I visit my preferred brothel the first time I leave my house – late on the third night – but once again I am unable to find my manhood when the moment comes.
I almost wrote that I visited my preferred brothel by accident, since it was not my intention to go there when I closed my front door behind me, but instead to visit the stream where Yeshua and I used to go. But are there accidents? That is the question I begin to ask myself after I return home from the bordello, since that is when Yeshua comes to me and tells me more of what has taken place between us.
50
I awaken from drunken sleep to find myself lying on my side against the cold floor, my knees tucked up by my chest. Night has descended, and an oil lamp burns on my table. My shutters are open, and moonlight is streaming in.
It is a comfort to have solid ground beneath me, but my head is throbbing and my feet are freezing – proof, I conclude, that I need to drink some more. As I fill my cup with wine, a stirring on the other side of the room turns my head.
A figure there raises his hand to hail me. ‘I answered you in the hiding place of thunder,’ he says.
He is squatting on his heels underneath my window giving out on the courtyard. His hands are joined together and are glowing with a cool bluish light.
You will say, Yaphiel, that this uncommon radiance in my old friend’s hands could not possibly have been produced by moonlight. So perhaps I ought to have realized that my shutters were not really open and that this was a vision.
What I believe now is that Yeshua opened my mind and showed me how the starlight of the Throne World was always shining inside him.
But I did not know that then.
‘Shalom, dodee,’ I tell him. ‘How did you get here?’
‘I walked, of course.’
‘No, but … but what happened? Your hands were cold and limp. And … you were not breathing.’
‘Your hands were cold, too.’
‘When?’ I ask.
He stands up and stretches his arms over his head, as he does after he has remained seated for hours, lost in chanting. The scourge-marks from his eye to his mouth have scabbed, but they will leave a long scar.
‘Your hands were cold when I revived you,’ he tells me.
‘But what does that have to do with you?’
‘I needed to make sure I could carry out my plan. So I summoned death to you first – to make sure it would work.’
‘That what would work?’
‘My plan.’
‘So neither of us was really dead?’ I ask.
‘Our hearts were stilled, which brought us within reach of the Angel of Death. But, in both cases, I commanded him to leave us and brought us back to life.’
‘Is this true?’
‘Yes.’
‘So you’re still alive?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me that your death was part of a plan?’
‘I couldn’t. Your sisters … I could not risk them finding out.’
‘But you could’ve saved me all this pain and grief – and this ocean of wine I’ve been drinking.’ I hold up my cup.
‘That’s why I’m telling you now.’
‘But why do you want everyone to think that you’re dead?’
‘I need to leave this place. I don’t want everyone waiting for me to return or to try to find me. That’s what the Father … that’s what He has asked of me.’
The slight hesitation in his voice gives me the idea that he is not telling me the whole truth. When I confess that to him, he says that it isn’t important at the moment for me to believe him or understand everything. ‘We’re together now – that’s all that counts,’ he says.
He stands up and smiles, and when we embrace, my tears begin to flow. ‘None of this makes any sense,’ I tell him.
‘There was no other way,’ he whispers.
Panic makes me hold him away from me. ‘We can’t let the Romans know that you’ve survived. We need to return to the Galilee right away!’
‘No, I must leave the Land of Zion.’
‘Have you decided where you’ll go?’
‘Yes,’ he says.
When he caresses my cheek, I notice that his hand is still glowing. Yet it is cool.
‘Listen, dodee,’ he says, ‘I need you to go somewhere for me.’
‘Where?’
‘To Ge Hinnom.’
‘Why there?’
‘I’ve left something there for you.’
‘What?’
‘You’ll find out when you get there. Go at dawn. Do you promise?’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘He touches his fingertip to the crusted blood on my brow. ‘What happened here?’
‘A Roman cut me – to mark me.’
‘Didn’t he see you were already marked?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I marked you when we were only eight years old.’
‘You did?’
‘Only a few people could see it. Most people can’t see what’s right in front of them.’
He smiles as if he would not have had it any other way. I touch the crusted scars on his cheek. ‘Do they hurt?’ I ask.
‘No.’
‘Your disfigurement means you’ll never become high priest,’ I say that with an ironic smile, since it is not a post he would ever have wanted.
I expect him to laugh, but he starts as if he has heard pursuing footsteps. ‘I must go,’ he whispers.
‘Already?’
He nods. ‘I’m sorry.’ He hooks his arm in mine and leads me to the door, where he places his hand on my brow and blesses me, and I feel his glow entering me as a thought: I am the fire that does not burn.
He leaves me before I have a chance to bless him in return. As I watch him running away, I realize that he may never come back to me, and my legs give way, and I reach out to the wall of my home to keep from falling.
From the end of my street, Yeshua turns back to me and holds up two fingers and …
Then I awaken to find I am lying face down on my mat. When I turn over, I discover that my shutters are closed. His higher soul found a way to come to me, I think. And it was clothed in flesh so I would not be blinded by its light.
