The Kingdom of the Wicked

by Anthony Burgess

  ‘Very often,’ young Ananias said, ‘the words come out of my mouth unbidden. Only when I’ve spoken the words do I see what they mean. Yes, teach in our synagogue. We Nazarenes have to be cunning. Our cunning now lies in using you. Saul turned into Paul. Tell them your story.’

  ‘Will they believe it?’

  Some were all too willing to believe. Others would not have believed if that airless small synagogue had turned into the Damascus road, the roof into the vault filled with the thunder of divine Aramaic. Paul said to the crammed congregation, and this stench of sweat and garlic too had to be loved: ‘I imprisoned, I whipped, I stoned, I put to death the followers of the Christ. Yet all the time, like yeast fermenting in the dark, the grace was working within me. Unwanted, unbidden. In a thunderflash the revelation came. The truth came not in a pale dawn when I was fuddled with sleep but in the effulgence of noonday—’ The orthodox looked at each other, the pagan God-fearers listened. ‘I was a horse disdainful of its rider, kicking against the spurs and the whip. Now I submit to the horseman—’

  A heavy man stood, a leatherseller named Rechab. He said: ‘You, Saul of Tarsus, known to all here and revered as the scourge of blasphemy and falsehood, were to come to Damascus to the joy of the faithful that the heretic and infidel might be seized and bound and taken before the chief priests of Jerusalem. But you are revealed as worthy yourself to be seized and judged and punished—’

  ‘May not a man change?’ Paul cried. ‘Is it forbidden to the light to enter? What I was I was. What I am you see – a man reborn, refashioned, even renamed. In my flesh transfigured and in my soul irradiated I know that my redeemer lives and I know the name of my redeemer – Jesus the anointed, true Son of the Everlasting, slain and re-arisen. Believe as I believe—’

  ‘Get out of Damascus,’ Rechab countercried. ‘You shame the faith. You defile the House of the Lord.’

  ‘Oh, I will leave Damascus soon enough,’ Paul said. ‘The faith is strong enough here with no need of the buttress of words of mine. Do not fear, you faithless. My way lies where the word is still to come. I must tread strange roads and sail unknown seas.’

  Transfigured within and yet the same, Saul or Paul showed no sign of transfiguration without. His hearers saw a young man growing untimely bald, his height below the ordinary, swarthy and with a sparse beard, the close-set dark brown eyes moist and luminous, though the luminosity might be as much from madness or disease as from inspiration. He dreamt of unity, but sometimes the body mocks the spirit. The frame was of one who seemed in prospect already chained and whipped, somewhat bowed, the movements of the body in speech as it were wincing from blows. It should not be so easy, the transformation from persecutor to evangelist; it should not be possible to snap away, with the hard thumb and fingers of a tentstitcher, so many martyrdoms. He had done much wrong, and the punishment had partly to be in the disguise of his own persecution for the teaching of the good. God is not mocked. Wrong is not negation of right but a positive quantum of great weight. Paul carried Saul on his back.

  The Castra Praetoria lay to the north-east of the city, between the Via Nomentana and the Via Tiburtina, a structure of grim right angles with a great parade ground in its exact middle. Here one day the men and officers of the Guard, Marcus Julius Tranquillus with them, were forced to watch a display of gladiatorial skill. The taller and stronger of the two combatants was all too evidently holding back with the painted wooden sword he wielded. The other, shorter, fatter, clumsier, squealing with little breath as he thrust his own blunt toy at the guts of his opponent, did not observe the grace of permission with which this latter fell to the dust, clutching a make-believe deathblow. When he fell the victor snapped his fingers at the uneasy referee, who at once handed over a real dagger that caught the noon sun. The squealer shoved the point in, tittering as the vanquished in surprise tried to get up, his two hands filling with the gush of red from his intestines. ‘Plaudite, plaudite,’ Gaius Caligula cried. Those at the front did so with no enthusiasm; some at the back retched.

  Gaius Caligula strutted in his little boots towards the gateway leading to the Via Tiburtina (Vetus), followed by staff, cushionbearers, sweetmeatcarriers. There was a shrine being erected not far from the guardroom by the gate, and the bust of the Emperor was already in its place, the cement affixing it not yet dry. The effigy, laurelled, held its modest eyes averted from the legend GAIUS CALIGULA DIVUS, but the mouth smirked. Gaius Caligula said:

  ‘One god, one god. Well, the Jews have their one god and now so do we. Not an unwashed tribal deity but a lord of lands and oceans. Our holy mission is to bring this new belief in the single godhead to the barbarous places of the earth. Britain. Germany. Thrace. Other places.’

