I had failed. There was no proof.
She got up and came back with a blanket, and we could hear boulders falling around the cave and down the mountainside, but she didn’t appear to be frightened.
“God will show us the way,” she said, reading my thoughts.
When I laid down on the wet floor of the cave, I felt the puffy envelope that was still in my jeans pocket. I sat back up and pulled it out and opened it up. It was a standard-sized sheet of paper and a square cut from my tattered old Gap scarf sealed in a tiny plastic envelope. It was roughly the same size as the Veil.
In some idiotic fantasy, I’d somehow thought that Pantera had written me a love letter or something equally ridiculous. But it just looked like some kind of mathematical formulas. I called to il Vettore in the dark. “Madam. I just remembered, Yusef gave me this paper,” I said, embarrassed about having loved the same man as she had.
She came over, and although she didn’t have to, she said, “He was a kind and understanding husband to me. But I always wanted to give my life to the Father of my Son.”
“I’m sorry?”
“God,” she said. “I was born to serve God. And you, my lovely friend, were born to save the Son of the Son of God.”
“I’m afraid I wasn’t up to the task.”
“You know, thirty-four years ago I was plucked out of my regular American teenage life. I was scared and angry and lonely. But I didn’t have a choice because I was chosen. Now it’s your turn.”
“Huh?”
“You’ve been called by God,” she said.
I remembered telling Sadowski, Next time God chooses up sides, can I be the one left on the bench? Now I felt awed by what had happened to me, to the world.
I handed her the paper Pantera had given me. She held a flashlight up to the pages and tried to make out the equations in the half-light. She called over an old man, who held the flashlight, read it, then took his glasses off, cleaned them, and read it again.
They looked at one another, he whispered something to her, and I could see shock mixed with something akin to joy spread over her face.
“What is it?”
“It’s the laboratory test results from your scarf,” she said, her blue eyes finally dancing with joy in the firelight.
I didn’t ask how she knew it had been from my scarf—but nothing surprised me any longer.
“The DNA, which I am more than sure will match the DNA on the Veil, holds the imprint of the life of Jesus—and of my son.”
She handed me the paper as though I’d understand what the hell she was showing me.
“I’m sorry, but what do these numbers mean?”
“Ms. Russo,” the old man said, waving the paper and holding the envelope with the small bit of scarf, “this proves that Demiel ben Yusef is the Son of the Son of God.”
“I’m sorry? How can you know this? I mean, it doesn’t say, ‘This is God’s DNA’ on the laboratory results, I’m sure.”
“Hardly!” He laughed and spun me around. If he were younger I swear he would have lifted me off my feet. “The DNA sample from your scarf? It contains only twenty-four chromosomes per cell.”
“And that means—what?”
“It means Demiel and Jesus only had one parent—God.”
“Again, I have no idea what you’re saying…”
“Every human being, you see, has forty-six chromosomes per cell,” he answered. I could see the tears once more springing into Theo’s eyes, but this time they were tears of joy.
She took up the explanation then, excitement overcoming her reserve. “What Dr. Litano is saying is that my son, as I know and now the world will know, was not conceived from man—but from God. He has only one set of chromosomes per cell. A human being—even a human clone—is made up of twenty-three pairs of chromosomes, or forty-six chromosomes per cell. Demiel’s cells only had twenty-four chromosomes, total.”
“But half would be twenty-three, not twenty-four—no?”
“Ahhh, even the Son of God needs a gender-determinant chromosome,” the old man answered. “The extra chromosome is what made—makes—her son a male. The Son of God has but one parent.”
With that she lifted the piece of white Gap scarf, held it up, and kissed it.
“The second execution yields the second veil of miracles,” she declared.
With that she pounded her chest softly and once more began the “ululu” lamentation, which reverberated around the walls of the cave.
And it was as beautiful a sound as I’d ever heard: It was as beautiful as the muezzins calling the faithful to prayer in Istanbul; the Mormon Tabernacle Choir singing in Salt Lake City; carolers outside my parents’ Long Island house on Christmas Eve; the voice of the cantor on the Friday night that Donald and I attended services at the temple in Rome. They were all the glorious sounds of eternity—when the sweet sound of God is the only sound you hear.