The Liars' Gospel: A Novel

by Naomi Alderman

  He could not sit with the others that night as they shared bread and oil and talked of the great miracles that God surely had in store for them in the future. He wandered down to the camp of the foreigners, where the non-Jewish people interested in the teachings of Yehoshuah slept. It was an accident that he happened to speak to Calidorus. It could as well have been another as him. He did not even know what he was looking for. Maybe only someone to whom he would not have to lie.

  Calidorus and some of his friends were playing a dice game by a low-burning fire. When they saw Iehuda approaching, they stood up and offered him the place of honor, but he refused it, preferring to sit and watch them play for a time. “Venus!” called one, when he had thrown a specially lucky set of numbers, and the others cursed him good-humoredly and poured more wine from a leather flask.

  As the evening wore on, more of the friends took their bedrolls and made camp, until only Calidorus and Iehuda were left by the last embers of the fire. And Calidorus spoke of his travels and the interesting people he had encountered. He was a scholar of the writings of the Greeks, spoke highly of the Roman Republic—this dream of government by the people had died when Julius Caesar took imperial power, and even to speak of it was to show a measure of trust. So Iehuda, in the end, told him his troubles.

  “Ah,” said Calidorus, “I have seen this trick performed. By a man in Shfat, who seemed to plunge his hand into the center of a boy’s chest and pull out a piece of black sticky stuff which a demon had placed inside him. I paid him all the gold in my purse to show me how he did it and the coat on my back to sell me the mechanism.”

  He said it matter-of-factly, so that Iehuda showed no surprise on his face. They were men of the world, discussing something everyone knew.

  “Would you like to see how it was done?” said Calidorus.

  Iehuda nodded slowly.

  Calidorus sent a slave to fetch something from a leather bag in the back of his tent and had Iehuda turn away while he prepared. When Iehuda turned back, he showed him the trick. Calidorus concealed a sheep’s bladder in the sleeve of his robe, near the wrist. When he pressed it, a red liquid spurted across his arm and up to his hand.

  “It is dyed water,” said Calidorus. “It is better if you use fresh sheep’s blood, though. And a piece of burnt wood resin—it goes sticky and black like this—concealed in the palm.”

  He showed Iehuda the piece of tacky material. It looked like the sort of evil a demon might place in a man.

  Calidorus shrugged. “If you’re willing to pay enough money, you will discover how a thing was done. I expect your friends did some trick like this, if they did anything at all.”

  Iehuda felt afraid, suddenly, in the center of his chest. How many times can a man lose his faith before he ceases to believe in faith itself?

  “I saw a holy man once bring a swarm of frogs out of a girl who suffered from the palsy,” he said.

  Calidorus smiled.

  “Did he lean very close into her?”

  Iehuda thought on it. He had been only a child when that gray-bearded preacher came to Qeriot, but now he remembered it, yes, the man had embraced the girl, caught her up from her bed, and then when he let her fall the frogs had begun to swarm, seeming to come from every part of her.

  “He had a bag of frogs concealed in his robe,” said Calidorus. “When he pulled her close he emptied that bag into her clothes, so the frogs seemed to come from her when he released her.” Calidorus looked at Iehuda’s face and made a wry half smile. “I was young once too,” he said, “don’t be ashamed. Children believe the stories.” He frowned. “Surely you must have thought this yourself already?”

  Iehuda thought: I am entirely alone. Anyone like Calidorus who sought this knowledge out already disbelieved. Why else would one look to learn the truth, except to be proved right in unbelief?

  “It hurts me,” he said.

  Calidorus’s mouth twisted a little. He clapped a hand on Iehuda’s shoulder, but the gesture was immediately awkward and he withdrew it.

  “Ah well,” Calidorus said, “he makes a fine spectacle, your friend.” He laughed. “I am certainly enjoying his story. And some of the things he says are fascinating.”

