Testament

by Nino Ricci

  All this was a matter of great irony, I thought, for though Yeshua had always been happy enough to eat and drink well when the occasion arose and to surround himself with young women, he had often struck me as someone almost entirely lacking in desires, as if his physical nature was merely so much baggage he carried, that he might slough off at its first inconvenience to him. Though he did not encourage fasting, for instance, he himself sometimes did so for days, as if simply by oversight; and though I had never heard him advocate sexual abstinence, which was the case with many of the cults, he had never shown any particular favour to one or the other of his women or given reason to believe he might choose one as his wife, so I might almost have wondered, if it were not so uncommon among Jews, whether his desires did not run in another direction. For these reasons, I felt no cause to believe there was any substance to the rumours against him. But exactly because there was so little in his teaching that reflected this ascetic side of him, it went unnoticed. Instead people made much of the feasts he went to at the homes of his wealthier patrons and how he never refused a glass of wine, so that it seemed entirely reasonable to believe as well that he kept his women with him for his pleasure.

  Thus many who had followed him before, and who counted themselves pious, now grew uneasy with him; while others who had ignored him suddenly thought him a Bacchus come to life, and began to come to him to bless their crops or cure their infertility, which appalled him. Sometimes a dozen or more would already be awaiting him at Kephas’s gate when he arose; sometimes at his sermons above the town he could hardly be heard for the clamour people made to be attended to. In the midst of these there were the usual ill who continued to come, and whose numbers had grown, so that more than once it happened that seeing the crowds waiting in ambush of him he would steal away with a few of us and leave them in the lurch.

  “If someone comes with only the truth, it’s not enough for them,” he said, growing bitter. “They have to have wonders.”

  So he grew increasingly reclusive, and even those times when he tended to the sick he appeared worn out by the effort, as if his healing had become a drain on his own vital force; because while at the outset his healing had appeared the natural complement to his ministry, it now began to seem an obstacle to it, and so he lost the heart for it. In this matter as well, however, logic was confounded: rather than diminishing his reputation, Yeshua’s growing reluctance to cure seemed instead to have the effect of enhancing it. As what had once been freely offered became more inaccessible and rare, so did the stories grow of the wonders that Yeshua was capable of and of the miracle cures he had brought about. Thus the blind and the lame appeared at the gate, and those close to death, filled with hope; and thus we were forced to turn them away. For Yeshua, there seemed no way out: the less he appeared in public, the more the rumours of his potency grew; but if he should come out and simply tend to people in the usual way, they felt disappointed, as if some sin of theirs or some failure of faith had kept him from using his powers to the full.

  On one occasion an old cripple who had had his relations bring him across the lake from Sennabris was so insistent on being seen that he had himself lifted up on his stretcher to the roof of Kephas’s house and lowered down by ropes into the courtyard. Kephas was ready to chase him and his people away at the end of a stick. But Yeshua was impressed by his persistence, though the man freely admitted it was skepticism and not belief that lay behind it: he wished to put to rest the rumours of Yeshua’s abilities.

  “You’re right to be skeptical,” Yeshua said. “Only God has that sort of power.”

  “Then why do you allow such lies to be spread about you?”

  “I can’t control what people say.”

  “Ah,” the old man said, “you’re like the ugly girl who to hide her ugliness never leaves the house, so the rumour spreads she’s in fact very beautiful and the suitors begin to line up at her door. When her sister accuses her of deceit, she says, ‘I can’t control the lies people tell about me.’ But in the meantime she doesn’t mind being thought beautiful.”

  Yeshua took all this very well and indeed seemed enlivened in a way he had not been for many weeks. He and the old man ended up talking together at great length, and parted friends. The man promised to return to Sennabris saying he had found not a miracle worker but something much rarer, a man of wisdom.

