‘I have.’
She looks at the other man. ‘And does he look like his twin?’
Saul shakes his head. ‘No, my lady, he is light.’
Does she have knowledge of their ancient faith? Of how the presence of the Lord burned Moses the Lawgiver’s face? She lives in Judea but Saul is aware that this newly raised city faces west and breathes the winds coming off the Great Sea—belongs to Greece and to Rome, not to Israel.
Her brow has creased at his words. They are not to her liking. Instead, she turns to the other man. ‘Do you resemble your twin?’
And quickly, without shifting her gaze, she demands of Saul, ‘You will translate for me.’
He must look at the man, he must do as he is asked. He turns to Thomas and speaks in Syrian. ‘She asks if you resemble your twin, if you are of similar countenance and shape to the Saviour.’
The man’s first response surprises both Saul and the lady. He lets out a great burst of laughter. And again is racked by a bout of coughing. He sweeps the back of his hand across his mouth, and wipes it on the front of his ragged tunic.
He turns to Saul. ‘I will answer, brother, but first you will give me my name.’
Saul is furious. The obstinate goat knows that it is forbidden for Saul to speak his name.
Saul glances at the lady. Her frown has deepened, her suspicions raised by their conversation.
Saul turns to the man. Is it indeed a resemblance to light that he sees? Or is it that, despite the old man’s tough skin and silver-flecked hair, in the dark, challenging eyes looking straight at him out of that determined face, he sees a likeness to that young girl who’d declared so long before: ‘If you are without sin, then cast your stone’?
Pride and envy; they are Saul’s great burdens. With humble grace and gratitude he asks, ‘Thomas, do you resemble your twin?’
Thomas raises his hand, as if examining it in the stark morning sunlight. ‘Tell her that my hands are larger and rougher. That my nose is broad and his is fine. But yes, we are unmistakably brothers.’
Saul is about to speak when Thomas interrupts him.
‘I am a peasant and he was a teacher. Our different work has made of us different men. If he were standing next to me she would know him immediately. By his light.’
‘They are brothers,’ Saul explains to the lady, ‘but this man before you is rougher and of the land. Our Saviour is a teacher and he is bathed in light. It is the light, the breath of the Lord that matters, not his human form.’
Her next movement stuns them. She drops from the bench and wraps her arms around Thomas’s feet. Now Saul knows why she banished the guards. Such abandonment and shamelessness can only be considered madness.
‘He was raised from the dead. That is what they say. Is that the truth?’
‘Yes,’ Saul answers, ‘that is the great and singular truth.’
Her hands have raised the mud-stained hem of Thomas’s smock and she is rubbing her face in the filthy rag. She does not care; she kisses it, speaking as she does so, but her words are muffled by the material.
As if aware of her recklessness, she lets go of the man’s feet. But she stays kneeling on the stone.
‘Ask him. I want to hear it from him. Did he see his brother resurrected? Did he see him die nailed to the gallows and then did he see him rise from his grave?’
He cannot look at Thomas. Saul speaks as if into a void. ‘She asks if Yeshua was resurrected. She asks if you were witness to this great reawakening.’
At this, Thomas falls to a crouch before her and, risking great punishment, he touches her face. She doesn’t recoil. He holds her gaze.
‘Tell her, brother, that the rising from death is not what matters. It’s his teachings that matter. There are brothers that claim they saw him resurrected. I have not.’
He turns his face to Saul now, and though there is exultation, Saul also sees the greater anguish.
‘But those who say they saw him rise did not see him die. They fled. I was there and I watched him die. And his suffering brought the Spirit into the world. That I can swear. Tell her that, Saul.’
Saul swallows, firms his resolve. This world, this evil world, is not enough. He has staked his faith to a greater truth.
‘My lady,’ he answers, ‘he says that Jesus the Saviour suffered and died on the crucifix and then was awoken on the third day. In body and in spirit. He attests to this. We all attest to this.’
He senses the perturbations of the man next to him, the tensing of his body. Saul has to be careful to convince the matron before him of their truth: it is her husband who holds their lives in his hands. Or is Thomas wincing because he has heard that dreadful Greek word that he must know by now, that obscene word now made sacred: crucifixion?
