The Liars' Gospel: A Novel

by Naomi Alderman

  “Yes, she’ll do very well. Only…”

  Natan raises an eyebrow. Waits.

  “Only are you certain of her innocence? She had a way about her which—”

  “No young man has ever even held her hand. Hodia has another priest waiting for her when your year is up. She knows she has to keep herself pure. Don’t mistake what your cock knows for what her cunt knows.”

  Caiaphas laughs, in spite of himself.

  “She’ll do very well,” he says.

  “And may your wife remain in perfect health until she reaches one hundred and twenty,” says Natan, grinning.

  “Amen.”

  He tries to reason it out to himself. He is not a stupid man or an uneducated one. His father, a Cohen as well of course, for the thing passes from father to son, had owned a string of vineyards and olive presses in the east, enough to pay for the best possible education for his son. His father had an idea that the boy might be material for a Cohen Gadol, so he had him learn Latin and Greek as fluently as his own Hebrew and Aramaic, and brought a tutor from Antioch. So he’s read Greek philosophy and Roman military history, as well as the texts of his own people. He knows the value of reason.

  He says to himself: why would his wife do such a thing? He says to himself: it would be death to her. And yet he cannot reason it himself. One needs a friend for such conversations. He waits until an evening a little later, when he and Natan have finished their business, when the lamb of the evening has been slaughtered, when the day cools and the night blows gently across the hills of Jerusalem.

  “Did you ever…” He looks at Natan. He had been intending to ask the question in one way but finds now that he cannot. Natan’s wife is buxom, loving, several years older than him; the man can never have suspected her. “Did you ever know a man who had a suspicion about his wife?”

  Natan’s usual merriness instantly sobers.

  “Kef,” he says, “your wife? Do you think your wife…”

  Caiaphas finds that his practiced High Priest smile, the liar’s smile, comes quickly and naturally to his lips.

  “By the enemies of God, no,” he says. “No, no. I heard a story from one of the other priests,” and he can tell that Natan is already trying to calculate which of the other priests it could be and whether he is lying and what this might mean for the smooth running of the Temple, but he must talk to someone and if Natan guesses, so be it. “I heard a story that one of them suspected his wife of adultery. Did you ever know a man who thought so?”

  Natan leans back in his chair. He scratches at his beard.

  “All women look at other men,” he says at last, “it’s natural. Means that there’s still juice in them. The day a woman says she never notices another man is the day you know she doesn’t want to fuck you anymore.”

  Caiaphas breathes out through his nose.

  “Looking is one thing,” he says, “I’m talking about something else.”

  Natan puts his cup down, leans forward, hands on his knees.

  “What are you talking about?” he says. “Your wife is the most sensible woman alive.” He reaches his hand forward and clasps Caiaphas’s knee briefly. “Even if she did pick you for a husband.”

  Caiaphas finds he is laughing. It is the politician’s laugh, the one he is surprised to find seems so convincing when it does not touch him at all on the inside.

  “Tell me about Darfon, son of Yoav,” he says quickly.

  “Oh,” says Natan, “is that all this is? The man’s a flirt, Kef, an unconscionable, foolish flirt and you’re not the first one to notice. I’ve been thinking for a long time I should send him north, to work at one of the record-keeping houses and get him out of our business here. Let him show off his muscles to the girls of the house of Zebulun and find himself a wife.”

  “But I—”

  “He will be away from here within two weeks.”

  He watches her the next day, privately, quietly, while she dresses in a simple night-blue shift and arranges her hair with two gold pins. His mind vacillates between suspicion and finding himself ridiculous. She would not be so foolish. She would not be so cruel. The simple fact that he fears it means it must be impossible.

  It is entirely forbidden for any man to lie with a wife who has been unfaithful to him. For any man, but especially for the High Priest. It is not only undesirable. It is not only that he may divorce her if he wishes. It is forbidden. If she has been unfaithful, he must know it and he must divorce her.