I realize then that I am gripping the calliper he gave me, and the scent of him is in my hands as if I have been holding him all night.
I reach the valley of Ge Hinnom just after sunrise. It is the monstrous refuse heap that serves all of Yerushalayim. We consider it an accursed place because children were sacrificed here to the gods of our ancient ancestors.
At this hour, the only other visitors are four pauperous children searching together over mounds of smouldering filth for shreds of food and remnants of clothing. They seem to have no trouble with the stench, but I must keep my hand over my nose and breathe through my mouth.
The Romans and wealthy Jews often discard their dead slaves here, and as I walk the valley’s eastern perimeter – searching for what Yeshua has left me – I am forced to climb high up the stony hillside to avoid two slavering mutts gorging on the corpse of what was once a woman. Beside a myrtle bush in flower, poking out from underneath a rusted coulter, is a soiled but charming puppet of a flower-seller. His roses are made out of red glass beads.
Might he be what Yeshua meant me to find?
After I put him in my pouch, the convulsive wailing of a child – far off and muffled – reaches me. I follow it to a rush-work basket hanging from a high branch of an oak tree on the hillock where infants are often left for rescue by mothers unable or unwilling to raise them. Inside is a baby in foul-smelling swaddling clothes – a girl, I soon discover. She has downy black hair and a squashed little face.
The baby girl is cold and wet and stained by her own filth, but I find that her fist around my finger is strong and purposeful – a favourable sign. Her urine, which slides warm over my fingers as I unwrap her, is neither bloody nor viscous, and its scent is sour, as it should be. I wipe her bottom wi
th oak leaves and a towel I pull from my pouch and ease her inside my tunic. I lay her belly down against my chest, where she will soak up my heat.
As I continue my search around Ge Hinnom, she begins to wail and my inability to nurse her becomes a torment – a form of injustice. Men are such limited creatures when it comes to children.
Ilana – that is what I decide to call her for the time being, since I found her in an oak tree. ‘You are in luck,’ I whisper to her as I jiggle her in my hands. ‘Mia will bring you to her orphanage and the women there will find you a wet nurse and a new home.’
I make a second complete circle around that pestilent valley, and, since I find nothing else of interest, I start calling out to Yeshua, but he neither appears nor shows me a sign.
A young woman dressed in an old robe and thick-soled shoes suddenly hails me from the steep ridge in the west. After she descends the rocky path to me, I recognize her as Salome, one of the orphanage’s child-savers. She wishes to relieve me of Ilana, and I am well aware that it would be for the best, but the child clings so desperately to me with those strong hands of hers that I cannot give her up.
Only when I have her inside my tunic again do I realize – as though jostled out of a deep sleep – that Ilana is what Yeshua left for me.
It will be many years, however, before I understand the reason why he wished for me to find your dearest mother, Yaphiel. Indeed, it will take me until after your birth.
51
I keep Yeshua’s visitation a secret from my family, since I need time to consider what he told me about his death – and mine. That means, of course, that I cannot tell Mia and my children that he intended for me to find the baby I bring home. Instead, I say that I found Ilana by accident while walking past Ge Hinnom.
Does my sister find it odd that I insist on bringing a baby into our family at the worst possible time? Her tense, brooding looks tell me that she fears that my grief may have severed my hold on reality and trapped us with a child she neither needs nor wants. She undoubtedly hopes that I shall soon discover that I am in no condition to serve as father to a newborn.
I am quite aware that a reasonable man would conclude that there could not be any occult meaning to my finding an exposed infant in Ge Hinnom. It is, after all, where mothers leave babies they wish to see rescued, and someone else – probably Salome – would have heard Ilana crying sooner or later and delivered her from danger.
A wet nurse and friend of Mia’s – Rachel – stays with us all that first day of Ilana’s new life in my home. I keep the baby with me when she is not nursing. She sleeps nearly all the time, exhausted from her ordeal, unaware that she was chosen for me.
I show off her astonishing grip to Yirmi, who laughs with admiration.
To see my son holding Ilana so tenderly is to believe that we have a future together.
I wait up for Yeshua all night, expecting him to return to see that I have carried out his wishes, but I receive no visitation or vision. At sunrise, after Rachel has had a chance to nurse Ilana, I decide to take her to visit Maryam of Magdala; she deserves to know that Yeshua’s soul clothed itself in his body and told me where to find the baby.
Neither pilgrims nor residents of Yerushalayim await me on my street; my week of notoriety has apparently ended. And so, as in times past, I do not lock the door behind me when I start for Yerushalayim.
Now that Yeshua is gone, I think, everyone must see the truth – that I never had any control over the workings of the world.
As soon as I reach the road west out of Bethany, I realize I must turn around; I cannot risk Maryam disbelieving what I had intended to recount to her and judging me mistaken or mad. I do not want her or anyone else to explain to me where Yeshua ends and I begin.
In such ways I have learned over the course of my life that there are experiences that I do not fully understand but do not wish to have explained to me. Who, after all, would permit his most cherished inner disputes to be settled by someone else?
