~15~

WEDNESDAY MORNING. Instead of Larissa, there was an old book beside Jack. And a note: I’ll call later. Thought you might like a couple of interesting facts! Jack picked up the book: The New Banbury Dictionary of Saints and Sinners, edited by Stefan Williams. He sat up a little in bed. Second edition, 1975, Banbury Cross Press, Illinois, USA. Fifteen dollars, written in pencil on the title page. No dust jacket, just the threadbare, cloth-bound boards, faded to pale ochre red, the corners frayed and a little squashed. Title and author stamped on the front and spine in dull gold lettering. Yellow-cream end papers, and glued onto the rear inside sleeve, an old yellow library loan pocket — catalogue number 823.89, R746h, Pepperdine University Library, Malibu, California 90265. Note to borrowers: overdue rate: 25c per day. Total fine cut 50% if paid when book is returned. A stamp indicated that at some point the book had ended up at the Tecolote Bookshop, De la Guerre Studios, Santa Barbara. And now momentarily with Jack Susko, via Larissa Tate, Sydney, Australia. Even inanimate objects got to see more of the world than Jack did.

He flipped it open at the bookmark. Page 217.

Sergius the New, monk; b. 1322, Smolensk; d. 1396, Zargorsk; cd. 1443; f.d. 15 January.

Named Boris at birth, Sergius the New suffered a childhood of great poverty and hardship. The family was poor and moved around frequently, often forced to flee surrounding villages due to the father’s mental illness and the horrible stigma attached to his condition. The city authorities eventually arrested him and placed the unfortunate sufferer in a sanatorium in 1329: to survive, the mother was thus forced to give some of her eight children away. Boris, the youngest, was left on the hard stone steps of the Monastery of the Holy Ghost, where he soon entered the order.

Not long after, legend tells us, he was discovered in the Scriptorium during a particularly cold winter’s night, sleeping by the fire. (The Scriptorium was the only room in the entire monastery that was heated.) The subsequent punishment he received, particularly brutal and reserved for only the most heinous of sinners, was forty-two lashes with the branch of a frozen birch tree. It is said that at the height of his pain and delirium, God appeared to him: He instructed Sergius to illuminate the Bible, ‘... with the light of the glory of He who sits upon the throne of the world and is worthy.’ [Theo. Ecc. II. et. iv. 7] Sentenced to further punishment for mouthing such blasphemy, Sergius was reprieved in the eleventh hour, after the abbot was visited by God in a dream and instructed to return Sergius to the Scriptorium and have him taught in the art of illumination. It is said the abbot was shown a vision of the Great Fires of God’s Wrath. God’s wish was thus duly executed.

Sergius the New became renowned as a young monk for the straightness of his lines, drawn freely and without technological aid, with either his left or right hand. Controversially, the manuscript paper was set on an angle across his scriptorium desk. (This eventually became standard procedure.) Other innovations included a cushion, made of hessian and filled with warm mulch and straw, that added nearly three hours to a monk’s productivity; and inserts cut into the heavy oak of the scriptorium desks, for the secure placement of ink pots, which resulted in so significant a reduction in the rate of accidental spillage and manuscript damage that Sergius was called before the Bishop of Smolensk and praised before a gathering of abbots. This led to his appointment, in 1354, as Grand Scribe at the Trinity Monastery of Zargorsk, where he would spend the remainder of his life and also complete God’s Work: culminating in his masterpiece, the illuminated Holy Book that has since become known as the Sergius Bible. It took fortytwo years to complete and was finished on the very day of his death in 1396.

In 1621, Sergius the New was pronounced patron saint of arthritis sufferers. The Vatican investigated the Sergius Bible in 1967, after a succession of miracles were attributed to it by those who read its pages. It was pronounced a Holy Relic in 1974.

Jack closed the book, dropped it onto the bed beside him and slid back down under the sheet a little. The Sergius Bible. He thought about what it would feel like to hold. All one hundred and twenty-two thousand dollars’ worth of it. All six-hundred-plus years’ history of it. And he wondered — if he asked nicely — would Viktor Kablunak maybe lend it to him for the weekend?