The lady is breathing heavily but her eyes are sharp. The meditation she clearly is drawing from his words keeps Saul silent.
Finally, she nods, as if having fully comprehended his words.
‘I have three sons. If I immerse them in water as it is said your cult insists on, will they live forever?’
Saul’s heart is thrilled. They are bringing the world to the Lord. ‘Yes,’ he answers gladly, his eyes, his mouth, his very form, smiling, ‘they will indeed be with the Lord in eternity.’
‘Will he do this for me?’
Saul’s calm is upturned and the spark of jealousy—that tinder that ignites another sin, pride—burns within his chest. It is unworthy.
He turns to Thomas. ‘She wishes you to baptise her sons.’
‘Are they of age?’
He translates this to the lady. She nods again.
‘Then I will do so,’ Thomas replies.
The Lady Drusilla carefully, elegantly, rises to her feet. Saul fights the desire to help her. She has touched Thomas but he cannot assume such liberty, cannot risk anger by laying hands upon her.
‘I have lost a son, my beautiful boy, my Julius.’
She speaks to Thomas, as if the strength of her emotion will be enough for him to understand her words. ‘If we are initiated into your cult,’ she continues, her eyes filling with tears, ‘will he too find salvation? Will he too be—’ she pauses, struggles to release the strange and perplexing words ‘—resurrected?’
It is as if a fever has erupted, ruthless and all-consuming, taking Saul’s strength. The immoral and godless murals have come alive, the false gods surging like waves. He knows that he is in rigor, the fever seeps from his mouth and he cannot speak. He feels arms around him. And then there is blackness.
Saul comes to, once again being held by Thomas. The walls are again solid. The lady is seated on the stone bench and is looking away from them, as if embarrassed by his loss of dignity and control.
One of the guards has returned with a goblet, the gold-leaf surface intricately sketched with images of satyrs and maidens. Ignoring the hideous relief, Saul drinks gratefully from the wine.
When he has emptied the cup, she dismisses the lad and points to the place beside her. ‘You may sit.’
With profuse thanks and apologies, he sits beside her. She and Saul are both careful not to touch.
‘Paul—’ she says his name firmly, in Greek ‘—please answer my question. Will your god raise my child?’
His doubt reawakens. How can he be worthy of the burden his Saviour has placed upon him—of bringing Rome to Israel? Saul knows the law and the prophets, the traditions and the hopes of his people. He knows that this break in the world was inaugurated at Creation and it is the promise that a Son of Man who was nailed to wood would be awoken on the third day. And with this rupture, as in the previous miracle of the parting of the sea that led Israel from slavery to the Promised Land, the Strangers were now also being led to Israel. But the dead idolators are lost. They are only promised to death, outcasts of both the old covenants and the new. Saul cannot speak.
The lady has dared shame. She has grasped his hand. ‘Ask him,’ she pleads, her eyes on the uncomprehending Thomas. ‘Ask him.�
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And Saul is once more in the light—his doubt and fear have taken flight. He understands now why he has been bonded to this man, who was once the most beloved of disciples and is now the most accursed. Saul marvels again at the magnitude of the Lord’s order, and the wisdom of His justice.
He turns to Thomas. ‘She had a son, his name was Julius. He has died and she is desperate to know if he too will be raised in the kingdom to come.’
Thomas doesn’t know scripture and he doesn’t have learning. He has been driven first from family and then from home. All out of loyalty to a brother whose meaning, in his suffering and in his death and in his reawakening, Thomas is too clod-headed, too wild, too stubborn to comprehend and too doubting to believe. But this Thomas is beaming.
‘Tell her that her son is already there,’ he urges Saul. ‘Tell her that our Lord is kind and loves the world. Tell her that our Lord is a shepherd who cares for every single one of His flock. Tell her that we are each and every one of us saviours if we proclaim this truth. Tell her that was the meaning of my twin’s teachings.’
