2 The Judas Kiss

by Angella Graff

  We found the home of Yosef’s cousin not far from the city center and we settled in to their small room, prepared for our arrival. Maryam, away from the young ones for the first time in so long, excused herself for a short sleep. Yehuda, Yeshua and I were permitted to step outside while Yaakov stayed behind to help Yosef reacquaint with his family, and the three of us sat on the low wall in front of the street.

  “What do you think?” I asked Yeshua, who was watching the city with half-lidded eyes. Yeshua and I didn’t often talk, but I felt a kinship with him, a sort of protective nature I’d adopted from the rest of the family.

  “It’s ugly,” he said, shaking his head softly. “I don’t understand it. Everyone is so…”

  “Terrified,” I said.

  He nodded and gave a little sigh. “They wouldn’t feel that way if they could understand their fears.”

  I didn’t quite know what he meant, and I looked over at Yehuda who simply shrugged and looked away. “Do you think we’re safe here?”

  “For now,” Yeshua said in that same, still, quiet voice. “There will come a time, I think, where great injustices will be done here. There will be blood spilled, and our people will be lost. But for now, we’re safe.”

  His words chilled me to my very core, and my skin broke out in tiny bumps. Yeshua frightened me sometimes, the way he spoke, the things he seemed to know, though I couldn’t always understand him. He was different, and I realized why Yosef and Maryam were so often frightened, and not just for him, but sometimes of him.

  Pesach lasted a week, and being truly just a young child, I didn’t understand a lot of it, but we were told the stories of our Hebrew fathers, and their escape from Egypt. Part of me felt wrong for being there, because although my true father was Hebrew, these were not my people. I didn’t fully understand their trials and tribulations.

  Yosef allowed me to abstain from sacrificing the lamb, and from the temple, though I watched with keen eyes, trying to take in all that I could. The city was packed full of pilgrims and, to my surprise, many what the Hebrews called Gentiles. They were not of Hebrew faith, but they came to see the city, and the celebration of the holiday. The Roman guard was out in full force, reporting back to the governor, a man called Gratus, who was a quiet man, or so said Yosef as we surveyed the Roman soldiers on crowd control.

  “The Romans don’t want to be here,” Yosef said to me quietly as the crowds wandered by. We had finished with the nightly routine, consumed our meager meal, and while Yehuda and Yeshua were inside attending to their mother, Yosef had taken a place beside me as I watched the city with curious eyes.

  “Why are they here?” I asked. Remembering when I was younger, my father had been sent off to battle, but never forced to live in a desolate city. He had lived in places of grandeur, often sending word to my mother who later claimed he was merely trying to make her jealous.

  “It’s told that they’re forced here. They’re part of the legions who lost battles or disobeyed. I can’t say for certain, Makabi,” he said sternly, but when I looked up at him, he winked at me and smiled. “Soon we’ll be back to Galilee and we can return to our work.”

  “Is this it?” I wondered quietly as I listened to the stamping feet of the pilgrims passing by. “Is this life? We live, we worship Yahweh, we live in fear of the Romans, we beg for mercy and we die? Is there nothing else to accomplish?” My mind was flashing back to my grand dreams of the Library of Alexandria. Of all the things I might know there, of the people I would talk with and debate. Of the young ones that I would instruct when I was old and wise and brave. I thought of the places I had been determined to travel, the seas I’d cross, and lands I’d explore. This could not be it. Not for me. Not Rome, not Jerusalem could hold me in. May the gods have mercy on me; let this not be my fate!

  “This is my life, my future,” Yosef said with a sad sigh, but he fixed me with a curious gaze and cocked his head to the side. “Perhaps grander dreams wait for you, Makabi. There is no telling what the future holds.”

  Pesach felt like the longest week of the bland foods, of lamb, of painted blood and unleavened bread. Of crowds that made the city feel hotter than it normally would have, and the ugly smells of so many bodies crammed together. When it was over, I breathed a sigh of relief as the guards thinned out, the governor was less present, and the pilgrims began to gently file their way out of the city.

