Know this, Yaphiel: one hears one’s own greatest fears above all else, even if they come in a whisper.
As we walk on, I keep my son ahead of me where I can watch over him.
If I could make judgement cede to compassion, I think, then the nails through the men’s heels would come loose out of respect for their flesh, and their bindings would fall free, and the crosses themselves would shiver with gratitude for having been freed from their evil purpose.
The crucified boy begs the Lord of Hosts for forgiveness, though for what he does not say. After a time, he uses the intimate name for God we rarely speak: Yahweh.
An incense-seller I approach tells me that the boy is named Aron ben Yaaqov. He is from a fishing village called Kaphar. So, although my son and I are too far away to see him clearly, I am fairly certain that his hands have been coarsened by fishing ropes and nets, and that he hears the breaking of waves before sleep on nearly every night.
If Yahweh grants young Aron mercy, then the salt air of the seashore will fill his lungs before death, and he will see himself aboard a sailing ship on a perfect spring night, skimming along the reflection of the moon towards home.
A woman from whom I purchase a cup of water flavoured with mint tells me that the boy and his father killed two Roman sentries. For what reason she does not know. Apparently his father escaped capture. Would the boy prefer that he had been caught so that he did not have to meet the Angel of Death alone? God forgive me, I fear that that is what I’d wish for in his place.
I ask you this, Yaphiel; even if this youth committed capital offences against the Empire, could not our governor, Pontius Pilatus, have simply exiled him to the island of Sardinia, where our brethren from Rome were banished by Tiberius, or some other far-off nowhere land? So powerful and well guarded a man as Pilatus could not possibly fear a beardless youth, which causes me to wonder what his secret motive might be. Does he murder our children to take away our future? Perhaps that is the symbolic meaning behind the death of Aron ben Yaaqov, and why – even today, so many years later – he still pleads to have his life returned to him in my dreams.
‘I have done nothing!’ Aron ben Yaaqov protests as my son and I do our best to make our way around the multitude.
The boy’s words help me identify his age by a scale other than years, for he is plainly old enough to reason logically but too young to have learned that innocence is not a valid defence under the Roman system of justice – at least, not for Jews.
Legionaries guard the place of execution. Do you see them? No? Well, the rest of us do, and they are heavily armed, which is why even the most courageous amongst us do not rise up and free our brethren.
A noisy marketplace has grown up at the far end of the crowd. Stalls thatched with palm fronds have been erected, and musicians, dancers, fire-eaters and a troupe of dark-skinned Nubian acrobats are performing there. An overly friendly barber nibbling on a knot of cheese offers to shave my stubble for half the going rate, since he has cousins in Bethany and recognizes me as the man revived by Yeshua ben Yosef.
Yirmi and I refrain from speaking of the crucifixions as we make our way home. If you find that strange, then so much the better for you, because you have not been forced to learn that a public execution stifles nearly all speech. It is my experience, in fact, that the vast majority of those living through a long slow war rarely mention the conflict.
As we descend an escarpment on to which we’ve detoured and rejoin the road home, I ask Yirmi to say nothing to his aunts about what we have just witnessed – unless they make it clear that they already know. ‘And please do not mention those young imbeciles who ridiculed us this morning,’ I add as an afterthought.
Alexandros is rocking back and forth on the cracked millstone that marks the entrance to our town, but the tessera I left him is gone. I detect the faint odour of grilled onions as I approach him. His midday meal? I wave, but he is lost to our world.
Our crippled, hard-of-hearing old neighbour Weathervane hails us from the side garden of his scruffy little house, where he is busy weeding. His wife and daughters gave him that nickname many years before, after he mounted a wooden hand on his roof.
