The Liars' Gospel: A Novel

by Naomi Alderman

  Along the roads to Jerusalem, the Romans had erected wooden frames—two planks crossed, one over the other, a long upright and short crosspiece—making a shape like the letter zayin. There were thousands. They lined the road on either side as far as she could see, down the hill and curving around. And to each frame, they had nailed a man.

  The day was warm. The sun was bright as if it knew not what it shone on. As if the Lord God Almighty, the Infinite One, He Who is Everywhere had forgotten this place.

  There was the smell of blood. And the buzzing sound of flies. They gathered at the soft places—the ears, the nose, the eyes. And the beating wings and low tearing rip of the vultures and the crows. The blood had trickled down the frames, had pooled at the bases, had dried in brown drips. And there was the stench of rotting flesh, like a taste in her mouth. And there was the sound.

  They walked along the rocky path. The men nearest the city had been nailed up first. They were already dead, their bodies contorted, their faces and flesh already eaten away by the carrion birds. As they went farther from the city, though, they came to the more recently captured rebels. These men had been there three days, four, five at most. It was they who were making the sound.

  The soldiers, she knew, were still watching from the parapets of the walls of Jerusalem. No man could be cut down until the Prefect gave leave, and these men would rot here and the flesh would be eaten from their bones by the birds and the swarming things of the air. For all that, those who still had tongues in their heads pleaded for mercy, for a sponge to their brows or a swift sword to their throats. They cried for their mothers, she remembers. This was where she learned that all dying men call out for a mother. No matter what they said or thought before.

  “Do not look up,” her father whispered to her, “do not stop, do not hesitate. Look down. Walk on.”

  So she walked through the valley beshaded by the screaming trees.

  This was the message of Rome to the people of Israel.

  There are things which are too painful to think of. And she tries, she struggles constantly not to think of it. But she cannot make a day pass without remembering those men calling for their mothers. She knows what a man calls out when he is nailed to a crossbeam. She should have forced him to come home.

  He sits on a rock a little way from her house. The wind brings news that summer will come soon.

  She watches his sitting. This boy who is so very alive.

  “Were you there,” she says, “in the uprising in Yaffo? Were you one of the rebels with the pretender king? Was your hand injured before you ever came here, injured in the fighting?”

  He says, “I was there.”

  “Following another master, Gidon? Another king of the Jews?”

  He shrugs. Says what she has known to be true for a long time.

  “They killed my family. My mother, my brothers, my father, my cousins and uncles. For a long time I followed anyone who promised to destroy them.”

  She nods. They are silent for a long while.

  “I am different now,” he says. “I did not lie that God told me to seek you out. It was after the rising in Yaffo, after we had been defeated, I was sleeping in the mountains waiting for spring and in a dream a voice as clear as a sword told me to come and find you.”

  She believes him.

  “You cannot stay here now.”

  He nods.

  “I’ll leave tomorrow.”

  “No,” she says, “too soon will raise suspicion. Wait another week or two. Start traveling with the early pilgrims for the next festival.”

  He nods again.

  She sits next to him, on the rock. The place is warm where the sun has been. A lizard is heating its blood an arm’s length away from them on another flat stone. She can feel his body next to hers as if they were touching. She sighs. He places his hand over hers. He clasps her hand. His thumb moves, feeling her fingers, absorbing them. She does not know whether he even sees her any longer or simply the man he hopes to reach through her. But he is so soft with her that her heart cracks open, she cannot help it.

  She says, quietly, “You believe what you told me? You hold it in your heart?”

  He says, “I do.”

  She says, “Then my son Yehoshuah lives in your heart.”

  He says, “And in the heart of all who believe it.”

  She nods. That is where the dead live. In the heart.

  He begins to hum a little melody. It is the melody the goat herders often sing when they are moving the brindled flock to summer pastures. She joins in, letting her voice run alongside his, sometimes choosing the notes which harmonize, sometimes singing the same tune. It feels as though they are one person, singing like this.

