The Liars' Gospel: A Novel

by Naomi Alderman

  “Why did you come, then? What was it for? To stir up an old woman in her grief? To plague me with your love for a dead man?”

  He looks as if he is about to say something, but stops.

  She says, “There is no reason, except that you wanted a place to hide and knew that telling me your stories would make me take you in.”

  He stares down at his hand. At the place where his fingers were. He traces the line of the scar with his left thumbnail.

  He says, “I came to bring you good news.”

  She says, “There is no good news. My son is dead. That is all the news there can be.”

  He says to her, so softly that she can barely hear the words, “He is risen.”

  She does not know what to say, does not think she has understood, so she says nothing.

  He looks at her, to see if she has grasped the heart of his words.

  There is such a wild hope in her.

  She has had dreams like this. Dreams in which the men come to her and say, “It was a mistake! He has not died, he was rescued. He is still alive.” And dreams, more painful yet, in which she knows that she has one day, one hour to speak to him, that he has returned so she could cradle his head against her body and smell the scent of him and hear the sound of his voice. She has lost the sound of his voice.

  Gidon says, “He died and rose again. A miracle made by God. He showed himself to Shimon from Even, and to Miryam from Migdala, and to some others of his friends. He is alive, Mother Miryam.”

  His voice cracks and his eyes burn and water and his face glows with a fervent intensity and she finds a feeling rising up inside her so strong and so immediate that at first she cannot identify it until suddenly she finds that she is laughing.

  She laughs as if she were vomiting, it is from the stomach not from a glad heart.

  He is hurt by her laughter. He thinks she is mocking him, although this is not what is happening.

  He says, affronted, “So laughed Sara our foremother, when God told her she would give birth to a child at ninety years old, and yet it came to pass.”

  And she stops laughing, although she cannot help a smile from creeping to her lips, as if she were merry.

  She says, “You are too old, Gidon, to believe this.”

  He feels a flush across his cheeks.

  He says, “They came to the tomb, Mother Miryam, the tomb where he had been laid, and the body was gone. He had risen.”

  And she laughs again. “Are you so foolish? Are you so unwise? Gidon, I sent my sons for his body as soon as the Sabbath was over. So that he would not lie in a stranger’s cold chamber when he could be buried in the warm earth, like his forefathers.”

  He looks at her, puzzled and aggrieved, and mumbles, “Yet he is risen. He has been seen.”

  She says, “Did you come here for this? To convince an old woman that her dead son yet lives?”

  He says nothing. She is angry now.

  “If he lives, if they did not kill him, if he revived in the burial chamber, if God returned him to me, why is he not here, Gidon? Whom should he see more than his mother? Why would he show himself to Shimon and to Miryam from Migdala and not to me?”

  And even as she says it she hears the voice in her head of Iehuda from Qeriot saying, “We are his family now, we who follow his teachings.” She sees her son’s face, the last time she spoke to him, when she felt afraid and did not know why. She knows he relinquished his family a long time before his death. If this child’s story were true, it would not be to her that he would have come. And this is too much to bear. She stands up quickly, her knees cracking and her back aching at the strain, and without knowing that she is going to do so she raises her right hand and hits Gidon across his left cheek.

  The sound is loud. Her hand stings. She stares at him because she is an old woman and he a young man and if he responded in kind he could easily kill her.

  He does not respond with a blow. He does not move or try to flee. He looks at her levelly and turns his face so that the opposite side is towards her. He waits. It is a kind of invitation.

  Her hand falls to her side.

  “I would have known from across the world if he were still in it.”

  The first year she was a woman, her father had taken her to Jerusalem for Shavuot, the festival at the end of the seven weeks from Passover. It is a joyous festival, a simple one, a celebration of the harvest that is just beginning. Farmers bring the first fruits of their fields to the altar, to thank God for blessing their trees and their ripening vines and the swaying golden seas of their wheat. They stayed with her father’s younger brother, Elihu, who lived so close to the Temple that they could see its walls from the roof of his house. The early summer light was golden, but the days blew with a sweet breeze so that the heat did not thicken or the air become still. She sat at the window on the first day, watching the never-ending procession of oxen-pulled carts filled with ripe pink pomegranates and furry yellow dates heading for the Temple, and her heart was glad.