Next to greet me is one of Nahara’s playmates, Akiva. He is seven years old and small for his age – dark-skinned with beautiful green cat-like eyes. He runs to me just before my son and I reach our street and, with his hands reaching up to my chest, entreats me – as he always does – to hold him upside down by his ankles and spin him in a circle. When I do, he shrieks with joy, and afterwards he walks around in a dizzy arc, as though glutted with drink, and falls in a heap. Who can say why he delights in losing his balance, but I’m glad he does, since it gives Yirmi and me a chance to laugh with him.
A ragged, bare-chested Samaritan approaches me as I am helping Akiva get to his feet. A bucket of water hangs from each end of a pole balanced over his shoulders. His wife and two children trail after him. The tiny boy and girl cling to their mother. They are barefoot and filthy, and they have immense, deeply shadowed, mud-coloured eyes.
The Samaritan’s hair and eyebrows have become a warren for lice. I press two copper coins into his hand and suggest the barber I met a little while earlier, for his head will need to be shaved and oiled if he is to rid himself of this plague.
Yaphiel, my father once told me a brief story that I’d like you to consider before I reach home and the pleasant surprise awaiting me there. For the simple reason that it was the first time that I considered – in that vague, ticklish way that insights come to children – that life sometimes gives us no favourable options and that we must choose the path of least suffering for ourselves and the people we love.
When he was a boy in Yerushalayim, my father witnessed a team of horses dragging the bloody carcass of a bull into the square outside the governor’s palace. Sewn inside the great creature’s belly were a bearded man and a girl who looked to be seven or eight years old. Their heads poked out of two gaps in the creature’s tightly stitched skin.
My father was told that the man was a Roman who had poisoned his father in order to inherit his wealth. As to why the little girl was sentenced to this torture along with her father, no one seemed to know.
The bull’s carcass was left in the blazing sun from early morning until mid-afternoon, when it was dragged off to the Imperial Theatre, where four starving bears were released from their cages. As was to be expected, the crowd exulted in the man’s shrieks as the lumbering brown beasts tore into him, but even the sight of his head ripped from his shoulders did not make up for their disappointment when they realized that the girl had not uttered a single shriek or plea for mercy. You see, she must have already been dead when the bull was hauled into the theatre, though everyone could see that her eyes had been open – bulging, in fact – when the bears bounded out of their cages towards their meal.
Apparently her father had managed to strangle her before reaching the theatre, my father told me. When I asked how he could know that, he replied that people who are choked to death end up with bulging eyes. Kneeling down and gripping my shoulders, he added, ‘But I can be sure that’s what the man did because that’s how I’d have killed you, my son.’
17
When my son and I turn the final corner into our street, we are stunned to find Mia and my cousin Ion waiting for us. My sister is wearing a frown. ‘Your fame has spread,’ she tells me.
A hundred or so paces beyond her, in front of my house, a throng has blocked the street all the way down to the southern perimeter of Bethany and what is left of its ancient town walls.
‘I have nothing to give them – no words of wisdom,’ I say.
‘I have been speaking to a few of them,’ Ion tells me in Greek, ‘and they are good souls – respectable citizens.’ He grips my arm as though to convince me. And his use of the expression respectable citizens – so typical of the Alexandrian Jews – gladdens me. ‘If you bless them, they will disperse,’ he assures me.
As we head
home, Mia notices the dried blood on my skinned hand. I tell her that I had a terrific battle with the canvas awning over the swimming pool. ‘And I lost,’ I tell her with what I hope is a charming grin.
She stops me and studies my palm as though the scrapes will reveal my future.
‘See if you can discover what we’re having for supper,’ I suggest, but my effort at humour proves a failure, and she returns my hand to me with a withering look.
‘Tell me what really happened,’ she says menacingly.
‘I slipped in the street.’
‘Do I look like an idiot?’ she asks.
‘Mia, I’m too tired to quarrel.’
‘Did you get into a scuffle with someone?’
‘No, of course not.’
She turns to Yirmi and gives him the imperious squint she learned from our mother.
‘Dad tripped,’ he agrees.
‘You make a fine pair of liars,’ she tells us, ‘but just tell me if this injury has anything to do with Annas.’
