Patmos, Greece
1.
Women keep their own secrets. These four sit together in a dim room, polishing silver, door open to let out the kerosene fumes. Laughter and talk, none of which I can understand. Three of them polish with rags but one uses her bare hands, the pads of her thumbs flat and blacked with soot. Rubs her finger in the cranny to catch the stain.
They see me standing in the courtyard, holding my little daughter in my arms. Because of her they call out to me in love and friendship. We do this every three weeks, they say when I ask. Wicker baskets piled with finished lamps rest on the cement step. French curves and cutouts through which the candle flame will shine. Metal blinding in the sun.
2.
John had climbed this very hill, hands bound, tunic dark with sweat. When he tripped and bloodied his toe against a stone, he managed somehow to keep silent. Guards surrounded him, men with short tempers. He had once been like them, not that they would dream of such a thing. Son of thunder. But that was long before, these boys not yet born when he had begun his discipleship on the banks of a faraway sea. He had woken that distant morning thinking only of the catch. Twist rope, mend net.
The sun here was strong, the air dry and sweet. The guards turned off the main path and led him through a stand of junipers, resinous and perfumed, up to a dark hole that opened in the slope. Their captain gave him to understand that this would be his place until such time as the emperor extended mercy to him—a day unlikely to come. John stepped inside. The cave was small, its walls gray stone shouldering out here and there into knobs. He thanked the guards for his rations and sat down on the cool floor to eat, blessing God before breaking his fast.
When the vision came to him, was he awake or asleep? A line of light, brighter than the sun’s keen edge. Thunder, perhaps, and a gust of wind that blew into the cave and scoured the room, making bits of refuse fly.
Or maybe none of that, but a change he sensed in himself. The skin on the back of his hand went porous and he saw there scenes from his past. Fine wrinkles on his wrist like the net of braided rope rising from the skin of the lake, heavy with fish. Fig tree in leaf but not in fruit, for the time of figs had not yet come. Aaron’s breastplate set with precious stones. Sense impressions but no words; those would come later. All he could do now was open his eyes to see the thing as best he could.
3.
Three men, half-tight but still in step, stride down the old road in front of our little patio. Kalispera, good evening, they say as they pass, ’spera, ’spera. ’Spera, we reply. A fat red moon, missing a rind, rises slowly over the monastery and floats like a bubble in syrup. Sure, it all feels like an omen if you try, but then what to make of the motorbikes speeding loud around the switchbacks, or the FUCK POLICE graffiti by the public basketball court, or the SMOKE CANNABIS? The moon became as blood, and the sun black as sackcloth of hair. I stand on the patio and watch as the red fades.
We’re on the latest stop of a long journey. The Corn Palace in Mitchell South Dakota, the Black Hills during the big Harley rally at Sturgis, the fallout shelter beneath the Greenbrier resort in West Virginia, my grandparents’ graves in rural Ohio, the Spanish Steps in Rome, a Capuchin crypt walled with bones, Florence. All very earthbound, and I don’t know why I think this will be any different. You can find Patmos on a ferry schedule and buy a ticket. You can step off the boat at midnight and catch a cab up the hill to a rented room. What do I think I’ll find here, on this little speck of an island in the middle of the Mediterranean?
I’ve come to Patmos, along with my husband and our eighteen-month-old daughter, for the same reason most people do: to visit the Cave of the Apocalypse, where John the Beloved Disciple, also known as John the Apostle or John the Evangelist, is said to have written Revelation around 90 A.D. I had been a bookish kid, raised in the South during the late Cold War, in a church that preached a fair number of sermons about the end times. These factors had combined to make Revelation a book with which I had a strange relationship. I’d avoided it as an adult but read it as a child, believing it was a foregone conclusion that the world would end soon. Fireballs, nuclear winter, cancer, starvation. We’d make it through the initial blast, I sensed, but would live only to suffer and scrounge for years.
None of this would seem to make for a carefree Mediterranean vacation. But since becoming a parent, I’ve realized I need to come to terms with this book somehow. Is the age of miracles past? Traveling here, could I make a vision of my own?
4.
To get to the Cave of the Apocalypse, take the stony old road up the hill, follow the left fork through the woods, and pass the trash heap by the abandoned house. We trudge along, sweaty and dusty, and pass a group of matrons heading down the road to the harbor town. Something makes me look back, and I see one of them squatting on the side of the path, relieving herself. Then she pulls up her drawers and runs to catch up with her friends.