  It was a good time to come to Jerusalem—especially for a girl who had become a woman, her mother said. The people had come from all corners of the land. A young man might notice her, or she might notice a young man. There were many nervous, eager, excited girls like her, walking to the Temple with their fathers, and many young men too. In the courtyard, her father gave her the coins to buy the lamb for the offering. She examined the creatures closely, chose one tied to the back of the stall, not the largest but with the purest white wool.

  There were soldiers outside the Temple, of course, auxiliaries employed by Rome. She heard another man tell her father there had been a skirmish, swiftly quashed, earlier in the day when three farmers had attacked a soldier. Miryam’s father said nothing, though in the past she had heard him rail against the Romans, wishing that the people would rise up and drive them from the land. He put his arm around her shoulders as they entered the Temple and whispered, “If you see something like that while we are here, Miryam, run. The Romans cannot tell the guilty from the innocent. If there is a squabble, run to your uncle’s house, you will be safe there.”

  They made their offering in peace. Seven baskets of the fruits of the land they brought to the priests: figs and barley, wheat and pomegranates, olives and dates and grapes dropping heavy on the vine. The pure white lamb was slaughtered, its blood scattered, its forbidden fats burned on the altar for the Lord. And they heard murmurings again as they left the Temple. The men gave one another secret signs, making a hand shape like a dagger and whispering low and confusing words.

  Miryam’s father kept a tight arm around her and brought his lips close to her ear. “You see nothing,” he said. “You hear nothing. We feast with your uncle tonight and tomorrow we go home.”

  When it happened, it was swift. They were walking past the spice market, homebound, and as they came in sight of the Hippodrome, with its tall colonnades and its fluttering flags, she knew something was wrong. Her father’s grip tightened on her shoulder. He stood still. Behind them, back the way they’d come, there was a tight knot of men, walking slowly but at a steady pace. The shutters on the buildings nearest the Hippodrome were shut and closed tight with wooden pegs. To the right, up the narrow alleyway, another small group of men. Burly farmers with corded muscular arms, each with a long bag on his back.

  The soldiers on the steps of the Hippodrome were laughing. Two of them were throwing dice. The others had wagered money on the outcome. Some were on lookout, most were watching the game. Miryam’s father’s grip was like iron tongs on her shoulder. They were in a thin crowd—some other parents with children, or whole families, each looking as frightened as they. They walked into the Hippodrome square, moving as quickly as they could without breaking into a run. Passing an open doorway, she saw that the dark room beyond was full. She had the impression of watchful black eyes, of shifting flesh, of the dull sheen of metal. Men had come to Jerusalem from all over the country for this festival. The thing had been planned.

&nb
sp; The day had grown overwarm and clouded, the sky off-white. The breeze faded away, the air was soft and moist as damp cloth. A splash of rain fell onto the cream marble plaza. A heavy, ripe droplet which burst on the dusty stone. And then another drop, and another. And as if the rain had been a signal they had agreed on long before, the men came.

  Screaming, they ran. Dark-skinned and red-mouthed, letting every rasping breath go from their lungs with a cutting edge like their metal blades. Wild shouting, anger howling, swinging their iron arms like free men whose home was overrun by vermin, they pelted up the steps of the Hippodrome and began the slaughter. The first guards, shocked by the sudden inrush, legs trembling, died before they had unsheathed their swords. Miryam saw one split from stomach to throat—a quiet smiling man who had unloosened his breastplate with the hotness of the day. Another soldier went down screaming, calling to the garrison.

  There were arms around her, suddenly. Strong arms around her waist and under her shoulders, lifting her up off the ground though she kicked and wrestled, pulling her back, gripping her close, and in her confusion it was several moments before she realized that the voice shouting in her ear, “Be still! Be still!” was her own father’s.

