The Liars' Gospel: A Novel

by Naomi Alderman

  And then there is something else. There is a screaming ululation from the front of the crowd, where the people are pushing close to the statue. Something changes in the mood, he can feel it around him, the way that one can feel the change in the dry air of the desert when a sudden rainstorm approaches. People around him are breathing more rapidly, pressing closer and closer. He feels a hand at his back and a woman’s arm around his waist. He cannot see her properly—it is dark and her head is turned away—but he guesses she is about thirty, with pale skin and hair oiled and scented with pine resin. She is dressed like a respectable married woman and yet her fingers are clutching at his robe. He begins to wonder whether this will end with an orgy—he had heard rumors of something like this in Jerusalem. He finds he is both horrified and excited, half hard already at the thought.

  But when the crowd parts momentarily, allowing him a clear view of the brightly lit area in front of the statue, he sees that it is something else. A woman with unbound hair, with eyes rolling back in her head, is dancing in front of the statue. Her skirts are hiked up past her thighs. She goes down into a crouch repeatedly and thrusts herself up. She is making guttural cries. She has pulled her robe off her shoulders and arms, it is slipping from her breasts, but what is happening is no love-dance.

  She has a small silver knife and she is cutting herself, across her arms, across her chest. Other women are singing with her, clicking with their tongues, slapping their arms against their bodies in rhythm, and as he watches she presses the tip of the knife into her own breast by the nipple, cutting a bright blue vein. She leans forward and allows the blood to gush over the feet of the statue, like milk from the breast of a woman giving suck. She squats and thrusts her pudenda towards the statue. She slices at her own thigh, completing the impression that she is bleeding from her places of sex.

  The woman next to Iehuda is still holding on to him, her fingers convulsively scrabbling at the fabric and the flesh of his side. He can smell her sweat. He is certain that some sexual rite is about to begin, or something more than that, something even more appalling than what he has already seen. He is afraid now of what may happen. But no one is moving. Only the bleeding woman at the front of the room continues to dance, to smear her blood onto the statue, to dip and sway until, suddenly, with a wild cry, she drops and falls across the idol’s feet, quivering, spent.

  The woman standing next to Iehuda lets her arm fall away from his body. He catches her eye. She looks dazed, her lips half parted. She reaches for him again, fumbling at his robes. Her hand finds the warm flesh of his back, under his clothing. It moves lower, grasping his buttock, squeezing. At the back of the room, through the curtains, a few people are stumbling out into the light, but he sees that two or three couples are already pushed up against the walls of the temple. The woman’s skin is covered in a sheen of sweat. He can smell her; through the incense and the odor of two hundred bodies pressed tight against each other, he can smell the thick willing scent of her. He puts his arm around her waist and half lifts her from her feet, pushing men and women aside to gain the temple wall. She is already gasping as, between a pillar and rough stone, he lifts her up, presses her against the wall where her feet can find the pillar, swings her skirts aside and enters her. She is wet and hot and ready and she cries out and bares her teeth and her hands scrabble at his back as he thrusts. It does not take long. He has not even uncovered her breast before he is done and, shuddering, lowers her to the floor.

  He wants to take her again. He feels already that it will not be long before he is ready to do so. He grabs at her waist. But she squeezes his hand, lets it go, and is now drifting towards the doorway. He follows as they exit, blinking, into the early-evening sun. He sees, with surprise, that her hair is red: it had looked dark, brown, in the dim light of the temple. He realizes in the same moment that she may be surprised to see his features, his own red-brown curls. He tries to speak to her.

  “What is your name?” he says.

  But she looks away, apparently faintly embarrassed, and says nothing.

  He thinks: woman, I have felt the grip of your cunt.

  But before he can find something else to say—something more uncomprehending, perhaps, or the thing he wants to say that she would not understand: did you know that you have just fucked a dead man?—she pulls her scarf over her head and hurries away.

  At the top of the marble steps leading back into the street, a maiden is holding a wide flat dish. Her arms soon struggle with the heavy heaping of coins that worshippers place there as they leave. Iehuda finds a small coin for her and steps back down into the street.

  Two older women pass him as they leave.

  “She was Assyrian,” mutters one to the other, “the one who cut herself. I’ve heard about their rites.”

  The other woman, dressed neatly and with the hairstyle of a respectable matron, sniffs and frowns. “A lot of fuss,” she says. “What’s wrong with a pigeon?”

  He smells the banquet before he sees it: the sweet sticky smell of spilled wine. The smell of pomades, too, of the fragrant oils with which Calidorus and his friends anoint themselves before a feast. It is the smell of money, copiously spent.

  He is late for the party. This is a mistake. He had not realized how long the temple service had gone on, he had stumbled back home dazed and would be grateful for a bath and a sleep. But although no one chides him, the anxiety of the slaves shows that he has made a bad error. One of the men hurriedly washes him with a wet cloth, another dresses him in a fresh robe and tries to touch his hair with the perfume. He grabs the man’s wrist as he approaches with the stone vial.

  “No,” he says.