The Cave is smaller than I’d expected, like a living room dug out of the mountainside. We step inside and sit down to catch our breath on a narrow bench, unsure of what to do next. I’d been so focused on getting here that now I’m kind of lost. A small window looks out over the dry hillside, down to the sapphire water. Right in front of us there’s an icon, Jesus with a potbelly. To our right there’s the hollow where John would lay his head, the corner set off now by a brass fence. You can see the cleft where he’d put his hand and help himself up. The headrest and the handhold are haloed with hammered silver. And straight ahead, the stone ceiling dips lower, and I see the break through which the awful visions entered. When the baby gets squirmy, David carries her outside, cradling her head so she won’t bump it on the low hip of the three-part crack.
I eavesdrop. The tour guide says that here is where John began to write, pointing to the white napkin spread like a tablecloth over a rock. Then she opens a leatherette-covered binder with L’APOCALYPSE printed on it in curving letters. “Apocalypse” is a Greek word meaning “unveiling.”
Theologians note the spiraling pattern of the narrative in Revelation. The stars fall from the heavens and you think it can’t get any worse, but instead of the story ending, it starts again with fresh modes of destruction. The narrator returns again and again to this story he can’t escape.
Revelation is a book in three parts. While exiled to Patmos, the narrator has a vision of Christ, who tells him about the end of the world. He charges the narrator with telling what has been, is, and will be—past, present, and future—and although the narrator’s first audience is the seven churches of nearby Asia Minor, in a larger sense, his audience is everyone who will ever read his book. Three times, Christ or an angel orders the narrator to write: “Write the things which thou hast seen” (1:19); “And he saith unto me, Write”(19:9); “And he said unto me, Write” (21:5).
“What has been” is the vision he’s just had. “What is” are the shortcomings of the seven churches. “What will be” takes up the majority of the book, and it details the end times, with seals being ripped off of scrolls, rivers and oceans turning to blood, and terrible suffering coming to anyone unfortunate enough to be alive.
“What will be” is what makes Revelation a scary book to read. It purports to be not history, but prophecy, and unlike the prophecies in the Old Testament, this one hadn’t come to fruition. We were waiting to see what would happen. Waiting for the moment when the story and our reality matched. The match might be coded; we had to watch closely or we might miss it. If we read it right, we could be on our guard, and as prepared as anyone could be. But reading the story implicated us, too, made us responsible. You know what to do. Live perfectly. Even as kid, I knew I couldn’t manage that. So maybe I’m here for a clue, a closer reading that might let me off the hook.
6.
John doesn’t make much use of Patmos except to name it at the beginning as the place of his exile. I, John, was in the isle called Patmos; and I was in the Spirit on the Lord’s day. For me, this passage neatly lays out the book’s central duality. He’s in Patmos, but he’s also in the spirit; linear narration doesn’t apply.
So I circle back again and again, returning to the Cave over the course of the week we spend in Patmos, not knowing what I hope to find. Whatever it is, it’s tied up with what I think is the most chilling verse of the whole book, Rev. 10:6: “that there should be time no longer.” The words call up a primal dread from my childhood, a fear that used to hit me at a particular time of day: summer evenings at eight o’clock.
In South Carolina, in July, that’s when the sun starts to set. That’s when I knew, even then, that the brief time allotted to me was slipping away, and I had nothing to show for it. It wasn’t solely a fear of the world ending that scared me—my parents wisely forbade me from watching The Day After and movies like it, but even from the ads I knew that it showed entire city populations being vaporized by atomic weapons. No, mine was more of an inward fear of not having real faith, of trying to make myself believe something absolutely. Sometimes I couldn’t do it.
If the Rapture came at one of my moments of doubt, I would be left completely alone for measureless time. I knew that was coming, had felt it even during children’s choir practice on Wednesday evenings. Yellow light poured in through the west windows of the choir room, and the director sat splaylegged on a stool. His khaki slacks were tight in the crotch—you couldn’t help but notice—but I was ashamed of myself for noticing, and knew that I was lost.
Looking back on it now, I have some questions. Did he really have to sit like that, feet propped on the rungs of the stool, spreading his legs like a lazy dog airing out his merchandise? I couldn’t have been the only one who noticed. We were in elementary school and knew little or nothing about sex—even listening to Joan Jett at the roller rink was suspect; I still remember someone’s mother leaning in and telling us, That is a bad, bad song, when “I Love Rock ’n’ Roll” came on the speakers. It wasn’t attraction I felt, looking at him, but fascination and embarrassment. Here was difference made unforgettably visible, a weird combination of pride and vulnerability.
