She collects herself. “Alex, I would give anything to see him.”
It comes out quickly, before I can let myself second-guess: “Then I want you to meet him.”
“Okay,” she says, suddenly sitting taller. “I would love that.”
She keeps glancing at Peter’s radio-controlled car on the floor. A red Maserati with a broken axle from a joyride into a medieval wall. Peter has written his name on the door. Mona can’t take her eyes off those scrawled letters.
“I would,” she repeats more faintly, “really love it.”
The discovery of how much those words mean to me is a warning that I need to step back. If hope comes this easily, so will disappointment.
“I can’t let that happen until Peter’s ready,” I say. “And I need time to get him ready. So you can’t just come knocking at our door again.”
She looks decimated. Trapped in her silence.
Finally I stand and say, “Peter’s at my uncle’s place right now. I need to get back to him.”
“Of course.”
She rises. On her feet again, she seems stronger. She tightens the sweater around her, then tucks in the chair. At the door, she makes a point of not moving, of letting me shepherd the parting. But the thought of her departure fills me with a premonition of vast loneliness. If in the morning she has gone back to Viterbo, I will have to hide my emotions from Peter. I will have to never let him know tonight happened.
As my hesitation deepens, she lifts a hand in the air and, as if touching a wall of glass, lets it linger.
“Here’s my number,” she says. It’s already written on a piece of paper in her hand. “Call me when you and Peter are ready.”
* * *
WHEN SHE’S GONE, LEO slowly drifts back. He doesn’t speak. We’ve returned to the oldest terrain of our friendship. In silence he walks me back to Lucio’s.
At the palace door he gives me a tap on the arm and a meaningful look. Making the sign of a telephone with his hand, he says, “If you want to talk about it.”
But I don’t want to talk about it.
Peter is asleep. His body is misaligned on the bed, feet nearly touching the pillow. I move him, and his eyes open. “Babbo,” he says lucidly, then tumbles back into the abyss. I kiss him on the forehead and stroke his arm.
Mothers in the neighborhood ask how a single father does it. They see me at playdates, at the meet-ups where rising students are supposed to become friendly before primary school starts, and they say how lucky Peter is to have me. Never do they suspect that I am a ghost. A sunken ship dragged back to the surface by the little boy hanging from the monkey bars. God took Mona but left me Peter. Now she is only one phone call away. And yet I wonder if I can bear to dial those numbers.
I say a prayer for Simon, then decide to sleep on the floor. My little boy deserves a bed of his own. But before I crawl out, I whisper in his ear.
“Peter, she came home.”
CHAPTER 18
PETER WAKES AT dawn. Lucio and Diego are still in their beds, but we find nuns in the kitchen preparing the last of the summer produce, peeling the carrots and rinsing the lettuce. They don’t seem to mind sharing their hour of peace with a little Napoleon who marches into the middle of them, pushing aside their habits like a showman forcing his way through theater curtains, and says, “Where are the cereals? What kind do you have?” No self-respecting Italian would eat cereal for breakfast, but Michael Black introduced me to American breakfast when I was a boy, just as he would later introduce Simon to American cigarettes. I think of what Mona would say, to find that her son has inherited the habit.
She is everywhere in this raking daylight. Ever since she left us, I’ve felt Mona’s presence mostly in the early hours, in the silence that blankets the world, where dreams linger in the borderlands of the night.
“Honey Smacks, please,” Peter says, rummaging in the drawer of utensils for a spoon and then plopping down in a chair to await service.
I get it myself. There were never foods like this in the palace until Peter was born. At his age, I remember asking Lucio for a slice of panettone for breakfast on the second day of Christmas and being told that it had all been thrown away. While I sip my espresso, I stare at the carton of milk beside Peter’s bowl. Fresh from the papal pastures at Castel Gandolfo. The first pangs of reality are returning. I wonder if Leo has tracked down Simon. The distant sound of church bells means it’s half past seven. Two and a half hours until our meeting with Mignatto.
