Prince of Peace Read Online Free Page B

that I no longer believed in God. Such a statement seems entirely unmomentous now, but I remember trembling as I said it then. Our certainties had all flaked away like dried skin. Michael sat in silence for such a long time that I began to wonder if he'd heard me. I was unable to read his face. Finally he replied with a voice so sad as to be completely unfamiliar. "None of us believes in God, Durk, but we act as if we do because we love each other. Otherwise..." He checked himself, as if he'd said too much already. I never asked him, Otherwise what? But I must have known. We have to help each other cling to God while we can, because eventually we do each other in and then God is all there is.
    What desolation I felt, standing there outside the prior's room, watching him. That old monk had been my spiritual father now for more than a decade. We had never overtly expressed affection for one another. I'd hidden from him in my wry irreverence; the trouble with religious superiors, I'd say to myself, is they think they are. He had shown me only his stern mask. His habitual expression had for years been a version of a desert shrub's. Yet, watching him at his psalter and imagining him praying for me, I felt a rush of, yes, love for the man and for the company of brothers who had received me as one not merely welcome but wanted. That I dared allow myself at last to feel such love for those men was how I knew that I was leaving them and their monastery forever. Leaving without a word. It would have been impossible for me to explain. What? That I had a daughter? That she was waiting in a taxi? That she'd come to take me to America? That I was going to my wife's side at her husband's grave? That he was my dearest friend, my enemy? How explain such riddles? What could I have said? Not so much to make the prior let me go—I was beyond permission—as to make him understand. But weren't we beyond understanding too? Hadn't we always been? When I'd arrived years before, a vagrant refugee in flight from dingy rented rooms where for months after Carolyn had left me I'd groped for a way to live and for the bottles of cheap booze that were always rolling under the bed. I'd told the prior nothing then. I could tell him nothing now. He would be shocked to find me gone, hurt perhaps, but not really surprised. What monk ever presumes to know in the dark shroud of his vocation what the old
Deus Absconditus
is up to now?
    "On the river of tears," Picard says, "man travels into silence." That was what I had done, going there in the first place. And now, grief-struck, stunned at Molly's reappearance, at the summons she'd brought not from Carolyn, but from my own life, I was doing it again. I was leaving the silence in silence.
    I stifled yet another urge to burst in on the prior to throw myself before him for his blessing. Instead I stepped back from his door into the shadows of the desert. Goodbye, dear father, I muttered. God keep you, I prayed, since I cannot.
Ad multos annos.
    I turned, faced Bethlehem for a moment. The stars were spread above me like a jovial throng, but like applause in church, affirmation from the night seemed wrong. This was loss, all loss. First Michael, my friend. Now Holy Cross, my only brothers. Gone, all gone. Already my years in the place were sliding away. I knew that I would someday account for myself to Father Prior and to my gracious confreres, but not then. In fact, of course, these pages are my accounting, and finally my mouth is at the grill of their cloister. Their ears are pressed against it and I am whispering, Oh my brothers, this is why I came to you and why I left.
    I didn't need a blessing. I didn't need permission. What I needed were my passport—I was Frank Durkin now, not Brother Francis—and something to wear. I circled the monastery and entered it by the proper door. The halls were quiet. In a few hours, but long before daylight, the monks would rise and sing the nocturnal psalms and they