; then my soul is to return and sit at his right hand.’

‘You mean he intends to turn humanity into wicked tenants who killed their master’s only son? And therefore lay on their feeble shoulders a heavier burden than that of Adam’s fault?’

‘He intends to wash their fallen souls in my blood, that of his only son, and summon them back to himself.’

‘Then there’s nothing to be done. But it’s you who have called for this blood. Don’t hold it against me or those people.’

Ahasuerus, finally making up his mind, ended with those words and went hurrying back down the hill. He had agreed to meet Judas Iscariot, who was to play the main role in the meeting behind the Temple. For a long time now Judas had been his man.

Judas had not yet arrived at the rendezvous. Ahasuerus waited there for a long time. At last Judas emerged from the shadows. His face was deathly pale but his eyes were gleaming like ill-omened cats-eyes.

‘You’re late.’

‘Yes, a bit.’

‘Why, you’re shivering, aren’t you?’

‘Not much. I’ve had a headache and chill since this afternoon.’

‘Don’t try to fool me. Has something happened?’

‘No, nothing . . .’

‘Come on. There’s something troubling you.’

‘It’s the same as with him; I can’t fool either of you. In fact, something did happen today. While we were sharing the evening meal, he quite unexpectedly said that one of us was going to betray him. The person sitting beside Peter asked who it was. He replied it was the one he would give a sop of bread to; he gave it to me and at the same time he whispered: Go and do what you are going to do. Since then I’ve been feeling ill at ease. He seems to know everything we are doing.’

‘You’ve gone weak-hearted. What’s become of the Judas that you were before? That Judas who used to study the diagonal battle lines of Epaminondas, the strategies of Alexander and Caesar; who dreamed of a national hero fit to be the heir of the Maccabees; who rushed to join the Zealots swearing on your own blood to save your compatriots groaning under the Roman yoke; who was always more cool-headed and precise than anyone else . . . now talking like a defeated soldier . . .’

‘Of course I’ve not changed. Nothing has changed in my disappointment regarding him, either. At first I thought that he would draw our people together by his immense power. I hoped he would form an alliance with Parthia and drive out the Romans. At present they’ve made peace with Rome but the Parthian army is very powerful. Its strong arrows penetrated the armor and shields of Crassus’ army; their agile cavalry have several times trampled down the massed infantry of Rome. If we rise up strongly united within the country, they will undoubtedly raise a powerful army and co-operate from the outside.’

Yet he has merely given our divided people a new faction, one integrating servility and nonresistance. That is eroding the explosive power of the lower classes at ever increasing speed. But he did not blame me, though I’m going to betray him; he showed not the least disquiet in the face of approaching disaster, and I am afraid of him.

‘That’s always the way he acts. It’s been his teaching for a long time. He’s wise enough to know that there is no way he can avoid this calamity. It’s a cunning form of resignation.’

‘Yet somehow I still have a feeling that he really is the Messiah.’

‘Be that as it may, it makes no real difference. You will simply accomplish by chance the plans he and his father have made. Anyway, you are obliged as a human being to keep the promises you have made to other human beings.’

‘Of course I’ll keep my promise. But forget about the thirty pieces of silver. We desperately need campaign funds but for some reason it makes me feel bad.’

‘No, you must accept. We’re not giving you that silver as the price of his blood, but because you are a human being. Work done on earth must be paid for on earth.’

Ahasuerus encouraged the hesitant Judas, and they went to where Caiaphas, that year’s high priest, and a large number of Pharisees were waiting. They had already mobilized several dozen Roman soldiers as well as members of the Temple guard. One elderly Pharisee who had been a close friend of his father first recognized Ahasuerus and asked him: ‘Are you sure that the fellow with you is the right one?’

‘Yes, that’s Judas Iscariot.’

‘No problem about his promise?’

‘He’s struck his thigh as a sign of his oath; how could he go back on his word?’

Thereupon, Caiaphas the high priest pointed at Judas and gave an order to the person standing beside him: ‘Pay that man thirty pieces of silver. And give him a cup of wine. He looks pale.’

Then drawing near to Judas, he said: ‘Don’t be distressed. It’s better that one man should die than that the whole nation should be sacrificed.’

Caiaphas’ father-in-law, Annas, who was also present, urged Judas on as if endorsing those words: ‘Let’s go. You only have to indicate the place and which of them he is. Apart from that, no need for you to lift so much as a finger.’

At last Judas set off in front, guiding the soldiers who were holding torches. At that hour, Jesus was at Gethsemane, on the other side of the Valley of Kidron. All the rest is reported in detail by the Gospels and other texts.

While those astounding events remain in the bright limelight of history, the course of Ahasuerus’ ensuing life has been consigned to legends and conjecture. Especially, the last encounter between him and Jesus has been strangely distorted even in the legends, giving rise to a kind of ghost story circulating among the Jews.

According to that account, on the morning of his execution, as Jesus was on his way to Golgotha carrying his cross, he fell exhausted directly in front of Ahasuerus’ house. As it happened, Ahasuerus was at home. He had observed with satisfaction the progress of the previous night’s events and was resting, having only returned home after the confirmation of Jesus’ sentence of crucifixion. The hubbub of the procession summoned him to the door, and on seeing him the fallen Jesus, pouring sweat like raindrops, slowly raised his head.

‘Finally it has come about as you wished. Their salvation is out of my hands now, and lies at the discretion of my father in heaven. What I desire now is a moment’s rest. If this is your house, let me rest here for a while. The human body I’ve taken finds such punishment truly agonizing.’

Ahasuerus stared vacantly at Jesus, then shook his head heavily.

‘I regret that I cannot allow it. Be on your way quickly. You’re the son of god, so ask for rest in god’s kingdom. This land belongs to human beings.’

With that, his speech suddenly grew vehement:

‘Quickly, now, get away from here quickly. You have not come to forgive humanity’s sins but to multiply them. With even half the miracles you performed in days gone by, you could avoid all this unnecessary suffering, so doesn’t your suffering in this wretched form mean that you are going to plunge a sharper thorn of guilt into human hearts? You want to make them commit a sin greater than any they have so far committed, mistreating and killing the son of God, then oblige them to go racing toward you, driven by guilt and fear.’

‘I cannot tell. My Father’s will alone . . .’

‘Yet your exaggerated agony will merely reduce them to an even greater desperation and debasement. Who among them will expect to receive a father’s forgiveness and blessing after having cruelly slaughtered his son? For goodness sake, don’t bequeath them any more painful memories; go your way quickly.’

The eyes of Jesus, who had hitherto only taught love and forgiveness, slowly filled with a blazing fury. It was fiercer than when he had driven the money changers from the Temple with a whip or when he had cursed Chorazin.

‘You reckon that everything will be brought to an end by this, but in fact this is only the beginning. I shall come again. One day I shall fulfil my Father’s great love.’

‘You say you’ll come again?’

‘Yes. I shall return. If you are doubtful, wait and see. You will undoubtedly see my Father’s glorious victory.’

Just then a young girl named Veronica emerged from the crowd and wiped away the sweat covering Jesus’ face with a clean cloth. Amazingly, the face of Jesus was imprinted clearly on it. Seeing that, Jesus added quietly and firmly:

‘That shows that my departure is neither a defeat nor a surrender.’

And he looked tenderly at the owner of the cloth.

‘Veronica, what you have done for me is recorded in the kingdom of heaven. No matter where you go in this world, God will watch over you.’

Then he uttered a rasping sigh, his face full of pain and fatigue. The Roman soldiers, unable to understand Aramaic, concluded that this untimely delay was because he was incapable of carrying his heavy cross. They laid hold of Simon from Cyrene who was entering the city at just that moment and forced him to carry the cross in his place. The procession once again set out along the road to Golgotha. The only person remaining was Ahasuerus, dumfounded by Jesus’ unexpected announcement of his return and sunk deep in thought.

As a matter of fact, Ahasuerus had several times heard mention of Jesus’ return from Judas, but he had merely taken it for a figure of speech he enjoyed using. Now he realized that it was their firm expectation and could not help feeling dazed, struck by a sudden sense of the great wall of time and space barring his way.

Time and space were innate modes of human perception, the necessary medium for thought and knowledge, but at the same time they were a major means of distinguishing the divine from the human. They were chains binding human life to finiteness, nails by which his body was fixed to one corner of the earth. Unless he was free of them, a return of Jesus at a time and place he could not know left him helpless.

Then occurred the most mysterious incident in Ahasuerus’ whole life. As soon as Jesus had left, Ahasuerus locked himself in his room deep in thought; suddenly his body transcended those limits of time and space. It was during the time when darkness covered the earth from about noon until three in the afternoon. But there is no knowing if that was due to his own strong will or to the power of some great spirit, such as he encountered in the desert. When his family, rendered suspicious by his over-long silence, forced the lock and opened the door of his room, he was not there. Freed from the restraints of time and space, he had left and was observing the last moments of Jesus.

Jesus was breathing his last. Dismas, the brigand crucified at his right, had just completed his repentance. Ahasuerus passed through the crowd and stood before him.

‘I have decided to wait for your return.’

‘The powers of darkness . . . have given you the ability to transcend time and space. I can see that . . . since people cannot perceive you.’

His words were squeezed out one by one in agony. Then he gazed desolately at the sky.

‘Father, I too would like to remain like that. Returning to life on the third day, I may have power over their eyes and ears for a little while, but what will you do about that man who will walk the earth for thousands of years whispering to people? How can you be sure that when next I come down into this world there will not be another cross waiting for me, that I shall not again return home in tears? I ask you once again, unless it is something I must accept, take this cup from me.’

But there was only a pitiless silence and Jesus’ last moment came. His body, drenched in blood and sweat, convulsed weakly and with a grieving cry he gave up the ghost:

‘Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?’

Some thought he had called on Elijah, but what he really meant was: My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Words which, for almost the only time in his whole life, made him look human. Far off, Mary of Magdala, James the Less, Mary the mother of Joseph and Salome were lamenting. Once Ahasuerus was completely sure that Jesus was dead, he left there and set out on his journey. A journey of lengthy, long drawn out waiting, perhaps lasting for ever.

In the years that followed, while Christianity, the result of an illicit union of Greek philosophy with the monotheism and ethical code of the Jews and the mysticism and natural genius for worship of the East, was using the sword of Caesar to expand its authority and was gaining control of people’s feeble souls by means of pillaged food supplies and petty miracles, the story of Ahasuerus became absurdly distorted. His journey of unending waiting, sad and lonely to human eyes, was explained through the malice of Christians as the result of a curse that Jesus spat out on the morning of his execution; his appearance was reported to be that of a lowly cobbler of those times. Bare footed, wearing a leather apron, with a Roman soldier’s sandal that he is stitching and a threaded needle in his hands, he is said to be forever wandering the world waiting for the dateless return of Jesus.

This time, whether it was because he had grown more accustomed to Min Yoseop’s style and method of logical development, or because he his mind was open from the start, Sergeant Nam found himself able to finish reading the remaining text with little difficulty. There had been two files left to be read but both were considerably thicker than the previous ones. Reading the last portion, he found himself enjoying it as a novel; he was moved deeply as earlier sections came back to him and he felt he could now understand the themes running through the entire work.

One strange thing was the way that, in contrast to the intensity of the anti-Christian argument that flowed through the entire story, the transcendent being that Min Yoseop had tried to present as a substitute was portrayed far too vaguely. There was nowhere any concrete depiction of the ‘Great Spirit’ Ahasuerus had encountered in the desert, and his teaching was only expressed as the reverse of the Word. Unable to find the reason for that, Sergeant Nam turned back to the section describing the events in the desert; there he discovered that a number of pages had been removed between the part in which Ahasuerus went into the desert and the part where he encountered Jesus. He had the impression that, rather than keeping that portion separately, Min Yoseop had torn up page after page, dissatisfied with what he had written, then gone on, leaving it sketched in a rough form.