The morning sun has risen by the time I start back towards Bethany, and it seems a much better idea to take Ilana into the countryside, where I shall begin to teach her the names of the trees and flowers of Judaea. You see, Yaphiel, every father is Adam, just as every mother is Havvah, and Yeshua has made it my joyful obligation to name the world for my new daughter.
52
I shall never know every detail of the plot against me and my family. Still, a man who has spent decades placing tiny fragments of stone together to tell stories that hold some meaning for him has his own peculiar needs and most especially a desire – ingenuous though it may be – for everything in his past and present to fit together neatly.
One thing is certain, Mia had only a sliver of time to decide between trying to save herself and my son.
It surprised me at first that the intruders wore slippers or soft-soled sandals, but then I realized that they must have had years of experience at such work. I suspect that Mia only detected their cushioned steps because the floor tiles in front of my alcove were in need of fixing and made a clinking sound when stepped on.
We are not generally aware of it, but if we are fortunate, I think, then our lives are redeemed by a few moments of deep and sacred understanding, when there is almost no time to think, and what we do is decided by forces unseen inside ourselves that know – somehow – what must be done.
The intruders did not need to break the hinges on my door because, as I have told you, I had left it unlocked that morning.
From twenty paces away, I already see that my front door is wide open. Gephen is seated inside the threshold, licking his right front paw. Only when I step to him and spot the red stains on his forehead and nose do I realize what it is he is cleaning from himself.
I grip Ilana tightly, step inside and call out to my son and sister.
My ears are tingling, listening for the slightest movement, but my house returns only silence. A sense of slowly falling tells me I ought to turn around and go for help. But if my children are in danger …
I find Grandfather Shimon lying on his back at the base of the ladder leading up to his room. His old sword has fallen from his hand, and a rose of blood has blossomed on his chest. His dull, unseeing eyes remain open.
At first I believed that an assassin had killed Shimon on entering my home. Later, I came to understand that my grandfather must have come downstairs from his room only after hearing Mia call out for Yirmi to run.
I ease my knife out of my pouch and take it in my fist. My grandfather’s brow is cold.
Yeshua gave me Ilana, so I must protect her before I go any further, I think, so I step as silently as a fawn into my alcove and slip the sleeping child into my clothes chest. She fusses, but she does not wake.
When the killers entered my home, Mia would have heard their footsteps and assumed I had returned. She would have been anxious to know if I had kept Ilana or come to my senses and left her at the orphanage.
What I later learned was that she had been with Yirmi in Marta’s workroom. They were studying her latest weaving. When Mia heard the steps coming in my front door, she smiled at Yirmi, then stepped through the doorway into her own bedroom and from there into the courtyard. Perhaps she held herself back for a moment before coming to greet me, to feel her relief at having me home more fully.
Mia told me once that I changed her life when she first held me in her arms. ‘As I cradled you, you giggled, and you kept on laughing while I made faces for you, and that sound was like finding a reason to be alive, and my heart became the exact shape and size of you.’
Everything small and fragile was sacred to Mia.
I had not known that butterflies will feed on blood. Two ivory ones flex their wings at the edge of the thick bloodstain spreading from my sister’s neck. Her head sits on the wooden table where she kept our ladles, tongs and other kitchen tools.
Mia, who took me aboard Noach’s Ark and rescued me from the Flood, who taught me that we need never be ashamed of love, wh
o was always trying to make her long arms seem shorter, who sang to me whenever …
I cannot keep the tears away. And I cannot leave her like this.
How long do I look into her dead and filmy eyes?
So this is the way you and I end. The unfairness of that is a heavy stone in my gut, and already I know I shall never rid myself of it.
What she and I never knew on all those thousands of occasions when we ate together and played with each other’s children and conversed about our parents was that we were always on the road to this violent end.
She was barefoot when she heard the intruders in my house, and her hair was down. In her left hand she still grips a woollen cat she made from felt. Its body is white and eyes are blue. It is styled after Gephen, of course. She had probably finished it this morning. I am certain it was to be her first gift to Ilana.
Her body was left where it fell, between the table and her cooking tripod.
A bird whose wings have been cut away.
That is the image that steals into my mind after I study what was done to her.
I step around her into her bedroom. It is empty. In Marta’s workroom, however, is a surprise that makes me jump back – a wounded man whom I recognize. He sits slumped by my sister’s loom. He is immense and powerful. Blood oozes on to the floor from a wound in his thigh.
‘I’ll kill you if you move!’ I cry out.
Did Mia stab him with the blade that she was using to shape her felt cat?
With the injury to his leg, he cannot possibly chase me down, but I make my knife ready in case he should make a desperate lunge.
Two much smaller men lie dead behind him. Only one of them still has his head. Both are drenched in blood. I do not recognize their faces.
‘I saw you outside Herod’s Palace on the day Yeshua was crucified,’ I tell him.
‘I … I see you there, too,’ he replies.
The Gospel According to Lazarus Page 35