“Why release him?”
“To show mercy. To bring the love of Rome as well as the scourge. You’ve done it before at the festivals. You know it works. It is clever.”
Too much to compliment him in this fashion? No. Pilate is as vain as any man.
“They have already come to ask, it is true.”
“Then release him. He has a body of followers, many of them women.” He drops this in as if it is in Yehoshuah’s favor. It is not. Rome takes only a little more account of women than Greece ever did. “That is my advice to you”—he lowers his head—“in return for a swift and merciful death. I’ve killed your men. Your soldiers will love you for doing away with me. It will be easier for you to keep them in line.”
Pilate’s lip curls.
“The soldiers will obey me because it is their duty so to do. They owe it to me, to Rome, to their Emperor.”
He motions with his head to the little golden statue of the God-Emperor in the alcove shrine opposite the window.
“You should still execute me. If you want to be wise.”
It is so easy to bait Pilate. He is entirely unable to conceal his reactions. He is angry that Bar-Avo has suggested a wise course of action, implied that he is not wise already.
“I know what men like you are. You consider it an honor to die at our hands, fighting. What if I don’t want to give you that honor? What if I keep you here as my slave? There’d be no martyr’s death for you then, no crowd of wailing women to keep your name alive and use it to spur on further rebellion.”
Bar-Avo shrugs.
“I am in your hands, Prefect. Do with me as you see fit.”
Pilate narrows his eyes, certain now that some game is being played with him.
“And what if I let you go?”
“My men would, of course, be delighted.”
“Yes,” says Pilate, “yes, your men. Ten thousand of them, they say, across Judea, loyal to you.”
This is not true, but Bar-Avo does not contradict him. There are nearer five thousand and they are loyal not to him but to the cause. To live free is more important than merely to live. Loyalty to him would hurt that cause. They must be willing to give him up if necessary; he would do the same to them.
“Yes,” Pilate muses, “let them taste the mercy of Rome as well as the kiss of her strap.”
The man is not an idiot, and yet he behaves like an idiot. It is pride. If another man were considering this course of action, Pilate would bring him up easily on five or six points which make it unthinkably foolish. But he cannot bring his mind to bear on his own plans.
“They would be grateful to me, would they not, if I released their master?”
“They would suspect I had turned traitor,” says Bar-Avo, because he can see the growing, gathering shimmer of the way to save his own skin.
“Hah!” Pilate smiles broadly. “Even better! Gratitude and mistrust. Magnificent. You could not have promised me anything better if you had designed it yourself.”
Bar-Avo tries to make his face as impassive as a stone. As if the thought of what he has done has hardened his heart.
“I’ll tell you what,” says Pilate, “I’ll make a game of it.”
His men are in the crowd. Bar-Avo sees them as soon as he and Yehoshuah are brought out blinking into the light of the square below Pilate’s home, the place where later on the Prefect has his soldiers massacre all those men.
They are here to see him die, perhaps. Or to start a riot, or join in with one if one starts. They mingle quietly with the crowd. The hoods of their cloaks are drawn up around their faces. There are perhaps two hundred people here and probably forty of them are his own men. Because of the respect and love they hold him. Not to try to save him, but to witness his death and bear witness of it to his friends, and to his mother, and to his wife and sons.
He sees two or three of the friends of Yehoshuah in the crowd. He had a smaller band, of course, and they were not strong men, not used to fighting or to witnessing death at the hands of Rome. He wishes more of Yehoshuah’s men were here. Such a united force should see how Rome kills. If they saw, they could not help but rise up.
Pilate addresses the crowd.
“People of Jerusalem!” he shouts. “I come here today to offer you a choice!”
The crowd stirs and mutters. He has played this little game before. He does not always do it, only sometimes. So they should not become complacent, of course.
“Your will is important to me! Rome does not wish to hurt you, only to bring you order and good governance. Therefore, I have two criminals here: the preacher Yehoshuah, who called himself the King of the Jews, and Barabbas, a rebel who murdered men during the rebellion.”