He was trying to teach us a song about the new heaven and the new earth: “For the first heaven and the first earth were passed away,” Rev. 21:1. The song was supposed to comfort us, but it chilled me. This first earth seemed pretty great. We used to drive down to the creek and wade in the cold water along the slick stones. We used to drive to the dump and heave our bags from the trunk into the pit, and once I found a book of poems there, and once a little table with a drawer set into the side. I painted the table pink and covered the worn spots on its top with picture postcards of places I had never been. In the backyard, puffballs squirted brown smoke out of their tops when you pressed them, and pill bugs motored along under the holly bushes. Could all this cease to be?
Yes. The children are grown, the house sold, the creek diverted to feed a water-treatment plant. Was the awful dread I used to feel just an intimation of the brevity of life? Possibly, but I think the unease was something more. A realization that even the most dreadful story could come true. That an even worse story—one you hadn’t read yet—could likewise become reality. The world of Revelation is still peopled and vivid, filled with action and therefore the potential for change. Worse yet was the threat of a wordless existence. The idea that a time could come when there was not even a terrible story to hold on to. My gut went hollow when I thought of that on those hot summer evenings. It was hard to explain to my parents, impossible to share with friends. This secret I had to bear alone. Its face was a blank sheet, bleached-out in the light.
7.
Is that monk Windexing the Bible? No—just the plastic sheet that covers it. There is much to do to prepare for tonight’s services. He tucks a loaf of bread into a napkin-lined basket, plucks spent tapers from the tray of sand and dumps them in a box, which goes outside to wait for trash day. Someone’s spread the rugs on the big rock outside for an airing. I watch the monk and he ignores me; I am just another visitor, sitting on the Cave’s bench. Nothing for me to do but pray or write, which is praying with your hands. You have to believe that someone’s listening.
The view would have been the same. This dry air, this steep hill, terraced now with olive trees. Lichen splashed across lumps of limestone. Junipers, eucalyptus, and thorns, surely, dry like these and begging to burn. The whirlwind is in the thorn trees. Simple food he depended on someone to bring him. It’s a dry place and never bore much. Probably he ate fish, clams, now and then a bit of bread.
Strange that his year of privation would lead, later, to the island’s becoming one of the richest in the Mediterranean. The monks of Patmos were wealthy for centuries, thanks to a chrysobull decree granted in 1088 by Emperor Alexius I Comnenus of Constantinople that exempted them from taxation and gave them the right to own ships that plied the waters and gained treasure. It’s a desert island and would seem to be naturally poor, devoted to an ascetic way of life, but an important story started here that’s attracted pilgrims and tribute for centuries, and you can see the wealth in the monastery at the top of the hill with its richly worked silver and gold icons, the treasures in its museum, its tapestries, the costly lamps I watched the women polish. The Cave itself can feel like an afterthought.
But the only treasure John carried out was the one wrung from his own mind. The words unspooled and he followed the trail they made.
Here God spoke. In a gray room that looks like a highway underpass. If here, why not anywhere? Walls of stone pliant as dough under your hands. Hollow out a place for your head to rest, and a grip to help your hand as you rise. What we take to be solid can turn soft and you sink, the earth’s skin breaking under your weight.
As many times as I visit, I never sit alone.
8.
The group filing in must be Russian Orthodox. The men gather in a circle and start singing an ancient-sounding song, led by a baby-faced priest with frizzy red hair. The women wear their hair wrapped in scarves of many patterned colors—print, paisley, white, turquoise. Nuns file in, wimples framing their faces and covering their chins. Now they’re all singing, men and women both, Kyrie eleison. The women kneel and then put a hand on the bench as they rise.
It occurs to me that this shiny, wobbly bench is holy too, and ought to be edged with silver. That the bottle of Windex is as transformational as holy oil, and more subtle. Kisses wear a smooth place into the bottom of Jesus’s robe, and shuffling feet press a trail into the floor. I breathe in and the tour group’s collective stale breath gusts into my lungs. So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom. On an old cane-seat chair behind me, the monk murmurs to himself in Greek, going over accounts.
The three-part seam says that the Word is powerful, fearsome. Be wary; inspiration can strike anywhere. It’s dangerous that way, destroying what you had believed, demanding a new place for itself. Inspiration carving itself onto the warm clay of hand and brain. Inspiration strong enough to split stone. Who hasn’t prayed for that? For a word that, even if inscrutable, is loud enough to transcribe?