‘No,’ I say. ‘Look, Mia, it was just some drunken Roman young men. They were eager to ruin someone’s day, and for some reason they chose me.’
I do not have the heart to deny each person who seeks my benediction or healing an opportunity to speak to me for a short while about their tribulations, and they plainly value this chance to be heard by a man who has passed a second time through the Gate of Birth, so it takes me well over an hour to finish with them. Whenever they question me about my resurrection, however, I steer our conversation back towards their ailments, since it is likely that one or more of them are spies sent by Annas to test the oath of silence that he forced on me. Hearing of the events that shattered the lives of so many strong-looking men and women reminds me that we never know what sorrows other people carry inside their hearts.
Once I am safely inside my locked front door, Cousin Ariston sits me down in my alcove and brings me a bowl of bread sopped in warm milk and honey, and Binyamin, my nephew, carries in a basin of hot water tempered with vinegar so that he can wipe the dirt from my bruised knee and hand.
With my family watching over me, I permit myself to close my eyes and drift away. I only awaken when my grandfather enters. He puts Ayin down on my clothes chest, his perch in the late afternoon, since from there he can observe the progress of sunset from my window.
Shimon sits beside me and takes my hand. He tells me that I shall always be his beloved little grandson and asks after my health. After that, we do not speak; along with Ayin, we watch the evening sky shed the blue of wisdom and dress in the pink and gold of mercy and kingship.
Shimon embraces me before returning to his room, and the pressure against my ribs makes me moan. ‘Are you really all right, son?’ he asks.
‘Just exhausted,’ I lie.
From out of nowhere, Nahara comes running towards me, but I grab her before she can crash into me.
‘Dad, what’s a mashal?’ she asks.
It is while I am explaining the concept of a parable to her that Marta steps in from the courtyard, arm in arm with Yeshua’s mother. I have not seen Maryam for more than two years, since the wedding of her youngest daughter, Sarah. Her hair has greyed over her temples, but she looks vigorous and happy.
I release my daughter’s hand and get to my feet. I do not know what Maryam makes of the unshaved and barefoot labourer that I have become, but I see a woman who has nursed, bathed and fed five children to adulthood and buried four others and who has been kind enough to share Yeshua with me since I was eight years old.
When she spots me, she thrusts her hands over her mouth as though I am a gift she had no right to expect, which makes me shiver; it seems too great a responsibility to have such a central place in her life.
‘Dodee,’ she says, reaching out to me.
Her touch brings me back to the warm evenings of Natzeret, when we would eat our suppers in her courtyard. I smile at the memory, but she does not, because holding the boy-turned-man who saved her twelve-year-old son from drowning always means too much at first.
Maryam was the first adult outside my family who took the time to see me not as the son of my parents or a friend of her son but as a person in my own right. In truth, she did not much care for me at first, and so she also taught me that our initial impressions of others can change, though I later learned that it often takes a terrible trauma to make us do so.
As always, Yeshua seems to be standing beside us when she and I separate. Two individuals of different ages who are joined for ever by their fondness for a third person is a form of love that has no name I am aware of in either Hebrew, Aramaic or Greek, but perhaps there is a language in some far corner of our world with greater awareness of the human heart. Indeed, I hope there is, because what Yeshua’s mother and I share has grown dearer to me with each passing year.
Maryam holds me away from her and leans her head back to study me, and this ought to be a moment of solidarity between us, but instead – absurdly – it merely reminds me of how much taller than her I have become. Do we ever grow used to the true height of the adults who ruled over our childhood?
She must be thinking much the same thing, because she gives way to easy laughter, which allows me to do the same.
She and I sit side by side at supper. When she addresses me, she takes my hand – a habit she had with Yosef and her children for as long as I can remember. I notice a throbbing in her jaw whenever there is a pause in our conversation, however. I begin to suspect that Yeshua has sent her with a message for me that she will deliver only when she and I are alone.