  Yosef declared we should stay an extra day, to keep from being stuck on the overcrowded roads back home. He agreed to help his cousin, a man who was so wary of me that I never learned his name, and the boys and I were allowed to roam freely, though close to the home.

  It was Yeshua who came up with the idea of visiting the Pharisee school for the scribes. It was a place, he said, for the young scholars to go. To debate philosophy and God and religion and life. It was a place where the grandest minds met and came up with the most fantastic ideas. “A messiah will come from there,” Yeshua said quietly, “so says my father.”

  “What’s a Messiah?” I asked as we casually strolled down the street.

  “The warrior who will come free our people,” Yehuda said, though there was a hint of bitterness in his voice. Nearly thirteen, he was already corrupted and angered by the oppressive world he was living in, and I remember even that young, I feared for him. “It’s a tale, a story, and one will never come.”

  I paused there in the street, leaning against a wall and looked at Yehuda. The words sounded so tired and bitter and I couldn’t understand what had made him this way. The boy had grown up so far from this place, far from the fear, in the city where people flourished, near the open sea, and their family had been left alone in peace.

  “It doesn’t have to be that way,” I said firmly, taking him by the wrist. “Yehuda, anything can happen. Anything could happen. We could make it happen.”

  “Easy for you to say,” he spat suddenly, his eyes flaring brightly at me. “Easy for you to say, Markus,” he sneered my name like a swear word. “All you need to do is tell them who you are. All you need to do, and you’ll be back in your palace with your slaves and your money, and we’ll be left here to rot in this city. We’re told to shut up or die, and if you disobey, if you displease the officials they nail you to a stake and leave you out there to rot. That won’t ever happen to you.”

  He’d been angry with me like this before, his jealousy over my standing and position, but it was the first time I truly understood it. Years before I had simply told him no. I would protect him. I would keep the big bad Romans from hurting him. I said it because I didn’t believe in the big, bad Romans. I didn’t think that my people would harm anyone just for the sake of harming someone.

  That was before I saw those crosses in the distance. It was before I saw these people, this dirty city, smelled this fear and bitterness. Even as a boy I understood it and I, too, was afraid. “That doesn’t mean we can’t make a difference, Yehuda,” I all-but whispered.

  Rolling his eyes, he turned from me and at the same moment we both realized that while we had stopped, Yeshua had continued on. Panicked, the pair of us ran through the streets, scanning the roads, the buildings and alleyways for the lost brother.

  “Let’s get to the city center,” Yehuda said, grabbing my hand, all thoughts of anger and jealousy gone. We did just that, but there was no sign of him. No one in the courtyard of the school had seen him, and after two hours, we had to return home empty handed.

  I expected the pair of us to get a beating, but while Maryam cried, Yosef said that Yeshua was far too old to require his brother to mind him, and he merely led the way, completely silent after that, into the warm afternoon. We searched for him for hours on end, and it was at the point that Yosef was ready to turn to the Roman authority that I spotted him in the court yard, speaking almost harshly to a young man just a few years older than he was.

  I didn’t know where Yosef was, but Yehuda was next to me and I nudged him, nodding in Yeshua’s direction. Yehuda called for his father, an
d rushing past us, he raced to the boy’s side, grabbing him by the shoulders, berating him in front of the Pharisee teachers.

  I wanted to go forward, to listen to what the teachers were saying to Yosef who stood by his son, red-faced and trembling, but Yehuda shook his head, holding me back. “That is not a place we want to be.”

  I stepped back and as I found a clear spot to crouch down, I saw them. They were men, short, bald, skin tan and wearing the most brilliantly orange robes I’d ever seen. They were standing beside the tall building overshadowing the school, waiting, it seemed, and watching the exchange between Yosef and the teachers.

  They looked different, like travelers I’d often seen in Alexandria, and after a moment I realized who they were. They were the men from the East. They had come for Yeshua, and my suspicions were confirmed when they approached Yosef and his face went white.

  Yehuda tensed next to me, rising to his feet but not daring to take a step. I closed my hand on his arm and compelled him to look at me. “Who are they?”

