“Do you know what I have heard, Iehuda?” Calidorus leans forward, mock earnest. “I had it in a letter from a business associate in Egypt. There one of your old friends is preaching that Yehoshuah yet lives.”
“I saw him die,” says Iehuda.
“Oh,” says Calidorus, “certainly he died. But, as you say, every man needs a master.”
“The governors and prefects will kill them for saying it.”
Calidorus nods. “Most men would rather die, you know, than give up a master. In some kingdoms, the ruler’s slaves and wives die with him, entombed in his grave. Most men have not the flexible heart you have. They cannot turn from one to the next. They must remain steadfast, even unto death.”
“It is a little noble,” Iehuda says slowly.
“It is idiocy. Do you think I still call my father’s master’s family my betters? I could buy them a hundred times over. We cannot cleave to the same thing forever. In this life, eventually, one is either a traitor or a fool.”
It is easy to leave, once you are used to leaving. Easy to feel the moment of it approaching, to sense the loosening of the ropes that bound you to the earth. One becomes adept in noticing the absolute apex of love or belief from which it will inevitably decline. There comes a point when one can even begin to love leaving, the only constant we carry with us. The man who wanders forever is not cursed, he is blessed.
He leaves before dawn. He takes food for a long journey, and three rings Calidorus gave him freely when he had told a particularly good tale, which will pay his way or be stolen by bandits, only the road will tell him in time. A few other necessary things, including two good knives. A man with two fine knives, good shoes and strong arms is wealthy, or never far from wealth. He will thrive as he has always, somehow, thrived.
He says to God, “Are you there?”
And God says, as God always says, “Yes, my son, I am with you.”
The pious would like to believe that God does not speak to the sinners, that one has to earn the right to hear His voice. The pious are wrong. God speaks to Judas of Qeriot just as he spoke to Yehoshuah of Natzaret, just as he would speak to the Emperor Tiberius of Rome if the twisted king had the wit to listen.
“What shall I do?” he says to God.
“Go west,” says the Lord. “You are in a port. Take passage on a ship and sail away.”
And he thinks he will. Here, this story is the only story of his life, the only thing he has ever done or will ever do. But there is this to be said for Rome: a man can become something new. He is not tied to his birth or his ancestral lands. There are great kingdoms yet to be seen. In the west the debauched Emperor Tiberius sits on his golden throne. In the west the Greeks ply their trade in wisdom. In the west, he has heard, there are demons and witches and uncircumcised barbarians with beards down to their navels and patterns on their skins. He is ready for them. And let them think in Israel that he is dead.
Caiaphas
THEY TIE A rope around his ankle so that, if he dies, they will be able to haul him out.
People say that, a thousand years ago, under the rule of King David or King Solomon, such a precaution was not necessary. The High Priest would enter the Holy of Holies alone on Yom Kippur, perform the sacred rituals, burn the incense, sprinkle the blood, and the Holy Breath would descend and the people would be forgiven.
Even five hundred years ago, after they had had to rebuild the Temple following the exile in Babylon, there was not so much danger. Even then, under the fabled High Priest Shimon the Righteous, the thread on the horns of the goat would turn from red to white and the people would know that they were forgiven.
But not now. Now, when they send a High Priest into the Holy of Holies, they know he may not come out alive. It happens not infrequently.
The Holy of Holies, the chamber at the center of the Temple, is built on the navel of the world. It was the first piece of land created when God said, “Let the land be divided from the sea.” It is from the earth of this spot that God scooped up the dust to make Adam and Eve, the first man and woman. It is the place where Abraham went to sacrifice his son Isaac, and where God stopped him and gave him a ram instead, which is how we know that the sacrifice of human life is not pleasing to Him, and that He instead desires the sweet savors of animal flesh. In the end of days, it is from this spot that the word of the Lord will radiate out like the sound of golden trumpets, so that all the nations will bow down before Him. It is the holiest place in all the world.
