The Liars' Gospel: A Novel

by Naomi Alderman

  “It didn’t mean anything, sweet. He just fell.”

  “But what did it mean?”

  He returned to this thought again and again. What did it mean that the rain fell? What did it mean that the dog died? As if the world were a book and each person and event in it had been carefully chosen, and their meanings could be understood if one only read aright.

  She and Yosef argued about him.

  “He’s always hanging around your skirts,” said Yosef, when he came in from his workshop and found Yehoshuah reading, or thinking, or whittling some wood by the fire when the other children were out playing in the orchards.

  “He’s different to other boys,” said Miryam. “He doesn’t like their rough-and-tumble games.”

  “You’re making him weak,” said Yosef. “You give in too easily.”

  “Give in what? I should throw him out of the house and force him to play?”

  “Yes! Or give him work! He’s nine, he’s old enough to work! Give him some of your jobs, working your fingers to the bone. Set him to chop the wood, or carry the water. If he wants to be a woman, let him pluck the goose!”

  “A woman? He should be like you?” said Miryam, and this was the start of their troubles.

  “Like me? What do you mean like me?”

  “Like you, never studying anymore as you did when you were young, never going to learn with the rabbi.”

  And so it went on. And Yehoshuah sat by the fire, and although he must have heard every word he said nothing, did nothing.

  As he grew to adulthood she feared, for a time, that she had done something wrong. Her fears were only calmed when she saw that her younger sons were normal. Yirmiyahu was married at seventeen. Iehuda went to the wedding canopy at twenty. Shimon, the quiet one, developed such an ardent passion for a girl from the next village that no one could hold him back and the wedding was arranged when he was barely fifteen. But although they suggested girls to Yehoshuah, he would not meet them, and though they tried to persuade him, he did not hear their words.

  As a young man, when he and Yosef could no longer be in the same home together, he began to travel. He stayed for a time among the Essenes, those men who live without women and refuse to defecate upon the Sabbath day. He took, for a year, more difficult vows. She had grandsons and granddaughters from her younger boys and the oldest was still unwed.

  He came back home for a time when he was twenty-seven. Still no woman with him, though she had hoped that after his wandering he might return with a sweet bride and surprise them all with…what? With normality at last. But no. He was odder than ever, more distant and strange. He would not meet anyone’s gaze, seemed always to be staring at something just out of view. He and Yosef argued. When would he found a family of his own? Build a house? There was that far field, if he wanted he could build himself a place there, but he could not live with them anymore, it wasn’t right, a fully grown man living like a child, waited on hand and foot by his mother.

  Yehoshuah was different now, though. Not quiet but angry, suddenly, with a violent rage that swept over his body and made him go stiff and white-faced.

  “You know nothing,” he said quietly, “old man.” And then, his voice rising to a shriek, “You know nothing, you know nothing. You. Know. Nothing!” and he picked up a pot from the table and smashed it on the ground.

  The other children were not there. They did not see what happened. Yosef and Miryam looked at the broken shards. Yehoshuah stared, with flared nostrils and rolling eyes, at his father and then darted for the door. It was three days, that time, before he returned.

  He spoke to himself. Or he heard voices. Or demons. Only sometimes—not all the time, she told her other children when they complained. He does not do it all the time. He is engaged in his studies, she said. He is reciting the words of the Torah, to keep them pure and complete in his heart. Is it not praiseworthy? Yosef looked at him like a stranger at their table. Not a son, an odd, full-grown man, whom they had taken in for no reason.

  The arguments grew worse. There came a day, if she was honest she had known it was coming, when Yehoshuah hit Yosef in a rage. Yosef had provoked it, probably. With a critical tone, angry words. And Yehoshuah rose up from his place by the fire and with the heel of his hand whacked his father hard on the temple. Yosef was a man nearing fifty and Yehoshuah was young and strong. Yosef stumbled, almost fell. Yehoshuah looked at his hand in disbelief. And Miryam found that she was saying, “Yosef! Why did you speak to him like that?” Because what will a mother not do for her son?

