My Glorious Brothers

by Howard Fast

  And then we were there. The Adon had rent his garments and said the prayer for the dead, so now he betrayed no reaction nor slackened his pace as we went into the crazy and incredible ruin that Jerusalem had become.

  The walls were not merely torn down, but savagely and madly and raggedly torn—and crowned with a seemingly endless row of pikes, each of which supported a Jew’s head. And the stink of decaying flesh filled the whole city. No one had cleaned the dried blood from the streets; furniture had been thrown from windows and balconies, and broken pieces of chairs, tables, beds and crockery were everywhere. The shells of burned houses made a pattern, and now and again you saw a severed arm or a leg that the burial details had missed, all rotten and covered with flies. Dogs ran in the city, and occasionally a group of mercenaries clanked through, eyeing us suspiciously, but making no move to harm us; otherwise it was deserted.

  As in that long ago, as in that first time when as children we came into the glorious city of David, we climbed up and up, toward the Temple. The Temple still stood; that we could see; and beyond it we could see the Acra, the enormous stone tower the Macedonians had built to house their garrison. The Acra was untouched; in fact, it was being strengthened with additional walls and buttresses, and there was a good deal of movement around it, but the Temple had been dealt with as insanely as the city walls. The mighty wooden gates had been burned. The precious hangings were torn down, and all over the polished walls obscene phallic symbols had been drawn, hideous cartoons of men and women having intercourse with beasts—the better for us to know and understand and appreciate the culture of civilization.

  Levites still stood at the gates; or at least they wore the garb of Levites. They moved to stop us as we entered, but when they saw Mattathias, when they saw his face, they shrank aside, and we walked past.

  We went into the Holy of Holies, the inner house of God, where the shewbread and the candelabra are. It stank like a butchers stall. The altar was filthy with dry blood and a pig’s head sat there, staring open-eyed at us. A great urn of pork stood to one side, and assorted filth lay on the floor.

  At the door, Mattathias halted for a moment—then went on, and then, for the first time in my life, I had the full measure of the old man, the Adon, who was my father. The Temple was he, and he was the Temple. Jews in Rome or in Alexandria, or in Athens or in Babylon, turn to the Temple when they pray; yet at best the Temple is a word or an image for them; they pass their lives and most of them never see it; but when had the Adon not seen it, walked in it, prayed in it? He was a Kohan; scratch the Temple and you cut his flesh. How can I say what it meant to him to see a pig’s head on the altar?

  Yet he did not falter, but walked to the altar and stood there in the filth. We followed him, and Judas raised his hand to sweep aside the head.

  “Leave it alone,” the Adon said coldly.

  John began, softly, the prayer for the dead, but the Adon cut him short. “Not here! Do you pray for the dead here?”

  Minutes went by, and still he stood there, his back to us. Then, at last, he turned around very slowly. The impassiveness of his face amazed me. His cloak was thrown back, and the pure sunlight, entering through the roof, played brilliantly on his pale silk jacket. His beard was quite white now, his long hair white too. Calmly, he looked at us, his glance passing from face to face, as if he were mildly inquiring for some quality he was certain he would find; and at last he fixed his gaze on Judas.

  “My son,” he said softly.

  “Yes, Father,” Judas answered.

  “When you cleanse this place, cleanse it well.”

  “Yes, Father,” Judas whispered.

  “Three times with lye, as the law says. Three times with ashes. And three times with cold, clean sand from the River Jordan.”

  “Yes, Father,” Judas said, his voice hardly audible, his eyes welling with tears.

  “And three times more, with cold water and loving care.”

  “Yes, Father.”

  Then the Adon went to John and kissed him upon the lips; then to me; then to Judas, to Eleazar, and to Jonathan. Then he said: “We have no more to do here. Let us go home.”

  We left the Temple, but at the gate the Adon paused, grasped one of the Levites by the arm, and said, “Where do you dwell?”

  Shrinking, the man answered, “In the Acra.”

