Through the windows in the roof, they look down on the Romans at their bath.
They are hilarious, strutting about, each man naked as a child, caring nothing for their modesty, their decency, their honor.
“Look at that!” whispers Giora, the youngest.
He’s pointing out the men being oiled by slaves. One in particular, a man in his fifties with a soldier’s physique, has two male slaves working on his back, rubbing thick drops of yellow olive oil into his skin.
“I’ve never had a woman work so hard on me as that,” mutters Ya’ir.
The man whose back is being oiled lets out a little moan of pleasure and the boys on the roof collapse in laughter.
“Neither has he!” says Ya’ir. “He’s never touched a woman in his life, look at him!”
There are six or seven men being rubbed with oil in a similar way.
Bar-Avo says, “My mum does that with the lamb before she roasts it.”
“Let’s see if they bring out the herbs!” says Ya’ir, and they start laughing again.
“We brought our own herbs, remember?” says Bar-Avo, indicating the leather bag on Ya’ir’s back, and Ya’ir’s face cracks into a grin.
They position themselves at four different downward-facing windows. It will be important, for maximum impact, to start at the back and work forwards. Giora is over the window the farthest away from the exit from the baths. Beneath him are the hot steamy rooms where men are exercising to cause the sweat to run from their pores before they go to be oiled. They are all naked, jogging on the spot or punching at imaginary enemies. Giora pulls the bag from his back and hefts its sloppy weight in his hands. The contents are runny. He undoes the leather draw cord holding it closed just a little and gets a whiff of the contents. He screws up his face. They have each come with a bagful of liquid animal feces. They have mixed it with water and let it rot in a barrel for a couple of days just to enhance the effect.
Giora leans his body half over the window, lowers the hand holding the bag down and then, holding on to its handle, begins to whirl it round and round and round.
The rotten, liquid, soupy feces splatter in wide arcs across the roomful of naked men. The stench is appalling. The stuff is sticky and smells of vomit and disease.
It splashes onto the bodies of all those naked men, across their pink scraped torsos and in their hair, and one man, a young soldier, looking in an unlucky direction, gets it across his face and in his mouth and eyes. He starts and then begins to retch as he realizes what it is.
They run, of course they do. They make for the room with the plunge bath, which is next in line and where Bar-Avo is waiting with another thick full bag. He had found some dog’s vomit to put into his, mixed with the shit. As the men start running through the building away from the whirling stench, Bar-Avo begins to empty his bag too, swinging it to make a splatter of filth, and then on, as they run in disgusted confusion, two of the men already vomiting, Matan empties his bag, and one of them, looking up to see where the pollution is coming from, takes some full in the face. They barely need Ya’ir’s bag, so much destruction has already been wrought in the place, but he empties it anyway, into the plunge pool, where some of them had leapt, attempting to wash themselves.
The boys are laughing as they drop the bags through the windows and can’t help staying to watch for perhaps a little longer than they should, as the men desperately try to clean themselves, and one of them knocks over a huge tub of oil, which spills slick and green across the tiled floor. Another man comically slips and falls in the oil—it’s too good, like players performing just for them—and manages to tip more of it over himself and, struggling to get up, pulls another man covered in brown slime down on top of himself. There’s a sharp snap as another one falls, and his arm is twisted awkwardly where he tried to break his fall—he’s evidently broken a bone and this is the funniest thing of all. Ya’ir rolls on his back laughing and Giora shouts through the window, “Go back to Rome!”
They are of course watching too intently. They do not notice that a man has scaled the back wall with a ladder until it is too late and he is almost on them. He is not covered in oil or shit. He is a soldier in his full uniform, one of the men stationed outside in case of an attack on the bathhouses. They do not notice anything until Giora starts to shout and Bar-Avo turns his head from observing the men covered in oil trying to stand up and sees this soldier, his eyes like gleaming stones, his teeth bared, raising Giora above his head only to hurl him through the window down onto the floor below. There is a loud crack as Giora lands and Bar-Avo cannot see if he’s moving, has no time to see.
The soldier draws his sword and the three of them, Bar-Avo, Ya’ir, Matan, scramble to their feet and back away across the roof. They are unarmed. The soldier roars and lunges. Ya’ir almost loses his footing on the edge of one of the windows and Bar-Avo pulls him back by the waist of his tunic. Taking his advantage, the soldier slashes at Ya’ir, brings his sword back red. Ya’ir screams, frightened, intense, like a child. The soldier’s taken a great slice of flesh out of Ya’ir’s raised arm and seeing this brings such rage to Bar-Avo that he surges forward, not thinking of himself, only of his anger and finding a place to sheathe it.
He is lucky. If he had tripped or missed his step the soldier’s downward slash with his sword would have caught him on the back of the neck and his head would have rolled down through the window to the tiled floor beneath. Instead he manages to lunge low, while Matan dances backward and the soldier is confused for a moment.
Bar-Avo kicks out wildly at the soldier’s knee and hits the perfect spot, at the side. There’s a gristly crunch and the soldier trips, falls to his knees, shouts and grabs out, reaching for the back of Bar-Avo’s tunic. He has him, he’s caught him by the tunic collar, he raises the sword in his right hand and Bar-Avo catches at the soldier’s wrist.