“Can I go kick with the boys?” Peter asks when he finishes his bowl and buses it to the nuns for rinsing.
The pre-seminary boys normally let him join their games of pickup soccer, a perk of being the teacher’s son, but Peter doesn’t seem to realize how early it is.
“There’s somewhere we need to go,” I say. “We can kick the ball together on the way.”
* * *
BELOW THE PALACE, IN the flower beds shaped like John Paul’s coat of arms, teams of papal landscapers are at work early, trying to finish before the midday sun. The head gardener, who has kids himself, smiles to see us dribble down the steep paths. It’s a cruel place to teach a boy soccer. The grade is so steep that on stormy days the stairs that connect the paths become waterfalls. Learning to control a ball here is like learning to swim by treading upstream in the Tiber. But Peter is stubborn, and like his uncle he seems to prefer his foes implacable. After months of losing the war against gravity, and chasing runaway balls down to the foot of the basilica, he is now able to hop down the slope on one foot, tapping the ball with the other to slow its momentum. His facility makes another gardener give a hand gesture meaning “excellent.” Soccer is the other thing we all have in common here.
“Where are we going?” Peter asks, buoyant.
But when I point at the building, he groans.
The museums don’t open until nine, but since Vatican offices open at eight in order to close for the day by one, I have only half an hour to see the exhibit in private before the curators show up. I need that time to prepare myself for Mignatto’s questions.
The main doors are locked. So are the doors from the curators’ quarters, which are also guarded. But Ugo showed me a convoluted back way, down to the art restorers’ underground laboratories, around a bend, then back up through a service elevator. Soon Peter and I are traveling down a line of galleries I didn’t see yesterday. He’s immediately mesmerized by the sight of an empty boom lift that has been used to hang a giant painting of the Deposition. Nearby is an even bigger canvas, wide enough to block a highway underpass, showing the disciples staring at Jesus’ shroud in an empty burial cave. Gospel verses are stenciled on the wall here, parts of them in bold, and something catches my eye.
Mark 15:46: Joseph bought a linen shroud, and taking Jesus down, wrapped him in the linen shroud.
Matthew 27:59: Joseph took the body, and wrapped it in a clean linen shroud.
Luke 23:53: Joseph took the body of Jesus down and wrapped it in a linen shroud.
Then an extraordinary finale. The sight of it stops me midstep. This is surely the first time any such idea has ever been advanced in the pope’s museums. Across the gallery is a huge reproduction from the Diatessaron page describing Jesus’ death and burial. The smudges have been removed, so the full Greek text is visible, but a haze remains, showing that the Alogi censored John’s version of events. It is here, far from the other gospel citations, that John’s text is stenciled on the wall. Ugo has separated the black sheep of the gospels from the other three. And to drive home the point, he has bolded very different words:
John 19:38–40: So Joseph came and took away Jesus’ body. Nicodemus also, who had at first come to him by night, came bringing a mixture of myrrh and aloes, about a hundred pounds’ weight. They took the body of Jesus, and bound it in linen cloths with the spices, as is the burial custom of the Jews.
I?
??m caught by surprise. Ugo has taken our gospel lessons and mounted them for the world to see. Everything he highlighted in John’s version shows how John is different from the other gospels. How the other three speak in unison while John is hard to square with the rest. Ugo has also made a brazen point by mounting this page from the Diatessaron: he seems to be saying that even nineteen centuries ago, in the time of the Alogi, Christians knew John was not quite writing history.
This makes me deeply uncomfortable. Ugo was supposed to be working on the history of the Shroud. I thought our gospel lessons were building toward something else, some theory of how the Shroud left Jerusalem for Edessa. What I see here is far more controversial. The Church believes that some minds aren’t ready to be exposed to some ideas. What’s good for the shepherd may not be good for the flock. Lay Catholics, lacking scriptural training, may leave this gallery with the impression that John is a second-class gospel or should be thrown out entirely for changing the facts. Everything Ugo has mounted here is technically correct, but he’s taken a huge risk by displaying it so publicly and leaving the viewer to draw his own inference.