  “Are there other Jews there?”

  “Yes.”

  “How many?”

  “About two thousand.”

  “Men of wealth?” the Adon went on. “Men of property? Men of culture?”

  “Yes—men of culture,” the Levite said.

  “An island of Western culture,” the Adon said softly. “One bit of Athens in the land of the Jews. Is that it?”

  The Levite nodded, uncertain as to what to make of the Adon’s gentle manner.

  “Friends of the King of Kings?”

  “Yes,” the Levite said, “friends of the King of Kings.”

  “Good. And they are safe and secure with walls wrapped around them and with ten thousand mercenaries to protect them from the ill-nurtured anger of their people. And is Menelaus, the high priest, with them?”

  “Yes, yes.”

  “Tell Menelaus that Mattathias ben John ben Simon was here from Modin to taste the glory of civilization, and tell him that I brought with me my five sons. Tell him that someday we will return.”

  And then we walked back to Modin.

  Part Two

  The Young Man,

  the Maccabee

  And if you are not Jewish, but from the outside, a stranger, as we say, of the nokri, how then shall I tell you what is meant among my people when we say “the Maccabee”?

  It is an old, old word among a people who have a curious veneration for words. We are the people of the Book, the Word, and the Law; and in the Law itself it is written, “Thou shalt not hold a slave and have him ignorant.” In a world where very few can read and write, the merest water carrier among us reads and writes, and with us a word is not a thing to be spoken foolishly or in an offhand way. And Maccabee is an old, old word, a strange word; yet were you to read the five books of Moses and all the other writings of old, you would look in vain for the word Maccabee. It is nowhere written.

  It is the nature of the word: it is not a title that a man may take, but a gift that only the people may give. In my father’s time, there was no Maccabee, nor in his father’s time, nor in his grandfather’s time; but if you speak to the old men, the Rabbis, of Gideon, they will not term him Gideon ben Joash, which was his name, but speak of him softly and gently as “the Maccabee”; yet how many were there like Gideon? Not of David will they speak thus, nor even of Moses who stood face to face with God, but of Hezekiah ben Ahaz, and perhaps of one or two others—of them, they will say “They were Maccabees.”

  It is not a word like “Melek” or “Adon” or even like “Rabbi,” which means “my master,” only in a strange and venerable way that is hard to explain. The Maccabee is no man’s master, and no man is his servant or his slave. Once in a long, long while there comes out of the people a man who is of them and from them and with them; him they call the Maccabee, because they love him. Some say that, in the beginning, the word was makabeth, which means “the hammer,” and such a man was a Hammer for the people to wield; and others say that the word once meant “to destroy,” because he who bore it destroyed the enemies of his people; but I know only that it is a word like no other word in our tongue, a title, worn by a few man—and I knew few men who deserved to wear it.

  Rabbi Ragesh said that there was only one—and to him he gave it.

  ***

  We came back from Jerusalem to Modin, where the walls of our valley pushed the world away. In the hills, each valley is an oasis which can even close out the sounds of men and women in pain, and time drove by in
that rhythmical sweep, measured by sunrise and sunset, by the five crops a year we take from our soil, by the ripening, the reaping, the planting, the sowing. Yet it was different, and every day was the last day.

  One day I came from the fields, hoe in hand, sweating and dirty, barefoot and barelegged, my pants rolled to the knee, and I saw the Adon taking the sword out of the jar of olive oil. Judas stood by the window, dressed for traveling, for hard traveling in the hills, leggings over heavy sandals, his striped cloak folded back over his shoulders and belted to him. On the table, there was a package of bread and dried figs and raisins. I looked from one to another, but neither spoke. I went to the basin and washed my hands and face, and as I dried myself, Eleazar entered from the courtyard behind the house, carrying Judas’s horn bow, which had been buried there, and a handful of arrows.

  “Here,” he said, handing them to Judas. “And I’ll ask you once more—can I go?”