The whole world is arranged in concentric circles around this spot. There is the world outside the land of Israel, and within that there is the land of Israel. And within that the holy city of Jerusalem. And within that the Temple. And within the Temple the courtyard of non-Jews, and inside that the courtyard of Jewish women, and inside that, closer yet to the holiest place, the courtyard of Jewish men, and inside that the courtyard of the priests. And within that courtyard of the priests, at the heart of the Temple, the reason for the whole edifice of marble colonnades, for the city, for the country, for the world. At the heart of the Temple is this holiest place in all of creation.
The chamber of the Holy of Holies is a small perfect cube, ten cubits, by ten cubits, by ten cubits. Its walls are marble. Its entrance is covered by two curtains. A raised marble platform shows where the Ark of the Covenant used to stand before it was lost—or hidden and its hiding place forgotten—during the Exile. Other than that, the room is empty. Apart from God. This is the place where God is.
And on Yom Kippur, when God brings his face very close to the earth, when he listens and observes His people most intently, on that day the High Priest—the Cohen Gadol—walks into the chamber alone. Alone he burns the incense on the glowing coals, and scatters the blood, and falls upon the stone dumbfounded in the presence of the Lord. Alone he mumbles his prayers into the cold smooth floor and squeezes his eyes tightly shut and finds his whole body shaking. And his head is filled with the smell of the incense and the speech of God, which is so far beyond words that when God Himself describes it in the Torah He can only say that the people hear the sights and see the words, so inadequate is our language to describe the Almighty.
And often these days, the High Priest does not survive the experience.
And because the square chamber is so holy, because they themselves would die if they dared to enter it, for it is certainly forbidden to them, they pull on the rope tied to his ankle to remove the body. This is always a terrible thing. If the man dies, by this token the people know that they have not been forgiven.
It is since the Romans, of course. Since Pompey with his iron boots strode about the holy chamber. Since the wall was breached and the treasures were examined by a Roman note-taker, wiping his nose on the back of his hand as he counted the golden vessels that once were made for the hand of Moses.
And yes, it is because of the men themselves. The High Priests, who once were chosen by their fellow priests for their wisdom and holiness and the force of the spirit in them, are now servants of Caesar, picked by Pilate the Prefect for other, more practical qualities. There are men who have bought their way to becoming High Priest by gifts to Pilate.
They do not always survive.
It is this which Caiaphas carries with him every morning when he rises and scratches, and kisses the head of his sleeping wife and goes to wash and put on the robes of his office and begin the services every day. Today is ordinary, and tomorrow will be ordinary and the next day in all likelihood. But once a year he will stand in the full presence of the Almighty and see if he is worthy to survive.
He has a suspicion regarding his wife.
He has seen her in the courtyard, her hair oiled with perfume but neatly covered like any modest woman, and a jar of water under her bent arm. He has watched as she asks one of the Temple Levites, a man called Darfon, to pull down the branch of the tree so she can pluck some of the sun-warmed dates. No, she smiles, not those ones, they are not quite soft yet. She does not like the crunchy dat
es. She wants them from that branch, where they are dark and sweet.
The Levite, Darfon, jumps up and grabs the branch with both arms. His sleeves flap down, revealing muscular brown arms, the hair wiry and strong like a young lamb’s. She smiles, and he can see her watching the man’s arms, and his sturdy legs kicking against the ground, so she can reach her hand up bending only at the elbow and pluck a soft warm date. She plucks two. She presses one to her lips, licking the brown skin with her small pink tongue. She gives the other to Darfon. He takes it coyly, smiling at her under his eyelashes, biting into it with a small, careful, hungry bite.
Caiaphas, watching, finds himself imagining a wolf, down out of the mountains, lean and ravenous from the famine in the land. Imagines the wolf stalking his wife, bringing her to bay in a grove strewn with rocks and broken pottery. Imagines the wolf growling and leaping to rip out her throat.
Or he imagines bruises slowly spreading across her face, turning her eyes bloodshot and her neck scarlet and blue. Imagines, and his hands feel how good it would be, throwing her to the ground, because it is not that he does not love her and desire her, but a thing like this must be paid hurt for hurt.
He is not a violent man; he has sacrificed enough young bulls and yearling lambs to understand the precious delicacy of life. He is startled by the strength of his feelings, how they leap up in him like a wolf he had not known was stalking by his side, or within him, all his life.