  Every part of him will go into the Holy of Holies on the Day of Atonement. No part of him may have touched an impure vessel.

  He must know. So he arranges things. He waits for a time when he knows that Natan the Levite, the man he trusts, will be busy with the tribute from the tribe of Gad. He calls another Levite, a man who does not know him.

  He says, with his liar’s smoothness, “My wife asked me to send one of these casks of wine home.” He motions to two of the barrels from Asher in the corner of his chamber. “Will you have one of your men do it?” A pause, just long enough so that it will seem as if the idea has only just occurred to him. “Oh,” he says, “why not send that man Darfon? He is strong, and my wife wanted someone to cut a low-trailing branch from the cherry tree in our garden.”

  Caiaphas is a wolf, cunning and perpetually hungry.

  He gives them a little time. He does not follow Darfon closely in the street. He hangs back and tarries at a market stall, examining jars of oil while he counts the moments in his mind. This would be the time when Darfon arrives at Caiaphas’s home unexpectedly. This would be how long it would take his wife to send the servants out on errands. This would be the moment they are alone. Now. It is now. His hands shake as he places a small jar of oil back on the stall and his feet begin to walk.

  He pauses before his own front door, thinking suddenly whether he would not rather go back to the Temple. It is the memory of the Holy of Holies that urges him on, the memory that soon he will be summoned back to that tiny chamber at the heart of everything and called on to answer for the whole of the people.

  The house is very quiet. The small fountain in the courtyard trickles into the pool beneath. His daughters’ bedrooms have already been neatly swept by the maidservants. His own bedroom, the large one that looks out onto the courtyard, is still and silent. Some of his wife’s hair is caught in the silver-backed hairbrush on her table. In the bronze mirror, his reflection walks past, creeping like a thief.

  It is so quiet here, away from the bustling street, that he can hear the birdsong.

  He ascends the wooden stairs at the side of the house leading to the upper floor where the servants sleep. Although it is his home, months can go past without his needing to visit these rooms. Some furniture is stored here, a few pieces he inherited from his grandfather. There are four tiny rooms with small windows and sleeping benches for the slaves, and two larger ones with better beds for the housekeeper and the cook.

  He fingers the blankets on one of the beds. Remembers how, when his children were young, he would often find them up here, playing in the dust. The slaves and the servants were kind to them. There is an ointment in an earthenware pot by one bed. He smells it and wrinkles his nose. Some foul-smelling cure for rheumatism or spottiness no doubt.

  In a box under one of the beds, he finds a letter in Greek—he had no idea that his cook could read Greek—it is a love letter from a man in Crete, promising to come soon and take her away, calling her his duck, his sweet fruit, his fresh pomegranate. As he reads, his emotions are mixed: irritation that some Cretan will take his cook away, anxiety that he might somehow be discovered reading this letter, even though the house is empty, and a kind of wonder at the secret chamber at the center of every human heart whose contents are unguessable from the outside.

  Even the slaves have their tiny arrangements of possessions. A talisman against coughing. A bone comb. A half-completed carving of a tree on a piece of olive wood. When they are released—and a Hebrew slave must be fre
ed after seven years of service—he supposes they will take these things with them, back into whatever life they came from.

  He is so involved in the examination of these artifacts that he half forgets why he came to the house in the middle of the afternoon at all. Until he hears his wife laughing.

  It is a short laugh, a breathless one. It is coming from outside. Peering through the tiny window above the housekeeper’s bed, he looks without seeing for a while: only the fountain, the vines growing up the trellises, the bushes and the fruit trees already beginning to drop their harvest on the red stone tiles. And then, craning, he sees them.

  They are in the gardener’s enclosure, screened off behind the main garden so that it can only be seen from above. He never goes in there: it is where the gardener stores his tools in a wooden box, where the plants which are not ready to come out are grown and tended. He does not even know how to get in: he thinks he has seen the latched gate in the fence at the back of the house but is not sure.

