The Implacable Hunter

by Gerald Kersh

  Afranius said: ‘Would it not have been wiser simply to bribe this miserable Eli in secret, and let him stay in Hagith’s employ?’

  ‘Wiser or not wiser, the paralysed Eli was hungry for an informer’s reward, which might have been enormous’ – Paulus laughed – ‘but you do not take into consideration two important factors: the abysmal shamelessness and the diseased arrogance of the average cripple; and the insuperable vanity of the so-called “public benefactor”. Eli will beg Hagith’s pardon, and Hagith will forgive him and take him back into his house, and trust him more than ever. In fact, Hagith will love him more than ever! Certain troubled consciences work that way: they negate law and order, and are the friends of crime with their vicarious free pardoning. But the scholarly and gentle Hagith on his side, fails to take into consideration that Eli-Kamzan will hate him for having forgiven him, the paralysed dog! He will go on tempting pity as a gambler tempts fate, playing for the utmost limit of forgiveness … And meanwhile, he is my man. Never trust a born cripple – somebody, somewhere, always owes him an arm or a leg. Ask Diomed!’

  ‘But you trust Eli?’ Afranius asked.

  ‘No. Eli trusts me,’ said Paulus, ‘he adores me. I showed him the Four Scourges, and I said: “Look here, you lopsided carrion. This scourge is the bull-hide strap; it bruises to the bone. This other is the knotted nine-thonged scourge; it takes off your skin. That there with the copper hooks is the three-tailed scorpion; it takes the flesh off your bones. But that last, which is thick as your wrist at the handle and tapers to a pin-point eight feet away – the one that is flint-coloured and almost transparent – that is made of rhinoceros hide, and Little Azrael can take a man’s leg off with one stroke of it. One of these four you shall receive, according to your demerits; in which case we’ll complete the work your mother’s malformed womb botched when it only half bore you. Behave yourself, and perhaps you won’t be beaten at all.” He kissed my feet. Oh, rest assured, Eli trusts me, Afranius!’

  ‘And his reward?’

  Paulus said: ‘Afranius, the highest reward one can offer most men is an assurance that they will not get what they deserve. Diomed says –’

  ‘Alas, my poor Diomed!’ said Afranius.

  Paulus was quick to answer: ‘Poor Diomed? He is no poor Diomed. Do you know, Afranius, the time will come when Diomed will be the greatest Roman in Asia?’

  ‘Who will promote him that high?’ asked Afranius.

  ‘Whoever it may be, it is simply something I feel in my bones,’ said Paulus. ‘Afranius, listen. Diomed says –’

  ‘Oh, damn Diomed!’

  ‘Diomed says that all basic intelligence services, whether civil or military, must be basically dependent upon the proper evaluation and correlation of information received, however seemingly irrelevant its nature or questionable its source. Well, Afranius, I will tell you a secret. I have been correlating and evaluating information received, and I have arrived at a remarkable conclusion.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Jesus Christ is alive,’ said Paulus.

  And then, for all the world as if it were the result of his own intensive investigation and study, he expounded to the astonished Afranius exactly what I had told him that night in my house – but with a fire and a vehemence of which I could never have been capable. He evoked a startling image of a breathing Jesus: a man with a limp, sleeved to the knuckles to hide nail scars, cowled to the eyes and muffled to the mouth, following his weird among the rocks; a gaunt, ragged, ghostly Catiline, gathering forces for an onslaught upon the Law; a spidery Anarch, spinning and spinning against his return in glory, feverish with fasting, fetid with fever, eyes of madness burned down in charred sockets; face moonstruck white, mouth parched black, gap-toothed and broken-nosed from the fists of the mob; back ridged like a sand-dune from the executioner’s scourge and stooped by youthful study …

  Right or wrong, dead or alive, there was Paulus’s vision of a prowling Jesus; and he talked of it to Afranius in the strained, urgent manner of a man who remembers, but cannot quite describe, a bad dream.

  ‘Well,’ said Afranius humouring him, ‘assuming this Jesus to be alive, which I personally doubt, how are you going to set about finding him?’

  ‘As Diomed says, you never begin a search by looking for an individual – you look for a place, or area, where that individual is most likely to be,’ said Paulus …

  And reading, I blushed: Diomed says this, and Diomed says that, and Ask Diomed so-and-so was growing embarrassing to me. He was talking in this way, of course, to win the approval and support of Afranius.