  And she will not, she will not. Her son is dead, he is gone, but when she closes her eyes she can believe that he is here now, that he has come back to her in the long notes and the tune and the piping warble at the back of the throat. He has not let go of her hand. He is so young, younger than her son was when she saw him last. His skin is soft, his hands uncalloused. She does not want to be moved but she cannot help herself. She is swept away.

  The song ends. He looks at her, those eyes so full of longing. She knows what he wants from her, this young and beautiful man.

  She says, “Shall I tell you a story?”

  He sits perfectly calm, with those shining eyes.

  “It is a story from long ago,” she says, “when I first became pregnant with my child Yehoshuah.”

  She sees him mutter something under his breath as she says her son’s name.

  “Now I think of it,” she says, and her voice has taken on the singsong quality of a child’s storyteller, “now that I think of it, there were signs that his birth would be special.” A chaffinch begins to sing in the thorn tree; a song of joy that the winter has, at last, receded. “There were birds,” she says, “the birds seemed to follow me wherever I went, singing to the child in my womb. And once, there was a stranger…”

  She pauses. Anyone who has read the Torah knows what a stranger is. A stranger could be anyone. A stranger could be the angel of the Lord come with a test of kindness or hospitality, and if you passed that test the angel might bless you. A stranger could be the Lord walking among you.

  “There was a stranger in the village who saw my belly swollen with the child and began suddenly to speak, saying, ‘Blessed are you, and blessed is that child whom you carry within you!’”

  She continues to tell this story. She thinks of how all the stories she has ever heard must have come to be. There are only three ways: either they were true, or someone was mistaken, or someone lied. She knows that the story she is telling is a lie, but she says it anyway. Not in fear, and not in anger, and not even in hope of anything that is to come, but because it brings her comfort to see that he believes it. Even such a simple, foolish thing as this. It brings her son back here, for a moment, back to her side and his small head under her hand and his life again unfolding. It is too good a gift to turn down, this opportunity to return him to life. And she knows it is a sin, and that God holds special punishments in store for such sins, but she cannot imagine worse than she has already seen.

  She had been in Jerusalem that last spring. After he was gone, after the first day of Passover, which is sacred and on which no work can be done, she heard that he had not hung long on that wooden frame. Her son, Yirmiyahu, brought her the news. One of Yehoshuah’s friends, a wealthy man, had bribed the guards and taken him down and placed him in a tomb.

  She thought on it for a day and a night. She remembered what he had said: they were not his family. They were not the ones he had called for, they were not the ones he had spent his last days with. But was it possible that he had died without thinking of her? He had no wife to mourn for him or children to carry on his name. If he had belonged to these friends in life, perhaps he was his family’s again in death.

  So she told her sons to go to the tomb and fetch his body to take it into the hills and bury him
in the ground. She thought: at least the crows will not have him. He will be buried in the same warm soil that will take my bones one day and until then I will know where he lies, and this thought was a comfort to her.

  Shimon, who was always the kindest, tried to lie to her.

  “We found a shady spot for him, by an olive grove,” he said, when they returned.

  But when she asked him exactly where, when she asked them to take her there now so she could mark the spot in her mind, their story didn’t hold.

  They had not found him. The body was gone. Taken, they supposed, by his friends to some special burial place.

  Even in death they would not give him back to her. She did not want to tell her sons her worst fear—that the Romans had the body, that she would see him again on the ramparts of the walls of Jerusalem, black and bloody and gouged by beaks and rotted away.

  She left Jerusalem that day and did not look to see if there were bodies on the walls, and did not ask, and told herself that her sons must be right and his friends had surely buried him in honor.

  It was as if he had never been now. As if that first son had been a curious dream, leaving behind no trace. Not a plowed field, not a grieving wife, not a grandson or granddaughter. No one in the village spoke of him. Her own children had tried to forget him. It had been as if she had never borne that first son, until Gidon came to Natzaret.

