When the boy’s shrieks finally end – has he passed out from the pain? – the silence that reproaches me for not rescuing him seems so deep that I know I would never reach its bottom if I were to fall inside.
Later that night, Gephen limps into my alcove and comes to me on my mat. He rubs his head against my leg, whimpering. His left forepaw is bleeding, and he smells of manure. Has evil come to reign over all of Bethany? I wonder.
I caress the cat’s belly – trying to sooth him and, through him, all those in torment.
I fall asleep with Gephen in my arms and awaken in the morning as though spun out of a war-chariot, unsure of where I am. When I throw open my shutters, the bright-blue firmament startles me. I gaze out, holding tight to the lintel, very much like a lizard peering out from behind a rock after a stormy night.
I find a dead dog just outside my front door, already being fed on by flies, and it is then that I realize I have lived through what we in the Galilee call a Night of Ophel.
Ophel: a dense, destructive, bleeding darkness; the darkness that can be felt from the Book of Names.
Lack of sleep has left me weak of body, but it is a comfort to sit beside Yirmi at the bottom of Lucius’ swimming pool and finish the sky in my mosaic, since it permits me to draw a line between my work day and the previous night.
When the composition is complete – every tessera in its final home – my son offers to prepare the grout for me, since my bad leg is stiff and painful. He lugs our sacks of quicklime and volcanic ash out of the shed by the garden gate and, under my guidance, pours their contents into an iron basin that Abibaal fetches for us. He mixes the resulting amalgam together with water.
Since Yirmi has never helped me finish a mosaic, I hand him my wooden paddle. ‘The grout will be ready when it is eager for the feel of the wood but not so greedy that it refuses to let it go,’ I tell him.
A short time later, when the mixture is perfect, I ladle a small portion of it into separate bucket and have Yirmi add the blue-black pigment I make from kohl and indigo. I shall apply this dark-grey grout in the slender gaps between the tesserae of the black flames so that their colour and their impact will be intensified.
I work alone because the grout tends to lick up every drop of moisture on one’s hands, turning the skin to leather. My fingers and palms are, by now, a lesser form of cowhide, so they will not endure any further damage, but my son’s tender flesh would suffer.
I do not pause for my midday meal, since I find this work so tedious that I might not return to it if I were to stop.
A pitiless sun has risen over Yerushalayim. Yirmi wipes my brow and towels off the grout I accidentally smear on my face and hair. He senses my waspish mood and cleaves to silence.
I finish shortly after the descent of the third hour, by my reckoning. I shall perform a few touch-ups the next day, as needed. After that, I shall do my best to let the mosaic go off without me and continue its journey alone, no longer burdened by its maker.
While Yirmi and I are resting in the shade of the cypress tree, Lucius comes to us. His eyes are tense and the set of his mouth is worried. ‘I need to talk to you,’ he says.
‘Is everything all right?’ I ask.
‘Yes, but come see me in my villa when you get your energy back.’
Yirmi and I clean our hands and faces at the fountain. As we enter the atrium, Lucius stands up from beside the low table where he has been arranging golden wildflowers in a black vase.
‘I’m grateful that you worked so long and hard today despite the heat,’ he tells us.
‘Thank you. Now why did you need to see me?’
‘Yeshua needs to speak to you. He wants you to go to him. I just received a message from a courier.’
‘Where does he want to meet me?’
‘At the tavern his father used to frequent near the Woodworker’s Synagogue. And he has asked for you to go to him right away.’
‘If I see him I’ll have to tell Annas.’
‘I’m sure he’ll invent something for you to tell the priest that will seem believable.’
Lucius leads us down two sets of stairs to the back entrance to the villa, which will leave us closer to our destination. ‘Perhaps you ought to go to the Jewish bathhouse after you speak to Yeshua,’ he suggests. ‘You’ll be my guest.’
‘Has our hard work left us smelling that bad?’
