A Man Who Runs

The lamp was not good. It was a clay one with a bad wick, and it burned with a small flame that leaned over to one side. I had asked about a better one. The soldier said there was no better one.

The room was under the street. You came down four steps to get into it, and the steps were worn in the middle where men had come down them for a long time. There was one window high up on the wall, and it was not really a window. It was a gap where the stones did not meet. In the morning you could see a line of light on the far wall, and by the middle of the day the line was gone.

It was cold. That is the thing I remember first, before the faces and before the words. It came up out of the floor. You felt it in your feet and then in your knees, and after an hour you felt it in your back. A man can get used to being cold in his hands. He does not get used to it in his back.

Paul sat against the wall with a blanket over his legs. He was an old man by then. His beard had gone thin and there were places on his jaw where it did not grow at all. He had a chain on his right wrist, and the other end of it went to a ring set into the stone.

The chain was longer than you would think. He could reach the door with it. He could not reach the steps.

I had the scroll on my knees. I had carried it through the street under my cloak because it had been raining, and the outside of the cloak was wet and the scroll was dry, and I was pleased about that, which tells you what I was thinking about.

He watched me get it out.

“Is that it,” he said.

“Most of it.”

“How much is most.”

“There is a piece at the end I have not done.”

He moved his leg under the blanket. He did that often, that winter. I do not know if it helped.

“Read it to me,” he said.

I did not read it that night. I sat with it open on my knees and I looked at the first line for a long while, and the lamp leaned over, and neither of us said anything.

He waited. He was good at that. People who did not know him thought he was a man who talked.

There was a cup on the ledge by the door.

It was a plain cup, red clay, with a chip out of the rim on one side. You would not look at it twice. Onesiphorus had found the room for us and had brought in what he could, and most of what was in there had come from him. A stool. Two blankets. A jar for water.

It was Peter’s cup.

I had carried it across the city in my bag along with the scroll and a spare wick and a knife for the reeds, and when I got there the first time I took it out and put it on the ledge. I said whose it was. Paul got up off the wall as far as the chain would let him and took it and turned it round in his hands, slowly, all the way round, and looked at the chip on the rim, and then put it back on the ledge himself and sat down again.

He drank out of it after that. He never mentioned it.

It had come from the house out past the wall where Peter and I had lived the best part of two years while I wrote. There had been a table in that house and a lamp that worked properly, and a woman who came in the mornings with bread. He would eat and then push the plate away and start, and I would write until my hand seized up, and then I would shake it out and he would wait and then go on.

He always held that cup in both hands. I do not know why. His hands were big enough to hold anything you like in one.

Afterwards I went back to the house for the last time and took what was mine and stood in the room a while, and then I took the cup off the shelf. It was not mine. I took it anyway.

So it sat on the ledge by the door in Rome that winter, and Paul drank his water out of a dead man’s cup, and neither of us said so.

There were things that winter we did not talk about.

I read to him on the second night.

I did not start at the beginning. I had read the beginning to myself too many times and I could not hear it any more, so I unrolled past it to a place I was less sure of, and told him that was what I was doing, and he nodded.

It was the day in Capernaum with the four men and the roof.

Peter had liked telling that one. It was his house. That was the part he always said first, before anything about the man or the mat — it was my house — and then he would stop and you could see him back in it. The crowd in the door and out into the street. No way through. And then the noise on the roof above them, and the dust coming down, and someone brushing it off their shoulder and looking up.

He would laugh when he got to the dust. Every time. He had been telling it for thirty years and he still laughed at the dust.

Then the hole opening, and the light coming in through it, and the four of them lowering the mat down on ropes with their four faces round the edge of the hole looking down.

And Jesus saying, Son, your sins are forgiven.

I read it as I had written it. Short. The way Peter said it.

Paul did not move at all while I read. I looked up once, near the end, and his eyes were shut, and I thought he had gone to sleep and I was a little sore about it. Then I saw his hand. He had the blanket bunched up in it.

When I stopped he sat there with his eyes shut for a while longer.

Then he said, “They tore a hole in the man’s roof.”

“They did.”

“Nobody paid for the roof.”

“Peter never said.”

“No,” he said. “He wouldn’t.”

He opened his eyes and looked at the ceiling of that place, which was stone, and had no hole in it at all.