And Saul, translating, tells Thomas’s truth and denies his own. ‘Yes,’ he says to the lady, ‘he says that your son too will be awoken to the Lord.’
The lady is sobbing, on her knees, kissing first Thomas’s and then Saul’s feet. Her tears flow without end. But finally the tears stop. She is exhausted but unshackled—the sadness that he first saw in her eyes has taken flight.
‘Thank you,’ she says. ‘I will guarantee your release.’
They are not returned to their prison cell. Instead, they are moved to an outdoor area where one of the guards, with bad grace, brings a cauldron of heated water, places it at their feet and gruffly orders them to wash. Saul and Thomas strip off their ragged and soiled tunics and greedily scoop the warm water over their bodies, washing away the grime, the filthy layers of crusted dirt and sweat, the husks of crushed lice and fleas. As Saul scrubs at his face he glances at the other man. He had once thought Thomas invincible, and indeed, for a long time, the Twin had seemed defiant of age; the power of his chest and his back had not weakened, the sturdiness of his jaw, the lion-like strength held within him had not depleted—it was said of him by the other apostles that he was so beloved by Yeshua that he would never grow old. But in the soul-crushing ever-darkness of the prison, old age had stealthily pursued him, and old age has won.
Saul has no idea for how many moons Thomas had been secluded in the cell before his arrival. And in the grim gloom of their gaol it is impossible to calculate the passing of time: their incarceration together feels like an age. No wonder the man’s lungs burn and weaken. Such misery will be carved and written on a body. It is visible in the white clutches of hair over Thomas’s chest and loins, in the sharp lines that scar his face. This, of course, would not be enough to weaken him. It is hunger that has been his most ruthless foe. The man’s frame is pitifully slumped, his arms and limbs unbearably thin. Skin hangs loose over his bones. Saul knows that he must also appear more ravaged and older. But even so, such was Thomas’s vitality that he feels a great and resounding pity for the man. The shadow of death covers him, even in the fierce sunlight where they stand.
Sensing Saul’s eyes upon him, Thomas looks up from where he is washing his feet and he smiles.
Remembering the oath taken against this blasphemer, Saul forces his heart to harden. He looks away.
Clean, each dressed in goat-hair tunics, they sit again in the vast room in which the Lady Drusilla received them. This time Saul isn’t disturbed by the paintings and friezes, the statues, the ornate decorations, the jewels and the gold. Cross-legged on the stone floor, he looks directly across at the naked form of the great and most respected of Caesars, the revered Augustus. He silently mouths the words of the prophets and in doing so begins to chuckle at the great foolishness of the Strangers. Assyria made its kings gods and Babylon made its kings gods and Persia made its kings gods and Greece made its kings gods and now they were all vanquished and gone, replaced by the Roman kings who believed themselves gods. And in that chuckle, in the breath between its emergence and its passing, a miracle occurs. A shadow falls across the wall, then another, and both intersect over the face of the Caesar as if to blind him. The shadows take the form of the Roman gallows, they make a giant cross against the wall, and all that was colour and sparkle is gone and all that remains is just the white of the light and the shadow of the cross.
In his elation, Saul dares to touch Thomas’s knee, to draw the man’s attention to the promise of the Lord written across the vainglory of the idols. Saul starts weeping at the immensity of what has just been given to him: as if he were Noah at the foot of the first rainbow or Abraham in the dazzling light of Mount Moriah. This gift, this grace, emboldens him and justifies everything—every shame, every rebuke, every insult and every curse, every lashing, every stoning and, even more powerfully, it assuages and vindicates his exile. He is too stunned to speak, but he insistently pushes Thomas’s knee to make him see.
‘What is it, scholar?’
With the other’s words, the light dissipates and the painted faces and garish idols return. But though it lessens it is not gone for it cannot ever be extinguished. It is all that will be left when the world falls.
‘Truly,’ he answers Thomas, ‘he is returning.’
The other man’s breath is patient and long. ‘He has come,’ he says quietly.
And this time Saul is not angered by the man’s mulishness. Again, as it was when they were stripped naked for their washing, in the tragic poverty of their flesh, he experiences only mercy for the other. This hollow world that Thomas believes in is the only world that he will know.
