The Liars' Gospel: A Novel

by Naomi Alderman

  “Come on,” says one of them, “something bigger. Come on.”

  Come on. That pottery jar, the small one. Giora, greatly daring, spins around, noticing the dark-eyed girls watching them from a rooftop. He hurls the jar, it shatters and still the soldiers do nothing. The boys are getting bigger by the moment now, strutting and squaring their shoulders. They smell of boy sweat and bottled-up anger. They’re remembering how the soldiers treat them, how they get pushed to the back of the line in the market, how the soldiers laugh at them, how they accuse them of thieving when they were just looking, how they search them for weapons in the street like criminals. All of them are suspect just because of who they are. They’re remembering how one of these soldiers took out that girl they like. Because isn’t this always how it is, over and over again?

  Come on. It’s his turn now, Bar-Avo’s. He hefts half a brick, feeling the weight of it, then hurls it in a wide arc. It bangs against a shield. It leaves a dent, and the boys laugh and shout, “Look what you’ve done!” just like their mums would. They surge forward towards the soldiers but then lose their nerve before they reach the line of bronze men. They jeer at each other, fall back.

  Someone throws a cobblestone. It gets a man on his head, he falls down. He’s all right, he’s moving, but the boys are shocked for a moment. Bar-Avo can see him holding his head, moaning. It’s a nasty sight but at the same time exciting. Something’s going to happen, his whole body knows it. The soldiers start shouting: angry barked commands. The boys don’t understand, the soldiers’ accents are thick, the words they’re using aren’t Aramaic or Hebrew.

  Bar-Avo feels himself becoming strong, the blood coming to all the right places as if his heart knew that this is what a man is made for. Now he’ll be a man, right here, father or no. The soldiers start to advance, orderly in their phalanx, and now it’s on. Giora runs towards the soldiers, roaring and throwing cobblestones with both hands, and he gets another one, knocks him down, and then the line breaks, because one of the other men decides to chase, even though his commander shouts at him to come back, to hold the line, not to be an idiot.

  Bar-Avo shouts and laughs and grabs his friend’s arm and now they’re off, leaping and running, the blood surging and their limbs singing, and shouting with fear and delight like a toddler chased by a parent pretending to be a monster. They whoop as they scramble over stalls and climb lumber piles, and grab on to roof struts to run along thatch or tile, grabbing handfuls of mud or broken pots to hurl at the soldiers. It is like the feeling when they first held a girl, because even though they had never done the thing before they knew exactly what to do somehow.

  Ya’ir is the first one to set a torch of straw and oil aflame and throw it among the soldiers with a jar of oil, which splashes fire onto the men’s legs and feet, causing a great howl. He laughs when he hears the sound, baring his teeth, and the others let out a rallying cry and begin to find flaming things to hurl.

  And now it is a running battle on the streets. The soldiers advance, and the boys retreat, but each time they retreat they’ve done a little more damage, and the soldiers are a little more ragged, and the boys are a little deeper into the streets of houses where they’ve known everyone all their lives and anyone would take them in. Bar-Avo and Giora slip through the tiny gap between the house of Shulamit the seamstress and Zakai the spice seller, the gap that doesn’t look like it’s there at all, just wide enough to take their skinny frames, and collapse in the courtyard for a moment, their bodies aching from laughter and fear and exertion all at once.

  They climb up onto the roof. Bar-Avo shows his bum to the soldiers. All around the streets, there’s laughter and shouting. From another rooftop, three girls are watching the battle, whispering behind their hands and giggling. The boys fighting down below spot them and play up to it. Giora does a backflip along the street as other boys throw pots and bottles. The girls applaud and shout—commentary to the boys on where the soldiers are coming from, admiration for the acrobatics, anger to the advancing troops.

  The thing turns from comedy to violence and back again as swift as a knife. One of those flaming jars of oil hits a soldier—his leg and arm begin to burn and his screams are hideous before his fellows smother the flames with a blanket and even still he whimpers as they carry him off. A red-headed boy is caught by the soldiers and, as he struggles to escape, one of them pulls out a sword and cuts off—somehow, in an awkward close-fought struggle—three fingers of his left hand so he is suddenly howling and bloody.