Judging from various indications, Min Yoseop had been barely twenty two or three when wrote the story. To reverse the existing Word was hard enough; inventing a new Word and a new god must have been very difficult. Perhaps this god had only taken full shape more recently, and, the thought suddenly struck Sergeant Nam, this new god must have some connection with the death of Min Yoseop and the disappearance of Cho Dongpal. But then he recalled that Min Yoseop had died while staying at a prayer house and that his path prior to his death had been bringing him back to Christianity; his idea immediately collapsed. It was contrary to common sense that he would have turned back toward Christianity at the very moment he had completed an anti-Christian doctrine. In addition, considering how, six years earlier, Cho Dongpal had readily rejected Christianity and followed Min Yoseop, it was clear that, by that time at least, enough of the doctrine had been formulated to impress him.

Thereupon, Sergeant Nam once again immersed himself in the case with a kind of passion that had almost nothing to do with the professional approach of a detective. He requested cooperation in his inquiries without making any distinctions between different administrative sections or ranks, if he thought it necessary in his attempts to trace Cho Dongpal’s whereabouts; when there was even the vaguest hope that he might turn up somewhere, he made impossible efforts to have someone hiding there. He even sent Detective Park to the home in Busan he had not been to for six years; he spent three days keeping watch there before he was pulled out after angry protests from the investigation chief; he likewise received a reprimand for having telegraphed to the local substations without any justification, ordering a general check of all the inns and rooming houses. Outwardly, he consistently claimed he wanted to solve the crime and apprehend the criminal, but in his inmost heart Sergeant Nam was obsessed by the hidden relationship between Min Yoseop and Cho Dongpal, and their new doctrine, which he sensed was deeply linked to their disaster. In a sense, it almost seemed as if Sergeant Nam too had been affected by Min Yoseop’s toxic knowledge.

Still, the result was extremely poor for all the efforts he had made. On the day his first regular report was due, the only new detail Sergeant Nam was able to add was that he had traced one more person who recalled Min Yoseop. It was an elderly spinster who had long worked at the counter of the city post office; she remembered Min Yoseop’s features and his odd personality. When he was sending a money order he would never fill in the name and address of the sender; each time she pointed this out, he would randomly scribble something, and that was how she remembered him.

Yet for a time Sergeant Nam clung to his hopeless investigation. It was such a strange passion that it made him smile bitterly whenever he thought of it. It was as if the spirit of the dead Min Yoseop had taken possession of him and was driving him on blindly; the slighter any realistic possibility of solving the crime became, the more Sergeant Nam’s tenacity increased. But within a large organization the power of an individual was bound to be limited. What first made Sergeant Nam lose heart and gradually grow weary were the simultaneously increasing pressures from above and below, material and immaterial. When Sergeant Nam put in a request for personnel, his superiors would invariably shake their heads with expressions of displeasure and if permission was forthcoming, the resistance from those to be dispatched was likewise not inconsiderable.

‘Where shall I go and spend the day wandering about?’

When a junior officer, a greenhorn who only seemed to have put on the uniform yesterday, questioned him sarcastically in that way, barely concealing his irritation, he felt as if he was receiving a bucket of cold water, just as much as when he heard his direct superior scold him.

As soon as the picnic season started, an increasing number of crimes in the vicinity of Donggak Temple served to put a brake on Sergeant Nam’s strange passion. Even with all the drafted into the combat police running around, they still lacked manpower and it was inevitable that an investigation that had already been classified as unsolved should take a back seat. There were times when Sergeant Nam was so busy putting out the fire under his feet that for several days he would completely forget the case of Min Yoseop.

So naturally the search for Cho Dongpal came to a halt, and two or three times the date for submitting periodical reports went by. Sergeant Nam found himself obliged to stop dealing with the case and spend his time in other ways, under the pressure of more immediate tasks, but inwardly he felt an increasing impatience, the cause of which he could not determine. There were moments early in the morning when he opened his eyes to find his throat burning from the previous evening’s drinking and heard the sound of a far away church bell, when Min Yoseop’s dead body loomed up and with it he felt that impatience spurring him on with an intensity it had not previously possessed.

14.

It seemed only a few days since he had submitted his previous report, yet the date for the fourth was already approaching. Taking advantage of a lull in the picnic season crimes, perhaps because it was June by now, Sergeant Nam returned to the case. It was in part because he was haunted by a feeling that after twice sending in reports of no progress, there ought to be something new this time; on the other hand, it was not completely divorced from a decision to make one last try.

Sergeant Nam called in Detectives Im and Park who, having free time for once, were lounging in the little shop downstairs and sent them to check on a few of the red light districts downtown. He wanted them to gather information from the brothel owners or the older prostitutes. In view of what they had so far discovered, it seemed unlikely they could expect much, but after all both Min Yoseop and Cho Dongpal were young and unmarried.

Detectives Im and Park, who had been cracking idle jokes with the new girl in the store after buying a bottle of something cool to drink, left grumbling openly about such preposterous orders. Yet less than an hour later, Detective Im came back bearing unexpected news. He reported that in a nearby brothel he had unearthed a girl who knew Min Yoseop. She was called Yun Hyangsun and at twenty-seven was a bit old for the job.

‘She said she’d never seen anyone as horny as him in six years as a hooker.’

Wiping away the sweat that was pearling on his brow, Detective Im laughed weakly. His expression was relaxed, unlike when he had gone out. Sergeant Nam could not believe that the word applied to Min Yoseop.

‘Not Cho Dongpal?’

‘She says she’s never heard of the guy. She clearly said it was this one with his eyes shut.’

As he replied, Detective Im pointed at Min Yoseop’s photo among the two he was still holding.

‘So what else did she say?’

‘Nothing much. Who is going to tell every last detail about himself to a whore he frequents once or twice a month?’

‘Once or twice a month? That makes him a regular.’

‘What’s so special about a whore’s regular customer? Anyway, that girl seemed not to know so much as Min Yoseop’s name.’

Sergeant Nam felt a strange premonition and at the same time grew suddenly suspicious of her. If she knew Min Yoseop well enough to recognize him in a photo lying dead with his eyes shut, the relationship must certainly have gone beyond that of a whore and a mere passing customer, so if she said she did not even know his name, she was claiming she knew far too little about him. Judging by Sergeant Nam’s personal experience, a man usually revealed at least his name to a girl he met several times, even if she was a hooker.

So Sergeant Nam went to see Yun Hyangsun, ignoring Detective Im and leaving him in a bad mood. Though he was not happy with the way Sergeant Nam had doubted his report, he seemed to count himself lucky not to have to go back out into the hot streets, and he explained where Yun Hyangsun could be found without further comment.

Under normal circumstances, prowling around a red-light district before lunchtime was something that would have embarrassed him, but today Sergeant Nam felt nothing of that kind and quickly found the house where Yun Hyangsun worked. It was an old building, barely better than a shack, called the House of Blue Perfume, and flashily decorated like an old whore’s makeup, though it only had windows on the side facing the street.

Yun Hyangsun was sitting in a sloppy posture on the wooden-floored veranda, very scantily dressed, presumably on account of the weather, and she greeted Sergeant Nam with an unwelcoming air. She seemed to recognize his job at a glance.

‘You keep pestering me. What’s up this time, Mr. Detective?’

On hearing the girl sneer provocatively without bothering to bring her wide-splayed legs together, Sergeant Nam was disgusted rather than offended. He also felt the kind of tension that he experienced when he encountered a suspect whose personality had grown ever more perverse and crooked with repeated condemnations, and he immediately began browbeating her, employing rough forms of speech.

‘Is this really the man? The one you say you know?’

‘Isn’t that what I said?’

Perhaps it was the way he spoke, for the woman suddenly drew her legs together and the tone of her voice softened.

‘When did this fellow start to come around?’

‘Well, perhaps a year or so ago . . .’

‘Recently?’

‘About five months ago. I don’t know the exact dates.’

‘Did he come often?’

‘Once or twice a month, perhaps. But that detective asked all this before, didn’t he? I’ve already told everything I know, so why keep asking?’

Again she resisted with what sounded like a whine. But Sergeant Nam continued to interrogate her as he had seen veteran detectives do, without the least change of expression.

‘What did he say he did?’

‘He said he earned a living by stealing, but he might just as well have claimed he was the President. It was surely a lie, in any case. How many hare-brained idiots come to places like this and spill all the beans about themselves?’

‘So you’ve never once seen this guy?’

As Sergeant Nam produced Cho Dongpal’s photo he observed her expression closely. It was an exaggerated stare, designed to make her aware she was being watched. That was a trick he had learned from the veterans during his few years in the criminal investigation division; it could sometimes induce people to reveal an expression they had intended to conceal.

‘I don’t know the bastard. You’re weird. The other guy asked exactly the same just a while ago . . .’

She denied stubbornly but in her eyes, that looked away the moment they met Sergeant Nam’s gaze, there were faint traces of a vague uneasiness. Besides, the way she denied knowing him without so much as glancing at the photo suggested some kind of obstinacy. Yes, there was something . . . sensing that, Sergeant Nam pressed her:

‘Stop lying. These two always went about together.’

‘No. I don’t know that fellow.’

‘Listen carefully.’

Sergeant Nam abruptly lowered his voice and spoke in a whisper. Then, deliberately adopting an icy expression, he once more addressed Yun Hyangsun, who was looking even tenser on hearing him unexpectedly whisper, in a lower, cutting voice: ‘I came here after making full inquiries. Don’t think you can pull the wool over my eyes. If I catch you out, you won’t be doing this business here any more . . . Miss Park next door says she saw the pair of them coming and going together.’

Seeing her weaken slightly, Sergeant Nam ventured a sly guess to which her reaction was unexpectedly violent. She suddenly began to heap insults on Miss Park, whose name Sergeant Nam had used on the spur of the moment without ever having met her; it gave her an excuse to vent her feelings.

‘Did that dirty bitch really say that? That bitch! No loyalty . . .’

‘Yes, she told me everything.’

‘She deserves to be fried in shit. That’s why she and I are still here selling cunt, though we’re nearly thirty.’

‘Spit it out. You know Cho Dongpal well, don’t you?’

‘Cho Dongpal? I tell you I don’t know any Cho Dongpal, Dung-fly, or whatever.’

Regaining confidence for some reason, she once again began to deny. Briefly disconcerted, Sergeant Nam suddenly realized the reason. Previously, when he had met Min Yoseop’s landlady, she had said that Cho Dongpal was using the family name Kim. Sergeant Nam guessed that since Yun Hyangsun only knew his pseudonym, she had grown bolder on hearing him use what she reckoned was the wrong name; so he calmly thrust Cho Dongpal’s photo before her eyes and spoke in crushing tones:

‘Yes, that’s his real name. Sometimes he uses Kim. Maybe he’s passing himself off as a Mr. Kim here too.’

‘In any case, I don’t know him.’

‘It’s not worth going down to the station, fighting till we’re blue in the face, then telling the truth, is it? Even if you speak out now, it’s not going to hurt the guy . . .’

Seeing her resolve weaken again, Sergeant Nam coaxed her in a gentler voice. She remained silent for a moment. Judging by her unfocussed gaze and the sudden frown on her brow, she seemed to be making up her mind about some difficult problem.

‘What the hell’s going on? Why are you looking for Mr. Kim?’

She spoke in a quiet voice, apparently having reached a decision. For the first time since they met, she spoke submissively, but still with a trace of fear somewhere within her.

‘So he pretended to be called Kim round here, too?’

‘He wasn’t pretending; he really was called Kim. Once, when there was a police check, I saw his residence card.’

Sergeant Nam finally realized why Cho Dongpal’s whereabouts had remained so completely unknown. He had not simply been using a false name, he had obviously been living as someone completely different, including the residence card, for the past several years.

‘Kim . . . what was his full name?’

‘I can’t remember what he was called, though I heard it several times.’

Her response disappointed Sergeant Nam considerably, for once he knew the name, Cho Dongpal was as good as found. He made an effort to conceal his feelings and skillfully changed the subject.

‘You’re sure it’s this man?’