‘Brother,’ says Saul, ‘I forgive you.’
There is no reply, only the deep, congested wheezing of the old man next to him. Thomas, cross-legged like Saul, has his palms open and is staring at them as if seeking revelation.
Thomas abruptly slaps both palms against the tiled floor. The booming echoes around the chamber; a swallow drinking at the fountain quivers at the sound and flees to the apex of the ceiling, searching and finding the light and disappearing towards the sun.
‘We should be grandfathers.’ Thomas’s voice is hushed but the tone is low and rumbling, as if a great anger is being contained. ‘We should be with our ageing wives, bouncing a grandchild on our laps. We should be proud of having lived in this world and having provided for our children and their children—that we have done everything in our power to bring good to this world.’
He turns and looks at Saul, and the haunting in his eyes makes Saul look away.
‘What have we accomplished, brother?’
The peace and grace and forgiveness that Saul was feeling only a few moments before is seeping and vanishing, as wine leaks inexorably out of a punctured skin. He knows he has to try to bring this condemned man back to the light. This must also be part of the Lord’s purpose. Why else have such bitter combatants been placed together? He must try.
‘We are preparing for the kingdom to come. We are witnessing the birth of something greater than ourselves.’ Saul hesitates, inhales, and forces the next words out. ‘Do you know how much I hated your brother? I was glad to hunt down anyone who followed him. I didn’t want a feeble saviour nailed to a cross.’ And Saul finds himself whispering, and in doing so he recalls the ancient humiliation. ‘I detested him,’ he hisses. ‘I wanted a hero, I wanted a leader, I wanted a saviour who would set us free!’
Thomas’s face is implacable. With a jerk of his chin—is it scorn? curiosity?—he indicates that Saul should continue.
‘Thomas, your brother appeared to me after his death. To teach me that he did indeed set us free. I cannot remake the world and I cannot renounce truth. You deny James, you deny Peter, you deny the Magdalena and John, you deny me.’
A surge of anger overwhelms Saul. He makes his hands fists not to submit to it.
‘He loved you, you were his beloved disciple, the first t
o follow him. All I’ve heard is how much he loved you, Thomas. How can it be that the one he loved the most is the one who most doubts him?’
The man opposite him releases a moan of such agony it could shake the foundations of the earth. ‘If what you speak is truth, then why doesn’t he show himself to me? Why has he abandoned me?’
And this time it is Thomas who seems driven to convince Saul, it is Thomas on his knees, taking his companion’s face between his rough hands, forcing Saul to look at him as he speaks, his words tumbling and rushing in agitation and purpose. ‘You weren’t there, Saul, I was—and you didn’t know him as the arrogant prick who snubbed us because he was learned and we were still peasants and he was righteous and we were sinners.’
Softly, with a loving smile, Thomas slaps Saul’s face. ‘I wager you too, eh, that you too were a vain little shit? I can imagine your family got sick of your book reading, of your proselytising.’
Thomas has closed his eyes. Saul knows that he is conjuring the Saviour as a boy, shaping and rebuilding memory.
‘I didn’t care at all for his sanctimonious preaching. But my father and my mother, may they rest in eternal peace, they were alarmed when he returned from the priests and the teachers. They were scared he’d go over to the rebels, or to the Zealots.’
Thomas has his eyes closed, still under the enchantment of memory; but he too is aware enough to speak quietly now. They are in a Roman fortress, and as all conquered peoples say of the Romans, their walls have ears.
‘Yeshua was full of talk, of the end of Rome and the rebirth of Israel. “The Saviour is coming, the Saviour is coming”—that’s all we ever heard. My father ordered me to go with him, and our mother also begged me to look after him, to make sure he was protected. So I followed him—that’s how I became the first disciple. I didn’t believe a word of it. All during our long summers, Nazareth was a rank stench from the rotting of the crucified. From childhood I had witnessed what the Romans could do. I knew the words of our prophets didn’t fucking scare them.’
With that obscenity, Thomas drops his hold of Saul.
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