Testament

by Nino Ricci

  It seemed that Yeshua and his men livened up as well when we crossed the frontier, perhaps at the prospect of returning home. But it turned out there was more to it than that—they were recognized here. In each village we passed there was someone who knew them, and came quietly offering homage; in one town, where we stopped for our midday rest, there seemed a whole little colony of Yeshua’s followers, who came slowly filtering in to pay their respects at the house where we’d put up. Yeshua appeared different among them than he had among the crowd in Tyre, more at ease, though it wasn’t the elders or even the men of standing who came to see him but the merest peasants and the like.

  It was twilight by the time we reached Kefar Nahum. The town lay along the Damascus road and the caravansary outside the walls gave off the noise and stench of animals and men. But the town itself had a dulled, neglected air. Just outside the gates we found a little crowd who had heard of Yeshua’s approach and had come to await him, most with some particular ailment they wished him to minister to. For the better part of an hour, until it grew too dark to see, Yeshua tended to those gathered. There was one boy, writhing in pain, who’d been brought to him with a broken shin bone, the fractured end of it protruding through the skin; Yeshua, with a few smooth motions, massaged the bone back into place, so that with a splint affixed the boy was practically able to leave on his own two feet. Surely it was more than simple learning that Yeshua brought to this work; he had a gift. You saw it in the concentration that came over him like a possession, the way every fibre in him seemed devoted to the task at hand.

  Afterwards we made our way to Kephas’s house, where Yeshua stayed. It was a small compound just off the main street, dank and cramped and swarming with animals and children. There we had our supper, which was ample enough, and then Yaqob and Yohanan—who were brothers, it turned out, a point no one had mentioned before—returned to their own home. Kephas invited me to sleep on his roof, which hardly seemed fit to hold my weight. But in fact the late summer heat sent several of the children and a couple of the men of the household up there as well, though not Yeshua, who apparently had his own little closet to sleep in at a back corner of the compound.

  One of those who came up to the roof was Kephas’s brother Andreas, who had taken a strange liking to me at supper, leaving his own place to come sit at my feet like a dog in search of a scrap. It had taken me a moment to realize he was simple—as I later learned, he had suffered some accident as a child. The others seemed uncomfortable when he came to me but did not really try to stop him. So for the rest of the evening he stayed close by, and then that night came up to the roof, setting his mat close to mine and giving me a huge child’s grin. The truth was I took comfort in his attachment to me—it was such a guileless thing, and so undemanding, that it made me feel welcome there, among strangers though I was, in a way that the mere protocols of hospitality could never have done.

  It was not until the following morning, when I awoke there on Kephas’s rooftop, that I had a chance for a proper view of Kefar Nahum and its situation. My impulse then was to revise my original harsh judgement at Yeshua’s choosing it as his base. The town itself—a city, Yeshua’s men had called it, though it had the most makeshift of walls and no battlements of any sort—did not amount to much, just a straggle of compounds similar to Kephas’s stretching along its few streets, all in the coarse black stone of the area and each looking as forbidding and cramped as the next; and then to the south the harbour, which was large enough but built with a confusing disarray of jetties and quays and crammed with every sort of ramshackle craft. It was the prospect, however, that struck me, the view out over the whole of the Sea of Kinneret, which seen from there—unlike from Tiberias, where it seemed merely a backdrop laid out for the king’s amusement—appeared truly to merit the name of sea, not from its size, perhaps, but from the sense of being in some way on a distant shore. Jerusalem felt very far from here, in another world; Rome, non-existent. Of course, all this was perhaps no more than the feeling one often got in the provinces, the illusory sense that nothing beyond the immediate was important or real.

  I was surprised, however, to make out just a couple of miles east of town what looked like a military camp, with Roman eagles flying. I had not heard of the place and wondered how it had come to be there, and that Antipas allowed it. Since the household had not yet come fully to life, I took the chance to slip away and make my way out to it, imagining I might learn something of use that I could then bring back to Jerusalem to show my superiors I had not been idle.