‘Sure. He always came around here together with that Mr. Min. But what’s happened? They’re neither of them the kind of people to have the police on their tails.’

‘Truth is, this Min Yoseop is dead.’

‘Why, him? When?’

‘Someone stuck a knife in him. About six months ago.’

‘And you suspect Mr. Kim of having done it?’

‘Not necessarily . . . only he’s gone missing for several months past.’

A hint of relief showed in her face. Her concern had been for Cho Dongpal; now it was clear she was thinking she did not have to worry about him. From the change in her, Sergeant Nam could sense her strong sympathy for Cho Dongpal.

‘In that case, you’re wrong to be looking for Mr. Kim. He used to treat Mr. Min like his lord and master. Even in a place like this he always called him ‘teacher.’ I don’t care what you do to me, I swear he didn’t kill him.’

‘We know that too. But for the moment we have to find him first. Only then will we be able to catch the culprit, whoever he is.’

‘Really? You don’t mean to arrest him, do you?’

Yun Hyangsun flinched sharply and stared at Sergeant Nam, as if a thought had just struck her. Obviously, she was sincerely worried. Although he was sorry to do so, Sergeant Nam took advantage of the moment to ask casually:

‘But why have you been shielding him from the start? Is he your boy friend?’

‘No. It’s not like that. It’s all on account of Sunja. Sunja, poor girl.’

As she spoke, her face suddenly grew sad. Anticipating an unexpected outcome from the change in her, Sergeant Nam strove to hide his excitement as he asked: ‘Who’s Sunja?’

‘She’s the girl Mr. Kim’s living with at present. You won’t arrest him, will you? You’re not going to make Sunja come back here, are you? Sunja’s just a poor kid.’

Yun Hyangsun sounded as if she was about to burst into tears. He had no idea what was her relationship with this Sunja, but Sergeant Nam found himself unable to understand how Yun Hyangsun, with the life she had led, could still retain an affection sincere enough to make her cry for her.

‘We first met ten years ago at Seoul Station. I still remember it. It was early one summer morning, thick with mist. Sick of hard, exhausting work on the farm and being poor, I’d caught the train up from the south-west without any clear plan, and on the open space in front of the station I came across this girl, standing dazed, clutching a scruffy traveling bag, like me. She said she’d run away from an orphanage somewhere in the south-east. We recognized one another at first sight and became friends. We stayed together from that day until we were separated at the employment agency ten days later. We went there together once all the money we’d both brought had gone. She went to work in a restaurant while I started out as a housemaid in a family. At first, we kept in touch for a while, and met sometimes. But then we both started to move around and it was not easy to meet. We lost touch after less than a year, and for a long time after that we were without news of each other.

‘Then, about four years ago, I found her again in Busan, in what was known as the ‘588 district.’ I’d gone from being a housemaid to a factory-worker, from the factory to a bar; I was cheated and I cheated; finally, after various ups and downs, I fell into this kind of life and was eventually sold to the place where she was already working. She’d followed a path not very different from mine, and drifted there. How we cried, meeting again like that . . . we spent one whole night crying; I’m not lying. After that, wherever we went, we were always together, at least until she met Mr. Kim and managed to get out from this alley. We might not share the same blood but . . . we’re sisters. She’s my little sister . . .’

Overcome with emotion, Yun Hyangsun laid bare the story of her past, half sobbing, half relating, although Sergeant Nam had not asked her to. It was not a particularly extraordinary tale, yet Sergeant Nam felt his nose pricking. But it was not the moment for indulging in pointless sentiment.

‘When did Cho Dongpal, I mean Kim, first meet this Sunja?’

‘Three years ago. In those days we were in Incheon. Why, you must have heard of it—the Yellow House. She seemed to be doomed; by then she’d caught some dreadful disease, tuberculosis of the lymphs or something, that means sure death to people like us. Our life’s always like that, isn’t it? The more you save, the more you have to spend, so you’re back to square one; once she was sick and unable to work, how was she going to survive with constant medicine bills? Crushed under snowballing debts, she’d have no choice but to wait helplessly to die. That was when Mr. Kim came along. It seems he’d heard about her on a visit to another girl; to our surprise, the very next day he got her out. He paid off all she owed to the madam, took her away and got treatment for her. And that’s not all. Amazingly, Mr. Kim even offered to marry her. Yet as soon as she was better, she came looking for me! I don’t know how she knew I’d moved here . . . I asked why she’d come back and not got married, and she said it was quite out of the question, much more than a girl like her deserved.’

‘What do you mean, deserved?’

Sergeant Nam asked casually, trying not to seem to be prying. He had had such difficulty in finding this chance to learn about Cho Dongpal’s unknown activities during the last three years. Unaware of Sergeant Nam’s hidden intentions, Yun Hyangsun now spoke of Cho Dongpal in tones verging on veneration.

‘That Mr. Kim, I reckon he’s really great. She says there are over twenty pupils he helps study, besides any number of people who are able to eat thanks to him. Once she was better, she spent a month or so helping look after them and she said it made her feel there really is another world. She said they were like people in a story-book. More amazing still is his family background. It seems he’s the only son of someone immensely rich; she said that although he was helping all those people, she never saw any sign of a lack of money.’

‘What did that Mr. Min do?’

‘According to Sunja, there was no knowing. She said he just spent the whole day reading or deep in thought and never did anything about the house or for the students. Yet Mr. Kim thought the world of him; she couldn’t understand why.’

‘So is this Sunja living with him nowadays?’

‘They came and took her away. She’d thought she was completely cured but she wasn’t. Less than three months after she returned here, she fell sick again and took to her bed. Then just as I was worrying myself sick that it would be like before, they came breezing along. I don’t know if they’d deliberately followed us or not, but they said they’d moved to this city, too. Some few months after they’d taken Sunja away, a letter arrived. It said she was cured and, persuaded by Mr. Kim’s insistence, she’d married him. And she asked if I had no thought of stopping this kind of life and making a new start . . .’

‘So why didn’t you?’

‘I didn’t want to be an extra burden. I reckoned I’d go on like this for a few more years, then see what to do once I’d saved up a bit. She wrote one more letter after that, then nothing more . . .’

‘What was their address?’

‘Gyeongsan. But from her last letter, it seemed that Mr. Kim had left home.’

Gyeongsan was a town not very far from Daegu. Full of almost incomprehensible joy at having finally traced Cho Dongpal, Sergeant Nam hurriedly asked for the exact address.

‘Promise me first—you’re not going to cause her any trouble?’

Before giving him the address, Yun Hyangsun again demanded an assurance. Repressing some vague pangs of conscience that he suddenly felt stir deep within him, Sergeant Nam reassured her with some well-chosen words. Only then did Yun Hyangsun go inside and come back with an envelope that she handed to Sergeant Nam.

‘How did you come to know Min Yoseop?’

Sergeant Nam asked, after he had written the address in his notebook. Not that there was anything he had been prevented from learning by their previous conversation, but he asked from a hope that there might still be something new he could learn. Aside from the relationship of Cho Dongpal with Kim Sunja, there might have been something special in her relationship with Min Yoseop.

‘What? Oh, that was because whenever he came with Mr. Kim, he always ended up in my room.’

‘Was there nothing special about him?’

‘A little. For instance, most people who come here either act awkwardly or try to make excuses; oddly enough he didn’t. How shall I put it? . . . that cool, calm attitude of his was somehow frightening and repulsive. Apart from that, his lack of conversation was unusual too . . .’

‘You said he was really horny?’

‘Oh . . . that was something I made up. Though he was rather special in that way too. After spending a night with him, I was in no mood to want any customers the next day, I was so exhausted. But you couldn’t really call him horny. Just very thoroughgoing in what he did. I’d say it was as if he was earnestly performing some kind of duty . . .’

Despite her job, she seemed embarrassed to talk about such things in broad daylight. Sergeant Nam’s questions were less connected with the investigation than with a human interest in Min Yoseop; stopping there, he stood up.

‘Thanks for everything.’

‘I hope it doesn’t hurt Sunja . . . but once he knows Mr. Min’s dead, Mr. Kim won’t stay quiet.’

Yun Hyangsun gazed at Sergeant Nam with eyes that were full of anxiety and suddenly spoke like a woman ten years older.

Gyeongsan was only about an hour’s bus ride from Daegu; by the time Sergeant Nam reached there, the sun was still a hand’s breadth above the western horizon. The house where Kim Sunja was living stood at the foot of a hill a little way outside the main township. The view was good, the air pure; they seemed to have rented a house well-suited for her convalescence. When Sergeant Nam entered the yard, wiping the sweat from his brow, a woman who seemed to be in her thirties was sitting on the wooden veranda in the light of the setting sun; she looked at him with an expressionless face. Her pallid complexion and the dark circles round her eyes gave her a sickly appearance. Moreover, the way she was out sitting on the veranda, that was still hot though the sun was setting, seemed to suggest that she was in poor health.

Because Yun Hyangsun had referred to her ‘younger sister,’ Sergeant Nam had been thinking of Kim Sunja as someone much younger; he therefore casually asked the woman:

‘Um . . . excuse me, does someone called Kim Sunja live here?’

The woman quietly raised her head and looked at Sergeant Nam. Her expression betrayed neither surprise nor watchfulness; it was too calm and blank. A low, feeble voice emerged from her thin lips.

‘That’s me. What’s the matter?’

‘Ah. I’m sorry. Yun Hyangsun called you her younger sister . . .’

On hearing Yun Hyangsun’s name, she seemed slightly taken aback. Then, quickly regaining her composure, she spoke:

‘She’s one year older than me.’

‘Ah! Can I ask you a couple of questions? Is your husband, Cho Dongpal, at home now?’

At that, an expression worthy of the name appeared on the woman’s face for the first time. It was not so much one of surprise or watchfulness, but rather one suggesting she had heard something unexpected.

‘My husband . . . is not Cho Dongpal. His name is . . .’

‘Of course. He also uses Kim as his family name.’

Sergeant Nam interrupted her to show that he knew that much. But she went on without cringing.

‘Kim Dong-uk. That’s the name on his residence registration and our marriage certificate.’

It looked as though Cho Dongpal had not revealed his real name even to her. Ramming the unfamiliar name of Kim Dong-uk firmly into his memory, Sergeant Nam drew Cho Dongpal’s picture from his notebook.

‘Anyway, that’s him, isn’t it?’

‘The picture looks like him.’

She examined the photo with a gaze that, although it seemed relaxed yet suggested a strange agitation that could not be expressed by the term ‘conjugal affection’ alone, then nodded quietly as she replied. His immediate impression was that she had not deliberately tried to conceal her husband’s name, but Sergeant Nam was not entirely convinced.

‘You had no idea your husband’s real name was Cho Dongpal?’

‘It’s the first I’ve heard of such a thing. But what’s happened?’

‘Well, I have to see your husband about something. I’ll tell him when I see him. Is he inside?’

‘No, he’s not been here for a long time.’

‘Don’t you know where he is?’

‘No.’

It was a situation where, if they were man and wife, there ought to have been some kind of feelings present, yet in replying her voice showed not the slightest change in its inflexion. Suspicious of that, Sergeant Nam quickly changed his mind and asked, observing her expression closely:

‘Did that ever happen before?’

‘Yes. Two months after our marriage he went out with someone, and only came home a year later.’

‘Where did he say he had been?’

‘He didn’t say but perhaps . . .’

‘Perhaps—had he been somewhere?’

‘Maybe he’d been in gaol. His hair was cut very short and his complexion was bad. After he came home, he stayed in bed for two days straight.’

‘Didn’t you ask him?’

‘He seemed not to want me to . . .’

‘But still . . . You mean you knew your husband had been in gaol and you didn’t even ask? Weren’t you curious to know why?’

Sergeant Nam asked bluntly, on the spur of the moment, but struck by her frozen expression, he did not even wait for a reply and went on to his next question.

‘So what about this time?’

‘I don’t know. Less than a week after coming home, he went out again.’