  He swallowed thickly and shook his head. “They’ve come for Yeshua.”

  “Your father won’t let them take him,” I whispered, but fear was growing in my belly like a fire, spreading through my bones, making my face numb and hot. “He can’t…” but even as I spoke those words, one man had pulled Yeshua aside and was speaking to him rapidly, gesturing wildly with his hands.

  And it was in that moment that something miraculous happened. As the man spoke, his eyes trained up to the sky, Yeshua smiled. He smiled, and it lit up his whole face and he turned to speak to his father.

  It was like a terrible dream, really, being cemented to the spot, unable to say or do anything as we watched Yosef fall to his knees. Yeshua was gone before we realized that anything was actually happening, and by the time we got to Yosef’s side, there was no sight of Yeshua in the streets.

  “Why did you let them take him?” Yehuda nearly shouted. “Why? Father! Go and stop them!”

  Yosef stared at his son with a deadened expression, his eyes muted, hands shaking as he eased himself up from his knees. He brushed the yellow sand from his front and started out ahead of us, sullen, silent, and crying.

  I was completely lost, without a clue as to what really happened, but I knew then that everything would be different. We reached the house where Maryam waited and were instructed to wait outside, given a bit of bread and wine to hold us over.

  Several moments passed and it was when we heard her wailing that we knew there was nothing to be done. Yehuda and I sat outside in the warm afternoon, our backs against the wall, and we waited. By the time Yosef came for us, the sun was already low in the sky, and we were starved and exhausted.

  I was more than happy to learn we wouldn’t be traveling that night, and we were able to have a hearty meal and an early sleep as Yosef and Maryam mourned quietly in the corner of the home. Yeshua hadn’t died, but from the bits of conversation I’d caught, he was lost to them. Twenty years, Yosef had said, that they wouldn’t see their son, and it was up to Yeshua after that if he wanted to return home.

  Maryam sobbed, begging Yosef to go after him, but everyone knew as well as I did, there was nothing to be done. There was no answer as to why they couldn’t go after him, but it simply was. We slept fitfully, I dreamed of the men in orange taking Yehuda to a large temple, shaving his head, and making him sit in front of a large golden statue.

  What I didn’t know then, was the men were Buddhists, come from what became ‘India’ to the western world, in the hills of Kashmir. They took him as the incarnation of the Buddha himself, and they taught him. They taught him the way of peace, the path of nonviolence and transcending the bitterness of the world. It was a lifestyle that I would come to study, to adore, yet never fully understand as my ability to fear death had been robbed from me on the day I was cursed with immortality.

  The road back home was a lonely one, not just for the loss of Yeshua, but also as Yaakov had been accepted into the Pharisee school alongside his cousin Yochanan, and the full, happy home I’d walked into was now small, torn, and grieving.

  We reached the banks of the sea in three days, our walk slower, stopping when Maryam could no longer keep her head up. She mourned, raged and cried that they had taken her son. They had given up everything to protect him, they had uprooted their family, they had taken risks and lived in fear, and it was all for nothing. My heart broke for her, but nothing anyone said could console her, and after we reached home, she went into the home and didn’t speak a word for several days.

  But life went on. There wasn’t anything else for life to do but move forward. We grew up, we worked hard, and we built our own homes near the family. I married young, only seventeen when I took my wife. She was not much younger than me, pretty, and she made me forget about my past, about my heritage, and with her I was Makabi, and I was a Hebrew man, and a proud husband, and after a year, father to a little girl named Maryam, after the mother who took me in.

  Yehuda never took a wife. He worked, he loved my children as they were born and grew up, and he was a part of our family. But he was quiet after that, after Yeshua had gone. He let the bitterness take him, and he never recovered. I loved him; he was my brother and I loved him and there wasn’t a moment that went by where I didn’t worry about him.

  And then it all changed. It was a spring morning; I was outside with Yosef working on a rather large order of furniture that was to be delivered to Jerusalem. It was warmer that year than it had been in some time, and as I sanded down the top of the table, sweat was pouring from my brow. The heavy, salty sea air whipped across our faces, stinging a little, but in that way that lets you know you’re home, where you belong.

