The Book of Strange New Things(61)
Besides, he enjoyed the hours he spent in his hammock, free of anything to do. While he was on the ground, working with his flock, his brain was buzzing constantly, alive to challenges and opportunities. Every encounter might prove crucial in his ministry. Nothing could be taken for granted. The Oasans believed themselves to be Christians, but their grasp of Christ’s teachings was remarkably weak. Their hearts were full of amorphous faith, but their minds lacked understanding – and they knew it. Their pastor needed to concentrate hard every minute, listening to them, watching their reactions, searching for a glimpse of a light going on.
And, more mundanely, he also needed to concentrate on the physical jobs at hand: the carrying of stones, the spreading of mortar, the digging of holes. When the day’s work was over, and the Oasans had gone home, it was bliss to climb into his hammock, and know that he could do nothing more. As though the net had scooped him out of the stream of responsibility and suspended him in limbo. Not the Catholic idea of Limbo, of course. A benign limbo between today’s work and tomorrow’s. A chance to be a lazy animal, owning nothing but its skin, stretched out in the dark, or dozing in the sun.
The net from which his hammock had been fashioned was just one of several on the site. Nets were what the Oasans used for carrying bricks. They carried the bricks from . . . from where? From wherever the bricks came from. Then across the scrubland to the church. Four Oasans, each with a corner of the net knotted around his (or her?) shoulder, would march solemnly, like pallbearers, carrying a pile of bricks slung in between them. Even though the church site was not far from the main cluster of buildings – just far enough away to give it the necessary status of a place outside the common run of things – it was still quite a long walk, Peter imagined, if you were carrying bricks. There seemed to be no wheeled transport available.
Peter found this a little hard to believe. The wheel was a self-evidently nifty invention, wasn’t it? You’d think that the Oasans, even if they’d never conceived of it before, would have adopted the wheel as soon as they’d seen it being used by the USIC work-force. Pre-technological lifestyle was all very dignified, he wasn’t putting it down, but surely nobody, if they had a choice, would lug bricks around in a fishing net.
Fishing net? He called it that because that’s what it looked like, but it must have been designed for some other purpose – maybe even specifically for carrying bricks. There was nothing else to use nets for, here. There were no oceans on Oasis, no large bodies of water, and presumably no fish.
No fish. He wondered whether this would cause comprehension problems when it came to certain crucial fish-related Bible stories. There were so many of those: Jonah and the whale, the miracle of the loaves and the fishes, the Galilean disciples being fishermen, the whole ‘fishers of men’ analogy . . . The bit in Matthew 13 about the kingdom of Heaven being like a net cast into the sea, gathering fish of every kind . . . Even in the opening chapter of Genesis, the first animals God made were sea creatures. How much of the Bible would he have to give up as untranslatable?
But no, he mustn’t get too downhearted about this. His problems were far from unique; they were par for the course. Missionaries in Papua New Guinea in the twentieth century had been forced to find a way around the fact that the native people didn’t know what sheep were, and that the local equivalent – pigs – didn’t work so well in the context of the Christian parables, because Papuans regarded their pigs as prey to be slaughtered. Here on Oasis, he would be faced with similar challenges and he would simply have to find the best compromises he could.
All things considered, he and the Oasans were communicating very well so far.
He rolled onto his belly and looked though the netting at the ground below. His sandals were positioned neatly, side by side, directly underneath him, on the smooth cement floor. Oasan cement barely needed trowelling; it spread out almost by itself and dried with a satiny finish, feeling less like concrete to the touch than unvarnished wood. It had just enough traction for the soft leather boots of the Oasans not to slip on it.
Next to his sandals lay one of the few tools on the site: a large spoon, the size of a . . . how would he describe it to Bea? The size of a small spade? Bicycle pump? Police baton? Anyway, it wasn’t made of wood or metal, but of a kind of glass, as strong as steel. Its function was to stir the mortar in the mortar vat, preventing it from drying too quickly. Last night – that is to say, five or six hours ago – before he’d climbed into his hammock to sleep, he’d spent a good twenty minutes cleaning mortar off this spoon, scraping at it with his fingers. The debris lay scattered all around. He had done a thorough job, despite his tiredness. The spoon was ready for another day’s stirring. Father Peter was the one who did that job, since he was the strongest.
He smiled at the thought of it. He had never been a particularly strong man before. In a past life, he’d been beaten up by other alcoholics, and tossed casually into the lock-up by police. Once, he had done his back in attempting to carry Bea to bed. (‘I’m too fat! I’m too fat!’ she’d cried, thus compounding the embarrassment all round when he was forced to let her fall.) Here, among the Oasans, he was a mighty creature. Here, he stood at the mortar vat and churned its contents with a giant spoon, admired by the weaker beings around him. It was ridiculous, he knew that, but there was something very morale-boosting about it, nonetheless.
The whole process of constructing a house was absurdly simple here, yet effective. The mortar-vat, primitive as a cauldron and stirred by hand, was typical of the level of sophistication. In the church walls as they took shape, there was no skeletal infrastructure: no metal stanchions, no wooden framework. The lozenge-shaped bricks were simply glued to the foundations and then fastened one to the other, layer upon layer. It seemed a dangerously simpleminded way to construct a building.