50. Jerusalem, 1998 - Confessions
In which Eleanor makes a confession.
Eleanor is finally ready to talk. She finds a receptive ear in the unlikeliest of places. 
Eleanor
Father Jerry meets me in the courtyard of the École. “Ready to see a priory?” his eyes twinkle as he grins at me. He is, as usual, dressed in regular street clothes. I haven’t yet seen him in his white habit.
“Looking forward to it!” I reply. “Priory?” I question. “I thought this was a monastery.”
“Abbeys and priories are both monasteries. But abbeys tend to be bigger. The École is the school—and its part of Saint-Étienne Priory. Which is all of this.” His hand gestures to the buildings around us. “But we just call it the École.”
I look around. The École is built with the same Jerusalem stone that everything is built with here. In the mornings and afternoons the city glows—the stone of the buildings reflecting a golden yellow. It’s mid morning now, so the École looks more white than pale golden yellow. On three sides, graceful arches face onto the courtyard. Some statuary and columns are dotted here and there. The courtyard is a mix of flagstones and dry grass.
“Underneath where we’re standing right now, is one of the cisterns.” He describes how the École, like all older buildings in Jerusalem, was built to catch the rain water and store it in cisterns under the building.
We head over to the Church of St Stephen, or Saint-Étienne as it’s called in French. As we step inside I stop and turn around slowly. It’s gorgeous, like one of the cathedrals in Europe. Twin colored marble and stone form the arches. The polished stone of the columns and floor gleams in the soft light coming through the windows at each end of the transept, reflecting back the light, so that the church feels light and airy. It’s smaller than St George’s Cathedral, but it feels more open.
Jerry tells me the story of St Stephen1. That Paul, whose writings are the focus of Jerry’s work, is believed to be one of the people who stoned St Stephen to death. “St Stephen was dragged out of the Damascus Gate and stoned,” Jerry says as we walk down the aisle. “The church is supposed to be built over the site of his tomb.”
Once again I am struck by how here, in Jerusalem, you literally walk on history everywhere. When I walk in the Old City, I am potentially walking the same exact paths as Jesus walked. It gets me every time. The sense of history not being history here. It’s the present. History has always seemed musty and boring. Here, ancient history plays out side by side with the vendors selling souvenirs made in China outside the Damascus Gate, which is just a few hundred yards from where I now stand with Jerry.
“The Priory’s built on top of the original monastery which was built in the 5th Century by Empress Eudocia. Now there’s a fascinating and forgotten woman of history.” Jerry’s eyes positively twinkle. He loves iconoclasts—especially women—I’ve come to appreciate. “The Emperor tried to assassinate her. She’d become too popular, so he fabricated rumors that she was unfaithful, forced her to flee, then sent an assassin after her, and she killed the assassin instead.” Jerry’s positively gleeful, I notice. “She must have been a formidable woman. They reached a truce when he paid her enough money to live here in the Holy Land and to build the original St Stephen’s church.
“When they were excavating the site to build the Priory, they found the remains of the original church. This altar,” he puts his hand on it gently, lovingly “is the original altar—they found it and built the church around it.”
We continue our tour of the priory. The library, the dining room—empty now, the lovely gardens surrounding the buildings. Damascus Gate, with all its din of traffic, vendors, tour buses, and tourists, is less than half a kilometer away, but here inside the walled gardens it's quiet and peaceful.
“You’d think that a priory would be sedate and pious,” Jerry continues on our ramble through the teaching and study rooms, “And you’d be wrong. We’re like any academic institution: intense political intrigue and rivalry among the scholars.
“Pope Pius X tried to shut us down. You see the Dominican order—and especially here at the École—we’re the intellectual brains of the Roman Catholic Church,” he taps his forehead with a grin. He says it with complete matter of factness and no grandiosity, but there’s a hint of laughter too.
“The Jesuits think they’re the teachers. But we’re the real scholars. Nor do we confuse our faith with our scholarship and our duty to rigorous critical thinking and academic debate. We can pray in the morning, debate the existence of God all day, and pray in the evening and not feel a twinge of guilt. But Pius did not like that at all.”