He laughs. ‘You always think the worst of me! No, I’m worried about the wounds on your back. I’ll send Abibaal to the bathhouse to meet you – he’ll wash the skin and apply his salves. And he’s a magician with a strigil!’
‘Lucius, thank you, but we can’t go,’ I say, before my son’s expectations can soar too high.
‘Why won’t you let me do something nice for you? First you tell me that you can’t go to the theatre with me. And now this.’
Maybe another time, I ought to lie but do not. Do I speak of matters best forgotten because of my excess of drink? Undoubtedly, but I see now that I was also hoping – in a small, neglected and never consulted part of my mind – that Lucius would plead my case to his aristocratic friends and win my family some justice. Though that was never a real possibility, of course.
‘I once had an … altercation with a customer there,’ I tell Lucius.
‘What kind of altercation?’
‘With my father’s assassin.’
Yirmi has never heard this story and draws in a shocked breath. We are standing at that moment in the corridor that connects his villa to the private storage room for garum and olive oil where Lucius caters to his wealthiest customers. It is dark and dripping with damp, and our voices echo off the stone walls. The sense of being protected by a secretive space is what I remember now most clearly.
I told the story to Lucius and Yirmi quickly because I then believed that Yeshua was waiting for me. Yaphiel, I shall tell it to you now as a warning, since I have long been terrified that my wish to see my father’s killer punished might one day draw him to you or one of my other grandchildren. Remember this, my child: should Julius ben Magnus ever cross your path, turn and run away as if he were in league with Asmodeus, for indeed he is.
After my mother discovered my father’s blood-soaked body in his bed, Mia noticed that the amulet he always kept around his neck was gone. It was a solar serpent – the size of a large dupondius. The serpent’s left eye was a yellow citrine and its right a pink tourmaline. The Egyptian symbol of eternal life – the ankh – was concealed cleverly amongst the etched lines of the serpent’s hood.
More than a decade after my father’s death – one cold winter afternoon – I decided to restore my flesh to vigour at the Jewish bathhouse. As I stepped into the caldarium – the hot room – I noticed a handsome, golden-haired slave cleansing the skin of a guest to the side of the bath. When I approached this youth for a closer look at his astonishing locks, I noticed that the man whose chest he was cleansing wore a familiar amulet around his neck. That this customer was a Jew was obvious, since he was wearing no towel and his covenant with the Lord was on show. He was lying on his back and his eyes were closed.
Why he had not left his amulet in the dressing room I cannot say. Perhaps he had had jewellery stolen at the bathhouse before. Or perhaps he feared being without its protection even for a moment.
On the excuse of questioning the slave about his handsome strigil, which had a handle made of mother-of-pearl, I stepped up to him. During our brief conversation, I managed a long look at the amulet. The serpent’s eyes were of two different colours, yellow and pink, and the tiny silver ankh, though tarnished, was clearly visible.
The rage that surged up through me was like fire. In one swift and sure movement, I tore the amulet from the man’s neck, breaking the silver chain. He was up and lunging for me before I had a chance to shout that he was a murderer. I remember the iron hardness of his hands around my neck more than anything else. We were separated by the other bathers or I would have died inside the grip of my father’s murdere
r.
Blood was on my hands – my own, I would later discover, from a deep wound on my shoulder that he had made by biting my flesh.
He grinned at me. His brown hair was in a tangle, and he was dripping sweat from his brow, but I had done him no damage.
The amulet must have fallen out of my grip when I tried to pull his hands from my throat. It was now in his fist.
‘You killed my father!’ I shouted.
‘You’ve mistaken me for someone else,’ he replied with a sneer.
‘That’s his amulet!’ I said, pointing.
‘I bought it in Damascus. If it was your father’s, he must have sold it there.’
Had I been mistaken? Was this man innocent?
Confused by emotions impossible to control, I permitted the manager of the bathhouse to lead me back to the street, where he warned me to never again approach the man I’d attacked since he was a killer for hire with powerful Roman friends. When I asked for the assassin’s name, he hesitated a moment, then whispered it in my ear: Julius ben Magnus.
