Testament Read online

  Praise for TESTAMENT

  “Like a palimpsest, Ricci’s Jesus testifies to the inexhaustible power of story, reminding us that enduring myths are not windows through which we view objective truths, but mirrors framing our own evanescent morality plays, in saecula saeculorum.” —The Globe and Mail

  “Altogether remarkable…. a novel rich in ideas, insight and emotional resonance. … an amazing feat … a miracle.” —Vancouver Sun

  “His prose creates an unstoppable momentum.” —Maclean’s

  “Ricci has taken an enormous risk, and the result is exhilarating. … [Testament] represents the vision of a remarkable man who is always rendered as a man…. A stunning achievement.” —Edmonton Journal

  “Bold and brilliant … his spare, lyrical prose reflects the extreme terrain of Palestine under the Romans—desert, mountains and oases…. With this novel, Ricci deserves legions of new readers and a reputation as one of Canada’s leading literary talents.” —The Gazette (Montreal)

  “In Testament, Nino Ricci illustrates the timelessness and timeliness of the teachings of the most controversial figure of his time, and ours.” —Ottawa Citizen

  “Memorable, captivating and unsettling, and the prose in which he recounts them impeccable.” —National Post

  “Ricci is one of Canada’s best pure writers, and Testament is no small achievement in any technical regard…. The sections overlap and move forward as a unit in an understated yet impressive handling of structure…. The writing has clarity and elegance throughout, and as a storyteller Ricci is effective and assured…. In a number of subtle, sometimes indirect ways, Ricci’s book reminds us of [the] less dramatic spiritual truths.” —Kitchener-Waterloo Record

  “An ambitious and sophisticated novel that retells the greatest story ever told…. elegant, beautifully formed prose … an easy perfection.” —The Hamilton Spectator

  “A master storyteller tells the master’s story…. Ricci is both inventive and convincing, his exploration of Christ’s life a provocative combination of myth and accepted fact. Testament is a striking and eminently readable book. Written with great narrative skill, it draws the reader into a story which, although the outcome and most of the major signposts are known, commands attention…. It is as though the scattered shards of four testaments have been retrieved to spin a new yet familiar story, one told with an experienced writer’s characteristic vividness and verve.” —The London Free Press

  “Testament, a refracted biography of Jesus, becomes too an examination of storytelling itself, for what is Jesus of Nazareth if not a teller of stories? … From the good book, Ricci has fashioned a great story.” —Quill & Quire [starred review]

  for Sarah

  for Virginia

  for Luca

  BOOK I

  YIHUDA OF QIRYAT

  I FIRST SAW HIM in the winter of that year at En Melakh, a town of a few hundred just north of the Salt Sea. He had come in out of the desert, people said—from the look of him, his blistered face and the way his skin hung from his bones, he’d passed a good while there. He had set himself up now just off the square, squatting in the shade of an old fig tree; I had a good view of him from the porch of the tavern I’d put up in across the way. Some of the townspeople, no doubt taking him for a holy man, dropped bits of food in front of him from time to time, which he accepted with a nod of his head but more often than not couldn’t seem to bring himself to stomach, letting them sit there in the dirt for the flies to collect on or the dogs to snatch away.

  Though the town lay on the Roman side of the frontier, the soldiers of Herod Antipas often passed that way when they travelled up from his southern territories. At the time, I was awaiting an informant we had among Herod’s men on his way back to the court from the Macherus fortress. The holy man had appeared perhaps the third day of my wait, simply there beneath the fig tree when I awoke; from the joyless look of him I thought he might have been cast out from one of the desert cults, the way they did sometimes if some bit of food should touch your hand before you’d washed it or if you missed some pause or half-word in your prayers. His hair and beard were scraggly and short as if recently shaved for a vow—they gave him a boyish appearance but couldn’t however quite take the dignity from him, which seemed to sit on him like some mantle someone had laid over him.

  He wasn’t wearing any sandals or cloak. I thought surely he’d had some cave out there to hole up in, and some brush for fire, or he would have frozen to death in the cold. Even here in the valley the nights had been bitter, the little heat the sun built up over the day through the winter haze vanishing the instant dusk fell. I waited to see if he planned to weather the night in the open or repair to some cranny when darkness set in. But the sun dropped and he didn’t move. My tavern-keeper, a mangy sort with an open sore on one of his knuckles, brought a lamp out to the porch and a bit of the gruel he passed off as food.

  “He’s a quiet one, that one,” he said, with his low, vulgar laugh, trying to ingratiate himself. “Nearly dead, from the look of it.”

  Not ten strides from the man some of the boys of the town, coming out after their suppers, began to get up a bit of a fire, spitting and holding their hands up to the flames and keeping their talk low lest the holy man overhear them. The orange haze their fire threw out just reached the man where he was, making him seem like someone at a threshold, someone turned away from the room of light the fire formed. Get up and warm yourself, I wanted to say to him, feeling I was out there with him in the cold, with the wind at my ankles and just a few bits of bread in my belly. But still he sat. It occurred to me that he was perhaps simply too enfeebled to rise, that his hapless look was his own hunger-dimmed wonder that he could sit there as his life ebbed away and not be able to lift a finger to save himself.