‘Gaol again?’

‘Again, I don’t know. Last time, there was a letter a few days later saying that he would be going somewhere far away, but this time there was not even that.’

‘Then what have you been living on?’

‘Back before, his teacher came by once a month and took care of everything.’

‘His teacher?’

‘Yes, my husband’s teacher.’

‘Was his name Min by any chance?’

‘That’s right. Mr. Min Yoseop.’

Suddenly Sergeant Nam felt a growing impatience.

‘In what ways did he take care of things?’

‘Mainly by looking after my living expenses; besides, if there were any difficulties, he would take care of them too.’

‘And this time?’

‘For some reason he hasn’t shown up yet. Luckily there was something left over from what he provided last time.’

‘So when was the last time this teacher came here?’

‘About six months ago. He came by the day after my husband got back. I think I heard him say he was going to go back somewhere.’

‘Tell me in detail what he said that day.’

‘They were talking in low voices in the next room, so I couldn’t hear exactly. The two of them seemed to be quarreling all night long. I had the impression my husband was urging him not to go back; it was dawn by the time he got free and left. That’s all I know.’

‘After that, what did your husband do?’

‘He stayed lying down for one whole day. Then, the evening of the next day he went out suddenly, and I’ve heard nothing of him since then.’

‘So that was about six months ago. Weren’t you worried? You didn’t report it.’

‘I thought he didn’t want to tell me where he was.’

‘So you think it’s the same as last time. To tell the truth, I’m from the police.’

‘I guessed as much. Has he got into trouble again?’

‘I don’t know yet. But that Mr. Min is dead.’

As he spoke, Sergeant Nam observed her calmly. At last a real expression appeared on her face. It was undoubtedly an expression of sorrow and anxiety, yet neither seemed to be for Cho Dongpal.

‘How did he die? What about my husband?’

Her voice trembled slightly as she asked, but there was not the least indication that she suspected Cho Dongpal was the assailant.

‘It’s because we don’t know that I’ve come to see you like this. Min Yoseop was brutally murdered by someone, and we cannot locate your husband. Of course, it’s because we’ve been looking for him under the name of Cho Dongpal, but . . .’

‘Then, my husband . . .?’

A far more pronounced expression had come onto her face than before, an expression where a strong denial was mingled with a veiled sneer. Feeling immensely discouraged, Sergeant Nam managed to hide his feelings as he spoke:

‘Nobody can tell. The only thing that’s certain is that it must have something to do with Min Yoseop’s death. The two of them had established some kind of close relationship and had been working together for six years. Then one dies and the other vanishes without trace. And that more or less just when the other was killed . . .’

‘No. You’ve got it wrong. If Mr. Min was killed, then you should have started your investigation with the idea that my husband was not safe either. If you suspect my husband at all, you’re wrong, utterly wrong.’

‘And why do you think that?’

‘First of all, because my husband respected Mr. Min so deeply he would not so much as step on his shadow. He never forgot even the smallest passing remark, once it was spoken by him, and tried to put it into practice. No matter how somber he might be looking, if Mr. Min happened to come by, his face would light up immediately. I’ve felt jealous more than once on seeing that. I can’t be sure, of course, but I think my husband would readily have laid down his life for him.’

‘We know that, to some extent. But there’s a saying that love and hate grow deep together. It’s not completely unknown for people who were the closest of companions one day to be at knives drawn the next.’

‘Maybe you’re inclined to think like that because I told you they’d quarreled the last time Mr. Min came, but on my husband’s part it was more like a fervent appeal than a quarrel. After Mr. Min left, I could hear my husband’s muffled sobbing. The next day he stayed lying down all day long and he looked totally washed out. When he left the house that night, he was staggering like someone seriously ill, so much so that I was really worried.’

But that remark alone was enough to reinforce the conviction that was already in Sergeant Nam’s mind. He had on several occasions seen cases where a change from one kind of extreme emotion to another had been instantaneous. Strengthened by that, Sergeant Nam quickly moved to lay hold of whatever material evidence might be there. He guessed that, as far as analyzing psychological motivation went, she probably could not help much.

‘I understand. Anyway, could I take a look inside the room?’

‘He’s not here, really. You can ask the landlady.’

She spoke in a way that suggested it bothered her but it did not sound like a straight refusal.

‘Of course I believe you. But there’s something I need to find out . . .’

With that, Sergeant Nam opened the door of the room adjoining the veranda on which she was sitting, without waiting for her to lead the way. The room was far too bare for a young married couple. A few clothes were hanging on the wall, a duvet with a clean cover lay in one corner, a large aluminum box stood at the back. It looked more like a bachelor’s room, equipped with the bare minimum needed for daily life.

The aluminum box, their only piece of furniture, appeared to serve at the same time as dressing table and as desk. The top was covered with a small plastic sheet; in one corner stood a round, iron-framed mirror and a few cosmetics; in the other lay a few notebooks and a couple of books.

‘Do you go to church?’

Sergeant Nam asked on noticing a thick Bible wedged between the other books.

‘No.’

‘What about that book, then?’

‘My husband used to consult it.’

‘Consult?’

‘Yes. Before my husband left home the first time, he used to be busy writing something, saying he was rewriting the Bible. He often used to refer to it.’

Hearing what she said, Sergeant Nam felt his heart suddenly begin to race. The fact that Cho Dongpal had been writing was rather unexpected, but it must be the part that had been missing from Min Yoseop’s text, the part about the new god.

‘Is this what your husband wrote?’

Sergeant Nam picked up a plastic-covered notebook lying under the Bible.

‘Yes. There was also an old notebook that he used to call the original, but after he had finished writing that one, he burned the other.’

What he had called the original was probably the portion that had been removed from Min Yoseop’s text and revised by him later. At first, unsure of what he wanted to write, he must have glossed over the teaching concerning the new god. But how had the completion of it passed into Cho Dongpal’s hands?

As she had said, the handwriting in the notebook was unfamiliar to Sergeant Nam’s eyes. It had even been elevated to scriptural status by the title ‘The Book of Quarantania’ but within the first few lines he could detect Min Yoseop’s personal style. Reading on, he found it impossible to discern what was by Min Yoseop and what had been revised and added by Cho Dongpal.

Sergeant Nam put the notebook aside, resolving to take time to read it carefully, and looked for other evidence. But if Cho Dongpal had indeed killed Min Yoseop, it was as if he had used the weapons of words and writing, for there was nothing else strange there. Compared to Min Yoseop, Cho Dongpal’s material possessions were next to nothing.

‘Have you gotten rid of any of Cho Dongpal’s things, or stored them somewhere else?’

Sergeant Nam asked, since there was so little belonging to Cho Dongpal in what had been the home they shared as a couple. Her answer had a boastful ring to it.

‘He’s different from other people. He never wanted to own anything apart from what he had to have. He only ever had a single set of clothing, summer and winter alike.’

For some reason he felt obliged to believe what she said. Giving up the idea of searching any further, Sergeant Nam rose to his feet, holding the notebook he had set aside just before.

‘I’m sorry but I’m going to have to take this. I assure you I’ll give it back.’

At those words, the expression on her face briefly grew morose and reluctant. But realizing that if the police wanted it, she could not refuse, she soon nodded feebly. She was looking extremely tired. Only then remembering that she was not in good health, Sergeant Nam suddenly felt sorry and hurried to leave.

‘Don’t worry too much about your husband. We’re not just looking on the bad side. But even if he comes back tomorrow, you must contact us without fail. After all, we have to put Mr. Min’s soul to rest, don’t we?’

15.

By the time Sergeant Nam got back to the station, it was well past nine. After he had requested inquiries concerning this newly discovered Kim Dong-uk, he left for home, carrying the notebook he had brought from Gyeongsan. He had found out about Cho Dongpal’s disguise and his current situation in considerable detail, but nothing had become really clear; postponing further investigation until the next day, he intended to examine Cho Dongpal’s notebook.

After reaching home and eating a late supper, Sergeant Nam opened the ‘Book of Quarantania.’

In the desert the Great Wisdom spoke to the Son of Man, saying:

In the beginning was the Great Being, and everything in the universe was one in him. The forms and the substance of all things were one in him, all the concepts and principles surrounding them were also one in him. But that Being was not the original Chaos which your human mythologies are happy to start with. How could your short-sighted perspectives reach back to that far distant day, your little words fully contain that immensity? Whereas volume and size, line and color were all dissolved in the One that was matter prior to form, and varying and opposing concepts and principles mingled in the One that was mind prior to meaning, still that was a totality of living harmony and order, a sublime inaction pregnant with creation and development. To view that as Chaos is merely your mistake in wrongly accepting the sophistry of the One who regards creation as his right.

You are descended from Abraham, so now I will speak using the myths and the name of the god of your people. The Goodness of Yahweh and my Wisdom were a warp and woof comprising that Original Being. We, who first began as the only self-aware beings, set about shaping ourselves to be the supreme minds of the universe that was to be newly created. By the time it came to you, we were two spirits that would partially reveal themselves under the names of Justice and Freedom after long ages of grinding and polishing.

The hypothesis of all your religions that there are two distinct principles that propel the universe is to some extent a reasonable one in that sense. For some reason you vaguely sensed the existence of our two beings from early times. But the linkage or the hierarchy between us were greatly misconstrued, the most obvious example of that being the way we were only understood as being each other’s negation—a good god on one side, an evil god on the other.

Initially we were one and we were equal; the principle uniting us was the harmony and order that had enabled the Original Being to stand, not as chaos but as perfection. Just as Goodness cannot be complete without Wisdom, how can Wisdom be complete without Goodness? Sin is nothing more than another name for Goodness without Wisdom; Evil is nothing but another name for Wisdom without Goodness. You too must have experienced how painful and bitter is Justice without Freedom and likewise Freedom without Justice.

What caused you to envisage the principle connecting the two of us as nothing but disunion and antagonism, hatred and conflict was probably the result of the discord that arose between us after the act of Creation. That cast an endlessly suggestive light onto your spiritual nature until it finally gave birth to such a mistaken conclusion.

We undertook the onerous job of the Creation of heaven and earth because we were weary of the loneliness of being the Unique, the unending stillness, and the long inaction. Yet Creation does not signify the right to govern what is created. Creation existed for our sake, certainly, but likewise we existed for the sake of creation. Creation was our right but also our duty.

The processof the Creation was on the whole similar to what your myths recall. First, there was the Word, and everything arose through that Word. Thereby, our duality became embodied in concrete beings, and everything was endowed with an individual name, form and meaning. However, your interpretation of the myth is mistaken; it is an exaggeration to say that the Word is the two of us. For prior to the Word came our will, and our being preceded that will. The Word, being nothing but a declaratory act such as naming or defining, cannot precede being, no matter how much it may precede everything else, and no matter how exalted, cannot be more than a ceremonial envoy of Creation that cannot attain the endowments of being itself.

However, once I had returned to my original silence in a state of contented fatigue after the Creation was done, something unexpected occurred. The Word, that should naturally have been brought to an end with the completion of the creation, remained as the avatar of a single will and began to coerce and shackle every kind of being. The Goodness of Yahweh, once left alone, sent down the Word in a constant flood, subjecting to his law alone every creature formed in the harmony of our sexual duality, intent on confining the essence of their originally distinct being within his arrogant will.

What was most intolerable in all that was the plight you humans fell into. Ah, humanity! The very Essence of Creation, most perfect embodiment of our duality in harmony, what blessed beings you were at first. Everything about you was permitted, excused, fulfilled and perfected. Your creation was the goal of Creation itself, you were perfection emanating from the Original Being. You believe that we fashioned you in imitation of ourselves but in fact by your emanation we received a likeness.

Yet the Goodness of Yahweh, once left alone, subjected much of what was yours to prohibition, deficiency, and imperfection, and even transformed being itself into his own means. For his Word condemned the half of your nature that you derived from me; his base desire for domination, intent on taking possession of the whole though he had rights over only half, took away the reward for obedience due to you, because he wanted you to obey only him; his vainglory, dreaming of absolute domination, made you a standard by which to measure the obedience of all creatures. That was the beginning of our unfortunate self-negation.