  The slave, who has tended to him a hundred times, looks puzzled but places the perfume vial back on the table. “My master is waiting,” he says.

  “Waiting” is something of an exaggeration. The feast had begun without Iehuda. In the dining room, six men are reclining on upholstered couches arranged around a low table. The table is well furnished. The men have silver cups of wine mixed with honey. There are dates, olives, bread, white cheese with herbs, dishes of lentils with fruit and in the center a huge ocean-fish with sliced citrons, dill and parsley. The men are drunk already and the meal is not even halfway over.

  “Ah, Judas”—Calidorus pronounces his name in the Greek fashion—“we were beginning to think you had forgotten about us entirely.”

  There is acid in his tone.

  “Never,” says Iehuda. “I was detained by some business in the market, that is all. My apologies, gentlemen.”

  Calidorus eyes him suspiciously.

  “Business? I thought”—he puts on a laugh—“that all the business you would ever have is been and gone.”

  “My apologies,” says Iehuda.

  It is time for him to perform.

  He is not exactly a guest at the banquet, just as he has not exactly been a guest in Calidorus’s house these past months. Not a slave, no certainly not that, but neither precisely a friend. He has been treated well, allowed to roam as he please, fed and supplied generously with wine, given clothes and two rooms of his own and even writing instruments and certain books. But there have been these parties. His presence has been requested in a way which is slightly firmer than an invitation. He has begun to wonder what might happen if he refused one of these generous offers of “an evening with some friends.”

  He takes a stance in the center of the room. The other men hush each other loudly, one spitting into the fish with an excessively enthusiastic “shhhhh.” In a dark corner of the room, Iehuda notices, two slaves are standing almost motionless.

  Calidorus introduces him with the usual flourish.

  “Behold the man before you,” he says, “once a follower and close confidant of a man some called the King of the Jews, but now a guest in my house. Since the subject of debate tonight is the gods, whether they are wise or foolish, to be loved or to be feared”—Calidorus had produced a series of such topics for debate at his symposia sinc
e Iehuda came to stay—“his assistance will be invaluable!” He beckons a slave to fill his wineglass again. “Come, tell us, Judas of Cariot, tell us about the God of the Jews and how your master was very nearly mistaken for him!”

  “We have heard,” says one of the men, his face flushed with drunkenness, “that you Jews believe that your God lives in only one house in Jerusalem! Is he not as wealthy as our gods, then, who can afford to keep up many homes?”

  The others find this hilarious. One laughs so long and loudly that he begins to choke, and the slave to his right has to help him to some wine.

  Iehuda sighs inwardly. It is one of the things that every gentile has heard about the Jews. Like the lie that Jews worship the pig and that is why they do not eat it. Like the lie that at the center of the Temple in Jerusalem, in the most sacred place, there is a donkey and its shit is piled up around it. Like the lie that Jews hate their bodies and their wives so much that they only make love through a hole in a sheet. How do these things begin? Which debased mind invented them? Who chose to pass them on, unthinking?

  He has learned to play along with such tales rather than challenge them. Or to circumnavigate them, like a boatswain foreseeing choppy waters. He tries to tell the truth jokingly.

  “Ah,” he replies to the drunken fool, “perhaps it is that our God is more loyal to us. Like a loving husband, he stays close to home. While we all know how Jupiter spreads his…favors.” He mimes the thrusting motion of the body, the bunching of his thighs reminding him suddenly, overwhelmingly, of the musk scent of the red-haired woman in the temple.

  But the trick works. The other men laugh. One punches the drunken questioner gently on the arm.

  “You’d do well to learn from them, hey, Pomponius? Stay a little closer to home and maybe your wife wouldn’t stray so much!”

  The others laugh and Pomponius, a jowly man in his fifties, though still with a fine head of thick black hair, reddens and scowls and drinks more wine.

  Calidorus, Iehuda notes, looks nervous. Rein it in, Iehuda says to himself, don’t embarrass important guests.

  “Ah”—he fakes a little laugh—“perhaps it is just that our God, like a wise husband, knows he cannot trust us, as no man can trust a woman! If he left us for a moment, we would start rutting with some other god.”

  He does a comical little mime of a woman peering through the curtain of her house, seeing her husband leave, and immediately grabbing the nearest slave and mounting him. The men laugh uproariously, toasting each other with wine, spilling more than they manage to get in their mouths. He has them now.

  “Yes,” rumbles Pomponius, relaxing a little, “you can’t trust women.”

  Calidorus gives Iehuda a small smile.

  “But now,” says Iehuda, “to my own small role in the downfall of a god. It is hard now even to recall how different I was back then. If you can believe it, I had a full beard.” He cups his two hands upwards at his waist, to indicate a beard so long that these clean-shaven Romans grimace.

  “Not only that, I was a virtuous and honorable man. I prayed every day, I observed the festivals and the Sabbath, I kept to the old ways of cleanliness in foods and in washing my body and in making sure I fucked only my own wife, and not anyone else’s.”

