I chuckled softly, a grubby, unshaven, smelly figure dressed in ragged clothes. I closed my eyes. Images drifted into my mind from Epiros and Corfu, Albania and Macedonia, Illyria and the Peloponnese, melting and merging together as I began to dream.
But then, splash, an apple fell into the water tank.
I started slightly, then rolled onto my side and prepared to settle down again.
Splash! A second apple hit the water. I sat up, realizing that there wasn’t a tree overhanging the water tank, so someone was throwing the apples in.
A young dark-haired village woman was standing watching me a few metres off, holding another apple ready in her hand. I gaped stupidly at her. She smiled.
‘George Simling!’ she said in perfect Illyrian English, with just a trace of an Antipodean twang. ‘What on earth are you doing here?’
It was Marija.
She laughed. ‘Don’t worry George, you haven’t seen a ghost. I live here now, with my Uncle Tomo. Well, he’s my mother’s cousin, but I call him my uncle. I got into some things back in IC which were hard to get out of…’
‘The AHS by any chance? Me too.’
‘Yes. I’m sorry. It was me that got you into that, wasn’t it?’
I shrugged: ‘It’s not your fault that I wanted to impress you.’
‘Did you?’ she seemed quite genuinely surprised. ‘I always thought you rather looked down on me. You never seemed to want to stay in my company.’
I covered my face with my hands. I felt that dull ache pressing behind my eyes. This had been the shameful beginning of Lucy’s betrayal. Marija had offered me her friendship. I chose instead – I deliberately chose – a confused, barely awake robot to play the part of my girlfriend. What would Marija think of me if she knew that?
‘Are you alright?’ Marija asked.
I took my hands away from my face.
‘Yes, just… tired.’
‘Come up to my uncle’s place. You can have a wash and something to eat, a sleep if you want. You look as if you could do with some sleep.’
‘I could.’
‘Come on then, it’s this way. Where were you heading George? Where have you come from?’
I made a gesture of pushing the question away. I had laid down that burden when I climbed into the water tank. I didn’t want to pick it up again so soon.
She laughed. ‘Okay. Tell me later. Now listen, I’d better warn you Uncle Tomo is a priest. Don’t worry, he’s no fanatic. He’s a pragmatist. That’s the way things tend to be in Montenegro. Okay it’s an Orthodox theocracy like Russia or Serbia or the Greek states, but our bishop is no zealot. We keep ourselves out of trouble and get on with life as best we can. I quite like that. I used to be much too keen to change everything, I think, as if I thought no one else had ever tried before.’
62
I had always felt daunted by the Orthodox priests with their long beards and robes, but I liked Marija’s uncle at once. He was a small, sharp, wiry, humorous man with a narrow face and piercing blue eyes that gave him a slightly Irish appearance. His wife Nada (they had no children) was also immediately likeable, almost a female version of her husband, thin and wiry with a sly, ironic smile. Both of them had lived all their adult lives in this small Montenegrin village, but they were open to the wider world and seemed genuinely pleased by my arrival. A bath was run for me, spare clothing was found for me, a bed was prepared for me to take a siesta. While I sat in the cool bath, good wine was being fetched from the cellar by Aunt Nada and a lamb was taken from its mother’s side in my honour and slaughtered by Uncle Tomo himself. I had the pleasant illusion that I had come home.
But it was harder when we were all sitting at table and Marija and her aunt and uncle were all pressing me for the story of my travels.
‘It must be two years now,’ said Marija, who couldn’t conceive of being anything other than purposeful. ‘Where have you been all this time? What have you been doing?’
‘Well,’ I began. ‘First of all I went down into Greece and then…’
It was very hard to make a convincing narrative without Lucy in it, but I didn’t think I would retain this warm welcome if I was honest with them and admitted to them that I had run away from Illyria with an animated sex toy and then engineered its destruction.
‘…I got a job with a farmer named Zhavkhov,’ I said. ‘I enjoyed working there, but unfortunately his daughter started getting a bit too fond of me. She was nice enough but… well, her attentions were getting rather insistent, and…’
‘And so you ran and ran until your clothes were in rags and you stank like a tramp,’ said Marija tartly.
I had hoped to make the story about Zhavkhov and Leta into something amusing and light-hearted, something that would demonstrate my credentials as a real warm-blooded human being. It seemed Marija had not been fooled.
I turned to Uncle Tomo, anxious to change the subject.
‘Can you tell me, because I’ve always wondered, what’s the difference between the Orthodox and the Catholic church?’
Uncle Tomo smiled, ‘Well, there are many differences. For one thing, if I was a Catholic priest, I would not be married to Nada here.’
‘But what is the difference, you know, in actual belief?’
The priest chuckled, ‘Actually a single word, the Latin word filioque, which the Western church inserted into the creed. It means and the son. The West maintained that the Holy Ghost proceeded from the Father and the Son. We in the East hold firmly to the view that the Holy Ghost proceeds only from the Father, albeit through the son. Of course there were other factors too, but that was the doctrinal difference that led to the schism back in 1054.’
He looked at me, smiling, a hint of a twinkle in his eye. Was he anticipating my incredulity, or did he himself find these things hard to take seriously?
Marija intervened, ‘You see, Uncle, for people like me and George brought up in the City, it’s hard enough to even imagine that such entities as the Holy Ghost or the Son are real, let alone feel so confident of their existence that we could think of discussing their precise relationship. Do you think any of your parishioners understand the doctrinal difference between Catholic and Orthodox?’
Uncle Tomo beamed: ‘No. Not one, I shouldn’t think.’
‘But they all hate Catholics like the plague,’ said Nada, with her sly smile.
‘Oh yes,’ agreed Tomo, laughing, ‘they hate them much worse than Muslims or Bogomili or even atheists!’
Perhaps he wouldn’t have laughed quite so easily if he had seen with his own eyes the full horror of the Holy Wars, but still, the laughter of Uncle Tomo and his wife was infectious – and both Marija and I joined in.
‘But as to the question of belief,’ said Uncle Tomo, ‘you know you City people have a completely different conception of it than we do. You will not believe in anything unless it is proved to you, will you?’
‘Well,’ said Marija, ‘science climbed a long way by only using building blocks that were properly tried and tested.’
‘Of course, unquestionably,’ said her uncle, ‘but our idea of belief is completely different. For us it is a matter of will. Of course it is difficult to believe in the Resurrection, of course it is difficult to believe in the Trinity. What evidence is there? But we see that as a challenge. We struggle to make ourselves believe.’