  The tribune Cornelius Sabinus said: ‘Palestine?’ He had heard a loud contention between the Emperor and Herod Agrippa about this, the Emperor graciously yielding to the more serious view of monotheism, but the mad changed quickly. Gaius Caligula said:

  ‘They already have their—You heard what I said. But still – logic, logic, there’s a certain logic in it. All right, parade dismissed.’ And he saluted his own bust before treading the purple carpet as far as his coach, a tasteless crusty gold affair. Some of the officers went off to bathe before the noon meal in the mess. The body of the dead Opsius was already being prepared for its obsequies. Nobody’s appetite was much impaired; death was, after all, their playfellow. Marcus Julius Tranquillus stripped off his armour as though it were defiled and left it strewn for his servant to scour and polish. Then he hurried to the stables to the north of the barracks, there to saddle and mount the piebald mare Euphemia, who chewed the last of her meal and gave no whinny of greeting.

  He rode west to the Viminal, turned on to the Vicus Patricius and with some difficulty trotted through the central streets of the city, which were thronged with noontime crowds. The Via Sacra. The Forum. The Palatine. He had right of entry into its grounds. Its slave quarters were thrust back to the northern limits of the estate, hidden by a grove of mixed planting – pine, poplar, cypress, chestnut. Marcus Julius found Sara waiting for him some yards away from the slave compound, in the territory of the masters where flowers grew. She was twisting a rose in nervous hands. Marcus Julius took her hands. The flower fell, depetalled. This situation was absurd, and both knew it. They spoke Greek; they were much on a level in Greek. Ruth? Ruth had died two days before, untended save by her sister, a nuisance, slave flesh no longer useful, give her to the compound incinerator alive. Sara had shown fire briefly respected, there is nothing like fire, and claimed burial in earth and the services of one of the rabbis of the city, the intoning of the qaddish. But slaves had no rights, much less in death. So Ruth had been buried like a dead dog. Sara was calm about it, with the calm of one who cannot bring with profit the rage of a known country to an unknown: rage here would be a useless language. But rage is liquid and calm is stone, and stone can break heads. Sara guarded her stone against a day, some day. ‘I should not be here,’ she said, meaning this zone a few footsteps beyond slave territory.

  ‘Nor I. And I mean that in a wider sense. The madness grows worse.’

  ‘You could go.’

  ‘Go? Family tradition. Service to the Emperor. My father and my grandfather too. Their emperors were different. There were free men in those days.’

  ‘How will it end?’

  ‘It will end with someone sticking a dagger into the divine Gaius. As he stuck a dagger into Opsius this morning. No, don’t ask me about that. It happens all the time.’

  ‘Why are things as they are?’

  ‘You need to ask why – when you saw what happened to your sister? Power divorced from reason. I call that madness. When I strike there will be reason in the point of my dagger—’

  ‘You?’

  ‘Someone like me. It will be the army, certainly. He thinks the army loves him. Pathetic. The army may well be the striking arm of the people.’

  ‘I don’t understand these things. Rome isn�
�t real.’

  ‘The torture and death are real enough. So is the bankruptcy. Millions spent on temples and shrines to the divine Caligula. The people taxed to the limit. You’ve been sold into Roman madness. And we were always taught you Jews were the mad ones. You had to learn the virtues of Roman stability.’

  ‘Oh, there’s madness enough in Judaea. Agh – look who’s coming.’

  She referred to a middle-aged woman once one of a family brought in chains from the Rhineland, gross, with greying strawy hair in plaits, in the blue gown of a slave overseer of slaves. This woman growled in bad Latin: ‘You – whatever your name is – didn’t you hear me call?’

  ‘If you don’t know my name, madam, how could I know you called?’

  ‘There are a hundred fowls to pluck. Come on, get to it. You Jewesses are an idle lot.’

  ‘You, whoever you are,’ Marcus Julius said, ‘are interrupting a private conversation.’

  ‘Slaves don’t have private conversations – whoever you are.’

  ‘I am Marcus Julius Tranquillus, senior centurion of the Praetorian Guard. Learn your place, woman.’

  ‘Don’t,’ Sara murmured in distress. ‘I’ll go.’

  ‘And,’ Marcus Julius said, ‘mind your behaviour to this lady here. Yes, lady. Slave means nothing. Queens have been slaves before now.’

  ‘It will do no good,’ Sara said, going.

  ‘Things will change. Things will have to change,’ he said. ‘I’ll try to see you tomorrow.’