  And yet over here Bar-Avo is clambering between buildings when a goat rushes out from a backyard enclosure, panicking at some small fire, and knocks him to the ground so that his friends laugh and point and howl with mirth. He picks himself up. His pride is a little injured and he makes up for it with a brilliant scheme, luring the soldiers down an alleyway with taunts, then scrambling up the wall with his friends’ help while, from the rooftops, the others pelt them with rotten fruit in a box they’d found left over from the market.

  There is no conclusion to the battle. It goes on like this until nightfall, with the soldiers making sudden rushes, capturing a few boys, and the boys throwing stones and sometimes fiery things and sheltering in houses and shouting rude slogans. A storage barn burns and they watch the flames together, fascinated by the slow crumbling tumble of the building folding in on itself. The fighting peters out before dawn, and Bar-Avo has still not been caught.

  He has had a good riot. He was one of those young men throwing fire bottles but they did not take him, although a soldier had his leg at one moment and at another he scaled a wall to find on the other side a soldier waiting for him with a red shouting face. He and Giora helped one another escape through a soft place in the roof of a cowshed and then patched it up so that the soldiers who followed them in could not find them. Giora laughed so much that he fell to his knees and almost sank through the roof again.

  There were girls watching them, and there was much pretence of protecting them even though the girls could easily have got away, but they nonetheless stayed on that roof, playing at being protected. And after sunset, as the day began to grow dim and the sky was the color of bright blossom shriveling to black and the night sounds of the mountains began to rise up, the soldiers slunk away back to barracks. They were dragging a captive or two but went so sullenly and having taken so little that the boys shouted catcalls behind them and the girls whispered, “You won, you really won.” There were two sets of hands around Bar-Avo’s waist in the dark and two sweet pliant bodies pressed against him and the girls did not seem to mind sharing as the night closed in and their hot mouths found him ready.

  That is his first riot, and it seems as far away from death as it is possible for any experience to be. When he wakes the morning after, his head so clear and alive that he feels that God has made the sun rise inside his own skull, he wants to do it again, and again, and again, and wishes with his whole heart that every day would be a day of climbing and shouting and throwing and goats and manure and backflips and oil jars, and that every night could be like the night that has just passed sweet and warm and that every morning for the whole of his life would be like this blue radiant dawn.

  He’s been taken notice of already. His cleverness and his daring and his eagerness for the fight—that last one most of all. Men older than him, men who’d kept to the old ways and whose fathers hadn’t given up the battle even when that stone in the wall fell in and the Romans breached the citadel, those men look at the rioters and pick out which ones seem to have something more than the rest.

  There is a man, Av-Raham, who sits in the marketplace most mornings, sipping occasionally from a bowlful of smoke. He has a little potbelly and his hair is thin at the crown, but he has a shrewd eye, and men come to him all morning long with questions and requests. He is the one who knows where those cartloads of wheat looted from the Romans ended up. His friends are the people who receive the extra measures of oil which somehow appear when there are bandits in the n
orth. It is he who owns the sharpest swords in Jerusalem, and he to whom one goes if one needs medicine, or aid, or revenge.

  They bring Bar-Avo to him the morning after the riot. Bar-Avo is cocky, at least at first. He’s only fifteen and he doesn’t know what he’s doing here. A small corner of him suspects that he’s in trouble. A larger part of him doesn’t care, because last night he had two girls and nothing that happens this morning can ever erase that. He’s still buzzing from the fight.

  They’d found him naked under a pile of old sacks, fucking one of those two girls again, his hair a cloud around his face, both of them moving slowly, tired but unable to stop. They’d waited until he was finished and then said, “Av-Raham would like to see you.” And Bar-Avo had taken a swig of water from a jug by his side, swirled it around in his mouth, spat it out into the straw and said, “What if I don’t want to see him?” They had explained most politely that Av-Raham was a good friend to his friends. And, swaggering, Bar-Avo had gone.

