Testament

by Nino Ricci

  For the longest time we remained sitting there in the streets, scarcely able to believe that our slaughter had been averted. Then finally we wiped our sweat and began to return to our homes.

  Yeshua stayed beside me as we made our way through the crowd.

  Mother, he said, when the others could not hear him, I was wrong to reject the Jews, because I am one of them.

  And because he had made this repentance, and called me his mother, I could not stop my tears.

  It seemed my good fortune then was more than I deserved, that out of the tragedy of the riots I had had Yeshua returned to me. I thought that Yehoceph would surely not send him from our house now if he chose to remain there, after all we had endured together, and so I was innocent enough to imagine that we might at last find peace with each other.

  But that very evening Yehoceph came to me and said, We cannot remain in this place, for he judged it foolish to have made so many sacrifices in the name of his sons only to have them murdered in a foreign country.

  It was my first thought then that it was for nothing, after all, that Yeshua had come back—I could hardly command him now to follow us out of the country, when he had already been so long on his own, nor could I make any argument to Yehoceph that he still had need of us. I might have questioned Yehoceph’s decision but lacked the heart to, for though I was loath to leave a place where I had known such freedom, neither did I wish to see my children annihilated or all our property destroyed. In any event it was clear that Yehoceph had already set his mind.

  I need to settle my affairs, was all I said to him, meaning my dowry, and thus the matter was decided.

  So it was that more than a dozen years after we’d left it, we prepared to return to our homeland. Yet I could not have said by then what home it was, when in Egypt I had borne eight children, including the two I buried, and had had work, and had understood the smallness of the world I’d left behind, so that I barely remembered any more the child who had set out.

  What we had departed from as a single kingdom under Herod had, after his death, undergone many changes and divisions, so that the country we returned to was scarcely recognizable as the one we had left. There had been uprisings and revolts, where whole cities had been burnt to the ground, and there were also territories, as we heard, that were run solely by bandits. In Judea, after many troubles, Herod’s son Archelaus had been banished by the Romans, who had set up their own ruler and committed many desecrations. Thus Yehoceph had no wish to return there, not only because we were known but because he did not wish to be a slave in his own land after being one for so long in another’s.

  We came to choose the place we had rejected years before, the Galilee, under Herod Antipas, who at least called himself a Jew, though eventually we learned that his own desecrations often exceeded those of the Romans. At the time, the word had spread that Herod planned a great city on the shores of the Sea of Kinneret, to be his capital. Yehoceph judged there would be work in the place for many years and thought it good, for while he himself was old, he had four sons whom he needed to settle.

  In the end there were nine of us who returned, because Yeshua, though I had not had the courage to hope it, chose to travel with us. I was careful not to show my joy at this or say anything in the way of encouragement, fearing these would be the very things that would drive him away. He said to me that if he was a Jew, he should see the land of the Jews, and so know himself. But the truth was he had grown close to us during the troubles. As for Yehoceph, I did not even broach the matter with him, but merely pretended to take it for granted that Yeshua would accompany us.

  We stopped for three days in Jerusalem. This was a mistake, since Yehoceph, wanting nothing to do with my own family, immediately set off to Bet Lehem with his sons to show them to his brothers, leaving Yeshua behind with me and the girls. I saw how much Yeshua took this to heart. On the journey Yehoceph had warmed to him, because Yeshua had been careful always to defer to him and show him respect, though clearly his superior in intelligence. But when we entered Judea, Yehoceph seemed to remember at once all the old proscriptions. From the black mood Yeshua fell into at being left behind I gathered he still had not understood what he was, though I did not know what other rift he imagined kept him separate from us. It seemed almost wilful, this blindness, when he was otherwise perceptive, and when even as a child he had come so near to the truth. Later I began to think it was precisely this denial that let him remain my son—he would not look at the thing directly so that he need not condemn me for it outright, but only hold it over me.

