The Kingdom of the Wicked

by Anthony Burgess

  He tore at the loaf roughly. The wrist wounds seemed nearly healed. He threw the pieces to the farthest, handed them to the nearest. Peter said, chewing Jesus’s body and then gulping it, ‘The last time, Lord?’

  ‘Yes, I leave you tomorrow at dawn. Don’t ask me where I’m going.’

  ‘We’re well aware of where ye’re going,’ Thomas said, ‘and we don’t have to see it. Ye’re going back to your father.’

  ‘Difficult,’ Jesus said, picking out the bones from the piece of fish in his hand, ‘for this flesh to become spirit. But take it that that is what is going to happen. I will take none of the flat roads out of Jerusalem. I’ll climb Mount Olivet and disappear at the top, and that will be the last of me. You may come and wave farewell if you wish. Then you have to wait for a particular visitation. You won’t have long to wait. I’m going now to have a word with my mother. Complete the ceremony, Peter.’ He stood and put his fingers to his lips. With the other hand he motioned that they remain seated. He opened the door, letting in no wind, and closed it. They could not hear his feet going down the outside wooden stair. Silence. Peter sighed very deeply, took the winejug, filled his own cup, said:

  ‘Now his blood.’ He passed it round. They all sipped.

  ‘A matter of waiting, is it?’ Thomas said. Nobody else said anything. That last brief sight of the living God, capricious, unhelpful, gave them little comfort. They needed comfort badly. The dry wind grew stronger and rattled the catch of the window shutter.

  ‘A young man, your honour,’ Caleb’s mother was saying, ‘and you know what young men are like – full of wild ideas. He has no father to keep him on the right path. A mother can do nothing when a young man’s head is filled with mad notions. Freedom and suchlike nonsense.’

  ‘So freedom is mad,’ Quintilius said. ‘Freedom is nonsense. What do you think – you?’

  He meant the elder daughter Sara, eighteen years old, pale-skinned, tall, unveiled, who looked steadily at him, without sexual appraisal, rather with a kind of quiet polar challenge which he found hard to interpret. Judaea against Rome? One generation against another? The upholder of a rigorous scheme of social conduct against its careless violater? For Quintilius had insisted that the interview take place in his dining room. He ate while they stood. Ruth, sixteen, her veil over all but her eyes, watched each mouthful of meat with what could be horror. A barefooted Syrian mixed wine with wellwater. It was against the Jewish law for the faithful to enter under the roof of the infidel. Matthias, who had brought them hither, insisted on waiting in the courtyard, though that left the women unchaperoned. They considered that the need to plead for a son and brother absolved them from a taboo which, being women, they could not anyway take seriously.

  ‘There are two kinds of freedom, sir,’ she said. ‘It does not matter if the body is in chains so long as the mind is free.’

  ‘Free to do what?’

  ‘To think. To believe. That is a freedom that cannot be removed – not even by—’ She had perhaps gone too far.

  ‘Not even by the oppressive forces of Rome – is that what you wish to say?’ He began to work on a bone.

  ‘It’s a thing we accept,’ Sara said. ‘Roman rule, I mean. We in our generation have known nothing different.’ Then she said: ‘You seem to have difficulty with our Aramaic. Would you prefer that I spoke in Latin?’

  ‘I neither have nor have not difficulty with your Aramaic,’ he said in Latin. ‘It is not a language I wish to master. To render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s. You know the saying?’

  ‘And to God the things that are God’s,’ she said in Latin with a strong Judaean burr. ‘It’s a common saying.’

  ‘And a saying that your brother spits out like a bad fig. Where did you learn your Latin?’

  ‘At home. We Jewish women stay at home. But I can see the world through books.’

  ‘She is a clever girl,’ her mother said, as in apology. ‘It’s the way some of the young are these days. Asking questions and so on. I don’t hold with it, sir.’

  ‘Well, woman, see where asking questions has got your son. For him I can do nothing. He defies the Roman state and he must take his punishment.’

  The mother began to wail.

  ‘Wait,’ Quintilius said, ‘I hadn’t finished. He’s not alone. There are others of his kind. To me indeed he’s not even a name. What would you give to see another in his place carrying the punitive cross?’

