by Anne Rice
Shouts greeted him again from the crowd.
This time it was Shemayah who burst out suddenly, as though he couldn't contain himself:
“Then what are we to do!”
“Need I tell you?” John answered. He drew back and once again raised his voice with the effortless power of an orator. “The man among you who has two tunics is to share with the man who has none; and those of you who have food are to give it to those who have nothing!”
Suddenly the young toll collector beside me called out, “Teacher, what shall we do!” People turned their heads to see who put this passionate question, so much from his own heart.
“Ah, collect no more than what you have been ordered to collect,” John responded. A huge wave of approving murmurs moved through those on the banks. The toll collector nodded his head.
But the King's soldiers were now stepping forward. “And what do you say to us, Teacher!” one shouted. “Tell us, what can we do?”
John looked up at them, squinting once more against the silvery clouded sun. “Don't take money by force, that's what you can do. And never accuse anyone falsely, and be content with your wages.”
Again came the nods and murmurs of approval.
“I tell you, the One coming after me already has His winnowing fork in His hand to clear His threshing floor, and to gather His wheat into the barn, or to burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire.”
Many went down who'd not done so before, but a huge commotion shook the crowd suddenly. People were turning, and there were cries of amazement.
Far to the right and above me on the slope there appeared a large group of soldiers, and out of their midst there strode one quite recognizable figure, stunning everyone to silence as he approached the bank over the river. The soldiers beat back the very grass for him, and held up the edges of his long purple cloak.
It was Herod Antipas. Seldom had I ever seen him so close to me as he stood now—a tall man, impressive by anyone's standards, and gentle eyed as he looked down in wonder on the man baptizing in the middle of the river.
“John bar Zechariah,” the King cried. An uneven and rapid hush fell over all those who saw him, all who heard his voice.
John looked up. Again he squinted. Then he raised his hand to shade his eyes.
“What is it that I must do?” the King cried out. “Tell me. How must I repent?”
The King's face was narrow and grave, but there was no mockery in him, only an intense focus.
John didn't speak for a moment and then in a huge voice he replied.
“Give up your brother's wife. She is not your wife. You know the law! Are you not a Jew?”
The crowd was shocked. The soldiers drew in close to the King as if anticipating a command, but the King himself was very still, and only watched as John reached out now to take the shoulders of my beloved Joseph, and help him up out of the water.
The toll collector started towards my mother and James, in order to give them assistance. Then he tossed off his rich mantle, and let it fall like any common wool robe, and he stepped before John and went down on his knees as all the others had done before him.
Joseph watched as the toll collector dipped his head and came up, wiping the water away from his face. The droplets clung to his oiled and gleaming hair.
The King stood impassive on the bluff, and then without a word, he turned, and disappeared into the ranks of his soldiers, and the entire flock, with sparkling gold-tipped lances and rounded shields, moved out of sight and was swallowed by the pilgrims coming towards us.
Dozens of men and women headed towards the water.
I saw Joseph staring up at me, his eyes clear, his expression familiar.
I moved down into the river. I passed Joseph and my mother, and the toll collector who stood at Joseph's elbow ready to assist him, on account of his age, even as James was there.
I moved up in front of John bar Zechariah.
My way had always been to look down. The subject of whisper and insult through much of my life, I seldom confronted a man with my gaze, but rather turned away and sought my work as a matter of course. It was a quiet demeanor.
But I didn't do this now. It was no longer my way. That was gone.
He stood frozen, staring at me. I looked at him—at his rugged frame, the hair matted to his chest, the dark camel-skin cloak half covering him. I saw his eyes then fixed on mine.
They were glazed, his eyes, the inevitable defense against a multitude of faces, a multitude of gazes, a multitude of expectations.
But as we faced one another—he only slightly taller than I—his eyes softened. They lost their tight puckering, their deep distance. I heard the breath pass out of him.
There came a sound like the flapping of wings, gentle yet large, as of doves startled in the dovecote, and all struggling Heavenward.
He stared upwards, to the right and left, then back at me.
He hadn't found the source of the sound.
I addressed him now in Hebrew:
“Johanan bar Zechariah,” I said.
His eyes grew wide.
“Yeshua bar Joseph,” he said.
The toll collector drew in to watch, to hear. I could see the vague shape of my mother and Joseph nearby. I could feel the others turning slowly towards us, moving clumsily towards us.
“It's you!” John whispered. “You . . . baptize me!” He held up the conch, dripping with water.
The disciples to the right and left stopped in the very midst of what they did. Those coming up out of the water remained standing, attentive. Something had changed in the holy man. What had changed?
I felt the throng itself like a great connected and living thing breathing with us.
I held up my hands.
“We're made in His image, you and I,” I said. “This is flesh, is it not? Am I not a man? Baptize me as you've done everyone else; do this, in the name of righteousness.”
I went down into the water. I felt his hand on my left shoulder. I felt his fingers close on my neck. I saw nothing and felt nothing and heard nothing but the cool flooding water, and then slowly I came up out of it, and stood, shocked by the flood of sunlight.