  I had had no word of my family in all my time in Egypt. So I was reacquainted now with my brothers and sisters, and learned for the first time that my father was dead. I gave over some of the dowry I had saved to my mother then, for my father had left her without any means and so she lived like a tenant in her own house, at the beck of my brothers’ wives. My brothers, for their part, showed little joy in seeing me, and I understood now that they blamed me for the loss of our fortune. To Yeshua, one of them said, You may sleep in the servants’ room. It was all I could do then not to leave that instant, which I refrained from only on my mother’s account. I ended by making my own bed and my daughters’ in the servants’ room as well, which in any event was empty, to make it seem we slept there only for lack of other places.

  Yeshua, however, understood the insult nonetheless, and the following morning I awoke to find he had gone. By evening, he still had not returned to the house. As I could not go searching for him in the dark, I spent a sleepless night, believing every sort of thing, that he had been denounced or had chosen to abandon me again or that he had been murdered in the streets, though surely he was safer in Jerusalem than he had ever been in the streets of Alexandria. In the morning I set out at sunrise in search of him and finally came upon him at the temple, listening to some of the teachers who stood discussing in the temple courts.

  I felt a chill then, seeing how his own ignorance was a danger to him, for, by law, bastards were prohibited from the temple precincts, on pain of death.

  One of the teachers, when he saw I was the boy’s mother, said, Your son is a blasphemer, since he claims there is more wisdom than what is written in the Torah.

  I remembered then how rigid in belief the Judeans were, though often enough in hypocrisy, it seemed to me, and wondered that I had not discouraged Yeshua from coming to a place where he could only be an outcast. For with a word, if the truth of him was known, men such as these could ruin his life.

  Taking him aside, I had no chance to express any happiness at finding him but said, You’re a fool to speak your mind so openly here.

  He stayed silent at this and I instantly repented, realizing that the worst thing was that I should drive him, through his defiance, to remain here in Jerusalem.

  It’s just that you are a boy, I said, and they cannot endure that you should be wiser than they are, which indeed was the truth.

  He finally agreed to return with me to my family’s house, and I said a room had been prepared for us off the inner courtyard, where some goods had been removed. For my sake, I thought, he pretended to be satisfied with this.

  Since I could no longer bear his silence on the matter, I asked if he would accompany us on the rest of our journey.

  I do not think I can know the Jews by the ones I’ve seen in Jerusalem, he said, at which I was relieved. And in the morning he presented himself with me and my daughters at the Damascus Gate so that we might join Yehoceph there for the journey north.

  We went up by way of Perea to avoid the Samaritans, travelling with a band of traders who were well armed against the brigands who hid in the hills. In the end, we reached the shores of Kinneret without incident. Yeshua, I saw, was very taken with the lake, as indeed we all were, for after the many miles of desert we had passed through, from Egypt and from Jerusalem, and after the grit that had lodged itself between our teeth, it seemed the very seat of paradise, lush and green then with the spring. We all seemed to f
eel a lifting, a sense of arrival, for the air itself appeared more pure than what we had left and the water more blue than even that of the Western Sea.

  At Sennabris, Yehoceph enquired about Herod’s new city. But we learned that the work had nearly ceased, for it had come out he had chosen a burial ground for his site and so his workers, except for the Greeks he had brought in, refused to proceed. Yehoceph was bitter at this, for we had made the journey there at no little trouble and expense. To worsen the matter, he was unwell—a fever had come to him after Jerusalem, with the damp and the cold that had met us there, and he had not shaken it. He was somewhere near sixty now, as I reckoned, and each ailment that came to him I thought might be his last. When we were settled in the caravansary outside the Sennabris gates I sent Yeshua into town to fetch a doctor for him.

  You imagine we’re still in Alexandria, where there are doctors, he said, and I heard the note of contempt in his voice for Yehoceph now, after Jerusalem. Nonetheless, he went into town with the coins I had given him and returned with a brew that seemed to give Yehoceph some comfort.