There is more muttering. Not men, the crowd are thinking to themselves, soldiers. Who do the Jews kill in a rebellion? Not other Jews. Soldiers. Even those who didn’t know that Bar-Avo had killed soldiers know it now. Pilate has as good as said: here is a freedom fighter, a hero. Does he know he’s said it? It’s so hard to tell with that man whether he’s being cunning or stupid. Or whether his cunning is the same as his stupidity, because only a stupid man would try to be cunning like that.
“I am going to allow you to decide which of these men shall live and which shall be executed. They are both criminals, both found guilty by your courts!”
But we know who influences the courts, murmur the crowd, we know who tells them whom they may find guilty and whom innocent.
“This man Yehoshuah has blasphemed against your God! And this man Barabbas has murdered men!”
But there are women in that crowd to whom Bar-Avo’s men have given bread when the Romans burned the wheat field. There are men in that crowd whom Bar-Avo’s men have fought with, defending their homes from bandits. There are children in that crowd whom Bar-Avo’s men have found medicine for. No group of guerrilla fighters can last for long without the love of the people they live among. What could Yehoshuah possibly have to compare with that? No preacher has anything to offer to an oppressed people that compares with bread and water and tinctures and swords.
“So which do you choose?” he shouts. “You can save one and only one! Which of these men will you save?”
And there’s no choice, none at all. Yehoshuah’s friends try to call for him, but there aren’t enough of them, and they’re drowned out by the voices rising up one on another on another saying, “Barabbas! Give us Barabbas! Blessed Barabbas!”
It is a pitilessly cruel game. If they refuse to call out names—and it has happened before, like gladiators refusing to fight—Pilate will simply kill both men. It is entirely unfair. It makes a mockery of life itself. And yet what can anyone do but participate?
Bar-Avo stares at Yehoshuah. Yehoshuah is looking out at the crowd, where his scattered friends are shouting themselves hoarse on his behalf. There is a man with tears streaming down his face as he shouts, “Yehoshuah! Yehoshuah!” Bar-Avo can see his lips moving, but the sound does not reach, so great is the clamor of “Barabbas! Barabbas!”
Pilate is disconcerted by the vehemence of the cries. Whatever calculation he thought he’d made, it seems to have fallen out differently from his expectation. His shoulders slope. He quiets the crowd. They settle down watchfully. He could do anything.
“But this man,” he says, “don’t you want this King of the Jews?”
And it’s clear to the crowd that he’s mocking them now. As if they’ve been left with any such thing as a rightful king, as if they’d be able to tell their rightful king when they saw him.
It is nearly one hundred years this year since Rome took hold of Jerusalem and breached her and penetrated her by force. He is asking this question as if every king for one hundred years hasn’t been placed on the throne by Rome. He despises them, and it is obvious in every word he utters.
“What shall I do with this King of the Jews?” he says.
“Execute him!” shouts someone in the crowd, and the rest take up the cry of “Barabbas!” again. The few pitiful voices cal
ling out the other name are entirely inaudible.
How is it possible that a whole life can come down to this moment: seeing how many friends you have and how loudly they are prepared to shout your name?
Bar-Avo wants to live, he thinks, but not like this. But that is a lie. He realizes it as he stands there, with the humility of a man who has been for these past few days half dead, half alive. He wants to live and he does not much care how, as long as it does not destroy the cause he’s fought for. He and Yehoshuah are both weeping, and the preacher’s friends are still shouting his name, still desperately trying to save him, and it is obvious they love the man. If it were possible to save them both, Bar-Avo’s men would be shouting for that. If it were possible to expel the occupiers from the land by shouting, they would shout for that until their throats bled. But there is never the choice to save both. There is never more mercy than absolutely required.
A look crosses Pilate’s face, and he glances to his left and right as if he wishes he had more soldiers around him. If he were to refuse to give them Bar-Avo now, his life would be in danger. There are enough men in the crowd to rush them. Crowds have a single voice and mind and heart. This crowd wants Bar-Avo.
