Her strength faded and her sighs grew faint. She looked at her son with a mournful, pitying gaze. Her eyes slowly closed, and in a voice that approximated silence she said, “Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Forgive us our tres-passes . . .”

Her voice broke off, though her lips still worked for a while. When they stopped, all movement in her body faded away. Then she quivered and moaned, and her face drained of color, and her spirit emanated forth. Her eyes continued to stare at what could not be seen.

When dawn came, the body of Marta al-Baniyah was placed in a wooden coffin, lifted up by two indigent pall-bearers, and buried in an abandoned field far from the city. The priests declined to pray over her remains, refusing to allow her bones to rest in any cemetery where the cross stands sentinel over the tombs. No one escorted her to that distant grave site save her son and another young man whom life’s misfortunes had taught compassion.

Yuhanna the Madman

I

In the days of summer, Yuhanna made his way every morning to his fields, driving his steers and calves before him, carrying his plow on his shoulders, and listening to the songs of thrushes and the rustling of leaves on their branches. Around noon, he approached the irrigation ditch running amid the depressions in those verdant meadows, and ate his lunch, leaving the leftover bread on the grass for the sparrows. In the evening, when the sunset snatched particles of light from space, he returned to his humble abode high above the villages and farms of northern Lebanon. He would sit peacefully with his elderly parents, giving ear to their accounts of the olden days, feeling the close approach of both sleep and rest.

In the days of winter he leaned over the fire, warming himself, listening to the moaning of the wind and the wailing of the elements, meditating on the succession of seasons, looking out from his peephole of a window upon snow-covered vales and naked trees that resembled nothing so much as a horde of beggars abandoned to the clutches of the biting cold and powerful gusts.

During the long nights he stayed up until his father slept, then opened a wooden cabinet and took out the New Testament, reading from it secretly by the feeble light of a lamp. He cast a wary eye from time to time on his slumbering father, who had forbidden him to read that book because the priests forbade the simple of heart to delve into the secrets of Jesus’s teaching, and withheld from them the blessings of the Church should they do so.

Thus Yuhanna passed his youth between beautiful fields, wondrous and the book of Jesus, brimming with light and spirit. Taciturn and contemplative, he listened to the conversation of his parents but gave no answer. He met with his youthful friends and sat with them quietly, peering into the distance, where the gloaming met the dark blue sky. When he went to church he returned dejected, for the teachings he heard from the pulpits and altars differed from what he read in the Gospel, and the lives of the believers with their leaders differed from the beautiful life about which Jesus of Nazareth had spoken.