Under Tiberius

by Nick Tosches

  Thus the riches of the rich and the riches of the Holy Temple.

  But I was no Jew, and Jesus was more wary of this notion than I. What might become of our wealth so securely on deposit, if the Temple heard tell that this wealth was for the building of a new temple dedicated to a new Way?

  Were this Rome, it would have been so easy, with my own good strong house, and the argentarii of the aristocracy at their places of business all about the forum. But this was not Rome.

  We acquired a second donkey, divided the burden of wealth in ox-hide sacks between the two beasts, and made our way.

  There were days when we did not recognize half of those who came and went in our fluctuating band of peripatetic disciples. It would be easy for a man with designs on our wealth to infiltrate us and steal away with the donkeys. He could put miles between us and our riches while we slept.

  Jesus suggested that we fix iron bells and clappers round the necks of the asses. But what can be fixed can be unfixed; and it took but a piece of rag wadded into a bell to silence a clapper.

  I remembered exacting those first petty coins from that false cripple in that valley settlement without name. It was so long ago, when we did not know what lay before us. Much was now behind us.

  There were quiet nights when I lay awake feeling that we should put an end to it. We could vanish silently, sail to Rome with the sea wind, and live our lives of ease. We could do it now. Right now. This very moment. Or before dawn broke. It was just a matter of wandering soundlessly off to Caesarea with our donkeys, then to the harbor. I told Jesus of these thoughts. He told me that, on quiet nights of his own, he was given to these feelings, too.

  “I once dreamed of happiness,” he said. “Now that I have the gold to buy it, I dream only of more gold. It seems that there are many sorrows among the uncounted riches in those sacks.”

  We looked to the stars for a long time. Clouds moved across them. A very light rain began to fall.

  “It seems that the night itself is pierced with sorrows,” he said.

  “Did you truly dream of happiness?” I asked him after a while.

  “I should say that I once yearned for happiness. Yes. I yearned for happiness, and now that I have the gold to buy it, I yearn only for more gold.”

  There was more silence, another wordless stagnancy, between us.

  “I ask,” I said, “because I have never dreamt happily. My dreaming has always been unpleasant. On the few occasions when I saw happiness in my dreams, I woke only to the more dire unpleasantness that this rare happiness was an intruder in the house of dreams, come only to bring disappointment in the house of my life.”

  Again there was nothing but the very light rain and the darkness without stars.

  “We all wish each other good night and sweet dreams,” he said. “But are sweet dreams to be had by us?”

  For lack of an answer, or words of any kind, I forced the ghost of a stillborn dismal laugh.

  “That is what the Book is,” said he. “The Book and all its curses and doomings and prophecies. It is the Book of Bad Dreams.”

  “Or simply the Book of Dreams.”

  “Which is to say that it is the Book of Life.”

  “One and the same.”

  “Would you pay for a sweet dream?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “And for the idle promise of one?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Yet that is what we sell,” he said, “and grow rich in the doing.”

  The light rain felt neither good nor bad. The constellations were there, somewhere, but they were not ours to see. And nothing more was said by us that night, for it was not ours to say. Our eyes were heavy. We seemed alone in all the world. We could extinguish it at any time, by entering the house of dreams. The house that awaited us. The house that we dreaded.

  The morning was a spent, still mist that stank of dung and human excrement. Slow steps made sucking sounds in the shallow mud and silt. Low groans and thick congested coughing could be heard from disciples who were not yet awake. The sky had no color.

  I told Jesus of my dream, in which I stood unsteadily on a jagged rock very high above a raging sea, having no knowledge of how I had ascended to this pinnacle, and, much more disturbingly, of how I was to manage a descent from it that would not be fatal.

  “And you?” I asked.

  “I dreamt I fucked that ignoble cunt of a mother of mine,” he said without hesitation.