He asked me about it a few nights later.

“There is not much teaching in it,” he said.

“No.”

“You have him going from one place to the next. He heals a man, he goes out, he heals another. There are the parables in the one part. Otherwise it is all doing.”

“Yes.”

“Why.”

I had thought about this. I had thought about it while I was writing it, which is a bad time to think about a thing.

“Peter didn’t tell it that way.”

Paul waited.

“He was not a man who remembered sayings,” I said. “He remembered what happened. Where they were standing. What the weather was doing. Who had hold of whose arm. I would ask him what Jesus taught in some place and he would tell me about the boat they had come in on.”

“So you wrote the boat.”

“I wrote what he gave me.”

He thought about that for a while. He moved his leg under the blanket.

“There are men who will say there is not enough in it,” he said.

“I know.”

“They will say a man could read the whole of it and not know what to believe.”

“They may.”

“What do you say.”

I looked down at the scroll on my knees. It was open at a place near the middle and I could see my own hand going along, a bit crooked where the reed had caught.

“I say he did not leave us a teaching,” I said. “He left us himself, and then he let us watch what he did with it.”

Paul did not answer that. But after a while he put his head back against the stone, and he said, more or less to himself, “No. That is right. That is right.”

And then, “Go on. Read me another one.”

It rained hard the night I read him the courtyard.

I had not planned it. I had come with the scroll under my cloak the same as always and we had eaten, and he had asked what was left, and I said there was the last part and I had most of it, and he said read me the last part.

So I unrolled it to Gethsemane and went on from there.

I read the arrest. I read Peter going along behind them at a distance, all the way into the courtyard of the high priest, and sitting down with the servants at the fire, warming himself.

I read the girl coming up to him.

I read all three times. The girl, and then the girl again to the men standing there, and then the men themselves, a little later, saying you are certainly one of them, you are a Galilean. I read him beginning to curse and to swear. I read that he said, I do not know this man of whom you speak.

Then the cock crowed the second time. And Peter remembered.

And he broke down and wept.

I read it the way I had written it. I had read it aloud to myself perhaps forty times by then, checking the sound of it.

I rolled it up.

The rain was coming down into the street above us and you could hear it going along the gutter and falling past the gap in the stones.

Paul had not said anything for a while.

When I looked at him he was sitting the way he sat, with his back against the wall and the blanket over his legs and his chained hand resting on his knee. He was looking at the floor between us.

He was crying.

He made no sound and he did not put his hand up to his face. He just sat there and let it happen, the way an old man does, as if it were weather.

I did not know what to do, so I did nothing, and after a time he said something I could not hear.

“I did not catch that,” I said.

“He let you write it,” Paul said.

“He told it to me,” I said.

“He told it to you.” Paul wiped his face with the back of his wrist, the one without the chain on it. “Did he tell you once, or did he tell you until you had it right?”

“Until I had it right.”

“So he went over it.”

“Yes.”

“Aloud. To you. More than once.”

“Yes.”

He nodded slowly and stopped, and I watched him work at it, whatever it was.

“When I was in Jerusalem,” he said, “the first time, after Damascus — I stayed with him a fortnight. We ate at the same table every day for fifteen days.” He looked up. “He never told me that.”

“No.”

“I have preached in cities where the only thing they knew about Peter was that he was the first one. The rock. I have said it myself, in rooms full of people.” He turned his hand over on his knee. “And he sat in a house with you and said, write down that I cursed and swore.”

“He did.”

“Why.”

I had asked him. Not in those words, and not straight out. I had gone around it for weeks and then one morning I said, do you want me to put it in, and he had looked at me with that flat look he had when he thought you were being stupid.

“He said if it was not in there then the whole thing was a lie,” I said. “He said, they need to know what he did with a man like me. He said, leave it in, and do not tidy it.”

“Do not tidy it.”

“Those were his words.”

Paul sat back. The rain had eased off a little above us.

“I would have tidied it,” he said.

I did not say anything to that.

“I would,” he said. “I know myself. I would have found a way to put it that was true and was not the truth.”

He was quiet a long while after that. I thought he had finished for the night. I had begun to think about the walk back and whether the rain would hold off.

Then he said, “How did he carry it?”

“What do you mean.”

“After. He lived thirty years after that. I want to know how he carried it.”

I looked at the scroll in my hands.