  He leaves as they had planned, when it is coming close to the Feast of Seven Weeks and the farmers are making their way to Jerusalem with carts filled with first fruits. He’ll be invisible among so many travelers.

  She has filled him full of stories. Some have a measure of truth to them, with Yehoshuah’s childhood curiosity and his interest in learning and the way he would sometimes say things that made the adults surprised. And some are things she hoped had happened, she wished had happened. She gives him hard cheeses and bread and dried fruit so that his knapsack is bursting and she imagines another bag on his back full of the tales he’ll tell, the stories he’ll take to his friends in Jerusalem and across the nation.

  “I’ll come back,” he says, “when things are less dangerous for you.”

  She does not say that she is an old woman now, and does not expect to live to see the day when things are less dangerous.

  She embraces him like a son, and he turns and begins to walk.

  She watches him until he is out of sight. If the soldiers come back, she will say: he deceived me. He lied. A broken-hearted mother, he had no pity.

  And perhaps they will listen, and perhaps they won’t. It is like the scorpion, she thinks, rubbing her right hand with her left. Once a child is born, the mother’s previous life is gone, all that matters is how she cares for the child, protects the child. Even that tiny part which is left when they are gone.

  She turns. The children will be waking soon, little Iov demanding his breakfast. It is nearly the fourth hour since dawn and she has still not made bread. She goes to begin her work.

  Iehuda from Qeriot

  IN THE MARKETPLACE, during Passover, he hears two strangers saying that he is dead.

  He is examining some clay oil lamps decorated with a blue inlay from Tarshish. At a stall nearby selling ripe melons, two women, their hair modestly covered, are discussing the rising in Jerusalem last Passover. It is not much discussed any longer, but the return of the season and the festival have brought it to mind. One woman, wearing a yellow scarf trimmed with fringes, knows more than the other. When he looks at her closely he thinks he remembers that she is the sister of the wife of one of the rabble who joined them in the last few weeks. Perhaps.

  “It is sad,” she is saying, “so many of them fled. Or took on other names.” She lists several of his former friends whose faces he never expects to see again in this world. Mattisyahu the former tax collector fled south to Africa, young Yirmiyahu to Egypt, Taddai to Syria. Others she has not heard about, or has heard only vague rumors. He stops to listen. This is more news than he has had of his former friends for months.

  The woman seems well informed. At one point she implies that some of her friends here in Caesarea send and receive letters from the dispersed disciples. He has heard that there are rebels here, still—Caesarea is a Roman town, the capital of the region, a waypoint for trade, so a good place for all kinds of conspiracy. But it is a mark of how little they accomplished that it is not dangerous for her to mention Yehoshuah in the market square. No one is now afraid of those who followed him.

  The woman shakes her head: “There are still so many mothers who do not know what became of their sons. And Iehuda from Qeriot died, of course. He threw himself from a rocky cliff onto a field of stones. Or I heard someone else say that some of the others threw him off.” She shrugs.

  “Where did you hear that?” he asks, before he has thought whether this is wise.

  The women look at him curiously. He is dressed in a fine toga, his face is beardless, his hair neatly clipped. He is not a man who should pay them attention. They look modestly to the floor.

  “I…” he says, “I was rather interested in the fellow at the time. Such amusing teachings.”

  He has learned the lines well. They come easily to him.

  The woman who was just now so full of gossip opens and closes her mouth but no sound emerges.

  At last she says, “Just rumors, sir. My brother is a sailor, he tells us tales. We have no common cause with traitors against Caesar.”

  Her tone is pleading.

  He nods and smiles, allows his gaze to drift from them. He has no interest in scaring them.

  The other woman has decided which melon she wants and buys it hurriedly. They move on, mumbling a good-bye, their eyes cast down. He wonders how many of their other snippets of news were outright lies or strange misheard half tales.