  After that, Yehoshuah wandered farther from their village, into the desert, for days sometimes. He had not founded a family, he had no crops to tend or harvest to reap. When he returned from the wilderness he would not say who he had seen there or what he had done. And she remembered the charming child he had been, the one who would reach his little hand out for hers and show her a lizard he had seen, or a new fern, and she wondered when she had lost him.

  Then one day, a week had passed, then two, and he did not return. For a month or two she thought he had died out there. In her dreams the scorpion returned, or its parent to exact vengeance on her son for her murder of its offspring. Her hand ached in its old wound and she thought perhaps it was a sign.

  She and Yosef quarreled about it.

  “Why were you always so hard with him?” she would say, and although she knew in her heart that there was no answer here, she could not stop. “Why could you never show him kindness?”

  “He needed less kindness from you, woman! He needed to be taught to be a man, instead of you constantly keeping him near, mothering him!”

  “I am his mother. What else should I have done?”

  And Yosef made that disgusted noise he kept specially for arguments he knew he could not win with her.

  She saw Yosef one day talking closely with the daughter of Ramatel, the blacksmith, a tall, well-built girl, but at that time she thought little of it. Her mind was occupied with chewing over Yehoshuah and what had become of him and whether she would ever hear from him or see him again, or if he had died somewhere out there in the desert and the wolves had had his bones.

  And then she heard a tale from a merchant that he had been seen in Kfar Nachum, and he was preaching and working wonders like a holy man. And they said another thing. They said he was out of his mind.

  And it is evening, and it is morning. And it is time to prepare for the Sabbath. She washes herself and the children. She bakes bread for today and for tomorrow. Just before sunset, she lights the oil lamps which will burn through the night and makes the blessing. And it is Friday morning, and it is Friday evening. The Sabbath day.

  The boy Gidon goes to pray with the men in Ephrayim’s field. She and the small children go to sit in the long barn and sing the women’s songs welcoming the Sabbath. They share out bread and wine and make the blessings on it. They drink the sweet wine made in years when they were young, the jars sealed with wax by their fathers, keeping in those long-ago summers until this day.

  Some of the women ask about Gidon. Not just, like Nechemiah’s wife, because they have a daughter who has taken an interest in him. They have heard something. The news has come that there was a small rising in Yaffo several months ago, in the autumn. A man appeared claiming to be the rightful king of Judea, the son of the king the Romans slew. He had followers, only two or three hundred, but they tried to break into the armory. The soldiers quashed the rebellion easily enough, but the man himself, along with several of his most important followers, had escaped.

  Does she think…Gidon was from Yaffo, they knew, does she think that he might be one of those men?

  She shakes her head.

  “He is what he says he is: a fool, not a liar.”

  Rahav puts a thin arm around her shoulder and hugs her.

  “We still mourn with you.”

  Rahav kisses the side of Miryam’s head. She’s a kind soul, especially with a glass of warm fragrant wine in her.

  It’s B
atchamsa who introduces a note of caution.

  “They’re looking, though,” she says. “They’ve sent out armed men as far as S’de Raphael.”

  “They won’t come this far north,” says Rahav, “not for a fugitive from Yaffo.”

  “They might,” says Batchamsa. “They just keep looking.”

  Rahav shakes her head. “One of his own people will betray him. They always do when they get scared or hungry and want to come home. In a month they’ll have found him in a cave near Yaffo and that’ll be the end of it.”

  Rahav does not say the part in the middle, Miryam notes. She does not say, “They’ll find him and then they’ll kill him and that’ll be the end of it.” Miryam supposes that this is Rahav’s kindness.

  She finds she feels a little protective of Gidon.