“He carried it well,” I said.

“That is not an answer. That is what you say about a man at his burial.”

“It is true, though.”

“It may be true. It is not what I asked.” He shifted his leg. “Everyone tells me he was restored. Three times by the fire, three times on the shore, feed my sheep, and the man is mended. It is very neat. I have preached it that way.”

“So have I.”

“Is it what happened?”

“It is what happened.”

“Then why,” he said, “does no one ever tell me about the middle part.”

“I do not follow you.”

“There is the night he denied him,” Paul said, “and there is the morning on the shore. That is not the same day. There are days in between. Nobody has ever told me one single thing about those days.” He lifted his hand a little, and the chain moved on the stone. “I have asked. I asked James once. He said he did not know where Peter went.”

The lamp leaned over. I remember watching it lean.

“I want to know what he did,” Paul said, “between the cock crowing and the stone being rolled away. Because I have met men who fell. There are a great many of them and nobody ever asks them about the days after.”

I said, “He went to a house.”

“Whose house?”

I could have said a friend’s. It would have been true. I could have said the house of a woman who was known to them, which was also true, and he would not have gone any further, because he was tired and it was late and the rain had started again.

I sat there with the scroll in my hands and I did not answer.

He watched me not answer.

“Mark,” he said.

“My mother’s house,” I said.

He did not move. He was very good at not moving.

“Your mother’s house in Jerusalem.”

“Yes.”

“He came to your mother’s house that night.”

“Before it was light.”

“And you know what he did there,” Paul said, “because somebody told you afterwards.”

I looked at the lamp. The wick had gone over so far that the flame was nearly lying on the clay.

“No,” I said.

“Then how do you know it?”

“I let him in.”

There was a long moment when neither of us said anything at all. Above us in the street somebody went past at a run, splashing, and shouted something to somebody, and whoever it was did not shout back.

“You were there,” Paul said.

“Yes.”

“You were a boy.”

“I was old enough.”

He sat forward. It took him a while, with the chain, and I did not help him, because he did not like to be helped with that.

“Mark,” he said. “Where were you when he was arrested?”

I did not answer him that night.

I said that it was late and that the rain would be worse if I waited, and he let me go, which was not like him. At the steps I turned round and he was still sitting forward with his hand on his knee, looking at where I had been sitting.

I came back two nights later. I did not bring the scroll.

“I will tell it,” I said, “but I am going to start a long way back, because it will not make any sense otherwise.”

“I have nowhere to be,” Paul said.

My father was dead by then. I do not remember him. My mother was called Mary, which was no help to anybody, there being four of them in our street alone, and she was known in Jerusalem as the one with the big house near the lower market.

It was a big house. There was a gate off the street with a bar on it, and through the gate a courtyard with a well in the corner and a fig tree that never did much, and stairs going up the outside wall to the rooms above. My uncle’s people had money in Cyprus and some of it had come to her, and she had put it into that house, and she kept it well.

The gate is the part I want you to see. It was heavy and it was barred at night.

That gate is in this story twice.

He came to us first when I was fourteen.

I do not know how it was arranged. I was not told things like that. I came in from an errand and there were more sandals than usual by the gate, and my mother met me in the courtyard and said we had people, and to be useful and to keep out of the way, which are two instructions that do not go together.

They ate upstairs. I carried things as far as the top step and a big man with a beard took them off me at the door, and that was Peter, though I did not know him then.

I did not get past him. I sat on the stairs instead.

They were loud. That is the thing nobody says now, and I have sat in a great many rooms since where men talk about those years in a low voice, as though the whole of it happened in a whisper. It did not. You could hear them from the courtyard. They argued about everything and they laughed at each other and somebody was always telling somebody else he had it wrong, and twice my mother went up to say there were people trying to sleep, and came down again without having said it.

Peter’s laugh went through the wall. You could hear it in the street. I have been in houses in this city where I would have known it through two floors.

That is what I have from those years, more than any of it. A house with too many people in it and the lamps still going at midnight.

When they came down I got out of the way like you do.

He stopped.

He was near the bottom of the stairs and I was standing against the wall with my back to it to let them past, and he stopped on the step above me and said, what is your name.

I told him.

He asked me whose the fig tree was.

