By the thirtieth day, speech and food, company and discourse seem things of a lifetime ago. Never was so much loneliness. Here is the lone moving figure of Papias crossing the near shore, where the seabirds rise lazily before his approach and land not six paces further on, as though he will not come there. They alight and land, cawing, scuffing the sand, wing-brushing where sandflies stand. He goes with heavy heart to the path across the island, and hurries then to the place of his private grief and guilt. In this season of purge he returns to the burnt ground where stood the house of the fisher's wife Marina. His stomach turns as he approaches. He feels he might fall down, but doesn't, but in him breaks the cords in which are tied up his emotions, and his shoulders shudder. He sees the blackened stone mound of the grave of the children, and a wail is torn out from inside him like a line with jagged hook.
O Lord, hear thy servant.
O Lord, if it be thy will, send us your mercy that we might abide.
Forgive us our trespasses.
If it be thy will, send us a sign.
Forty days and nights of fasting. Forty days and nights of prayer ascending. John remains as he was in the beginning. The Apostle is as ever, some part distant, as though a portion of him is perpetually engaged elsewhere. He suffers the fast without evidence of decline. It is as if for him food and sleep have already been abandoned and the necessities of life for others are for him idle. He remains. His great age matters not. He may live for ever, or until the Lord Jesus comes for him. So it seems. In his blind silence he sits, a rock of faith. He touches the water to his lips only; they flake and scab, but he pays them no attention. His praying is like the instrument of the gifted. He knows its form and features so well that it is become his second nature. He is more than comfortable within it. He sees the words in his mind without saying them. He sees the distance between heaven and earth in terms of height and tilts his head slightly backwards as if in his darkness he will see the light coming. The prayers flow from him. Sometime he finds in himself the words of the psalms, and twenty, thirty of them flow past his mind; other times a single one recurs and repeats until it becomes like the noise of a wind blowing upwards. He prays. The forty days and nights pass over him.
18
The springtime comes all about the island as the disciples fast. It announces itself in light and air. Warm breezes play at the cave entrance. The sea sings lightly. What sign is expected, what the community seeks, has not been said. The fasting was for each not for reward, and God is not to be bargained with.
But as he rings the bell for the fortieth day, Papias feels there will be something. Something will happen. He knows it. He has food prepared for the supper after midnight. All day he feels the strange exhilaration of imminence. The disciples have come through. Though they have weakened, their faces gaunt, their flesh a yellowish hue, and the eyes of many shot red with blood, they have endured. He rings the bell as loud as possible. Let the sound peal out! Let the heavens hear! It is the final day.
He walks the shore with quickened step. The sky is perfectly blue, the light thrilling. Papias's belief in miracle is such that anything could happen. It might come from the sea or the air, he thinks. The waves themselves could stop in mid-fall and then curl back as they did for Moses, or the blue canopy overhead open, amber-fringed, and golden chariots with angel charioteers appear. Winged horses could thunder down the sky, trumpets herald the Almighty. It could be so. It could be. At any moment the Lord might come for his beloved disciple. So the day has been made lovely, so the sea glistens like polished glass.
Papias walks the full length of the curved sand to the rocks and then back again. He prays to be worthy to witness. He prays that our Lord of Infinite Mercy forgive him his sins. The tender skin of his ear wound burns with the sun. He holds a palm against it as he walks, as though to keep in something he hears. His footprints parallel those of earlier days. Birds are in the sky. He watches these, too, for the possibility of signs. Anything can be used as the language of the Lord, for he created all. Just so, even flies. The world is thus to the youth as he comes along the shore, it is charged, loaded with meaning; just beneath the surface of all is this pulsing sense of advent. It is the fortieth day.
He returns the full length of the eastern shore to where he left the handbell in the sand. He goes along the stone-way and looks back over the island edge. Not yet, he thinks. He does not come yet. But it will be soon. With light, swift stride he goes back the dry scarp to the dwelling of Danil, where rainwater brims a trough, and he dips two buckets and brings these back to the cave. He empties the water into a large earthen pot and returns to the trough with the buckets to fill again. All the time he keeps his eyes on the sky. Is the blue made thinner? Is the sky in some manner stretched? The color seems less, as though a white albumin has been pressed on to a palette and worked into the blue. Does all now not seem whiter? Is there not a milky opalescence? Look, how the distant rocks are softened in light! How pearled is the very air!
Several times, as he comes and goes with chores readying for the end of the fast, Papias thinks the moment is at hand. He stops. One time he drops to his knees so certain is he that he hears trumpets clarion. But the noon passes without event. The day remains strangely bright, but nothing more transpires.
'It will be hereafter,' he counsels himself. 'The fast will end at midnight when I ring the bell, and then, then. .' He does not finish. Although there are none listening, he does not want to say aloud the words lest he be guilty of presumption and upset the order of things.
The afternoon is long, the evening longer.
The disciples continue as before. As Papias brings to each a beaker of water, none show sign of even knowing it is the last day. They sit or kneel in silence. He wants to tell them. His mind flutters with a hundred thoughts, caged birds. It is nearly done, he wants to say, and the day shines brilliant with thanksgiving and God's glory. The hour is near. It is near at last. But Papias can do nothing but pour the water and bow and leave and visit the next.
The sun weakens. He comes inside the final hours and kneels by the Apostle. On the face of John, too, there is no sign of the nearness of the end. He is away in himself and has passed beyond the suffering of time.
Across the darkness, at last, Papias goes. Sky is million-starred, moon-lovely. He goes first to the furthest dwelling, that of Lemuel, and rings the bell. Then he hurries back along the ledge walk, where are Meletios and Simon, and beats the clapper there, then — his excitement making slip his sandals on the rocks — to Danil, Ioseph, and Eli. He cannot move quickly enough. It is as if an instant after the bell sounds the heavens may open, the stars fall away down the sky. His heart races. It will be now. They have done it; they have fasted forty days and nights and are as pure as any of God's creatures walking on the surface of the earth. They are as lights lit. From the highest point in the heavens our Lord could see them shining, and at their centre his beloved disciple.
Come. Come now.
Without word — absence from speech making the muscles of their mouths tight — without the slightest show of victory, through the glittering dark the disciples move. They gather into the cool air of the cave. John reaches out a hand for Papias.
'Help me to stand, Brother.'
Papias takes the thin fingers. The Apostle is bent down, his head low, and at first can raise only his arm above him. It is as if he has prayed himself into the earth, and his knees and torso are as a tree grown into a stone.