  Sara said cautiously: ‘What do you mean, sir – give? You mean we can – buy his freedom?’ They were back on Aramaic; her mother knew nothing else.

  ‘Crudely put – buy. A very crude word. Shall we say that his punishment could be commuted into a fine. A heavy one, of course. There is money in your family?’

  ‘My husband worked at the potter’s trade, sir. He left nothing. There is my brother, though—’

  ‘Uncle Matthias,’ Ruth said, ‘has joined the Nazarenes, mother. He is going to give his money to the Nazarene poor.’

  ‘Aren’t we the poor?’ the mother wailed. ‘Isn’t his own sister’s son more deserving than the – unwashed beggars of the town? We’ll speak to him, your honour. Give him an hour and he’ll come back with the money?’

  ‘Shall we say fifty aurei – gold pieces?’

  Sara said firmly: ‘It’s impossible, sir. I know it’s impossible. And we have no—’ She looked for the word and could not find it.

  ‘No guarantees, you mean, I think. You have no trust in Roman mercy? Or in the word of a Roman officer?’

  ‘Just half an hour, sir,’ the mother cried. ‘I know he can get the money.’

  ‘Alternatively,’ Quintilius said, ‘you ladies are now, I suppose, destitute. You are hereby offered posts in the household of the deputy procurator of Judaea. Unpaid, of course.’

  ‘You mean,’ Ruth said, very wide-eyed, ‘to be slaves?’

  ‘Come, mother, Ruth,’ Sara said. ‘As the deputy procurator says, Caleb has defied the Roman state. He must take his punishment.’

  But Caleb’s mother was on her own knees and clinging to those of the deputy procurator. A small dog, almost hairless and with eyes like small lamps, looked up from his bit of gristle with surprise. Quintilius kicked her off and calling the waiting guard:

  ‘Get these Jewesses out of here.’

  Matthias, waiting in the courtyard, now in a very plain and, it appeared, artfully torn and soiled garment, asked how things had gone. Badly. ‘There was never any hope,’ Sara said. ‘I’ve heard of his ways before. He takes money but gives nothing in return.’

  ‘Save him, Matthias,’ the mother wailed. ‘Fifty gold pieces.’

  ‘No,’ Sara said firmly. ‘Caleb knew this would happen sooner or later. He talked of being a living torch burning for the cause. I knew there was no point in going. All we can say is that we did what we could.’

  ‘You’re a hard hard girl. All this book learning.’

  ‘But he’s not dead yet,’ Sara said harshly. ‘He’s not even been whipped. It’s not over yet.’

  Matthias, before going to his widowered home, escorted them to their single-roomed lodging in the house of Elias the mad. This Elias was a second cousin, bequeathed his house by his wholly sane brother Amos, and was mad only in the sense that he believed the world would soon be taken over by rats, achbroschim, and that the Romans, who spoke what he called rat language, were the harbingers of their coming. Matthias himself had a large house not far from the Temple. He was now in his thirties but had been made a widower in his twenties, when his wife Hannah had died of an infection from cutting her finger along with the evening loaf. The achbroschim, according to Elias, were the responsible ones. On their way in the early evening the little party saw with gloom the festooning of the housetops in the narrower streets in celebration of coming Pentecost or Shabu’oth, the feast of weeks or the day of the first fruits. Young men were climbing ladders to affix strings of dried leaves to roofs, and these were lifted across the street with pronged poles to
be affixed to the roofs opposite. Whole streets were so festooned. The Greek Jew Stephen saw the three women in black and the ragged rich Matthias from the summit of his ladder, interpreted their gloom and cried: ‘Don’t worry. It’s not finished yet.’

  On his way home Matthias passed the Temple, behind which a sunset of splendid though as it were casual lavishness glowed in a sort of benediction. Was it, Matthias asked himself, still properly the house of his faith? Yes, more his Temple than that of the many who would not accept that the history of the race had reached its fulfilment. It was the solid and immovable tabernacle of the living numen whose son he had known, though but briefly and not intimately, in the flesh, and whose message he accepted with all his heart. Why then, this sunset, did the Temple seem faintly hostile? Because it was in the hands of the custodians of a past already dusty; it had nothing to say to the present. The task of the Nazarenes was to take over the Temple, slowly, slowly, through the infiltration of belief. It was to be the Temple of fulfilment, but not yet. It had, in a sense, to be loved more than ever, as a dumb but living creature gently to be taught that it was the house of the Christ as well as the immemorial Father. Yet hard hearts would set themselves long against the truth.

