Testament

by Nino Ricci

  As if to spite us then, the fire suddenly cracked and a big ember flew out onto a bit of the fellow’s leg that wasn’t properly covered. Mary reached out quickly to brush it away. But the man’s leg hadn’t moved at all. The ember had sat there long enough that I could smell the skin burning, yet there hadn’t been so much as a twitch in him. Jesus, though, hadn’t seemed to notice, still feeling around the fellow’s skull. Then finally there was a point when he seemed to find whatever it was he’d been looking for—suddenly he grew even more intent, and closed his eyes as if he was sending them down to his fingers to see. There was a strange moment then, the light from the fire dark and red and making shadows so I wasn’t sure any more what I was seeing—it looked as if Jesus had put his fingers right down inside the man’s skull, right through the bone like that, and after he’d felt around in there for a bit, something gushed out from the fellow’s head into Jesus’s hands, dark and alive. Rachel was standing close by and she sucked in her breath, surely thinking it was some devil that had come out of him. And I thought the same, because when Jesus tossed the thing into the fire it sizzled and squealed there like something dying.

  For a moment then Jesus knelt there with the fellow’s head still in his hands looking down on him grimly as if he was thinking, Too late. And that was when it happened, and we all of us saw it, that the man simply opened his eyes, and was alive.

  We all stood there speechless. At first Rachel looked even more frightened than before, seeing him come back to life like that. But then realizing what had happened, she fell down on her knees kissing her brother and calling out to her god to thank him. Soon everyone was down on their knees with her, and the only one who didn’t seem to understand what was going on was Elazar himself, who was still lying there with his head in Jesus’s hands blinking his eyes as if wondering how we’d all come to be in his courtyard.

  Jesus got Mary to bring out some cloth so he could bandage up Elazar’s head. He looked tired, as if the thing had taken a lot out of him.

  “Do you know who I am?” he said to Elazar, to see if he had his senses back. And Elazar got a big grin and said, “You must be the son of god himself, if you brought me back from the dead.” And there was a pause and then everyone laughed, even Jesus.

  After Jesus had bandaged him, Elazar sat there in front of the fire and had something to eat, and told us what it was like to be dead. And what it had seemed to him, the way he remembered it, though it was already slipping from him, was that he was in a cave and there was a group of people in with him around a little fire, though he was the only one standing up. And he was saying to the rest, I’m going out, because he could see at the entrance to the cave that it was sunny and bright outside, and didn’t want to sit in the dark. But everyone was saying, Don’t go, and he couldn’t make sense of that. At the time he’d thought he was just having a dream but now he knew that wasn’t so, since a lot of the people in the cave were the very ones sitting at the fire with him now.

  He pointed at me.

  “I could see this fellow and I’ve never even met him before,” he said. Everyone laughed at that, though I wasn’t sure why—it gave me a chill to think I was there in that cave with him when he was dead.

  Jesus said something similar had happened to him once as well, when he’d been knifed during a riot as a boy. But he’d seen a lake instead of a cave, and had thought, I should walk off into the water, though he knew it would kill him to do it. In the end he’d actually set off, and had walked under the waves seeing all sorts of things he’d never have known were there, fish and rocks of amazing colours and shapes. And when he came to again he didn’t know if his god had been saying to him that that was what his heavenly kingdom was like or just that he should open his eyes, since most people looked at the world and all they saw was grey like the surface of the lake, but some people saw underneath.

  The Rock was so relieved to see his cousin alive again that he said we should bring him back to our camp and have a feast for him. But Jesus said he needed his rest, and made us promise not to spread rumours of what we’d seen, since all he’d done was a bit of medicine and the rest had been the work of his god. It was no use, though, his being modest—we’d all seen the thing with our own eyes.

  In the end, the story travelled fairly quickly. Not that everyone believed it—most Jerusalemites, for instance, couldn’t imagine someone from Galilee doing such a thing, and then it was almost every day for them that some charlatan came along to the city claiming this or that. But by the next day the word about Jesus had started to spread, with the handful on one side ready to believe in every wonder and the handful on the other who thought Jesus should be thrashed as a fraud. And then there were those in between who just laughed to themselves about the holy man of Galilee, who built temples out of snow and brought his friends back from the dead.

  By the next morning a warm wind had come in and most of the snow had melted, the fields just one big sea of mud. Our little huts had wasted away by then into the strangest shapes, rounded and stunted like the stubby limbs of lepers, so that it almost frightened you to look at them.

  While we were having our breakfast, an old greybeard came along to our camp looking for Jesus. He was a dignified sort, and well dressed, and had somehow managed to pass through all the muck without getting a speck of it on him. When Jesus saw him he went right to him and kissed his hand, clearly knowing him. But his men had grown wary, lurking nearby as if to hear every word while Jesus and the fellow talked.

  His name was Joseph. I gathered he ran a school of some sort in the city, and wanted Jesus to come see it. All this seemed innocent enough except for the dark looks on the faces of Simon the Rock and the others.

  “I’ll come with some of my men,” Jesus said, as if to appease them, and it was set that he’d go around later in the day.