  But Afranius said: ‘Oh, to hell with what Diomed says! Since when did a broken nose and a heavy fist make a man an oracle? We were boys together, Diomed and I, and I could tell you some stories –’

  ‘I don’t want to hear them. Diomed is my only friend. I love Diomed.’

  ‘He’s been my friend for twenty years, and I love him too, young Paulus; but I’m not so confounded vain as to believe that the virtue of my love is strong enough to make a god of him … although I concede that love is a very powerful thing. By the way, have you told Diomed of this story, or hypothesis, of Jesus surviving the cross?’

  With that ready candour and absolute honesty which puts the professional examiner on his guard and makes him ready to put pressure on a question, Paulus replied: ‘No, Afranius. I did not tell Diomed of this.’

  It did not occur to the worldly-wise, sly, contemplative, commentative Afranius that I, Diomed, might have told Paulus. The astuteness of a clever man in theory is nearly always, in practice, as full of holes as a sieve. Confronted with a real problem, however trivial, there is none so useless as your narrator of subtly-woven plot and tricky counterplot. Paulus did rightly in keeping a close mouth. But Afranius deserved to be kicked, kicked hard: if you don’t want to know an answer, do not waste a question, but if you want to know something, then go into the matter with a gimlet. In some ways, I thought, Afranius really was something of a fool.

  He said: ‘Very well; granting your “place” and your “area” and what not – do you expect to find Jesus here in Jerusalem?’

  ‘Not necessarily. As Diomed puts it, the next best thing to discovering the area in which a person may be found is, to find someone who knows where this area may be situated. This brings us to the matter of the Diakonos.’

  ‘The messenger?’

  ‘Yes. Jesus has his Messengers, seven or eight of them. They raise and distribute funds, uphold his preachings, and in a loose kind of way keep the Nazarenes together. Now here in Jerusalem – here in the gut, Afranius, here in the heart! – I have made misery and confusion for the Nazarenes. Why,’ said Paulus, cracking his knuckles, ‘already the dogs fear me more than they fear their drag-footed whore’s by-blow of a King Jesus. Eh? Well now, Jesus must send a Deacon to give them courage, or he loses face. If he does not, then the Nazarenes will wail, “Where is he who said he was King of the Jews and the Son of God – where is he now, in the hour of our trouble?” So a Messenger will come, and I want that man. Yes sir, I must have that Messenger, and I will have that Messenger!’

  ‘How?’

  ‘If you will visit me after dinner at my house – I mean, of course, Mattathias ben Saripha’s house, which he has lent me – perhaps I may be able to show you how.’

  ‘Why don’t you invite me to dinner?’ asked Afranius.

  Paulus smiled, and said: ‘Because tonight your cousin, the noble Quintus, is serving suckling pigs from a fruit-fed sow, and you would not like to miss that. You love suckling pig.’

  ‘How do you know this?’ asked Afranius, in astonishment.

  ‘Oh, in Jerusalem that which has wings carries me news. Incidentally, the sow is white but the piglets are piebald. Quintus’s cook has orders to roast them quite simply, with a savoury stuffing. The little pigs will have been killed and bled three hours ago, I think,’ said Paulus.

  ‘Tell me about my bath attendants,’ said Afranius, with irony.


  ‘Eh? Oh, the two slave-girls? One is an Egyptian whom Quintus calls Cleopatra; the other, a Syrian called Maia. You do not care for them much because they are too plump for your taste. You had a discussion about that matter with Quintus, the night before last. You maintained that a slender woman was nakeder than a fat one. Quintus, however, took the position that a man who likes to feel bone under a woman’s flesh is in love with Death…. More?’

  ‘What! You spy on your friends, do you, little man?’ said Afranius, perilously near anger.

  ‘No, Afranius, no! If I were spying on you, would I be such a fool as to uncover myself? Simply, information comes my way – all kinds of information, wanted and unwanted – and I repeated this only to tease you. What is it to me, if Quintus has pigs for dinner and fat girls in his bath? In Jerusalem, walls have ears –’

  ‘Oh the gods smite your stinking Jerusalem!’ cried Afranius. ‘It is a fly-trap and a shit-house, not a city!’