  Here was one hard heart, though a young one, one prematurely indurated to dogged ancient priestly intolerance. Quite near Matthias’s home the young theological student from Cilicia lodged in the house of his sister. He sat cross-legged outside this house in the dusty unwalled garden, working with hard fingers at tent-stitching while the light lasted. He nodded somewhat menacingly at Matthias, who nodded more amiably back. ‘So,’ Saul said, ‘you are become the replacement of the man who hanged himself.’

  ‘The twelfth of the inner group, yes. How did you hear of it?’

  ‘I see it as a duty to keep my eyes and ears open to all things that would impair if they could the serene fortitude and sempiternal truth of the Jewish faith.’

  ‘You speak pompously for so young a man. But much study will often make a young man pompous. Why do you look so bitterly at me?’

  ‘Is my look bitter? It’s meant to be pitying. You have fallen into terrible error. Error, they say, must be burnt out quickly before it takes root. Don’t you fear the burning?’

  ‘I am a good Jew who, by God’s good grace, have been granted a vision of salvation. Very well, I am in error as the world sees it. There is hardly one prophet in the holy record who was not stoned and reviled because he caught a gleam of the truth. We were promised a Messiah, in time not eternity. In the reign of Augustus he was born, in the reign of Tiberius he was put to death. Because he wore the robes of human history does he defile the eternal by induing the temporal?’

  ‘Now it’s you who talks pompously. You know as well as I that these last years have seen too many of these false saviours puffed up with their mad inner visions. They are all as bad as each other. We shall have more yet. Some of them have been sane enough not to spit defiance at authority. Your man blasphemed against everything – even the Temple.’

  ‘I have just come from seeing the beauty of the Temple in the glow of this sunset. He never blasphemed against it as the house of God. He loved it as we all love it. But just as the presence of the Lord himself can inhere in a bit of bread, and bread is no more than flour and water, so the Temple is, without God’s presence, no more than bricks and stone and slime and a little gold and silver. It was made by human hands, as bread is. But the body, he said, is a greater Temple, because it was not made by human hands. If we must choose between the two Temples, even an erring man is more sacred than what Solomon built and Herod, to his own vicious glory, improved upon. Do not say: even the Temple, young man. There are greater things than Temples and Sanhedrins and high priests.’

  ‘You see.’ Saul seemed to marvel. ‘He’s been adept at leading you into dangerous error.’

  ‘I’m a simple man, not a theologian like you. His simplicity spoke to my own. But it isn’t only theologians who have to be saved.’

  ‘Well, hug your simplicity to yourself, or it will be the worse for you.’ And he dug the strong sharp needle into the tough canvas.

  ‘You, a mere student, have the power to threaten? The law speaks through me, and through all of the true sons of the faith.’ His sister then called him in to supper. He put his needle with others into a little wooden case and nodded a fierce good night at Matthias.

  I am, like many, somewhat confused about the events that, we are told, transfigured the sixth day of the month Siwan. Early in the morning the disciples, along with Mary the mother of Jesus, who had been telling them some story of the early youth of the man who had disappeared in the dawn mists on the peak of Olivet, had assembled in their upper room with the intention of going to the Temple to witness the first fruits’ offerings. Thomas, tetchy, tired, sat at the table while the rest stood around the mother. He dozed.

  ‘He was climbing to the roof of our house and the ladder collapsed when he was near the top. He fell – oh, it seemed a terrible fall. He was so young and we thought he would cry. But he didn’t seem to be hurt. He got up and laughed, then he shook his little fist at the ladder. Then he seemed to comfort the ladder, embracing it as if it were a kitten that had scratched him and couldn’t understand why it was being scolded—’

  At this moment Thomas woke with a harsh shout as of terror. They turned to him. ‘Did ye no see it?’ he panted. ‘It was the mouth of God ready to swallow me and in the mouth was a tongue all red and the tongue split in two and all fire came out of it.’ Then he knew it was a dream. ‘Ach, I’ve a wicked taste in my mouth. Pass that waterjug, James, one or other of ye.’

