He still had no clear idea how many people lived in C-2. The houses had many rooms, like beehives, and he couldn’t guess how many of them were inhabited. Which meant he also couldn’t estimate how tiny, or not so tiny, the proportion of Christians was. Maybe one per cent. Maybe a hundredth of one per cent. He just didn’t know.
Still, even a hundred Christians was an amazing achievement in a place like this, more than enough to accomplish great things. The church was coming ahead. The building, that is. It had a roof now, sensibly sloped, watertight and utilitarian. His polite requests for a spire had been deflected (‘we do all other thing, plea??e, before’); he sensed that they would deflect it for ever.
As a compensation, the Oasans had promised to decorate the ceiling. Kurtzberg had once shown them a photograph of a place they called, almost unintelligibly, the ??i?????ine ?apel. Inspired by the handiwork of Michelangelo, the Oasans were keen to create something similar, except they suggested that all the incidents should be from the life of Jesus rather than from the Old Testament. Peter was all for it. Apart from giving the church some much-needed colour, it would give him an insight into the unique nature of these people’s perception.
Lover Five, as always, was quickest off the mark, showing him her sketch of the scene she proposed to paint. It was the one outside Jesus’s tomb, where Salome and the two Marys find the stone rolled away. Evidently, this story was already familiar to her. Peter couldn’t guess which of the four gospel accounts Kurtzberg had used, whether it was Luke’s ‘two men in dazzling raiment’ story, Matthew’s angel descending from Heaven with earthquake accompaniment, Mark’s lone young man sitting on a rock, or John’s pair of angels inside the tomb. Whichever it was, Lover Five had rejected these characters and replaced them with the risen Christ. Her mourners, daintily proportioned and clad in hooded robes like herself, confronted a scarecrow-thin figure wearing a loincloth. This Jesus stood erect with arms spread wide, an eye-shaped hole in each palm of His starfish-shaped hands. Above His neck, where His head should be, Lover Five had left a blank space surrounded by a porcupine profusion of lines, to indicate radiance from an incandescent light source. On the ground between Him and the women lay a bagel-like object which Peter realised after a minute must be the discarded crown of thorns.
‘No longer dead,’ Lover Five explained, or maybe that was the title of her drawing.
Lover Five may have been first with her sketch, but she was not the first to get a painting mounted on the church ceiling. That distinction belonged to Jesus Lover Sixty-Three, an extremely shy individual who communicated mainly in gestures, even among his (her?) own people. The Oasans were scrupulous in their respect for others, and gossip was not their style, but Peter gradually got the message that Lover Sixty-Three was disfigured or malformed in some way. Nothing specific was said, only a general sense that Lover Sixty-Three was a pathetic character, soldiering on as though he was normal when everyone could see he wasn’t. Peter tried his best, without staring, to see what the problem might be. He noted that the flesh of Lover Sixty-Three’s face appeared less raw, less glistening, than other people’s. It looked as if it had been dusted with talc, or briefly cooked, like fresh chicken whose pinkness fades to white after a few seconds in boiling water. In Peter’s eyes, this made him, if anything, a little easier to behold. But to his neighbours, it was evidence of a pitiable disability.
Whatever Lover Sixty-Three’s handicap was, it didn’t affect his artistic skill. His painted panel, already affixed to the church ceiling directly above the pulpit, was the sole finished contribution so far, and any subsequent offerings would have to be impressive indeed to equal its quality. It glowed like a stained-glass skylight, and had an uncanny ability to remain visible even when the sun was on the wane and the church’s interior grew dim, as though the pigments were luminescent in their own right. It combined bold Expressionist colours with the intricate, exquisitely balanced composition of a medieval altarpiece. The figures were approximately half life-sized, crowded onto a rectangle of velvety cloth that was bigger than Jesus Lover Sixty-Three.
