Testament

by Nino Ricci

  The camp was not nearly as ramshackle a place as I’d expected, having been built not by Antipas but by the Romans, with their typical efficiency and precision. They had been motivated in this less by philanthropy than by strategy: the colony was set on the promontory that stood over the Arbela caves, and was a way of keeping the caves, which were accessible only from above, out of the hands of the rebels and bandits who normally inhabited them. Several barracks-style dormitories ran along the length of the promontory, with a courtyard and common kitchen at the centre of them. Apparently before the Romans had turned the place over to Antipas, as they eventually had, they actually supplied food for the residents and encouraged large communal meals and a sharing of tasks as a way of maintaining some sort of discipline and order. Now, however, the residents were dependent on the generosity of their relatives in bringing food and on the honesty of the guards in delivering it.

  What was surprising in the camp was its air of normalcy: people went about their business, cooking and cleaning, carrying water, even farming a bit of field there, with only the slightest sense of hush and shame at their afflictions. Clearly Yeshua had brought an air of hope to the place. He encouraged cleanliness and had set up special areas of segregation to monitor various ailments and work towards a cure; and he treated people from an entirely medical point of view, with none of the condescension that the priests in Jerusalem showed in sending the afflicted off to their quarantine, nor indeed with the least concern for their uncleanness. When I asked him how he reconciled his approach with the proscriptions of the scriptures, he said merely that our forefathers had found their own way of expressing things that could not otherwise have been understood then.

  When he had finished his rounds in the camp proper, he led me down to the caves. This was where the worst cases took refuge, those without hope. The whole mountain face at Arbela was riddled with these caves, which were accessible only by a steep footpath, one that here and there required you to scrabble against the rock face; already as we neared the end of it there was an overwhelming stench of putrid flesh, people moving like wraiths against the caves’ darkness. It was from here that Antigonus, the last of the Maccabees, had fought Herod the Great, Herod finally resorting to swinging grappling hooks down into the mouths of the caves from above in order to drag his enemy out from them. But for the lepers who had now retreated to them, the caves had become their permanent homes, not because they had been forced into them but because shame had driven them there. So it was that once their disfigurements had rendered them hideous they repaired from the barracks above to this forsaken place, where they lived out their final agonizing years wondering what sin of their fathers or themselves had brought this horror on them.

  Yeshua was surely the first visitor from outside the camp whom many of these people had seen in months or years. He told me they had shunned him when he’d first come, out of shame and their concern for his own purity. But now at his approach they came together quite openly, gathering on a little rock shelf that jutted out from the cliff face. It was an astounding sight, these dozens of lepers congregating there, men, women, and even some children, many of them so gnarled-limbed and deformed they were hardly recognizable as human. But what was surprising in lepers was that as putrid and corrupt as their outward form might be, their mental faculties were not affected in the least, so that you were suddenly astounded to hear from out of their mass of rotting flesh a perfect human voice. Thus it was that Yeshua did a most simple and amazing thing: he sat himself down amongst these lepers and conversed with them as if their affliction counted for nothing in his eyes.

  This was no doubt what Yeshua had wished me to wit-ness—the utter contrast in these people between the outer person and the inner one, a theme he returned to again and again in his teaching. He liked in particular to tell the story of the pious man and the sinner who went to the temple to pray: the former used the occasion as an opportunity to list all his virtues, while the latter, not even daring to look up to heaven, merely begged the Lord’s mercy. The sinner, of course, was the hero of the tale, for his inner humility made him more worthy of God’s love than the other’s outer piety; and the story always went over well with people, who saw in it, I imagined, a sanction for their own laxity. I, however, always felt sorry for the poor pious man, who was stuck with the rigour of his discipline and self-denial while the sinner was left free to sin again.

  But sitting among the lepers I did not feel quite so cynical. For the longest time, not even aware I was doing it, I stood well back from the circle they had formed around Yeshua, so repulsed was I by their smell and their hideousness and so accustomed to keeping lepers at a distance. But perhaps it was their own unthinking acceptance of my aversion, even as they sat conversing in the most normal fashion with Yeshua, that shamed me, that brought home to me not only how quick we all were to judge by appearances but also how deeply ingrained were the prejudices that got passed on to us. It was second nature in a Jew to see in a leper’s affliction a sign of hopeless corruption. But it took only a few minutes among them to see they were merely average sorts of beings like the rest of us, made perhaps more humble and timid by their isolation but still recognizable as people you might have passed in the streets of any village. Afterwards I could hardly remember what was talked about—the most mundane of things, what had been done in the towns for the feasts, how the harvests had been, what marriages had taken place, petty matters I would not have imagined that Yeshua would have paid the least attention to. But within a matter of minutes I was sitting there amidst the others and had almost forgotten their deformities, so much had the smallest acquaintance with their inner selves transformed my vision of their outer ones.

