The Tongues of Men or Angels

Three Years after the Crucifixion

Saul could see nothing. What had been bright was black. He felt as if something lay across his vision, like the film that forms on the eyes of the dying, not a lens, darker than that, darker even than his lids, something more like scales, which blocked the world entirely.

Still lying on his back, on the packed dirt track where he had fallen, dropped like a tortoise by an eagle, Saul is vaporized, unable to locate the pieces of himself.

He hears his men, if they can be called that, if they were ever that, discussing him and what to do. Their voices are far away, echoes of a world unreal. Compared at least to the voice of Jesus, just gone, which Saul thinks was the realest thing he has ever heard.

Still, from some delirium distance, Saul hears his men in conclave. He tries to form words of his own but they will not come. The guards, having arrived at their decision, desert to a man, taking with them the goodly purse of money that was entrusted to Saul for lodgings, bribery and transport to carry the kidnapped back to Jerusalem. And they also take the mule and the swords, the letter from the high priest, for parchment is expensive, and even Saul’s own dagger. Then they leave.

But only moments afterwards, as if thinking better of it, they return.

Saul manages to speak now: ‘I knew you couldn’t abandon me,’ he says, the words croaking out of him, like slinking cave creatures unused to an exterior.

The guards do not reply. They just unfasten Saul’s sandals and his belt and lift them off. And then they take his outer coat and tunic as well. They leave Saul in his loincloth, sprawled in the dust, arms outstretched, feet pressed together, staring at the sun with eyes that cannot see.

And it seems to Saul that more people pass him by, leave him lying like that. It seems to him that he calls out and they do not respond. It seems to Saul that there is no love left in this land. He sits up and edges his way as best he can — crawling splay-fingered — to what he thinks is the side of the road and stays there, hunched like a hedgehog, but without even its feeble defence, with not a single spine to keep the world from him.

The air has cooled to night before someone stops. The man asks what has taken place. And Saul responds only that he has been robbed. Robbed and left like this, unable to see. The man’s accent is strange; he might come from Samaria; Saul doesn’t ask. The man gives him water from a gourd, sweet and flinty. The man leads him by the hand along the remainder of the road into Damascus. The man asks where he should take him to in Damascus, if he has kin or friends with whom he was to stay. And Saul tells the man to take him to the only place he knows of, the only man in truth he knows to live in Damascus at all: to the house of Ananias on Straight Street, to the leader of The Way.

‘This traveller was robbed and somehow blinded. He seems disturbed in the head by it all. He says he is a friend of yours.’

‘Then he must be,’ says a voice that Saul takes to be Ananias’s, a man he was dispatched to Damascus to capture.

There had been another Ananias, in Jerusalem. Some of those of The Way whom Saul interrogated told of a rumour that Cephas had killed the other Ananias and his wife — or, at the least, had had them killed — because they hid a portion of the proceeds from the sale of a field from the rest of the group. Among The Way there were no personal possessions: everything was pooled and used as was required by those in want. The penalties for hoarding resources were apparently pitiless.

This Ananias, Damascus Ananias, is filled with mercy. He finds Saul a robe, leads him to a pallet and lays him there. He wets Saul’s brow with water, above his crazed, staring eyes. He tries to feed Saul bread and Saul tries to eat it. Saul is without speech, like an old man taken to bed at the end of life. The things he has to say are too big; he cannot find a path to them.

‘He has spoken to me,’ Saul says finally. ‘Jesus, whom you follow, he has spoken to me. He appeared to me as a light, so powerful that it blinded me. And he told me to come to you here.’

‘Were you also robbed then, as the Samaritan said? How did you come to be so near nakedness?’

‘My men became beset by devils and the devils in them led them to turn upon me.’

‘Your men? Are you a merchant then?’

‘I am, or was, a captain of the Temple Guard. I did much evil to your brothers at Jerusalem and I came here with authority from the high priest to bind his enemies and take them back to him. But Jesus told me I have been selected as his vessel, to bear his name before kings and the children of Israel. Jesus told me that I, whom they thought was weak, like a nurtured runt, will become strong. What the powers of this world scorned, God has chosen.’

Ananias pats him on the head and smooths Saul’s thin, damp hair. ‘I think you need to sleep,’ he says. ‘Sleep now and we’ll talk tomorrow.’

Maybe Ananias thought Saul delirious, but Saul’s story does not change when he wakes. Nor does it the next day. And when, on the third day under Ananias’s roof, Saul wakes to discover that his sight has returned, Ananias is forced to concede that this is a fully paid-up fucking miracle.