  Joseph wanted to introduce Jesus to a friend of his near there who owned the local olive press and Jesus went off with him, taking only Simon and John and Jacob. He’d hardly been gone a few instants, though, before two young men showed up, long-haired and a bit savage as if they’d just walked out of the desert, and said they’d come searching for the man who’d raised someone from the dead. It wasn’t long before a family showed up who’d come from Elazar’s village, and then a cripple who came along on his crutches. But our landlord, seeing the crowd that had started to gather, got his hackles up and went over to ask them their business. Hearing the story of Elazar from them, he started thinking he had some sort of conjurer staying on his land, and he chased off the lot of them and then came up to Jesus’s men.

  “You’ll have to move on,” he said, bald-faced like that. “I have my own people coming in.”

  We hardly knew how to answer him.

  “Where will we find another place?” one of the men said, because you could see that all the fields around us were already taken, with more pilgrims still coming in.

  But the fellow just shrugged his shoulders and said it wasn’t his business, and if we had an argument we could make it to the soldiers.

  While we were still wringing our hands over what to do, Jesus came back in a foul temper over some argument he’d had with Simon and the others about Joseph. It didn’t help his mood when we broke the news to him about the camp, and how we’d allowed the people who’d come looking for him to be chased off. He sent a few of his men out then to see if there was any place for us at a camp the Romans had set up on the other side of the city, and said the rest, if we needed, could move to the field of Joseph’s friend. John and Jacob he again charged with finding sheep for us, then he said that for himself he planned to keep his word to Joseph, and visit his school.

  It turned out it was only the two Simons among his men who were left to go with him, and seeing me lingering nearby Jesus told me to join them. I couldn’t do less than hurry to fall in. Jesus set a quick pace and the three of us just followed quietly behind, hardly daring to speak because of Jesus’s mood. Then even before we got to the city gates w
e saw how tense things had become after the riot the previous day, with soldiers everywhere, stopping people on the least suspicion and searching every basket and pocket and sack until you thought they’d crack open your eggs to see if you’d hidden any stones inside. We were all of us on edge thanks to Judas’s warning—any minute, we thought, the slaughter could begin.

  In the city, every speck of snow had been swept up and carted away. Then as we were walking along the wall of the Temple Mount, a line of soldiers marched through and practically knocked us off our feet to clear us out of the way. It turned out the governor had decided to parade himself through the city—we could see his gold sedan descending the steps of the fortress, servants running in front to run a purple carpet where he was going to pass. About fifty of his special Samaritan guard went ahead of him, their feathers flying and their breastplates stamped with eagles that were sacrilege to the Jews, and already as they approached you saw people in the crowd holding a fist to their chest with the first finger out, to show defiance. I got just the one glimpse of the governor himself as his car went by—he looked like a boy, fat-cheeked and mean like the children of the rich who got their pleasure from mistreating the slaves.

  The procession left a bitterness in the air you could taste, as if the city had been contaminated. All the decorations that had been set out for the feast, coloured banners and bangles and great painted torches set along the streets that would be lit on the actual night, seemed suddenly out of place. But we moved on past the Temple Mount into the older section of the city and some of the tension seemed to die away, the little winding streets full of cooking smells, and fires burning in every courtyard.

  After a series of twists and turns we came finally to a shady square where some children were playing. Off to one side was a gate that led into a courtyard, and in the courtyard was a little pool with a fig tree overlooking it. Under the tree, sitting on a mat with three or four fellows my own age dressed in brown robes, was Jesus’s friend Joseph. He got up when he saw Jesus and made his four charges get up as well and kiss Jesus’s hand.

  “So you’ve come,” he said to Jesus, and you could see he was pleased.

  He had his charges bring food and a bit of wine. It turned out the school wasn’t much more than what we saw right in front of us, the courtyard and then a handful of small rooms that came off it. The other teachers weren’t around—they had their jobs in the day and only taught at night. Joseph looked a little embarrassed now about how humble the place was, after the trouble he’d gone to to get Jesus to come to it. He said they got some money for rent from the Jewish council but were hoping for more, since they wanted to keep their teachers during the day but didn’t like to charge fees.

  Jesus said, “If the truth could be bought, even kings would be wise.” But I could see that the Rock and the Zealot were a little surprised at the place, and had been expecting something grander.

  It happened now that one of the boys we’d met when we’d come in, and who’d gone off, returned trailing a thin, narrow-eyed man dressed in a fine coat of the same scarlet as the robes of the temple officials.

  “I brought Zadok to meet Jesus,” the boy said. But it was clear Joseph wasn’t pleased to see him. It took only an instant to understand what was going on—the boy must have been some sort of spy for the man, who it turned out worked for the council. Sure enough Zadok took one look at Jesus, in his old shirt and coat and without any shoes, and said, “So this is our Galilean,” in a tone as if Jesus was some shoddy animal Joseph wanted to sell.

  From there the tone of things only worsened. Jesus had gone to stone, standing there not saying a word, while Zadok went on talking only to Joseph as if Jesus wasn’t there.

  “I wonder if you knew your Galilean was a great magician,” Zadok said. “I heard he was going to people’s graves last night and raising them from the dead.”