  At one point water was passed around, and a bit of oil and bread. To save me embarrassment, one of the women brought me a separate portion that had apparently been specifically sent for from above, the bread wrapped in leaves so that no hands should have touched it and the water and oil set in pots of stone to keep them pure. But for Yeshua, I saw, no special arrangement was made, nor did he so much as flinch at taking the ladle from which the others had drunk. It seemed so repellent a thing and yet so intimate, to share with them in this way—the sight of it left a strange agitation in me that afterwards I could not shake for many days, as if I witnessed some horror. Yet it was clear that, for the lepers, it was as though he had thus taken their affliction upon himself, to share the burden of it. I thought I understood something in him then, though I could not quite have expressed it, that indeed he was like the lepers in some way, or even Rakiil, all those who were marked, though he had a prince’s bearing and the looks of one. If I saw the lepers differently afterwards, it was perhaps exactly in this, in understanding in them a dislocation that was still in some sense spiritual yet not moral, which was a manner of thinking that as a Jew I was not accustomed to.

  Whatever Yeshua’s intentions with the lepers, however, it remained true that his treatment of them continued to polarize feeling about him, so much so that for a time it grew difficult for us to travel freely and people were forced to come looking for him at Kefar Nahum, where he would speak to them either on a hill above the town or on the beach, sometimes standing in a boat a little ways off from the shore then so that they could see him. For the core of his following, of course, the matter was merely further evidence of his greatness, and for all I could say, that was indeed the case. But as tensions and emotions rose, there seemed a danger of descending into fanaticism, with the attendant risk of calling onto Yeshua the fate of Yohanan before him.

  For my part, I could no longer pretend that I might somehow be able to turn an association with Yeshua to the good of my own cause. The animosities he had aroused in the region made it difficult for me to establish relations with anyone outside his following; while within it I had found no one who seemed sufficiently like-minded to be a good prospect for recruitment. Even the faction that had split from him under Aram of Kinneret, when I tried to approach it, would have nothing to
do with me: they apparently assumed at once I was a spy, either for Yeshua or for Herod, so that even when I finally managed to arrange to meet directly with Aram himself, I was left standing half the night in the woods outside Kinneret without seeing any sign of him.

  It so happened that it was just around this time that Pontius Pilate arrived in Caesarea Maritima to take up his post as Judean procurator. News of his arrival would likely not have drawn much attention among the Galileans, who seemed to make their indifference to Judean politics a point of pride, were it not that as his first act, Pilate had the Antonia fortress in Jerusalem regarrisoned and had the new squadron erect around the place, secretly and by night, standards that bore the images of Caesar. When the populace awoke to find Caesar’s image flying well-nigh over the temple, there was a great outcry. Almost at once a mob formed to travel to Caesarea, where Pilate had apparently remained the whole time without so much as having stepped foot outside the palace.

  When word of the protest reached us in Kefar Nahum, it was my immediate instinct that I must join it, as much from shame over my long idleness as from eagerness for the cause. In any event it seemed certain that some from our own movement would be among the protesters there, and so I might learn from them how matters went in Jerusalem and if it was safe to return. At the back of my mind I knew that if I left Yeshua now, I might not find the circumstance that would let me rejoin him, and no doubt it was for that reason that I chose to leave in haste, and without explanation—not, as I deluded myself, because I feared I should be forced to lie to him, since he surely would not have required any excuse from me for my departure, but rather because I was afraid of that part of me that simply wished to remain with him. Later I had cause to regret this hasty exodus not only on my account but on Yohanan’s, from whom I had been unable to hide my departure and who begged to accompany me. In the end he got only as far as Sepphoris before turning back, confessing that he feared his father’s anger, since he had not sought his permission. But I later discovered that despite his early return he was severely chastised, as if he had gone off on some debauchery, though he was hardly a child to be so much under his father’s yoke.

  By the time I reached Caesarea on my own, the protest had already been going on for several days. I was amazed by the numbers I found gathered there, in the thousands and still growing, not only from Jerusalem but apparently from all the countryside in between. The entire square in front of the palace was filled with protesters, all the usual traffic there come to a halt; and though apparently soldiers had initially been posted at all the entrances into the square as if to hem people in, the crowd had grown so sprawling and large by now that it could no longer be comfortably contained and the soldiers had retreated to form a line in front of the palace instead.

  The crowd looked made up of the simplest sort of folk, men, women, and children all mixed together as if whole families had simply stood up from their dinners and set off en masse for the capital the instant word had reached them of Pilate’s sacrilege. As far as I could tell, the only leadership to speak of consisted of a few of the more radical members of the Council (certainly none of the priests were there; nor, at first, did I see any of our own people); and then, from the villages, a number of teachers and elders, each to his group. Under normal circumstances, with such a crowd and no one dominant voice, there would have been the danger of the entire affair deteriorating into factionalism. But since people had come so single-mindedly, with no motive except their outrage and no objective except the removal of Caesar’s standards, there was an atmosphere in the crowd of tremendous solidarity.