  From some of those we met we learned there was work for masons at Sepphoris, which Herod had rebuilt after the revolts and continued to use as his capital while he awaited his new one. We went on there at once, and Yehoceph was able to find work for himself and Yaqob at least, even if not at favourable wages. Since Jews at the time were still forbidden from taking up residence in the city, we took a house at Notzerah nearby, which once, as we heard, when the building at Sepphoris had progressed most rapidly, had been an active town, but now seemed decrepit and half-deserted.

  Yeshua had remained with us as far as Notzerah. But it was clear that after Jerusalem a bond had been broken, and I saw it chafed him to stay with us, and knew in my heart that he would leave. In Notzerah there was no occupation for him, nor any life that might seem familiar, and while he travelled into Sepphoris on a few occasions, where there were schools and educated men, I saw it bothered him to go into the town seeking amusements when Yehoceph and Yaqob sweated there in the sun for their daily pay. Again I could have told him of the money I’d set aside, so that he might have attended a school in Caesarea or Ptolemais on the coast. But if he should have asked why there was money for him and not the others, or indeed why I had so long withheld it, I could not have answered him.

  In the end he came to me and said he would seek work on the lake as a fisherman, and I had nothing to say to prevent him from this. As I later heard, he returned to Sennabris and joined a fleet there for a season but then moved on, some said into the Decapolis, others north into Tyre. As he did not return home in this time or send any word of himself, I could not judge the truth one way or the other, and eventually I stopped asking after him entirely, to avoid the shame of being his mother yet not knowing his whereabouts, but also because I could no longer stand to hear of him, when it was clear he had cut his ties. It was strange that in Alexandria, where we had been so at odds and where there had been every influence to drive us apart, we had remained together in the end, whereas here in our own homeland he had slipped from me as if by merest chance, so that it seemed my own failure that I had not found the way to hold him close or that there had been a part of me, which wanted rest, that had been content to set him free.

  Without Yeshua it appeared that our lives were made simple, that we formed a family like any other and so had truly begun again, even if Notzerah was the very end of the earth, full of goat herds and the ignorant, and Sepphoris, the few times I visited it, looked hopelessly dusty and small after our years in Alexandria. There was a quality of the air in those parts, because of the woods and the hills and because we were far from the sea, which I had grown used to, that made it seem we were lost to the world, remote from the places of import. But over time I grew at home in that remoteness, and the restlessness I had felt in Alexandria began to fade. In Notzerah, because we had come from far away and from a great city, people looked at us with respect, and there was no one who wondered at my past or took me for anything different than what I seemed. So I became simply a mother looking to my children, and my days were spent at the river and at the well. With my dowry, in the end, to keep it safe, I purchased an olive grove near the town, not trusting the merchants in those parts to invest it, but neither daring to keep it in my home for fear of bandits.

  We had not been in the Galilee much over a year before Yehoceph passed on. A small illness took him over one day seemingly so trifling that he did not even let it keep him from work, but later Yaqob and some of his fellows needed to carry him home and by evening he was dead. It surprised me then the grief that went through me, for I had not imagined I loved him. Indeed, perhaps I had not, except that I had been with him some fifteen years, and had borne his children, and he had spared me, as I saw now, a life surely far worse than the one he had given me. Never once had he raised his hand against me or asked of me anything it was unreasonable for a man to ask of his wife, and the fairness of mind I had detested in him as a bride had in the end stood me well in all my years with him. On his deathbed, when he understood his time had come, he did not say to me, I command this or that, or, Look you follow my wishes, but rather held his tongue and said only the wages that were owed to him at his work, by which I understood his trust in me.