And all the followers of The Way in Damascus come to his house to witness the wonder and to talk with Saul. As do not a few other Jews, who have not yet been baptized into The Way, but nonetheless recognize and respect Ananias and the others of The Way as devout men and strict observers of the Law of Moses. And some even take the miracle of Saul as sufficient provocation to belong to The Way themselves.

So three others join Saul to be baptized: an old awning maker, with eyes that wander independent of each other like a skink’s; a tinker, who sharpens knives and trades in the farrago of the Jewish quarter; and a young widower, near beardless and eviscerated, because his wife, soft as blossom, has lately died in childbirth, murdered by a curled, self-hanged creature that would have been a son.

The baptism is a practice taught by John, who founded The Way, whose disciple Jesus was at first: the submersion an induction and a sign that a new sinless life is begun; a mark of repentance and regeneration to speed the arrival of the Day of Yahweh.

Though the river Abana coils through Damascus, the followers of The Way do their initiatory rites out of town, upstream. Not just because Baptizer John and Jesus both preached in wilderness places but also because the Abana’s waters are holier before every household and stall in Damascus has flung their waste and night-soil into its flow.

Saul is, of course, used to submersion, the ceremonial cleansing practised by all Jews who wish to enter the inner courts of the Temple. But there it was in man-made pools designed for the purpose, entered one at a time, a private purification between one man and the one-God. Here Saul strips, with his fellow acolytes, before a small crowd of other followers of The Way, naked and humbled in public. The parts of Saul’s body long sun-hid beneath his soldier’s tunic are pale, like the inner flesh of bitten fruit. The old awning maker is withered as a winter prune and the tinker is as slight as kindling once disrobed. Four circumcised penises are presented to the river and the hills and the watchers, as evidence of God’s eternal covenant with Abraham and all his descendants. As evidence of God’s love for His people, soon to be demonstrated in the new age, which His anointed King is going to return to inaugurate.

The shock of the water’s cold cuts through time. The ceremony, the rebirth, severs a life into the portions before it and after. The acolytes buckle their knees into the water so that they are entirely sunken from sight and when they resurface they cry out, ‘Abba! Father!’ as new mystical children. Saul clambers onto the bank dripping like a fish but dewy as a babe. And fresh white robes are put on him. And Ananias hugs him, and all the new adherents clutch each other, and there is love once more in the world. And Saul surely feels the thing that Ananias talked about: the Holy Spirit that descended upon him there in the water and is now with him. Saul feels it in each fingertip and in his lips and in the hair that prickles upon the breeze, and he wants to sing of it, overcome with a strange tongue, so he does, and though no one understands his words they all do understand. And some join him, singing of the mysteries of the heavens and praising God in rapid involuntary languages known only to Him.

Later Ananias tells Saul of how a great number, perhaps as many as five hundred at one moment, felt the Holy Spirit upon them like that, coming through them like a wind, and all began talking in tongues, as though drunk, though it was only morning. And how, after Jesus’s death his followers were at first destroyed and distraught, and scattered, returning to Galilee and their homes. But when Cephas, James the Lesser and others had visions, encounters perhaps similar to Saul’s own, they began to realize that this must surely all be part of God’s plan. That Jesus’s death was a necessary thing because he was to come back as a resurrected king, the first to be resurrected, but all the righteous would be resurrected in the age he was shortly to bring. And they began searching the scriptures for the proofs of this, and they found in Isaiah’s writings of a Suffering Servant, the very things they were searching for.

Ananias shows Saul these passages. And Saul at first protests, because the passages do not mention a messiah and they had never been taught to him as having anything to do with a messiah and they seem clearly to indicate that the suffering servant described is Israel the nation. But Saul comes to realize that maybe they could also refer to Jesus, if looked at in just the right way, as if the true meaning is obscured by a veil. And once you accept this premise, then how many other great secrets might be hidden in the Torah and Prophets, just waiting to be discovered, perhaps ready to be revealed by Saul himself?

During weeks and then months under Ananias’s tutelage, Saul begins to reconstruct himself, piece by piece. Like shards of a shattered sword reforged. And, as sometimes happens with a bone that heals, he is afterwards formed thicker than ever at the breaks. He is stronger than before. But the bone never forgets, even if stronger, that once it was broken. And Saul, even if rebuilt, even if he appears to be the same man, is not the same. The parts recovered from a thing so obliterated can never be placed together just as they were. We are not just altered by such events. We are other.