  Tomorrow had a different meaning for Caleb, the brother of Sara, who was in training as a wrestler at the foot of the Palatine hill, in one of the gymnasia which fed the imperial games. ‘Metellus,’ he had said, mentioning also the name of that patrician sponsor whom he had impressed on the voyage hither. Strip off, he had been told by the games editor. Stripped off, he had been grinned at, though not unkindly, by all there present. Nullum praeputium. If you’re Metellus, I’m the ghost of Julius Caesar. Let’s see what you can do, lad. Aye, naked, balls all adangle. Testibus ponderosis, to quote Cicero. And Caleb had faced up to a lithe wiry one-eyed half-Greek half-Arab, whose body was already sleek with olive oil. Caleb knew that trick, an Arab one. He grabbed a towel and bade the man wipe himself unslippery and grippable. No, who was he, the Jew, to give orders? So Metellus took him in his slipperiness by the long strangely ungreasy hair and flung him to the sand of the wrestling pit, rolling him over and over with his foot like fish for the frying in flour. Then, when the sandy Greek Arab rose protesting, Caleb showed some of his Palestinian holds. You’ll do, lad. In time, that is. Style, grace are needed. You can’t feed Roman audiences just anything. Come now, let the German giant knock you into shape. Or out of it. We all have to learn. This German giant was a Goliath with a wart in his brow like an embedded stone from a sling. He was strong but slow. His body was sown with sandy flue like a lawn, except for his wide chest, which was thick with hairs like three housebrooms. He tossed Caleb about like a mealsack and threw him down to grovel at his great flat German feet. Caleb sank his teeth in the left little toe and would have bitten it off had the giant not dealt him a nape chop, howling. The chop hurt Caleb sorely and lighted a rage which he knew must be subdued: rage was liquid, calm a stone. With the twin stones of his clenched fists Caleb leapt to smash the German’s nose, whose thyrls sprouted hairferns like twin cornucopiae. The German went mad and flailed, shaking blood from his upper lip. Caleb leapt to gouge out his pale German eyes. Caleb was smashed in the jaw and felt bone seem, with surprise, to change its place. He took two seconds off, dancing away from the wind of new blows, to resmash his jaw back into position. He dove for the great mossy tree trunk of a right leg and held it in an embrace he refused to allow thwacks and fist-thumps to dislodge. He would have him over, by the Lord God of Hosts he would. And did. He danced on the huge bare belly. Enough, lad, you’ve shown what you can do. Make reverence to your opponent. Move into barracks tomorrow.

  Tomorrow in the other sense meant the day of reckoning, but with whom or what was not yet clear. Fire the palace. Arm the Jews. Hold the Emperor in an excruciating armlock and cry: Let my sisters go. One thing at a time. Tomorrow would come, though not tomorrow.

  ‘Tomorrow?’ Paul said. ‘But he may be dead tomorrow. I say tonight, I say now.’

  ‘I don’t speak as a Nazarene,’ Seth said, ‘because I’m not a Nazarene, at least not yet. But I take it you still regard me as a friend.’

  ‘Friend and brother. And you’re concerned for my life. Well, I’m also concerned for it – I’ve much to do and I start late. But the cause isn’t helped by cowardice.’

  ‘The streets,’ Ananias said, ‘are always dangerous at night. It’s madness to go out.’

  ‘Who,’ Paul asked, ‘is the danger from? The Jews or the Arabs?’

  ‘As far as you’re concerned,’ an old man sitting by the fire said, ‘both.’ Paul nodded: that seemed reasonable. He had been out of the city into Nabataean territory. He had even made a pilgrimage to Mount Horeb, thinking things out, but the God of Moses and Elijah had proffered no special signal, unless signally evil weather meant such: lightning had flashed about the summit like bad temper. The Nabataean Arabs he had preached at outside the town limits had understood his Aramaic but had responded rather viciously to his message about the Son of God. They wanted to be left alone with their bleating kids and cooking pots. They did not like bald-headed strangers dropping by and disturbing the decent monotonous day with new ideas. The ethnarch of the city, responsible to King Aretas, a most conservative man, was undoubtedly willing to side with the Damascene Jews when they shrieked against the turncoat blasphemer. The doctrine of love was highly subversive. Paul looked into the fire that Ananias’s mother had lighted: it was a chill evening. In the fire, which spat like Nabataean Arabs and their camels, he saw no good auguries. He said:

  ‘A fellow Nazarene lies dying because he was beaten by these thugs of the man Rechab. He needs my comfort. Am I to skulk here because of a few bravos with breadknives? Besides, I have a bodyguard. Have I not?’ He smiled but got no answer from Seth, Ananias, and the burly but not notably brave twins Adbeel and Mibsam (if those were really their names). These last two were always biting their lips. Paul rose from the fire and said: ‘I’m going.’