  There was something he liked about the deferential air surrounding Av-Raham. He couldn’t help imagining how it would feel to be the man whom others talked to in low voices, asked favors of and consulted. He was old—over fifty probably—and not handsome, not like Bar-Avo, but there was something charismatic about him. Over the years Bar-Avo would watch him closely to see how he did it. The formation of the inner circle within his group of followers. The constant denial that he was a man of any importance whatever. The impression that he was holding secrets and that, perhaps, he spoke to God. These are the skills by which a man leads, inspiring both love and fear.

  That morning, the conversation was brief.

  “They tell me you acquitted yourself well in the battle yesterday.”

  Bar-Avo has all the humility of a teenager.

  “Yes,” he says. “No one can climb as well as me, no one else hit as many soldiers with the oil pots, I think those are the most important things.”

  Av-Raham smiled an amused smile.

  “The most important things. Tell me, do you hate Rome?”

  And there’s no question, none at all. Rome is all the things that are wrong in all the world.

  “Yes.”

  “Then we may find a use for you. You are the son of Mered, aren’t you?”

  The mention of his father stings him. He was not a good father. Bar-Avo has not seen him for a long time.

  “I’m a man now. It doesn’t matter whose son I am.”

  And Av-Raham’s eyes meet those of one of the men standing beside him and they both laugh. Bar-Avo cannot read the laugh, cannot see that it says: yes, we understand that, we have said those words ourselves when we were boys.

  Bar-Avo shouts at this ring of slow, thoughtful men, “Do not ask me about my father! My father is dead! I have no father!”

  And Av-Raham says, slowly, “None of us has a father.”

  Bar-Avo looks around at them, trying to see if they are mocking him.

  “Or at least, God is our father,” says Av-Raham, “no other father matters. You can be simply His son with us. Or mine, for I am father to many.”

  Bar-Avo squints and thinks and curls his lip.

  “I will be the son of some father,” he says at last, and that is how he gets his name, which means “the son of his father,” and no other name he has had before has ever suited him so well as this. He is this now, a man who carries his own father with him, a nameless, invisible, intangible father.

  Av-Raham, whose name means “the father to many,” laughs.

  “Either way,” he says, “now you belong with us.”

  And that is that.

  They give him little tasks at first, and he deals with them handily. A set of daggers to be smuggled past the guards—he conceals them under a cartful of vegetables a farmer asks him to take to market and gets paid twice for the journey, once by the farmer and once by Av-Raham’s men. Messages to be carried. Lookout to be kept as they cut open the leather thongs holding a prized horse belonging to the Prefect in its stable, slap its thigh and send it skittering across the plaza, where, terrified by the smells and the noise, it falls and lames itself. Conversations to be overheard in the marketplace—there is always a use for information carelessly dropped.

  He is bored sometimes, but also paid fairly well for his trouble—so much so that he can now be the man of his home, bringing his mother meat and bread. And when there is going to be a riot he knows it, and he is the one who can tell his friends where to be and at what time. And he knows where the fires will be lit and where the roofs will be torn off and what can be stolen early on because everyone will think that this saddle or that blanket or that wheel of cheese must have burned in the flames. A long campaign of resistance and anger is nothing if not pragmatic. Young men must be found to fight, and must be rewarded and encouraged, and people must eat.

  Many days are dull—days of waiting for the fighting or for anything to happen. He does not mind the dullness. He finds himself more patient than he’d realized. The more he thinks on it, the more he wants what Av-Raham has. That quiet command, honor in the hearts of men. One has to wait, and work hard, and become trustworthy, before these things start to happen.

  There is a day when Av-Raham shows him a map of Israel. He has never seen more than a little plan before—drawn on a table in wine, perhaps—to show where the grain store is in relation to where they are now, or which of three roads leads to the house of the girl he likes. This is a brushed-vellum masterpiece, kept rolled in a cloth bag and brought out ceremoniously when the men sit discussing their affairs.