I said it was ours and that it was no good. He said what was wrong with it. I said it had never had more than a dozen on it and half of those went bad on the branch. He asked me what I thought the matter was, and he asked it the way you ask a man who would know, and I stood there and told him about the well being too near it and the ground being sour, and he listened to all of it.

Then he said, you had better show me.

And he went out into that courtyard in the dark with me and stood under it with his hands behind his back, looking up into the branches, and the other men waited at the gate.

I was fourteen years old.

He came back two months later and the first thing he said to me was, how is your tree.

After that I was let in.

Not to the table. There were twenty grown men in that room and nowhere to put me. But I was allowed at the low end by the door with my back against the wall, and nobody sent me out.

So I was there the night Peter told the one about the loaves.

He told it with his hands, the way he told everything. Five thousand men. Out in the open country with the light going. The disciples wanting to send them away to buy food, because that was the sensible thing, and he made sure we knew it was the sensible thing.

And Jesus saying, you give them something to eat.

Then Andrew coming through the crowd with a boy.

That was the part. A boy had his dinner with him — five little loaves and two fish, the small dried ones you get by the lake — and Andrew brought him up, and Peter did Andrew’s face when he said it, half apologising, but what are they among so many.

They all laughed.

I did not, because I was working out what the boy had done.

He had it in his hands. His mother had wrapped it for him that morning and he had carried it all day and kept it when everyone else had run out, and he was the only one on that whole hillside with anything at all. And a grown man came through the crowd and asked him for it.

He could have said no. Nobody would have known him. He could have said no and gone home and eaten it in the dark.

I looked down the room.

He was at the far end with his elbows on the table listening to Peter tell it, and he had heard it a hundred times and he was letting him tell it anyway.

And I thought: if he asked me for it I would give him the lot.

That is what I thought, sitting on the floor at the low end of my mother’s table at fourteen years old. Not I would share it. Not I would give him some. I would get up in front of five thousand men and carry it the whole way down the hill and put it in his hands.

I was seventeen that Passover.

I had stopped sitting on the stairs. A man of seventeen does not sit on the stairs. I stood in the courtyard below with my arms folded, near enough to hear and far enough to be doing something else, and if anybody had asked I would have said I was seeing to the gate.

He knew where I was. He came down last and said something to me on his way out, most times, and I answered him short and looking at the wall, because there were men about.

The tree had come good, by the way.

They did not eat with us that year. They ate up the hill somewhere, and it had been arranged so that nobody knew where until they were standing in it, and I was sore about that all evening.

I slept in the room off the courtyard with a linen cloth over me and nothing else, because it was warm.

The noise woke me.

Men walking in step, coming down our street. You hear that up by the fortress in the daytime. You do not hear it in our street at night. There was iron in it, and there was torchlight going along the wall above my head, and then it went past the gate and down towards the bottom of the street.

I knew where they were going. Everybody knew where he went at night that week. He had been out at the olives every evening since they came up for the feast, and half the city could have told them so.

I did not think about it. I got up, and took the cloth off the bed because it was all I had, and lifted the bar and went out.

They were a long way down by then. I could see the torches at the bottom of our street where it turns, and I went after them.

I was going to the garden because he was there.

The stones were cold. That is what I noticed first, going down that street at a half-run with one hand holding the cloth at my shoulder — the cold coming up through my feet, and the wet in the low places where the water sits.

I kept back. Far enough that I could see the light and not the men.

They went out through the gate and down into the valley, and up the track on the other side. It was a clear night with a moon and I could see them once they were off the road — twenty or thirty of them strung out, temple men mostly, and some with swords and some with those long staves the guard carry.

They turned off at the olives.

I knew that place. Everyone knew it. A walled garden with presses in it, and he went there the way a man goes to sit down at the end of the day. I had been past it a hundred times.

I came up the last part off the track, on the grass, and got in among the trees on the low side where the wall is broken, and I stopped there.

I could hear them. I could not see anything yet but the light going about in the branches.

Then somebody said his name.

It was Judas. I did not know that then. I knew the voice from my mother’s house and I stood in the trees trying to think which one he was.

He said, Rabbi.

Then they took him.

I came up nearer, to where the wall is down and there is a gap you can stand in, and from there I could see. The torches were in close around him. Somebody at the edge of it swung a sword and there was a shout, a real one, high and wrong, and then a lot of noise and men shoving.