I was dumbfoundeded by the absurd self-righteousness of my Other Half but hoped at least to avoid the tragedy of a division between us two, who were originally one. What great unhappiness is caused to children by discord between parents! After my cautious remonstrances and admonitions had been ignored, I handed everything over to him, retired to the furthest ends of the universe and withdrew into an immense self-pity.

That was my first error. That quiet concession convinced him quite baselessly that he had gained a victory, and ultimately gave birth among you to the superstitious belief that he was superior to me. The various myths describing the expulsion of evil gods and dragons that you have heard in your travels through this world are nothing but stories made up to exalt him and diminish me on the basis of that concession.

But a far greater error than my concession was to follow. Yielding to a sudden introspective impulse after I had withdrawn into that immense self-pity, I came back to see this world and you. Alas, indeed, if it had not been for my imprudent attachment that day; if my curiosity about you, left to his Goodness alone, had not blinded the eyes of my Wisdom; if I had only foreseen that days like today would come, and not laid claim to a belated right; if I had let things go on for ever as they were, the ensuing long-drawn-out agony and distress would not have befallen me, . . . but I emerged from retirement and silence, casually thinking that I would just cast a covert glance and then come back.

I flew through great distances of space and alighted on this earth, reaching a spot where I could observe you unseen. But once I had seen the state you had fallen into, my original idea, that I would quickly go back, changed immediately. It was because my unhappy imaginings, that had constantly tormented me since I left you, all proved to be correct.

The myth of a lost paradise is widely spread among many peoples, but since your version is closest to the truth, I will follow it. The garden reported to you to have been a paradise was a well laid out stud farm; your first parents, reported to have been happy there, were just a pair of ever so docile animals. Where did they now radiate the dignity that we had at first intended, where did that wisdom and spirituality remain? Every trace of all the glorious attributes that my Wisdom had bestowed on them on the day of creation had vanished in negation and condemnation, all that remained were a habitual submission to the Word of the Self-Righteous and a vegetable-like vitality.

First I tried to discover what had become of that half of their original nature that had been extracted from your first parents, those glorious attributes of yours that my wisdom had bestowed. No need to seek far, they were all hidden inside the fruit of a tree in the middle of the garden. In later times, that fruit was known to you as the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

The moment I first looked up at that tree, I felt more contempt than rage toward the self-righteousness and vanity of my Other Half. Although he had surrounded it with an iron fence of the strict Word, he had given it a majestic trunk and fresh leaves, while he had given its fruit a more appetizing appearance and fragrance than anything else in the entire garden. In the painful abstinence and obedience of your first parents overcoming the strong temptation they felt every time they looked at the tree, and the memory of a right to enjoy beauty and know truth that had left faint traces in their nature no matter how hard he swept and scraped, he affirmed and enjoyed his own absolute power.

Even more amazing were his explanations about the fruit, full of lies and malevolence. Your poor first parents, taken in by what he said and forgetting completely that it had originally been the proudest part of themselves, regarded it only as a fruit full of sin and death. The freedom of choice that my Wisdom had given them was chained by his self-righteous Word and mistaking their right to regain it for temptation and loss, they struggled against it in fear and trembling.

Once I had realized their full plight, I withdrew briefly to a quiet spot and fell into deep thought. Should I simply observe the self-righteousness of my Other Half and you, its victims? Was I going to tolerate to the end all his tyranny and his unfair intrusions regarding you? Was I going to watch without saying a word the fall and self-abasement of my Other Half merely to avoid our tragic disunion when it was soon going to lead us all to a shameful self-negation? I could not simply let that happen.

As I said before, Creation was both our right and our duty. Creation must ever involve a responsibility for beginning and end. Creation which only has misery as its goal cannot be permitted. Embodying the harmony of our sexual duality, you should be able to enjoy the way you were originally formed. What was lost must be found, what was bound must be untied—that was what I decided.

Seeking the side that would carry out that decision, I chose the woman rather than the man. That was Eve, Eternal Mother to you. From the start, I noted her hanging around the tree several times a day, casting glances full of longing.

So I secretly sent the Snake of Wisdom to tell her the whole truth. As you know, that was no cunning act of temptation but a rightful and innocent way of informing her. My estimation proved correct. Your Eternal Mother without any special instigation or urging not only magnificently regained all she had lost, she also freed her clumsy and cowardly husband from the self-righteousness of the Word. Undoubtedly some memory of the first day of her creation, like a faint nostalgia lingering in her soul, enabled her to overcome her fear of Yahweh’s incoherent wrath.

You have seen in your travels how all the peoples of the world without exception venerate ‘the Great Mother’ or ‘the Eternal Mother Goddess.’ You might consider that to be connected with productivity but it is not necessarily so. In later days, when it has become difficult to link women and productivity in the old sense, people will often be heard speaking of ‘salvation by the feminine;’ that may well be on account of a belief in a particular spiritual power transmitted only to women since Eve’s deed that day.

The fury of my Other Half at losing in a single morning the use of the standard that had hitherto symbolized the complete submission of all creatures was immense. His deeply wounded self-righteousness and his abruptly shattered narcissism turned into a violent hatred that fell on the heads of your first parents. In place of your sorrowful age of ignorance now began your agonizing age of freedom.

That same day your first parents were expelled from the garden, pursued by all kinds of dreadful punishments. The unanticipated realities of birth and death replaced your everlasting life; discords and tensions previously unknown wrecked your mutual happiness. The earth was cursed and brought forth thorns and thistles; you were only able to get food from the remaining parched land by working in the sweat of your brows. That was the start of days of hard labor and pain; nights of sorrow, solitude and fear came upon you. In addition, Eve was given the suffering of pregnancy and childbearing.

You will reproach me, but at that moment there was no way even my Wisdom could deal with such wrath. Our disunion had now grown into an irreversible self-negation; I did not wish to see that unique process of creation and development returned to the primeval silence and inaction. Furthermore, some part of the sufferings you were to experience would rightly have to be paid to him as the price of your regained wisdom and freedom. For it was clear that there was also a part which could be considered the price paid when your first parents sold those to him amidst the bliss they enjoyed in the garden.

The only thing I could do was wait until the tears of your grief and the sweat of your labors had pacified his blind wrath. Hence I prayed anxiously that the day would finally come when this world would be once again fully yours, when you would return to it to live, love and enjoy as the beings you were first designed to be.

It was a mistaken hope on my part. Though you had been expelled from the Garden, that did not mean that you had for ever been freed from his self-righteousness, his perverted attachment and groundless self-confidence. Absurdly enough, he was convinced that you would return. He believed that one day his Goodness would overwhelm my wisdom, and that you would choose righteousness without freedom rather than freedom without righteousness.

That was not all. In the Primal Being we had originally been one, and even after we had each come to self-awareness, the principles that bound us together were still harmony and unity, yet in no time at all he had been caught up in violent feelings of antagonism and unilateralism. Therefore he considered the restoration of your first parents’ full being to be a defeat, and resolved to add glory to the victory he would finally achieve when he brought you back to his self-righteousness under the freedom which that defeat had bestowed on you. That was accompanied by such a firm conviction that it was as if he had deliberately not noticed my intrusion.

Moreover, as Eve began to give birth your numbers increased and among you arose those who encouraged that false belief of his. They were holy priests and mighty princes; among your people they included the numerous patriarchs of the faith, the fervent prophets, the Judges and Kings. Unable to cope with the freedom they had regained after such struggles, or driven by madness, servility, or by earthly needs, they threw themselves back into the arms of the Self-Righteous. In the name of goodness they persecuted wisdom; advocating righteousness, they trampled on freedom, curried favor with Yahweh, and so added to his unfounded self-confidence.

Yet a larger number of you were different. Although you were unable to become complete in any way on account of our discord, the larger number hoped to enjoy both sides, incomplete as that was, rather than let themselves be imprisoned in goodness without wisdom, righteousness without freedom; they chose to remain in this world as whole beings, fighting against its harsh nature, rather than abandon the half of their being that had been regained with such difficulty and return to his abundant garden. Even in the records of those most faithful to his teaching, there is no one who put an end to his life solely in the hope of rising to the heavenly kingdom.

The first thing to happen on account of that was the catastrophe known to your people as ‘Noah’s flood.’ He killed all of you who refused to return to him and, unwilling to trust the only survivor Noah, established the Law. After forty-nine days of deluge had engulfed the age of your freedom, the age of the Law began under the promise of the rainbow. It was an age of the Word organized by a logic more effective to soothe and pacify you, an age that would look forward to and eventually be perfected by the coming of Moses.

But although he could kill every living thing in the world, he could do nothing about my share hidden in Noah’s nature. As his descendants grew in number, that part which had shrivelled up returned to life and stood up to the Law that had been forcefully imposed on you. Though he repeatedly stressed sin, that does not even exist, and alternately burdened you with hair-raising calamities in this world and hell fire in the world to come, nothing could intimidate you; likewise, you were not in the least tempted by the abundance and tranquility of the former Paradise, or by his heavenly kingdom to which it had been transferred unchanged. It was all the time the same vicious circle, sin without responsibility and punishment without discrimination.

That is what befell the citizens of those cursed cities, Sodom and Gomorrah, that now lie deep beneath the Dead Sea; the same befell all those other cities and peoples that your Scriptures record as a warning. How many children were scourged without knowing why, how many cities and nations were hurled into the fires of destruction for the sin of not having become a hothouse of saints?

Like many of the world’s holy books, your Scriptures say that their deaths were the wages of sin. But from the beginning no such sin ever existed. As I have already said several times, what is there designated as sin is in fact nothing more than one aspect of the being you received in the beginning. In those times, a corner of your nature which had neither color nor name and knew no division between right and wrong, was treated differently merely because it was judged by the Word of the Self-Righteous, and because of the fear provoked by his whimsical punishment.

Even admitting that such things as sins exist, you have to realize that the cause of many of them lies with the one who also punishes them. Greed is caused by your shortages, resulting from the barren state of the earth that he had covered with thorns and thistles; Cain’s envy and hatred began with his favoritism toward Abel. Your lust is a mixture of the penalty of childbirth, which produced many pairs of men and women, with your nature, easily fascinated by beauty as well as novelty. Your squabbles are merely an imitation of the way he classifies even petty deeds into this and that and distinguishes between them.

Blasphemy, that he punishes most severely, is even worse. Insofar as you are most truly no one’s means and your own end, your faith and obedience can only be purchased by grace and love. Is there anything in the world that does not come with a price; what leaf ever shakes when no wind is blowing? Then what do you have to be thankful and praise him for, when he drove you out with curses and gave you nothing but whips and the Law?

Your people’s records boast of many heroes of faith; in actual fact what they displayed was no faith but your typical weakness and servility. Fear of a suffering greater than the bitter grief of losing his property, wives and children or having his entire body aflame with boils made Job submit to Yahweh’s high-handed persuasion; it was only the thought of how the punishment of Yahweh might be crueler than the persecutions of the Assyrians that in the end forced Jonas to set out for Nineveh.

His unfair system of rewards and punishments too keeps encouraging and nurturing you in your so-called sins. Let me refer again to your records. How is it that disasters visited you regardless of good or evil, while good fortune brought you smiles without distinction of right and wrong? For what reason were Esau’s mountains a barren land and his labors a prey for wolves while Jacob’s flocks prospered and his enterprises gave thanks for abundance? How can Noah’s curse of Canaan be justified? How could Lot’s incest with his two daughters be tolerated? Ah, Mount Gilboah, why should you have welcomed the bones of good Jonathan, while you, Jerusalem, saw David’s illegitimate son enjoy the royal throne and wisdom although he had shed his brothers’ blood? Why was the stone that struck Zechariah so sharp, why was the stone that struck Jeremiah so powerful? Why did someone who practiced goodness and pursued justice inherit wrath, if Yahweh truly loved him, and why was someone who tilled fields of evil and sowed seeds of poison able to harvest blessings, if truly he hated him?