I learned all I could about him over the coming months and discovered that he had been born and raised in Joppa and had been employed for several years as a bodyguard for Felix Marcus Octavianus, the Roman who had refused to pay his debts to my father. I discovered, too, that he had ended the lives of at least six other men. And I learned, as well, that my sisters and I had, in truth, been extraordinarily fortunate, for he enjoyed his work so much that in three of those cases he had also murdered the men’s children.
36
Yirmi and I await Yeshua in the raucous tavern where the woodworkers of Yerushalayim and their companions drink away whatever portion of their silver and copper coinage that their wives have not yet managed to slip out of their satchels and stash away. We sit in a dark corner, at a small, square wooden table with misaligned legs, hoping that our hunched, defensive posture will keep strangers from joining us. I have almost no talent at the art of waiting, but Yirmi reads me the graffiti etched into the table’s surface, and a few of them display an obscene wit that keeps us amused. One of them even makes us laugh aloud, although it is silly: I was certain I’d fucked the ugliest woman in the world and then I met her mother.
An impressive number of comments satirize our conquerors. Yirmi is at an age when bodily exhalations and excretions often seem hilarious, and this remark sets him giggling: Every time the Emperor farts the Romans praise his genius.
Surprisingly, one observation – freshly carved in Greek with a florid hand – sets me thinking of Leah: My wife watches over me with her multi-coloured mind.
Poikilophron – multi-coloured mind – has a twisting, somersaulting sound. But did the poet intend to write thron, meaning throne, instead of phron? That would make it a far more common term. In the end, it makes little difference, for a good deal of verse, as I was once told by a Galilean bard, is created by the trickster spirits – the kesilim – who jumble up letters and syllables on purpose so that all of us might have new words with which to play.
At length, a stick-thin, toothless old rogue opens the shutters on the window nearest us and starts to shriek profanities at the women passing by. Yirmi and I sip our posca, nibble our lupines and hope for a bolt of divine lightning to silence the churlish old idiot. While watching my son’s face studying the girls who occasionally pass by our window, I realize why I have been feeling an intruder here: my father would have often taken the boy to taverns such as this. In my extravagant, long-defeated heart I know that Yirmi would have heard epic stories of the olden days – of war, hardship and sacrifice but also of miraculous love – that I shall never be able to tell him.
What could be keeping Yeshua?
Sunset soon creates clouds of carmine and sulphur above the houses across the square. I know we ought to make our way home, but, when the tavern manager sets his candle flame to the wick of the lantern on our table, he asks if my son and I can make room for another drink.
As I sip my palm wine, my son endeavours to engage me in conversation about the wonders awaiting him in Alexandria. ‘Can one climb to the top of the lighthouse?’ he asks. ‘Shall I be able to take lessons in the Egyptian language? Are there trees and flowers that I have never …’
I fight through my apprehension to give the colourful replies he deserves.
By the time we leave, a dense netting of stars has spread across the firmament, and a frigid wind has swept in from the mountains in the east. I hold Yirmi close to me as we make our way to Yaaqov’s home. He shivers in my arms but voices no complaint.
Sarah, Yaaqov’s wife, confirms that her husband is with his older brother and tells me how to find their meeting place. I borrow an old camlet cloak from her and force Yirmi to put it on.
My son and I weave in and out of the labyrinth of streets behind the Imperial Theatre in order to confound any spies who may be observing us. Two armed guards admit us to the house where Yeshua is having supper. It belongs to a friend whose identity must remain a secret, since he still lives in Yerushalayim and might suffer reprisals if this scroll were to come into the hands of the Roman authorities. When I give the guards my name and purpose, the shorter of the two – a dark Galilean youth with hooded eyes – climbs up a ladder in the courtyard to the first storey.
The ceiling creaks with each of his steps. As I gaze up, the guard who has remained with us – elderly and lean, with the pointy profile of a hunting dog – reads my expression and says, ‘The structural beams are secure.’