Watching the pilgrims, I see what I’m supposed to do. Cross yourself; buy a candle; kiss the icons; drop a coin in the alms box. It makes no sound when it falls, muffled as it is by other gifts. All of us are searching for a way to express something—reverence, delight at having arrived here safely, gratitude to God for the inspiration to do work, awe at the beauty of the dry hills and the dark sapphire sea. We share, I think, a desire to show respect to the monk, whose job it is to take care of the place, who domesticates its wildness by living here. I can barely greet him in his native language, and am abashed when I try. I envy the silver-polishers; they have a job that needs doing. The Russian women unwind their scarves and touch them to the crack. I want to participate, too, but what do I have to sanctify? I look down and see my hat and my notebook, and stand up to take my turn.
The Cave could provide an example of the compromises of a good life. Yes, the terrors of world’s end—which you can decide not to believe. It’s too awful; make it untrue. Distance the Beast to the historical past, Nero, ancient Rome. Yet there’s part of you that knows the Beast can change himself into the thing you fear most. Think what that is; don’t speak it. To say it could bring him to life. The fear of Revelation is the fear of death. You know the end is real, much as it torments you. Once you find out, the trick is trying to forget about it. At best it becomes like my memory of the choir director in the khaki slacks—always present, often underground.
But this is the other half of the compromise: going over accounts so you can use the coins left in the box to buy candles for tomorrow’s prayers. Carpets freshly beaten. Whang, whang, the sexton bangs the brass candelabrum to make the taper fit. Wraps the base with a paper towel and tests it. Secure.
9.
During our days in Patmos, we eat our faces off. Octopus, prawns in melted garlic butter, green beans. Slab of feta and a spoonful of yellow oil. Glass tumbler of ouzo, steel cup of salted potato chips. A measure of wheat for a penny, and three measures of barley for a penny, and see thou hurt not the oil and the wine.
One evening in town, I see the Russian Orthodox priest with the red beard, his face open and frankly relieved that his work is over for the moment. Enjoy yourself in the tourist shops, young priest. Buy an olivewood spoon, bricks of soap, a child’s dress edged with white lace. Buy a cardboard box of incense the same size as a pack of cigarettes. Buy a gold-smeared icon of potbelly Jesus, a plastic magnet picturing the Cave, a postcard of a naked satyr dancing joyfully with his enormous erection.
We visit the grocery store, where we learn that the Greek word for diapers is pampers. Toot Toot is a popular brand of sandwich bread. Along the road, I steal seeds from blooming four-o’clocks and stash them in my pocket. When evening falls, the air fills with the sweet smell of juniper and eucalyptus, hay and warm stone. This is my favorite time of day here; though it used to bring me dread as a child, in Patmos, somehow it doesn’t. The buildings the faintest of pink in the fading sunlight; the grumpy sexton driving up the hill in his little car. No portents of destruction, only the world we would grieve to leave.
I conflated my old fear of apocalypse with the place its story began—a natural mistake for a Cold War kid, for whom place names have the power to convey a physical chill. Alamogordo, Frenchman Flat, Jornada del Muerto. The Cave of the Apocalypse is a popular site for a particular kind of tourist, but what kind? One whose mind is on the things of heaven and not of earth? Who venerates the site of a story’s beginning? Or who is confused by something in herself and believes that taking notes and pinching sand into a plastic bag will let her in on some secret? She strains her ears to hear that secret over the whining mopeds, the generator that rattles one hill over, and the reruns of The Nanny, dubbed in Greek. The clock on the wall reads, permanently, 10:01.
I thought everything written was true. Give me the little book. Sweet as honey in my mouth but as soon as I had eaten it my belly was bitter. I was always looking for a sign, asking myself what it could mean. Trying to interpret things I found in my daily life, which can get you into trouble. What does it mean to let a story scare you? I went to Patmos because I had read about it. I knew the story, and believed that gave me an insight into the place. At its root, this impulse wasn’t so different from the desire I’d had to visit Nantucket Harbor, or New Bedford, Massachusetts: “How cheerily, how hilariously, O my Captain, would we bowl on our way to see old Nantucket again!” But there’s a difference if you believe the story might be prophetic.
Look at these fragments. Shards of ironware. Green thumbnails of sand-scoured glass from Kampos Beach. After five on Sundays, the buses don’t run, and you have to borrow the cell phone the tavern owner gives you to call Patmos Taxi. An old story says that John gathered sticks and pebbles from the seashore and transformed them into gold and pearls and rubies, to teach his followers about the folly of trading eternal grace for the transient riches of earth. After a month of penance, his disciples turned the gems back into common stones and left them on there on the beach, where we found them.
