* * *

At dawn, soldiers had attacked the Temple of Kindness and Repair, seeking to free the bishop. By evening they had broken through into the outer courts. Lord Chrism sat on his veranda under a cool wet sky, talking to his disciple while seminarians played gongs and xylophones behind a wooden screen. This music was the softest and most soothing of the fourteen permissible types of sound. It contained a simple melody, and Lord Chrism had asked that the drums be muted, so that he could hear a young nun sing the vague and soporific story of the world’s creation. She had a lovely voice, and the distant sound of gunshots and explosions seemed to mix with it and find its way among the deep-bellied gongs and cymbals like another instrument. Lord Chrism sipped a glass of wine. Underneath his robes, goblins and cherubs yawned and slumbered, invisible and forgotten.

“I have a memory of Paradise,” he was saying. “A very faint one. The prophets tell us that the sun shines so brightly there, objects have no shape and bodies no form. Permit me to doubt it. I am blind, and objects have no shape for me. So I know that it is not there that evil resides. That is not the difference between Paradise and Earth. Blind as I am, I can still see color most precisely. My old master told me Paradise would be . . . what? We would float as if in a sea of color.” He laughed, a dry rustle in his throat. “Permit me to doubt it. He was completely blind in the last years of his life, as if he lived at the bottom of a well. Completely blind. I think men build the frame of heaven out of what they never had, but they furnish it with memories of what they’ve lost. According to the prophets, it’s a place of perfect freedom.” Again Lord Chrism laughed his feathery laugh. “I am an old man. Yet even so, when I consult my heart and not my head, I picture scenes of endless . . . procreation there. In exquisite detail. More so now, in fact. I remember when I lost my manhood. I never used to think of such things. I was an idealist.

I didn’t even know what I had sacrificed.”

Behind the screen, the world’s prehistory pursued its gentle course, soft brass bells describing the formation of the stratosphere. The old man sipped his wine and squinted out into the waning afternoon.

He looked towards the Mountain of Redemption, its impossible bulk wreathed in clouds. “These days you hardly ever see the lights of the cathedral,” he complained. “They’re always hidden in the clouds.

Every night I look for them.” He sighed. “Perhaps it’s fallen down.”

“It’s a question of faith,” muttered the disciple.

“Don’t be fatuous. Faith doesn’t enter into it. Either it has or it hasn’t. It’s like everything else.” The old man paused, and when he spoke again it was in a softer tone. “I told you I had lost my idealism. It’s strange, because today I will perform the only idealistic action of my life. A paradox. No, because idealists are incapable of action. It takes an old man.” He leaned forward. “I tell you I will burn her! I will. When I perceive the singer has to raise her voice to cover up the sound of gunfire. Because I used to think with all my heart, and now . . .” He touched his skinny forehead with his fingers. “Now I know that if there is purity in Paradise, it is maintained by fire.”