“What I am trying to explain is why I couldn’t see what is happening to David when we first looked at it on Sunday afternoon. You, of course, were approaching it from a legal point of view, your friend saw it from a psychological one, Philip Gardner can see David only as the colorful Erasmus, and I was stuck at seeing Erasmus as a perversion of David Sawyer. This morning at that ungodly hour, I finally turned it around, placed him in an historical setting, and looked at his actions as if they indeed held an internal logic, rather than simply reflecting the irrational reactions of a severely traumatized man.” She leaned forward to drive her point home. “The key idea here is, ”covenant.“”
Kate swallowed her bite and tried to look intelligent. “A covenant is some kind of agreement, isn’t it?”
“A biblical covenant could be anything from an international treaty to a business arrangement. It was regarded as a sacred commitment, legally and morally binding, absolutely unbreakable. The relationship between the Divinity and the people of Israel was covenantal, for example. I should have known immediately that was what David was doing—he used the idea twice in explaining himself, the first time when he was talking to you and Philip Gardner in Berkeley, the second in the interview on Friday. The passages were on both lists, but I was seeing it as one of his loosely metaphorical quotations, or expressing a psychological truth, not a literal one.”
“What difference would that make, precisely?”
“A great deal. You see—well, let me take a step back here.” Take several, thought Kate. “What you see in David is a conjunction of two very different religious traditions that have been brought together by his personal disaster and welded together by his need. The idea of covenant is one of them—we’ll come back to that. The other is the tradition of the Holy Fool, a figure David spent much of his adult life studying. Ten years ago, David took a long-delayed but decisive action and told Kyle Roberts that there was no future, no real future, in the academic world for him. David now attributes his harsh words to his own vanity, which I assume means that he was too proud of his own status to recommend an inferior scholar for a post that he, Kyle, was not suited for. I agreed with him at the time, and still do: One cannot allow oneself to be known as a person who recommends duds,- the academic world is too small and too unforgiving for that. At any rate, David’s criticism was the spark that set off a badly unbalanced and volatile personality, and David’s family, his beloved son, as well as three other innocents, were destroyed in the explosion.
“Now, one of the most basic characteristics of the fool, either a secular or a religious one, is that he is without a will. Even inanimate objects are more self-willed than a fool. Think of some of Charlie Chaplin’s brilliant bits where he wrestles with chairs and clothing and lengths of wallpaper and such and then is beaten by them. Look at the way your Erasmus depends on his scepter—a classic piece of foolishness, by the way. He has no will,- he makes no choices,- he is wafted to and fro by powers he cannot controclass="underline" Even when he appears forceful and aggressive, he is acting only as a mirror. David, in fact, took this to an extreme, though I admit a logical one: He does not even have words of his own.”
She waited until she saw that Kate had followed her this far, saw Kate begin to nod, and continued.
“Only a brilliant man like David could have managed it. And, more than brilliance. I am not so ready as Dean Gardner to attribute sainthood to David, but he did have a point, and David’s charisma was always considerable.
“What I think happened, then, is that at the point in David’s life where he had to choose between death—remember what he said, that the only thing worse than death was wanting death and being denied it?—and some tolerable form of life, he chose a life of absolute surrender, of complete will-lessness. Complete and daily sacrifice, without any risk of doing harm to another by taking positive action, a form of service to humanity that was properly demanding and might go some way to make up for what he was responsible for—and here’s where the idea of covenant comes in. Guilt is a feeling with a limited life span, and David could not take the chance that someday—in a year, or three years, or five—the initial impulse that drove him to live the life of a Fool would fade and he would find some excuse to resume his normal life. So he ensured that it would be permanent by declaring a covenant, an unbreakable oath said, I venture to say, over the dead body of his son.
“A covenant is either whole or it is broken—nothing in between, no amendments or retractions. In the most archaic forms, the symbolic recognition of a covenant is a split carcass, down the halves of which a flame is passed or the people walk. In fact, in the Hebrew language a covenant is ‘cut,” not just made, which serves as a reminder that if one party goes back on his part of the agreement, he may be split down the middle as the carcass was.
“I can see I’m losing you, and I freely admit that it’s a very cerebral explanation. In fact, I doubt very much that David thought of it in anything like this manner. His was, I imagine, a ‘gut’ response to the option of suicide. The fool’s way of thinking came naturally to hand—it fit—and he clamped on the oath, sworn on his son’s body, like a suit of armor. No—more than armor,- like an exoskeleton, a rigid carapace that held him together and allowed him to justify living. The inflexibility of the vow, the safety of speaking in other men’s words, the freedom that comes with letting go—that has become his life. A life of service to the homeless, of ministering in different ways to the spiritually impoverished middle classes and to the dangerously isolated seminarians.”
“And now, jail,” said Kate slowly. “And probably prison.”
“What do you mean?” Professor Whitlaw said sharply.
“I have had the strong feeling the last few days that Sawyer is reconciling himself to being incarcerated, that he doesn’t really care whether he’s in or out. At any rate, he certainly isn’t afraid of it anymore, like he was at first.”
“God. Oh God. Yes, I can see that. His ministry in prison. Oh Lord, what can we do?”
“We must make him talk. We have to find out what he knows about John’s death. Professor Whitlaw, I am being horribly unprofessional by saying this, but frankly I have serious doubts that David Sawyer killed the man. However, I think he knows who did. He must tell us.”
The cafe lunch tide that had risen around the two women was now starting to ebb, and Kate only now became briefly aware of her surroundings. After a long time, Professor Whitlaw looked up at her, and to Kate’s astonishment the woman did not seem far from tears.
“I want David back, you do understand that. He was my best friend in all the world, and I have missed him terribly, every day, for all these years. However, much as I would rejoice in having him return to himself, I have to admit that what you want could finally destroy what remains of his life. If you make David break this strange vow of personal speechlessness, you will force him to break faith with his murdered son, and I suspect that for David that would be intolerable. It would negate the whole last ten years of his life. I do not wish to be overly dramatic, but I very much fear that if you break his oath, you will break him. You could kill him.”
“What would you recommend we do?”
“You might find the real murderer.”
Kate suppressed a surge of irritation. “Yes,” she said dryly.
“Other than that, frankly, I do not know what you can do. Self-preservation is too low a priority for him to respond to that particular appeal, and you have already tried to convince him that he has the responsibility to help bring the man’s killer to justice, with no result whatsoever. Unless you can convince him that his silence positively harms others, I can’t see that you’ll budge him.”