  “No,” Judas said shortly.

  The Adon was wiping the sword. “It will weigh you down,” he said. “You’re not used to a sword, my son.”

  “There are many things for me to learn. The sword, I think, is least difficult. Will you fetch me the scabbard?” he asked Eleazar.

  “Where are you going?” I demanded.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Where is he going?” I asked my father.

  The old man shook his head. Judas ran a bowstring through his fingers, rolled it and placed it in his pouch. The short bow and the arrows he thrust into his belt under his coat.

  “Answer me!” I said angrily. “I asked you where you were going!”

  “And I told you—I don’t know.”

  “Who does know?”

  “I’m going into the hills,” Judas said, after a long moment of hesitation. “I’m going to walk through villages. I’m going to look at the people and talk to them.”

  “Why?”

  “To see what they will do.”

  “What do you expect them to do?”

  “I don’t know. That’s why I am going.”

  I sat down on the bench by the table. Eleazar returned with the scabbard, and Judas sheathed the sword and slung it over his back, under the cloak. There was an incredible lack of self-consciousness about all his actions, a fact that still irritated me, yet I couldn’t help but reflect how magnificent he looked, his great cloak sweeping back over his shoulders, the spread and strength of him, the superb poise of his head, his close-cropped reddish-brown beard, and his hair falling to his shoulders under his tight, round cap. I watched him, considered him, and brooded about what he intended, while Jonathan came in with Ruth. Judas and Ruth went out to the court behind the house together, and in a little while they came back.

  “I’m going with you,” I said to Judas finally.

  “I want to go alone,” he replied. You didn’t argue with him; he had that quality that turned argument away. John came in, and we were all there. He kissed them, and then he motioned for me to go out with him.

  Outside, he looked at me for a while, and then he put his arms around me. As always with him, my hot, bitter anger ran out.

  “Don’t let anything happen,” he said.

  “What do you expect to happen?”

  “I don’t know, Simon, I don’t know. I’m trying to see in the dark. Take care of them.”

  ***

  The days went by, and each day it became a little worse—not a great deal worse, but a little worse. In the little village of Goumad, which is only an hour’s walk from Modin, Apelles’s mercenaries put a whole family to death, because three arrows were discovered behind a rafter in their house. The man of the house, Benjamin ben Caleb, was crucified. That was a new thing in the land, a Western importation of Antiochus, the King of Kings. Living, Ben Caleb was nailed over the door of his home, and for a whole day, the mercenaries stood around, listening to his cries and smiling appreciatively. Then, a day or two later, four girls were raped in Zorah, a village to the south of us. One of the village people who tried to defend them was slain. In Galilee, in Samaria, and in Phoenicia, where Jews lived in cities among the Gentiles, it was worse, and terrible tales of pain and suffering drifted back to us in Judea. Yet strangely enough, life in Modin went on much as it always had. We took in the crop; we threshed the wheat and dried the fruit; children were born and old folk died; we filled our presses with new olive oil, and at night we sat at the table after supper, talking of when it had been better and how it would be worse, singing our old, old songs, and listening to the old men tell stories.

  It was four days after Judas had left, in the evening time, and a dozen of the village folk sat at the board of Mattathias, drinking wine, munching nuts and raisins, and discussing that most ready of subjects, life’s bitterness under the heel of a foreign invader. We are a people who have had perhaps a little more than our share of misery, in one place or another, and we have learned to turn it into laughter; it had to be that way, otherwise we would have long ago perished. I remember well that Simon ben Lazar was retelling that already overworked tale of Antiochus and the three wise fools, one of those painful, bitter stories that thread through so much of the literature of an oppressed people, and I remember that I was letting the words slip by, so that I could watch Ruth with all my heart and both my eyes. She sat with her mother, holding her head as always high and alert, as if she were listening—God help me, I thought she was listening for Judas—and the lamplight slanted off her face, making a sheen on her skin like polished bronze. How well I remember her that night, the tilt of her head, the shadows under her cheekbones, the coiled braids of her red hair, such a woman as I have not known before or since—and for who else but Judas? Who else could stand beside her and look paired, face, stature and heart out of the ancient blood of the Kohanim?