I lead Peter quickly through the galleries we saw yesterday. We have only twenty minutes to see what else Ugo has in store.
Finally we reach an area almost at the end of the museums, where the galleries feed into the Sistine Chapel. Before us hangs a sheet of black plastic, thick as canvas, covering the next entryway. Peter hugs his soccer ball defensively. He peers into the darkness beyond the curtain as if it’s the closet where he huddled with Sister Helena.
I pull back the sheet. The air has a claylike smell. Long sets of makeshift walls have been raised in front of the windows, blocking the natural light. The floor is white with dust. Something’s wrong. The exhibit opens in three days, but the preparations seem to stop right here.
All around us are ornate display cases that seem to have been treated no better than sawhorses. The glass tops are floured with particles of drywall mud. Electrical cords are coiled on them. I swipe my hand across the surface and see a manuscript by Evagrius Scholasticus, a Christian historian who lived two hundred years before Charlemagne. The page in front of me tells how Edessa was attacked by a Persian army but was saved by its miraculous image of Jesus. Beside him is Bishop Eusebius, the father of Church history, writing in 300 AD, who says he’s been to the archives of Edessa himself and has seen the letters Jesus traded with the city’s king. Peter, noticing that the texts are in Greek, lights up. “Those words are long!” he says.
Each page looks like an endless string of letters because these manuscripts were written before the invention of spaces between words. They are mystical, mystifying documents, so old that the world reflected in them is unlike ours and reminiscent of the world of the gospels instead. Mysterious things seem commonplace. The boundaries of history, fantasy, and hearsay are muddy. But Ugo’s point is clear: by a very early date, intellectuals across the Christian East had heard of a powerful relic in Edessa that originated in Jesus himself.
I look around for some sign of what happened here. Of why nothing’s been finished. The net impression is that the exhibit underwent a sudden change. The individual parts are familiar, but the thrust is different and strange.
“Come on,” I say, waving Peter toward the next hall, hoping to find it in better shape.
But a display case has been pushed into the entryway, as if the workmen were unsure which gallery it was meant for. Inside the case is a small, unimpressive manuscript that records a sermon given a thousand years ago. The occasion for the sermon is a miraculous rescue: a Byzantine army marched to the gates of Edessa, seized the mystical image of Christ from Muslim hands, and carried it eight hundred miles across the Turkish highlands and desert before leading it triumphantly into the Orthodox capital of Constantinople.
I pause and look more carefully. This isn’t what I thought Ugo had discovered. This sermon was given in 944 AD, long before the Crusades. Which means we Catholics didn’t rescue the Shroud from Edessa. Before the first Catholic knight ever went crusading, the Orthodox had already rescued it and moved it out of Edessa. So then, how did we get it?
The next gallery is the end of the line. The walls are painted dark gray, but as my eyes adjust, I notice shapes. Glossy silhouettes of ships and armies, domes and steeples. An ancient city skyline at night, painted in a dozen shades of black. There’s nothing else but a single, small display case, and behind it a pair of doors that lead to the next corridor. When Peter rushes forward to test the doors, he finds them locked. Perhaps the Diatessaron is being kept back there. I turn back toward the display case. Inside is a solitary sheet of parchment, written in Greek, with a regal-looking red seal. It is dated 1205 AD.
A knot forms in my stomach. This is out of sequence. Ugo’s Latin manuscripts, two galleries earlier, were older than this parchment. The Greek manuscripts I just saw were far older. 1205 reverses direction. Ugo must be introducing something new. A different line of argument. And 1205 hovers uncomfortably close to an event in Eastern history that this exhibit must never, ever invoke.
The placard beside the parchment says I’m looking at a document from the Vatican Secret Archives. A letter sent to the pope by the Byzantine imperial family.
An ache travels through my body. There’s only one reason the Eastern emperor would’ve written the pope in 1205.
Words flit by under my eyes. Thieves. Relics. Unforgivable. I’m filled by a leaden sensation that makes it impossible to turn away. This can’t be.