“Who was Pope Pius?” I ask. Growing up in the Anglican tradition I know essentially nothing of Catholic history after Henry VIII broke from the Holy Roman Empire.
“Pope at the beginning of the 20th century,” Father Jerry replies. “1903 to 1914. He thought what we were doing here was a threat to Catholic orthodoxy. Too modernist. The École was closed for a year just before World War II because he ordered the École’s founder, Marie-Joseph Lagrange, back to France. Then Pius died and Lagrange came back to Jerusalem. The politics of Catholicism are all about who’s in power at the Vatican.
“The cells are up here,” Jerry says as we pause at the bottom of a set of stairs.
“Cells?” I ask.
“Our rooms.”
A long corridor stretches out in front of us. It’s clean and spare. Just stone walls and stone floor. Immaculately clean. Nothing at all on the walls to break its austereness.
“This is me,” Jerry says as he swings open a door about half way down the corridor.
I step into a different world.
On the wall on the right, Jerry’s bed, immaculately made. Opposite the door, light pours in from a wide window that faces onto a central courtyard. On the wall to my left, and behind me, are floor to ceiling bookcases, chock full of books. In the middle of the room, a desk, two comfortable armchairs in front of it, and Persian carpets on the floor. This “cell” is warm and homey and lived in.
“Pre-lunch drink?” Jerry asks. He reaches into a cupboard on my left and takes out two glasses and a bottle of gin. Of course; this is Jerry after all. He moves over to a small fridge built into the bookshelves that I hadn’t noticed before and takes out a bottle of tonic water, some limes and an ice tray.
A few minutes later we’re sitting companionably in the two armchairs, while Jerry continues to tell me stories of life in the École.
Somehow, I don’t know how, I find myself telling Jerry about Mahdi. Perhaps it's all those stories about what really happens in a Dominican priory—and that it's far from the austere life I always assumed that of a monk to be. It just seems like Jerry won’t judge.
And he doesn’t.
“You’re still in love with him, aren’t you?” he asks gently.
I nod. Even now, even after that letter—so sweet, so tender, so loving—so final.
“Technically, as a Muslim, he could have stayed married and married you, but how viable an option was that really?” Jerry asks.
“It wasn’t, I know. And I couldn’t bear the idea of him leaving Fatima either,” I say miserably, tears salting my face now. Jerry is only voicing things I’ve said a thousand times to myself. “But I just can’t seem to let go,” I sob. Jerry’s kindness is more than I can bear.
“You can carry on loving him and still let go,” Jerry says gently, reaching over and taking my hands in his much bigger ones. “I did.”
Astonishment pushes the tears away. I look at Jerry, my mouth open in comic surprise. This is the last thing I expected to hear from Jerry.
“Dominican monks can love too. There’s celibacy and there’s love. She’s still alive and we see each other from time to time when our paths cross on our travels. But for both of us, we take our vows seriously. We can love and still honor our vows.”
“She’s a nun!” I ask incredulously.
“Hmm-mm.”
I take that in. In some ways Jerry reminds me of Mahdi—although they could hardly look more different. Well, they both have white hair, but where Mahdi’s frame is thin and light, Jerry’s frame is robust. It’s their eyes. Their probing intellect, their sense of humor. And how quickly and easily I feel at ease in their company. They’re both older than Dad, but they both treat me as an equal, engaging with me seriously, never dismissing or putting me down. In other words the exact opposite of Naughton, and sometimes even Francois.
He tells me more about her. I tell him more about Mahdi. And in the telling, the dark black hole starts to close. Maybe it’s because there’s not an ounce of criticism in Jerry’s responses. “There’s never anything wrong about love,” he says. “It can be inconvenient, it can cause hurt to others we love, and then we have to figure out what honors everyone, but love is never wrong. It just is.”
It just is.
My love for Mahdi can just be. I can let him go. I don’t have to do anything about it. It can just be.
“Thank you.” I say back to Jerry.
“Now, shall we go down to lunch?” he asks.
And we do.
2 June, 1998
Dear Mahdi
After two long years I can finally reply to your letter. At least here, in my journal. I’m not sure I will ever send this, though.