  I could see Joseph was caught out by this, and hadn’t heard a word yet of the rumours going around. His eye went to Jesus but it was plain Jesus wasn’t going to stoop to answer the man.

  “You can’t blame him for the lies people spread,” Joseph said.

  You knew Jesus could have put Zadok in his place in a moment—I’d seen him do it a dozen times before with his sort. But the longer he stood there silent, the more Zadok seemed to be in the right.

  “I suppose we have enough teachers in Jerusalem that we don’t need to go looking for wonder-workers from Galilee,” Zadok said finally. Then he added, almost offhandedly, “Though I hear the man isn’t a Galilean at all but a Jerusalemite, at least on the mother’s side. On the father’s side it’s not as clear.”

  He looked Jesus in the face then for the first time.

  “Who was he, your father?” he said. “I might have known him.”

  He stood there in front of Jesus, giving him time to answer, but still Jesus didn’t say a word. The silence grew eerie then. But Zadok just smiled an unfriendly smile at Joseph, and said he had to go.

  Joseph was full of apologies the instant Zadok left, even though his spy was still there. But at the same time everything felt different now.

  “Even if they take this place away from us we’ll find another one,” Joseph said. “I know some people who’ll help.” But there was something in his voice that said he didn’t quite believe this.

  Jesus had remained standing where he was with the dead stillness he had.

  “It was my mistake to come here,” he said now, “and to bring any shame to you. But it’s not because of what I’ve taught or what I’ve done but because of something I can’t change, which is that I don’t have any father but my god, and am a bastard.”

  Joseph went white as marble. We all stood in silence, and it seemed the walls of the place might fall in. I don’t think any of us had followed what Zadok had been hinting at and so we were stunned, as if one man had been standing in front of us and had suddenly become another one.

  Joseph couldn’t meet Jesus’s eye. It seemed his mouth was struggling to come up with some sort of utterance but without any success.

  “I’m sorry to have brought any trouble to you,” Jesus said, and then he kissed Joseph’s hand and went out.

  The rest of us stood there not knowing what to do. You could see Zadok’s spy was itching to run off to tell Zadok what had happened, and Joseph turned to him and said, “Get out and don’t come back.”

  It was the Zealot who finally started out after Jesus, with a panicked look. I followed after him and then heard the Rock coming up behind, though it was all we could do to make our way through those twisting streets. The Rock had a look of amazement as if the world had fallen away underneath him—it seemed beyond the scope of his mind, that the man he’d just seen revealed to him was the same one he’d trusted and followed.

  We only caught up to Jesus towards the Temple Mount. He hardly seemed aware we were behind him, just making his way single-mindedly through the traffic. We couldn’t even be sure where he was headed and I was relieved when he went out the gates and made for our old camp. We found things in total confusion there—our landlord had already sold off our place to another group, who’d knocked down our tents and started putting up their own. To make matters worse, there was space for only half of us at the Roman camp, which in any event had been reduced to mud pits by the melting snow. John and Jacob, however, had got our sheep, who stood there in the mud bleating to the heavens.

  For Jesus, though, the chaos turned out to be a godsend, because it took all of our minds off what had just happened. He set to work sorting things out, dividing the camp and sending half of it straggling off with some of his men to the new campground. Of the rest he sorted out those who had some family in town they could go to, and sent a few others to stay with Elazar and his sisters, and a few more to the room in town where Mary and some of the other women were putting up. That left a straggling band of some forty or so, including we three Simons, who somehow had ended up huddled together there at the edge of the field as if some yoke
held us together.

  Jesus set off with us for the house of Joseph’s friend. I thought the Rock might just stay behind sitting hunched in that field, from the way he was looking, or let us go on our way and then start off back home. But at the last minute he went to the load of goods there was to move and like an ox took up twice his fair share, though he wouldn’t meet anybody’s eye. The Zealot, on the other hand, couldn’t keep his eyes still, looking anxiously from the Rock to me and back again, trying to get some message as to what we should do.

  We had to cross a long stretch of muddy fields, up one slope and down another, but then the road we were on got rockier and more solid and the going easier. The place we came to was a large country house in the middle of an olive grove, perched well up the hillside and with a view out over the whole of Jerusalem. The owner wanted to put the lot of us up inside his house, but Jesus said no, we only wanted a corner of field, insisting on the thing so that the man gave in. No doubt Jesus didn’t want it said that he’d taken advantage, if the word got back from Joseph of their falling-out. Still, the owner went so far as to kill one of his own sheep for our supper, sending it out already roasted and prepared so we couldn’t refuse it.

  By the time we’d eaten it was well past dark. We’d hardly had time to think with the work of settling ourselves, and not the Rock nor the Zealot or I had spoken a word since we’d come from the school. But when supper was through and people started preparing for sleep, Jesus came to us and led us into a little moonlit garden that came off the back of our host’s courtyard, a walled-in cranny of a place hidden away there like a secret, with oleander and jasmine and dozens of flowers I couldn’t even have named. In the middle of the place was a pool so deep you couldn’t see to the bottom of it, and in the corner an ancient olive tree, gnarled and twisted and bent like an old wise man.