Testament Read online

  The purge that followed the discovery of our infiltration at Macherus was a great setback to us and indeed seemed to threaten to undermine the whole of our movement. At the fort itself it was not only our leaders who were discovered but also their handful of recruits, all of them summarily executed, so that our strength there was wiped out. But by far the greater blow to us was that the Romans and the Herods were quick to use the thing to their own ends, joining forces to rid themselves of anyone who had ever been the least trouble to them, and in the process ferreting out by chance many of our own people. In Jerusalem there was such a stink from the rotting corpses outside the Gennath Gate that the members of the council, as I heard it, sent a protest to the emperor, no doubt imagining that they had thus stood strong against our Roman oppressors and showed the dignity of the Jews.

  I myself had gone quietly back to Jerusalem after Ezekias’s death but did not dare to speak to anyone, for fear I was being watched. Then a few days after my return, I learned that the teacher in the city I had reported to had been arrested. I did not waste any time then but at once packed away all the goods I had in my shop and then collected what money remained from my inheritance and left the city. For a number of days I took refuge with a cousin I had at Joppa, though I told him nothing, of course, of my situation. But Roman battalions often passed through the town on their way from Caesarea Maritima up the coast, which the Romans had set up as their capital, so I grew afraid of bringing him into risk and moved on.

  In the end I crossed the northern frontier and went on to Tyre, having heard we had a group there. I had passed through Tyre with my father several times as a child and had thought it a great city, with its grand causeway and port and its many temples. But it now seemed a vulgar and lawless place, full of beggars and scoundrels. It took me many days to track down our group, since there was much suspicion and fear even there at the time, and then what I found were half a dozen aging rebels who still hearkened back to Yihuda the Galilean and who had been so long absent from our country as to have lost all sense of the realities facing us. As a result, my relations with them were strained from the start. As others of our party began to filter into the city with more news of the reprisals against us, the members of the Tyrian group grew puffed up with the delusion that the leadership of the movement would now somehow come to rest with them. So the rest of us began to avoid them out of fear they would compromise us in some way, with the Roman authorities or with our own leadership. For my part, since I had heard of no warrant against me in Jerusalem, I began to think seriously of leaving the city, though I knew also that a few of those close to me had been arrested and shipped off into slavery.

  Through all this I had hardly given another thought to Yehoshua. But one day after I’d been in the city a matter of months I came across a gathering of some twenty or so near the city gates and there he stood addressing it, though changed in appearance now, fair and well-groomed and well-fed so that he seemed almost a Greek, and changed, too, in his manner, with an air of authority I had not seen in him at En Melakh. Nonetheless he did not seem to be making much headway with the crowd, who were badgering him because he had slighted the Tyrian gods.

  “You should keep your ideas for the Jews,” someone said to him.

  “Is that what your teachers tell you? That there’s a truth for Tyrians and another for Jews?”

  “You say so yourselves!”

  Soon enough the crowd broke up. A few rough-looking attendants who had been hovering near him in stony silence huddled around him now speaking in muted Aramaic. But when I approached him his eye went to me at once.

  “I saw you in the crowd,” he said. “I was happy to see a friend in it.”

  It was getting on to dark and so I invited him and his men to take their supper with me at the inn where I was staying near the port, run by an old Jew sympathetic to our cause. The whole way there he grilled me in a fairly lively way on the customs of the city, in Greek, leaving his colleagues, who obviously spoke no Greek and in fact looked like the roughest sort of hirelings, entirely out of the conversation. At the time this did not strike me as remarkable, but later I saw how he sometimes consulted them for the smallest things, so that my first impression of them as mere bodyguards or servants seemed mistaken.

  Then at one point, taking me by surprise, he said, “I heard the arrest of that man at En Melakh was because of a plot.”

  “Ah,” I said, and didn’t pursue the matter. But in this way he made clear to me that he’d guessed the reason for my presence there in Tyre.