Yet many of you suffered and still suffer cruel punishment on account of this unknowable thing called sin. If you are truly guilty of any sin, it is only the sin of not being able to conform to the Word that came later than your nature, which preceded it; the sin of not being able to suffer hunger and thirst and die quietly; the sin of not letting yourselves be killed or robbed helplessly; the sin of not even pretending hypocritically to control your physical desires; the sin of not being cunning enough to flatter the Self-Righteous; above all, simply the sin of not being able to enter into his capricious and arogant choices.

Still I endured and waited. I lingered for thousands and thousands of years, saying nothing, hoping that his blind fury and wrong-headed stubbornness would melt away. I strove to believe that one day he would awaken from his age-old obsession, the two of us would recover our primeval harmony and order, and then you would find happiness.

It was a hopeless expectation. He grew increasingly stubborn, your misery and unhappiness only increased as time went on. At last, unable to listen any longer to your howls of pain and your sorrowful laments, I approached him and attempted to compromise.

First, I proposed that we should govern you according to each one’s share. My idea was that, if he controlled the aspects of your nature that came from him, and I those that were mine, at least you would be punished for sin according to your responsibilities, if you had to be. That involved a risk of perpetuating our division, but I wanted at least to lessen the floggings you were receiving without knowing why.

Contrary to my expectations, he strongly rejected my proposal. Having mistakenly come to consider my long ages of concession as a recognition of his superiority, he refused even to accept that we could speak on an equal footing. Now going beyond the vanity of being satisfied with only a half, he manifested rage at losing what he had acquired.

I found it quite outrageous, but I withdrew in silence. Then after some hesitation I made him a second proposition, that I would renounce my share. I urged him to withdraw from you the freedom that had brought nothing but suffering, and reinstall you in the former garden. It was a bitter renunciation on my part, but the pain I felt at your unhappiness and misery were such that I felt I could not do otherwise. Despite that enormous concession on my part, he once again flatly rejected my request. The reason was that it had long been his hope and belief that he would again summon you into the kingdom of his self-righteousness, but summoning you after depriving you of your freedom would not have satisfied his vanity. His hope was that you would choose him instead of me with your free wills, and return so. To that end, he had invented the word ‘repentance’ and disseminated it among you, as he had beautified his acceptance of you with the word ‘salvation’.

After hesitating for a while, his oblique response was the ‘Son of Man’ about whom he began to drop hints to your people from early on. By that ‘Son of Man’ he said he would respond to my proposition and unravel the long-lasting entanglement between us concerning the Creation.

Your fanatical prophets and their interpreters say this and that, but I know who the Son of Man is that he is going to send. He is a persona, another face of the same coin, localized in my Other Half even before the creation of the universe. He will be called ‘Son of Man’ and will be born with a human body but he will not be the son of a man in the true sense. He is merely an alter ego of my Other Half, an incarnation of his self-righteousness and his Word.

I think I also know what answer that Son of Man will bring from my Other Half. For that reason I have spurred on the madness of Thedos and similar pretenders, hinting at the answer he has to bring and warning of what will happen if he fails, stirring up the hearts of many more people to think in advance about what true salvation ought to be like. But above all my major preparation is you, the dearly loved son of my spirit, anointed with the oil of wisdom.

From the moment when, for some reason or other, my Other Half chose a woman of your people, sent down the ‘Son of Man’ and implanted him in her womb, I have had my eye on you. Before you could follow in your father’s footsteps and be hardened by the self-righteous Word, I sent Thedos to you; later, once you were grown up, I egged you on to leave your father’s hothouse and experience intensely the pain and misery of people with their bodies of flesh. Finally I called you away from home and neighbors to roam through every part of the world and I showed you the two of us under many names and appearances. Without all those journeys and experiences, you would never have been able to understand and follow what I am telling you now.

So at last the time has come. The Son of Man sent by my Other Half will soon reveal himself to the world. You must visit him first and discover what answer my Other Half has sent. If you ask him whether he has brought bread, miracles, and worldly power, you will soon be able to discover the plan of my Other Half who is in heaven. If he has indeed come with bread, miracles and worldly power, that will replace your previous painful freedom and before long you will attain at least a half-salvation. Only bread, miracles and power are capable of coercing you and enabling you to regain the former garden without wasteful hesitation.

But if he has not brought those things, as an ominous foreboding I’ve had for some time tells me, that would mean that Yahweh has once again rejected my appeal. It would mean that he still believes his wounded spiritual vanity can only be cured by your painful freedom, and that yet longer and more painful years of wandering and delusion await you. This false Son of Man may say he has come to initiate a new age of love, but in actual fact he will have come merely to complete Yahweh’s self-righteousness.

Then you must first begin by expelling from this world that false Son of Man, that living, moving Word of the Self-Righteous. His venomous breath must be prevented from polluting your innocent souls, the leaven of Yahweh must not be allowed to ferment here. You must become the true Son of Man, protect this world and humanity. That false Son of Man may have come with a hidden power to perform trifling miracles, and with an exceptionally long and slippery tongue. You will have to fight him as an ordinary, powerless son of man, but never forget that this world and its humanity will always be on your side. Engage all your strength, not for the sake of someone higher but for yourself and those like you; employ all your intelligence, not for a kingdom far away in heaven but for this world that you now tread.

The Great Wisdom spoke again to the Son of Man, saying:

Son of Man, I heard your footsteps coming across the desert as you invoked me, full of dread. How pale your face is, and how you stagger! Why, you are already trembling in fear at an unbelievable rumor.

But you, anointed by wisdom, have nothing to dread, nothing to fear. Now that false Son of Man has gone back to the place he came from, the earth is delivered into your hands again. Why should you waver if thieves rolled aside the stone blocking the door of the tomb and ripped off the shroud, then a pack of coyotes dragged away the body, and the story became exaggerated as it passed from mouth to mouth? If some weak-minded people, misled by that, see a ghost and go about whispering that he is risen again, what is there for you to be afraid of? The seeds of the Word that he sowed and the blood that drenched his cross may be a burden to you, but I still believe in the rock-firm resolve with which you drove him from the world. I feel certain that, even if he came again, he would be driven out in a hail of stones thanks to your awareness and once again be obliged to return in tears to the One who sent him.

In spite of all that, I have come to you now not because your calls were so ardent but because there are still words that I need to speak to you; I want to tell you what you have to expect, now you can pass beyond time and space.

What I have been striving for was the negation of my Other Half, fallen into self-righteousness, and you were the agent helping me here on earth. I trained you to oppose the Word of the Self-Righteous who had come down to earth in a human body, and have now freed you from the chains of time and space since I am afraid he will come again after he has been expelled.

However, if you believe that all my efforts have been solely aimed at negating my Other Half, you are mistaken. If you thought that I undertook this long and painful fight with the intention of exalting myself alone on the basis of that negation, that would be an even greater error; and if you thought that I dreamed of taking possession of this world and you all alone, that would be more than an error, it would be a blasphemy against our holiness. Just as goodness becomes self-righteousness when it asserts itself alone, so too wisdom becomes evil when it asserts itself alone. If you replace self-righteousness with evil, how is that different from rescuing a man from drowning then throwing him into a fire?

My negation was for the sake of a greater affirmation; the confrontation within our duality must ultimately be a process designed to arrive at a greater harmony. I began with a recollection of that primal Great One, but my intended goal was to arrive at our exalted union by way of the furnace of dialectic. If there is a god that you should believe in and serve, it is the One we two will become at that moment.

The ‘We become One’ of that day will not desire your belief or service. We shall be great and perfect in ourself. We shall feel sorry for you if you waste time and wealth in onerous ceremonies and rituals.

There will be no Law or Word coming to you in our name and troubling you. When we formed you, we gave you everything. Do not waste your time striving to know what our will is. Everything is contained within your souls; it will rise up on its own, without you drawing it up.

As you will not have to fear our wrath, so you must not boast of our joy. We will not rebuke or punish your evil. For that too is part of our creation. Neither will we exalt goodness and reward it. Since that too derives from us. You must neither add to nor take away so much as a single mustard seed from what we have given. None of your actions have any kind of coloring, in heaven as on earth.

Even after our distinctions and interventions have come to an end, goodness will continue to be esteemed among you, love and mercy will be encouraged. Not because they make us happy but because they are beneficial to you. As ever, evil must be denounced, hatred and quarreling must be restrained. That too, not because we dislike them but because they are harmful to you. You must not kill, so that you can avoid being killed. You must not steal; then you will not be robbed. You must not commit adultery, for then your wives and daughters will remain chaste. Love your neighbors, then your neighbors will love you. Many other rules will remain, but they will not be a continuation of outdated commandments and laws. They will not be imposed downward from above but will be built upward from below as things agreed among you.

I repeat, you were complete when you were made. Instead of the trouble of having to distinguish it ourselves, we endowed you with goodness; instead of the effort of intervening, we conferred wisdom on you. It would be up to you whether that goodness and wisdom were enjoyed together as justice and freedom, or taken as your own yoke of self-righteousness and evil.

Do not seek us on that day, gazing pointlessly up at the sky. We have established you on earth, so seek salvation and forgiveness on earth. Truly I tell you, there is nothing that can oppress you and add to our holiness. There is nothing that could be taken from you that would add to us; there is nothing that could exalt us by humbling you. Our pleasure should not be at the cost of your pain; your sorrow should not be our joy. Whoever serves you best serves us best; all things come from you and end with you.

When Sergeant Nam had finished reading and put the book down, he found himself feeling far more confused and at a loss than after reading any other part of Min Yoseop’s manuscript. Cho Dongpal’s clumsy handwriting and half-baked ideas might be partly to blame, but to call that speaker a god struck him as just too absurd. The last section especially struck even Sergeant Nam, who was unfamiliar with theological debates, as being nothing but unifying for the sake of unifying. The way the basis of Ahasuerus’ intense anti-Christian logic in his attacks on Jesus ended up as that fuzzy god, was frankly a huge disappointment.

What disappointed Sergeant Nam most was the absence of practical usefulness in that section, which he had been inwardly hoping to find. He was convinced that it contained clues which would show that his own suspicions about Cho Dongpal were not unfounded. Yet despite repeated re-readings, he could not find any. Just as he was falling asleep, he recalled the prayer house where Min Yoseop had last stayed and the words of Preacher Hwang; as a result he felt he could see where Min Yoseop’s and Cho Dongpal’s beliefs had parted ways, but that by no means provided a motive for such a grisly murder.

16.

By contrast, the riddle of the identity and activities of Kim Dong-uk was easily solved. The next morning Sergeant Nam went to work with a head thick from lack of sleep, to find that a response had already arrived to the inquiry he had submitted the previous evening. First, Kim Dong-uk was an orphan of no fixed abode who had been exempted from military service on grounds of mental deficiency. Yet he had two previous convictions, which did not fit well with that; his first, for theft, had resulted in nine months’ imprisonment with two years’ suspended sentence; the second, for attempted robbery, earned him a year’s imprisonment. Beside which, more surprising still, he was currently serving time for assault in nearby Hwawon prison. Not only Sergeant Nam but Lieutenant Lee too, who had examined the report from the National Police headquarters with him, were at a total loss.

But as the two of them were discussing the illogicality of the report, Detective Kim, who had been listening to their whispers from his place opposite, suddenly broke in: ‘Suppose ‘mental deficiency’ doesn’t mean someone a bit lacking but someone deranged? Now what was the fellow’s name?’

‘Kim Dong-uk.’

Sergeant Nam spoke almost unthinkingly. Detective Kim repeated the name to himself a few times, then leapt to his feet, exclaiming: ‘Then it must be him!’

‘Him? Who?’

Lieutenant Lee asked, slightly tense.

‘Wait one moment. I’ll go and check.’

With that, Detective Kim went over to the filing-cabinet and began to ferret through the old records.