  Peter’s story later was that Thomas spluttered his water out, for a wind rose suddenly, in the room not without. Without there was no stir of flag, leaf or garment. They saw each other’s hair and beard lifted by this wind. It sang at them like a choir and, exerting huge force, drove them in a huddle to the door.

  The streets were full of people of the separation: Parthians and Medes and Elamites, citizens of the other provinces of Palestine, of Cappadocia, Pontus, the territories of Asia, Phrygia, Pamphylia, Egypt, Cretans and Arabians and even men and women from Rome, all Jews come to the sacred city for the ritual of the presentation of the first sheaf of the barley harvest. Many of these people saw twelve men come tumbling laughing down wooden stairs and many more saw and heard them in the streets that led to the Temple. Thaddeus the fluteplayer had, it seems, found a ram’s horn or shofar, and he was blowing this not in the normal manner of an angry summons but so as to produce a melody of four notes, like a camp call to dinner or parade. The laughter of the others was like drunkenness or inspiration, which have something in common, and, in the way of all people seeking diversion, even at a solemn time, people followed the dozen, smiling, shaking their heads, mockcheering.

  At this time Caleb was being prodded down one of the narrower lanes towards his crucifixion. His wrists were roped to the crossbar he bore on his shoulders. He was naked except for a cloth round his groin which would in time be pulled off to underline the obscenity of his execution. On his back were visible the bleeding stripes of his statutory flogging. Behind him were his two nameless Zealot victim companions, and a Syrian maniple thrust spears at all three and at the murmuring crowd in the street. The Syrian under-officer had chosen this street rather than the main road in the innocent belief that the little grim procession would thus attract less public notice, and he feared, being a somewhat timorous Syrian, Jewish violence. In fact he got neither; he got worse. Knots of people followed the tuneful shofar against the current of the cortège and bumped against speared small Syrians with little fear. Caleb interpreted the great noise as the alleluias of zealotry. His mother and sisters, weeping, accompanied by those good-hearted ladies of Jerusalem who tried, against Roman opposition, to give drugged wine to the crucified, attempted to join his death march, wailing and weeping with the loudness considered proper on such an occasion, and Caleb cried:

  ‘You
hear them, mother? This is the noise I wanted to hear. I regret nothing. Leave me.’

  At this moment young men leant from the roofs of the houses and set torches to the festoons of dry leaves and flowers that stretched across the street. Acrid smoke got in eyes and nostrils, as much those of the Syrian escort as of the crowd, most of which read this as a new and somewhat brutal mode of rejoicing. Young men, cushioned from yelling Syrian military by staid and bewildered visitors to the city, got at Caleb’s roped wrists and freed them with a pair of knives, and the crosspiece fell and caused stumbling. A rope ladder rolled down from a roof. Caleb began to climb. The Syrian under-officer yelled and prodded with an impotent spear, whose shaft had been grasped by two youths who showed fine white teeth. Burning and smoky festoons still fell. Caleb reached roof level, the ladder was drawn up with remarkable speed. By Jupiter, there was going to be trouble for somebody.

  By now it could be said that a great part of Jerusalem, natives and visitors, had found its way to the open courts of the Temple, where Peter, as leader of the twelve, had fixed on a pillar with a plinth that afforded room for two bare feet and volutes on the column that granted a handhold. From this he was to speak. The Syrian escort, holding on to the remaining two prisoners, were diverted from the straight road to execution by their need to find Caleb. He had got on to a roof, meaning that he could now be anywhere. The under-officer frankly wept, waving his spear in gestures of desperation. By Castor and Pollux, there was going to be trouble.

  Priests in the courtyard were chanting: ‘We offer you, Lord God of Hosts, these first fruits of your planting and nurturing, as also this holy bread baked from the first of the new barley grain—’ But they had but a small attendance. They turned at the babble of many voices. A brawny Nazarene, no longer young, was bawling:

  ‘Men and women of Judaea, and all that are dwelling in Jerusalem, give ear to my words.’