  There, in that screened-off place, his wife is sitting in Darfon’s lap. She is wriggling, pretending to try to escape. Another bubble of laughter rises from her lips. Darfon plucks a ripe plum from the tree whose branches bend low over the garden and puts it to her lips. She bites it. The juice dribbles down her chin. Darfon meets her eyes, questioningly. She becomes very still. He puts his tongue to her neck and laps at the juice on her chin, her throat, lower. Her eyes are closed. She leans back into his arms.

  Caiaphas turns away from the window then. His heart is sick and his body is angry and the wolf inside him stalks and prowls and says to him: go down now and strip her clothes from her body and parade her through the street like the harlot she is. And the lamb inside him says: speak to her, be merciful, warn her, for you have seen nothing yet that damns her absolutely. The little room full of the center of another person’s presence says: every person must have their secret place.

  And the wolf says: look again. And he says: no. And the wolf says: look again. You know what you will see. It will make your blood hot and then there will be none of this skulking in shadows. Look again, it says, and find all the courage you need.

  But when he turns back to the window, his wife is smoothing off her dress and arranging her hair with the two gold pins. And Darfon is in another part of the garden, lopping down the low branch with a saw.

  A man may have more than one wife, but a wife may have only one husband. And this means that if a man should chance to desire or know a woman other than his wife, he may simply take her as a new wife and all will be well. But a woman must cleave only to her husband; this is the law of God. Therefore it is right for a man to keep watch over his wife, to ensure that she is not allowed to stray. He has, after all, purchased her from her father by a deed of contract, and he must be free of all doubt concerning the purity of his possession.

  There is a thing a man can do, if he has a suspicion regarding his wife. It is scrupulously fair. It is written in the Torah and so we know that it is good and just. A man who suspects that his wife has lain with another man must go to the priests—or to another priest—and declare that the breath of jealousy has entered him. And then they bring the wife and make a little offering to God: some barley flour. This is to begin, to ask God to enter into the thing they will do next.

  They take holy water from the sacred well in the Temple and mix into it a tiny pinch of dust from the floor of the holiest enclosure in the Temple. And finally they write the curse against adultery, containing the holy four-letter name of God on a piece of paper. And they put the paper in the water until the ink dissolves. And this holiest of holy water, this water which contains the unspeakable name of God, this they make her drink.

  And then two things may happen. If she is guilty, if she has lain with another man, then the waters will be bitter waters. They will cause her belly to swell, and her ripe thighs to wither, and in the fullness of many days she will die.

  But if she is innocent she will conceive a child.

  It can be observed how merciful and humane a law this is, for when the breath of jealousy enters a man he may be tempted to beat his wife, or even kill her. But in this way it can be ensured that no sin taints him, even though his wife may be mired in her sin.

  Caiaphas could call his wife to be scrutinized by this ceremony. But it would not be a simple matter. If she died of it, he would have killed Annas’s daughter, and Annas is a powerful man. And if she lived, he would have disgraced Annas’s daughter. And Annas is a powerful man. And men love their daughters.

  There is another interview with Pilate the following day. The wolf’s head amber ring glints and the man foams and expostulates and makes it very clear that if he does not have his money for the aqueduct he will have to look for a new High Priest, one who is more accommodating to his needs.

  Annas has another son waiting to take the office. And would not that be in some ways easier? Caiaphas is willing to give up over this. Temple money cannot be used to build a civic amenity. What next? Send the priests to work the land? Melt down the golden cups and silver trumpets as Roman coins? They could give all the money for the sacred incense to the poor, but before long there would be no Temple at all this way. Not to mention that he would not be able to remain Cohen Gadol anyway if he allowed Pilate the money. He will have to enter the Holy of Holies again this year, as every year. God will see what he has done.

  Annas does not agree.

  They drink wine in the evening while the house is sleeping and the wild creatures are calling on the hills of Jerusalem. Caiaphas has not spoken to his wife this day, they have not lain together. He is trying to decide what to do. This conversation must be had in any case: it is more serious than matters of the family.

  Annas says, “Give him the money.”

