‘Ye??, keep your prophe??y, plea??e.’ She said it neither playfully nor imploringly, as far as he could tell. She was matter-of-fact and, although she spoke no louder than other Oasans, emphatic. Or maybe he was just imagining that. Maybe he was imagining everything, perceiving differences that weren’t there, in his keenness to get a grip on these people. He and Bea had read an article once, in some magazine or other, which explained that cats were not really individuals, despite what their owners liked to think. All the distinctive noises and eccentric behaviours that your cat exhibited were merely standard-issue genetic features built into that particular sub-breed. A horrible article, written by a smug little journalist with a receding hairline. Bea had been thoroughly shaken by it. And it took a lot to shake Bea.
‘Tell me, Jesus Lover Five,’ said Peter. ‘The person you love who makes you sad, the one who doesn’t believe in Jesus. Is he your son?’
‘My . . . brother.’
‘And have you other brothers and sisters?’
‘One alive. One in the earth.’
‘And your mother and father?’
‘In the earth.’
‘Do you have children of your own?’
‘God plea??e no.’
Peter nodded, as if he understood. He knew he was not much the wiser, and that he still had no proof of Lover Five’s gender.
‘Please forgive my stupidity, Jesus Lover Five, but are you male or female?’
She didn’t reply, only cocked her head to one side. Her facial cleft did not contort, he’d noticed, when she was confused: not like Jesus Lover One’s. He wondered if this meant that she was smarter, or just more guarded.
‘You just referred . . . You just told me of your brother. You called him your brother, not your sister. What makes him your brother and not your sister?’
She considered this for a few seconds. ‘God.’
He tried again. ‘Are you your brother’s brother or your brother’s sister?’
Again she pondered. ‘For you, I will name me with the word brother,’ she said. ‘Becau??e the word ??i?????er i?? very hard ???o ??peak.’
‘But if you could say “sister” more easily, is that what you would say?’
She shifted her posture, so that the robe again covered her groin. ‘I would ??ay nothing.’
‘In the story of Adam and Eve,’ he pressed on, ‘God created man and woman. Male and female. Two different kinds of people. Are there two different kinds here too?’
‘We are all differen???,’ she said.
Peter smiled and looked away. He knew when he was beaten. Through a hole in the wall, which in the very near future would be a beautiful stained-glass window, he spied, in the distance, a procession of Oasans carrying nets full of bricks.
A thought occurred to him, and, along with that thought, the realisation that he hadn’t asked anyone at USIC to show him the Oasans’ old settlement, the one they’d mysteriously abandoned. It was one of those oversights which Bea, if she’d been here, would never have been guilty of. The mere mention of a place called C-2 would have made her curious about C-1. Honestly, what was wrong with him? Beatrice, on the rare occasions she became exasperated with these sorts of lapses, would accuse him of having one of his ‘Korsakoff moments’. That was a joke, of course. They both knew that alcohol had nothing to do with it.
‘Lover Five?’ he said.
She didn’t respond. Oasans didn’t waste words. You could take it for granted that they were listening, waiting for you to get around to the part of your question they could answer.
‘When Kurtzberg was with you,’ he continued, ‘in the previous . . . in the settlement where you lived before, the one near the USIC base, did you build a church there?’
‘No,’ she replied.
‘Why not?’
She thought about it for a minute. ‘No,’ she said.
‘Where did you worship?’
‘Father Kur?????berg came ???o u?? in our hou??e,’ she said. ‘The whole day, he go from one hou??e ???o another hou??e ???o another hou??e. We wai??? for him. We wai??? a long ???ime. Then he come, read from the Book, we pray, then he go.’
‘That’s one way of doing it,’ said Peter diplomatically. ‘A very good way. Jesus himself said, “Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.”’
‘We ??aw never Je??u??,’ said Jesus Lover Five. ‘?ur? i?? be???er.’
Peter smiled, unable to suppress a surge of pride. He sincerely hoped that a physical church would, indeed, be better.
‘But where did Kurtzberg live?’ he pushed on. ‘I mean, where did he sleep, while he was here with you?’ He imagined Kurtzberg swaddled in a bathtub-shaped cocoon, sweating all night into fancy pyjamas. As a short man, the pastor would at least have been the right size to fit into an Oasan bed.
‘Father Kur?????berg have car,’ said Jesus Lover Five.
‘Car?’
‘Big car.’ With her hands, she sketched a shape in the air: a crude rectangle that did not suggest any particular kind of vehicle.
‘You mean he would just drive off to spend the night . . . uh . . . to sleep at the USIC base?’
‘No. Car have bed. Car have food. Car have everything.’
Peter nodded. Of course. It was the obvious way to tackle the challenge. And no doubt such a vehicle – maybe even the same vehicle Kurtzberg had used – would have been made available for him, too, if he’d requested it. But he’d deliberately decided not to go down that route, and he didn’t regret it. There was, he sensed, a distance between Kurtzberg and his flock, a barrier which no amount of mutual respect and fellowship had been able to remove. The Oasans regarded their first pastor as an alien, and not just in the literal sense. Camping out in his car, Kurtzberg signalled that he was perpetually ready to switch on the ignition, press the accelerator and drive away.
‘Where do you think Kurtzberg is now?’
Lover Five was silent for a while. The other Jesus Lovers were very near now, the tread of their soft boots making only a slight noise on the soil. The bricks were no doubt heavy but the Oasans bore them without grunting or flinching.
‘Here,’ said Lover Five at last, waving her hand in front of her. She seemed to be indicating the world in general.
‘You think he’s alive?’
‘I believe. God willing.’
‘When he . . . uh . . . ’ Peter paused to compose a question that was specific enough for her to answer. ‘Did he say goodbye? I mean, when you saw him last. When he was leaving, did he say, “I’m going away and not coming back”, or did he say “I’ll see you next week” or . . . what did he say?’
Again she was silent. Then: ‘No goodbye.’
‘God ble?? our reunion, Father Pe???er,’ a voice called to him.
And so the Oasans came to build their church, or, as they put it, their ?ur?. Peter hoped one day to wean them off that word in favour of another. Here these folk were, constructing a church brick by brick, and yet they couldn’t pronounce the name of what they were labouring so devotedly to make. There was something unfair about that.
Lately, as often as possible without overselling the idea, Peter used the phrase ‘our haven’ instead of ‘church’. ‘We build our haven,’ he’d say (no sibilants at all!), or he would link the two words together in the same sentence. And, mindful to nip any misunderstandings in the bud, he took care to explain that ‘haven’ was different from ‘Heaven’. Both places offered a safe, welcoming home for those who’d accepted Jesus into their heart, but one was a physical locale and the other was a state of eternal spiritual union with God.
A few of the Oasans had started using the word; not many. Most preferred to say ‘?ur?’ even though it convulsed their bodies. And the ones who did say ‘haven’ pronounced it no differently from ‘Heaven’, despite reassuring him that they understood the difference.