by Quinn, Jack
Yentl’s husband was absent from Sepphoris for weeks and sometimes months at a time, leading his caravan to sell merchandise as far away to the north as Damascus and Heliopolis, absences of which we took full advantage during my prolonged carpentry tasks in old Steven’s home and after. Despite an uneasy guilt beneath the surface, my youthful mind rationalized cuckolding that sad old man was the punitive consequence for preferring his business to his wife, for his assumed inability to copulate with her frequently, and for my capacity to instill a glow of happiness in that sour, unfulfilled young woman he had left behind. During those summer months, we never talked about Steven or Yentl’s infertility or my twisted leg.
In anticipation of their first child that year, Yehoshua was in the process of adding a second room to his house on which he and I both labored during the long summer evenings. I had been alone one afternoon cutting branches from a felled tree we had dragged to the meadow’s edge when I spied a pillar of smoke beyond a hillock where Yehoshua had sited his home. When I crested the hill above it, I stood as a statue contemplating a scene that crushed the breath from my chest and buckled my knees.
Yehoshua was kneeling on the ground near the path to his burning house, cradling Rebekah in his lap, her face streaked with dirt and blood, robe torn and bloodied, her hair disheveled, inert within his arms pressing her tiny limp body to his breast, the head of his double bladed ax dug into the ground beside him. I jogged down the slope noting a half dozen mounted men leading three horses whose Roman cavalry soldiers had been slung across their saddles, blood seeping from gashes on their heads and rents in their light tunics and armor. I dashed to Yehoshua as fast as my leg and cane could carry me, squatting helpless beside him as he rocked his dead wife, his face buried in her tangled black tresses, keening softly, tears of desolation streaming from clenched eyes into her hair. Neither my arm around his neck nor impotent words could break through his utter anguish. So I left him for a while to follow the men on horseback who reigned in their mounts as I approached.
On their way from Capernaum to Sepphoris they had galloped the few miles farther south to Nazarat and Yehoshua’s house as Judah had instructed them, arriving at the scene at the same instant as my brother, where three half-drunk legionnaires were defiling Rebekah. The soldiers had probably been dispatched to take revenge on Yehoshua or executing a standing order to do so, but finding him absent had raped his wife as diversion, killing the girl and his unborn child in the process. The Zealots were chagrined at having come too late to prevent the assault, but whether Yehoshua had come upon the scene before or after Judah’s men had killed the soldiers I never knew nor asked. The Zealots disposed of the soldiers’ bodies deep in a cave on the far side of a ravine and sent their valuable horses south to their group in Idumea.
The rebel leader advised me to fetch our women to prepare Rebekah for Shiva and complete the funeral ceremony as quickly as possible, before the dead soldiers were missed and a search for them began. Nothing could save Yehoshua’s new home from the dark column of smoke and torrid flames that engulfed it, leaping high above the blackened cabin collapsing in the weakening rays of late afternoon sunshine.
My mind was a blur during that following day or I have purposely banished those sad, traditional rituals from memory. Yet I do know that the women of my family and those of Rebekah’s took immediate charge of her body, washing and bathing it with ointments of nard, myrrh, aloes and perfumes, while Father and I sat mostly in silence with Yehoshua and several
close friends. The women wrapped Rebekah’s little body in a clean white shroud, her face veiled
with a soudarion42, her feet and hands tied with strips of linen. She was placed on a sleeping mat in
our home that evening so that relatives and friends could say their final goodbye.
Early next morning, the loud, keening women, many who had rubbed dirt in their hair,
preceded the shuffling steps of the heartsick widower, his bride cradled in his arms, the custom with dead children, the men behind him in torn robes wailing in full voice, proclaiming our communal loss. We followed my brother, trailed by the piercing, melancholy sound of the flutists and professional mourner to a deep grave we had dug fifty cubits behind his house according to law, in the shade of a stout young oak standing amid a wild garden of yellow, purple, red and white flowers bathed in the light of the new day, stretching back to a field of tall, green grass swaying in the morning breeze.