  He winks broadly, as if to say that he is exaggerating slightly here. The men chuckle. Iehuda has read Ovid, with the stories of gods fucking women, women fucking animals, animals turned into human beings so that they can rut and grunt and screw. He understands what these people are like. They would not really believe that any healthy young man could have been a virgin at twenty-eight when he took a wife, that it would never have occurred to him to be unfaithful to her. Perhaps they would not even believe that he had never eaten the flesh of a pig.

  So he tells them the story they want to hear. It is a jesting version of tale, he has rehearsed it many times at many such dinners. He knows exactly where to pause, where to emphasize a joke, where to undercut a tragic moment, turning it to ridicule. In the version he tells, he is the impudent puck, the fool who dares to challenge the king. In this story, Yehoshuah—his friend, the man he loved best in all the world—becomes a puffed-up little prince who waved his needlelike sword at Roman rule. Iehuda becomes the naïve innocent who says, “If you irritate their skin, they will swat at us all.” He paints himself as foolish, giving his friend up and believing that Pilate would do no more than scold him. The men laugh. They drink more wine. Calidorus is pleased.

  And while he tells this liar’s tale, Iehuda reminds himself of how it really was. He does this every time, although it pains him, because he must know it, if only in his heart.

  He had been so holy and abstemious that no Roman would believe it. His father had died when he was a boy. He had worked the farm, and attended the Temple on holy days, and cared for his mother and his two younger sisters, and only when they were fed, and wed, did he think of himself. He was a boy who loved the Lord too much, if such there is. Loved Him too much and thought of Him too much, and wanted only to do His will and know His words. The days in Jerusalem for the three festivals were his only respite from work, and they were joyous indeed, for then he was close to the place where God lived. And when he married—yes, at twenty-eight, and yes, a virgin, and yes, this had not seemed a special hardship to him—a thoughtful and hardworking and quiet man, when he lay with his wife that first time he thought of the deed as much a joining with God as with the shrewd and lusty woman, Elkannah, who had consented to marry him.

  She worked in the fields by his side and spun wool and wove cloth and baked bread, and he felt lucky past imagining—though he was too serious a man ever to be freely joyful. His beard was long and full, though Elkannah used to sit astride him on the bed and trim it with the knife when he let her. He still remembers the curve of her behind and how neatly it fitted into his two cupped palms, and how his cock would rise to meet her while she wriggled on his lap and laughed and told him to hold still or she would end by stabbing him with this knife and who then would provide for her and the children they would surely have, would he think about that?

  But when he was twenty-nine a hard fever passed through the village of Qeriot. It had been a long hot spring when they were taken down and water was short in the mountain streams. Only the well gave a good supply and some days they were too weak to lift and turn the bucket. It was a blinding fever, putting black spots in front of the eyes and then making it too painful to look out in full sunlight. But it was his fault, he knew, even though he had been as sick as her. He should have found a way to get water.

  On the third day, he managed to leave his bed to walk to the well. He tottered like a newborn lamb all the way there and all the way back, with the black spots hovering at the edges of his sight, but when he brought back the water Elkannah was dead. Quiet in the bed, as if she had slipped out between one breath and the next. As if she had simply forgotten to take that next breath and might remember in a moment, wipe her hands on her apron, chide herself for her foolishness. But she was gone.

  And then something else was gone, suddenly and without his consent.

  It was not the sweet soft scent of his wife in bed in the mornings that he missed the most—though he missed her beyond enduring. He missed most the God who he had always felt watching over him, who in quiet moments he would speak to and imagine that he heard a comforting response. Who he had wept to on long nights after his father had died and who had placed a hand upon his neck and said, “I am your Father in heaven, and I shall give you strength.” He felt that the line joining him to heaven—like the cord that connects a baby to its mother—had been severed. Perhaps the Father was still there, but Iehuda’s face was turned so far away that he could not tell any longer.

  He thinks now that it may have been a crime to feel as he did. To mourn for a God more than for a wife? But it is so.

  Some time passed, but he did not measure it. A handful of seasons, and he worked still just the same, because what else was there to do, an
d the people of the village—who had themselves lost parents and children, spouses and siblings—said to themselves, “Before long he will take another wife, he will have sons and daughters and forget this first one.” They did not know that his heart was as cold as the earth and as empty as a dry wheat husk.

  And then the man came to the village. Iehuda had heard nothing of him. The decision to go and listen to him speak was merely the choice between a long night alone in his home and sitting with the people to hear whatever foolishness they would hear. He had seen dozens of such preachers over the years, he and Elkannah had gone to listen to them sometimes and joked over their prattle or, occasionally, debated their wisdom.

  This man had not been so much different, at first. Telling tales to illustrate his messages, talking about God’s love. At a certain point, he fell silent. Sifted the earth with his hand. Rubbed his forehead. Looked up, as if searching through the crowd, and with his eyes found Iehuda, and he held the gaze, and held it, and Iehuda could not look away.

  “You are looking for God,” said the preacher, “but God is also looking for you. And He will find you. He has found you tonight.”

  And Iehuda felt tears starting in his eyes.

  “You have lost much.” The man spoke in a level tone, neither emphasizing nor attempting to persuade. He spoke as if he were hearing the simple truth from heaven.