Testament

by Nino Ricci

  “Cease your protest and go home,” Pilate said, “and I will spare your lives.”

  And on that signal the soldiers to a man unsheathed their swords.

  This was an act of such provocation that it seemed there would be nothing for it but for us to riot, weaponless though we were and composed as much of women and children as of able-bodied men. Perhaps that was exactly what Pilate had hoped for; he could then send word back to Caesar that the Jews had revolted, and he had been forced to put them down. For a long moment then the strangest sort of tension seemed to hover over us, of outrage mingled with fear and with the simple astonishment that we could suddenly be facing our deaths. I was surprised at how little zeal I felt at the thought of such a sacrifice—it was not the way I’d ever foreseen my contribution, as a simple number in some tally of our dead.

  At that instant, however, it happened that one of the leaders from Jerusalem, a young teacher by the name of Eleazar, suddenly came forward out of the crowd and had himself heaved up onto the barricade beneath Pilate’s tribunal. Before the soldiers could remove him, he shouted out to Pilate that we were prepared to die rather than transgress our own law. Then, for all to see, he knelt down on the narrow shelf the barricade afforded and bared his neck to the soldiers, as if to invite their swords.

  A hush fell over the stadium while we waited to see how the soldiers would respond. But since no signal was forthcoming from Pilate, they made no move. Someone else took up Eleazar’s cry then, and someone else again, so that it spread by degrees across the stadium, and then, one by one, people began to kneel down in the dirt with their necks offered up, until nearly every man, woman, and child in the place was readied for the sword.

  My initial reaction at the sight of such submission was abhorrence, for while there had clearly been something calculated and cynical in Eleazar’s gesture—he was, in effect, simply calling Pilate’s bluff—the crowd seemed to be following his lead in utter seriousness, as if people were truly prepared to be slaughtered there where they knelt. But even as I struggled with my revulsion I found myself kneeling with the rest, perhaps merely because I feared being taken for a coward if I did not; and in kneeling I had a sort of revelation, for what I felt was not a sense of submission but of sudden power. The most an enemy could take from you was your life; offer that to him freely, and his hold over you was gone. So it was that the ten thousand of us kneeling there in the sand, our lives at stake, suddenly seemed to be the ones who instead were holding Pilate for ransom: he could only submit to us or have us killed, though in so doing only take that which we had willingly given over to him.

  I could hardly have described the feeling that went through the stadium as we knelt there except to say that it was as if we had all of us for a moment been bound up in a single will. The fear that had been palpable when the soldiers had first appeared had completely vanished; and if it had happened at that moment that Pilate had given the signal and the soldiers had descended on us, I would have wagered that not one of us would have flinched before the knife. As it happened, however, the signal didn’t come: Pilate merely stood staring out at us as dumbfounded as we had first been at the sight of his soldiers. He had reckoned us the merest savages, to be frightened off our beliefs at the first hint of any threat; instead, he found us willing to die over a matter that must have seemed to him almost trivial.

  After a few minutes, Pilate, pale with anger, got up from his seat and left the stadium, leaving us kneeling in the sun and the soldiers watching over us with their weapons still bared. For perhaps an hour we remained at that standoff; and then again, as suddenly as they had come, the soldiers withdrew and the message came through from the palace that we were free to go. This time, there was no rejoicing: under the leadership of Eleazar and a few others, we marched in almost total silence back to the palace square—where our booths, in the meantime, had been knocked down—and sat ourselves on the paving stones as if we were prepared to remain there until the end of days if we weren’t granted our original demand. We could see Pilate watching us from the palace windows; no doubt he had hoped that after he’d released us we would simply pick up and go, happy to escape with our lives, instead of stubbornly returning to torment him. When sunset came and we began to rebuild our booths and distribute what food we had remaining, he must have made a decision to cut his losses, for he sent his pages out again to announce to us that the standards would be removed.

  It was doubtful whether any of us in the crowd had ever quite believed that the matter would end in this way, that without violence, and by sheer force of will, we would achieve our goal. The normal expectation in protests of this sort was that there would be skirmishes or at least arrests, that the matter would be appealed finally to the governor in Damascus or to Rome where it would fester for months or years before any decision was made—in short, that our people would still in the end be made to suffer every indignity while the administration, even if it had massacred scores of us, would at best be only mildly reprimanded. That we were walking away now with what seemed total victory left us a bit stunned at first—it was as if we hadn’t quite understood why in this case things had turned out differently. Somehow Eleazar, either by stroke of genius or of luck, had rescued us, had found the way to save at once both our honour and our lives. I remembered a story I’d heard as a young man of a similar protest in Alexandria, where the Jews, to save their quarter from attack by fellow citizens during some dispute, had simply lain down in the path of the approaching mob; faced with the prospect of having to trample a mile of them, the mob had eventually turned tail and headed home. At the time, the strategy had struck me as foolhardy and craven. But now I saw the matter differently; I saw the power there was in confronting the enemy with the spectre of his own barbarity.