We are twelve at supper: Maryam, Yirmi, Nahara, Mia, Marta, my cousins Ion and Ariston, Grandfather Shimon, my nephew Binyamin and my niece Yehudit and her husband Rafael. Gephen, who would paw and whine for scraps if we permitted him to stay with us, has been banished to the courtyard.
We eat patinas stuffed with leaks, carrots and coriander. Marta and Mia have prepared two different styles, the first with a healthy dose of the kosher garum that Lucius gave me as a gift, the second without, because I am of the opinion that the fermented juices of fish would better be used as fertilizer.
A number of strangers and neighbours come to our door over the course of the meal, soliciting my blessing, but Marta tells them that I am already asleep. Even to those who are adamant and tactless she does not raise her voice, since we have an honoured guest with us.
No one talks of the executions that have taken place. Or of my death and revival. I know from experience that these two subjects will, as a result, wait for me in my bed.
My sisters talk with Maryam of the old friends we had in Sepphoris. Her husband Yosef and my father – along with thousands of other woodworkers, bricklayers and stonemasons – restored life to that city after the Romans crushed an uprising in the Galilee and turned nearly every street to rubble.
After Maryam takes a final almond biscuit, she leans close to me and asks in a whisper that I escort her back to her niece’s house. And so, finally, we are to be alone.
Even at this late hour, the streets are filled with pilgrims conversing in animated voices and eating little treats. The gleaming lanterns everywhere give our town an atmosphere of celebration. I bless all those who approach me and, as is my habit, hand out our leftover bread to those who are hungry.
Maryam and I take a circuitous route to Yerushalayim to avoid the crucified men on Methuselah’s Hill. When we pass the small bridge and dry riverbed where Mia found her first abandoned baby eight years before, I tell Maryam how my sister rushed the cold and listless child to a wet nurse she knew in Yerushalayim. ‘It was when the little girl opened her eyes and reached out a straining hand’, I say in triumph, ‘that Mia discovered her life’s work.’
After praising the way my sister has grown into such an industrious and good-hearted woman, Maryam looks across the ancient hills of Judaea as though she is searching for what she has little hope of finding. She removes her headscarf and shakes the tight weave out of her hair. I wish to
ask what is bothering her, but, at the moment, our age difference seems to make that impossible.
An evening marketplace has grown up on the far side of the riverbed, and a Galilean wine-seller has decorated his stall with lanterns glowing red, blue and yellow through fabrics of different colours. I reason that Maryam might tell me her troubling thoughts if she takes a drink with me. I buy a cup for the two of us, and we sit on my cape under a plane tree turned into a dark many-armed giant by the moonlight.
Sharing our wine – drinking from one cup – becomes our unspoken oath, certifying that, although we have not spoken in two years, we are still – and shall for ever be – family.
‘I am working for a wealthy Roman Jew in the Upper Town,’ I tell Maryam, hoping that some light conversation will put her at ease. ‘I’ve made a ferocious-looking Ziz at the bottom of his swimming pool, and I’ve put a menorah on his head, like a crown.’
‘You and your birds!’ she says, laughing girlishly. ‘You used to drag Yeshua off to the most outlandish places to watch them.’ She wags a finger of rebuke at me. ‘I used to worry that you two would be swallowed by quicksand. Or eaten by crocodiles!’
Would I like her to believe I’ve changed hardly a whit from the boy I was? Leaning towards her, I whisper, ‘It would have been thrilling to have to escape a hungry crocodile on occasion!’
After we share another laugh, she falls silent. Perhaps a secret of mine will prompt her to reveal her concerns to me. ‘I’ll tell you something no one knows,’ I say. ‘Adam and Havvah are talking with Ziz in my mosaic. I’ve given the first man my face and the first woman Leah’s.’
‘I know what my Yeshua would say about that,’ she says confidently.
The Gospel According to Lazarus Page 10
