Priest of Sin: An Ancient Tale of Mortal Sin

By Mohammed Y. Burhan

A busy man receives a call from his mother one day, beckoning him to visit. Upon his arrival, she admits that she feels ill, but she cannot clarify the symptoms or source. She begins to speak of an old memory of an ancient book, discovered by her father and hidden in the attic. Recovering the book, she gives it to her sonwhose curiosity gets the best of him.

The man descends into the story told by this ancient book. According to the translator, the tales it contains occurred before the birth of Jesus Christ. The stories are the firsthand accounts of five scribes who witnessed a temple servant whose life was anything but sinless. The servants name was Tor.

Many days of Tors life existed within the space of the temples Holy of Holies, where he kept watch over the altars and idols. Tor had his doubts, howeversome of the same doubts we have today. Who is God? What does He want from us, and why are we here? It takes a long journey, filled with strife, for Tor to discover his own answers, in a story that proves that, the way to knowledge can be the way to sin.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trafford Publishing
• Release date: Feb 22, 2012
• ISBN: 9781466916500

Mohammed Y. Burhan

Novelist, poet, and journalist born in Syria. He has published six books in Arabic: Historical Drama: An Academic Study in TV Production Incomplete Texts: Poetry and Short Stories. Priest of Sin: Historical Novel Heart’s Healer: Historical Novel Taste of lightness: Poetry and Short Stories House of Hatred: Historical Novel His novel House of Hatred has been translated into Mandarin and published in China. His works were subject to academic thesis in Middle Eastern universities. And many literary studies and reviews about his work were published in several Arabic newspapers.

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Contents

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Prologue

How soon can you be here? There is something you need to know about your grandfather.

It was crazy to leave my piling work and my family and fly thousands of kilometers just to grant her wish and listen to her telling me about my grandfather.

But I did it. I didn’t even hesitate to do it. Why not? Intuition has always been the key link between my mother and me. Moreover, I was the only one on earth who knew how valuable her gifts were.

In the airport, she was waiting for me, and as usual, she was all alone while holding a bouquet of white flowers. How could this eighty-year-old woman be so romantic? Her love for life made her fight back all the diseases of old age. She got over them by turning her back on every idea of the inevitable end.

Two hours later, I was amid plenty of flowers and plants. Her home was more a garden than a house. I sat down near my small bag, under the apricot tree, waiting for her coffee.

For my mother, preparing coffee is a specialty like that of caring for flowers. She waters the coffeepot from the pottery jar that she keeps under the brugmansia plant—she never fills the pot directly from the tap.

As for the coffee beans, she brings them from the purses that she hides between the petunia plants. She grinds the beans herself to grant a fresh cup of coffee that has the flavor of plants and the taste of dew.

Through the window of the kitchen that looks out over the yard, I was watching her gestures and her lips that were silently mouthing the words she wanted to tell me. I had to draw a tender smile as my mother was still my mother. She never changed. She paid special attention to telling her stories. She was keen to tell an attractive story from the very first reciting, and that was why she was preparing herself to tell it.

She, unusually, didn’t ask me about myself or about my family; rather, she directly started while serving the coffee.

Something very strange is happening to me, something here inside my head, she said. I feel I am sick, but without pain. I even can’t sleep. I am suffering a very bad insomnia. You see how pale my skin is? Maybe because I am tired.

Why, Mother? What’s wrong with you?

She continued. Well, I don’t know, but I feel that I am living my old memories. I don’t know if this sudden attack of memories is something bad, but it is so tiring. Believe it or not, I am living the details of very old events—seventy years ago, or over. I am living them as if they are happening now.

Why don’t you go to the doctor?

I don’t know. And this is not my concern now. I want to tell you one of my memories about your grandfather. I think you need to know about it.

In her usual suspenseful way of narrating, my mother started telling me what had happened to her a few days ago. She wasn’t just telling me what had happened; rather, she was transporting me to what had happened so that I would live the details of what she was saying.

"One day the canary woke me up in the early morning, about five o’clock. It usually comes to the vine in the yard and chirps to wake me up. It stays until I come to the kitchen to prepare my coffee, but that morning the bird flew to the apricot tree and continued chirping. What’s wrong with it? I thought. It must be hungry. It must be asking me to bring some bulgur wheat. So I climbed up to the attic to bring a handful of the stored bulgur in the clay vessels. But suddenly, while opening one of the vessels, my eyes flashed back and a similar moment came to my mind. This was long ago. I was putting something in a similar hole in the wall. I recalled every detail and lived the past as if it were happening now, not seventy years ago.

"That day your grandfather came back after his long absence in Haifa, he was carrying some new clothes and candies for the children—your aunts and uncles. We ran in a circle around him, scattering our presents and quarreling about them. As for him, he sat with your grandma, paging through an old brown book that, as he told her, he had found while putting together a new railway track with some workers.