Two threadbare sleeping mats are rolled up in the corner beside a stack of logs and just-gathered pine cones that give the room the pleasant smell of a forest. On top of a flat-topped trunk against the wall is an old scroll discoloured by black mildew. I point to it. ‘May I take a look?’
‘Be my guest,’ he says.
I discover a ketubah decorated with myrtle flowers, rue leaves and other floral motifs connected with matrimony. It was written more than forty years before. I read the first line aloud, then continue to the end in silence. What a pleasure even such bland and legalistic prose can be to a reader deprived of books!
Curiously, the contract stipulates the right of the bride – whose name is Margarite – to name all the couple’s children.
‘Women!’ the guard sneers when I read that clause aloud, as if they are the origin of all misfortune and dishonour.
The smell of grilling fish steals in through the open door to the courtyard. Only then do I notice Andreas, one of Yeshua’s young disciples, crouched over a cooking fire, a fisherman’s hat pulled down over his brow. He waves to me as I observe him from the doorway, and I hail him back. When I breathe in on his oil-scented smoke, my stomach gurgles so loudly that the guard, my son and I have ourselves a good laugh.
Yeshua leads Yaaqov down the ladder into the courtyard only moments later. A wooden calliper hangs around his neck. Its graduated bow is made of yellowing bone, which identifies it as his father’s. Has he been preaching about how we must measure even our enemies with compassion?
When we embrace, he brushes his cheek against mine to feel the prickly scratch of my whiskers. At such moments, I imagine us to be long-lost brothers in an ancient Greek epic, recognizing each other through the feel of their flesh – which may be why he now brings my hands to his lips.
‘Do you laugh when you think of the future?’ he asks me, paraphrasing a Proverb.
‘I laugh so that your dearest father Yosef, who sits in the heavens, may also smile,’ I reply, adapting a verse from the Psalms.
Yeshua and I each pick out one more quote from Mosheh to offer the other. It is our way of constructing our island. You see, Yaphiel, he and I spent too much time with our tutors when we were young, and we craved a territory over which we had absolute dominion.
A curiosity: Yeshua’s eyes sometimes change colour in my dreams. Although he had the dark-brown eyes of his father, I have seen them as sky-blue and green and, on one occasion, silver – like the reflective gaze of Mosheh, whose soul was
made from the light skimming off the waters of the rivers of Eden.
For a time, studying his face, the room and everything in it vanishes.
‘There is only now,’ he says, as though he has freed us from time. He opens his hands. ‘There’s no need to rush.’
Loneliness need not be my fate is what my quickened pulse is telling me. This island we make is where I always live, even when I am not aware of it.
Time starts up again when Yeshua kisses my son’s brow and blesses him. He speaks with such tenderness that the strangest of all the strange thoughts that have occurred to me over my lifetime appears unbidden inside me: If only we could have made a child together …
Does my old friend read my mind, or have I failed to hear a previous comment from my son that would make his coming remark seem commonplace?
‘We’ll have to wait until the wheel turns once more,’ Yeshua says. He uses the Greek word kuklos for wheel, and, since the concealed meanings of this term may only be revealed to the initiated, I can say nothing more about his intentions.
Did Yeshua speak aloud or only in my mind? I recall his lips moving, but maybe they did so only for me. Later, I shall have a chance to ask Yirmi if he heard Yeshua mention a wheel or speak the word kuklos, and he will reply that he heard nothing of the sort.
A vision is a higher truth that seeks entry to us through our eyes. But what ought we to call audible words spoken inside the mind of another person?
Over the years, Yohanon, Maryam of Magdala, Loukas and others have told me that they have heard Yeshua address them inside their minds, and his father once mentioned to me in passing that on four different occasions Yeshua called out to him over great distances, and each time he could hear his son as plainly as if they were standing together. On his deathbed, Yosef also told me that he heard his son speak a verse of Torah to him at the moment I saved him from drowning.
‘Which verse?’ I had asked him.
The Gospel According to Lazarus Page 26