After Rebekah’s internment, we gathered outside our house where the women had set out mourning bread and wine on tables. My brother had wandered off alone in the forest, and to my knowledge, did not return for several days. The men drank their allotment of wine as prescribed by the Sanhedrin to prevent a carouse. Rebekah’s relatives and friends were the first to gather their wives and families and leave the assemblage, apparently unable to engage in the prevalent conversation regarding little Rebekah’s horrendous demise.
I had sent a message to James regarding Rebekah’s death by accosting a traveler on the Jerusalem road, but he did not arrive in Nazarat until the following week.
“How do you feel?” James asked Yehoshua in lieu of a greeting. It was a question I had not even thought to pose.
Yehoshua looked up at James, a stubble of beard on his usually clean-shaven cheeks, his eyes hollow as the raccoon. “Like a large stone heavy with sorrow and anger is lodged in my chest.”
Yehoshua’s eyes filled as James led him out of our carpentry shop speaking words of comfort. I followed at a respectable distance across the field, over the incline beyond the charred rubble of his leveled home smoldering still, my brothers standing beside the cairn marking Rebekah’s grave, weeping together in each others’ embrace.
They had dried their eyes when I came to their side, and James turned to me. “We have tasks afoot, Little Brother. The Romans will come in force to seek their missing soldiers.”
Opposing even one-tenth of the endless number of cohorts that occupied our land was out of the question. “Yehoshua must hide,” he said.
I was fearful that would not suffice when the prefect determined what had happened. “Damn those Zealots!”
James was too preoccupied to admonish me for cursing and began to lay out a scheme to secrete Yehoshua in the forest several kilometers to the west of town. He sent me back to my parents’ house to assure them that their son would be safe, and to fetch tent cloth, cooking utensils, and food while James and Yehoshua established his hideaway.
Yehoshua was seated on a fallen log when I found them, elbows propped on knees, his hands holding his head at the ears, staring at the ground between his feet.
I gave James a cup of wine into which he poured an equal amount of water, as was his wont. “You might as well pour the wine out and drink the water,” I told him, immediately regretting the kind of comment that often slips out of my mouth without restraint.
“That might be good advice for you also, Little Brother.”
“I like the taste of it,” I said, moving to the fire to turn the spit that skewered the pigeon I had killed that morning. I did not want to get into that argument again.
James sat on the ground beside Yehoshua, his back resting against the log. “Do not allow your spirit to be cast down, my Brother. Your entire life is before you. Unleavened hate or a thirst for wider vengeance will make you a churlish, unhappy man. That is not God’s plan for you.”
“If defiling and killing innocent women are included, I wish no part of it or Him.”
“We cannot know what God intends,” James replied.. “Why He permits or causes evil acts to occur.”
“God!” Yehoshua said. “I think Shimon is right. Either He is an unpredictable, malevolent deity such as the pagan gods we despise, or he ignores His Chosen People.”
“Shimon must work out his beliefs on his own. Whatever conclusions he comes to will affect him alone.”
“Then so will mine do to me.”
“I came tonight to tell you of a vision I
had while at prayer several nights ago while praying in the desert. A man stood on a mountaintop attired in a white robe so brilliant that it pained my eyes. Below, on the slopes of the mountain were people of all races and colors and descriptions, men and women, babes in arms, children of every age, covering the sides of the mountain for as far as my gaze could reach.
I had been rinsing our bowls by the fire and could not resist an attempt to pique our eldest brother, despite knowing from experience that was impossible. “It sounds more like your image of yourself, than Yehoshua, James.”
Our pious sibling could never get angry with me nor anyone else, for that matter. “I am but a lowly priest attempting to find my way by trying to help others do likewise.”
It was customary for self-styled prophets and healers to spend the traditional forty days in the desert to commune with God. Fasting with little water, it was no wonder they saw visions and heard voices. I was surprised that James followed this practice.
“Well, I do not believe in visions,” I told him. “You probably forgot to water your wine.”
“If you cannot sit there in silence, you waggish little pest, I will send you home to let your sisters antagonize you.”