  At supper we switched to Aramaic, though his men—there were three of them, Yaqob and Yohanan and then the apparent leader, Shimon, whom Yehoshua, however, no doubt because of his hulking frame, called Kephas, the Rock—mainly kept up their brooding silence. From their accents I’d gathered they were Galileans, which went some way towards explaining their manner, since that race was not known for wasting its words. They addressed their master by the shortened Yeshua, which made him seem common. But later I learned that that had been his given name and it was only the prophet Yohanan who had named him more formally, when he had purified him, as was his practice.

  Though he had been Yohanan’s acolyte, his notions did not seem to accord much with what I knew of Yohanan’s. Yohanan had preached the imminent end of days, like the desert cults; but Yeshua did not seem in such a hurry. As he put it, Yohanan was right to make us feel each day was our last, so we might be woken up to our mortality. But in so saying he showed he didn’t agree with him. For his own part, he seemed to think more in the manner of a Greek than a Jew, finding recourse for his arguments in logic rather than scripture; thus I wasn’t surprised to learn that as a child he had lived in Alexandria.

  I couldn’t quite gather what it was that had brought him to Tyre and wondered if the reason wasn’t so different from my own, having heard that the matter of Yohanan had not yet been settled. But it wasn’t entirely unknown for Jews to proselytize in that region, so he might merely have come in search of converts. Also, as I learned, he had been there only a matter of weeks, and planned to return the following day to Kefar Nahum in Galilee, where it seemed he was now based. I made some comment half in jest then of how I would gladly be rid of Tyre as well, and he said I was welcome to travel with him if I wished. But I could not tell if the invitation was made casually or in earnest.

  I asked the group if they wanted to put up at the inn for the night. But Kephas, who was clearly wary of me, said, “We sleep in the open. We have no money with us.”

  This seemed a point of honour with him. I remembered Yeshua’s rejection of the coin I had offered in En Melakh.

  “Then how do you eat?”

  “The Lord provides,” Kephas said.

  I was tempted to ask if it was the Lord who was paying for his supper, but said only, “You will stay as my guests, of course,” so they could not refuse me.

  Our meeting might have ended there with Yeshua and me going our separate ways the next day if not for an occurrence later that evening that considerably sharpened my interest in him. A Phoenician woman from the countryside appeared at the inn in search of him, having somehow managed to track him down; and she had along with her a daughter whom she held literally leashed to her by a cord tied around the girl’s waist and who looked like some wild animal she had captured, dirtied and dishevelled, her face covered in scratches and scabs. The girl’s hands were bound in rags that she was constantly gnawing at to free herself, all the while emitting long howls and moans, eerie and guttural, that seemed to border on speech without quite becoming it.

  I had stayed down in the parlour after supper and was one of the first to speak to the woman when she showed up in the courtyard. She said word of Yeshua’s power had reached her after he had passed through a village near hers the previous day and cured a child there, and she had brought her own daughter in the hope he might cure her as well. The rags, she said, were to keep the girl, who had several times tried to take her own life, from doing
any further injury to herself.

  I was surprised to learn that Yeshua enjoyed this renown as a healer. A boy was sent up to his room to fetch him and a few minutes later he appeared in the courtyard with his men. A curious and almost comic thing happened then: at the sight of Kephas, the girl, who despite her rantings had appeared relatively harmless until that moment, suddenly lunged at the poor man and began hitting at him with her rag-covered fists. It took both Yaqob and Yohanan to pull her off him.

  The mother, by this point, was practically prostrate with apology.

  “Master, please,” she said, nearly incoherent, “master.”

  Yeshua had wisely been holding himself back a bit from the fray. But now he came forward to put a hand on the girl’s forehead. The gesture seemed to calm her.

  “Bring her into the sitting room,” he said.

