The Testament of Mary by Colm Tóibín

easily seen. And then I followed our guardian and Mary down the hill on the other side, walking slowly, walking slowly away.
    I have dreamed I was there. I have dreamed that I held my broken son in my arms when he was all bloody and then again when he was washed, that I had him back for that time, that I touched his flesh and put my hands on his face, which had grown beautiful and gaunt now that his suffering was over. I touched his feet and his hands where the nails had been. I pulled the thorns out of his head and washed the blood out of his hair. They left me with him, the others, Mary and the guardian but the others too who had come to be with him at the end, who had put themselves in danger to declare their belief in him. And we were left there with him. Since the grisly vicious job had been done and a man had been made to die splayed out against the sky on a hill so the world would know and see and remember,those who had made him die had no more reason to remain. They were eating and drinking somewhere, or waiting to be paid. Thus the busy hill, so filled not long before with smoke and shouting, with cruelty and hard faces, now became a soft place for weeping. We held him and touched him, he who was both heavy and weightless, the blood all gone from his body, his body like marble or ivory in its rich paleness. His body was growing stiff and lifeless but some other part of him, what he had given us in those last hours, what had come from his suffering, hovered in the air around us like something sweet to comfort us.
    I have dreamed this. And there are times when I have let the dream into the day to live with me, when I have sat in that chair and felt that I was holding him, his body all cleansed of pain and myself cleansed too of the pain that I felt, which was part of his pain, the pain we shared. All of this is easy to imagine. It is what really happened that is unimaginable, and it is what really happened that I must face now in these months before I go into my grave or else everything that happened will become a sweet story that will grow poisonous as bright berries that hang low on trees. I do not know why it matters that I should tell the truth to myself at night, why it should matter that the truth should be spoken at least once in the world. Because the world is a place of silence, the sky at night whenthe birds have gone is a vast silent place. No words will make the slightest difference to the sky at night. They will not brighten it or make it less strange. And the day too has its own deep indifference to anything that is said.
    I tell the truth not because it will change night into day or make the days endless in their beauty and the comfort they offer us, we who are old. I speak simply because I can, because enough has happened and because the chance might not come again. It will not be long maybe when I begin again to dream that I waited on the hill that day and held him naked in my arms, it will not be long before that dream, so close to me now and so real, will fill the air and will make its way backwards into time and thus become what happened, or what must have happened, what happened, what I know happened, what I saw happened.
    What happened was this. They held me between them as they ran and it became clear to me that our guardian did not have anything planned. He knew as little as we did about where he was going. We could not go back into the city. He had some money, but we had no food. It struck me that he was urging us forward so he could save himself, that the grand plan for my protection came later, but it was not dominant in those hours. In the way they work now, my guests who come, they try to make connections, weave a pattern, a meaning into things, and they ask me to help, and I will help them as I have donealready, but not now. Now I know how random it was and uncertain, and there are things that happened on that journey that I do not care even now to conjure up. I know we were not good in