  Since it was dark by the time of Pilate’s announcement, most of us bedded down in the square for the night and only set out for home the following morning. We were a haggard lot by then, seeming more sombre and chastened in victory than we’d been in adversity. No one dared to rejoice until we’d seen with our own eyes that the standards had truly been removed. For my own part, I believed that Pilate would keep to his word—surely he wouldn’t risk another confrontation of the sort he’d just been through. Nonetheless, it was my plan to follow the crowd back into Jerusalem, as much, however, for the cover it provided for my return there as out of concern for the standards. I could not go any longer without some news of our group; it did not bode well, I thought, that I had recognized none of them amongst the protesters.

  It was exactly then, however, on the road out of the city, that I finally met some who were familiar to me, two young men whom I knew by the names of Rohagah and Yekhubbah. They behaved strangely towards me, hardly meeting my eye, and it was only by pains that I was able to learn from them that I was under question because I had not yet returned to Jerusalem. I was outraged at this. I said to them that surely they’d had word of me from Tyre.

  The elder one, Rohagah, though they were neither of them much more than boys, said, “From Tyre we heard only that you had left in the night, and given no message,” which was untrue.

  The two of them were types of a new recruit that I did not get on with, and who hardly differed from Zealots in the narrowness of their thinking and the severity of their manner. Towards me, their sort were disdainful and thought me untrustworthy because they regarded me as a foreigner, and hence tainted by the ways of the world.

  I said to them that in any event I was just then on my way to Jerusalem, and that surely I had been wise to await the proper moment for my return rather than risking bringing further suspicion on us in the midst of the reprisals.

  “Then you should not come at all, if you’re under suspicion,” Rohagah said, stupidly, it seemed to me.

  I might have thrashed him. We stood there in the middle of the road not speaking until Yekhubbah, seeing my anger, said awkwardly, “They’re planning an action for Jerusalem,” though it was clear from Rohagah’s look that he had
overstepped his bounds. “They only want to take care.”

  I was amazed at this. Surely it was foolishness to proceed with an action in Jerusalem when we could not be certain of any of the outposts; if Pilate did not crush us, the Syrian governor surely would.

  I said, “I’d heard the reprisals had left us decimated.”

  “Those who were lost have been replaced,” Rohagah said, which chilled me, for I understood him to mean that he and his lot had now got the upper hand.

  He had been good enough to leave me a way out.

  “Perhaps you’re right that I should wait,” I said. “You’ll tell the others that I’m looking to our work in Galilee.”

  “Of course.”

  And when they had gone I felt a tremendous relief to have escaped them.

  I realized then how loath I had been to return to Jerusalem from the start; understanding the situation there made me infinitely more so. The truth was that once I had got caught up in the spirit of the protest, I had hardly given a thought to Jerusalem, or to our cause; rather it had always been to Yeshua that my mind had gone back, and to what he might make of the thing, and to what I would say to him if I returned to him. It seemed my experience in Caesarea had changed my view of things in some important way, like a shift of light that made you see some object differently, that made you reconsider what you thought its nature to be. The object, in this case, was our freedom, which I had always imagined was a thing that had to be wrested away from our enemies like a trophy or prize. But in the stadium, when we’d been kneeling there, it had seemed something more subtle than that, not to be captured or won but somehow called into being, conjured up like a spirit.

  Thus it fell out that I did not go on to Jerusalem as I had planned but rather left the crowd where the road forked north to return to the Galilee. While I was stopped in Sepphoris the word came through that Pilate had in fact kept his pledge, though no one in that city, filled with Greeks as it was, showed much interest in the event. Later, of course, Pilate would make us pay dearly for this early leniency, never missing an opportunity to put us in our place. But at the time the victory seemed a significant one, not least for the method by which we had brought it about.

  On my way out of Sepphoris I could not resist the urge to detour southward a few miles to Notzerah, the town of Yeshua’s family, though I did not know what I hoped to find there. Apparently the place had been just a hamlet until workers hired on for the rebuilding of Sepphoris following the rebellion had begun to take up residence there, forbidden as they were from living in Sepphoris proper. As a result, the present town was rather sprawling and unkempt, and stretched out pell-mell along a series of irregular slopes so that it made a disagreeable impression and so that defences of any kind were impossible. All the buildings showed signs of haste in their construction; several that I noticed had upper storeys that lay collapsed in ruins above the main one, so that it was easy to surmise they had been added on in the shoddiest possible manner as the town’s population burgeoned. Ironically these were the hovels that the craftsmen who built the splendours of Sepphoris had had to return to every evening. At the height of the construction the town must have been a bustling one; but now I found it half-deserted, many of the houses abandoned and an air of desuetude hanging over the place. In the surrounding region the town had a reputation for roguery and dishonesty, though also, apparently, for the beauty of its women, which, however, I saw scant evidence of during my own visit.

  I asked about Yeshua. People knew at once who I meant, though at first I wasn’t certain we were referring to the same man, so different was the image people gave out of him from the one I had come to have. As it turned out, he had left the town long before, only a matter of years after his family had come there from Egypt; and from the sound of it, the townspeople had been glad to see the back of him. He’d had airs, people said, the town couldn’t abide him; or they said he’d gone mad and run off, and his family hadn’t been able to bring him back. Of his current ministry, which most of them had heard about, they were dismissive—what kind of a man, they said, and him the eldest son, left his widowed mother and siblings without a further thought to them.