And through the whole of it he did not move.

That is the only thing I can tell you about it. Everybody in that garden was moving except him.

Then the rest of them ran.

I saw men coming out of that garden in every direction, past me, close enough to touch, one of them so close I felt the air. They went down through the trees and out onto the hillside and they were gone, all of them, in about the time it takes to say it.

I did not run. Not then.

I stood in the gap in the wall with the linen held at my shoulder and I watched them take him out through the gate onto the track, with the torches going along, and I thought: I am still here.

I was proud of it. I was standing there in the dark in a sheet with every one of his friends gone over the hill, and I was proud of myself.

That lasted until they turned and came back.

Two of them came back up the track.

I do not know why. They came up with a torch between them, not hurrying, looking into the dark on both sides, and I did not move, because I thought they had not seen me.

The one in front came straight at the gap in the wall. He did not say anything. He got hold of the cloth at my shoulder with his whole hand and pulled, and I went the other way, and it came off me, and I was naked, and then I was running.

Behind me somebody laughed.

That is what I remember. Not the hand and not the pulling. The laugh.

I ran the whole way home naked. Past people in the street — there are always people in the street that week — and some of them shouted after me. I got the gate shut and the bar across and stood in my mother’s courtyard holding onto it and could not get my breath.

I was not hurt. Nobody had followed me.

I had left him in a garden with a hundred men and I had come home.

And then the lamp came on the stairs, and it was my mother, because of the noise of the gate.

She did not say anything. She went and got a blanket and put it round me and took me inside and sat me down, and after a while she asked me where I had been, and I said out, and she left it.

She never asked me again.

I sat up the rest of that night. I got as far as the door twice. The first time I told myself there was nothing I could do, which was true. The second time I told myself I did not know where they had taken him, which was also true, and both times I sat back down.

It was not that I was afraid of the men with the torches.

It was that I had run once, and I knew that if I went out I would run again. Not might. Would.

I told nobody for thirty years.

The knocking came before it was light.

Not loud. Three, and a wait. Three, and a wait. Somebody knocking so that only the courtyard would hear it.

I went down and stood on the inside of the gate with my face at the grille, and I did not open it. That was the rule in our house. You look first.

There was a man in the street with his back to the gate, watching the top of the street.

Then he turned round and knocked again, close enough that I could have touched his hand through the grille.

It was Peter.

And I stood there with my hands on the bar and did not lift it.

Not he is in danger. Not let him in.

I thought: so you ran as well.

Then I let him in.

He came in fast and stood against the wall while I shut the gate.

Neither of us said anything.

He had known me three years. He called me lad. He did not call me lad that night. He looked at me and then looked away.

There was ash down the front of his cloak.

I thought I would see fear. I knew what that was, I had it myself, and I thought I would know it when I saw it. It was not fear. He never once checked the street. He never asked me what I had seen.

He stood there with his hands down at his sides and they were shaking. Not from cold. He had big hands. I had watched those hands hold a cup at our table since I was fourteen, and I stood in the courtyard and watched them shake and could not look anywhere else.

Then he sat down with his back to the wall and put his head in his hands.

I got a blanket and draped it over him and left him sitting there alone on the cold stone.

He was there all the next day.

My mother found him in the morning and said his name and he did not answer her, so she left him alone and went and made bread, and the house went on the way a house does.

People came to the gate through the day with news. My mother went each time and listened and came back and said it out to the courtyard.

They had taken him to Pilate.

The crowd had asked for Barabbas.

He had gone out to be crucified, and two others with him.

Peter did not move for any of it. When she said the last one he put his head back against the wall, and I saw his throat move, and he did not make a sound.

The middle of the day went dark and stayed dark about three hours. My mother lit a lamp at noon and put it on the step.

He got up then and stood out in the courtyard looking at the sky over the wall, and stood there a long time, and then sat down again on the stones out in the open.

Nobody said a word to him all day. My mother put food beside him twice and took it away again.

We did not go out. Not one of us. Everything I know about that day, somebody told us at the gate.

He left us on the first day of the week.

He was with us all the Sabbath and did not eat and did not talk. John came for a while and the two of them sat on the step together.

Then early on the first day the women went out to the tomb, my mother with them, and they came back home all at once talking over the top of each other, and Peter came out of the room where he was sitting and stood in the doorway.