  He turns the clay lamp over in his hand. He imagines throwing it to the floor, how the oil would spill forth, staining the hard earth with fragrance. It is a little time before he realizes that he is remembering the perfume bottle smashed on the ground, the room choking with its scent.

  He wants to think about what he’s heard. None of what the woman said might be true, or a portion of it, but if this is the tale being told among those who knew his friends, perhaps it is time to leave his hiding place. Perhaps he should find them, tell them he is still alive, try to explain what he did.

  He walks home slowly, taking the long route around, west towards the harbor. Here the boats are constantly working. Even on the Sabbath, even on the festivals, men from fifty nations load and unload cargo. There are baskets of fresh fish, figs from the orchards in the north, oil and perfume from across the ocean, bolts of expensively dyed cloth, pretty stones and jewels for women, even silver mirrors and ivory combs for those who can afford such things. Caesarea is rich.

  The harbor too is one of the wonders of the world. Herod’s men slung it across the bay in seven years. They worked on the Sabbath, and in the seventh year, the year of rest. If he were still in Jerusalem, some preacher would even now be shouting to a crowd of followers that the harbor was cursed, that all who traded in it had earned God’s eternal anger. But this is not Jerusalem and the work goes on.

  He wonders if this is the freedom he had sought all along. To be in a place where one could decide to care or not to care about the laws for oneself. The Romans had brought that freedom, together with their statues of their little arguing gods, and he had never noticed.

  It is a kind of freedom, he thinks, to be dead. If he is dead, he smiles at the thought, perhaps even God has ceased to care what he does.

  And as he thinks this, he finds that his feet have taken him wandering past the small Syrian temple to one of their goddesses. From inside the squat marble building comes the sound of laryngeal chanting, the soft cries of the worshippers in response.

  He has never visited before, but he is suddenly curious to see what the nations do with their many gods. And he is not ready to go home quite yet—not to face the crowd of Calidorus’s
perfumed friends with the smiling ironic face of a dead man. He picks up the hem of his cloak, ascends the dusty steps and, ducking under the curtain, enters the temple.

  It is dark inside, and the smell of fragrant wood and oil is thick. Well-trimmed oil lamps are positioned in alcoves, but there are not enough of them to cast more than a glow. The people are tightly packed, crowding towards the altar, and for a while all he can see is an indistinguishable mass of humanity. But his eyes become accustomed to the gloom. At the front of the temple, on a raised marble platform, lit by the brightest lamps to draw the eye, the service is taking place.

  It is not so different. They slaughter a pigeon and pour its blood onto the stone. Libations of wine are poured on the altar, prayers are uttered in Greek. The priests are women, of course, that is different. They are clad in white—he thinks he has heard that this symbolizes the fact that no man has had them. It’s been a long time since Iehuda last had a woman—nearly a year now—and his body often aches to hold soft, yielding flesh again. He is sure that the other men must feel the same rushing in their loins when the soft virgins bend to pour the oil—does it make the moment more sacred for them? He has heard that they believe their gods are pleased with sexual congress.

  And there is the idol, of course, that is different to Temple services in Jerusalem. She is the best lit of all: a dozen lamps carefully placed on hand-shaped ledges jutting out from the wall surround her. She is a naked woman, large breasts, broad hips, round belly, beads around her neck—is this worship nothing but sex? They pour the oil on the feet of the statue as if it could feel, they waft the incense around its head as if it could smell.

  At a certain point, some of the worshippers surge forward and ecstatically plant kisses on the feet of the statue, grabbing her ankles, mumbling prayers, placing pieces of clay with messages scratched on them and small coins into the sacred pool in front of her. As if, he thinks scornfully, this object they had made themselves could grant their wishes. He is unimpressed. All these years he had thought something terrible, even monstrous, went on in these temples. Like most Jews, he had never set foot inside a place of wicked idolatry and had imagined something much worse than children playing with a doll, pretending it could grant favors.