“Poor Amina!” she cries. “But is it not a blessing that she didn’t live to witness her only heir come to this? Oh, but now my precious granddaughter and daughter-in-law are paying for our sins! When will it end?”
Katerine gives no indication of recognizing me either; instead, she looks suspiciously at the monk seated to her left, Albrecht Bosch, who is typing madly on his keyboard with ink-stained fingers. Bosch weeps profusely, as a father weeps for a son, and he pleads in vain at the screen:
“No! No! No!”
Albrecht Bosch thought he had understood Ott Bowles’ suffering, and that, by sharing his own sorrows with him, had shown him the way. He had been there for Ott as a friend, as the father he would never be in place of the father who never was; yet in recent months the letters and telephone calls went unanswered, and now his urgent e-mail messages are being left unanswered as well, begging Ott to free Sarah and me and return home to his family in Buffalo. From his stool in the monastery, Bosch frees another of these supplications into the ether of the Internet and looks frantically at his watch; it is too late, the time for Albrecht Bosch’s final appeal has passed, leaving him alone again in a world that had never really welcomed him.
Sitting on the stools next to Bosch, Tad Bowles and Barratte Rabun follow the drama on their computers in disbelief, each concerned not for their son but for the difficulties that will be visited upon their own lives by his behavior. Tad’s preoccupation is his reputation:
“My name will be forever associated with this outrage!” he bellows.
Tad is being humiliated by his own son, and, like his father before him, who was humiliated by his son in the bedroom of a lover, he vows with all his heart and soul never to forgive Ott this shame. In his rage, he tosses his computer onto the altar table at the feet of the other humiliated Son and walks out into the rain. Only when Otto Bowles’ name has been replaced by a number, and then only when that number is to be erased from the Book of Life, will Tad reconsider this vow and seek to reclaim that which he has disowned; but by then he will discover, as did his own father, that what he disowned had long since disowned him.
Barratte Rabun, too, is consumed by names, but hers is a different complaint-she mourns an opportunity lost to resurrect a name rather than the urgent need to bury one. That name, Rabun, has now been soiled beyond all recognition, and dirtied with it is her dream of the family that lived so long ago breathing once again within the bodies of its children and grandchildren. She beseeches the heavens:
“How? How could I have lost them again? Twice in the same lifetime!”
The computer in her lap, where once she cradled this precious dream filled with such hope, sends back a message that the dream is indeed lost forever; and that message confirms for Barratte Rabun what her cousin Amina had understood and explained long ago-that the mercy of God will never shed its light upon the Rabuns of Kamenz. Barratte closes her computer and throws it into the fire. She will not grant the unforgiving God of that perverse, meaningless relic on the altar table another moment of satisfaction.
The stool at the apex of the semicircle sits vacant, and next to it sits Holden Hurley, wearing orange prison coveralls beneath his brown robe, smirking from ear to ear as if he is playing a computer game and winning with every move. Events have unfolded in ways even his grand dreams could not have predicted, lifting him higher and higher toward his goal. The scandal of Educate-for-Tomorrow has shoved Hurley’s fascist drama onto the front page of every major newspaper, and into the lead segment of every news broadcast and talk show. Supporters have flooded the airwaves with words of support, and the mails with money; racist thugs around the world, emboldened by the new attention, have turned upon Jews and blacks in a giddy frenzy, torching their homes, businesses, and places of worship. Otto Bowles, the indispensable zealot toiling in the shadows, has secured for Hurley a place in the miserable history of the Holocaust by offering up as a blood sacrifice the family of the Jew who helped put Hurley behind bars.
Next to Hurley in the chapel sit my poor parents, eyes transfixed upon their computers in anguish and disbelief. They do not even notice me standing beside them. How can one begin to describe the agony of parents witnessing the murder of their own child and their own granddaughter? In their grief-stricken faces atop Cudi Dagh, I see the unfathomable joy of my first moments of life-the jubilant astonishment and wonder that rises up from the tender vulnerability of birth to declare again for a cynical world the existence of unconditional love. I could not bear the gift of that love as I grew older; I convinced myself I was not worthy of receiving it, even as I recognized it emanating from me with the birth of my own daughter. Yet here it is again, pouring forth from the shattered faces of my parents, flailing itself against the computer screens in a futile attempt to shield me from harm, to protect the dying object of an infinite grace. As if in a dream, all their hurts and hatreds melt away at that instant; the excesses of their marriage and divorce, the drinking and adultery, the intolerance, prejudice, and all-consuming self-centeredness fade, for one sacred moment, into the static background of life.
The digital clocks at the bottom corners of the computer screens on the laps of the monks of Cudi Dagh all display 4:02:34 a.m., 10/17/94. The screens flicker brightly, as if they are bursting into flame, then they show me holding Sarah, bloodied and lifeless, in the dim light of the mushroom house. I am screaming without sound, as if in a silent movie. The gun drops from my fingers. Ott Bowles, with a bullet hole in his leg, slides across the floor toward the gun.
The computer screens cannot show what Ott Bowles is thinking at that moment, but I know. His soul is mine now, and we are forever one. He is thinking about Amina, Barratte, and the Rabuns of Kamenz; he is thinking about the Schriebergs and how they have been ungrateful; he is thinking about the world and how it has been merciless; he is thinking about Holden Hurley and Sam Mansour and how my husband has destroyed them; he is thinking about Tim Shelly and how I have killed him and my own child; he is thinking about how he rushed forward to help us out of the mushroom house but how I shot him down in cold blood; he is thinking about how unjust and unfair life has been.
Most of all, Otto Rabun Bowles is thinking about justice.
He knows now the documentary will never be aired, and that he will be forever misunderstood, blamed, and convicted for Tim’s and Sarah’s deaths. The Rabuns have always been misunderstood, blamed, convicted for things they did not do.
The computer screens on the laps of the monks finally show what I have been unable to accept from the moment of my arrival in Shemaya. Ott Bowles raises the gun and fires three silent shots into my chest. I slump over on top of Sarah. Moments later, police officers storm the mushroom house. They had been able to trace the e-mails after all. The computer screens go blank.
41
The giant fist of the storm pounds the roof of the monastery of Cudi Dagh, demanding that the guilty appear for sentencing. When the storm is not appeased, the mountain itself begins to quake, and the sea overtakes the summit, bursting through the door of the monastery. The one-armed Savior on the menorah breaks free from his nails and tumbles head over heels into the water, but none of the monks dare to retrieve him-and it might be that none of them care-for he alone would spare the condemned, and there is no room left in the monastery of Cudi Dagh for forgiveness.
“Find him!” I scream, but I am not searching for the fallen Savior. I am hunting for the sinner, Otto Rabun Bowles, and I burn with the desire to become the instrument of his torture and within earshot of his shrieks. The thunderclap of electricity that too gently ended his life is only the beginning of what I have planned for him.