  Caiaphas sloshes the wine in his cup. Annas is playing some long and difficult game. Caiaphas cannot see to the end of it. And he is afraid. Playing a game with Rome is like teasing a wolf, tickling its jowls and expecting not to lose a hand.

  “Should I lie to the other priests? Have it done in the dead of night? There is that mute slave, Umman. I could send him to do it.”

  “No,” says Annas, “do it in broad daylight. Have ten priests take the money to him through the Temple at noon. Use that…what’s his name, Egozi, the one who can never keep his mouth shut, to lead them.”

  “But,” he says, “the honor of the Temple. Once it is known, the people will revile me for a traitor.”

  “Not as much,” says Annas, “as they’ll revile Pilate.”

  Annas looks to the left, out through the pillars of the courtyard, towards the Temple Mount and the star-filled sky above it.

  “His standing with the Governor of Syria grows daily worse and worse,” says Annas. “And we need to be rid of him. He’ll find a way to get his money. But if we do it this way…”

  “The people will be angry,” says Caiaphas.

  “He will not be able to stand against them,” says Annas.

  He drains his cup to the dregs. From the thin line of trees marking the start of the mountains comes a single howl, then another, and another.

  There is a matter of which Caiaphas never thinks. Not that he has decided not to think of it, but it simply does not cross his mind, as a thousand thousand small matters connected to the business of the Temple never occur to him again once they are concluded.

  However, his memory is good. If one were to ask him, he would be able to recall how they sourced new bulls that year when the fourteen sacred bulls destined for the altar all died of a cattle plague only hours before the festival. If Annas requested the information, Caiaphas would be able to explain why, six years ago, the tribute from the tribe of Re’uven had been especially high. And if anyone inquired—but why would anyone inquire?—he would remember a madman they handed to the Prefect for Roman justice.

  He saw him only three times, and each time the man seemed less impressive than the previous occasion.

  The first time he saw the
man, he was a genuine inconvenience. Caiaphas had been studying an ancient text on one of the papyri he had bought from an Egyptian trader. It was a Greek text, a fascinating account of the workings of the human body. His eyes became tired with the close work, and he looked up, through the window of his reading chamber, at the bustling outer courtyard, alive with the people who make the holy necessities for the Temple and those who buy them. There was a madman in the courtyard, with a gang of thugs.

  The man was whirling his arms wildly, shouting without cease, and there was white spittle in his beard and his mouth was red and sore like the mouth of a man who is lost in the desert and dried up with thirst.

  Caiaphas could not make out the matter of his shouts, only certain phrases reached him: “my father’s house!,” “a holy house!,” “evildoers!”

  His rants were screams, his voice cracked as he bellowed. He was a pantomime of pain, an ill man surrounded by a phalanx of serious, stone-faced men with broad shoulders and thick walking staffs.

  The ranting was not unusual. The temple brought out such people, particularly now, close to a festival. Only the previous week a woman had attempted to strip naked in the courtyard, declaring that she was the daughter of Caesar and that all the men must fuck her in turn to make the new king of Rome and Jerusalem. Caiaphas had had to send for his wife’s maidservants to subdue her.

  There would be priests already in the courtyard to lead this man out as kindly as they could. If necessary he would send his personal servants to help them. He stood up, leaned against the window, the soft grainy plaster damp under his fingertips.

  The man was overturning tables. Raging like a child. He put both his arms under the planks-on-blocks of the man selling holy oil and hurled them wildly. A hundred tiny ceramic jars shattered on the marble flags. Oil pressed from olives in the mountains to the north and brought here by mule cart over five days’ perilous journeying dribbled into the cracks between the stones. The owner of the stall, a straggle-haired fellow of fifty, was struggling to reach the man, fighting against the flint-eyed followers who held him back. All around the courtyard they were holding men back while their leader went from stall to stall pulling down carefully pinned curtains and throwing over piles of clay pots and soft flour cakes, like a Roman soldier bent on destruction.