The Gospel Of Judas by Simon Mawer Page A

it be that He was so intelligent?’
    Francesco shrugs. ‘It isn’t that the Jew lacks intelligence. He may be highly intelligent – for example, look at his well-known prowess at chess. What the Jew lacks is the creative faculty.’
    ‘Who said that?’
    ‘Oh, I don’t know. Some book I read. But I don’t believe any of it. For example, Mendelssohn was a Jew. He didn’t lack the creative faculty, did he?’
    ‘
Mutti
no longer plays Mendelssohn. He is
not
creative, that is what they say now. He is
derivative
.’ Leo frowns at the word, as though he is not quite sure of the meaning. ‘Yet wasn’t Jesus creative? Didn’t He create the true religion for the whole of mankind?’
    The Italian considers the conundrum for a moment, and then smiles. ‘It was not Jesus who created it, but God.’ There is a thoughtful silence. Through the windows come the outside sounds of the garden – crickets, a blackbird singing, a gardener clipping a hedge in the Italian garden below.
    ‘But Jesus
was
God, that is what Father Berenhoeffer says. So God Himself must be a Jew …’
    ‘I expect so.’
    ‘You
expect
so? This is a very dangerous thing to say,
signor
Francesco.’ The child looks at him with disapproving eyes, and, having caught him out, a glint of triumph. ‘Judas I can understand. Judas has all the untrustworthy qualities of the Jew. But Jesus? It is too much …’
    ‘I think perhaps you should get on with your work, young man. Or I will report your idleness to your father.’
    The lesson continues in the bright, sunny room while afly circles beneath the ceiling light and
signor
Francesco reads a book.
    After a while the boy looks up again.
    ‘Why do you always look at my mother?’
    Francesco feigns surprise. ‘Why do I
what
?’
    ‘You look at her all the time. Are you perhaps in love with her?’ The boy’s expression is quite serious: all the seriousness and thoughtlessness of childhood is there.
    ‘I
like
your mother very much. She is a good woman, and she is very much in love with your father.’
    ‘I know that, but that is not what I asked.’
    The office is in shadow, the heavy drapes drawn to keep out the sun. A clock ticks on the mantelshelf. A fly buzzes mindlessly against a windowpane, trapped between curtain and glass, like a specimen in a collection that has suddenly and desperately come alive. From the wall the Führer stares petulantly into the shadows. On the desk there is the silver-framed photograph of Leo in the uniform of the Jungvolk, and the picture of Gretchen wearing a dirndl.
    Francesco is at the desk, with the drawers open and papers laid out before him. Francesco is a thief. The question is, what is he stealing? And for whom?

5
    ‘They don’t warn you about it when you join the priesthood, do they?’
    ‘Warn you about what?’
    ‘The loneliness and the boredom.’
    ‘I’m not bored. What makes you think I’m bored?’
    Her sharp laugh. ‘You’ve just admitted to being lonely.’
    Jack watched, faintly amused. He sat in his favourite armchair, detached from the two of them on the sofa, and he laughed at his wife in the manner of someone amused by a precocious child. ‘Let him be, Maddy. What did poor Leo do to deserve this?’
    ‘Leo the lion,’ she said, ignoring her husband. ‘But you’re feline, not leonine. You’re just like Percy.’ Percy was the cat that the Brewers had inherited from the previous occupants of their apartment. It was a grey, solemn beast that sat in the middle of the carpet and did nothing. His Staffordshire pottery act, was what Madeleine called it. The cat was an exemplar, a paradigm. ‘Just watch him. Not asleep, justsitting. He’s like Leo. Nothing to do, nowhere to go, no one to talk to, nothing going on in his mind.’
    The cat had been, of course, castrated, but Madeleine never referred to that aspect of the analogy.
    ‘He’s waiting for mice,’ Leo said.
    ‘And you? Leo the lion? Waiting for gazelles?’
    ‘I’m not