As always, that threat was enough to keep me quiet for hours.
“I am aware that advice is easier to give than take, Yehoshua. Nevertheless, I must counsel you to do nothing in your present despondency and thirst for vengeance that would prevent you from a noble mission, if it were to be offered.”
Yehoshua waved a hand before him, dismissing the entire notion. “I know you are a pious man, Brother. You are a far more likely candidate for a mission as a leader of men than I am. I am just an ordinary carpenter.”
“Perhaps that is exactly who God wants to lead other ordinary men,” James said. “Not the learned Rabbis with their heads buried so long in scrolls written by other wise men that they have forgotten what God wants from his creatures in their everyday lives.”
Yehoshua rose suddenly, walked to the fire and stood there, hands tucked in the sleeves of his robe, gazing down into the flames as though they might contain the reason why his life had taken this bleak turn from his previous happy, connubial state to his present status as a grieving widower for whose apprehension the Romans would pay 100 denarii.
“I am in no mood to contemplate God,” he said at last, almost in a whisper.
James stood from the cross-legged sitting position he had assumed. It was dark now, and they both cast long shadows from the flickering light thrown by the burning logs which I had replenished from my seat on the large boulder beside them, surreptitiously sipping uncut wine straight from the calabash, a vantage point that created the illusion of my older brothers looming over me as two supernatural beings who possessed the powers to change the course of the world.
“We need not discuss this tonight,” James said as he came abreast of his taller sibling. “There was no immediacy in the vision, just an inkling that someday you may be called to work for
the Kingdom of God..”
“We will never discuss it or anything else, if the Romans capture me.”
The gossip I had heard in town was that the Romans suspected that Zealots were involved in killing the three soldiers who murdered Rebekah. Since they had rarely been able to arrest any of them, they had set a more achievable goal of arresting Yehoshua, who clearly had the motive to slay the legionnaires—regardless of the plausibility that one man could have slain three mounted soldiers armed with broad swords and pikes.
My peripheral vision caught a shadow beyond the firelight, but before I could shout an alarm, the hooded form of Judah the Galilean materialized at the edge of the firelight. His commiseration for Yehoshua’s loss and apology for the inability of his men to prevent it were sincere, after which he scuffed dirt onto the flames of our cooking pit.
“The smoke can be seen at a distance,” he explained, then stood in silence until James bade him to sit.
“Although your altercation with the publican was not of immediate concern to the new prefect,” he told us, “the missing soldiers will be.”
“Let them come,” Yehoshua said between clenched teeth.
The dying embers cast an amber glow in which I saw James place a hand on Yehoshua’s shoulder. “That is unwise, Brother.”
Yehoshua flared in anger. “What then? Run like a frightened sheep from the wolves?”
“I have contacted a surgeon friend who lives in Sidon,” Judah said, “whose eldest son was recently lost at sea. The man will allow you to live in his home in exchange for your apprenticeship.”
“Pretending to be his son?” Yehoshua asked.
“His nephew from Tyre.”
“The Romans want to arrest me to make an example of a Jew who dares kill their soldiers. They will hunt me as the jackal hunts the ewe.”
“They would crucify you,” I said, shuddering involuntarily at the unwelcome image of the poor victims hung out at Golgotha.
They all ignored me, and James tried to be reassuring. “But like the jackal, they will eventually tire of a hunt that does not yield meat.”
“I know not how to heal,” Yehoshua argued.
“My friend will teach you,” Judah said. “The Romans will be looking for a wood worker closer to Nazarat.”
The control of Rome throughout the country was ubiquitous. They had conquered Israel two hundred years ago without opposition, naming it Palestine after their previous conquest of the Philistines, dividing the administration of our country into the three Roman provinces of Judea in the south, Phoenicia to the north, and Galilee between. Each province was administered by a Roman Prefect with a Jewish king appointed in theoretical rule of the entire nation.