It is high summer. Passover is long gone. The sun bakes down on the cool marble plazas of the Temple, and on the north gate, where the drovers bring in their hot and reeking sheep for the slaughter. It heats the marketplace, where the fruit sellers lazily beat palm fans to keep the flies off their wares and the donkeys’ tails twitch, raising clouds of gnats. It cooks the houses of the wealthy and the hovels of the poor, it turns the swimming ponds into warm pools of bubbling algae and frogs. In the minds of King, Governor, Prefect, soldiers, priests and farmers it raises the specter of famine, for what if the rains do not come? They always come if God wills it and why would he not will it—yet there have been years when they did not come. Jerusalem is languorous in the heat, unable to move, slow-witted but fretful. But just because Jerusalem does not move, one cannot believe she is asleep.
The Prefect, Pilate, wears a ring with a wolf’s head. The wolf is the animal of Rome, of course: in another room Pilate has his little shrine to the God-Emperor Tiberius, and above it a picture of Romulus and Remus suckling at the teat of their wolf-mother. Like the wolf, Rome hunts with a great pack. Like the wolf, she protects her own but to those outside her circle she is nothing but teeth. Pilate’s ring, on the third finger of his long bony right hand, is a great disc of amber with the wolf’s head carved into it, snarling, showing fangs. When Pilate slams his hand onto the table, the bright summer light glints off the sharp bevels and lines of the carving, making the teeth sparkle and the eye blink.
“Three months!” he shouts, and then, appearing to calm himself, although this is all for show and Caiaphas has seen it before, he repeats again more softly, “Three months.”
Caiaphas stares at a point just behind Pilate’s head, to the niche where the man has his little statue of Mars, bearing a sword. There would be a riot in the city if they knew he had brought this idol so near to the holy sanctuary. There had been a riot four years earlier when he brought a new garrison of soldiers into the city bearing their banners showing Caesar’s head. It is forbidden to bring a graven image or an idol or an image of any kind this close to the Temple.
“Are you so stupid, Caiaphas?” Pilate asks slowly. “Is it that you are stupid? Is it that you have not understood what I have asked these three months? Do I need to ask you more slowly so you can follow my request? I. Want. The. Money.”
Caiaphas licks his upper lip.
“I have tried to explain…” he begins, and he hears his own voice wheedling like a child’s and the wolf in his own throat growls at him and before he can stop himself he says, “It is forbidden. It is utterly forbidden. What you are asking is impossible.”
Pilate stares at him, and his nostrils flare and his mouth works.
He brings his hand down on the table again, so hard that the ink pot jumps and spatters.
“It is not impossible if I command it! The city of Jerusalem,” says Pilate, “is dying of thirst. There is fresh water in the mountains, there are men ready to begin construction, there is stone in the quarries. Look!” Pilate opens his hands magnanimously. “Look at your city.” Out of the window, Jerusalem bakes and shimmers. “Give me the money from the Temple so I can build the aqueduct and bring the water from the hills.”
Caiaphas wonders whether, if he angered the man enough, Pilate would pull down one of those swords from the wall and run him through. Remember, he says to himself, how vulnerable you are. Remember how swiftly the life would run out of you, like the life of a young lamb under your blade. And yet the wolf in him will not hear it.
“The money that is given to the Temple is for its use alone,” he says. “It is a sacred trust, given to us by God.”
He remembers the widows and the orphans who bring their tiny offerings to the Temple, because they know God will be pleased with their sacrifice, however small it is. They bring it freely. It is money they meant for the Temple. It is not his to give away.
“Fuck on your God!” shouts Pilate. “That Temple is piled up with gold and decorated with marble, while not a single aqueduct brings water to the south of the city.”
“They have their wells. No one suffers from thirst in Jerusalem.”
Pilate bangs his hand on the table again.
“Five hundred talents of gold! You will hardly miss it from your coffers. We could begin to quarry the stone this week!”