  The camp lay right at the Jordan, which fed into the lake there and formed the frontier of Herod Philip’s territory. It looked large enough to house perhaps a hundred men, and stood watch over a sizeable customs house that controlled the border crossing. A sleepy-eyed guard, a young Cilician, told me the Romans had set the place up a number of years before to deal with the brigands in the hills—freedom fighters, I took him to mean, though it was true that many of them were no better than thieves—after Antipas and Philip had shown themselves unable to. The so-called brigands had been more or less eradicated, but the camp had remained; no doubt the Romans were happy to use it to keep an eye on their client kings, and on the revenues coming in from the customs house. At the moment only a meagre twenty-five men were stationed there, commanded by a captain who was apparently quite well liked by the local population and who in fact had recently married a girl from Kefar Nahum.

  I made my way back to Kephas’s house. It was still not an hour past daybreak and so I was surprised to find a small crowd had already gathered in the narrow street outside his gate, imagining them to be supplicants for Yeshua’s attentions. But there were no ill with them, nor indeed did they seem there for instruction, for there was a tension among them and an angry murmuring that died down only when I came near and they saw I was a stranger.

  I asked one of them what had brought them there and he said bluntly, “They’ve killed the prophet Yohanan.”

  I was shocked. As we’d heard, even in Tyre, Yohanan had lately been taken down to the fortress at Macherus, to rot there, we assumed, until he was forgotten; but this was unexpected. There had been no trial, not even a charge—the Romans would at least have taken the trouble of that, though perhaps that was why they had left the job to Antipas. No doubt Antipas had assumed he might simply append Yohanan’s execution to the recent spate of political ones, not reckoning how much greater was the affection Jews felt for their prophets than their insurrectionists.

  The crowd continued to grow. I could see how he’d been loved even this far along the lake, many of those who came looking stricken as if one of their own family had died. At one point a wail of mourning started up, and slowly filled the street; but still Yeshua did not come out. I could not tell what the crowd wanted of him, simple condolence or something more—there was that peasant anger to them that I’d seen elsewhere, born of helplessness but more dangerous for that, if it found an object.

  When Yeshua finally did emerge, however, he looked so naked in his own mourning, his robe torn and his forehead blackened with ash, that the crowd seemed instantly quelled. For a few minutes he talked, though without great conviction, I thought, of how Yohanan’s death merely confirmed his greatness, invoking the usual scripture and the familiar stories of the rejected prophets. The speech appeared to have less the effect of reassuring the crowd than of bringing home to them their loss. Yet in this way the threat of violence that had been palpable moments before seemed to dissipate.

  As he finished, there was a commotion at the far end of the street: a contingent of soldiers had arrived from the military camp. They’d clearly been roused in a hurry, given that there hadn’t been any sign of activity when I’d been out there not a half-hour before. The captain—Ventidius, I’d learned his name was, after the famous general—left his men at the back of the crowd and made his way through it to Kephas’s door. He was a man of forty perhaps, not young at any rate, and too old surely to be commanding such a forgotten
outpost. But he had a natural dignity to him and carried authority, to judge by the ungrudging way the crowd let him through. He addressed himself at once to Yeshua, with an intensity and familiarity that surprised me.

  “I assure you Rome had no hand in this,” he said.

  He seemed almost to believe this, though it couldn’t have been true. Yohanan’s only crime against Antipas had been to denounce his lusts, which in any event were well known.

  To his credit now, Yeshua said only, “The Romans have many hands besides their own.”

  Whatever the case, it was obvious that Ventidius had been caught off guard, and also that he was angry not merely at having been left in the dark but at the actual outrage of Yohanan’s death. Later I learned he was a God-fearer, as they called them, one of those sympathetic to the Jews.