Sidon, a busy port on the coast of the Mare Mediterranean in occupied Phoenicia, was approximately three hundred kilometers north of Nazarat, far enough away to discourage regular commerce from the Galilee, and fell under the jurisdiction of the prefect in Sidon, isolated from the Roman garrisons in Caesarea and Capernaum. During my lifetime, Emperor Augustus Caesar was a fair ruler to the citizens of Rome, but a greedy conqueror in Asia and Europa. Half-Jew King Herod Antipas oversaw the completion of our majestic second Temple, although he ruled Israel in cruelty and blood. Coponius, the prefect of Phoenicia and Syria, followed Vespasian’s father as Galilee prefect, and brutal, malevolent Pontius Pilate reigned from Caesarea as procurator of Judea.
Yehoshua rose, shaking his head, then walked a couple of dozen paces away until he was a mere shadow among the thick stand of trees and brush. After what seemed interminable moments he returned to us. “I suppose I must go away for a time.”
Judah clasped a hand on his knee. “We shall leave tonight.”
James and I made our farewells to Yehoshua, who was led off into the darkness by Judah and other shadows falling in behind them beyond the clearing. James and I sat in the darkness listening to the night sounds of owls, crickets and predators until Yehoshua and the Zealots were well on their way up the main road to the north. I threw dry twigs on the embers, staring with an empty mind at the tiny flames I had coaxed to life.
“I shall miss him,” I said at length.
James was as dispirited as I. “It will be better to miss him for awhile than forever.”
“How long must he be away?”
“The memory of Rome is longer even than your own. Their taste for blood vengeance insatiable.”
“What can we do?”
James scooped earth up in his hands absently allowing it to trickle through his fingers. “Let us go home at first light, Shimon. We must assure our parents that Yehoshua is safe and resume our normal lives. No one except we two must know more.”
One day in the week that followed, after James had returned to Jerusalem, I was partaking of the evening meal under the entrance awning of our home with my family, when we heard the thunder of many hoof beats on the path to the Sepphoris road. I rose and grabbed my cane, but before I could escape, a troop of heavily ar
med soldiers surrounded our house on snorting mounts lathered with white foam.
Their leader in plumed helmet, breastplate and red cape remained on his horse. “Where is the man Yehoshua?”
Unable to comprehend Latin, my Father looked to me.
I rose from the bench to address the Roman. “There is no one here by that name.”
“Where has he gone?”
“To find work in Joppa, on the south coast.”
The Roman leveled a hard stare at me. “If that is false, we will return to pry the truth from you.”
The squad wheeled their mounts and trotted off toward the Jerusalem road to the south.
Father stared into his cup of wine as I repeated my dialogue with the legionnaire in Aramaic. “That was a foolish lie, Shimon.”
Mother wrung her hands on the table before her at the ill fortune that was decimating our family. “They will return and torture you.”
“Not if they cannot find me.”
“Then they will torture us and burn our home,” Sarah said.
“Tell them I went to Haifa to find a ship for Cyprus or Greece.”
Sarah was close to tears. “And when they discover that lie?”
“It is not a lie.”
I tied my sling around a rolled shelter cloth, filled a calabash with spring water and assured my saddened family that both Yehoshua and I would return as soon as the Romans became preoccupied with other matters. Probably two, three months at the most. Neither James nor I had told the family where Judah had taken Yehoshua, so they could not reveal his whereabouts. Although the Romans would reverse their chase quickly once they had learned from taverns and travelers that Yehoshua had not passed that way, I trusted my head start on the Romans would allow me to remain in the lead during the one hundred or more kilometer distance to the Sea.
As a diversion, I took the longer route that night from Nazarat to the port of Haifa, setting into the rhythm of my comfortable, lopsided jog through the darkened fields and forest, avoiding the paved road the mounted Romans would use. My track took me along the outskirts of Sepphoris, where my thoughts turned to my past pleasures with Yentl. Already distressed by my forced exile from my family, I realized those erstwhile trysts would also end. My loins overpowered my brain by rationalizing that the Romans would not ride all night or turn from their gallop south until morning, when they would detour to my home to find me, giving me plenty of time to dally.