The clouds above had shifted. The sound of beating wings filled my ears. I stared forward and saw across John's face the shadow of a dove moving upwards—and then I saw the bird itself rising into a great opening of deep blue sky, and I heard a whisper against my ears, a whisper that penetrated the sound of the wings, as though a pair of lips had touched both ears at the same time, and faint as it was, soft and secretive as it was, it seemed the edge of an immense echo.
This is my Son, this is my beloved.
All the riverbank had gone quiet.
Then noise. The old familiar noise. Shouts and cries, and exclamations, those sounds so mingled in my mind and soul with the stoning of Yitra and the mob around Avigail—the noise of triumphant young men, the endless broken crying of pilgrims—I heard them all around me, the excited beat and cry of voices intermingling with one another, answering one another, growing louder and louder as they vied with one another.
I stared upward at the great endless stretch of blue and I saw the dove flying higher and higher. It became a tiny thing, a speck in the shimmer of the drenching sunlight.
I staggered backwards. I almost lost my balance. I stared at Joseph. I saw his gray eyes fixed on me, saw the faint smile on his lips, and saw in the same instant my mother's face, impassive and still faintly sad, lovingly sad, as she stood beside him.
“It is You!” said John bar Zechariah again.
I didn't answer.
The chorus of the crowd rose.
I turned and went up the far bank, tramping through the weeds, moving faster and faster. I stopped and glanced back once. I saw Joseph again, held tenderly in the arms of the toll collector who stared at me wildly. Joseph's face was collected and wistful and over the gulf between us he nodded. I saw my brothers, I saw all of my kindred there, I saw Shemayah, I saw Avigail. I s
aw the small figure of Silent Hannah.
I saw them all, and I saw them particularly—the smooth innocence of the very old, eyes gleaming beneath the heavy folds of skin; the sudden break from weariness in those in their prime, who stood poised between condemnation and wonder; the frank excitement of the children who begged for their parents to explain to them what had happened—and interwoven with all, the busy, the concerned, the worn, the confused, each and every one touching another.
Never had I beheld them all in this way, each anchored to concern yet wedded to the one to the left and the one to the right, and all tossing as if not in sand but by the sea on rolling waves.
I turned and looked down at John, who'd turned to stare up at me. He opened his mouth to speak but said nothing.
I turned away from him. For one second the sunshine sparkling in the stiff branches of a shifting tree held me frozen. If trees and blowing grass could talk, they were talking to me.
And they were talking of silence.
On and on I walked, my mind filled only with the sound of my own feet, moving through reeds and marsh and then to the rocky dry ground, and on and on, my sandals slapping the road, and then the bare earth where there was no road.
I had now to be alone, to go where no one could find me or question me. Not now. I had to seek the solitude that all my life had been denied me.
I had to seek it beyond hamlet or town or camp. I had to seek it where there was nothing but the burnt sand, and the searing wind, and the highest cliffs of the land. I had to seek it as if it was nowhere and as if it contained nothing—when in fact it was the palm of the hand that held me.
21
VOICES. THEY WOULDN'T STOP.
I'd passed the last little settlement days ago. I'd drunk my last deep draught of water there.
I didn't know where I was now, only that it was cold, and the only true sound was the wind howling as it swept down into the wadi. I clung to the cliff and made my way upwards. The light was dying fast. That's why it was so cold.
And the voices wouldn't stop, all the arguments, all the calculations, all the predications, all the pondering, and on and on, and on.
The wearier I became the louder they became.
In a small cave I lay, out of the bite of the wind, and drew my robe tightly around me. The thirst was gone. The hunger was gone. So that meant it had been many days because they'd hurt for many days and that much was now finished. Light-headed, empty, I craved all things and no one thing. My lips split and the skin flaked from them. My hands were burnt red; my eyes ached whether opened or closed.
But the voices would not stop, and slowly, rolling over on my back, I looked beyond the entrance of the cave at the stars—just as I'd always done, musing at the sheer cloudless clarity of it over the sandy wastes, the thing we call magnificence.
And then the remembering came, driving away the random voices of censure, the remembering . . . of every single solitary thing I'd ever done in this, my earthly existence.
It was not a sequence. It did not have the order of words written on parchment from one side of the column to the other, and then back again and again and again. Yet it was unfolding.
And sparkling in the density were the moments of pain—of loss, of fear, of sudden regret, of grief, of discomforting and tormented amazement.
Pain, like the stars themselves, each moment with its own infinitesimal shape and magnitude. All of those memories drew themselves around me as if composing a great garment that was my life, a garment that wrapped itself around and around and over and under until it encased me like my skin, completely.
Sometime before morning, I understood something. That I could without the slightest effort hold any and all of these moments in my mind; that they coexisted, these varied and tiny and countless agonies. Little agonies.
When the morning came and the bitter wind died in the glare, I walked on, letting these countless moments come, letting my mind fling them in my own eyes and at my own heart, like the sand that burnt my eyes, and burnt my lips. I went on remembering.