"He started reading her some pages from the book, actually decoding them, as they were written in a very strange way.

"Every morning for the few next days, we saw him sitting by the hearth and reading my mother some stories from the book. Actually, my mother didn’t care much for what he was reading; she usually nodded off every time he held the book to read. We also didn’t like it when he did this, especially when he sometimes asked us to leave the room as he wanted to read certain excerpts.

"Oh, how curious we were to know what our father didn’t want us to! So, shivering with cold, we eavesdropped behind the door.

"A few days later, your grandfather prepared his traveling bundle to go back to work on the railway track in Haifa. The journey took ten days, as I remember, so he usually loaded his pack animal with much bread, ten candles, some thyme, some tea, and a bottle of oil.

"However, having finished reading the book, he asked me to climb up to the attic and to make a hole in the back adobe wall to put the book inside it. He had wrapped the book in a piece of cloth. He then asked me to fill the hole again with the new adobe that my mother had prepared in a small pot.

I did what he wanted me to, but since then, no one ever mentioned the book. We all forgot about it, and so did my father and mother. I only remembered it that morning—when I called you.

My mother then got the book, still wrapped in the same white cloth, from under the swing that she usually sat in, and she gave it to me.

For the next three days in my mother’s house, I was not brave enough to unwrap the book. I was afraid that my obsession with books would distract me from my being with my mother. I had to grant the three days to her and not waste a single moment doing something else.

In the yard of our old-fashioned Arabic house, by the small circular pond and with the murmur of the fountain, we sat together for long hours, from the early morning till noon. She usually told me the latest news about our relatives and friends. Actually, this kind of news had no room in the limited space of the phone calls.

However, what really astonished me was the amazing flow of her memory when she talked about the past. Nay, she was really attacked by the curse of memory. Amazingly, she could remember the color of her dress that she wore for her aunt’s wedding sixty-five years ago. She could even remember the style of her small mirror that she used in order to comb her hair before going to school. She could actually remember the fine details just like a camera.

In the morning of the fourth day, while I was packing my bag to get ready to leave to the airport, my mother unpacked the bag, picked the book up, and said, Keep it with you. It will be entertaining to read it during your flight.

She then smiled, adding, Be careful! Don’t lose it or forget it on the plane, as usual.

Ah, a mother is the only one on earth who knows her children’s weak points. And she is always keen to remind them that, before her, naked they are. No matter how old they are or how far they go, she still has the key to their lives.

A few hours later, I remembered her smiling face when I was fastening the seat belt and trying to give no ear to the noise of the flight attendants. Anyway, it was a lucky flight because, exactly as I had wished, the seat next to me was vacant, which meant I could avoid desultory talks.

My heart leapt as I carefully unwrapped the cloth of the old book that smelled of dust.

I slowly opened to the first page.

The five testimonies preserved in these papers shalt not be available to the public, I advise, as profligacy is utterly clear therein, and the person involved is clearly an apostate.

We consider probable, still with no clear evidence, that he lived four or five hundred years before the blessed flesh birth of Jesus Christ.

The first testimony is by Hermes, the sage, who seems to have asked the others to write their testimonies on what happened and then put them together in one manuscript.

And the small letters in the footnote read as follows:

After eighty-eight days of hard work, translation into Arabic is accomplished on Monday, in the fourth day of the ninth month of the year one thousand seven hundred and forty-seven after the birth of the glorious Lord.

We handed in the translated pages along with the hard copies of the testimonies to Father Anton Abu Markus so that he may keep them in the library away from the sight of believers.

Jesus’s Mercy Seeker

Jorjos Al-Jahboni

Chapter 1

The Testimony of Hermes, the Sage

I am Hermes, the sage, the faithful servant of Ra. I witness that I saw, I witness that I heard, and I witness that the falseness in my speech comes from the many confusing aspects and the confused memory, but surely not from mine heart, as there, deep inside myself, nothing but the truth dwells.

What happened had happened. I never can change it, as I am not the one to make destiny happen, but in this testimony I am telling what exactly happened. I am confessing everything that I know without keeping to myself what might protect me from being punished when the subjective hands could reach these papers.

My story with Tor is my story with the village of Sakhibo itself.

One day, in the month of Hatour, the terrible phoenixlike wind blew the routes away with its sandy wings, making a continuous whooping that sounded like wailing. The sky was overcast, and the clouds veiled the roofs of the houses. That afternoon, a horrible storm blew for three hours. It was a bad omen, I thought, as not one drop of rain fell down the squeezing whirls.

I arrived in Sakhibo. The village was on bended knees, praying for some rain—rain that might save her from a night so gloomy that the deity alone would know how vicious it was.

Darkness started swallowing the last lights of the day, and the gloomy people retired