  It seemed Pilate had not yet made an appearance, but had sent word that even if all of Palestine gathered at his door, he would not have the icons removed. As the crowd continued to grow it appeared that indeed would be the case, that soon the whole of the country would have joined us there at Pilate’s gate. But rather than being encouraged by this show of force, I felt a familiar despair. In the first place, it frustrated me how quick we were to take affront at this type of incorporeal challenge when our people were daily murdered and enslaved without our raising a whisper of complaint. In the second, what I was most struck by at seeing us gathered in such numbers was less our strength than our weakness. Not a man of us was armed; and even had we been, we would never have been so well-armed as Pilate’s soldiers, who, apart from the weapons they carried with them, had engines in their garrison capable of killing whole swaths of us with a single stroke. Beyond that, even if by sheer force of numbers we were to overwhelm them, the empire would yield up an almost infinite number of replacements for them, so that in the end the sum of every last Jew scattered throughout the civilized world from beyond the Euphrates to beyond the Nile would not total a fraction of the forces that Rome could muster against us.

  These were truths, of course, that our movement had always kept before it—so we had laid down our foundations, and eschewed populism, and sent our missions abroad in search of allies, all so that we might avoid the senseless massacre in which most of our uprisings had ended. But perhaps it was exactly being there in that crowd, feeling the energy of it, that I saw clearly how doomed our own enterprise was as well, just endless scheming and planning and waiting that bore no relation to the mass of people, our tiny gains promptly erased at every smallest setback. There seemed only these two extremes, either to recklessly seize the moment in the face of certain defeat, or to plan and plan so endlessly that all momentum was lost and the moment of action forever deferred.

  In the square, however, the main concern by that point was with finding food. No one had been prepared for the thing to drag on like this, and what supplies people had brought with them had long been used up. There was little help to be expected on this front from the Caesareans, who were mainly pagans and regarded us as at best an annoyance and at worst a positive menace; and even the Jews who lived there seemed unwilling to show us open solidarity lest they be made to pay the price after our departure. But teams had apparently been organized to fetch food from the surrounding countryside, and these returned not long after sundown with vegetables and cheese and fruit, wine, fresh bread, all of it donated by the Jewish villages and farms around the city and parcelled out equally among us so that no one of the thousands gathered there in the square should go hungry. In addition, reeds and branches had been brought in to make booths against the cold as if it were the Feast of Tabernacles, and there was such a celebratory mood in the square that night, with fires and singing, that you would not have known if you had stumbled upon us that we had come there in anger and in protest.

  It must have put a fright into Pilate, however, to look out from the palace windows the next morning and see the square taken over by our booths as though by a conquering army. Not long after sunrise he responded by calling out what seemed the whole of his legion, maybe some three thousand in all, who lined up practically a testudo in front of the palace ten rows deep, seeming fully prepared to march against us. Most of us were just coming to after the night’s festivities and we stared out bleary-eyed and hushed at this apparition. But when half an hour had passed and still the soldiers had not moved against us, the crowd began to taunt them. Many of the soldiers were Samaritans, and understood perfectly well the abuse that was being hurled at them; and we would surely have descended into violence had the soldiers not been recalled as suddenly as they had been deployed, the bulk of them filing away into the palace courtyard and seemingly back to the garrison to leave only the nominal handful guarding the gates.

  None of us had any idea what to make of this apparent backing down. Pilate, having only just taken up his post, was an unknown quantity to us, and whether he was showing cowardice or benevolence in withdrawing his troops we couldn’t judge. But not long afterwards he sent his pages out among us to announce that he was prepared to come to terms, and that we should gather in the stadium so that he could comfortably address us. Such a feeling of elation went through the crowd then that no one thought to question the wisdo
m of letting ourselves be penned up like that, the whole crowd instead surging at once towards the stadium gates so that even those of us who might have resisted were swept along with the rest. Meanwhile the citizens of Caesarea, happy to have their square liberated, stood lined up in the streetside arcades to watch us pass as if we were prisoners being marched along in a triumph.

  At the stadium there was a handful of troops who directed us to the arena, into which the several thousand of us were crammed like so many sheep. Pilate had already taken his seat on the tribunal—he was smaller than I’d expected, and had that bearing, at once arrogant and defensive, of someone perpetually conscious of being of second rank. It was always hard to tell with that sort what excesses they would be prone to when given power. In this case, it was also unclear whether Pilate had acted on his own in setting up the standards, or on the express orders of Tiberius. The rumour was that he so hated the Jews he had been determined to put them in their place at once by rescinding the special privileges they had always enjoyed. But if that was the case and he had acted without Caesar’s sanction, then he was foolish enough to be a real danger to us.

  When we were all assembled, Pilate raised his hand and we fell silent. At that point there were only perhaps fifty soldiers visible in the stadium, most of them milling around the gates in what appeared to be a casual way and the rest stationed up near Pilate’s tribunal. But then on a nod from Pilate the gates were suddenly secured, leaving no exit, and an instant later there was a great rattle of armour while what seemed the entire contigent of troops that had beset us that morning suddenly poured out from the wings and into the stadium’s first rows to encircle us, the host of them planting themselves there with their hands on the hilts of their swords as if ready on the instant to leap over the barricade and massacre the lot of us. We all stood dumbfounded: even those of us who might have suspected Pilate’s intentions would never have believed he would consider resorting to such wholesale slaughter. Either he was bluffing or he was one of those madmen that the emperors sometimes sent out to the provinces simply to rid the capital of them.