Testament

by Nino Ricci

  None of these things, however, did I say to him or in any way make apparent, instead simply showing him a mother’s love, in my deference to him and the care I took in the things that touched on him. But where with my other children I was equitable and calm, with Yeshua I knew only extremes, so that there seemed little difference in the end between the restraint I had shown towards him when he was a child for the sake of shame and the restraint I showed now to keep my dignity. For his part, he remained inscrutable—indeed in many respects he brought to mind Yehoceph, fair and beyond reprimand in every thing but sparing in any emotion. For this, I blamed myself, since I had been mother to him. But also I thought he punished me in this way, knowing that I hung on any sign of affection from him. Sometimes it appeared he went out of his way to make me see what I missed, bringing gifts for his sisters or praising them before me to show he was capable of such displays, but then presenting to me always the same dutiful forbearance.

  Because of these hurts, over time, even if the very restraint I had taught him was their cause, I began to find fault with him. It was over the smallest things at first, his appearance or his manners, some tiny oversight, so that it was easy enough for him to let my censure pass. But soon enough a bitterness crept into my voice. Then after the barley harvest in the spring, because he had sold the crop without so much as consulting me, I complained of the price he had got, though it was not insufficient.

  What do you care of the price, since I was the one who sweat to earn it, he said.

  I lost my temper then.

  You would not have needed to sweat and to work the fields like a common labourer, I said, if you had followed my counsel and taken a trade.

  This was the sheerest hypocrisy in me, for I had been the one to disdain Zekaryah’s advice when he had given it. Yet when I had made the complaint I could not bring myself to retract it, though I knew the stubbornness of Yeshua’s mind and that he would not let my words pass. So when he had finished with the wheat as well, he came to me and said he had apprenticed himself to a shepherd.

  This was the lowest thing, good only for criminals and the simple-minded.

  You’ve done this to shame us, I said.

  Yet I knew it was wrong to talk of shame to him, when I was the one who had put him always in its shadow.

  With some virulence he said, I’ll rather spare you shame because I’ll sleep in the open, and our neighbours won’t see me returning to your house in dirty clothes any longer.

  True to his word, he took to the pastures then and was gone from Notzerah for many days at a stretch. Since we had little to do in our own fields at that time of year, it might have happened that no one would have taken much note of this, for though the work was low, it was more respectable than idling. But during his respites he did not come home to us as he might have but rather took to the streets of Notzerah and began to live there as Artimidorus had in Alexandria, to show everyone in the town he had left his own house. He would sit at the edge of the market or near the assembly house like a beggar, and people did not know what to make of him, since they recognized him as my son. If they went up to him and asked him what his business was, he made some reply they could not understand, like Artimidorus used to do, except that in Notzerah, where there were no Greeks and where no one had ever seen the likes of an Artimidorus, he seemed merely to have lost his mind.

  When I first got word of what he did, I went to him at once.

  Now it’s you who imagines we are still in Alexandria, making a nuisance of yourself in the streets, I said.

  But he said that he had found his trade now, which was precisely to be a nuisance, and refused to follow me home.

  Thus the gloom I had felt for many years, and that I thought had passed, now came back in force, so that there were many times I wished Yeshua had never returned to us, but left us in peace. For though he would not stay with us, neither would he let us forget him, coming more and more often to the town now until his employer, I heard, set him free because he could not depend on him. Subsequently, he was in the town every day, and because he had no livelihood, he had indeed begun to beg for his food.

  Once more I went to him.

  Your orchard needs tending, I said, since it was coming on to the harvest again.

  Woman, I don’t have any interest any more in olives or barley, he said, and I could have struck him then for his insolence.

  So I left him there in the street and told my children not to mind him, though I knew they went out to him and brought him food. And I mistakenly imagined again, as I had when he was a child, that he could not persist in his stubbornness but must come around to me in the end. But a number of the young men of the town, having discovered that he was not afraid to speak his mind, had begun to go to him now where he was and put questions to him for their amusement, hoping to draw from him some outrageous reply. They asked him what he thought of such and such a leader or if this or that trader was honest or if it profited them to study the scriptures when they could earn nothing by them. And because he always had an answer ready, which often enough showed some truth, he began to be known in the town for the things that he said.

  It was not long, however, before he began to incur people’s enmity in this way. There were those who were ready to chase him away at the end of a stick because he had insulted them or called their good name into question, and many others who said he was a bad influence, since he had left his own home to beg in the streets and often called into question what people had learned from their teachers. Then there were some, because on several occasions he had complained against Herod and said he had little respect for the Jews, who would have had him arrested for sedition. Yeshua was quick to point out then that many of the town’s leaders depended on Herod for their wealth and so feared to go against him, for they served as the contractors for his workers or as the middlemen for his goods. In this way the town began to divide between those who supported him because he spoke honestly and those who hated him for the same reason.