  It was then that a goat cried out, and I heard it and slipped away unobtrusively, so as not to break up the warm flow and spirit of the folk, but fearing that one of the jackals from the hills might be in the corral. I went through the back door, the court, and up the hillside to the stone enclosure where the beasts were kept. It was not a goat, after all, but two rams locked in the horns and one of them crying with pain. I separated them—and then the evening was so cool and pleasant, the moon so round and bright, that I was loath to return, but sat myself under an olive tree where I could watch the moon and smell the clean sea breeze.

  It must have been a half hour that I was sitting there before I heard someone call my name, “Simon, Simon?”

  “Who calls for Simon?” I asked, although I knew well enough, my heart pounding and my hands suddenly wet.

  “A moonstruck lad,” Ruth said, coming around the edge of the corral, half-singing the words of the song, “who sits and dreams of a lovely lass—were you bored, Simon?”

  “I thought there was a jackal in the corral. You shouldn’t be here with me.”

  “Why?” She stood in front of me, her bare toes playing with my sandals, smiling impishly. “Why shouldn’t I be out here with you, Simon, who came to protect the goats from a jackal? And if it were not a jackal but a lion, such as David found?”

  “There hasn’t been a lion in Judea these three hundred years,” I answered sullenly.

  “You never smile, do you, and nothing is ever funny, is it, Simon ben Mattathias? You are the unhappiest man in Modin—in Judea, I think—in the whole world, I suppose. I think I would give years of my life if a lion were to step out from behind me and swallow you.”

  “It’s hardly likely,” I said.

  “If you will spread your cloak, I would like to sit down,” she laughed.

  Shaking my head, I spread the cloak, and she sat down beside me. Apparently, she waited for me to speak, and I didn’t know what to say—so we sat there silent, as the moon climbed into the sky and the moonlight flowed like molten silver over the Judean hills. And
at last she said:

  “You once liked me, Simon—or I thought so.”

  I stared at her.

  “Or I thought so, and for so long,” she mused, “every time I came into the house of Mattathias, I asked myself—Will Simon be there, will he look at me? Will he smile at me? Will he speak to me? Will he touch my hand?”

  Sick with rage and frustration, I could only say, “And Judas is gone four days!”

  “What?” She turned to me, incredulous.

  “You heard me.”

  “Simon, what have I to do with Judas? Simon, what’s wrong with you—what did I do to you? You’ve been like stone, like ice—not only to me, to your father, to Judas!”

  “With no reason?”

  “I don’t know what your reasons are, Simon.”

  “And when you went out with Judas before he left—”

  “I don’t love Judas,” she said tiredly.

  “Does he know that?”

  “He knows it.”

  I shook my head helplessly. “He loves you,” I said. “I know it. I know Judas, every gesture, every look, every thought. He’s never had anything but what he’s wanted to have. I know that damned, cursed humility of his—”

  “Is that why you hate him?”

  “I don’t hate him.”

  She took both my hands in hers, rocking them on her lap, telling me, “Simon, Simon—Simon ben Mattathias, Simon of Modin—oh how many names I have for you!—my Simon, my strange, beautiful, wonderful, wise and foolish Simon, it’s always been you, no second one, no third one, only Simon and a dream that he would love me someday—no, not to love me, but to be near me, to look at me sometimes, to speak to me sometimes; and even that I can’t have, can I, Simon?”

  “And Judas loves you.”

  “Simon, will your whole life be Judas? Is there anything besides Jonathan and Eleazar—and John too? What kind of guilt do you bear for them? Judas took me in his arms—and I pitied him. I don’t belong to him. I don’t belong to anyone, Simon ben Mattathias—I could only belong to one man.”