  In the evening, they eat with her brother Shmuel’s family. His wife has made soup and roast goat leg with wild garlic. Gidon eats with them. The village’s decision to treat him as an imbecile has faded. He has done good work on Miryam’s land. Those who work deserve to eat.

  Shmuel sets in on him again, saying,

  “But you will return to Yaffo in the spring, yes? Before Passover?”

  Gidon shifts his shoulders awkwardly. He is less comfortable here than he is with her alone. He does not talk so readily.

  “I might stay here,” he says, and then seems about to say something more, but falls silent.

  “He has been useful with the goats,” she says. “Iov can never bring them all in. We lost two over the winter. Gidon gathers them safely in.”

  Shmuel nods and takes more bread and goat covered in the thick paste of herbs and olive oil. Her brother is the patriarch now, the one who makes the decisions since her husband has gone. But he’s not an unkind man. He dips his bread into the green oil and swallows it, leaving a few emerald flecks in his beard.

  “But you’ll tell me when you get tired of him, yes?” he says, then grins widely, “so we can send him on his way with courtesy, of course.”

  They said he was out of his mind. This, they came to tell her. The sympathetic women from the villages nearby came, when they passed through for market day. “Passing through” was what they said, though Natzaret was a mile or more out of their way. People who had not visited her for five years came to tell her that her son was mad. Just as a kindness.

  He had desecrated the Temple, they said, and she could not believe it. He had loved going to the Temple as a boy, buying the cake for a meal offering in the outer courtyard and accompanying the sacrifice.

  He had done work on the Sabbath, they said, and she laughed and said, “Yehoshuah? Who never did a stick of work the other six days of the week?” And they laughed too, because nothing is funnier than a mother mocking her own son, and agreed that perhaps on this point she was right.

  Yosef, she noticed, did not laugh at this joke.

  As they were getting ready for sleep, he said to her, “It’s not enough that he’s run away? Now he brings disgrace on the family?”

  She did not bother to argue. He wanted to lie with her that night, but she refused him, and he made that special noise again, of unconquerable exasperation.

  Those friends who loved her best told her simply that Yehoshuah was changed. That he seemed frightening sometimes, or frightened himself. Those who loved her best told her that it had been hard to recognize him, that something in him had begun to work differently, that even his face was changed. One said she heard he had been questioned by the Roman guard but they had not held him.

  “You should go to talk to him,” she said to Yosef one night.

  He looked at her.

  “It’s your job,” she said, because this sometimes called him to his duty. “You are his father. You should go and see that all is well with him. I’m worried about him.”

  “You’ve always worried about him over the wrong things.”

  “Rahav said she’d heard that the guard questioned him. You should go there. Talk to him. Bring him home. Please.”

  He stared at her levelly. His beard was all gray now, and his eyes wrinkled and his skin burnished, and where now was the young strong husband who had lifted her up with one hand? And had loved her? She had thought that he had loved her.

  “No,” he said, “he will have no more from me.”

  “Then I will go myself.”

  He breathed in and out. She saw in his face the same lines as Yehoshuah’s face. The same angry stiff mouth, the same twitching brow. They had the same anger, that was the problem.

  “I forbid it. Do you understand? You are not to bring disgrace upon us. I forbid it.”

  She looked at him. Whatever he had been, he was not it anymore.

  “I understand,” she said.

  It was around two weeks after that when Yosef went north to take a look at some lumber and to trade. And she called her grown sons to tell them what she intended, and they agreed to it.

  She will not go with her family to Jerusalem this Passover. Her brother Shmuel will make a sacrifice for her. She and her sister and Shmuel’s wife will stay behind, as they did when they were young women with many small children to care for. But still, although she will not eat the sacrificed lamb with them in Jerusalem, there are duties to be performed. The house must be cleaned, every jar that has held flour must be emptied and scoured.