  It happened at the time that there was a woman in Notzerah, a Jewess by the name of Ester, whose husband had run away with the brigands. After his absence had gone on a year or more she had taken another man into her house, though there was no news whether her husband was alive or dead. The elders condemned her for this and wished to drive the couple from the town, to free us from their example. But Yeshua, when the question was put to him in the street, asked what purpose it would serve to drive them away when we only forced their example on others. It seemed from this that he did not believe they should be punished in any way but merely left to follow their lusts. Yet there was a logic to his words. For as he said, it was no punishment to a thief if he was merely banished to the next town for his crimes, while in so doing we made ourselves into sinners by forcing on others the thing we ourselves could not bear.

  But is it not also a sin, people asked him, to see those who commit a crime and do nothing.

  Yeshua gave the example then of the child who blasphemed.

  He isn’t banished to strangers, Yeshua said, or put to death, but rather looked to by his mother and father, who teach him his error. So do we need to see to our sinners and not pass our work on to strangers.

  There were many who were amazed at such wisdom in someone little more than a boy, and it was not long before the very youths who used to come to taunt him now came because they thought he spoke more truthfully than their own teachers. But the elders in the town were furious at the position he had taken. One of them apparently went to him and said, What authority do you have in the scriptures for what you say.

  But he answered, Do you require authority for what’s merely common sense, which enraged the man.

  For my part, I too was surprised at the arguments he made, not because of their wisdom, since I knew the acuity of his mind, but because he had attached himself to the cause of a stranger and shown compassion for her when he showed none at home. It seemed to me then that he took her part only in argument, from the rhet
oric he had learned at the hands of Artimidorus. But perhaps I was mistaken. Perhaps he showed others the affection he could not to a mother as I showed him that owed a husband, for years later I heard how he preached forgiveness and love like the teacher Hillel, though I had never known these things from him.

  Some of the elders, when they saw how openly he defied their authority and the power he had begun to have over the young, came to me at my home.

  He will corrupt people, they said, since he speaks outside the law.

  And they told me to look to him and to take him from the streets, or risk my own name.

  I began to fear that they would discover what he was, and how much greater their censure would be then and how much more severe the dishonour they would visit on all of us. And it seemed a tremendous bullheadedness in him that he should do everything in his power to keep us from an ordinary life, raising troubles for us and calling attention to what it cost me so much to hide.

  I sent Yaqob to him, hoping he would fare better with him, though indeed Yaqob was one of those who thought Yeshua did well to question the elders and so had little argument to make. But then Yeshua came to me of his own accord.

  Why do you try to silence me, he said, when I merely tell the truth.

  But because of his arrogance I said, What can you know of the truth when you’re just a child.

  The truth is that you’re only afraid for your own reputation, he said.

  I grew enraged then, thinking how I had always thought of his protection, and still he accused me.

  It’s you who needs to be afraid, I said, because you are a bastard and will be chased from the town.

  From his look then, from the way his spirit fell, it was clear that even still he had not yet known the thing for certain. I was mortified, for I understood he had only taunted me all these years from his own fear, and had hoped against hope, and had perhaps all his life, from the days when Tryphon had first made clear to him his talents, wondered what thing it was that conspired against him, and kept him from the path of a normal life.

  Return to your home, I said. You have a place with us.

  It seems I have found my place, which is in the streets, he said.

  This was in his sixteenth year. He left the town then, for all I knew to join the brigands, and this time I did not go in search of him, for there was all the world to search in and no thread, as I believed, that held him to me.

  I could not have said how he spent the following years, or where he reached to, or what ideas formed in his head. In the first while I heard rumours of him, that he had gone up to Sidon or Damascus or even to Rome, though it was as likely that he had simply returned to his fisherman’s work at Sennabris. But then the time went by and I had no further news of him. So I thought he had passed away from the world, or found anonymity, or gone to make his fortune where he would not be burdened by his past. For my part, I had looked to settling my children, had married my daughters to men of good standing and found wives for my two elder sons, and it seemed that all had ended for the best, that I had made a place for my family and safeguarded our name. Though a widow, I was fortunate enough not to be among the poor, since the olive grove I had purchased still produced and my sons had work, one at home with me and two at Sepphoris and one at the new capital Tiberias, which after all had proceeded.

  It was some years after Yeshua’s departure that we heard of the rise of the prophet Yohanan, who went among the Jews preaching justice for the common people and condemning every sort of hypocrisy. Once, returning from the Passover sacrifice at the temple, we came upon his camp along the Jordan, where his followers came to be purified and receive his blessing. At the time he had grown so favoured with people that a settlement had grown up around him the size of a town, the tents stretching away in every direction. Because many of those who came, which included women as much as men, were given to ecstasies and possessions, there was a great moaning and ululation that rose up from the place, and surely those who stumbled upon it knowing nothing of Yohanan must have thought they had reached the very city of the damned.

