The Liars' Gospel: A Novel

by Naomi Alderman

  She smiles. “Still.”

  “So he’ll tell them, and they’ll wish you that your other sons live.”

  This is how life continues. Learning to bear the unbearable.

  Through the family feast Gidon watches and is mindful and says nothing. The family ask about him. She says, “He was lost in the mountains when the snow fell. He is staying here until he is well enough to make the journey home.” And they glance at him, looking his rangy form up and down, seeing that he appears quite well, and they say nothing. It is Passover, when it is especially meritorious to take in the stranger and the wanderer. Some of them remind her of what happened this time last year, and some say nothing. She finds they cannot make it harder for her either way. At least they do not ask about her husband. They are mostly concerned with tales of the soldiers still scouring the country for the last of the rebels from Yaffo. They are coming nearer to Galilee because their search has not been fruitful farther south. The family shake their heads and worry. They eat the unleavened bread and drink wine.

  When she wakes the next morning, Gidon has completed his chores and has a soup bubbling on the fire. He is cutting some vegetables for it—onions and leeks.

  He smiles. “One who helps a widow,” he quotes, “isn’t his portion doubled or tripled under heaven? And she who gives succor to an orphan will find herself blessed, and God will turn His face to her.”

  She frowns. She thinks—I could tell him, and then he will know all my sorrow.

  “I am not a widow,” she says. “As far as I know.”

  Gidon’s hands stop working.

  “He was angry with me. I disobeyed him too often. I was a stubborn wife, and people told him that I had disobeyed his wishes in…a certain matter. He put me away,” she speaks quickly and quietly, “he took another wife and moved her to another village. He gave me the keritut, the contract of divorce, and told me I was permitted to other men.”

  She is not sorry he’s gone. Apart from the strength in his shoulders, she barely misses him. She wants her children close to her and she wants her son back, and Yosef and his new young wife seem the least of her concerns.

  Gidon says nothing. He knows she has told him a sad and lonely thing. Most women in her position would lie and say that the husband was dead.

  She heard that Yehoshuah preached a teaching which had never been heard before. Many of his teachings were not new. He told them well, and with a force and skill that impressed the listeners, but the teachings themselves were as familiar to her as her own skin.

  She herself had taught him the famous story of Rabbi Hillel. A man came to the two great rabbis, Rabbi Hillel and Rabbi Shammai, and made of each of them the same request: “Teach me the whole of the Torah while I stand on one leg.” Rabbi Shammai chased him off with a broom. But Rabbi Hillel said: “Stand on one leg and I will teach you.” And the man stood on one leg. And Rabbi Hillel said: “That which is hateful to you, do not do to other people. That is the whole of the law: all the rest is commentary. Go and learn.”

  When Yehoshuah said, “Treat others as you hope they’d treat you,” it was not a new teaching. Rabbi Hillel was an old man when Yehoshuah was born.

  But he taught a new thing, one of the women from Kfar Nachum told her. He said that if a man divorces his wife and takes another, it is the same as adultery. This saying was popular among women. They passed it one to another. Every village had some woman whose husband had put her away, scraping a living in her old age on the goats and land their marriage contract made him give her, with no rest for her aching bones even though she had borne him sons and daughters.

  She wondered if this was a secret message for her, a sign that he thought of her still. But he did not send word to her. He did not speak about Yosef. He talked of having another father, spoke of God as his father. And she thought: he wants me to go to him again. Surely this means he wants to see me.

  It is a curious thing, the growth of trust between two people. When two strangers meet, there is no trust. They may fear one another. They do not know if one is a spy, or a traitor, or a thief. There is no dramatic moment which marks the transition from mistrust to trust. Like the approach of summer, it walks a little farther on every day, so that when we come to notice it, it has already occurred. Suddenly one notices that, yes, this is a person whom I would have watch over my flocks, my children, my secrets.

  She is moved by the softness of Gidon’s features. His beard has hardly begun to come in, just a few patches of fuzz like a mountain dog in molt. His eyelashes are long, and his smell is the sweet thick scent of a young man in whom the sap is just rising. His elbows and knees are sharp, his shoulders are stiff. There is a wanting in him, and not yet an understanding of what he wants. Her son was just so when he was twenty. His tender eyes were just so. The way he holds the cup of warm liquid, cradling it close to him, rubbing his knuckles in the cold, he was just like this boy.

  Her heart comes close to him. She says nothing more of her husband. For a long time, he says nothing more of her son. He works. They bank the fire down after the evening meal and talk of what could be done with the western field next year.

  She went to Yehoshuah the winter before Gidon arrived in Natzaret. It was not such a harsh winter, there was no snow. She had heard that he had a mighty crowd of followers with him, perhaps five hundred people traveling in a great convoy. They were circling near to Natzaret, not half a day’s journey, and she left the littlest children with Shimon’s wife and wrapped woolen robes around her and borrowed a mule from Rahav and went to see her son.

  It had been many a year, she thought, since she had last made such a journey alone. A young woman would never travel so unprotected. But there was a fierce freedom to it. Who could rob her now? What would they take from her? She had water, and hard bread, and a bag of apples. She kept to the main roads. She told her sons where she had gone and when to expect her return.

