Testament

by Nino Ricci

  These charges, regardless of their truth, would have been harmful enough in themselves, and indeed Yeshua’s followers had already begun to desert him on their account. But then it happened that all three of those who were at the core of the accusations against him, the girl, her father, and Chizkijah, mysteriously died, within a matter of weeks of each other. There were those who were quick to see the hand of evil in the thing, and to say it was Yeshua’s own followers who were behind the deaths. I could hardly credit that Yeshua would have encouraged murder, or even that he had had any part in the pregnancy of the girl, who indeed was well known for her behaviour. Yet it was surely possible that some of Yeshua’s followers had been overzealous on his account. The entire matter left an air of corruption and threat around Yeshua’s ministry like the menace one associated with the Zealots in Jerusalem, who would stop at nothing to reach their ends.

  In all this time I had not laid eyes on Yeshua again, after our meeting outside Kefar Nahum. In some sense I had ceased to think of him as my son, since everything I heard of him struck me as wholly foreign to the life that I lived now. Even Yaqob by now had resigned himself to his rejection of us, and no longer spoke of him, and in Notzerah I was not so much disdained on his account as held in sympathy, as if I had lost him in some way, as one might lose a son to illness or war. So I might have forgotten him, and dismissed what I heard as the fabrication of his enemies or simply shut my ears to it, except that there was always that part of me that could not drop the fear I felt for him and the sense of a reckoning that must come, if not from the Lord, then from his own pride.

  After the scandals that hit him on Chizkijah’s account, Yeshua descended into increasing strangeness. It was only the most fanatical who remained attached to him now and the most destitute, with the least to lose, so that they seemed in danger of becoming like the cults one heard of, which practised the strangest rites and held their leaders as gods. Yeshua would hardly deign to enter a town any more, but only wandered the countryside with his ragged band of followers like some brigand overlord, eating roots and wild fruit for his supper and spending the nights in caves or in the open air. No doubt he thus hoped to emulate his old mentor Yohanan, except that people only saw in this the sign of a growing lunacy, and had confirmed for them the madness they had always suspected in him.

  When the Jubilee was ushered in Yeshua told his disciples that all the old laws must be respected, that their land must be left fallow and any debts they were owed be forgiven. This would have beggared many of them, who relied for their very sustenance on the bit of land they had or who could not count on their own debts to be absolved as they absolved those of others. So he thinned the ranks of his following again, as if he sought to winnow it down to some sort of purity, with no taint of compromise. I thought often in those days of his teacher Artimidorus, and how he had spoken in riddles and contradictions so that anyone trailing behind him must either conform to every intricacy of his thought or lose his way. Likewise, Yeshua had set out on a path on which many had accompanied him at first, but at each difficult turn some had fallen away until he was left with only his handful.

  Toward Passover I began to hear rumours that Yeshua planned a pilgrimage into Jerusalem to mark the Jubilee. I was dumbfounded, for until now he had taken all due care to avoid the place. His followers had always put this down to his beliefs, that he did not venerate the temple like other Jews, or simply that he hated the Judeans and could not bear to be subject to them. But they could not know what was surely the truth, that he dared not show his face there for fear of being exposed. Perhaps he imagined that he himself was redeemed through the Jubilee, though even the old laws, from what I knew, gave no quarter to a bastard in this respect. But my greater fear was this, that he acted, as always, in defiance. There seemed that part of him that forever fought against what he was, and would not be governed by it, as if his bastard self was some second entity in him that he must rise over and suppress. I remembered the days we had spent in Jerusalem on our way to Galilee years before and the insults my own family had paid him then, and thought that these were the grudges he had carried all his life and that would not leave him, so that he sought always the means for their redress.

  At Notzerah, a good part of the town had enlisted for the Passover pilgrimage, and indeed of my family alone, when every child and spouse’s cousin had been counted, we made a battalion, and I the one who was looked to, to lead us. For Yeshua’s sake, when I heard of his own pilgrimage, I considered keeping instead to my home, so that I might not be in the city to bring any shame to him, or to receive it. But I told myself there were too many who depended on me, and too little chance, from the hundreds of thousands who would be in the city then, that I should encounter him. What was truer, however, was that there was that part of me that couldn’t bear the thought of him in the city without me, unprotected and at the mercy of my sin.

  We were many weeks in preparation for the journey, sewing our tents and baking our bread and cakes and laying in our meat. Because of the work, I could in some measure keep at bay my fear on Yeshua’s account, though every day some new scene presented itself to my mind’s eye until every stone of the city accused him and every man he passed said, Is that not the bastard of Miryam. I considered that I might go to him to try to dissuade him from the journey, except that I knew I would thus only seem to oppose him again, and so would confirm him in exactly the thing I wished to discourage him from. The fact was that I was powerless over him, now as always, though whether because of his will or because I had never truly entered his thoughts or followed the workings of his mind, I could no longer say. I thought of the wonders that were spoken of him, and that I dismissed—who was to say if there wasn’t more truth to them than I knew, for even when he was a child I had seen the power that came off him, and that had surpassed my understanding. And this was the thing that most pained me and confounded me, how that power had been thwarted by his birth and turned away from the greatness that might have been his due, even while it seemed his very birth that marked him and set him apart and made him in every way the thing that he was.