  Yaqob, when we reached the place, said, Will we be purified with the rest, for a number of those in our company had stopped by the river to be cleansed. But I said we had made our sacrifice at the temple, and so had our purity.

  We might have gone on then, except that my son Ioses came to me quietly and said that Yeshua was among the acolytes who prayed with Yohanan by the river. I could hardly believe this was so. Nonetheless I followed him through the crowd to where Yohanan’s acolytes prayed in a mass at the riverbank. They were on their knees there in the shoals, a dozen or more, their hair hanging in coils and their skin darkened by the sun so that it was difficult to tell one from the next. Even from a distance, however, I made him out amidst the others, wearing like them the leather belt that marked Yohanan’s followers, though so changed in appearance from when he had been with us, gaunt and black-skinned and long-haired like the rest, that it amazed me Ioses had recognized him.

  I had both Yaqob’s wife and the wife of my son Yihuda with me then, and also many of the townspeople of Notzerah with whom we had travelled and who had known Yeshua when he preached in the streets. So in that moment it seemed a shame to me to go to him, and let it be known to all that he was there, and then be met, as I thought, only with his rejection.

  I said to Ioses, You are mistaken, and he did not gainsay me, nor did he speak to his brothers. And I comforted myself with the thought that I had acted rightly, since it would only have brought upheaval to us to have Yeshua in our lives again, when we had found peace and respectability.

  While we stood there, a wealthy Judean arrived in his carriage and made a great show of passing through the crowd to reach Yohanan, people clearing a path for him because they could see he was a man of stature. When his slaves had set him down he emerged from his carriage in all his finery and said he had come to be cleansed. But Yohanan at once chastised him, and said that the servants who carried him were greater than he was.

  You must come to God not in your carriage but on your knees, he said.

  And taking a brand from a cooking fire nearby, he set it to the carriage’s curtains, which immediately went up in flames. It took only a moment before the entire carriage was burning in front of the man’s eyes, with no chance of saving it.

  Those of us who stood watching were astonished to see this, and more astonished when the carriage’s owner, whether in true repentance or merely to save appearances, fell down on his knees before Yohanan. Yohanan, however, did not pay any further attention to him but simply returned to those who had preceded him and who still stood waiting to be cleansed. His actions impressed themselves deeply on the crowd, not least because of the pleasure we felt at seeing the man’s arrogance reduced. In the meanwhile the carriage continued to burn and the rich man to supplicate but Yohanan stayed oblivious, and even his acolytes, and Yeshua among them, did not pause so much as a breath in their prayers, as if they were well used to Yohanan’s actions.

  We left shortly afterwards. I was careful to keep my family from the shore lest another of them recognize their brother. But no one further picked him out. On the road there was a good deal of talk of what Yohanan had done, though as much, it seemed, from titillation as from understanding, for many had heard of his madness and were pleased now to say they had witnessed it with their own eyes. But for my part, I began to see in Yohanan’s actions my own reproof. For while he had shown to us how meaningless were the pomp and opinions of this world, and the airs we made for ourselves, I had denied my own son for fear of opinion.

  For many weeks afterwards I could not suppress the memory of what I had done, so that it seemed the shame of having shunned Yeshua was greater by far than any that might have come from having gone to him. And the restlessness I had felt as a young woman in Alexandria began to return to me, for I saw how my mind had been open then but had grown complacent, and how I thought only of my position now, just as Yeshua had once accused me
, when before I had cared more for truth. Indeed it seemed that since Yeshua had gone from me I had put from my mind all thoughts except those of the marriage of my daughters and sons, and that the doorway he had opened for me had been closed. I thought of Artimidorus, how he had given over the coins I had paid him so that they might be flung to the earth—I remembered how my blood had quickened in that instant and I had felt alive, for it was as if he had put a knife through the very fabric of things. So it had been seeing Yohanan give fire to the rich man’s carriage. It seemed fitting to me now that Yeshua had taken up with him, for he and Artimidorus were of a piece, set on their minds’ trajectories, caring nothing for our petty hierarchies and rules.

  I was established in the world and had reached the point where I might simply have rested and found comfort. Yet even now the trouble that had marked my life would not leave me, for my conscience would not be still until I had made peace with my son. Sometimes in these days, though I could hardly call up his face any longer, I thought of the man who had fathered him, and what had become of him, and what he might make of the child he had forced on me. Likely some war had carried him off or old age, though I could not say I regretted if God had cleared him from the earth. And yet I thought I would not have traded my son away for any price, though I hated how he had come to me, nor, after all, could I have done without the trouble he had given me, for that had been my life.