  About his family they were more generous: they were good people but kept to themselves. The father, who had died not long after coming to the town, had been a stonemason; but not much more seemed to be known about him. Since his death the family had been supported by Yeshua’s brothers, who worked at odd building jobs as well as farming a plot of land outside the town bought by the father just after his arrival.

  This was not the background I would have guessed for Yeshua, whom I had imagined the son of a clerk, at least, or a merchant, to judge by his education. No doubt this explained the town’s dislike of him: he had acted above his station. I would have liked to have met some of his family, to get a clearer notion of him, but I did not know what I might say to them, or if they would welcome me. Instead I contented myself with a view of his home, which I was directed to, in the hope I might catch a glimpse of some brother of his in passing.

  The place was built on a steep incline that led down to one of the little valleys the town was folded into, clinging there precariously, I thought, though it looked of slightly sturdier construction than many of the other houses in the town. It was double-storeyed, the bottom floor built directly into the hillside and seeming to function as a stable, with a little courtyard out front, and the second one reached by a narrow stone stairwell, though apparently opening out at ground level in back. There was nothing particularly distinctive about the place—it seemed the house of a family that had done neither excessively well nor excessively poorly, that was not remarkable in any way, except that it had produced this Yeshua who was either a madman, as the townspeople had it, or a saint, as his followers did.

  While I stood staring at the place from across the street, a woman emerged from the stable into the front courtyard and looked out at me—his mother, I presumed, though she did not look nearly as old as I would have expected, her hair pitch-black and her eyes blacker still. She was the first woman I’d seen in the town in whom there was any sign of an intrinsic beauty, though it was clear from her look, which had something of the Arab to it, and from her bearing, which was that of a city woman, that she did not belong to the place, and that indeed she would gladly have kicked the dust of it from her heels. She held my gaze an instant, though distractedly, with a sort of hollowness that seemed to suggest her life had failed her in some way. I was almost tempted to go to her, to bring her some word of comfort: I come from your son, who sends his greetings. But as abruptly as she’d come she turned away and retreated into the shadows, and I saw no more of her.

  I returned to Kefar Nahum. After the tension and ferment of Caesarea, the town seemed like the end of the world, hopelessly backward and remote, and Yeshua himself perhaps the madman, after all, that his fellow townsmen had reckoned him to be. I began to speak to him of the events in Caesarea but he was strangely distant and cool, treating me as if I had betrayed him by going off or by daring to learn things that might compete with his own teaching. Then several times he went out of his way to show favour to Kephas at my expense, even though Kephas, to his credit, was clearly shamed by such pettiness. For my part, I took the matter much more to heart than I would have admitted—I had come back from Caesarea in a sort of agitation, on the verge of some insight, it seemed, that I owed to Yeshua’s example; yet he had spurned me as if to say that I’d understood nothing, that we walked in different countries, that I was still too hopelessly far from any real grasp of things for him to stoop to instruct me.

  I might have simply gone my own way then except that I lacked not only destination but means: at my departure, to repay any debt I owed, I’d left the bulk of my remaining funds to the common purse, which I’d left behind for Yohanan’s brother. The purse had now been given over to Matthaios again, with no suggestion it would be returned me; and so I was in some measure held hostage there, unless I chose to hire myself
out in the streets for my living. It was as if while I’d been gone some enemy had worked every means to put me at a disadvantage should I return. Had I foreseen the reception that awaited me, I might just as soon have gone back to Jerusalem after all, where at least I was known and felt of some use, while here it seemed that for a few days’ absence I had become a stranger.

  There had been some changes while I’d been away. Yeshua had added a new disciple to our inner group, a pagan they called Simon the Canaanite, the first heathen he’d included among us; and he made it clear to all of us that he was to be treated as an equal, even though in so doing he seemed merely to emphasize the man’s difference from the rest of us. In the end, of course, none of us could shake the tinge of condescension that marked all our exchanges with him, particularly as he himself had the cringing manner of someone used to abasing himself for the sake of fitting in. Apart from the fact that his addition to the group brought our number to a portentous twelve, as if we were the twelve tribes reborn, the sole reason for his presence seemed to be to further rile the powers already set against us.

  It had never been any secret that Yeshua considered his mission to extend to the heathens. But until now his proselytizing had always been seen in the same light as that of the Pharisees, aimed simply at winning converts for the Jews. Simon, however, had remained uncircumcised, and though he would surely have submitted to the knife at once had Yeshua required it of him, Yeshua seemed to want to make an example of him. The thing was never spoken about openly, of course, but as the rumour of Simon’s condition spread, the matter threatened to be an even more explosive one than that of the lepers. At every gathering a question would come up about the covenant; and Yeshua would use his usual evasions and riddles to avoid confronting it directly. Then when someone asked him outright if some different sign would replace circumcision in his new kingdom, Yeshua said it was only the weak of faith who required a mark of their covenant. On that occasion there were some in the audience who were ready to stone him on the spot had they not been restrained by the people around them.