  Iehuda felt a pain rising in the center of his chest. His heart was heavy and he thought: could I be like this man? Could I take it all as an entertainment, a pantomime? There were five hundred people in Yehoshuah’s encampment, some of them talking as if he was the promised Messiah, some of them debating his teachings and some, like Calidorus, simply enjoying the performance. Calidorus’s way seemed easiest—the man’s presence was like a cool spring of fresh water in the fires of Iehuda’s mind. He knew he could not be like Calidorus, but he also knew he could not now unknow the things he knew or unsee the things he had seen.

  He shifted his weight from one foot to the other.

  “What am I now?” he said.

  And Calidorus seemed uncomfortable.

  “Come and stay with me,” he said, “when you grow tired of following your prophet through this wilderness, come and be my guest in Caesarea. Ask anyone there for my house and they will tell you. When all this is done, come to me.”

  He came back to the inner circle changed. He found that he listened differently. He watched differently. He noticed, again and again now, Rome. And how Yehoshuah’s words, and the words of his friends, were a provocation to Rome.

  There was an angry tone to him now. Had it always been there? Had Iehuda only just begun to notice it?

  On the road to Shomron, men and women ran out of their homes and across the fields to see Yehoshuah. In one place—a rich and fertile land, where the soil was tilled in great soft waves and the barley was growing high and strong—a man was kneeling by the side of the road, waiting for them. He was a prosperous farmer, one could tell immediately by the quality of his boots and the thick wool coat around his shoulders. But he was kneeling at the roadside, tears falling from his cheeks, mumbling.

  Yehoshuah bent down to talk to the man. And Iehuda saw that old Yehoshuah, the one whose very presence soothed the heart.

  Yehoshuah shook his head softly.

  “Do not weep my friend,” he said. “God has told me that He has chosen you to walk with us. Come now.”

  This was a great deal to ask. The farm behind them was good. On the hills, a flock of brindled sheep grazed, guarded by a shepherd boy. The boy was probably the man’s son, the sheep probably his flock.

  “My father has died,” said the man, the tears still falling silently. “He died this morning, just as you approached. Teacher, give me a blessing.”

  Yehoshuah placed his hands on the man’s shoulders.

  “You are already blessed,” he said. “Our Father has blessed you with this call. Come and walk with me. We are traveling to Jerusalem. Come now and do not look back.”

  The man stared Yehoshuah full in the face. A man who has lost his father is like a man felled by a mighty blow. The death of a mother is the loss of love, but the death of a father is the loss of certainty. The tallest tree that will ever stand in the forest is fallen.

  “I must bury my father,” he said. He spoke, Iehuda thought, without hearing his own words. It was not an answer, it was a realization. He said it again. “I cannot walk with you now, for I must bury my father. Let me go and bury my father first.”

  Iehuda heard one of the other men—he thought it was Jeremiah—whisper to his fellow, “Is this how he speaks to the son of David?”

  If he could, Iehuda would have hit that man in the face, but he realized suddenly that if he did that, it would be dangerous. How had he not known that they had come to this pass, where dissent was dangerous? If he hit the man, the others would say that he did not believe that Yehoshuah was the son of David—that is, the rightful heir to the throne in Jerusalem. And then…he did not know what might happen.

  There had been a fight, a week earlier, between some of those different factions. A man had been stabbed with a knife and they had left hi
m in Rafa’at for his wound to mend. Iehuda had not thought of it after that day. But he found himself thinking of it now. What would happen if he argued with this crowd of angry men? He felt afraid. And ashamed of his own fear.

  Yehoshuah knelt down and clasped the farmer’s hands.

  “Are you dead?” he whispered softly.

  The man, pulling one rough paw from Yehoshuah’s grasp to wipe away the tears from his eyes, looked bemused.

  “I say again,” said Yehoshuah, “are you dead? For you say you must bury your father,” and then he turned to the crowd behind him, all straining to catch his words, “but I say,” and he raised his voice to a shout, “let the dead bury their dead. You must come with us to announce that the kingdom of God is here!”