  He stood there awkwardly an instant, not able to look Yeshua in the eye, then faced the crowd and asked it to disperse. Everything had gone strangely quiet, and it seemed for a moment that things might turn again. At the foot of the street the soldiers stood by uneasily, seeming to hem the crowd in because of the narrowness of the space. But Yeshua, for his part, did nothing to relieve the tension, turning and retreating without another word back through Kephas’s gate. A kind of panic seemed to go through the crowd then at being left suddenly leaderless. But finally this too passed and people began to drift away, until Ventidius gathered up his men and led them off without further ceremony.

  In the end only a small group remained there in the street, huddled outside Kephas’s gate. Seeing that the brothers Yaqob and Yohanan were part of it, I went over and Yohanan, the younger of the two and the more friendly, introduced me around to the rest of the group. The men were mainly fishermen and labourers, from the look of them; there were a few women as well, to whom I was introduced, however, with the same blunt lack of formality as to the men. I was amazed when Yohanan said that all these, too, were among those whom Yeshua had called to be his intimates, for it was clear at once that there was not a person of education or of standing among them. The whole group of them looked chastened and subdued with the news of Yohanan’s death, and I sensed as well a measure of fear in them.

  Soon Kephas came out. We followed him around the corner to the harbour and from there out through one of the town gates and onto the lakeshore. Yeshua was already there by the water, still in his torn robe; he had apparently slipped out of the house by a back way. The barest of greetings were exchanged, and then a couple of the women set about preparing a cooking fire, into which some fish were heaped with some onions and leeks. One of the women had brought bread; for water, Kephas filled a flask directly from the lake. When the meal was ready everyone sat in a circle right there on the stones and a little ritual of deferment was played out, the disciples first offering the food to Yeshua who in turn offered it back to them, so that in the end it was Kephas who broke the fast.

  It was not until we had eaten that anyone broached the subject of Yohanan’s death. Yaqob—I took it that he and his brother were thought the hotheads of the group, by the group’s measure—was of the opinion that a protest should be lodged directly with the governor in Damascus, or with Caesar himself. But a few of the others felt rather that they should remain quiet for the time and perhaps even disband.

  “Fools!” Yeshua said. “Haven’t you learned anything from Yohanan’s death? Don’t you understand it’s the same road we’re on?”

  Everyone was taken aback at this. There was an awkward silence and then someone timidly asked if he thought then that they should follow Yaqob’s advice and protest to the governor.

  “What’s the governor to us, who wouldn’t have been fit to touch Yohanan’s sleeve? Try to think what I’ve taught you when you say things.”

  He was out of patience. It was clear Yohanan’s death had unsettled him.

  There was another long silence.

  “Teacher,” one of the men said, and you could see it was what they were all thinking, “will Herod come to arrest us now?”

  Yeshua relented.

  “No,” he said, “no. We have no fight with Herod.”

  Not long afterwards the group broke up. Kephas and I were left alone with Yeshua on the beach.

  “Are you so sure of Herod?” I said to him.

  “We’re nothing to him. You can see for yourself.”

  And it seemed true enough, seeing him there with his little band of peasants. Yet he talked like someone who would bow to no one.

  Kephas was busy clearing away the remnants of our meal.

  “You think I’ve surrounded myself with simpletons and cowards,” Yeshua said to me, though it wasn’t clear if Kephas had heard.

  “It’s not for me to judge.”

  “When you look at us, you probably imagine only how we would seem to your friends in Jerusalem. But in the end the people you’re trying to save are these same ones you might look down on. And without them, who is left? Without them, what is the point?”

  He said this although I hadn’t spoken to him in anything but the most guarded terms of my work. Yet he appeared truly to believe what he was saying, though in my experience it had always seemed that the vast mass of men were expendable, and had little to redeem them.

  Yaqob and Yohanan had brought a boat out from the harbour up near the shore where we were sitting, apparently setting out for a day’s fishing despite their mourning. They called out for Kephas to join them.

  “You’re welcome to stay with us for a time if you wish,” Yeshua said to me. But I couldn’t tell if he meant this merely as an offer of refuge.

  Kephas was still lingering nearby.

  “I have affairs—” I started.

  “Of course.”

