The Testimony. James Smythe

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СКАЧАТЬ his doors, because all of a sudden he’s afraid! Rough area, this, he says, and I don’t answer. Not talking? You some sort of mompie? No, I tell him, I just don’t want to talk to you, eh? Then he gets a call and pulls over down the road, outside a house, and he comes back two minutes later with this grinning fucking kont, stinking of dagga. This guy laughs as he gets in the back next to me. He does that click thing with his teeth. Fuck’s sake, I say, do I have to sit next to this one? The policeman tells me to shut it, and he starts off again. We’re two minutes down the road – the guy next to me hasn’t stopped smiling the entire time – and then we all start to hear the static again. I thought this was over, the stoner says, and then it gets louder. The guy in front pulls over, stops the engine, and we all just listen, and then we hear it. God. Then the kêrel unlocks his door, gets out, and just walks off, leaving me and this fucking reefer-stinking loser just sitting there, doors locked, right down the road from them fucking bergies. It’s a bloody miracle we made it out alive.

       Dhruv Rawat, doctor, Bankipore

      It was first thing in the morning, which was my busiest time, because everybody came before they went to work. Lots of the jobs started early and ended earlier, so I was always busy, it seemed. This one day there wasn’t a queue, which was rare, or so it seemed; I never had a chance to actually look outside to see, but there was always somebody at the door as soon as one patient had left, always another waiting to tell me about their illnesses. That morning I had the man with the bad foot back in, and he had put it up on my table. I took care of it, he said, I swear to you, I swear. You didn’t, I said to him, because if you had, you wouldn’t be back here. Did you go to the hospital? I asked. No, he said. The parts where I had cut it, tested it, drained it, they were black around the holes; The flesh has turned necrotic, I told him. What does that mean? It means that you have to have it cut off; not the foot, just the dead flesh, before it spreads. You’ll have to go to the hospital right now; I’ll take you there myself if you can’t walk or drive. No, he said, no, it’s fine. You cut the dead flesh off yourself. I trust you. I told him that I wasn’t equipped, but he insisted, pointing at the scalpel that was in the medical kit on my desk. You can use that, I have a strong pain threshold, I can take it. I had lifted the scalpel, and I was dangling it over his foot – because I knew this man, and I knew that he wouldn’t leave until he was satisfied, or he would leave and he would hobble around on his rotting foot until it was forcibly removed from his body, which would be the eventual outcome – and then The Broadcast happened. I sat there with the scalpel against his skin and listened to it, and he went quiet as well, for a while. When it was done he said, Well? Are you going to cut it off then? I will, I told him, just later. I went out onto the street to see what was going on – because it was inconceivable that it was in my head, no matter what it felt like – and it was … It was like a fly, buzzing around. Everybody was looking around for it, looking up in the sky to see if there would be something there to give them answers.

       Isabella Dulli, nun, Vatican City

      After the static, because they didn’t know what it was, they stopped the tourists from going into the Basilica, and certainly from going down into the tomb. It is so fragile; they only let 200 people in every month, that is why it gets so busy, why the tourists are so desperate to see it when we do let them, why they queue all night, sometimes, travel from hundreds of miles away. The tour guides took them away from the queue, told them to head up to the square, that they would have to come back. Most of them said it was fine; some of them complained. There’s no way you can come in, because it might be unstable. Then, we didn’t know if it was just from the building, or the electrics. I went down into the Basilica anyway, because I had been looking forward to it for days. It smelled so old, still, even with all the cleaning that they did, for preservation. It smelled of stone and dust, and there were very few places I loved more in the world, partly because of that very smell. I went down into the darkness – because the lights are so dim, it is always dark in the tomb, and there are always guides, because the ground is still unstable, like a building site in so many ways – and I knelt in front of the tomb itself to pray to the father of our church. I wasn’t praying for anything at all; only praying as I always did, out of love. Then I heard it, His voice, so strong through the darkness, but not the darkness of the tomb, the darkness of my heart, of the world; it was not frightening, or threatening. It was just all that I could hear. I thought of all of the faithful written about through history who He spoke to, His voice so strong; and I thought, and me. I was joining those whom He loved the most, who He was so close to as to spread His word directly, to fortify belief and to set His awe in the minds of His people. I cried in the darkness; my tears patted the stone of the tomb, and I was so happy right then, knowing that this was the happiest moment of my life; everything built up to that, and I would never be alone again. It was me and my God, and we were together.

       Tom Gibson, news anchor, New York City

      As senior anchor I had certain privileges. I got to pull rank on shifts, and as mine came to an end, after a very long day, My Children hit, and I decided that I wasn’t going anywhere. As soon as we heard what The Broadcast was saying, I knew that this could be the biggest news story of all time.

       Meredith Lieberstein, retiree, New York City

      The priests on the news after that first Broadcast looked so smug. There is nothing worse than a smug priest, Leonard said. He got so angry with one of them – I told you so, I said this was the case, the priest kept saying to the reporter; This is the Lord come back to speak to us – that he threw a tangerine at the television. It split all over the screen, burst like a water bomb. He cleaned it down – his temper never lasted for more than a single, regrettable second – but the apartment smelt of it all day, of that sharp citrus smell. It’s nice when it comes from a scented air freshener; it’s horrid to live with it all day when it’s not, so sweet and bitter and real.

      Leonard and I used to be Jews. We’re Ex-jews, he would say whenever anybody asked, Capital E, lower-case j, as if that hammered home his point: I’ve got my own emphasis for these things. He liked having things in his life and then renouncing them, that was another of his things. (I’ve realized recently, thinking about it, how many things he used to have.) We stopped being Jews in the late Nineties, not long after we first started seeing each other. He had just left his first wife, an awful woman called Estelle, and we found each other in a bar one night. We spent hours talking about everything and anything, and that pattern stuck. On our fourth date we got onto religion, and discovered that we felt the same way – disheartened, mostly – and that was that. We woke up the next day and decided to not bother any more. We already both used to celebrate Christmas more than we did Hanukkah, so it didn’t affect us there, and all the other stuff, it just felt natural to ignore it. We did that until the end of the next decade, when Leonard got his cancer, and then I started to think about it, to wonder. He never did, of course; cancer was a fight, and it could be beaten by hard work and perspiration, as far as Leonard was concerned, but I didn’t feel that way. It was diagnosed in the late stages, and the doctor told us that if he operated the next day, Leonard might be lucky. Might be lucky, he said. That’s a chance of a chance, outside odds at best, I figured. I had to drive home to fetch Leonard his pyjamas and a book, and on the way I passed the synagogue on Willet, so I stopped the car and waited until the next service started. I remembered every part of it – it was so ingrained, even after over a decade of not thinking about it even once – as if it were deeper than memory, like it was a part of my DNA, even – and I prayed for Leonard to get better. I prayed for an extra edge over the Might be lucky. And he was lucky. They cut the cancer out, they did radiotherapy, he was sick for a while, weak as the old man that he never wanted to be, and then he started to get better. I don’t know what saved him, whether it was the luck, the doctors, the prayer, but something did. I carried on going to synagogue, СКАЧАТЬ