It is a power game, of course. Pilate could request the money from Rome, but his standing is not good enough to have any expectation of receiving it. This Caiaphas has from various spies in the orbit of the Governor of Syria, Pilate’s superior. But he wants to leave Jerusalem more like Rome than he found it. No Roman can see a city without wanting to drop an aqueduct on it, for all that the well water is clean and plentiful. And if he persuades the Temple to pay for the project, he will report in one of those dry military dispatches that the people are “beginning to understand the benefits of Roman rule.”
Caiaphas shrugs. It is a gesture calculated to irritate Pilate and he knows it.
“If you were to send the soldiers in,” he says, “I could not prevent them. My priests are not warriors.”
“Oh no,” says Pilate, “I know how this will go. You will force me to send soldiers into the Temple. And we will desecrate some sacred urn or tread in the wrong way on a holy pavement, or distress the spirit of the blessed sheep or breathe improperly in the presence of the consecrated midden heap. And then there will be another riot and I will have to call in troops from Syria to quash it and that would make them say…” He blinks and stops himself. “That would be very inconvenient. These fucking people!” He wipes the sweat beading on his brow with the sleeve of his robe. “One cannot walk from one end of the square to the other without insulting an ancient tradition of some tribe or other.”
Pilate pokes his finger at Caiaphas. “You will give me the money and tell them that your God has commanded it. Tell them you had a dream.”
Caiaphas inclines his head as if to say “an excellent idea,” or possibly, “I will try but I cannot promise,” or possibly, “You are a fool and hold on to this city by a tiny thread.” He has been ending conversations this way for months now. Appearing to concede, never quite consummating his promises.
Every morning and every evening, a lamb is sacrificed. But this is only the beginning. Every morning and every evening, incense is burned on the altar in the Holy of Holies. Every day, there is the seven-branched candelabrum to be filled with pure-pressed oil. On the Sabbath, a meal offering of flour and oil and wine. And at the new moon, two yearling bulls, a ram, seven lambs. To say nothing of the p
articular sacrifices during the three yearly festivals of pilgrimage, and at New Year in the autumn and Yom Kippur ten days after that. And the sin offerings brought to seek God’s forgiveness by penitents around the year. And the peace offerings. And the thanksgiving offerings, for recovery from illness or escape from danger.
“And do you think this is easy?” Annas had said to him when he was a young man. It was when Caiaphas first began to be taken notice of in the Temple and by his fellow priests. Annas was High Priest then; he had these conversations with many young men who had been taken notice of. “Let us take the incense, for example. Do you think that when the servant from the house of Avtinas comes to bring the incense that it has come from nowhere?”
Caiaphas, attempting to impress the older man, had spouted the lines he had learned.
“There are eleven spices in the incense,” he said, “frankincense and myrrh and cassia and spikenard and saffron and—”
“Listen to yourself. Stop. Understand how much is necessary for that list you spool out. Where does the saffron come from?”
Caiaphas shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “From flowers?”
“From only one flower, which grows most plentifully only in Persia. We use a sack of it every month. A good handful of saffron is the product of ten thousand flowers. A hundred handfuls in a sack. A hundred men laboring crouched over their flowers are needed to supply us with saffron alone.”
Caiaphas looked out over the Temple courtyard, where he could count easily a hundred priests hurrying about their duty. He nodded slowly.
“You are not impressed, I see. You think that a hundred men laboring in the hills of Persia are not so very much for the glory of God. Then consider. They dry those tiny threads in the sun. They bundle them into sacks—and where do the sacks come from? Someone must weave them, someone must stamp them with our seal. They put the sacks into the back of a closed wagon—and who made that wagon? Who bred those mules? The wagon is driven by a strong man, with five other men guarding it. They pass through mountains and valleys. A dried-up riverbed. A pasture of waving grass and biting gnats. They fight off bandits who attempt to steal the precious treasure. At night they take turns to sleep. Perhaps in the crossing one of their usual waterholes is empty. Perhaps one of the animals dies. They must change the route regularly or the bandits will ambush them. They must check the sacks for weevil and mold—if it rains too heavily and the saffron becomes wet, their journey is in vain. At last they arrive in Jerusalem, if we are lucky. And of all these things, do you know what is the most needful?”
The Liars' Gospel: A Novel Page 14