  I took this as an indication that he was familiar with the tale of the dream of Caesar, and to bring the jest to rest, I said:

  “A great and wondrous dream, for it augurs that you shall ravish and conquer the world.”

  But I was mistaken. He had never heard the story of the dream of Caesar. Scratching and fingering the humidity-stuck folds of his scrotum and looking at me curiously, he shook his head and walked off a few paces to piss in peace.

  Even-song and morn-song. Dream and dirt. One and the same.

  Our riches seemed now to grow with the strangeness in the air of these days. It did not occur to me, nor to my Lord, that we furthered this strangeness with every forward movement of our mission, spreading it through the land as we spread the Word and we spread the Way.

  19

  WE FOUND HIM HIS TUNIC OF FINE FLAXEN LINEN AND immaculate white. For a robe, we settled on one of simple deep cerulean blue. Dyed with indigo, it was of the color worn by the humbler classes in Rome, though it was of better making. The eye of Jesus was at first taken by a robe of red. But I advised against this, explaining to him that red was a color worn by the Roman aristocracy. Like violet, I told him, it distinguished men of wealth and privilege from the common people.

  The tunic was of pure linen, the cloak of pure wool, for the law of the Book commanded that no Jew wear clothes of wool and linen woven together.

  He gave the coarse gray tunic to a beggar in rags, and cut quite a figure as we departed Tyre.

  Old men with staffs, in turbans and knitted skull-caps, men of business, men of labor, women with scarves and veils on their heads followed us to the shore, and children ran with them.

  The trees were beginning to bud again. We spent the week of the Pesach in Capernaum, by the sea.

  I had been in this land now for almost a year. With the help of Jesus and synagogue men and their scrolls, I had learned something of the rudiments of the language of the Book. I had learned enough to know that no one truly understood the language of the Book.

  The parataxis of its language disallows clear understanding. Ancient vestigial intermediary word-forms are ambiguous or unsolvable. The omission of verbal connective elements results in shade upon shade of possible meaning. The elusive allusions and arcane syntax of its divine and prophetic pronouncements are like ominous rainclouds that do not burst open.

  The Hebrew of the Book describes mysteries in mysterious ways. The more learned the scholar, the more acute his awareness of this, and the more acute his vexation.

  I did not learn the language of the Book, you might say. I learned the unlearnableness of it. That and some words here and there of Hebrew and Aramaic.

  It was in Capernaum during Pesach that I first tasted the unleavened bread of affliction, of which Jesus had told me. It was not so bad that you would spit it out, but it was so bad that you would not raise it to your lips a second time unless you were very hungry and with nothing else to eat.

  This bread of affliction was not the stuff of Romans. I was a Roman, and furthermore I was dearly missing Rome. I found a small inn with a table outdoors beneath a willow tree, and was served good Roman bread, olive oil, sausage of wild boar with much garlic, and a cup of wine.

  The town was quiet with the undertakings of Pesach. Many had left to make pilgrimage to Jerusalem.

  There were spring breezes from the sea. As I ate and drank, I composed words of beauty on a wax tablet. Though they were only now beginning to flow, I felt them to be among the finest I had written for my Lord. I had learned to
cultivate the powers of mysterious portent that were of the Book, but to express them in a clear and simple way, which seemed much appealing to the people, and also a most fresh and welcome relief to them. It was not a storm-god I gave them, but his son, a new god, a god of comforting warm breezes instead of fulmination; a god who embraced them, and who was in turn embraced by them.

  Two disciples came upon me, the young fisherman Andreas and the priest, Aaron. Soon they were joined by Ephraim, the rabbi.

  “We observe the holy Pesach, and our Gaius feasts,” said the young fisherman with a smile, emboldened by the company of the priest and the rabbi.