In the night I awoke. Was this my own voice reciting what was written? “ ‘And every secret thing shall be opened, and every dark place illuminated.’ ”
Dear God, no, do not let them know this, do not let them know the great accumulation of all of this, this agony and joy, this misery, this solace, this reaching, this gouging pain, this . . .
But they will know, each and every one of them will know. They will know because what you are remembering is what has happened to each and every one of them. Did you think this was more or less for you? Did you think—?
And when they are called to account, when they stand naked before God and every incident and utterance is laid bare—you, you will know all of it with each and every one of them!
I knelt in the sand.
Is this possible, Lord, to be with each of them when he or she comes to know? To be there for every single cry of anguish? For the grief-stricken remembrance of every incomplete joy?
Oh, Lord, God, what is judgment and how can it be, if I cannot bear to be with all of them for every ugly word, every harsh and desperate cry, for every gesture examined, for every deed explored to its roots? And I saw the deeds, the deeds of my own life, the smallest, most trivial things, I saw them suddenly in their seed and sprout and with their groping branches; I saw them growing, intertwining with other deeds, and those deeds come to form a thicket and a woodland and a great roving wilderness that dwarfed the world as we hold it on a map, the world as we hold it in our minds. Dear God, next to this, this endless spawning of deed from deed and word from word and thought from thought—the world is nothing. Every single soul is a world!
I started to cry. But I would not close off this vision—no, let me see, and all those who lifted the stones, and I, I blundering, and James' face when I said it, I am weary of you, my brother, and from that instant outwards a million echoes of those words in all present who heard or thought they heard, who would remember, repeat, confess, defend . . . and so on it goes for the lifting of a finger, the launching of the ship, the fall of an army in a northern forest, the burning of a city as flames rage through house after house! Dear God, I cannot . . . but I will. I will.
I sobbed aloud. I will. O Father in Heaven, I am reaching to You with hands of flesh and blood. I am longing for You in Your perfection with this heart that is imperfection! And I reach up for You with what is decaying before my very eyes, and I stare at Your stars from within the prison of this body, but this is not my prison, this is my Will. This is Your Will.
I collapsed weeping.
And I will go down, down with every single one of them into the depths of Sheol, into the private darkness, into the anguish exposed for all eyes and for Your eyes, into the fear, into the fire which is the heat of every mind. I will be with them, every solitary one of them. I am one of them! And I am Your Son! I am Your only begotten Son! And driven here by Your Spirit, I cry because I cannot do anything but grasp it, grasp it as I cannot contain it in this flesh-and-blood mind, and by Your leave I cry.
I cried. I cried and I cried. “Lord, give me this little while that I may cry, for I've heard that tears accomplish much. . . .”
Alone? You said you wanted to be alone? You wanted this, to be alone? You wanted the silence? You wanted to be alone and in the silence. Don't you understand the temptation now of being alone? You are alone. Well, you are absolutely alone because you are the only One who can do this!
What judgment can there ever be for man, woman, or child—if I am not there for every heartbeat at every depth of their torment?
The dawn came.
And the dawn came again, and again.
I lay in a heap as the sand blew over me.
And the voice of the Lord was not in the wind; and it was not in the sand; and it was not in the sun; and it was not in the stars.
It was inside me.
I'd always known who I really was. I was God. And I'd chosen not to know it. Well, no
w I knew just what it meant to be the man who knew he was God.
22
FORTY DAYS AND FORTY NIGHTS. That's how long Moses remained on Sinai. That's how long Elijah fasted before the Lord spoke to him.
“Lord, I have done it,” I whispered. “I know, too, what they expect of me. Only too well, do I know.”
My sandals were falling to pieces. I'd retied the thongs more times than I could count. The sight of my sunburnt hands unsettled me, but I only laughed under my breath. I was headed home.
Down the mountains, towards the bright shimmering desert that lay between me and the river I couldn't see.
“Alone, alone, alone,” I sang. I had never felt such hunger. I had never felt such thirst. They rose as if in answer to my own pronouncement. “Oh, yes, so many times did I devoutly wish for it,” I sang to myself. “To be alone.” And now I was alone, with no bread, no water, no place to rest my head.
“Alone?”
It was a voice. It was a familiar voice, a man's voice familiar in timbre and pitch.
I turned around.
The sun was behind me, and so the light was painless and clear.
He was about my height, and beautifully garbed, more beautifully and richly even than Reuben of Cana or Jason—more like the figure of the King. He wore a linen tunic, embroidered with a border of green leaves and red flowers, each little floret glistening with gold thread. The border of his white mantle was even thicker, richer, woven as the mantles of the Priests are woven, and hung even with tiny gold bells. His sandals were covered with gleaming buckles. And around his waist he wore a thick leather girdle studded with bronze points, as a soldier might wear. Indeed a sword in a jeweled scabbard hung at his side.
His hair was long and lustrous, a deep rich brown. And so were his soft eyes.
“My little joke does not amuse you,” he said gently with a graceful bow.
“Your joke?”
“You don't ever look into a mirror. Don't you recognize the image of yourself?”