“Very well!” shouts Pilate. “I have heard your wishes! I hope that seeing the magnanimity of Rome will encourage you to be loyal! To love your Emperor! To stop your petty uprisings! I know that Barabbas, having felt this mercy, will join with me in longing for peace between the two great nations of Rome and the Jews!”
Yehoshuah’s friends are still calling out, they are trying to get close to the raised platform on which the men are displayed. Yehoshuah himself stands absolutely silent, his head bowed, his hands tied, like Bar-Avo’s, behind his back. Bar-Avo looks at Yehoshuah, while one of Pilate’s soldiers saws at the ropes that bind him.
And eventually Yehoshuah looks back. He seems shocked and frightened and alone. He understands that he has failed to win a popularity contest, that he has somehow not made enough friends, or loyal enough friends, to fight for him on this nonsensical battlefield.
Bar-Avo too has heard the sayings of the rabbis: that one good friend is worth an army of hangers-on, that fools consort with a multitude while the wise man keeps his counsel among a few whom he can trust. They are wrong, the rabbis, in this matter. In times of peace a man has the luxury of picking a few good friends. In times of war one must hoard the love of men as one lays down stocks of grain and oil and jars of water against an ill-fortuned time. Bar-Avo’s friends are his treasure house. They have saved his life.
Pilate does not have to release him, even still. There is no law that says he must obey the will of the people, just as no statute or edict from Rome has told him to ask them. But Pilate is too fearful a man to be willing to chance a crowd like this. He has rolled the dice hoping for Venus and it has come up Vultures.
They cut through Bar-Avo’s ropes at last. His wrists are sore, his hands numb. There is a gash on his right hand where the knife slipped—though they were none too careful with it and perhaps the wound was intended. The soldiers hustle him by his shoulders to the edge of the platform and half lower, half push him off. He looks back. Yehoshuah’s head is still hanging down. Their eyes meet as Bar-Avo reaches the ground and his friends begin to encircle him, hugging and patting and punching his shoulder.
Bar-Avo says, “I am sorry,” and though the sound of his words is obscured by the noise of the crowd he thinks that perhaps Yehoshuah sees the words form on his lips and understands, because the man’s head moves. It is something like a shake of the head, something like a thin smile, something like a sob in the movement of his shoulders.
He is touched by the man’s ambiguous gesture. As his friends sweep him away, he thinks that perhaps they should attempt to mount a rescue, as they might try to do for one of their own captains. But such maneuvers are risky at best—they would not have tried one even for him. They are more likely to end in losing twenty men than saving one. It is odd, really, that the idea has even crossed his mind, since this man is nothing to him. Except, of course, that this is the man who will die in his place, whose death has bought his life.
He has lived his life in the exact opposite fashion to the way this Yehoshuah has lived and that is why he, Bar-Avo, lives and Yehoshuah will die.
In the marble-floored plaza, as he is taken out in triumph, a few men and women are weeping. He turns his head again to see Yehoshuah led through the iron gates towards the dungeon from which he will travel to the place of execution. The gate closes fast behind him and Barabbas can no longer see his face.
He goes to sit beneath the men who are being crucified, later. He is the most free bandit and murderer in the whole of Judea now, for the Prefect has liberated him in front of a great multitude and so he can go where he pleases and do what he likes.
Besides, two of the men crucified that day have fought alongside his men, stealing grain and arms from the Romans. He pays the guards to cut their wrists as the nails go in so that death will come to them more quickly and he waits until he sees them slump. He has their bodies taken down for burial before the evening, as is right. He has already told his loyal lieutenants to bring pouches of silver to the men’s families. This is how a man makes friends and keeps them.
He would have told the guards to do the same trick with Yehoshuah, to ease his passing, but some of the man’s family and friends are standing by. One of them, the man he’d seen weeping in the plaza, spits and shouts as he walks past, “Murderer! You should be up on that cross, not my master!”
And he finds he no longer has a mind to help that death go swiftly.