  He ran with her, as the rain fell more strongly and the men screamed, ran back through the crowd. Charged at them with his shoulder, held her pressed close into his chest so that she could only inch her face to the side to breathe and, with one eye open, see glimpses of those who pushed forward. They were smiling hot, blood-grins. It was those soldiers who had taken their land, it was this man, and this, who had stolen their harvest, their women, their God. Miryam did not see where her father was running to, only that he was striving against the sea, pushing away from the place of blood.

  When at last they came to rest and the noise was more distant, she saw at once that her father had taken two gashes, one across his shoulder, through the fabric of his robe, and one to his ear, which was half gone, the top sliced off, and oozing dark blood. He had collapsed, with her still grasped firmly by one of his arms, on a pile of sacks. They were in a dark room across the courtyard from the Hippodrome. She tried to stand up, but her father pulled her back.

  “Be still,” he whispered, and fell back onto the sacks.

  Clasped against his chest, Miryam could feel his breathing, rapid and shallow. His grip loosened, and she crawled out from under his arm, staying low. The shouting and the dreadful cries from the square were increasing. She saw a long trickle of blood run down her father’s neck and, feeling with her fingers in the gloom, found a wet patch on his skull. He was still breathing though. She put a palm in the center of his chest to reassure herself of that. Still, yes.

  She looked about. They must be in a stable, probably for a priest’s family so close to the Temple. It had that clean smell of horseflesh and dry straw. They were just beneath the window, which was shuttered, but she pressed her eye up against a chink in the wood. Arrows were flying in the square—one thudded into the thick shutter, and she thought: what if one were to hit my eye?—but she could not look away.

  The slaughter was endless. The soldiers at the Hippodrome had lowered the metal gate to keep the attackers out. They had the upper ground now, looking down the steps on the mass of Jews running up towards them. They fired arrows through the grille and she saw twenty men brought down as she watched, pierced through the stomach, the chest, the groin. Near to her hiding place a man slumped with an arrow sticking out of his thigh. He tried to pull it out and screamed. He was young, she thought, maybe eighteen or nineteen. There was a sheen of sweat on his brow. He looked around for a safe place to shelter. What if he came here? What if he opened the door and they were discovered? And if the soldiers came, what then? Another arrow found his neck with a crunching snapping sound and he fell back, dead. God forgive her, she was grateful.

  As she watched, the Jews, unable to sustain the heavy losses from the archers, fell back into the surrounding streets. The square in front of the Hippodrome was dark with bodies, and running red—Roman blood and Jewish blood, she thought. One of the soldiers was still moving, moaning. She wondered how long his comrades would leave him there. Her father was still breathing. She moistened his lips from her water skin. He licked them. It was a good sign. It would be dark in two or three hours—perhaps he would be able to move then.

  She heard cheering from the street outside. Were the Romans celebrating their victory? But the noise intensified. Not a cheering. A rising again of the raging voices. The clash of arms. She put her eye to the shutter a second time. From the roofs of nearby houses, the Jews had raised ladders and ropes, and had hoisted themselves to the upper levels of the colonnade. From there, they had the upper ground and were throwing down rocks, bricks pulled from the structure itself. There were boys with their slingshots, hurling down missiles—the more the Roman soldiers looked up, the greater the danger to them. She saw one man smashed in the mouth with a brick, his upper lip gone, his teeth out and the whole center of his face pouring blood and gouts of flesh. The Romans tried to fight back at first—they sent their arrows upwards and even pulled some of the men down bodily, and set on them with swords, cleaving their limbs and heads from their torsos.

  But the advantage of holding the higher ground was too great. The Romans withdrew, sheltering in the back of the colonnade. The center of the Hippodrome, Miryam could see, was piled with the bodies of the fallen. There was a great cheering from the Jews on top of the Hippodrome, a victory cry. Miryam could not see what the Romans were doing. The Jews atop the colonnade could not see either.

