The Book of Strange New Things(99)
Even so, to recognise was not the same as to know. You could train yourself to identify a certain pattern of bulge and colour, and realise: this is Jesus Lover Thirteen. But who, really, was Jesus Lover Thirteen? Peter had to admit he was finding it difficult to know the Oasans in any deeper sense. He loved them. For the time being, that would have to do.
Sometimes, he wondered if it would have to do for ever. It was hard to remember individuals if they didn’t behave like humans, with their circus displays of ego, their compulsive efforts to brand themselves on your mind. Oasans didn’t work that way. No one engaged in behaviours that screamed Look at me! or Why won’t the world let me be myself? No one, as far as he could tell, was anxiously pondering the question Who am I? They just got on with life. At first, he’d found that impossible to believe, and assumed this equanimity must be a front, and any day now he would discover that the Oasans were as screwed up as anyone else. But no. They were as they appeared to be.
In one way, it was really kind of . . . restful, to be spared the melodramas that made things so complicated when you dealt with other humans. But it meant that his tried-and-true method of gaining intimacy with new acquaintances was totally useless here. He and Bea had pulled it off so many times, in all the places where they’d ministered, from opulent hotel lobbies to needle exchanges, always the same message to open people up: Don’t worry, I can see that you’re not like everybody else. Don’t worry, I can see that you’re special.
The Oasans didn’t need Peter to tell them who they were. They bore their individuality with modest self-confidence, neither celebrating nor defending the eccentricities and flaws that distinguished them from others of their kind. They were like the most Buddhist-y Buddhists imaginable – which made their hunger for the Christian religion all the more miraculous.
‘You’re aware, aren’t you,’ he’d said to Jesus Lover One a while back, ‘that some of my people believe in different religions from the Christian one?’
‘We have heard,’ Lover One replied.
‘Would you like me to tell you something about those religions?’
It seemed the decent thing to offer. Lover One did the fidgety thing with the sleeves of his robe that he always did when he wanted a conversation to go no further.
‘We will have no other God than God our ??aviour. In Him alone we have hope of Life.’
It was what any Christian pastor might yearn to hear from a new convert, yet hearing it stated so baldly, so calmly, was a bit unsettling. Ministering to the Oasans was a joy, but Peter couldn’t help thinking that it was too easy.
Or was it? Why shouldn’t it be easy? When the window of the soul was clear, not smeared and tarnished with the accumulated muck of deviousness and egomania and self-loathing, there was nothing to stop the light from shining straight in. Yes, maybe that was it. Or maybe the Oasans were just too na?ve, too impressionable, and it was his responsibility to give their faith some intellectual rigour. He hadn’t worked it out yet. He was still praying on it.
Then there were the ones who weren’t Jesus Lovers, the ones whose names he couldn’t even pronounce. What was he to do about them? They were no less precious in the eyes of God, and no doubt had needs and sorrows every bit as serious as anyone else’s. He should be reaching out to them, but they ignored him. Not aggressively; they just behaved as if he wasn’t there. No, that wasn’t quite right; they acknowledged his presence as one might respect a fragile obstacle – a plant that mustn’t be stepped on, a chair that mustn’t be knocked over – but they had nothing to say to him. Because, of course, they literally had nothing to say to him, nor he to them.
Determined to do more than just preach to the converted, Peter strove to get to know these strangers, noting the nuances of their gestures, the way they related to each other, the roles they seemed to play in the community. Which, in a community as egalitarian as the Oasans’, was not easy. There were days when he felt that the best he’d ever achieve with them was a sort of animal tolerance: the kind of relationship that an occasional visitor develops with a cat which, after a while, no longer hisses and hides.
Altogether there were about a dozen non-Christians he recognised on sight and whose mannerisms he felt he was getting a grip on. As for the Jesus Lovers, he knew them all. He kept notes on them, indecipherable notes scrawled sometimes in the dark, smudged with sweat and humidity, qualified with question marks in the margins. It didn’t matter. The real, practical knowledge was intuitive, stored in what he liked to think of as the Oasan side of his brain.
He still had no clear idea how many people lived in C-2. The houses had many rooms, like beehives, and he couldn’t guess how many of them were inhabited. Which meant he also couldn’t estimate how tiny, or not so tiny, the proportion of Christians was. Maybe one per cent. Maybe a hundredth of one per cent. He just didn’t know.
Still, even a hundred Christians was an amazing achievement in a place like this, more than enough to accomplish great things. The church was coming ahead. The building, that is. It had a roof now, sensibly sloped, watertight and utilitarian. His polite requests for a spire had been deflected (‘we do all other thing, plea??e, before’); he sensed that they would deflect it for ever.
As a compensation, the Oasans had promised to decorate the ceiling. Kurtzberg had once shown them a photograph of a place they called, almost unintelligibly, the ??i?????ine ?apel. Inspired by the handiwork of Michelangelo, the Oasans were keen to create something similar, except they suggested that all the incidents should be from the life of Jesus rather than from the Old Testament. Peter was all for it. Apart from giving the church some much-needed colour, it would give him an insight into the unique nature of these people’s perception.