  The men standing behind Iehuda cheered, for they understood this to mean “nothing is important but our own work,” and the people far back in the throng who could not see what was happening cheered. The tenderhearted women did not cheer, for their hearts went out to the farmer, from whose eyes tears were falling like ripe fruit. And Iehuda did not cheer.

  Yehoshuah stood up and walked on. Iehuda looked back at the man in the mud and dust at the side of the road, who would have to bury his father that afternoon.

  There grew to be an inner circle within the inner circle. Iehuda was not part of that group. It was Shimon, and Jeremiah, and Jona. They had not been the first to join the wandering rabble, but they were zealous. Jona saw signs and wonders in every speck of dust. Jeremiah muttered darkly about the days that are surely to come when the Lord will destroy all those who do not hearken to his holy name. Shimon was a steady man: he was not enraged by doubters but filled with sorrow and pity for them.

  There was a day when Yehoshuah took those three alone up into the hills to pray. They were gone for a night and a day with no food or water. Something happened there, but Iehuda could never root out exactly what it was.

  Shimon, the most solid of the three, said that he had fallen into a deep sleep and dreamed that Yehoshuah was standing with Moses and Elijah, and this dream had the marks of truth to it and he was convinced by it in his own breast. Jona said he had seen the gates of heaven open and the very voice of the Lord had spoken to him by name, but Jona had been known to hear the voice of the Lord in the honking of geese. Jeremiah would say nothing of what he’d seen, only that it had been vouchsafed to him that Rome would burn and the kingdom of heaven would come to earth, which was no more than he had always said.

  The longer Iehuda asked, the less this tale became. And yet he heard in the camp that the three men had been taken up in a fiery chariot to the heavens, where the good Lord had spoken to them and told them Yehoshuah was His promised one. He found one man selling white pebbles which he said had been taken from the holy place where they ascended to heaven. Women were sewing them into the hem of their clothes to keep off the evil eye.

  Iehuda wanted to discuss the matter with Calidorus, who continued to travel with them, waited on by his body-slave, even as it pleased him to walk like a pilgrim. But he felt somehow repulsed by the idea. He contented himself with imagining what Calidorus would say. Something Greek, he imagined, something from philosophy. Calidorus often quoted from the philosopher whose very name—Epikouros—was a byword for heresy among the rabbis.

  He might say, “The gods, if there are gods, do not concern themselves with us. How can they, when we see the crippled and lame all around us? If it pleases your friends to think that they saw the gods, so be it. It pleases me to go to a play and imagine I have seen Helen of Troy or Agamemnon in his war cry.”

  This answer, from an imaginary Calidorus, pleased him. He welcomed the worm into his breast.

  An insanity came upon them. They argued over who could sit closest to Yehoshuah, like children fighting over a toy. As if he were already dead and they were arguing over his clothes or the scraps of flesh adhering to his body. Iehuda felt it too. He had always felt it, the desire to be close to the man. The sense that it was impossible to be too close, that he would allow himself to be utterly consumed by Yehoshuah and consider it an honor. This had always been why he struggled so hard to remain separate, to find a place deep in his breast which did not belong to Yehoshuah.

  But those weeks, the thing began to tip over into madness. There were more of them every day and at the edges of the group there were more soldiers watching. They all knew that with a rabble this large there would be spies from the Prefect, there would be those who would report his words and deeds and the size of the crowd for a coin or two. But Yehoshuah did not tell them to disperse. It was unwise. They looked now like the kind of rebellious multitude which the Romans dealt with so swiftly and so successfully. They looked like bodies waiting to be nailed up along the road to Jerusalem.

  None of the others would say this to Yehoshuah, so it fell to Iehuda again and again to say, when they ate bread together in the evening, “We should be circumspect. We should disband now and re-form in a few weeks, like we did before.”

  Yehoshuah did not reply, except with a smile. The others hated Iehuda for saying it. He saw that they were enjoying the sense of danger, for it was also a feeling of power. He could not tell truth from lies anymore. He heard someone say that the priests at the Temple were plotting against them and this sounded like absolute insanity. He heard someone else say that King Herod Antipater in the north had paid for information on Yehoshuah and this also seemed madness. But there was such certainty in the group and he was embedded in it so completely that he could not see them from the outside any longer. Perhaps they really were the most important thing in Judea.