‘It’s him, there’s no doubt about it. Talk about not seeing what’s in front of your nose . . .’

Pointing to an entry in the files, he spoke in a way that suggested how proud he was of his amazing memory. Sergeant Nam glanced at the date; it was the very day on which Min Yoseop’s body had been discovered. The victim of the assault had been a girl—at which abruptly Sergeant Nam recalled the girl in leather boots and the youth with the shaved head. Now he understood why Cho Dongpal’s photo had seemed somehow familiar, and why Detective Kim had been able to recall the name, because of the uncommon nature of the incident.

‘But—if he got six months, wasn’t yesterday the last day?’

Lieutenant Lee spoke after seeming to be calculating something. He was right. The affair might have been classified as a minor offense but Kim Dong-uk, or Cho Dongpal rather, had been sentenced to six months in prison; he was due to come out that very day.

Sergeant Nam quickly called a car and went speeding toward Gyeongsan with Detective Im. Cho Dongpal had indeed come back home. He was drinking alone, though it was still broad daylight; he opened the door of his room to them with a calm expression on his face. Sergeant Nam, who had come in fondling the revolver in his pocket just in case, felt suddenly let down. But determined not to give him a breathing space, he asked sharply:

‘Cho Dongpal?’

‘Why call me by the name I hate and have given up?’

‘Who’s Kim Dong-uk?’

‘Isn’t he sitting here?’

There was something sarcastic in Cho Dongpal’s voice as he replied to Sergeant Nam without inviting him into his room. At that, Sergeant Nam raised his voice, inwardly growing angry:

‘Don’t play games with me. Who’s Kim Dong-uk?’

‘Hey, it really matters so much? Then I’ll tell you. He was a wretched guy I met on a building site. He fell sick and died; I buried him, then borrowed his identity and residence card. It’s not difficult to change photos, is it?’

On hearing that, Sergeant Nam quickly understood Cho Dongpal’s transformation. Indeed, that kind of change was not at all difficult in the criminal world. Not long before, he had come across someone who had lost his residence card and had gained a criminal record without realizing it. But the important questions lay elsewhere.

‘You killed him, didn’t you? Min Yoseop, I mean.’

Sergeant Nam accused him abruptly, as if this change of identity had become an unshakable piece of evidence.

‘Why? Was he rich enough to be worth killing? Or were we fighting over some beautiful girl?’

Cho Dongpal answered back in an unshaken voice. Sergeant Nam was suddenly at a loss what to say. With nothing but a vague hunch to go by, he could still not even guess what had been his motive for murder. He was really a master criminal.

‘Don’t play the innocent. We found out everything before we came.’

He tried to make up for his momentary discomfiture in that way. Cho Dongpal laughed, as if calling his bluff, then brazenly invited them in:

‘You think you know? Anyway, come inside. Let’s talk over a glass of soju.’

‘Shut up and come out. We’ll go to the station and talk there.’

Refusing to let himself be dragged into his self-assured mood, Sergeant Nam spoke in a harsher tone. Cho Dongpal’s expression promptly grew threatening.

‘What’s all this about? You’re spoiling the taste of my drink. You think an ex-con has no name? They can’t have issued an arrest warrant on the strength of a report by someone with a head as dumb as yours. Come inside when I ask you to. Let’s not make things more difficult than they have to be.’

Strangely enough, there was something overpowering in his voice. Sergeant Nam intuitively gave up all thought of using force. He could have jumped on Cho Dongpal and dragged him off to the station but, unwilling to risk a desperate resistance, he left Detective Im in the yard and entered the room.

‘Shut the door, darling. I can’t stand the face of that guy sniffing about the yard for no reason with his hair on end. And bring us another bottle.’

Once Sergeant Nam had entered and sat down, Cho Dongpal addressed someone in a dark corner of the room. He had not recognized her, but it was Kim Sunja crouching there like a figure carved in wood. Detective Im, perched on one end of the veranda, glared angrily at Cho Dongpal, but at a sign from Sergeant Nam he restrained himself, pretending not to have heard his malicious words. Cho Dongpal watched vacantly as the woman rose like a shadow and left the room, quietly shutting the door. Then he addressed Sergeant Nam again.

‘Hearing you’d taken away my ‘Book of Quarantania,’ I thought you must have understood something of what we were up to. But do you really know? Why I killed him, I mean?’

He admitted the suspicions against him as if he was talking of someone else. Sergeant Nam rejoiced inwardly but deliberately spoke in a curt, firm voice: ‘I know everything.’

His tough reply came from a desire not to be too dependant on the other’s good will. It seemed to provoke Cho Dongpal, whose tone suddenly became sarcastic again.

‘Don’t talk rubbish. If I stay silent, the prosecution will have a hard time making a case against me.’

That was certainly true. With no material proof and no clear motive for murder, it would be hard to arrest him, let alone arraign him. The only solution was to get him to tell them everything they needed; but the distinct impression that his had been a crime of conviction, and the strong personality indicated by his prominent nose and upward slanting eyes, suggested that it would be impossible to force anything out of him in the interrogation room.

‘It would be a stupid power struggle. About your doctrines . . .’

Recalling Min Yoseop’s notebooks and the ‘Book of Quarantania’ as well as the groups they had led in various towns, Sergeant Nam tried to probe without much confidence. Cho Dongpal laughed sneeringly as if to say it was nonsense.

‘Our doctrine? Can there be a doctrine without followers?’

‘Then what were those kids you took around here and there? And why write that Book of Quarantania or whatever it is?’

‘Ah, so that’s what you’re thinking of.’

Cho Dongpal sneered again before continuing.

‘You’re not so wrong; we started those notes with the idea of making our own scriptures. We even had an ambition of canonizing the rest of Min Yoseop’s notebooks and turning them into a proper Bible. But we gave that up long ago. God wills, but it’s man who acts. And what really drove me on was the fever of action, so things turned out as they did. And those kids—they weren’t our followers. we intended to train a few of them as apostles, but mostly they were simply the objects of the belief we were practicing. In reality, right up to the moment when Min Yoseop finally sent them packing, they had no idea they were being brought up and cared for according to any kind of doctrine.’

‘So why kill him?’

Sergeant Nam asked casually, sensing that a strange fever was beginning to invade Cho Dongpal’s voice. His question was a step back from his previous claim that he knew everything.

‘Now you’re speaking frankly. You should have asked earlier.’

Cho Dongpal broke into a gratified smile as he spoke, emptied his glass in a single gulp, then asked, as if he was interrogating Sergeant Nam:

‘Do you really know what the relationship between him and me was?’

‘Of course.’

‘The same as my father and mother still believe—that Min Yoseop led me astray?’

Sergeant Nam suddenly felt that he wanted to shake his head, but anxious not to interrupt the flow of words, he replied what he wanted to hear:

‘More or less.’

‘Wrong. Since you’ve already been investigating, you must know about the high school I attended. In those days, that school was counted as one of the ten best in the country. And I was at the top of the class until my second year. I was eighteen when I left home . . . and as for Min Yoseop, it was my own decision to follow him. His beliefs and his lonely struggle to practice them were so beautiful and persuasive.

‘It was he who tried hard to get rid of me. When he left our house in the middle of the night as if he was running away, it was because of me; in a way, my daring way of putting things into practice had already begun to frighten him.’

Cho Dongpal’s voice was beginning to tremble, perhaps on account of the drink or his excitement. Sergeant Nam suddenly felt that he was childish and foolish for his age.

‘Then how did you meet up with him again?’

‘I spent two months wandering about looking for him. In those days I couldn’t even imagine what it meant to be out there alone; I was pretty desperate. I finally found him on a construction site in Daejeon. Naturally, he tried to persuade me to go back home, but I couldn’t go back. He had smashed the idol I had previously served and had utterly destroyed the faith and system of values I had treasured. He had been intending to build a new world on those ruins; then suddenly he abandoned me . . .

‘I clung to him desperately. I begged to be allowed to share in that new and splendid world he had created in his heart. He was uneasy for some reason, but finally accepted me.’

‘When you robbed your parents, was that to get the money to go looking for him?’

‘You know about that? You mean my parents know too?’

Cho Dongpal seemed to be taken aback. But then he went on with his own tale, as if that was unimportant.

‘Sure I robbed our house, but it was not for the money. I needed a special ritual to ensure that my departure would be irreversible.

‘It must have been about three days after I first left home. I had been wandering around the wharves in Masan, where he might have gone. I had walked until it was getting dark without being able to find him; suddenly I longed to go back home. I was madly homesick. So I went back. But just as I entered the alley and could see the lamp in front of our house, I suddenly felt how wretched and weak I was, so attached to the animal-like ties of blood and the home comforts that they offer. That was what made me decide to rob our house on the spur of the moment. I wanted to make it a place I would never be able to go back to.

‘Of course, it was not an easy thing to do. Calling up memories of mother grabbing a poor whore’s meager earnings, remembering father’s double-crossing when he turned in his fellow smugglers and got a reward, I treated them as mercilessly as any bandit. I’d even taken the wedding ring mother had worn on her finger for dozens of years, but then, finally, as I was warning that I would kill them if they informed the police, I found myself all choked up. If you say they guessed it was me, that must have been the reason . . .

‘Of the money I took, I kept just the little I needed, then shared out the rest as I had already decided, to a pedlar-woman with three small kids and a husband sick with TB, to shanty-town folk having to feed a family of six with one measure of flour a day . . .’

‘So that’s how it started. Yet from what I’ve read there’s nothing in your doctrine encouraging you to do that sort of thing . . .’

Sergeant Nam asked something he had been curious about from the start. Cho Dongpal glanced quickly at him and suddenly raised his voice.

‘You’ve got it wrong. Our god had put everything in our hands. Whatever we could forgive one another for was forgiven by him. But what you are calling the start was not then. If it had not been for Kim Dong-uk’s death, we would probably still be relying on our trivial labor and the sympathy of an untrustworthy society’.

‘Kim Dong-uk’s death?’

‘That’s right. That day I took the dying man on my back and went round all the hospitals; meanwhile Min Yoseop was making the rounds of the flashy charities, begging for mercy. But in the end I had no choice but to carry him back to our tent while Min Yoseop returned empty-handed. They can erect shiny clock towers for everyone to see at the corners of public squares, or donate scholarships that fill a little corner of a newspaper, but they had no money at all for a wretched laborer dying in their very shadow.

‘I decided that the time had come for us to act. We realized that even while we were sighing in vain and shedding pointless tears of pity, many other Kim Dong-uks were dying.’

Strangely, Cho Dongpal’s eyes were losing their brightness, though his voice remained strong. That somehow made him look stupid, helping Sergeant Nam to remain detached from his incomprehensible passion.

‘Were your two convictions under Kim Dong-uk’s name because of that?’

‘You’ve got it right. I had no bread to satisfy this world’s wants, no ability to work miracles, no power to impose justice. What I could do was transfer the goods of those unfairly possessing too much to people with far too little. Of course, you would call that larceny and robbery.’

‘Still, what with taking a clock from some small inn and attempting clumsy burglaries—you didn’t carry out any very remarkable jobs, did you?’

‘That’s your problem, Detective. Those two convictions on my record were occasions when I deliberately bungled things in order to let myself be caught. In my experience, there’s no safer hiding-place than prison. On a day when I’d pulled off a big job, if I let myself be caught for a petty theft you would leave me right there under your noses while you went running after the wrong suspect. Besides, Kim Dong-uk was mentally deficient . . . At best, a few months’ complete rest and when I came out it would all be over. Among the unsolved cases in Daejeon, four years back, there should be one where a guy who’d made a packet by speculating got knifed and robbed of nearly five million Won. With several previous jobs it had become hard for me to stay there any longer, so I deliberately made a big strike; then on the morning of the day following I walked out of the inn where I’d been staying taking a wall clock with me. Then the year before last in Incheon, an upstart who’d become rich buying and selling real estate got robbed, and on the morning of the very next day I vanished into a police station. After handing over the money to Min Yoseop, I went to a neighborhood close to a police station and pretended to be attempting a mugging . . .’