  Gidon helps her, carrying the wool blankets back from the stream when they are heavy and sodden and throwing them over the rope she has tied between two trees. He climbs into the back of the clay-and-reed flour store and washes the stone floor, bent double, inhaling the flour dust, so that when he comes out his eyes are red and his back cracks as he stands up. They do not speak of the anniversary that is fast approaching until the very eve of Passover.

  The day before Passover is time to bake the matzot—the flat unrisen bread that they will eat for the next week. The flour cakes will last overnight, she will wrap them in cloth and put them in a stone jar to keep off insects and mold. She puts the flat stone into the fire to heat, takes three measures of flour from the jar and pulls up a bucket of cold clear water from the well. She begins to mix the water into the flour—swiftly, because her mother taught her that matzot should be made as quickly as possible—pulling it into a dough, forming round flat cakes, pummeling them out with the heel of her hand, stretching the dough to thinness. She makes dots in the surface of each cake with a wooden point, then quickly tosses them onto the heated stone, where they immediately begin to bubble and crisp, becoming fragrant with wood smoke and with flakes of burnt flour on the surface.

  When she looks up, she sees that Gidon is watching her. She does not know how long he has been there. He watches her so tenderly. He must have seen his own mother perform this task.

  “We ate them, the last meal with Yehoshuah,” he says at last.

  Her blood is chilled and her bones are old ash. She does not want to know what they did. She wants to know everything. Her mouth tries to say, “Don’t tell me.” Her breath longs to beg him for every detail. She is thirsty for every moment she missed. She wants to ask if there was a crumb in his beard from the unrisen bread. Did he remember to change his clothes before the festival started? Would anyone but a mother notice? The desire, always coiled in her, always ready to pounce, springs now: the desire to wail and say why was I not there at his last meal, why did I not force him to come home?

  All this rises up in her. She throws another flat round matzo cake onto the hot stone. She looks at Gidon.

  “I miss him too,” the boy says.

  And she cannot help herself. There are always tears in her now. Her voice cracks and she says, “You do not know what it means to miss him.”

  She picks raw dough from her fingertips and lifts the flat matzo from the stone.

  Gidon’s eyes, too, are filled with tears.

  He says, “I have not your right.”

  She finishes the baking, wraps the flatbreads in a cloth. Her sister will arrive soon with the lamb, so she
banks the fire up high, with the hyssop grass and herbs she has dried for the occasion. Gidon gathers armfuls of green branches to make a smoky fire, separating out the dry logs which will burn long and evenly.

  She says, “Did he ever speak of me?”

  Gidon pauses and thinks. She can see that he wants to be kind to her.

  “He spoke about his father,” he says, “or he told stories about a good father, and that father I think is God, who reigns above. There are many stories and sayings he told about fathers.”

  “But not mothers?” she says.

  He shakes his head slowly, and she can see the thought is only now occurring to him.

  “He told a story of a widow,” he says. “Perhaps that widow called you to mind?”

  “Perhaps,” she says.

  She believes Gidon that her son didn’t talk of her, or ask for her, or even think of her. He had distanced himself from her deliberately a long time before.

  People said he was out of his mind.

  They agreed to journey to see him speak. Word came that he had circled round in a wide loop, through Hoshaya and Cana towards Emek. It was a long trek—a quarter of a day or a little more. Yosef would be away for several days longer and they need never tell him where they’d been. It was a bad business, to lie to him, but the brothers all agreed, and if the younger ones blurted something out, they could say that they had imagined it, dreamed it. Yehoshuah was their oldest brother and they wanted to see him.

  They took the donkey, loaded it with water skins, bread and cheese and walked. At S’de Nachal, they met a woman on the way, her hair uncovered, carrying a baby at her breast wrapped in a woolen blanket.

  She said, “Are you going to see the teacher?”

  Iov opened his mouth to answer but Miryam interrupted him.

  “What teacher is that?” she said.

  The woman checked on the baby, fussing and pawing, its little hand waving as it struggled to latch on to the nipple. Though her breast was covered, the older boys looked away, disgusted or embarrassed.