It is not, in any case, the worst method of execution Rome has ever devised. There is a particular thing they do which begins with hanging a man upside down by his ankles between two trees and slowly, across many hours or even days, sawing him vertically in half from scrotum to neck. It is astonishing how long a man will live like this, upside down, when he would die right side up. By contrast, crucifixion is merciful. There is another thing he has heard is done in Persia, where maggots of a particular beetle are introduced under the flesh and the man is fed milk and honey to keep him alive while the maggots burrow through his sinews and make their nest in his belly and sometimes crawl out alive through his eyes and ears and nose while he is still himself just living. Sufficiently living to scream, anyway. Death, the only inevitable item on the list of life, is nonetheless such a constant matter of human creativity. He finds he has an odd admiration for it. He would never have had the ingenuity to devise such methods.
He wonders, as he lingers by the crosses, whether it is his destiny to end his days here too, pinioned and waiting to be food for ravens. It is most likely, he thinks. That is how it will probably fall out. He will join all the thousands upon thousands of men whom Rome has nailed up, but the important thing is to make sure he has scratched her face before that day.
Afterwards, he finds the man who betrayed him. His dear friend Ya’ir, the one who was his most loyal and trusted follower, the one who fought alongside him, his most precious Ya’ir.
Bar-Avo is crying when he talks to Ya’ir.
“I trusted you,” he says, “I gave you everything, I looked after you and your family, you are my brother.”
Ya’ir, tied with rope at wrists and ankles, gagged across his mouth, says nothing.
“If you had a reason for me, any reason at all,” says Bar-Avo, “maybe it would be different.”
Ya’ir does not even attempt to speak. His eyes are dead already. What can the reason possibly have been? Only that he had capitulated, taken the Roman money, agreed to betray them because he had accepted that Rome was the only power and had the only favor worth gaining.
Bar-Avo leaps up from his chair and strikes him across the face, but still he says nothing.
They keep him for three days. They have to perform a certain number of unpleasant tasks to be sure they’ve found out everything he knows. Bar-Avo watches, for the most part, but does not
participate, and it becomes clear over time that Ya’ir does not know much.
They hang him in the end, from a tree near the village where they’ve been hiding, and put it about that it was a suicide. If anyone questions this story or even wonders if it was true, they do not dare to say it out loud.
He sends later to root out what happened to that Yehoshuah’s followers and family. It is not only sentiment that makes him do it; a rabble army looking for a new leader could be useful to him. He gets back a garbled tale that the dead man’s body was stolen, probably by his family, but perhaps by some of the hangers-on who wanted to set up a shrine to the holy man. He asks his own people to report back if they find out the truth of the story, but no one ever tells him a convincing tale about it.
In those days, Av-Raham dies. It is not sudden or violent; he is an old man now, nearing eighty, and his spirit burns brightly but his body is frail. He has time to gather his men to him, to tell them to keep fighting—they know that—and to name his successors. Bar-Avo is named, of course, as the captain of the north.
They bury Av-Raham just before sunset and stand weeping over his grave for a long time. Bar-Avo lingers after the other men have departed, wanting to wring some final wisdom out of the dry earth. It is for him now to decide how to prosecute the ongoing war.
He says, “They captured me. They have spies among our ranks. If we push on we may perish and be defeated.”
And from the grave he hears Av-Raham’s voice and smells the man’s scent, the smoke and the mild smell of frying onions: “Better perish than live under occupation. Better every man dead than that.”
Bar-Avo is pragmatic. He knows that the dead often appear in dreams and visions, that just because you think you have smelled the scent of a man’s clothes after he has died does not mean that you should do what that voice tells you.
Pilate is mobilizing his forces, striking back at the “bandits” who have harried his supply lines for months. It might be a time to retreat, to scatter the men to their homes and wait for the crackdown to end. It is not Bar-Avo’s decision alone, but he is part of the decision. He says no, tell the men to come to the city even still. If there is no fight there will at least be a mighty demonstration of anger. We are ready now, or we will soon be ready. The people want to overthrow the Romans.
The Liars' Gospel: A Novel Page 24