  Those of us who made the Passover journey from Notzerah appeared a rabble as we set out, enough to fill a score of tents and more, though soon enough we came upon other companies that were larger still, so that it seemed all of Galilee had taken to the road. In the hope of making better time we chose to go down by way of Caesarea and the coast rather than by the Jordan, along the highway the Romans had built. But even here the traffic was thick, since there were not only the pilgrims to contend with but also the troops travelling down to Jerusalem from Caesarea because of the threat of disturbances, and who, when they marched by in their squadrons, would beat us back from the road so that they might pass freely.

  In this way, however, I saw the sea, which I had not laid eyes on since I had travelled up from Egypt many years before. I thought it would lift my heart to see it again, but I could only think of how wondrous my first vision of it had been and the possibilities I had imagined at the time that had not come to pass. It surprised me that I could look back with fondness on those days, yoked as I was then to a man I did not love and burdened with a bastard child and setting out for I knew not where. Now I had all my children around me but that bastard one, and my grandchildren, and people who respected me, yet I felt a hollowness despite myself, as if I had missed some great mystery or chance.

  On the fourth day we rose up from Lydda to Jerusalem, reaching the city at nightfall. There were many soldiers along the road there, asking the business of all those they did not like the look of and considerably slowing our progress, since the way was already crowded with pilgrims. Then when we reached the gates we saw that we would not be allowed to enter the city but must go at once to the camps the soldiers had marked out for us beneath the walls. The air had turned cold with our ascent and as we were setting out our tents, in the scant half-acre of ground that was all those of us from Notzerah had been allotted, it began to snow. I reme
mbered the snowfalls I had seen in the city as a child, though rarely at this time of year, and how quiet the streets had become then, as if they slept. But in the fields there, all of us crowded together and the ground quickly turning to mud, it was only the cold that impressed itself on us, a chill that sank into our bones, since in the work of preparing our beds before the snow overwhelmed us, we had hardly had time to so much as build a fire.

  To the surprise of everyone, the snow continued through the night. By morning it had covered the fields and weighed down the cloth of our tents, and still continued to fall so heavy and thick that the very air seemed a wall to pass through. We were able to enter the city now but the place had come to a standstill, for even there the snow had not melted away as was normally the case but had stayed an arm deep on the ground. People had to dig furrows through it in order to pass along the streets, and at the temple, we heard, it took an army of Levites to keep the courtyards clear. Despite the cold, however, people were enlivened, so that it seemed no one gave any thought to work and the festival would begin from that day. Only the soldiers looked unaffected, standing guard so unmoving on the ramparts that the snow piled up on their shoulders, their Roman pride staying them from shaking it free.

  It was not until evening that the snow finally tapered off and then stopped. By then, however, the mood of festivity had been quashed, for there had been an incident at the Sheep Gate where the lambs for the Passover sacrifice were being sold. Because it was the prescribed day, there were many thousands who had been pressing in at the market there, including my son Yaqob. But the snow had hampered everyone’s movements and the sales had gone slowly, so that as night came on there were many who began to panic because they had not yet had the chance to purchase their lamb. Finally a disturbance broke out, and the soldiers keeping watch over the place did not waste any time, but quickly went in with their swords and their clubs, and so killed a man. There would surely have been a riot then had not the soldiers been thick on the ground, and had not the Jews already experienced the savagery of the present procurator, who had always quelled every disturbance in the most brutal manner. So no one wished to begin what would surely have been a bloodbath, and the crowd dispersed and went home, though many were forced to leave without the chance of acquiring their lamb.

  The following day there were soldiers on every corner and all the snow that had remained in the streets had been carted away, to prevent any impediments to their movements. At the temple they lined the roof of the colonnade around the entire temple mount and at the fortress, which flanked the mount to the north, they stood watch at every tower, so that should any have had thoughts of revenge for the previous day, they must surely have seen the folly of them. At midday the procurator, who always came down from Caesarea during the festivals so that he might personally safeguard the peace, had himself carried through the city like a great monarch to remind us of Rome’s dominion, with slaves going before him to lay purpled cloth on the pavement so that even the air that his litter passed over should not bear so much as the scent of the muddied streets. Thus the festive mood of the previous day seemed the remotest memory and we felt the sword hanging over us, fearing that some disturbance would plunge us all into bloodshed. Even in the fields where we had pitched our tents, the soldiers stood watch, and as the snow melted away and the earth turned to muck again, it seemed we occupied some vast prisoners’ camp, all of us dirtied and cold and despondent, though we had come to worship.