  As I had taken a liking to the young fisherman when he had joined us at Simonias, so I now took a disliking to him. The once affable young dolt had become an arrogant young dolt. My disliking was stronger than the liking had been. He had removed himself from under the wing of Peter, and no longer looked to him as an elder brother. The priest and the rabbi had shown kindness toward him, and he saw this kindness as their acceptance of him as an equal, which he was not, and which they certainly did not feel him to be. It is always the most inferior of men who espouse the lie that all men are equal. His manner of speech to me was an impudence that raised my hackles.

  I wanted to smack this little wisp-whiskered calfling, this tilapia hatchling, more viridis than virilis.

  Do you think your God even knows of your existence? I wanted to demand of him.

  I wanted to tell him that his God was dead. I wanted to demand of him further: Do you think that you are other than the most insignificant and stunted sapling grown from the humus of your dead God’s putrid decomposition?

  May you choke to death on your bread of affliction, I wanted to tell him.

  But I did not. I breathed and let my sudden anger subside and dissipate. I would not have the peacefulness of the previous moments stolen from me. The breezes through the overhanging tree, the pleasures of my food and drink, the calm, flowing composition: I would not allow these to be lost. I wished that Jesus might happen by, sit with me, and savor the good bread and pork sausage, that the calfling and the priest and the rabbi might see him do so. And Jesus did come by, but he did not take the bread or the meat into his mouth, but merely gazed on us.

  To the hatchling, I spoke calmly, but with a note of angry rebuke that I could hear, even if he could not.

  “God does not care what you eat. God does not care what you wear.” There was no response, and I continued, saying what came to me. “Adam and Eve went naked before him, and were forbidden one food alone: the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.”

  The priest and the rabbi seemed indulgent, even supportive, of my right to speak.

  “And what was the nature of this tree and its forbidden fruit?” I asked.

  “It was a fig tree,” said the titmouse.

  “The Book,” said the priest, “describes it only as—”

  I interjected the next word that would have come from his lips, the Hebrew word, plain and simple, for “fruit,” a word very much like our word for the fruit of the pear tree. He was startled, not by the impolite manner of my interruption, but by my acquaintance with, and utterance of, this ancient Hebrew word.

  “No fruit from the branch of a tree rooted in this earth bears the knowledge of good and evil,” I continued.

  “And why,” I asked, “did Adam and Eve’s taste of this fruit cause them immediately to feel shame at their nakedness?”

  There were no answers forthcoming. I sensed that the priest and the rabbi had answers at the ready, but that they would rather hold their tongues and hear me implicate myself further. Jesus stood behind them like a divine presence, all-knowing but silent. And so I went on:

  “It is because the forbidden fruit, the knowledge of good and evil, is the secret truth unrevealed in the Book’s fable of creation. It is the secret that precedes the fable. It is inherent in God, but at the same time unknown to him. It is the secret of the creation not of the world, but of the creation of the creator himself.”

  I saw Jesus furtively rolling his eyes to me.

  “You speak blasphemy,” said the priest.

  “And at Pesach,” squeaked the titmouse. Again I wanted to smack him.

  “And what of the serpent?” said the rabbi.

  “The serpent?” said I. “She is wisdom. The serpent is wisdom.”

  “Blasphemy,” repeated the priest. There was no anger in his voice. He seemed merely to be making a casual observation.

  “Blasphemy,” echoed Andreas. The priest glanced at him with impatience. I was not alone in finding the boy irksome.

  I felt that I had suffered enough of this. I wanted only to return to my bread and my sausage, my wine and my wax tablet, and my quiet. With a turn of pleasant mischief, I decided to draw from my sleeve the gentile lot, and to lay the matter all on my loiterer.

  “I am but a disciple of our Lord’s,” I said. “I am a gentile, unlearned in Hebrew and the profundities of the Book. I will say no more. Ask the Lord, not me.”

  They looked to the Lord, whose eyes no longer rolled, and whose face was now a beatific blank.

  My bread, my sausage, my wine, my wax tablet, my quiet. They were mine once again.

