Читать книгу Cult Sister - Lesley Smailes - Страница 9

NEW YORK CITY, NEW YORK:

Diving through tunnels and heavy traffic, Ross, Stefan and I made our way to Long Island. After delivering the car and getting our deposit back, we caught the subway to Greenwich Village. Stefan had a South African friend there who had offered him and me a place to stay. Ross found accommodation at a motel nearby.

Stefan’s friend was a publisher who lived on 10th Street. Rich and friendly, he was happy to put us up in his apartment. Stefan and I spent that first day exploring downtown Manhattan and lunching in Central Park. On our return to the village, just before twilight, we exited the subway too early. Consulting our map, we worked out that we had to go through Washington Square to get to 10th Street.

The square was full of New Yorkers enjoying the late afternoon sun. A tall, sweat-shiny exhibitionist shimmied past me on rollerblades with snakelike ease, wearing only a skimpy red Speedo and headphones. A grungy group of hippies lounged on the grass, a cloud of marijuana smoke hovering hazely-lazily around them.

At the far end of the park were heavily made-up transvestites sitting on a bench. Colourful, dreadlocked Rastafarians with thick accents tried to sell me weed.

Then I saw him. He was a humble-looking man with a big beard and a long blue shirt. He was talking to a stylish woman with bright lipstick and earrings. The contrast between the two was marked. He was pointing to the page of a small book.

I felt drawn to him. As I approached, he asked me if I ever read the Bible. ‘Every day,’ I lied. His name was Jonathan. I had never met a Jewish Christian before. With his down-to-the-knee-and-wrist shirt, baggy, nondescript trousers and well-worn leather sandals, he looked exactly how I imagined one of Jesus’s disciples would have looked. We exchanged a few more words and then I ran on to catch up to Stefan.

Returning to the comfortable 10th Street apartment, I felt light and free. I kept on thinking about the man in the long blue shirt. Stefan and I were going to supper with South African friends of his, but I excused myself from the date, telling him I needed a bit of space.

Then I returned to the park to find the intriguing stranger. He was still there, but another man who was also wearing one of the long raincoat-type garments had joined him. This man approached me when he saw me looking at him and asked if I was interested in spiritual things. I said I definitely was.

His name was Thomas. He had short, curly hair, a long beard and was missing a front incisor. Although he didn’t have quite the same level of charisma as Jonathan, he spoke with an intense conviction that drew me in. He told me that he lived by faith and that he had forsaken his old life many years before to become a disciple of Jesus.

We sat down on the grass and he opened up his small pocket Bible and pointed out verses I had never seen before. It felt like he was putting a knife through my heart. Growing up, I’d had Bible stories read to me all the time and had gone to hundreds of church meetings and worship services. Now I, who thought I knew so much, was being confronted with things I had never seen or heard before.

He told me that the way I was dressed was wrong, also that it was wrong for me to be wearing jewellery, and, wrong too that my hair was so short. Suddenly I felt like everything about me was wrong. I was a sinner. Immoral, unholy and riddled with wrong. Thomas seemed uncomfortable, hardly ever making eye contact as he spoke to me. Later he suggested that I meet one of his ‘sisters’. He explained that among his people it was frowned upon for a man and a woman to sit together, talking. At that point he almost lost me. What a weirdo!

Little did I know that this strange man would soon be my husband and the father of my children. As odd as I found Thomas, I couldn’t ignore what he was saying – his words made me feel dirty and jaded. More than anything, I wanted to be clean inside. We arranged to meet the next day at the arched entrance to the park so he could introduce me to his ‘sister’.

By this time I was starving. I asked a friendly looking passer-by where I could get a good, inexpensive falafel. ‘Come with me,’ he said, with a thick accent. Solomon was a young Jewish dancer from Israel who had won, he told me, a scholarship to a famous dance school in New York. He took me to an obscure Israeli restaurant on a hidden side street and bought me supper. I treated us to dessert. We ate our ice-cream cones while window shopping in the village, finishing back at Washington Square where Solomon put on an impromptu dance show for me.

He told me how he was having such an internal struggle. The men in his family had been cantors in their local synagogue for hundreds of years. Solomon wanted to be a cantor too and walk the straight and narrow. He danced this out for me, pretending he was on a tightrope, his arms outstretched. Balancing. Careful, pointy steps. But his body just wanted to dance. And then he danced, wildly and sensuously, jumping on benches and twisting, turning and gyrating with grace and ease. It was as though he was dancing out my own heart’s dilemma.

We ended up kissing late into the night on the grass where I had, just hours before, been talking about the end of the world, the mark of the beast and false Christians.