  Yehuda was off to the side, working on fitting a glass pane into a wooden frame when we first saw him. The road was clear, and there was no mistaking the man with the face identical to Yehuda, strolling across the land. He was wearing wrapped robes from the East in gentle colors of the earth, brown and green, and his smile carried with it a serenity that would never be seen on Yehuda’s face.

  I didn’t notice him until the sound of glass shattering startled me out of my work. I whipped around to see if Yehuda was okay, and it only took me a moment to see what he was staring at. Yeshua was coming up the road. He gave a little wave, so unlike the boy who had disappeared to the East so long ago, and with him came this moment, a dread passing over me, when I realized that nothing was going to be the same, and the world was about to crumble down around us.

  Chapter Thirteen

  By the fourth time Andrew vomited on the carpet, Ben was done. He was absolutely and completely one-thousand percent done. It wasn’t that he couldn’t handle vomit; he was a homicide detective for Christ’s sakes. He’d seen more gore and filth than any human should ever be subjected to. But having to take care of a god-possessed heroin junkie going through withdrawals sent Ben over the edge.

  He had no way of reaching Alex, he was worried that Olivia was going to be considered missing and the last thing he needed was to be implicated or involved in any reported kidnapping. His desire to call Stella and demand a little help was pressing on him more and more as time went by.

  He’d managed to get Andrew cleaned up and into the bed, and he was airing out the smell of smoke, booze and vomit through the cracked hotel door and open window. He was pacing the room, missing those quiet minutes he’d spent strolling on the beach, his hand in Alex’s, trying not to associate holding hands with her with holding hands with Thor, because frankly that was just a little too bizarre for him.

  He was about to give up, to tell Andrew thanks for nothing, and leave the room when he was startled by both Alex strolling through the door and his cell phone ringing at the same time. Eyes trained on Alex, he fumbled with his phone and answered without checking to see who it was.

  “Stanford,” he barked, not really in the mood to speak to anyone.

  “I’m in trouble,” came the shaking, half-whispered plea.

 
He ripped the phone away from his ear and glanced at the caller ID to see that it was Stella. He held a hand up to Alex and then stepped outside of the hotel room, feeling panicked and worried for her despite his anger over her secrets. “What’s happening? Where are you?”

  “I’m being followed,” she said, her voice still husky and quiet. “I’m in a diner about an hour outside of San Diego. It’s somewhere off the freeway.”

  “Do you need me to come get you?” Ben asked. He could see through the slit in the curtain Alex bending over to check on Andrew who was still unconscious in the bed. He wasn’t quite sure how he could possibly get away from these two, no matter who it was that needed help.

  “No, I have my car, but I’m worried about you. They know you know,” she said. Her voice echoed slightly, cueing Ben in to the fact that she was likely in a bathroom. “Part of my agreement was that I kept what I knew a secret.”

  “What agreement?” Ben demanded, no longer distracted by his two companions. “Agreement with whom?”

  “It’s better that I don’t say,” she said. “I realize I’ve been keeping a lot of secrets, but it was to keep you safe.”

  “Fat lot of good that did,” Ben all-but shouted at her. “My sister’s a puppet, Mark and Jude were kidnapped, and I’m in some hotel with Viking gods, one of which is currently having a heroin fit on the hotel bed. I don’t think it could get much worse, Stella, so why not just tell me the damn truth.”

  “What do you mean Viking gods?” she said, ignoring everything else he’d just shouted at her.

  “You know what, that’s not important,” Ben said. “You met Andrew already, so you already know all about that. What I want is answers.”

  “I’ll explain everything when I get there, okay. Where are you?” she asked.

  Ben let out a sharp laugh and shook his head, despite the fact that she couldn’t see the gesture. “Oh no. I’m not telling you anything. I have no idea who you’re talking to or what you know. You could be in league with that crazy bitch for all I know,” he said sharply, unable to utter Nike’s name.