You were right to end it, I do know that. But were we wrong to start it? I have stumbled over that for so long. I’ve never been able to explain satisfactorily to myself why I allowed myself to fall in love with you in the first place. How much did I use you being Muslim as a way to excuse and rationalize what I would have condemned in another? One part of me acknowledges that I was irresistibly attracted to you. Another part of me says “It just crept up on me unaware, until suddenly, there it was, you kissing me in the parking garage and me kissing you right back.”
I was never more surprised in my life than when you took both my hands in yours across the lunch table, looked me deeply in the eyes and asked me, “Do you know how very much you mean to me?” I knew I had an infatuated crush on you. I had just put that down to being ridiculously young and starstruck by working so closely with a senior ANC comrade. I was disarmed by your kindness and warmth, and bolstered by your seemingly genuine enjoyment of working with me on the Inauguration Committee. You actually solicited my ideas and input, and didn’t just dismiss me and relegate me to being “just the junior representative.” But that I actually meant something to you? That took my breath away. And in that moment it all became real. This wasn’t some girlish fantasy. This wasn’t just me. This was you too. This was adult. It was real.
I still remember that first grabbed kiss in the parking garage so vividly. The tickle of your mustache, the way my body felt so at home in your arms, holding me close, every part of me feeling every party of you. You were home. You were safety. You were my rock.
I cried in the car as I drove home. “Why, why, why?” came pounding through my head. “He’s married, he’s old enough to be your father, he’s ANC, he’s Muslim, he’s Indian.” And “Why not, why not, why not,” came the response. “He’s Mahdi. When he looks at you, you know he sees you, he really sees you. And he wants you as much as you want him. So why not? You are simply two people who want each other.”
I’ve lived with that choice ever since. I have never regretted our time together. And while I question and question, I just don’t seem able to convince myself that it was wrong. It felt so right. Like we just fit.
I can be going along thinking “I’m getting over you” and then suddenly, there you are. Next to me. In front of me. I can touch you, feel you, reach out to you. Your achingly gentle face. Your kind eyes, that I can just swim in forever. Your warm smile, the comfort of home. Your soft voice, a blanket to wrap around myself.
And then comes the crushing, numbing, aching sense of loss all over again. A black hole that sucks me in whole. Time and again. Tears flow and flow. And then I remonstrate with myself and pull myself back together.
For it all to happen again at some unpredictable moment.
And I miss your mind as much as your embrace, your passion, you showing me what love is really like. A warmth radiates even now when I think of…oh, those long tender nights, you taking me places I’d never dreamed existed…
I loved debating and dissecting issues with you, the way we could bounce ideas off of each other. So many times I wish for your guidance now as I struggle with Francois, with how to be a diplomat in this unforgiving land, what to do with Naughton having taken Henrik’s place in Pretoria and still trying to run our lives from there. I feel very lost and uncertain sometimes.
And underneath your intellect: your deep integrity, your passion for justice, for people, for freedom. They were never just slogans for you. They were knitted into the fibers of your being, so that you could act in no other way. I try to live that here in my work. Most days it feels like a hopeless task. How did you and so many others hold onto hope, and your humanity, for so long?
Is Bangkok changing you like I feel Jerusalem is changing me? Has time away from the struggle, the heart of the ANC had an effect? You had all those years in exile—but even in exile, you were still in the middle of it. The worst part about a posting is the isolation, I've come to learn. The terrible sense that the umbilical cord to South Africa is there, but so stretched, that it could snap.
But you have Fatima.
While I am alone.
Except for Themba and Tlali of course.
Alone, yet with Jerry’s kindness today, accepting, finally, that this is my path now. And I can feel now how I can carry you with me, even as I walk alone. You are still with me—rather than just gone.
Maybe one day we will meet or talk again. And maybe one day, someone else will have the benefit of all that you have taught and shown me.
All my love.
E
Bonus Material
The École Biblique: “the oldest biblical and archaeological research center in the Holy Land”.
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Stephen is traditionally venerated as the first martyr of Christianity. A leader in the early church in Jerusalem after Jesus’s death, he angered members of various synagogues by his teachings. He was tried and found guilty of blasphemy by the Jewish authorities, and then stoned to death.
A fascinating chapter historically, plus a wonderful reveal of really how deep of a romance and a love story is at the heart of the whole journey!