His choice of Biblical scene was Thomas the Doubter’s meeting with his fellow disciples when they tell him they’ve seen Jesus. A most unusual subject to tackle: Peter was almost certain that no Christian painter had ever attempted it before. Compared to the more sensational finger-in-the-wound encounter with the resurrected Christ, this earlier episode was devoid of visual drama: an ordinary man in an ordinary room voices his scepticism about what a bunch of other ordinary men have just told him. But in Lover Sixty-Three’s conception, it was spectacular. The disciples’ robes – all in different colours, of course – were scorched with tiny black crucifixes, as though a barrage of laser beams from the radiant Christ had sizzled brands onto their clothing. Speech bubbles issued from their slitty mouths, like trails of vapour. Inside each bubble was a pair of disembodied hands, in the same starfish design as Lover Five had used. And in the centre of each starfish, the eye-shaped hole, adorned with an impasto glob of pure crimson which could either be a pupil or a drop of blood. Thomas’s robe was monochrome, unmarked, and his speech bubble was a sober brown. It contained no hands, no images of any kind, only a screed of calligraphy, incomprehensible but elegant, like Arabic.
‘This is very beautiful,’ Peter had said to Jesus Lover Sixty-Three when the painting was formally delivered.
Lover Sixty-Three lowered his head. Assent, embarrassment, acknowledgement, pensiveness, pleasure, pain, who knew?
‘It also reminds us of a very important truth about our faith,’ said Peter. ‘A truth that’s especially important in a place like this, situated so very far away from where Christianity began.’
Lover Sixty-Three stooped lower still. Perhaps his head weighed too heavy on his neck.
‘Jesus allowed Thomas to put his finger into His wounds,’ said Peter, ‘because He understood that some people cannot believe without proof. It’s a natural human response.’ Peter hesitated, wondering if the word ‘human’ needed qualification, then decided it must be obvious by now that he regarded the Oasans as no less human than himself. ‘But Jesus was aware that it would not be possible for everyone, everywhere, forever afterward, to see and touch Him the way Thomas did. So He said, “Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.” And that’s us, my friend.’ He laid a hand gingerly on Lover Sixty-Three’s shoulder. ‘You and me, and all of us here.’
‘Ye??,’ said Lover Sixty-Three. For him, that constituted fulsome conversation. A group of other Jesus Lovers, who’d accompanied him to the church for the delivery of the painting, made trembling motions with their shoulders. Peter realised that this was probably their equivalent of laughter. Laughter! So they did have a sense of humour after all! He was constantly learning important things of this kind, things which made him feel that the gulf between him and these people was growing shorter with every sunrise.
Lover Sixty-Three’s painting was solemnly raised and affixed to the ceiling, inaugurating the church’s devotional display. The next day, it was joined by Jesus Lover Twenty’s interpretation of Mary Magdalene being purged of her seven devils. The devils – ectoplasmic vapours with vaguely feline shapes – exploded from her torso like fireworks, ignited by Jesus, who stood behind Mary in a spread-armed pose. It was a cruder piece of work than Lover Sixty-Three’s, but no less strong, and it, too, glowed with an unfeasible luminescence.
The next day, no one brought a painting, but they did bring Peter a bed, to replace the bundle of rags and nets he’d been sleeping on since his hammock had come down. The Oasans had accepted his hammock unquestioningly, and would have been quite prepared to worship with it dangling in their midst, but Peter had cut it down when he judged the church was so close to finished now that the hammock marred its dignity. The Oasans, noting that their pastor did not necessarily require to hang suspended in order to be comfortable, had quietly constructed a bed for him, according to their usual bathtub/coffin template, albeit larger, shallower and less crammed with swaddly cotton. It was carried across the scrubland to the church, ushered through the door and installed right behind the pulpit, without any pretence that it was anything other than a bed. During the first prayer meeting after its arrival, Peter joked that if he got too tired while speaking, he could always just fall backwards and have a sleep. His congregation nodded indulgently. To them, it was a sensible idea.
On the morning that Grainger came to fetch him, Peter awoke to anticipation. Anticipation of the rain. For the natives, this was not unusual; rain occurred at predictable intervals, and they’d had a lifetime to accustom themselves to its rhythms. But Peter was not so attuned, and the rains always caught him by surprise. Until now. He stirred in his bed, slippery with sweat, thick-headed, squinting from the window-shaped rectangle of light that warmed his chest. Yet, dazed as he was, he knew at once that he must lose no time coming to the surface or trying to recall his dreams or continuing to rack his brains for a pronounceable alternative to ‘Baptist’, but that he should get up and go outside.