You won’t have heard, but a volcanic eruption has destroyed one of the most densely populated cities in Guatemala, I’m not going to attempt to spell the name of the place but it sounds like an Aztec deity. Anyway, a volcano called Santa Maria blew its stack and spewed ash and lava for hundreds of miles around. The people had 24 hours warning, which only made it worse. There were zillions of vehicles jammed onto the roads, everybody was trying to escape with as many of their possessions as they could carry. Roof racks with half a house teetering on top, bicycles with baby cots balanced on them, crazy stuff like that. Cars were trying to take shortcuts through shops, cars were trying to drive on top of other cars, trapped motorists were smashing through their own windscreens to climb out because they couldn’t open the doors, the army wanted to demolish some buildings to widen the bottlenecks but there were too many people in the way. There was nowhere for planes to land or take off, the entire region just became one vast mass grave. People with only seconds to live were filming the lava with their phones and sending the footage to their relatives overseas. And get this: THERE IS NO RESCUE EFFORT. Can you imagine that? There’s nothing and nobody to rescue. The city has ceased to exist, it’s just part of the volcano now, it’s a geological feature. All those people had so many reasons to live and now what are they? Just chemical traces.
The ash cloud is colossal and has stopped planes flying, not just over central America but all over the world. Flights had only just resumed after the bombing of Lahore Airport and now they’re grounded again. The airline that took you to the USA has gone out of business. I felt such a surge of distress when I heard that, a lurch in my gut. I remembered standing at Heathrow watching the planes take off and wondering which one was yours and looking forward to you coming back. The airline going bust seems symbolic. It’s like a sign that you won’t be able to come home.
Everywhere, things are breaking down. Institutions that have been around forever are going to the wall. We’ve seen this happening for years, I know, but it’s accelerating suddenly. And for once, it’s not just the underdogs that suffer while the elites carry on as usual. The elites are being hit just as hard. And I’m not only talking about bankruptcy. Some of the wealthiest people in America were murdered last week, dragged out of their homes and beaten to death. Nobody knows exactly why, but it happened during a power blackout in Seattle that lasted four days. All the systems that keep the city functioning ground to a halt. No pay cheques, no automatic teller machines, no cash registers, no electronic security locks, no TV, no traffic control, no petrol (I didn’t know petrol pumps need electricity to work, but apparently they do). Within 48 hours there was widespread looting and then people started killing each other.
The situation here in the UK is not so stable either. It’s got rapidly worse since you left. Sometimes I feel as though your leaving caused things to fall apart!
And there was more. And, in the backlog of previous messages, more still. An inventory of things that were going wrong in the house. Complaints about farcically difficult communications with utilities companies. The sudden impossibility of obtaining fresh eggs. Riots in Madagascar. Joshua pissing on the bed; the washing machine being too small for a queen-sized duvet; the local launderette having closed down. The cancellation of the church’s Saturday morning crèche service. Martial law in Georgia. (Georgia in the Russian Federation or Georgia in the USA? He couldn’t remember whether Bea had made this clear, and he didn’t feel like trawling through the screeds again to check.) Mirah and her husband emigrating to Iran, leaving Mirah’s ￡300 debt to Bea unpaid. A power surge that blew all the lightbulbs in the house. Government-employed ‘nutrition experts’ defending steep rises in the price of full-cream milk. Smashed windows and ‘For Sale’ signs at the Indian restaurant across the road. Bea’s morning sickness and what she was taking to suppress it. The sacking of a prominent UK government minister who, in a newspaper interview, had described Britain as ‘completely fucked’. Bea’s unrequited cravings for toffee cheesecake and for intimacy with her man. Updates on mutual acquaintances whose faces Peter could not call to mind.
But, through it all, the uncomprehending hurt that he wasn’t writing to her.
This morning, I was so frantic about you, I was sure you must have died. I’d been counting the hours until you were due back from the settlement and as soon as I figured you were back, I checked for messages every two minutes. But . . . nothing. I had visions of you dying of an exotic disease from eating something poisonous, or being murdered by the people you’re ministering to. That’s how most missionaries die, isn’t it? I couldn’t think of any other reason why you would leave me in the dark for so long. Finally I cracked and wrote to that USIC guy, Alex Grainger – and got a reply almost immediately. He says you’re fine, says you have a beard now. Can you imagine how I felt, begging a stranger for hints of how my own husband is doing? I’ve eaten many slices of humble pie in my life but that one was hard to swallow. Are you sure you’re not angry with me, deep down, for getting pregnant? It was bad of me to stop taking the Pill without telling you, I know that. Please, please forgive me. I did it out of love for you and out of fear that you would die and there’d be nothing of you left. It wasn’t a selfish thing, you must believe me. I prayed and prayed about it, trying to figure out if I was just a female hankering for offspring. But in my heart, I can’t see it. All I see is love for you and for the baby that will carry some of you into the future. OK, I broke our agreement that we would wait, and that was wrong, but remember we also had an agreement that you would never drink again and then you went AWOL from the Salford Pentecost Powerhouse and I had to pick up the pieces. I understand why you went off the rails and we got over it and it’s in the past, and I’m tremendously proud of you, but the point is that you made me a solemn promise and you broke it, and life went on and so it should. And although I hate to appear as though I’m jockeying for higher moral ground, your going on a bender in Salford wasn’t done out of love, whereas my getting pregnant was.
Anyway, enough of that. My hand is throbbing from typing this and your head is probably throbbing from having to read it. I’m sorry. I should lighten up. A workman from the window company is thumping about downstairs, fixing the bathroom. I’d given up hope; I’m ashamed to say I’d even given up praying for it. After all, I’d been told that the waiting list stretched ahead for weeks. But lo and behold: bright and early this morning, the guy showed up and said his boss had told him to shift his schedule around and do our place first. God forgets nothing!