Nobody could follow it. They were all talking.

What I got out of it was he is not there, over and over, from three of them at once, and somebody saying something about a young man in white, and my mother with her hand on Peter’s arm saying his name — Peter, Peter, listen.

Then he was gone. He went out at a dead run in his bare feet and John went after him, and the gate stood open behind them and nobody thought to shut it.

That is the last thing I have of him from that week.

He came back to that house many times over the years. He ate at that table. He was in the upper room the night they arrested him again, years later, and he stood at that same gate in the dark and knocked, and Rhoda was so glad to hear him that she left him standing in the street.

And from that Sabbath to the day they killed him in this city, neither of us ever said one word to the other about it.

Thirty years.

Paul did not say anything for a long time after that.

The lamp had got low. I leaned over and worked the wick up with the knife and got it burning properly, and when I sat back he was looking at me.

“You have not finished,” he said.

“I have. That is all of it.”

“That is all of Peter.” He shifted. “You have told me about a man sitting in a courtyard. You told it very well. You told me where he sat and how his hands were and what he did when it went dark.”

“Yes.”

“And every part of it, you saw from somewhere else in the same courtyard.”

I did not answer.

“Where were you,” Paul said, “when they arrested him?”

“I have told you. I was at the house.”

“You came home. That is a different thing.” He put his hand flat on his knee. “Mark. You said you let him in. You said you had run away. You said it twice tonight and you went past it both times as though it were nothing, and I have been sitting here waiting for you to come back to it, and you have not come back to it.”

The rain had stopped. It was very quiet down there when the rain stopped.

“It is not in the book,” he said.

“No.”

“Why is it not in the book?”

“Because it does not belong in the book.”

“You put in a hole in a man’s roof,” Paul said. “You put in the dust coming down. You put in a man cursing and swearing in a courtyard because he told you not to tidy it.” He was not loud. He never had to be. “You were in that garden. You are the only one who has told me a single thing about that garden that was not handed to him by somebody else. And it is not in the book.”

I rolled the scroll up. I did it slowly, because my hands were not right.

“No,” I said. “It is not.”

“They have all of them got their part in it,” I said. “That is why.”

Paul waited.

“Peter denies him. That is in there because Peter said put it in. James and John ask for the thrones, and they are named, and they are alive and they can answer for themselves. Judas has his part and there is no help for him.” I had the scroll in both hands. “Every man who is named in that book has a name that stands for something. They were apostles. They were sent.”

“And you were not.”

“I was seventeen.”

“That is not an answer either.”

“I was a boy in a sheet,” I said. “I was not a disciple. I was not one of them. I had no part in it and no business being there, and if I put myself into that book I am claiming something I have no right to claim.”

He let that sit.

Then he said, “Is that true?”

“It is true that I was seventeen.”

“That is not what I asked you.”

I did not say anything.

“Mark,” he said, “I have heard a great many men explain why a thing should not be written down. I have written to churches full of them. There is always a reason, and the reason is always a good one.”

“Then you have your answer.”

“No,” he said. “I do not. That is why I am asking.”

The lamp leaned over. I remember thinking that I should have brought a better wick and that I had thought that every night for a month and had never once remembered it in the daytime.

“If I write it,” I said, “then it is in there for good.”

“Yes.”

“Then whoever reads that book, from now until the end, will know that there was a boy who ran.”

“Yes,” Paul said. “That is what writing is.”

“It is not the boy,” I said.

I had not meant to say it. It came out on its own and then it was in the room and I could not do anything about it.

“Go on,” Paul said.

“The boy is nothing. Boys run. If it had only been the boy I would have written it down thirty years ago and thought no more about it.”

“Then what.”

“It is that I have done it since.”

He did not move.

“I have done it my whole life,” I said. “I ran out of that garden and I have been running out of places ever since, and there is not a man alive who knows that about me except one, and he is dead, and I do not think he ever knew the half of it.”

“Peter knew?”

“Peter never asked me a question in thirty years.” I put the scroll down on the floor beside me, because I did not trust my hands with it. “He did not have to. He saw me open that gate.”

The chain moved on the stone. He had shifted without meaning to.

“Mark,” he said, and then he stopped.

And I knew what he had been going to say, and he knew that I knew, and neither of us said it, and we sat in that cold room with a bad lamp between us and the thing was there all the same.