  ‘Yes, I don’t care for it myself, either,’ said Paulus. ‘But one of these days it will be properly watered and drained.’ Afranius noted, with a kind of half-amused exasperation, that Paulus spoke as if this were a matter he, personally, would attend to as soon as he had a free moment.

  So he went home to Quintus’s house, and bathed with an uneasy feeling that Paulus’s glittering eyes were following his every movement. The suckling pigs were excellent. His good humour restored, Afranius said to Quintus, after the first mouthful, ‘Do you know, cousin, this tastes distinctly like a piebald piglet, and no other. Yes, and I’ll swear their mother is white!’

  ‘Is this another of your jokes, Afranius? Who can tell the colour of a pig by its taste? How the hell should I know the shades of its hair?’

  ‘As a matter of curiosity, ask your butler.’

  Quintus asked the butler, and the butler asked the cook. The piglets had been piebald. Not being in a mood to prolong the joke, Afranius told his cousin how he knew, saying, ‘Quintus, old fellow, there are spies in your house.’

  ‘Why, of course there are,’ said Quintus, laughing. ‘You are in Jerusalem now, Afranius! I have lived here seventeen years, and have been spied on every minute. You get used to it. Let them spy their fill and go away, I say. What do they gain by knowing the colour of my stools, and so forth? Never brush spies off – let them spy themselves blind through looking at the same object too long and close. Remember the anecdote of the philosopher and the lice. “On no account comb them out,” said he to a solicitous person, “they have eaten their dinner, and are asleep; drive them away, and fresh, hungry ones will come to take their place.” So it is with the Jews.’

  ‘Your correspondence?’ asked Afranius. ‘Your secretary?’

  ‘He is a spy, naturally. I dictate to him only what I want Jerusalem to know; and what Jerusalem knows, it keeps secret, such being the nature of Jerusalem. Anything personal, I write myself and send my official courier.’

  ‘And even now we may be overheard?’ asked Afranius.

  ‘Certainly,’ said Quintus, with a wink and a chuckle. ‘It will all go back. And how it will confuse them! Between ourselves, Afranius, I have, at intervals, certain great thoughts but I never write them down; I follow the example of the masters. What great man ever wrote? Did Homer? No. Did Moses? No. Did Isaiah? Did Zeno? Did that Indian philosopher who sits in a lotus, or the yellow man Confucius ever write a line? No. Did Socrates write? Certainly not. What is good enough for them, then, is good enough for me. I throw out thoughts; take them or leave them. Let the pure-minded clarify, let the muddle-headed make turgid – it will all come sweet out of the filter.’ And this affable sybarite swallowed a great goblet of white wine and laughed until his face was blue.

  Reluctant to leave such pleasant company but not to be tempted away from his duty, Afranius went at last to Mattathias ben Saripha’s house on the outskirts of the city. This house, he wrote, encircled by blank walls, crouched in the black shadows of some old cedar trees under a thin, hooked moon – trees of such a menacing and watchful aspect that Afranius would not have been much surprised if they had suddenly shrugged off their cloaks of ragged foliage and, revealing themselves as some other kind of creatures, closed in on him, whispering. Or, said Afranius, they might have been Herod’s martyrs of trees, dumb with fear, dripping with pitch, and waiting for the touch of a torch, at which they would go up shrieking in sheets of flame.

  Paulus was waiting in a long lofty room, dimly lit, and dumb with carpets and draperies. Such were the shadows cast by the perfumed lamps that the corners of the room might have been the unexplored corners of the earth, and the ceiling the dark dome of the night.

  ‘The man I am waiting for will be here presently,’ he said, offering wine and sweetmeats.

  ‘A magnate? A potentate?’ asked Afranius, admiring Paulus’s jewelled coat. ‘You are dressed for one.’

  Paulus replied: ‘A beggar, and the scum of Jerusalem, that’s who I am dressed for.’ Then, defensively: ‘The coat was a gift, so I put it on. It is the kind of thing a king wears, when he goes abroad, to please the mob. What gentleman would be seen in such a coat?’

  But now the butler announced a visitor, and an armed servant conducted a man into the room. Paulus stared at him in silence for a long minute. The newcomer fidgeted uneasily. He was a big, stooped, ox-shouldered man, flabby-faced and grey of complexion, with a thin beard and a protuberant upper lip. He was round, pale and soiled like a turnip, and he shaded his prominent, watery eyes with a great flat hand, limp and veinous as a wilting leaf.