Bar-Avo is the weaker of the two. The soldier is behind him, pushing his arm down. Bar-Avo is trying to hold it back with his own right arm, but he’s not strong enough and the sword is descending towards his ear, his face. And then the soldier gives a sudden start. Matan has kicked his spine and this moment of released pressure gives Bar-Avo enough leeway. He grabs the soldier’s wrist, pulls the sword down and back and there, into the soft part of the throat, just above the armored breastplate.
The soldier falls backward. He chokes and groans and grabs at the sword sticking out of his throat. The blood bubbles down his front like the blood of the lamb when it is slaughtered for the sacrifice. And he dies just as easily, there on the roof tiles, his sticky blood dripping down through the open window. They stare for a minute, startled and silent, before the shouts from the bathhouse remind them to run, to scale the wall, to get away.
Bar-Avo had not quite meant it but had not tried to avoid it either. He feels nothing afterwards, not grief or shock or pity, only perhaps a kind of surprise that it was so simple. And a kind of shock at himself, at his own cool capacity. He knows something about himself now that he didn’t know before, that it will not trouble him to kill a man. He thinks: this will be useful.
Av-Raham, when he hears, congratulates Bar-Avo in front of his men and says, “The first of many!” And Bar-Avo agrees. Yes. The first of many.
There are reprisals. Rome does not know precisely who attacked the bathhouse and killed the soldier, and Giora somehow managed to limp away on a broken ankle before he could be caught and questioned, so the Prefect’s men round up a few dozen young men and give them lashes in the marketplace. They execute five or six for “stirring up unrest.” Av-Raham sends gifts of money and promises of loyalty to the families of those young men. Rome wins nothing by this.
Bar-Avo marries soon after this, because the death has sharpened him somehow and the girls are not enough night after night. He has not got a child on any girl yet but at some point he will, he knows, and this thought, the thought that he might have to take a girl because he has given her a child, makes him think that it is time to marry.<
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He does not need to look too hard for a wife. There are a dozen girls of the right age—fifteen or sixteen—among the daughters of Av-Raham’s friends, and they are sweet and kind and think him handsome. There is one he likes, Judith, not just for the spread of her hips and her neat bottom, but because she seems to understand when he talks.
He has not slept with her; it is not right to do so with the daughters of these men. But once they sat together in a barn during a rainstorm and he told her how he longed to make his mother proud, and take care of her in her old years, and at this Judith leaned her head on his shoulder and said, “She doesn’t know how lucky she is to have a son like you.”
He had kissed her on the mouth and her kiss tasted faintly of cherries, and he tried to do more but she pushed his hands away and moved to put a little distance between them.
“You think everything will always come easily to you,” says Judith, “but one day there’ll be something you can’t get and then what will you do?”
“I’ll have to ask your father for you instead,” he says, and she laughs.
Judith’s father, one of the zealous men, is delighted by the offer of a new son-in-law and agrees rather swiftly.
She is a good girl, and gives him six children in six years, all of whom live to be bright toddlers and then on and on. They are four boys and two girls and Bar-Avo is surprised suddenly to be a father to many small delightful people whom Judith presents to him each evening washed for bed, who ask him if he has apples for them, who are delighted by the gift of a shiny stone or a piece of misshapen clay.
Judith, sensible as she is, does not ask questions about where he goes during the day or who he sees or what they tell him. She knows where they keep the daggers, wrapped in leather in the roof, and knows to keep the children from them. She knows what food to give him to take if he suddenly says that he will be away for a few days, and who to ask if he’s away for longer than he said. She is very calm if he happens to give her a message to tuck into the baby’s wrappings and pass to a man selling saltfish at the market.
His job, in these days, is to gather followers. A movement of revolution needs an army and each man must be recruited individually.
He travels to Acre, and then to Galilee, and talks to the strong men who are gathering their fishing nets in from the great lake. Their arms are knotted with muscles. Their thighs are bunched like tree trunks. Their bodies are meaty like bulls’. These are men who can thrust with a sword or a spear and pierce straight through another man’s body so that the point sees daylight on the other side. It is men like these that he wants. This is how to secure power, he sees. Work hard, be loyal to those who have much help to give you, but secure your own followers too. A day will come when Rome is gone. But before that, he will slowly become stronger and more powerful.
“Come and follow me,” he says to the fishermen, “follow me and free the country from tyranny.”
“We cannot follow you,” they say, “we have hauls of fish to pull in and families to feed.”
And he says, “Is not God the Master of all?”
And they say, “Yes.”
And he says, “Then will not God provide for His children, if they will only follow Him?”
And one of them, more curious than the others perhaps, says, “How shall we follow?”
And at that Bar-Avo gives them instruction. How they will become trusted friends of those who are zealous for the Lord. How they will listen for the code words that will show that the speaker is a true messenger from Bar-Avo. Such a messenger will tell them that he has “God alone as leader and master.” God alone. He says it again, and he knows how it feels to hear. No disgusting Emperor steeped in seamy sin upon his golden throne. No Roman army. No Prefect laying waste to good men’s lives upon his whims. God alone, he says to them, as leader and master.