Pamphylia.

Neither of us had said that word out loud in the same room since the day it happened.

He said it first.

“I have thought about Perga,” he said.

“So have I.”

“I daresay you have.”

He took his time. He was choosing, and I could see him choosing, and it was not like him.

“You went home,” he said. “We were eight days off the boat and you went home, and I stood on that road and watched you go, and I said to your uncle, he has turned back from the work.”

“I remember what you said.”

“I said it to a great many people afterwards.”

“I know that too.”

He nodded slowly. “And when he wanted to take you again, I would not have it. And I would not give way, and he would not give way, and I lost the best man I ever had over it, and I have never got him back.” He looked at the floor. “That is the price of it. Barnabas and I did not speak again. He is dead now as well.”

“I know.”

“Do you know why I would not have it?”

“Because I ran.”

“No,” Paul said. “Because I did not know why you ran. You never told me. You stood in front of me at Antioch with your uncle’s hand on your shoulder and you would not say one word in your own defence, and I took that for a man who had nothing to say.” He lifted his hand off his knee an inch, and let it down. “And I have sat in this room for four nights listening to you, and I find that you were seventeen years old in a garden and somebody took your clothes off you, and you have never told a living soul.”

“No.”

“Would you have told me? In Antioch. If I had asked you.”

I thought about it. I gave him the true answer, which took a while.

“No,” I said.

“No,” he said. “I do not think you would.”

And that was all he said about it, then or ever.

He was tired after that.

I got up to go. I put the scroll under my arm and I checked the water jar and moved the cup on the ledge to where his hand would find it, and I said I would come the night after next.

He said, “Put it in.”

I stood there with the scroll under my arm.

“It is two lines,” he said. “You do not have to put your name on it. You do not have to explain it. Two lines, in the place where it happened, and then go on to the next thing.”

“And what does that do?”

“I do not know,” Paul said.

That is what he said. I had expected him to tell me it would help somebody.

“I do not know what it does,” he said again. “But it happened, and nobody has written it down, and when you are dead there will be nobody left who can.”

He put his head back against the wall.

“Everything in that book is somebody’s worst day,” he said. “A man with his hand withered up. A woman bleeding twelve years. A father whose boy is dying. You have written down the worst day of a great many people and you have been very careful with all of them.”

“That is different.”

“It is not different. It is only nearer.”

I went up the four steps. At the top I turned round, and he had his eyes shut.

“It will not be about you,” he said, without opening them. “That is the part you have wrong. Write it down and it stops being about you. Leave it out and it will be about you for the rest of your life.”

Then he said, “Go home. It is late.”

I did not write it that night, or the night after.

I went back twice and read him other things and neither of us mentioned it. He did not ask. He was a man who asked once.

Then there was an evening at the end of that week when I was alone in the room where I slept, with the scroll out on the table in front of me and the lamp going properly for once, and I could not settle to anything.

I got out the other rolls to look for something and I did not know what.

I found Amos.

I had learned him as a boy. My mother had paid a man to come to the house twice a week, and he was old and he smelt of onions and he made me say the prophets back to him standing up, and I had hated every hour of it.

I knew what was in the second chapter. I had known it since I was a boy.

He who is stout of heart among the mighty shall flee away naked in that day.

I sat in a rented room in Rome with my finger on that line.

The mighty. The strong men. The ones who stand.

He is not talking about a boy in a garden. He is talking about the bravest man you have. He is saying that when that day comes, the bravest man you have will go out of it with nothing on, running.

I read it again. I read the whole chapter through and came back to it.

It does not say the brave man is not brave. It does not say he was a coward all along and that the day found him out. It says there is a day coming that no man stands in. That is all it says.

I had been seventeen years old and I had thought I was the only one.

I sat there a long time with the lamp burning and the noise of the street coming up, and I did not pray and I did not weep and nothing happened to me that I could tell anybody about afterwards.

Then I put Amos away, and I pulled the scroll across, and I found the place in the garden where they all forsook him and fled.

And I wrote:

And a young man followed him, with nothing but a linen cloth about his body. And they seized him, but he left the linen cloth and ran away naked.

I read it over.

Then I put the reed down and rolled the scroll up and went to bed, and in the morning I took it across the city and read him the next part, and I never told him I had done it.