The Dark Path by David Schickler Page A

back. Mara is on the ferry deck and I can tell it’s her just by her silhouette.
    â€œMaaax!” She bounds down the gangplank into my arms like a soldier’s wife.
    I’ve splurged to get us the nicest hostel room, a private one with a big bed. At a local restaurant we and all our friends have a giant laugh-fest of a meal that lasts until midnight, and I get the DJ to play “Stir It Up,” my and Mara’s favorite Bob Marley song. But later as Graham is singing Sinatra and making the room whoop, Mara starts crying. She’s watching an Alabama Boy and his girlfriend kiss and I know that she’s seeing in them some unassailable oneness, some deep agreement of being. She goes out onto the terrace and I follow.
    â€œMara,” I say. “Mar.” It’s a nickname that I use only in emergencies. I put my arms around her while she looks at the ocean.
    â€œYou’re upset about the Medjugorje plan, right?” I say. “Look, let’s just bag it.”
    Mara has agreed that after Ios, she and I will break off from the others and travel to Medjugorje, the Yugoslav village where the Virgin Mary has allegedly appeared. I have doubts about the place, but I’ve longed to see it.
    â€œWe’re not bagging it,” Mara insists, wiping her eyes. “It’s important to you . . . so it’s important to me.”
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    FROM IOS, she and I take the ferry to Athens. We take a train to Yugoslavia and then get up into the mountains to Medjugorje by bus. The terrain is free of vegetation. Among the dirt and rocks is a church, and pilgrims visit a hillside spot where visitations have allegedly happened. We see candles and crucifixes around a shrine. Most of the pilgrims are middle-aged Americans in windbreakers. I arrange for Mara and me to piggyback onto a tour group as they meet the eldest visionary.
    She is a young woman named Vicka, and speaking through a translator she answers questions. I ask Vicka what she or for that matter Mary feels about the world’s many religions and the bitter divides among them. Once she understands my question Vicka smiles and speaks to the translator.
    â€œVicka says,” the translator tells me, “that there is only one God.”
    Later in the day we go to the nearby seaside town of Dubrovnik. While Mara goes off to take photographs I duck into a church. There’s an American tour group celebrating Mass. They’ve just been to Medjugorje and are soon to fly home. Several people in the group keep glancing at one woman among them. She is around fifty, and the others nudge her to talk. She shakes her head until the group’s priest asks if she’ll please tell the story just one more time. She stands.
    She says that a few years ago she had malignant tumors in her head—a large one at the base of her brain, and a smaller one on the left side—and that surgeons removed them. She convalesced, losing her hair and lots of weight. She eventually came through it, but she had a paralyzing fear that the tumors would come back.
    Then in Medjugorje she was on the shrine hill during a prayer ceremony. Afterward a man came up to her. He was Latvian and spoke no English, and he could communicate only via his friend, who translated. He told the woman that during the ceremony he’d been in the crowd below her. He said that he’d seen two glowing images on her head, one larger one near the base of her skull and a smaller one on her head’s left side. He said that they were faces shining in her dark hair. He said that he believed he’d seen the face of Christ.
    â€œSo I just know now that they . . .” The woman gestures at her own bowed head. “They’re gone for good. I’ll die someday, but not from them.”
    When the Mass ends I hurry to the city’s castle ramparts where Mara and I agreed to meet. She’s sitting on a giant black