Finally my eyes find the lines that must’ve thrilled Ugo when he first discovered this letter, and horrified him when Simon explained what they meant.
They stole the most sacred relic of all. The linen cloth in which our Lord Jesus was wrapped after his death.
I recognize the image on the wall now. I understand why Ugo had it painted black. This is why Ugo was concerned about the Crusades. This is how we got the Shroud. We didn’t rescue it from Edessa. We stole it from Constantinople.
* * *
1204 IS THE DARKEST year in the history between the Catholic and Orthodox Churches. Far darker than the year of our schism, a century and a half earlier. In 1204, Catholic knights sailed for the Holy Land, bound for the Fourth Crusade. But they stopped first, on their way, in Constantinople. Their intention was to combine forces with the Christian armies of the East, to join their Orthodox brethren in the greatest of all religious wars. But what they found in the Orthodox capital was unlike anything they had seen in the Catholic West. Constantinople was then the stronghold of Christendom. Ever since the fall of Rome it had been the protector of all Europe. Not once had its walls been conquered by barbarian invaders, so within those walls lay a thousand years of unspoiled wealth. Treasures from the ancient world, side by side with the greatest collection of Christian relics that has ever existed on earth.
In the West, meantime, it had been eight centuries since the fall of ancient Rome, eight centuries of barbarian invasions and foreign overlords and chaos. We Catholics were poor. We were hungry. We were weary. We owed money on the ships we sailed in and couldn’t afford the contract on our own holy war. Seeing the riches of the Orthodox capital, Catholic knights made the greatest mistake in the thousand-year schism between our Churches.
Instead of sailing to the Holy Land, they attacked Constantinople. They raped Orthodox women and killed Orthodox priests. They put fellow Christians to the sword and burned whole swaths of the city, erasing the magnificent library of Constantinople off the face of the earth. In Hagia Sophia, the Saint Peter’s of the East, Catholics put a prostitute on the throne. And when the emperor couldn’t pay the huge ransom we demanded as the price of his city’s freedom—not even by melting his gold—we broke into Orthodox churches and looted his city’s relics.
The combined treasures of all Western churches today are only a pale reflection of what lay in those reliquaries. For centuries the oldest Christian cities
of the East had sent their most precious objects to Constantinople for protection from our enemies. Imperial armies safeguarded them and patriarchs called on God to protect them. Byzantine civilization itself became a life-support system for the massive religious treasury at its heart. Which we Catholics now proceeded to pillage.
That is the skyline on this gallery wall. Constantinople in the endless darkness of 1204.
Western Catholics today don’t understand the permanence of this wound. But another moment in history illustrates it well. Two and a half centuries later, long after Catholics had come and gone from Constantinople, Muslim armies arrived in their place. Orthodox bishops, faced with the extinction of their civilization, were forced to ask for help. They traveled west and negotiated a humiliating pact with the pope. But when they returned home, their own flock threw them out. The ordinary men and women of the Orthodox Church had made their choice. They would rather die at the hands of Muslims than owe their lives to Catholics.
So Constantinople fell. Istanbul was born. And to this day, if you asked an Orthodox what sealed the split between our two Churches, he would grit his teeth and say, with the knife still jiggling in his back: 1204.
The letter before my eyes resurrects the horror of that year. Ugo has discovered the most damning fact I can imagine. It’s no longer a mystery how the Shroud arrived in medieval France. It’s no longer a mystery why it seemed to have no past. We Catholics had every reason to forget where it came from. Because we stole it from the Orthodox.
I am speechless that Ugo had the audacity to mount such a thing on these walls, under the pope’s own roof. It is a shocking confession of Catholic sin. Though no one can be more familiar than I am with Ugo’s allegiance to the truth, and his insistence on presenting the facts at any cost, even I am stunned. If ever there was time to paper over a discovery and hew to a respectful silence, surely it was now. I wish that I could be moved by Ugo’s bravery. Instead I am shocked by his indifference to the cost.