  She ruminated as she rode. There was such an anger in her heart, she hadn’t known it was there until she was alone on her mule, riding the iron-hard miles. She had never been a bad mother, never truly a bad wife. She’d cared for her children—she flexed her stiff fingers, reminding herself how much it had cost her to care—had made loaves of bread and meal cakes and soups and roasted meat and dried fruits, had washed the children and kept them free from disease, had lain with her husband even when she was tired or unwilling because these are the duties of a wife and a mother. She had vanished into it and not accounted it a loss. This is who she was: a mother.

  And this child could not pay her the duties of a son? Not to visit her in glory with his mighty crowd of men? Not to give her a place at his table? Not to write to her or send word to her after all she had done? From the first red scored line that had popped open across her belly when she grew big with him to the last bowl of soup she had made for him before he vanished, was all of this nothing?

  Her soul grew bitter as the miles passed and when she arrived at the encampment—there was no mistaking it, five hundred travelers make smell and noise and smoke—she felt as tough and unyielding as the frozen earth.

  “Where is the tent of Yehoshuah of Natzaret?” she said to a Roman hanger-on with fine clothes.

  “Who are you to ask?”

  “I am his mother,” she said.

  The first they know of it is that the long barn is on fire. The barn at the edge of the village, the first one you come to if you’re walking from the south. There are cries in the street of “fire, fire” and Miryam runs out like everyone else, carrying her bucket, ready to be part of a chain down to the river. It has been dry these past few weeks—a stray cinder from a careless fire could have set the barn ablaze.

  They begin to run down the hill to the barn, barefooted mostly on the chalk-dry baked earth. Calling to one another that they should make for the river to bring water. And they see the crested plumes and the glittering spears and they hear the sound of the phalanx. And they are afraid.

  It is only a scoutin
g party, ten men with a guide who speaks the native language. Rome does not send its finest and best to seek out a small village sixty-five miles from Jerusalem. But even a scouting party brings with it the authority of those who sent it, the invisible chain stretching back from these ten to the centurions garrisoned at the capital, and from there to the Prefect, and from there to the Emperor himself. If these men are not satisfied, others will come. If those are not satisfied, more men will come. Eventually Rome will have its answer, or the place will be reduced to a bloody smear upon smoldering earth.

  This is why they have burned the barn. It is not your barn, they are saying. It is ours. Rome owns you.

  They come to a halt in the town square. The people gather there too. There is nothing to do now about the barn or the stores that will be lost.

  The leader of the soldiers makes a brief statement. The people of the village do not understand the language. Some of them, those who go to the larger cities to trade, have learned a few words, but this speech is fast and complex.

  They know the translator. He is a man who works for the tax overseer in Galilee. They have seen him often. He never brings good news. It is no surprise to see him now with the Roman soldiers; he has come before with mercenaries to exact his payments.

  This time, he attempts to pretend that he is their friend. The Romans do not understand what he is saying, the people do not understand what the Romans have said. There is no way to be sure that he is even communicating the true message.

  “They’ve brought me here,” he says, “because they’re looking for people who fled Yaffo. In the uprising a few months ago, I know you heard about it. Now, I’ve tried to reason with them, tried to persuade them. You’re good people, you pay your taxes on time, you don’t make trouble. But they’ve heard the rumor that a boy from Yaffo is living in the village now. A new boy. And I’m sure you don’t want to harbor known criminals, not in a quiet place like Natzaret! So my best advice is, hand him over. They’ll take him away and ask him questions and leave you alone. You might even have time to save some of the”—he inclines his head faintly towards the barn—“some of it, perhaps.”

  They look around at one another. Gidon is not there, he is in the hills with the new lambs, he will be there for a day or two probably. Miryam wonders if any of them will speak.

  “He is living with me,” she says, loudly and suddenly, surprising even herself a little. “But he is not the man you’re seeking.”

  The tax collector smiles. The gold ring glitters on his thumb.

  “Mother Miryam, I would never have thought it of you! Well, hand him over and we’ll be on our way.”

  Miryam sees her brother Shmuel shift in the crowd. He would go and get the boy now, she realizes. He would mount a pony and gallop into the hills to find him and give him to the Romans.

  “No,” she says, “he is not the man you want.”

  Shmuel’s body stiffens. He tries to catch her eye, to mouth something to her.

  “We’ll have to judge that ourselves, Mother Miryam.”

  “No,” she says.

  And something in the atmosphere turns. Perhaps it is that one of the soldiers fingers his spear, not understanding the conversation but hearing something in her tone.

  The lead soldier bends to whisper a word or two in the tax collector’s ear. The man nods.

  “If you can’t produce him, Mother Miryam,” he says, and his voice is hard now, “we will take you instead. For questioning.”

  She tightens the muscles in her stomach. She will need to lie.

  When she came in to see him, she found she was singing a song under her breath. It was a psalm, set to a tune the goat herders sing. She used to sing it to Yehoshuah when he was a tiny baby and perhaps some part of her thought that it would turn him back to the child he was, and he would remember how he used to need her.