  From where I sat, I could see, through the breaches in the swaying willows, the synagogue that marked the center of Capernaum. It was of two stories, built of limestone, with carved ornamentation of some skill: stylized plants, fruits, Stars of David, figures from the legends, and geometric patterns like those of the swastika of India. The synagogue rose above the other structures of the town, and further distinguished itself by its blushing paleness amid the town’s buildings of black basalt.

  I could hear the hushed sounds of afternoon prayer. The streets were all but empty. The taverner, a few fellow Romans and other gentiles, a Jew or two who may have been unbelievers. Each of us cast a solitary shadow that made us appear to be alone, apart, and excluded. As in fact we were.

  As I have said, I missed Rome dearly in the bloom of that Judean spring. All the more dearly did I miss my good wife and son, your grandmother and father.

  From the innkeeper, I bought for a widow’s mite a small, brittle round of the bread of affliction. In the deserted street, I crushed it in my fist and let the crumbs fall to the ground.

  Little birds gathered to delight in them. I felt a smile come to my face as I watched them, their small feathered throats aquiver with chirrupings and pipings of a carefree happiness that laid waste the dirge-like prayer of those who could not fly.

  20

  THAT NIGHT, WHICH WAS THE LAST NIGHT OF PESACH, WE SAT alone on a bench of stone on the grounds of the synagogue. The donkeys were tethered nearby. The younger of them grazed on a tuft of spring grass and weeds that grew amid what remained of very old paving-tiles. The other, the one who had been with us from the outset, looked to the stars. We watched him do this, wondering what figures he saw in the constellations.

  “Why did you let him speak to me as he did?” I asked.

  “Whom?”

  In the light of the waning moon, I could see the faint wry smile on his face, which told me that he sensed the pique in my question and knew the answer to his own.

  “That goat pellet of yours,” I said. “The runt of your motley litter.”

  “Thou speakest disparagingly of our devoted disciples.”

  “It is a new Way of which you preach. A new God, a new Way. Do you know that I was fully expecting you to sit down and share bread and wine with me?”

  “That day will come.” His eyes moved from the donkey to the stars from which the donkey’s eyes now turned. “They are not ready for your pagan sausage yet.” The older donkey joined the other to graze on the grass and weeds that grew amid the broken paving-stones. “And they are not my litter. They are ours.”

  My eyes moved to the stars as well.

  “Do you see a great bear there?” I asked him, raising high my arm and pointing to the bright star that marks the uppe
r part of the tail of our Ursa Major.

  “I see a great leopard. You see a bear because you were taught to see a bear. I see a leopard because I was taught to see a leopard. If they had taught us to see a salamander, we would see a salamander.

  “We see what we were trained to see, and cannot free ourselves from seeing as we do.

  “Teaching is often a dangerous thing. To be taught is often to be impaired. Children are punished for their innate imaginations, and trained to see and do alike, as one might domesticate a free and wild dog into a household pet. Teaching should encourage individuals, not liquefy them into a leaden homogeneity to be poured into uniform molds to cast leaden minds that are all of a kind.”

  “Everything we are taught is a lie.”

  “And what of our teaching?”

  “As I have said.”

  “And so the great bear and the great leopard become a great salamander.”

  At this, we shared quiet laughter.

  “So, tell me,” he said. “What ever were you talking about? ‘The serpent is wisdom.’ The secret truth that is hidden in the fable. Tell me. Please. Really. What ever were you talking about?”

  I drew slow breath and looked at him. I had taken it for granted that he had fully understood what I had been talking about; but now it was clear that he had not.

  “How did the God of your Book come to be?” I said. “How did all the gods of all the peoples of all the world, throughout all the eons, come to be?”

  “By the invention of man,” he answered plainly.

  “Yes. And why did man invent the gods? Why did he invent the God of your Book? Of what use to him was this God? What need did he have of this God?”

  He pondered for a moment. He seemed less at a loss for an answer than for a way of expressing it.