  His men sat her on a bench in the parlour. She was still mumbling in her indecipherable speech but seemed to have retreated into herself, staring out glassy-eyed as if entirely unaware of us or her surroundings. At Yeshua’s instructions the servant boy brought a basin of water and a cloth, and Yeshua proceeded to dab at the grime on the girl’s face and at the streaks of dried blood from her scratches. I remembered how he had tended to Ezekias in this way, how he had made him seem human again; and somehow he managed to work this same effect now with the girl. From out of that demonic visage of grime and blood there emerged suddenly a child, an innocent. He ran his cloth over her hair as well, bringing it back to rough order; then he began to unwrap her hands. All the while the girl grew increasingly placid, until her ramblings had died down to a whisper.

  “Bring her something to eat,” Yeshua said, after he had her hands free, and when a bowl of soup was brought out she set into it like someone famished.

  From a pouch on his belt Yeshua pulled out some bits of herb and told the girl’s mother to make a brew from it to help calm the girl if she should suffer another attack.

  “Is it a demon, master?” the woman asked.

  “The girl is pregnant. When you find who’s responsible, you’ll have your demon.”

  The woman was instantly silenced by this, as were we all—the girl was no more than nine or ten. But it was immediately clear that Yeshua was right, both from the woman’s guilty silence and from the small bulge in the girl’s dress that grew obvious now that our attention had been drawn to it.

  The girl was quietly licking her bowl to get the dregs of the soup.

  “Take her home and look after her,” Yeshua said.

  There had been nothing miraculous in any of this, yet the whole incident affected me deeply. The vision of that young girl’s face, called back, it seemed, from some precipice as if indeed by a kind of magic, had seared itself into my mind. I had seen instances of this kind of possession before, if that was what it could be called, and also “cures” of varying degrees of success (on more than one occasion staged, I was sure, to win over a credulous audience). But while usually these cases were handled with all manner of obfuscation and subterfuge, with chants and potions and charms or countless animal sacrifices that usually ended up on the doctor’s supper table without any appreciable benefit to the patient, Yeshua had held true throughout to the plainest and simplest of observations and gestures, and in so doing had brought about an improvement that, if not permanent, had at least the great virtue of being honest. That he had taken the trouble of examining the girl’s condition from the point of view of physical causes already set him apart from the usual run of physicians and healers, who leapt at once to the mystical in order to cover their own lack of understanding.

  Afterwards I held Yeshua back on the pretext of speaking to him of his education, which he told me he’d received during his time in Alexandria. But in fact a notion had taken hold of me: I had begun to think of his earlier offer to join him. I reasoned to myself that he would provide cover for my return to our own territories, even if at bottom he wasn’t much less a fugitive than I was; and also that in Galilee I could move freely, being unknown there. I had it in mind, or so I said to myself, that I might look to building our movement there, since as far as I knew we had no strength in the region. But the truth was simply that I was drawn to Yeshua. I had seen something in him, the mark of a leader, and was loath to let him slip from me.

  We sat talking there for an hour or more, long after his men had returned to their room. As he presented himself, it seemed he was merely an itinerant teacher of the sort that was common enough even in Judea, with a little following there in the Galilee that supported him. Yet he did not much resemble the teachers I had known when I’d studied in Jerusalem, whose minds were like windowless rooms circumscribed on every side by the law, while Yeshua’s was curious and quick. The innkeeper had joined us and brought wine, which Yeshua did not abstain from, and soon we were drawn into political arguments and to talk of the emperor Tiberius and his strange retreat to the isle of Capri, where it was said he indulged every lust and gave no thought to the affairs of state. The innkeeper saw hopes for our independence in this, saying surely his house must crumble if he did not look to it. But Yeshua, cutting to the heart of the matter, said, “I’m sure he has servants enough to tend to his house if he doesn’t,” which indeed proved prescient, for it wasn’t long afterwards that we began to hear how Sejanus had wormed his way into power, managing things with greater brutality and rigour than ever Tiberius had.

  At one point Yeshua asked after my own schooling and I was quick to mention Ephesus, as if I was anxious not to seem to him some mere Pharisee, who had read nothing outside of the scriptures.