  It was coming towards a hot, late Passover. The days and months had fallen out so that it was already full spring by the week before the festival. The air was ripe with the green scent of acacia trees and with the hum of hovering insects.

  They came to the house of a friend—a merchant by the name of Shimon, whom people had called Shimon the leper because he was so unpopular. Shimon had been impressed with Yehoshuah’s teachings on the value of riches. The man had given much of his wealth to the poor and every day now the beggars of Beit Ani came to the back door of his home to receive bread. They were to stay there one night, with Yehoshuah in the bed of honor, and then walk on closer to Jerusalem.

  The house was heavy with the smell of a great crowd of the sick and the dirty and the poor. The smells all mingled together: body odor and dirty clothes and women’s menstrual blood and a man with fetid sores on his leg and the animals and the tanned animal hides and the half-soured milk in the jars on the floor and the onions on the breath of the camel drivers.

  People came for cures, but Yehoshuah performed none that day. His mood was merry and indulgent and he let visitors come with little gifts—a sheepskin, a basket of dried fruits, a silver charm—or to tell him, bowing and twisting their bodies in attitudes of worship, that his face was the face of a holy man, a true prophet of God. Every time they did this, Iehuda felt more uncomfortable.

  Towards the end of the afternoon, a wealthy woman wound her way through the crowd. She was dressed in a fine silk robe, her hair elaborately turned in several plaits around her head, and she was mad. Either mad or drunk, as was clear from her unsteady movements, from the way her eyes darted around the room.

  She was carrying a small alabaster jar of perfumed oil—the stone was thin, expertly worked, the jar much longer than it was wide, a cool narrow vial. The container alone would be worth a month’s wages. She stopped in front of Yehoshuah’s chair of honor, bowed low, ceremoniously but with a curious simpering smile on her face. She cracked the stem of the jar so that they could smell what she had brought. It was spikenard, a dense scent of mint and spices and a meaty richness. The smell traveled up and around the room, cutting through the sweat and garlic and sour milk with its scouring sharpness. This was a precious gift—people brought them valuable possessions now, she was not the first, but spikenard was one of the rarest components of Temple incense, brought from Kush in India.
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  The woman smiled lopsidedly. Her eyes rolled back in her head. Iehuda wondered where she’d got the perfume from, what she’d done to obtain this vial worth more than a year’s work for a laboring man. She held the jar in her left hand, and reached out her right to touch a lock of Yehoshuah’s hair. Yehoshuah smiled at the woman. She was breathing very quickly, her breasts rising and falling. A sheen of sweat coated her skin. Iehuda wondered if she was about to throw herself bodily onto Yehoshuah—this had happened before.

  Instead, she spoke in a slow, slurred voice:

  “May I anoint you?”

  Iehuda waited for Yehoshuah’s easy smile, his way of turning a refusal into an honor. He would say no, but he would show her by his kindness that her offer had been accepted in the spirit if not on earth.

  This was not what happened.

  Yehoshuah’s glance met the woman’s eerie, glazed eyes.

  He bowed his head before her for the anointing.

  She tipped the vial. The oil began to flow out over Yehoshuah’s hair. It was enough, more than enough, plenty. Someone rushed to stop her—every drop that fell was a meal for twenty people, every thick glug was a pregnant goat, a pair of good shoes, a field golden with high waving wheat. She laughed and cracked the vial between her hands. The whole fortune of it poured out upon Yehoshuah, coating his head, his shoulders, filling the room with the thick, nauseating, choking scent.

  There was no other smell now. The aromas of life—of bodies and animals and dirt and fermentation—all those smells were gone, as if the sounds of the world had been blotted out by the clanging of a terrible gong. This one, too-clean odor, the smell of new-cut pine wood, was all that remained. Beautiful, yes, in a way. But revolting, because it was too strong and because it had destroyed everything else.