  ‘Mercy, Shofet!’ he cried, and went down on his knees.

  ‘I am not a judge,’ said Paulus. ‘You ask mercy for what?’

  ‘I am a sinner,’ said the man, in a glib kind of sing-song whine, ‘I am the lowest of the low, Judge. Why, then, should I not ask mercy? But I call your honour to witness that I came to you of my own accord.’

  ‘If I wanted you, animal, do you think I could not have had you dragged here by the heels?’

  ‘Yes, yes, a thousand times! But, Lord, is it not better that I came willingly to serve you, without being bidden?’

  ‘That is for me to decide. Firstly: you are a Nazarene, are you not?’

  ‘Oh Master, why do you say so? If I am in Babylon, does that make me a Babylonian? Was Lot a Sodomite? Is – ?’

  ‘You are a servant of the Nazarenes.’

  ‘The children of Israel were servants of Pharaoh. Did this –?’

  ‘Be quiet. Do you think I am here to exchange definitions with you?’

  ‘God forbid, Rabbi!’

  ‘Your name is Nun, is it not?’

  Nodding vigorously, the man replied, ‘Nun, son of Jehuda. But they call me Blind Nun.’

  ‘But you are not blind.’

  ‘No master. But I was blind for forty years. I was born blind.’

  ‘You are a liar. You are a malingering liar.’

  ‘I swear by the Almighty, master, that I am not lying! Lilith touched my eyes in the womb. All Jerusalem knows it. It was God’s punishment to my father and God’s vengeance upon my mother. I was blind forty years, and then the sight of these unlucky eyes was restored.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I do not know.’

  ‘No, you do not know, because you never were blind.’

  ‘Master, it was because I was blind that some people took me to Jesus. I would never have thought of going to him. They took me by the arms, and dragged me there, and said: “Here is Blind Nun, who has been sightless from birth.”’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘Then Jesus said to me: “Nun, do you desire to see?” It was my heart’s desire to see. I said: “Yes, Rabbi.” Then Jesus put a hand on my face, two fingers on each eyelid, and kept them there while he said: “See”. I opened my eyes, and I saw.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘I fainted.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I cannot explain, Judge. For forty years my ears and my fingers were my eyes. I can hear the squeak
of a bat. I can recognise everyone in Jerusalem by his footsteps. The darkness is my light, oh Lord, the great and gentle darkness, which I shall never see again – never! For if I bind my eyes, that which I have seen is lit with lamps inside me. And I am not of that which I see; I am as lost in the dirty daylight as you might be in the dead of night in a strange city. And the sight of things confuses my senses. I cannot link what I see with what I hear and touch. The world is out of shape, now, and I break my shins against it. The city is a coffin, and above it, what? Nothing. Blue? What is blue? The sun? A headache swimming in blood. Cursed be the day when I desired to see!’

  ‘Ha!’ Paulus exclaimed, deeply interested. ‘Say more.’

  ‘Lord, once I was Blind Nun. I knew every stone of the city, and every voice, and I was sure-footed as a goat. Now I know nothing and I stumble. I could always get a living; all I needed to do was, walk the streets with my staff and a wooden bowl, blessing passers-by by their names. The Jews are charitable; I never went to bed empty. If I laid out a few coppers the shopkeepers gave me more rather than less, because I was blind. Now, they say: “Praise God and go to work, Nun – you have your eyesight and a strong back. We have nothing for you.” Also, I have a wife.’

  ‘Oh, you have, have you?’

  ‘I have. As the saying goes, for every hole there is somewhere a patch. Fifteen years ago, somebody said: “Fat Ruth, the potter’s widow, is the perfect wife for Blind Nun. Perhaps, in all Jerusalem, Blind Nun might marry Fat Ruth.” I did not know why somebody laughed. Now I know. While I was blind, she pleased me – something smooth and soft is comforting to a blind man. To a man with sight, she is disgusting: the fat of her ankles touches the ground, the fat of her wrists covers her knuckles, she has no teeth, her skin is speckled like a croaking toad, and her eyes look in two different directions. I am sick to think that I ever touched her; but if I had remained blind I should still love her.’

  Paulus said: ‘The Nazarenes give you alms, however.’