My darling Peter, please write. It doesn’t have to be the definitive statement on everything. A few lines would make me so happy. One line even. Just say hello.
Your loving wife,
Bea
He felt feverish and dehydrated. He walked to the fridge and had a swig of water, then stood for a minute with his hot forehead pressed against the cool shell of the machine.
He sat on the edge of the bed. At his feet lay the loose pages of a Bible chapter he was adapting for his flock. Luke 3. John the Baptist announcing that there was someone coming soon ‘the latchet of whose shoes I am not worthy to unloose’. Oh, that awkward word ‘latchet’. And its even more awkward alternatives, ‘strap’ and ‘shoelace’. He’d considered ‘leather band’, but there was the additional problem that Oasans’ footwear had no straps or laces and the entire concept might require explanation, which might be more trouble than it was worth, theologically speaking. If only he could think of an equivalent detail to replace the shoe stuff with . . . ‘whose (something) I am not worthy to (something)’ . . . Obviously, to mess around with the metaphors and similes of Jesus was unacceptable, but this was John, a mere mortal, no more divine than any other missionary, his utterances no more sacred than Peter’s own. Or were they? The Oasans had made it clear that they preferred their Scripture as literal as possible, and his misguided attempt to translate ‘manna’ as ‘whiteflower’ had caused murmurs of –
‘WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING?’
He flinched. The voice – low-pitched, male and loud – had spoken right near his ear. He wheeled round. No one had entered the room. And God, surely, did not resort to four-letter words.
Dear Bea, he wrote,
I’m so sorry for my silence. I’ve been busy, true, but that’s not the reason I haven’t been writing. The real reason is hard to explain but it certainly isn’t that I’m angry with you and CERTAINLY not because I don’t love you.
This mission has turned out very different from what I anticipated. The things I expected to have a lot of trouble with have gone astonishingly smoothly but I feel out of my depth in other ways I never imagined. I assumed that I would be fighting an uphill battle to minister to the Oasans and that it would take me weeks, maybe even months, to construct even the flimsiest, most provisional bridge between these very foreign minds/hearts and the love of God awaiting them on the other side. But what has actually tested me beyond my abilities is the gulf that has opened up between you and me. I don’t mean an emotional gulf, in that my feelings for you have changed in any way. I mean a barrier that circumstances has pushed between us. Of course, physically, we are a huge distance apart. That doesn’t help. But the main thing I’m having to confront is that our relationship, until now, has totally depended on us being together. We’ve always seen and done things as a team and discussed everything as it’s come up, day by day, minute by minute – even second by second. Suddenly we’re on different paths. And your path has veered off in a frighteningly strange direction.
All these disasters that are befalling the world – the tsunamis and earthquakes and financial meltdowns or whatever – are just so alien to my life here. They don’t feel real. I’m ashamed to admit this because obviously to the people suffering through them they’re very real indeed but I have enormous trouble getting my head around them. And I very quickly reach a point where I think ‘If she tells me about one more disaster my brain will seize up.’ Of course I’m horrified by this failure of compassion, but the more I strain to overcome it the worse it becomes.
Another problem is that I find it almost impossible to talk about the Oasans to anyone who doesn’t know them. Not just to you, to the USIC guys as well. My communion with my new brothers and sisters in Christ seems to happen on a different plane, as though I’m speaking their language even though I’m not. Trying to describe it afterwards is like trying to explain what a smell looks like or what a sound tastes like.
But I must try.
The basics: The church is built. We worship in it regularly. I’ve taught the Oasans adapted versions of hymns that they can sing without too much difficulty. (The insides of their faces aren’t like ours; they have throats but I’m not convinced they have tongues.) I read to them from the Bible, which they insist on calling The Book of Strange New Things. They have a marked preference for the New Testament over the Old. Thrilling OT adventure stories like Daniel in the lions’ den, Samson & Delilah, David & Goliath, etc, don’t connect with them. They ask comprehension-type questions but you can tell that even on an ‘action’ level they don’t really get it. What floats their boat is Jesus and forgiveness. An evangelist’s dream.
They are gentle, kind, humble, hardworking people. It’s a privilege to live amongst them. They call themselves Jesus Lover One, Jesus Lover Two, etc. Jesus Lover One was the very first convert, dating back to the early days of Kurtzberg’s ministry. I wish I could show you pictures as I’m hopeless at describing them. Their behaviour is not that distinctive compared to ours, eg, I wouldn’t call some of them extrovert & others introvert, some good-humoured & others bad-tempered, some well-balanced & others crazy, etc. They’re all pretty low-key and the differences between them are quite subtle. It would take a novelist’s skill to capture those nuances in words and, as I’ve discovered to my embarrassment, I totally lack that skill. Also, they look physically very similar. Pure, unadulterated genetic stock. I never thought about this before coming here, but when we need to tell the difference between people, we get a lot of help from all the cross-breeding and migration that’s gone on in human history. It’s given us such a smorgasbord of different physical types – caricatures almost. By ‘we’ and ‘us’ I mean people in the cosmopolitan West, of course. If we were rural Chinese, and somebody asked us to describe someone else, we wouldn’t say, ‘She’s got straight black hair, dark brown eyes, she’s about five foot three’ and so on. We’d have to get more into the nuances. Whereas in the West there’s so much diversity we can say ‘He’s six foot two with blonde frizzy hair and pale blue eyes’, and that immediately sets him apart from the crowd. Bea, I’m rambling here but the point is that the Jesus Lovers would all look the same to you except for the colours of their robes. ‘By their fruits ye shall know them’, I guess. In a future letter I’ll tell you about the contributions that some of the individual Jesus Lovers have made to the church.