  I had half-resolved to go out and offer him my cloak when I was headed off by a woman who was apparently the mother of one of the boys in the square, and who came out chastising the lot of them.

  “Animals! Didn’t one of you think to give him a bit of fire?”

  And she proceeded to purloin some of the precious faggots of wood the boys had no doubt scrounged for all afternoon in the brush and to build a little fire in front of the man. When she’d got a blaze going she took off her own shawl and draped it over his shoulders, then took her son by the ear and dragged him off home. Within minutes the rest of the boys, thus humiliated, had begun to disperse as well, the last two or three lingering defiantly a bit before finally quenching their own fire and shamefacedly dropping their remaining handfuls of wood into that of the holy man.

  The holy man, for his part, had seemed oblivious to all of this. But when the boys had gone I detected a bit of movement in him, a slight drawing in towards the fire as if towards some secret it might whisper to him. I thought I ought to assure myself that he at least had his wits about him, and so, with the excuse of further stoking his fire, I took a few twigs from the small bundle that the tavern-keeper kept near his gate and walked out to him. It was only when I got close to him that I saw what his body had been giving in to: he had fallen asleep. I wavered a moment over tending to him—it was always my instinct then in situations of that kind to err on the side of indifference, as the way of drawing the least attention to myself. But seeing him helpless like that in his sleep, and even more hopelessly frail than he had seemed from a distance, I shored up his fire a bit and then for good measure draped my cloak over his shawl, knowing that I could beg an extra blanket off the tavern-keeper for my own lice-infested bed. What struck me as I draped the cloak over him was how peculiar this act of charity felt, how alien to my nature, as if I had now truly become a man whom I’d thought I merely feigned to be.

  The group I formed part of was based in Jerusalem, and had among it a few members o
f the aristocracy from which it derived funds, but also shopkeepers and clerks, bakers and common labourers, though I had never been certain in the several years of my own involvement with it how far its network extended. The truth was that we were not encouraged to know one another, against the chance of capture and betrayal, and in my own case I could not have named with certainty more than a few dozen of my co-conspirators, although there were many others, of course, whom I had met in one way or another or whom I knew only by aliases. I myself had been recruited during my days as a recorder at the temple, where I had taken refuge after the death of my parents. At the time it had been rage that moved me, and a young man’s passion, though afterwards I also had cause to be grateful for the years of boredom I had been saved copying out the rolls for the temple tax.

  Like the Zealots, we worked for Rome’s overthrow though, unlike them, we did not imagine that only God was our commander or that it was profanement to know more than what was written in the Torah. So we had a few men of experience amongst us, at least, who understood how the world worked and the forces we were up against. But many of those who had joined us in the hope of imminent revolt had, over time, lost patience with our leaders’ caution and our lack of progress. It was our strategy, for instance, that we stir up unrest in the entire region before risking any action of our own. Yet the fact was that we did not have the contacts for proper embassies abroad, and that outside our borders we had won to our cause only the most minor of tribal lords. So our grand hope of a revolution that would spread across the whole of the empire, and be unquenchable, appeared increasingly the merest fantasy. In the meantime we had begun to descend into factions, and even those who ought to have been our allies often proved, over some point of doctrine, our fiercest enemies. The Zealots, for instance, considered us cowards and collaborationists because we did not protest every smallest infringement of Jewish law; yet they thus wasted in a thousand little outbursts the resources that ought to have gone to a single great conflagration.

  In the face of our failures abroad we had begun to put our energies instead into infiltrating the Palestinian outposts, not only those in Judea, which the Romans controlled directly, but also those in the territories of their vassals Herod Antipas and Herod Philip, on the reasoning that in the event of revolt we would need to take the outlying fortresses at once if we were to stand any chance of holding back the Roman legions based in Syria. Most of us were kept in the dark, of course, about our actual strength, going about our little tasks with hardly any sense of the whole we formed part of, not only because our leaders so arranged it but because even amongst ourselves we did not dare to confide in one another or pool our knowledge, for fear of spies. In my own case there were two men I reported to, one a teacher and grain merchant who lived near the stadium, and the other a lawyer who worked in the city administration; outside these I spoke to no one except in the most general terms. For my work, I ran a shop just beneath the Antonia fortress where I sold phylacteries and also various foreign texts, and where I offered services as a scribe. It was in this latter office that I made myself useful to our group—the soldiers from the fortress often came to me to prepare their letters home, and so I learned the comings and goings of the procurator and the movements of the troops and so on. In the beginning, because I had been raised in Ephesus and knew something of the world, I had also a number of times been sent abroad, even once as far as Rome. But eventually it grew clear that I did not have the character for diplomacy. So I was given other duties, though from time to time was still sent on small assignments outside the city, which I increasingly welcomed as the atmosphere among us in Jerusalem grew more and more oppressive.

