The Fifth Gospel(162)
Some of them come toward me en masse. I realize I’m standing in front of the elevator. The doors open, and I step aside. Three of them filter in, speaking a language I don’t recognize. I think I overhear the word for evening prayer, which must be why they’re going downstairs. But one of them, in Italian, instructs the operator to hold the door. More are coming.
Now a room opens down the hall. A young priest comes out. His beard is thin. He idles by the doorway, staring back into it. And in my gut I feel a thrill. I know what this means. He’s waiting for his boss.
I try not to stare as the bishop—fifty or sixty years old, with an impressive belly and a handsome loose cassock—comes striding out. Just as Gianni said, he wears the Orthodox stovepipe hat. The remaining priests in the hallway make room for him as he walks toward the elevator. The operator reaches for his key—but the bishop shakes his head. Another priest in the car says, “Wait, please. More coming.”
I peer down the corridor. From the same open door, another bishop has appeared, this one wearing a gold chain with a painted portrait of the Theotokos, the Virgin Mary. Even at a distance I can see the glitter of something on his stovepipe hat: the tiny cross that signifies a high-ranking bishop or metropolitan. This bishop is more senior, surely at least seventy years old. He walks with a stoop. His aides travel on either side of him, minding that his cassock doesn’t catch under his feet.
Yet even now, the door behind him doesn’t shut. And suddenly, there’s a commotion. For some reason, the priests in the hallway begin murmuring. Some of them gather outside the open door, stealing looks inside. The rest of them separate to the far walls of the corridor. They are parting like the sea, because someone else is beginning to emerge.
A man in white.
CHAPTER 30
A SHIVER GOES THROUGH me. All through the hallway, priests bow. My eyes must be playing tricks.
As the man approaches, he comes into focus. It isn’t John Paul. It’s someone even more ancient. His eyes are black smudges. And he has a beard.
The beard encircles his long, drawn face like a wreath of white fog. It extends down to the middle of his chest, where he carries something in his hand: a white stovepipe hat with a small jeweled cross. As he passes the other priests, he lifts a hand in blessing.
I’m frozen. I know who this is.
In poor, accented Italian, the man says to me, “God bless you.”
“And you,” I fumble as two priests exit the elevator to make sure he has room to enter it.
Simon has done the impossible. The tradition of Romanian Orthodoxy is that its highest leader may wear white. Before my eyes is one of the nine patriarchs of the Orthodox Church.
I begin hurrying down the stairs. The elevator must be going to the ground floor, to the private chapel attached to the Casa.
And then I realize: I can’t follow them there. I would barely be able to communicate with these men. They might mistake me for a brother since my cassock and beard look Orthodox, but because of our schism, the Orthodox Church forbids me—a Catholic—from receiving the Eucharist with them. Even joining them for evening prayer without revealing who I am would be an act of bad faith.
Instead, I take the stairs no farther than the third-floor landing and slip inside. My nerves are ringing. I lean against the wall, wondering how this could’ve gone so wrong. How something so beautiful, so historic, could’ve cost Ugo his life. How Simon could lose his priesthood over it.
Here on the third floor, a door opens. A Roman Catholic priest steps out of his room. He walks toward the elevator. As he presses the button, he takes a second look at me.
I know this look too well. Though I have more in common with him than I have with any Orthodox upstairs—I’m a Catholic; I follow the pope; this priest and I can receive the Eucharist in each other’s churches—he seems to think I’m out of place.