  She turned back to her father. His lips were moving. She wet the sleeve of her dress in her water skin and dripped a few drops into his mouth. He swallowed. The stable was dark and cool. She leaned close to his lips.

  He was whispering, “Run, Miryam, run to your uncle Elihu’s house. Run now.”

  She looked outside again. The square was quiet. She saw a weeping woman walking at the edge find a particular corpse and kneel, cradling a head in her arms. If she were to run, this would be the time for it. But if she ran, and soldiers retreating from the Hippodrome found her father here, they would kill him. At least if she were here, a young girl, she could plead for him. She could not leave.

  “The danger has passed, father,” she said, “the square is quiet. Rest, and when you are able to walk we will go together.”

  “Run,” he kept saying, “run now.”

  His fingers and his legs were cold. He was shivering. Crawling on the floor, she brought more sacks and covered him. The shivering diminished. He moved onto his side and began to breathe more slowly and evenly. He was sleeping—a true sleep, not a faint.

  There was a sound from the square like the sound of trees being felled. A great cracking sound. She wondered if the Romans had brought battering rams. There was a low, rumbling roar, like the sea heard from far off. She put her eye to the shutter again.

  The Romans had set the Hippodrome on fire. The bottom part of the structure was stone, but the upper floors and galleries, the parts where the Jews had climbed, were wood. And the wood was crackling flame, like the altar of the Temple, like the smell of the burning sacrifices, the wood was on fire.

  She saw that a great host of men had retreated to the very roof of the Hippodrome, where the clay tiles were not yet aflame. But there was no way down. The ladders had burned and no building was near enough the Hippodrome to jump. They were going to burn to death there, on the flat roof of the building. Some of the men were clinging to each other and some were on their knees praying and some were shaking and tearing their clothes and hair. She saw one man take five paces back from the edge of the roof and run forward, as if trying to jump to the next, but it was too far and he fell to the stone floor and did not move again.

  There were others who joined him soon enough, jumping from the roof to escape a death by flames. She saw some as the fire crept up the wooden structure draw their swords and fall on them. And some did not jump and did not take a bl
ade to end their lives but waited or tried to climb down through the flames and their cries were the loudest and most anguished of all. She had heard it said that a man who died as a martyr to Rome would be rewarded by heaven. The growling, unquenchable fire sent bright sparks up to the skies and she remembered how the life of a lamb goes back to its maker while the flesh remains here on earth, but the cries were so loud that after a time she could not think of anything else.

  The square between the stables and the Hippodrome was stone and marble. The flames did not extend across them. She watched through the night, ready to drag her father behind her if he could not move himself and the flames jumped to the buildings nearby. But they did not. The soldiers had made a neat job of it. And the rain, coming and going, helped a little. The fire burned out while it was still night, leaving just blackened stumps of wood poking up into the sky from the stone base. Before dawn the next morning, Miryam shook her father until he woke and, stumbling, dizzy, crawling sometimes, he came with her to the house of his brother Elihu.

  They stayed in her uncle’s house then seventeen days, not daring to leave even to find food or to hear the news of what had passed in Jerusalem. They had the well, and wheat flour and dried fruit enough to live on, and her father grew stronger every day. He and her uncle agreed they must not go into the country—the Romans would be looking for anyone who fled Jerusalem, guilty or innocent. Anyone trying to leave the city would be branded a criminal and a traitor. Especially a man with fresh wounds showing.

  When at last her father was well enough to attempt the long journey, and Elihu had made inquiries about the best time to attempt the gates and the best lies to tell there, they left. They went in the early morning. The soldiers at the Double Gate asked them what business they had and Miryam replied, as her father and uncle had schooled her, that they were citizens of Jerusalem, and she was betrothed to a boy from the north and they must attend the wedding or the dowry would be lost. The soldiers joshed among themselves and made bawdy jokes to her about her wedding night. She cast her eyes down and, tiring of the game at last, they let them go. It was only then that she saw what was to be seen.