Remember this: the child asleep in the cleft between beds, pushed close together. This: how the rat running under the tables in the plaka makes us all scream and drop our potato chips. This: a German tour guide stops me in the courtyard to read my child’s face and palms. “She is destined for a great work,” she says, “but she must be surrounded by people who support her.”
As she walks away, she turns back and calls out, “Agapemo,” my love. “She will have a large dream-world,” she says.
Potted plants grow in the courtyard beside the steps leading down to the Cave. Tea roses, jade plants. Shaded by the whitewashed wall, sheltered from the sea wind. The saucers beneath the plants hold water; it must be someone’s job to refill them. Who knows how long we have? In the meantime, tend the flowers till they bloom, and pinch them when they’re blown.
11.
A year or so after his arrival, John left Patmos, his book finished, the emperor who exiled him dead. He would have walked down the steep hillside path he’d climbed before, heading for the harbor. A little boat would have taken him to Ephesus, where according to tradition, he died of natural causes at a good old age, the only one of the disciples to avoid death by crucifixion or torture. In the last letters he’s believed to have written, John says again and again, Little children, love one another.
We walk through town on our last night there. A sign in the goldsmith’s window reads: JEWELRY COLLECTION INSPIRED BY APOCALYPSE. Strings of pearls, coral figurines, lapis lazuli pendants, beads of onyx and tigereye. John spends much more time describing gems than he does on his one bare mention of Patmos. Jasper, sapphire, topaz, amethyst. I buy a silver ring inscribed with rubbed-black characters in ancient Greek. He shall wipe away all tears from their eyes. Not exactly the inscription I wanted but it’s the one that fits my finger. If I could pick any verse it would be: What thou seest, write in a book.
Tradition says that John performed many miracles after he left Patmos. In one of them, a man shattered priceless gems into shards to prove that he did not care for riches. But John said that this was pointless, because it did not help anyone. He put the fragments back together again, and his followers sold the gems, giving the proceeds to the poor.
Diamonds can be set afire. Diamonds can shatter if struck a certain blow. Rough diamonds are greasy, gray, onion-skinned. Little pebbles you’ll throw out with the mudwater if you don’t take care. Rub them between your fingers to know them.
Pearls demand special care, and love to lie against the skin. True amber smells of resin. Zeolites, known as “boiling stones,” bubble when heated. Emeralds are cool against the finger; reject warm stones as false. Emeralds are also known for their flaws. Were John’s shattered gems emeralds? Did they keep their seams after their miraculous repair, like the crack in the roof of the Cave? John had a fondness for that kind of thing, could have decided purposely to leave one, to tell the tale of the break to those who knew how to read it.
12.
Those four-o’clock seeds I pocketed have taken root in the clay here at home. My flowers of the apocalypse, blooming in late afternoon on heart-shaped leaves. Mama, the pink flowers have started, the child said to me yesterday as we weeded.
And I believe the act of having a child flies in the face of actual belief in apocalypse. If you really think that extended suffering and an awful end must be our portion, you don’t want to bring a child into that and sentence her to such pain. If you have a kid, you’re betting that it’s at least unlikely. And that maybe it won’t happen at all.
The people who live in the shadow of the Cave of the Apocalypse aren’t more aware of the brevity of life than people anywhere else. They don’t possess some rare secret that walking the streets of their towns might let you in on. It wasn’t religious reasons that pulled me to Patmos, exactly. More like a funeral for my childhood dread so that I wouldn’t pass it along. If I could go back to the child I used to be, that serious girl even then keeping track of everything, trying to do right, I would take the Bible out of her hands and close it on the desk. I would tell her that eternal things matter, but God loves you, and so do I. Nothing you do can separate you from that truth.
I was onto something when I went outside and hunted the ground for treasure as a child. I didn’t know it then, but seeing the beauty in a chip of colored stone and knowing that stone’s name is a gift. I was able to see the love of God paving the world around me but I distrusted this knowledge because it was concrete. I believed in bodiless dread, but not in the physical reality that I could see and touch. At the end of Revelation John writes about the stones that furnish paradise. He must have known his readers would need the relief of the physical after all he had put them through, and he might have needed the relief himself. There is something more than what we see and know in this mortal life. And our days are precious; I knew it even then, reading the line “when time should be no more.”
If there should be time no more, let it end here, paused in this moment. Our last afternoon in Patmos. The child eating green beans and tomatoes from a thick ironware plate until she’s full and sleepy, then tipping over in her high chair to fall dazed into the yellow sand. Sleeping in her father’s arms under the ailanthus tree as the afternoon wanes. Then we peel off our clothes and swim in the warm bay until the man with the boat calls out to us that it’s time to go.