  “So we’re both Greeks, then,” he said to me, joking. Yet the truth was that even in Ephesus my father had sent me only to the Jews of our own quarter, since he himself had been raised in the Negeb and was hardly worldly. What larger education I had got then had come mainly from scrounging the occasional text from the market and from wandering the streets, and it had always seemed to me that our little quarter was like some island we lived on, the tiny realm of the familiar, hemmed in on every side by the great, dark swell of the unknown.

  I asked him if he had ever seen Ephesus and he said once, in passing, before he had joined Yohanan.

  “It seemed to me there were many wonders there,” he said.

  But in fact it still pained me to speak of the place since my parents’ death there.

  “Surely there were more in Alexandria.”

  He laughed at that.

  “Maybe so. But not every wonder is a boon.”

  Before we retired I finally put it to him that I might take up his offer to share the road. I was afraid he might surmise I was merely using him for my own ends and take offence. But if he was troubled by the notion of travelling with someone he had by now surely gathered to be a rebel, he did not show it.

  “Of course you’re welcome with us, as I told you,” he said, and seemed sincere in this.

  So it was set that I would leave with him and his men the following day. I asked the innkeeper to pass on word to my Tyrian colleagues that I had gone, but I did not imagine that I would be missed.

  We set out the next morning not long after dawn, travelling cross country towards the frontier at Gush Halav, though it meant a hard trek over the mountains. There was only the odd village along the road, rough assemblages of stone shacks with perhaps some pasture nearby or some rocky patches of field carved out of the forest; the rest was dark cypress woods for as far as the eye could see, forbidding and without interest. Despite the sun the air was cool because of the hills and because of a wind that blew against us the entire day, so that it seemed the distance we travelled was doubled and the slope we rose against twice as steep. As the road was deserted except for the occasional villager who tried to sell us some bit of handiwork or food, we were left to our own company, which however suited me well.

  Yeshua, no doubt sensing the uneasiness of his men at having me included among them, seemed therefore to throw us together, for much of the journey wal
king some paces ahead of us and out of hearing so that we were forced to make our way with one another. For their part, his men, after the first awkwardness, made a genuine effort to integrate me into their party, and regaled me with stories—some of them, however, utterly fantastical—of the great works that Yeshua had already wrought in Galilee. (Later, of course, I would hear them recount in these same exaggerated tones the story of Yeshua’s treatment of the young girl in Tyre.) Even Kephas, in the end, maintained the strictest civility, passing his flask first to me whenever we stopped to drink and in the evening, when we set up camp at the side of the road, carefully portioning out the bits of food he had in his pack—I, assuming we would be having our supper in Gush Halav, had neither brought my own provisions nor purchased any along the way—so that everything was perfectly equitable.

  In amidst the tales Yeshua’s men passed on to me I was able to pick out that Yeshua had come to Kefar Nahum early that spring, which would have been not long after we’d met in En Melakh. The men were very mysterious about how he had ended up there and how they had come to be his followers, saying only that he had called them, giving to the words that special weight with which converts invested their particular terminology. I thought perhaps he had chosen the place for the refuge offered by the hills in the area should he need to flee, since as far as I knew it was otherwise without distinctions or charms. But it came out he had family nearby in Notzerah, a town just outside of Sepphoris, the former Galilean capital. I was surprised when his men said they had never met with any of his family; it appeared, however, that they had little to do with Yeshua’s past, nor indeed did they seem curious of it.

  We crossed the frontier at Gush Halav not long after dawn the following day, getting through without incident. I immediately felt my blood quicken at stepping back onto native soil. It was just coming on to the end of the summer and the grape harvest was in progress, the vineyards already alive with workers and the air rife with the sweet, half-fermented smell of must. After the gloomy woods that had lined the road to Gush Halav, it was a relief to see open fields again and signs of human presence. I had never been in that part of the country before or indeed spent more than a matter of days in the Galilee and so was surprised at the level of cultivation, not only in the valleys but even on the hilltops, which were covered in olive groves. I imagined it was the Jews who had so tamed the place, in the generations since the Maccabees had won it back for us, though many of the olive trees we passed looked so gnarled and old they might have gone back to the ancient Canaanites.