  And yet I knew in that moment that I would stay. The truth was I had no other plan, nor could I bear the thought then of returning to Jerusalem to the fear and distrust I was certain to find there.

  Only now did Kephas finally take his leave, giving his respects to Yeshua and me and then hiking up his tunic and wading out to the awaiting boat. In a matter of minutes the boat was already far out onto the lake and I could make out merely the dark speck of its hull amidst a dozen others. So I had thrown my lot in with fishermen, it seemed. But it appeared honest enough work, something to put against all the empty gestures and talk I had left behind in Jerusalem.

  From the outset it was clear that I was not well accepted by the others in Yeshua’s inner circle. My education marked me, and my accent; but chiefly it was my willingness to challenge Yeshua’s views, which Yeshua applauded, saying it kept his mind sharp for his critics, but which in the men of the group brought out a brooding discomfort and in the women a fairly open hostility. The women—there were several of them who hovered around Yeshua like the Greek furies, and whom I could hardly tell apart—were in fact not much more than girls, and were a source of considerable dissension, as I learned, within Yeshua’s following. But because he treated them with a measure of parity with the men and suffered them to be among his intimates, they imagined themselves his protectors, and showed me an arrogance I would never have countenanced in them if not for Yeshua’s sake. There was one of them, a plain thing thin as a reed who was the daughter of a fish merchant, who seemed to make it her sole work to resist any competing claim I might make to his attention, travelling several miles from her village every morning at the crack of dawn to make sure she was present the instant he rose from his bed. It did not always appear to me that Yeshua quite understood the effect he had on these women; otherwise he might have taken greater care to keep a distance from them, which, as it later fell out, would have saved him much grief.

  Apart from Andreas, then, whose artless attachment to me even the women had been unable to undermine, only Yohanan showed me anything like friendliness. He had apparently taken to me on our trip in from Tyre, and his natural liveliness and curiosity made him see in me a window onto the world. He often asked me about my travels and about life outside the Galilee, the wonders I had seen an
d the different customs and beliefs; he was a bright young man, and the only handsome one of the lot, and I suspected that if Yeshua hadn’t taken him in, he would have found a way to make a name for himself in Tiberias or Jerusalem. His father was a successful fisherman in the town, with one of the larger residences; and eventually, unable to bear any more the congestion at Kephas’s house and the tension that my presence there seemed to arouse, I took up Yohanan’s offer to repair to his, where I had a little canopy of my own off the courtyard and was left more or less to myself.

  There was something else that set me apart from the rest of the group: I was one of the few who carried a purse. I was never certain how the original injunction against money had come to assert itself among them—with some of the group I was sure it was mere superstition, and predated Yeshua, since I’d heard there were still many in those parts who believed that demons lived in coins. But Yeshua, it appeared, had some program in mind. It was nothing so plain, say, as the simple eschewing of greed; it seemed rather a kind of surrender, a means of stripping away the usual barriers between people. Often enough we would arrive in a town with not a scrap of food with us and not a penny in our purse, and then somehow it would seem that exactly because we had nothing, what we needed would come to us, and a meal would be offered and a roof put over our heads.

  As time went on it happened more and more, however, that we could not exist entirely outside the usual systems of exchange. For one thing, as Yeshua’s popularity grew, a few of his wealthier patrons were forever urging donations on him, to help with the purchase of medicines or to distribute to the poor; and even before I came to them they had appointed one of their number, Matthaios, who worked at the customs house, to carry the common purse. Gradually, however, that role came somehow to devolve upon me, partly, it seemed, as Yeshua’s way of showing the others that I could be trusted. The others appeared happy enough to let me have the thing—I was their scapegoat, bearing the taint of lucre so they needn’t. In fact, not a little of the money that we took in came from the most dubious of sources, publicans and collaborationists and the like, people shunned by the local populace but openly welcomed by Yeshua, who neither refused their money nor asked them where it came from. If it had been taken from the poor, he said, then all the better that we should have the chance to return it to them; and if from the rich, then we would surely put it to better use than they would have themselves.