“What of the priests?” says one, and Bar-Avo knows by this question that he has them.
“The priests connive with the Prefect and Rome and wheedle for their own fortunes. Haven’t you heard how rich the High Priest’s family is? Where do you think that money is from? It’s stolen from the Temple. And it’s blood money paid by Rome for our lives.”
And they believe, because they have heard the stories.
“God alone,” he says, “leader and master of all. None but God. God alone.”
They repeat it after him.
And when he walks on to the next village and the next most of the men stay, but giving him their word that he can call on them. And one or two—young men, men without families or men who long for the fight—walk with him. Strong fighting bodies, and he has them practicing their dagger thrusts in the evening and fashioning arrowheads. When he comes back to Jerusalem after three months’ walking, he has a score of men built like muscled oxen with him and another twenty times that number who have promised their right arms to the cause. He will not need them yet. But they will all come to Jerusalem to sacrifice for the festivals of pilgrimage, and then suddenly he will have an army.
“There is a logic to battles,” says Av-Raham, welcoming him back with a great feast and a calf spit-roasted over a fire of old olive wood. “There is a way to sense when the city is ready for war.”
All his friends are there: Matan and Ya’ir, and Giora, who broke his ankle in the fall from the roof and walks with a limp now but is still useful to the cause. Bar-Avo’s own mother has pride of place by the fire and his brothers and sisters with her, because now he is a man of some influence. It pleases him to see his family’s hands shiny with grease from the calf slaughtered in his honor. His wife is here too, her body newly strange and enticing to him after so many months away, and their children filled to the brim with meat and dozing like a half-dozen little puppies draped across her lap. And Av-Raham and the elder men, who look at him with new respect now. They sent several men out to recruit but none has come back with such good news as he.
“I can feel it is coming now,” says Av-Raham. “It will not be long. A year or half a year. Have you heard about the holy men each claiming to be the Messiah? This is a sure sign that the time is near. And the people who follow them? They will come to us.”
They drink wine and eat meat. Their moment is at hand.
There are terrible rumors across the land of Israel, stories so shocking that they must be passed from person to person as quickly as possible.
Some say that the Prefect is demanding that the Temple give up its holy money, donated for the glory of God, to build some kind of latrine. Some say that the priests have agreed to it and that the gold will be transferred under cover of darkness. This news alone is enough to provoke angry shouts in the street, insults flung at soldiers, stones and wine jugs thrown from upper windows at them as they pass in the street.
Bar-Avo leads a raid on a caravan bringing wine to a wealthy Roman merchant. It is for actions like this that the Romans call them bandits and murderers, but that is to misunderstand: they are freedom fighters. They kill the guards who resist them and let those who run go free. Inside the wagons they find not only wine but chests of gold and letters for half the most powerful men in Jerusalem and Caesarea. The letters confirm that the Prefect, Pilate, is weak and has been demanding additional resources from Syria. The money goes to shore up their support in the west and the south. Bar-Avo’s esteem increases tenfold with this find.
Now, suddenly, he is the one to whom men come for advice. Av-Raham is still a leader, a man of much influence, but Bar-Avo is the rising star. They come to tell him about a preacher who slaughtered a cat outside the Temple to represent the sacrilege done there every day by sacrificing for the Romans, and one who has been making cures and who upset the tables in the Temple. They tell him about small risings and pockets of resistance. He is the one who decides what punishment should be meted out to men found to have been too generous to the Romans.
What does it take to make a man follow you? Not love. For love a man will mourn you and bury you when you are dead, but not follow
you into battle. For a man to follow you, it must seem that you are the one who knows the way out. Every person is in a dark place. Every person wants to feel that some other man has found the road back into the light.
A few days before Passover the city is ready.
All of Bar-Avo’s four hundred men are coming to Jerusalem to sacrifice for the festival. His provocateurs do not even have to make up stories, just remind people of what has already happened. They say, “Remember the Hippodrome?” and even men who were not born when it happened have heard the stories and see in their imaginations the great structure set aflame and thousands of men crucified up and down all the roads to the capital.
He holds a great feast just before Passover in a place where they’ve made camp with their allies, to the west of the city. They roast lambs upon great fires and sing songs and call down curses on the head of every Roman. He lays out his plans to the men—how it will be when we take control of the city, who will take which of the gates, who will storm the high places and David’s Tower. He is foolhardy, perhaps, because he cannot see every figure lurking at the edge of the crowd or ask where they have come from and what their name is. He holds up the bread and the wine at the meal and says, “Just as we eat this bread and drink this wine, so we will devour the armies of Rome and drink sweet victory!” And there are great cheers.
Shortly after dawn, when the birds are still calling out and the sky is streaked with pink-tinged clouds, he wakes with his wife next to him, soft and sweet-smelling, and thinks for a moment, why did I wake so suddenly, and then he hears the cry again. Loud and low and afraid: “Soldiers!”
The Liars' Gospel: A Novel Page 22