  The house of the dying Nazarene lay not far from the city wall. The lane which skirted this wall was a narrow curve; labyrinthine alleys made twisted radii to it. The moon was near the full but had to fight with sluggish rainclouds. Paul strode, and his friends had to trot to reach him. They were in no position to guard him against daggers, being votaries of love and hence unarmed. But Seth, mercifully as yet unconverted, still had his knife. When three cut-throats sprang out of the shadows with foul cries that were oblique expressions of holiness, it was Seth who struck out. Paul saw Ananias, he was sure it was Ananias, go down gurgling. In the throat, true to their name. Paul stumbled against some stone steps to his right. At the top of them someone was swinging a lantern. By its light he saw Seth held struggling by two while the third swung his dagger back for a stroke in the belly. Then the lantern swung away. The one holding it called down: ‘Paul! Paul! Here! Quick!’ Paul mounted stumbling and found the steps led to an open door. A house whose walls were part of the wall of the city. ‘In! Quick!’ He heard a gasp below, which he assumed was Seth dying, and the feet of men running away, the lipbiting twins no doubt.

  Paul panted and looked about him in the shadowy house. Its master, whom his swinging lantern dramatised into red and gold facets with inky shadows, seemed to be a robust man in middle age. With his free hand he shot three screaming iron bolts. This house had been perhaps a sentinel’s post in the days before Rome had pacified the region. Paul heard dagger hefts and ringed fists hammering at the tough wood of the bolted door. We want him, Saul the renegade, cut his throat, give him to God’s good justice though summary. The householder yelled: ‘Rebecca! Leah!’ Two old women came from a dark hole of a room with one little lamp between them. The
man came up to Paul and breathed on him the comfort of home and safety – goat’s cheese and onions for supper. ‘I’ll have to open up to them. Come quick with me.’ Leah and Rebecca went up to the door, nodded to each other, then began a loud gabbled curse on evil men who disturbed good women in their naked beds. Paul was led to an opening with shutters drawn back, beyond it the gloomy night, beneath it, the lantern showed, a precipice of stone wall, that of the city, with no toeholds. He shook his head. ‘Wait,’ the man said. He brought, yelling ‘Wait wait’ to the hammerers, a network bag of the kind called by the Greeks a sagrane, used for hoisting bales of hay. There was a rope already affixed to it. The two old women cursed heartily but with head-shakes towards each other: this cursing was proving of little avail against godly persecutors. Paul got into the bag. ‘Now,’ the man said, ‘easy does it.’ And tugging on the rope while at the same time easing it free with the rhythmic giving of his hands, he watched Paul descend. Paul saw him high above, plying his tug and slack, and he waved when he felt earth bump benignly. The man could not see but he could feel the emptying of the bag. Paul got into the shadow of a buttress, listening. Where is he? Not here, your worships. Where do you have him hid? Very elusive these Nazarenes, slippery customers you might say. Grumbling and the slamming of a door, shouts and more grumbling and then silence on that peripheral lane. There was a whistled tune from above in the shape of a question. Paul whistled back the shape of an answer. Then he was left to the night and his tears of rage.

  In the Hebrew manner these tears had to be deferred, along with the shouts to high heaven, until he had walked some way from the city. He rested, shivering also from the night wind, in the lee of some haystooks in a field. Cows lowed from their byre and an ass gave him a brief lesson in braying. He brayed an anger that no Nazarene could have taught him. What was the difference between the stoning of Stephen and the cutting into the flesh of Seth and Ananias? He had been responsible for both. He was the same man as always, a deathbringer, and the bringing of death had hardly begun. Better not to have been born, so clucked some far off fowls. Words of his own, spoken in bitterness during his studies under Gamaliel of the holy word. No man had ever been able to do right by that dyspeptic and capricious God. The smell of burnt flesh pleased him, as well as the snipping of infant foreskins. He gave wholly irrelevant answers to the just plaints of suffering Job. How far had he changed under the humanising influence of his blessed son? I have chosen you, Saulpaul, for your deathbringing rigour. Owls hooted, hunting for mice. The night world breathed the terror of pursuit. There was no unity, there was only a bitter division, and the division was the work of a creator who, secure in his own unity, was amused by the spectacle of pain, doubt, the law of eating and being eaten. The clouds had scudded off above the south-west road to Tyrus, leaving the moon full and veined like a bloodshot eye. The moon gave the flat fields and the hills beyond a mock blessing of silver.