Sergeant Nam felt as though he’d been struck. There was the brazenness of the confession of course, but more amazing than that was the boldness and ingenuity of the hiding-place. It was true that no one would ever imagine that a bandit who had successfully got away with millions of Won thirty minutes before would try to take a few thousands from the pocket of a passer-by in the street. Especially when the person brought in had been dispensed from military service on grounds of mental deficiency.

Still, it was no mere matter for admiration. Even taking into account the particular characteristics of a crime of conviction, the motives for the crime were too far removed from common sense. In order to test him once more, Sergeant Nam applied sarcasm in place of admiration.

‘It’s all the same. Whether the money you stole was a few millions or a few billions, how many can you help with that? Are you some kind of belated Hong Gildong or Robin Hood?’

‘Because you’ve been reading Min Yoseop’s notebooks, you’re talking just like him. I know that if you transform the fundamental structures of society far more people can be helped more effectively than by any belated Hong Gildong. And of course I’ve heard stories of priests somewhere in Latin America hiding submachine guns under their clerical robes and fighting to bring down the structures of oppression and exploitation. But that is as remote and as difficult as Christian salvation. At this very moment, on every street-corner our neighbors are starving, sick and dying; where can we find time for such long-term plans? Better to save one person suffering before your very eyes now than make plans that might save a million in some unspecified future time. Creating an ideology, then trying to change the world by means of its dissemination and responses to it, is as difficult as expecting the wounds of the world to be healed by an awakening of the rich and the compassion arising from it. The delay in bettering the world is because action goes chasing helter-skelter after philosophy and logic that lead the way. I told them to follow behind and chose to put action first. The beauty of action lies in achieving something definite, however small . . .’

Cho Dongpal was becoming increasingly excited, as if he had been waiting for this. Although all that was not without interest, it was too unrelated to their present business, so Sergeant Nam turned the conversation in a more practical direction.

‘Sounds interesting. But that will do. Was that why you put yourself in prison again? To hide after having killed Min Yoseop?’

‘Now you know.’

Unexpectedly, Cho Dongpal assented easily. Yet he was emptying one glass after another, as if at a loss what to do about his inner confusion. Sergeant Nam was worried that he was getting too drunk, but did not try to stop him, reckoning it was a far better way of keeping the words flowing. In fact, the more he drank, the more animated he seemed to become.

‘So that’s you dealt with; but what was Min Yoseop doing before he died? I know you and he always kept together.’

‘He was mainly in charge of the distribution. Occasionally he helped with the robbing, but unless I judged it was absolutely safe, I never involved him in what I was doing; when I was arrested, I never got him involved. You see, that man was not simply the authority serving to justify me, he was the logic and philosophy capable of following behind and interpreting my actions, that went on ahead. He was also the agent who stayed outside and cared for many people while I was in prison.’

‘Then why did you kill him?’

Sergeant Nam, trying hard to conceal any appearance of interrogating him, finally asked about what puzzled him most. The strain of not seeming to be interrogating him made his voice tremble awkwardly, but Cho Dongpal replied without paying any particular attention to that.

‘Because he had abandoned our god.’

‘Your god? The one in the Book of Quarantania?’

‘Of course. We had already discovered that one god a long time ago. Not being very good at writing, I could only depict him as I did, but that god had been the crystallization of our long quest and the ultimate expression of our minds. I suppose you’ve read it more or less—a god not involved in notions of good and evil or value judgments; a god that does not impose yokes on the First Being by a Word coming after; a god that forgives and approves of everything; a god that does not meddle in life on this earth by means of heaven or hell; a god that does not desire submission and worship, does not demand sacrifices and devotion; a god that trusts our wisdom and reason, making us completely free . . .’

Unlike the sarcastic tone he had adopted when asked a similar question previously, Cho Dongpal’s voice had begun to ring with an over-sincere, almost frantic fervor. Feeling that, Sergeant Nam quickly interrupted his flood of words and once more oriented the conversation in the direction he wanted.

‘Yes, I’ve read it. But how did Min Yoseop betray that god?’

At that, Cho Dongpal suddenly awoke from his frenzy and opened the new bottle that his wife had put down, approaching like a vanishing shadow. His hand was shaking visibly. Seeing him fill the glass to overflowing, Sergeant Nam was on the verge of stopping him but restrained himself. Apart from an incoherent confession and unreliable circumstantial evidence, he had still not been able to obtain anything solid. Besides, on the face of Cho Dongpal, as he thirstily emptied his glass and shut his eyes tightly, as if gathering his thoughts, there shone a kind of dignity that he felt unable to challenge roughly.

‘It was just six months ago. I had completed my second term inside and was duly released. I came looking for him; he had moved here to Daegu. But he and the twenty kids, who should have been there to welcome me, had all dispersed. Following a note from him, I went to the boarding house where he had been staying, but he had already left there, leaving behind a long letter.

‘Until then, I had no idea that he had gone and shut himself up inside that prayer house. Even if the way he had sent the kids away left me feeling uneasy, at most I assumed that the past had begun to catch up with him, so he had temporarily scattered and hidden them, and that he had gone into hiding somewhere. But . . . it wasn’t like that. He knew perfectly well when I was due out, yet he only turned up three days later, and out of the blue said we should split up. He said he had taken the money in the savings account and the key-money from the house, given it all to the kids and sent them off for good . . .’

‘Why so suddenly?’

‘In order to go back to his former god and his church. Back into that religion of women and slaves, that self-righteous Word and that masochistic fervor . . . he said he was lonely and afraid. Our god who never smiled or grew angry, who was never happy or sad, who never rebuked or praised—he was tired of that; actions disengaged from any notion of good or evil, evil without punishment, and good without reward, were all equally hollow.’

At that point, Cho Dongpal groped for the bottle of liquor, not opening his eyes, seized it and took several gulps directly from the bottle. Someone with even a small amount of intuition would have found it odd, but Sergeant Nam was so taken with Cho Dongpal’s story that he simply stared at him blankly and waited for him to go on.

‘He also said that whether it was the de-individualizing trends in theology, or the theology of revolution, and beyond that, even if it meant joining hands with Marxism, we should always remain ‘in god;’ that no matter how unreasonable it might seem, ultimately we had to leave salvation and forgiveness to heaven. Then he concluded that, while we had labored to manufacture our new god as if we had received some kind of sacred calling, in actual fact by our half-baked knowledge and vague notions we were merely reproducing the crudest form of atheism; that what we had believed so undoubtingly to be a god had been at most the God of Reason who had appeared like a kind of madness during the Century of Revolutions and then vanished in derision, if it was not merely the deification of a vulgar, rough kind of ethics. After all that, he was going back to the foot of the cross in an exaggerated repentance.

‘But I could not follow him. Since he had made it himself, he could destroy it himself, whereas I had received it from him and could not destroy it. Regarding practice too, he had always vacillated on the threshold between hesitation and doubt so that going back would be easy for him, while I had fallen far too deeply in and there was no way I could turn back. Rather than confront him with hopeless arguments, I tried to hold him back in the name of the long years I had spent with him. On my knees I begged him not to go back to Yahweh, entreated him with tears. But in the end it was to no avail.

‘After he had left that night, I did not sleep a wink. I had a feeling that the world had suddenly turned into an empty, lonely place. Then as dawn broke, I heard a roar as if the world I had trusted in all that time had collapsed. He himself had been that world. Ever since I set out to follow him, my life had found its meaning in him, all my actions had found their justification by him. Then in a moment everything had crumbled. Gaping at my feet was nothing but the abyss of a bottomless pit. There was nothing left but the wretchedness of Sancho Panza watching Don Quixote emerge from his illusions.

‘Yet I tried my hardest to forget him. I resolved to stand on my own two feet, to think for myself, to go groping along my path without him. I even fostered an ambition of going beyond him and perfecting our notion of holiness. Only there was one thing I could not forgive. That was the sign of our defeat, he himself kneeling in front of the cross shedding humiliating tears of repentance at the very hour when I would be engaged in that painful struggle. It was as if, with him there like that, I would never be able to begin anything on my own again. It seemed that I and my new god would only be safe if he were eliminated. So, after hours of detailed planning, I went to find him at the prayer house he was staying in . . .’

Cho Dongpal once again paused and raised the bottle to his lips. For some time, the sound of Detective Im’s impatient throat clearings outside the door had been reminding him to hurry up. At last Sergeant Nam began to realize that his behavior was much too relaxed for a detective confronting a murder suspect, yet he continued to stare at Cho Dongpal, seized by a strange feeling. Perhaps the interest and curiosity accumulated in the course of the past months’ arduous searches had overwhelmed his professional sense. For his part, Cho Dongpal seemed to have completely forgotten the very existence of Sergeant Nam; taking the bottle from his lips, he began to chatter again. He gave the impression of someone pursued.

‘It was still dark, very early in the morning, when I climbed the hill behind the prayer house, unobserved by anyone. I was familiar with his habit of going for a stroll at dawn, so I selected a lonely wooded path that he seemed likely to take, and waited. I had been standing there shivering for about an hour when he appeared, as if he had been summoned. I don’t know if he had been praying all night, or if he had not been able to sleep on account of me, but his hair looked disheveled in the dim light and his face was dreadfully haggard. I lured him to the place where I killed him, and there pleaded with him one last time. Once more I fell to my knees, joined my hands and begged . . .’

Seemingly out of breath, Cho Dongpal stopped talking, but not now in order to go on drinking. He clenched his teeth as if suppressing pain and spoke with difficulty.

‘It was no use. Rather he urged me to return with him to the foot of the cross. He wanted us to make a new beginning there. The moment I judged there was no way I could make him change his mind, I pulled out the knife. But, still . . .’

Cho Dongpal was suddenly seized by a convulsion that interrupted his story. He seemed to try to gather his strength to overcome it, and then, as if finding that useless, raised the bottle to his lips with a shaking hand. He was breathing in harsh gasps. Sensing now that something was seriously wrong, Sergeant Nam snatched the bottle from his hand.

‘You’ve drunk too much. No more.’

Cho Dongpal resisted briefly, then gave up, and began talking again.

‘He showed no special alarm, and did not try to escape. I might be wrong, but I got the impression he had a slight smile on his lips. His eyes seemed to have filled with a kind of mysterious light . . . then, blinded by a sudden hatred, I lunged at his breast with my knife . . .’

At that moment Cho Dongpal curved in on himself, unable to finish what he was saying, and fell forward. His teeth were clenched so hard that the veins of his neck stood out strongly; he was clearly suffering some kind of intense pain. Surprised, Sergeant Nam helped him sit up and questioned him urgently:

‘What’s wrong? What’s the matter?’

But Cho Dongpal made no reply. Clutching his stomach as if fighting a severe gripe, he squirmed violently. Kim Sunja, who until then had merely sat there like a still-life observing her husband, threw herself face downward onto the floor and began to sob quietly. Hearing her, and Sergeant Nam’s urgent cry, Detective Im wrenched open the door and rushed in. His face was tense and he had even pulled out his revolver.

‘It’s not the drink. Get a car, quickly. I’ll carry him down.’

Sergeant Nam shouted wildly at Detective Im as he pulled Cho Dongpal onto his back. He glared angrily at Sergeant Nam, then hurried out.

‘It’s very late. This man took a more than fatal dose of poison several hours ago. Seeing the way that alcohol helped delay the effect, I suppose it may have been methanol. I’ll do what I can, but it will be difficult. Retinal edema has already set in.’

When they arrived at the hospital, after much trouble, the middle-aged doctor shook his head as he spoke.

Cho Dongpal regained consciousness just once before he died. Like the sudden flare of an expiring candle, he spoke in a tone clearer than ever before:

‘Don’t think that I’ve fallen defeated like him. What’s summoning me now is Min Yoseop’s blood, not despair about our god. What will remain alive for ever is our god, before this hour and after this hour; even if nobody is able to sense it, his solitary holiness will always be shining above your heads . . .’