  Bar-Avo has come to bring wineskins he stole from a Roman officer when he was distracted by a commotion in the marketplace, and to receive his orders. But when he enters the small back room where these discussions are held, he cannot help staring at the map.

  “They have moved their troops here,” one of the men is saying to Av-Raham, putting a finger on the map, “so their supply lines will have to go through the mountain pass.”

  Bar-Avo sees at once what the map is. There is the sea, inked with fine blue waves. Here is the coast, here are the roads leading in from Yaffo to Jerusalem, up to Caesarea, down to the desert. He has imagined the countryside with this eagle’s view when he walks from place to place. And all over the map are dried black beans—from one of the sacks kept in the storeroom which conceals the entrance to this chamber. Av-Raham sees him looking.

  “They are the Romans,” he says, pointing out the beans, “here is the garrison”—a cluster of beans near Jerusalem—“and here are the outposts”—all around the countryside. “We keep watch on where they go and what they do, so we know when new supplies will be dispatched to them and when they will be isolated.”

  “So you can decide when to strike,” says Bar-Avo wonderingly.

  “These are guesses really. Merely that. Our information is often out of date. But we try to steal from them when we can. There is nothing sweeter,” Av-Raham says, smiling, his little potbelly shifting against the table as he leans forward, “than killing a Roman soldier with his own sword.”

  Bar-Avo smiles too. He has imagined himself a killer before, like all boys. Has swished a sword and imagined running someone through with it. He has taken lambs to offer at the Temple and seen the life go out of them and understood how simple and how important the thing is.

  “How many of them will we kill before they leave?”

  Av-Raham looks into Bar-Avo’s eyes, then takes his left hand by the wrist, palm up. He plucks a bean delicately from the table and places it in Bar-Avo’s palm.

  “This is how we proceed now. One by one. But with God’s help…”

  Av-Raham sweeps the beans off the parchment with the back of his hand. It takes two sweeps, three, to clear them all.

  “That is what we must do. Every one of them out. No peace until every single one of them is swept away.”

  “We’ll drive them into the sea,” says Bar-Avo, looking at the beans on the floor.

  Av-Raham p
ulls Bar-Avo towards him, so Bar-Avo can smell the older man’s scent of onions and spice and the cloves he chews. Av-Raham holds him at the back of the neck and kisses the top of his head.

  “With a thousand boys like you,” he says, “we will do it.”

  He is trusted, as time goes on, with bigger things. He is taught where the caches of swords are, and how to grease and wrap them so that they will not rust in their long months underground. He learns the different ways to set a fire in a building so that it will take with little kindling and without time to waste. He learns the names of the important men up and down the land. Av-Raham even has one of the old men teach him to read, though Bar-Avo always does so slowly and hesitatingly, for this is a skill necessary to a revolution.

  It is entirely true that some of these skills are dull and he has to be convinced that learning them is necessary. But then there is the day when he first kills a man. That is not a boring day.

  There was no reason for this to be the day, though he knew the day would come and that it would be a moment like this. He is nearing twenty now and commands a handful of men of a similar age or a bit younger. They make mischief, steal things where they can, riot and destroy property, telling themselves every time that, piece by piece, they are pulling Rome off their land.

  Today it will be the baths. Rome has not built a grand bathhouse in Jerusalem as she does in many of her conquered cities, but there is a small pool, one story only, near to the dormitories for the soldiers stationed in Jerusalem. The soldiers bathe there and that is enough to make it worthy of attack. And it’s used by some of the people in the town, those for whom the traditional ritual baths are insufficiently Roman, those who want to show their loyalty to the occupying power. Traitors, therefore, in their treacherous waters.

  Bar-Avo and his friends have decided on a plan. There are open windows in the roof of the baths, and the building is next to several houses, one owned by a man who owes a great deal to Av-Raham and has been persuaded to let them use the window which leads out onto the curved bathhouse roof. Four of them go: Ya’ir, Giora, Matan and Bar-Avo himself. They shin down the wall from the window, each of them carrying a leather bag over his shoulder, each of them suppressing laughter.