  He was sitting with three of his men, and when he saw her he frowned and she realized that for a moment he did not recognize her. Oh, this was heavy and cold. But at last, within a heartbeat, his face broke into a smile.

  “Mother,” he said.

  They walked together, to soothe her sore legs, stiff from the ride. She told him at first all the news of the family, the nieces and nephews and the doings of the village. He listened but he seemed distant. He replied, “That is good,” to news of a good harvest or “Those are sad tidings,” to a death in childbed.

  “And what of you?” she said at last. “Here you are, a mighty man with many followers.”

  She took his arm in hers and hugged it. “Are you going to set up a great school and be a teacher? I would be so proud to tell the people at home that you had founded a college, taken a wife…” She lets her voice trail off.

  He paused his walking. She stopped too. He bent down so his face was level with hers.

  “Mother,” he said, “God has called me. He has told me to go to Jerusalem at Passover, because it is time for a new heaven and a new earth.”

  His eyes were unblinking. His face shone like the moon. There was a smudge of dirt in the center of his forehead.

  She felt suddenly impatient.

  “Jerusalem, yes, very well. A good place to find new followers, but then what? Will you wander like this forever? Like a tent-dweller, with no place to find rest?”

  “God will show me. God Himself and no other.”

  She frowned.

  “You should come back to Galilee. We have fine pastures, the fishing is good. Bring your people there. Settle. Be a great man in Galilee. Yes!”

  “It is not mine to decide. I follow the will only of God.”

  And this enraged her. Thinking of all she had done for him and how he was as stupid as a stone.

  “Grow up,” she said. “The will of God is all very well, but we must also plan for ourselves. Be a man.”

  “Like my father?”

  “I will bring your father!” She could not control herself now, she took any weapon to throw at him. “He will come here with your brothers and they will bring you back home and stop all this nonsense!”

  Yehoshuah looked at her benignly. She felt afraid of him. What a foolishness, to be afraid of her own small boy.

  “I love my father,” he said.

  “That is not what you used to say,” she snapped back.

  “I have learned a great many things,” he said.

  “And you have not learned to send for your mother, or send her word that you are well, or write to her, or give her the honored place at your table.”

  He drew her to him and kissed her on the top of her head. “Ima,” he said, “you will see such things, you will be amazed.”

  But he would not come home.

  “Gidon is my grandson,” she says.

  The tax collector knows her, and all her children and grand-children. He does not believe her. She can see his disbelief in his face. She will have to try harder.

  “He is my grandson, son of my son Yehoshuah, who died. He got him on a whore in Yaffo many years ago and I did not know it till last year, when he came”—here she makes her voice waver like an old, grieving woman—“when he came and found me and told me signs and I saw in his face that he must be that child.”

  The tax collector laughs. He mutters something to the soldiers and they chuckle too. The mood has changed again. She does not know what they are joking about. That she has taken in the son of a whore, who could be any man’s? That she boasts of it? That she has been deceived by an obvious fraudster looking for an easy home and meals provided? Perhaps among all this they will not notice another lie.

  “He came last year, you say? About when?”

  “In the summer,” she says quickly, “between the Feast of Seven Weeks and New Year.”

  Around the square, there are looks from one to another, another to a third. It is a hard thing she is asking of them. If none of them contradict her, they will all be accomplices. If Rome finds out they have lied, the whole village will burn.

  The tax collector
looks at them suspiciously, waiting to see if any will break. No one speaks.

  “Well,” he chuckles, “if you have a whore’s son in your home, don’t let us detain you! Perhaps you find him as skillful as his mother!” He chuckles to himself, then, evidently disappointed by the lack of laughter from the crowd, translates his joke for the soldiers, who are as amused by it as he.

  No one speaks to her after the soldiers leave. Rahav and Amala and Batchamsa are all there, but they do not embrace her or comfort her. Their looks are wary.

  At last, Rahav says, “You have put us in danger, Miryam.”

  It’s true. She will have to set it right.

  Gidon comes down from the mountain after two days. He has heard what she’s done before he sees her, she can read it in his solemn face.

  He looks different now from the way he was when he first came to Natzaret. Working outdoors has weathered and darkened his skin. He is not so thin, that’s her good stews and bread. The place where they took off his fingers has healed to a fine silver scar across the end of his right hand. The way he works now you’d think he’d been born like that. He will be all right, she tells herself, when he has to leave.

  She gives him lentil soup with flatbread and he eats it greedily. A thin dribble of the sunny liquid drips down the scraggly beard on his chin. He finishes, and she tries to take the bowl from him to wash, but he holds on to it with his maimed right hand, the three fingers stronger than both her arms.

  He says, “Why didn’t you tell them where I was?”

  She lets go of the bowl. She sits down opposite him.

  He says, “I didn’t come here to bring danger to you all. That isn’t what I wanted, I didn’t…”

  He slams his good hand down on the table. The earthenware pot jumps. He reminds her of her son at that moment. The memory brings a sickness to her stomach, and the sickness makes her angry.