  When he had died I felt his loss in many ways, not only because of his wages and because there was no longer any man in the house but because it seemed to me that in his death I did not understand any more what it was to live on this earth. For here was a man who had worked all his days even to the final one, and who had known little comfort from his wife, whom he had married in disgrace, and yet somehow he had taken meaning from the things of his life, which was only in the birth of his sons and the thought of their prospering. But what was it if each generation sacrificed every pleasure in this way, for its sons, for then each son would sacrifice in turn, and there would be no joy on the earth.

  As to myself, I was but thirty then and yet an old woman, for my husband was dead and I had no prospect of another and my daughters would marry in a matter of years and my sons find their work. So for several months I could not find it in me to leave my home, I who had wandered every quarter of Alexandria, nor could I smile or take any pleasure in my children. I thought of my own childhood in Jerusalem and how the world had seemed different, the feast days and the market days, the great run of time that had seemed to stretch before me like very eternity. The strangest things came into my memory then—the smell of dill in my mother’s kitchen, or how clear the air stood on a winter morning, or the sound the mules made in the earliest dawn outside our gate. Everything had seemed full of a promise then that had come to nothing in the end, that had slowly been stripped away from the world.

  It was Yaqob, finally, seeing how unhappy I had become and understanding me more than I knew, who came to me and said he would seek out Yeshua and bring him home.

  Why seek him out when he has abandoned us, I said.

  Because he is the eldest, Yaqob said, and our father is dead.

  I might have preferred then the stupor I had fallen into to reopening the wound that Yeshua was for me. But Yaqob was determined, and I could not bring myself to forbid him. The truth was I had little hope that he would find Yeshua, or that finding him, would be able to bring him home—we had lost our chance when we had first come from Alexandria, and I did not think we would see one another. Even then he had been like a restless animal that suffered itself out of loyalty to stay with its master but in the end must run wild.

  After only three days, however, much to our surprise, Yaqob returned to us with his brother. He had found him at Sennabris—it seemed he had returned there for the high season.

  I might have shown some pleasure then but did not dare to, since I did not know in what spirit he came, or if he would stay with us. But he said to me, If there’s work for me, I am here to take the place of the eldest, to show that he would stay.

  I could not find the words to answer him.
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  I have purchased a field for you, I said in the end, like a girl with a trinket, since it was all I could offer.

  So it was that Yeshua returned to us, and was part of our family again. In the beginning, none of us could escape the strangeness of his presence or how he was different from us in his looks and his manner, so that there seemed a silence that spread around him like a pool, and even the kinship I had felt with him against the others when he was a child appeared to have faded, and they were the ones now I felt allied with. But true to his word he took his place among us, and together with his brothers worked the olive grove I had purchased and rented land for barley and wheat. And for a time it began to seem that in the death of Yehoceph I had after all found a new life, since I had my son at home with me now without my husband’s shadow and the darkness that had dogged me for so many years seemed lifted. As to the others, because Yaqob accepted Yeshua, so his brothers did, and my daughters were happy to see him with us on my account. Even the people of the town found nothing peculiar to remark in his presence, for just as they had thought it fitting, when he was on his own, that with so many sons in the house he should have gone his own way, so they thought it fitting now, after Yehoceph’s death, that as the eldest he should return.

  At the olive harvest we purchased a mill to make our oil and set it at the edge of our grove. While the others shook the fruit from the trees, I helped Yeshua to press it, tending the olives while he guided the wheel. In those weeks it seemed we grew together again, because of the silence of the hills there and the air and the sky and the rhythms our bodies fell into, which were deeper than speech. In his exertion I saw Yeshua was as beautiful as any Greek, fair-skinned and fair-haired, and it took my breath sometimes to look at him and know he was my son. There was that part of me that wished to dote on him now, to make up for what I had denied myself, and indeed sometimes I felt that because I had never known the love of a husband, I was drawn to him with all the excess of emotion I thus had not spent. Once in the market, because I had kept young, it in fact happened that he was mistaken for my husband, which shamed him. But I was strangely pleased at this since it seemed I thus possessed him more, or that he was bound to me not by blood but by choice.