  To avoid further trouble, allowance needed to be made for the many of us who had not been able to purchase our lamb on the appointed day. The temple officials, with the consent of the Romans, arranged for lambs that were deemed to have been purchased on the proper day to be distributed from the temple basilica, in exchange for a donation to the temple treasury. This time I undertook to accompany Yaqob to make our purchase to ensure he did not come away empty-handed again, and so fought my way with him through the huge crowds that had flocked to the basilica, and which had made of it a great market. It was there as we waited that I overheard talk among some of the women nearby of a wonder-worker who had come to the city. They joked about the man and about the stories that were spread of him, that he had built a temple entirely of snow and that he had raised from the dead the man who had been killed by the Romans the day before. Yet it was exactly in these exaggerations that I recognized Yeshua. I was surprised at the anger that rose in me at the note of contempt in their voices, though it was not as sharp as my fear. Already Yeshua had found the way to call attention to himself, though only, it seemed, to make himself a laughingstock. I was glad that the women had not named him, and so that Yaqob had not heard his brother mocked.

  Because of the numbers that were in the city, I thought it might easily happen that our paths would not cross. I went about my business and prepared for the feast, and tried to put him from my mind. Then the following day I was in the Lower City with my sons Yihuda and Ioses so that they might pay their respects to one of their father’s sisters who lived there. As we were passing the gates that led up to the temple I saw a man coming towards us, nearly in rags, with a motley band of some dozen or so following behind. The street was crowded then with those going up to the temple or simply passing by, but people instinctively stood aside for the man, no doubt because of his appearance, all skin and bone the way he was and barefoot and in his rags, though he came up the street as if he was king of it.

  It took a moment before I realized it was Yeshua. I could hardly believe what had become of him. I stood there in his path and did not know what action to take, since it would have been shameful to turn away, yet I was afraid to make known that this was my son, for fear that someone who knew me would then know what he was.

  It was Ioses again, however, who said, as he had at Yohanan’s camp, It is our brother. This time I did not have it in me to dissuade him. So we stood there in the middle of the street as Yeshua came on, and he could not help but see us despite the crowds.

  It was not until he was quite near that he looked at us directly. I thought then that he might simply feign that he did not know us and pass us by, and so spare embarrassment to us all. But to my amazement he came right up to us and, turning to the group who was following him, said, This is my mother and these are my brothers, as though only a matter of days had passed since he had last seen us. Then he embraced his brothers and took my hand in both of his and brought it to his lips, which in all his life he had not done.

  I had no idea what to make of this and was left in confusion there in the street. But then his meaning grew clear, which I saw now was the purest self-destruction, for he had wished to announce to the crowd exactly the thing I had wished to hide for his sake, which was his parentage.

  He had moved on with his ragged band to the gates that led up to the temple courts. I remembered how he had gone to the temple as a child and the trouble he had made for himself then, though without knowing the danger he was in, being a bastard. Now he knew, and still he put himself forward. Surely if the word went out of what he was, he might be arrested or worse. Yet it seemed this was the very thing that he dared—to be discovered.

  Since I did not know what else to do, I continued with my sons to the house of their aunt. We had hardly settled ourselves there, however, before one of the wives I had known when I had lived with Yehoceph’s brothers in Bet Lehem, and who was also visiting for the feast, came in from the streets. Finding me there, she smiled with all the malice she had held for me many years before and asked if my eldest son had come for the festival as well. So I knew that already the rumour of Yeshua had spread.

  They say he is a famous wonder-worker, the woman said, trying to shame me in front of my sons, which shows even the lowest can make their way.

  I would have answered her then with the venom she deserved but, for Yeshua’s sake, held my tongue. I could not bear to stay on there, however, and told my sons we would take our leave, which left them in confusion, for in all these years I had never made clear to th
em what set Yeshua apart or what enmity I had with their father’s family, or indeed my own.

  As we were passing beneath the temple mount again we heard rumours in the street that there had been a disturbance in the temple courts. It was impossible to get at the truth of the thing, for some said a man had been killed and others that there had been only arrests and still others that only the temple guards had been involved and not the Romans, since it was merely that a pagan had made his way past the fence. The gates up to the courts had been closed by that point to prevent any further coming or going and so we could not make our way up to get further news. But then one of those we spoke to mentioned the wonder-worker of Galilee as among those arrested, and another confirmed this, and I knew that the worst had happened.

  We returned immediately then to our tents, so that I might speak to Yaqob. He wasted no time in questioning me as to circumstance, but said we must go at once to the Roman fortress to find the thing out for certain. The streets were thick with those making their purchases for the Passover meal and even in the alleys and side streets we had to fight our way, nor did the soldiers help our progress, standing squarely in the middle of every intersection to make their presence known. Then when we reached the fortress we were not allowed so much as to mount the steps to the gate, held back by the line of soldiers who stood watch there. When we tried to question them we discovered they spoke neither Hebrew nor Aramaic, and so I needed to make my way with them in Greek, which by now was almost lost to me.