  En Melakh was barely a day’s journey from Jerusalem but seemed much further, at the bottom of the long, bleak road that led down from the city to the Jordan plain. I had left Jerusalem under clear skies, but here a dust-filled wind had daily blown across the flats like the Almighty’s angry breath, blocking the sun and dropping grit in every nook and crevice. The morning after the holy man’s arrival, however, dawned clear. During the night I had hardly been able to sleep for the thought of him sitting out there in the cold—I did not know why my mind had so fixed on him except that he seemed an obscure sort of challenge to me, to my own smug sense of mission, sitting there half-dead yet asking for nothing.

  When I awoke, just past daybreak, I did not take the trouble to so much as wash my hands before going out to check on him. My heart sank when I saw he was missing from his spot beneath the fig tree—my first thought was that he had died in the night and had already been carted away, to prevent the desecration of buzzards alighting there in the middle of the town. But then I caught sight of him amidst the early morning traffic a little ways from the square, padding along in the dim red of sunrise towards the stable that served to house the pack animals and goats of the local market. It was a shock to see him fully upright, all skin and bones the way he was, little more than a wraith against the dawn, walking with that strange light-footedness of the very thin and the very frail that makes them look almost lively and spry even when they are at death’s door.

  At the stables he ducked into one of the stalls and squatted to ease himself. It was only when he had emerged and had begun to move back towards the square that I noticed he was no longer wearing my cloak, only the shawl he’d been given, which gave him a slightly comical, womanly air despite his wisps of beard; and I saw now that my cloak in fact lay neatly draped over the low mud wall of the tavern’s porch. Clearly his wits were sharper than I had imagined them, if he had known enough to track me down. But rather than being pleased that the thing had been returned to me, I felt a prick of injury at how speedily he had seemed to wish to rid himself of it, as if it were some curse that had been laid on him.

  He took up his place beneath the fig tree again. There was a little more life in his eyes than there had been the day before—it seemed he had crossed back, after all, to the land of the living. From somewhere he’d got hold of a gourd that he’d filled with water and now he set about doing his ablutions, with the careful frugality of a seasoned desert-dweller, a few drops for his hands, his forearms, his face, a few more for his ankles and feet. When he had finished he leaned in low on his haunches, arms outspread, to say his prayers.

  It seemed shameful to watch him while he prayed. I took my cloak up and drew it over me against the lingering cold and went into the courtyard, where the tavern-keeper’s daughter, Adah, a girl of fourteen or so, was preparing some porridge at the bit of fire there. She was a strange girl, as unblemished as her father was vile but also not quite present somehow, a bit simple perhaps. Sometimes her father would send her half-undressed to my room to bring me my meals or wine, with a conniving that chilled me.

  “I never see you go out to the market like the other girls,” I said to her. “Maybe your husband’s there.”

  But she misunderstood.

  “I don’t have a husband,” she said with a panicked look, then hurried off to bring her father his breakfast.

  I was accustomed enough to biding my time in those days but the holy man had made me restless—simply that he was there, fired by a sense of purpose different from mine, or perhaps the waste that I saw then in his sort of devotion. I went out after I’d eaten and he was still sitting beneath his tree, the sun just rising above the houses behind him to cast his shadow all along the length of the square. Without quite knowing what I intended, I walked out to where he was.

  I tossed a coin on the ground in front of him.

  “For your breakfast,” I said. But he didn’t pick it up. Up close I saw he still had a dulled look, his eyes sunken, the skin sagging against his bones.

  “Bread would be better,” he said.

  His voice was stronger than I would have imagined it, seeming to echo in the hollow places in him.

  “With a coin you can buy bread.”

  “All the same.”

  There didn’t seem any arrogance in this, only stubborn-ness—I thought
perhaps it was part of his vow, to abjure any coinage, or that he was one of those who wouldn’t touch coins on account of the images there. I bent to collect the thing and went at once into the market, where I bought a bit of stew that I brought back to him. He thanked me roughly and set into it with a barely controlled vehemence, his appetite clearly returned.

  “I lent you my cloak,” I said.

  He didn’t look up from his food.

  “I recognized it.”

  And yet did not think to thank me. So it seemed I must wrestle him for my blessing.

  “And you returned it. For which I’m grateful.”

  “It seemed so fine I thought you’d miss it.”

  “But you haven’t returned the shawl you were given.”

  “It’s less fine. I thought it would be less missed.”

  He put me in mind of those barefooted Greeks I’d seen as a boy in the squares of Ephesus, who lived on air and made it their job to poke fun at the least hint of pretension.

  He had finished his food.

  “Should I send another bowl?” I said.

  “If you like.”

  I paid a boy to bring out more stew, then moved on through the market. En Melakh was one of the towns that the madman Cassius had razed when he was in Syria, for failing to pay him tribute, and it had been rebuilt in crude Greek style with an open market just inside the gates. There wasn’t much of interest to be had in it—a bit of coloured wool from the coast, a few trinkets and hair combs, some dried meat and fruits. At the back, where the concessions gave way to the narrow alleys of a bazaar, an old woman ran a shop out of her house that I’d noticed people hurrying from carrying secret parcels wrapped in sackcloth: potions and charms. A carved figurine of three wise men wrapped in fish skins stood in a niche above the woman’s lintel. These were our God-fearing Jews, I thought, hedging their bets, worshipping icons of old men dressed up as fish.