  This was the sort of thing that most pleased Yeshua: a reasoned discussion that ended with his interlocutor won over to his point of view. In this he revealed himself to be at heart a teacher—not a mystic, not a cultist, not even a healer per se, but merely what he had presented himself to me as from the start, someone with a few plain truths he wished to impart to people. Indeed, this was the Yeshua that I had been drawn to, and that I now missed. If things had been different, if the need of people hadn’t been so great or if he himself hadn’t had that special air to him, the quality of being chosen or marked that seemed almost to stand outside him like a second person, then he might have simply lived out his life in Notzerah or Kefar Nahum with his little following and his bit of renown. As it was, however, the mood of the times went against him, so that though he preached peace, yet he would not be left in it.

  It was around this time that one of the women in our group, Ribqah, from Migdal, took seriously ill. She was a girl of little means and of questionable virtue whom Yeshua, however, no doubt exactly because the world held her in such low regard, had always kept very close to him. He had suffered much criticism on this account even from his own people, and Herod’s spies had been quick to make use of the thing to further discredit him. Thus when she was struck down it was taken as a sign, in the way the peasants did, and the matter assumed a much greater importance than it merited.

  It was mid-morning when word came to us that she was ill. A group of us set out at once from Kefar Nahum for her village, which was some five or six miles down the lakeshore. When we arrived there we were directed to a salting shed on the beach, and were surprised to find her simply spread out on a table next to a heap of entrails from the night’s catch. Yeshua was livid.

  “Why hasn’t she been brought inside?”

  But her father couldn’t seem to fathom Yeshua’s anger.

  “We wanted to keep an eye on her while we worked,” he said.

  She had suffered a bite of some sort while she’d been walking along the beach, no one knew from what. The bite, on her shin, had already formed a suppurating abscess and had bloated her leg. Yeshua brought her to her bed and treated her as best he could, lancing the abscess and drawing blood from her in the hope of draining the poison. But within the hour she was dead. When the life passed out of her, Yeshua wept. It was a long time before we could get him to leave her so she could be dressed for burial.

  “I did nothing for her,” he said.

  Afterwards he kept up his mourning for many days, holed up in his little room at the back of Kephas’s house. The entire time he neither ate nor washed, his forehead still smeared with the dirt he had put there when Ribqah had died. He seemed to be mourning his own impotence—for all the wonders people ascribed to him, he had been unable to save one of those closest to him. So it was that whenever he heard there were supplicants at the gate, he would at once slip out by the back way, and be gone for many hours.

  We were all of us worried for him at the time, and wondered what would become of him. With each day that passed without food he seemed to grow more wild-eyed and less reasonable, so that we feared he would descend into madness. The only one of us whose presence he would suffer then was Andreas, from whom he took water at least and who would cling to him to comfort him without the least affectation or reserve, so that tears would come to Yeshua’s eyes. Indeed it was Andreas, I thought, who was the thing that held him to the world then, since he was such a child and could not be put off, whereas the rest of us hardly dared to go near him.

  For my part, I wondered, seeing the depths he had fallen into, if I had ever really understood him, since he s
eemed such a stranger to me in that state, and more defeated even than when I had first met him at En Melakh. Clearly it was not only the matter of Ribqah that had undone him, for there were any number he had not cured and more than one who had died in his arms. Rather it seemed he had lost his way, as if he himself was no longer certain what he must be to people or as if the second person he was, which was his public one, had somehow split away and left only this ghost of himself. Afterwards I thought it had been a mistake for even those of us closest to him to have avoided him during that time, and to have failed to reassure him. But in my own case I no longer felt sufficiently in his confidence to believe I could reach him in any way.

  After many days in this state he finally called us together at Kephas’s house and said he would be leaving us for a time, he could not say for how long. Among the twelve there was a great sense of destitution at this, and it seemed only by force of will that the women were able to keep themselves from wailing aloud. Yet because we didn’t know the state of his mind no one dared to beg him to stay. Perhaps he took offence at this, or indeed had been awaiting some sign from us of our support for him, because he left the house at once then to be alone again.

  When he’d gone I said, “We must find the way to accompany him, when he goes,” and I could see there was some relief at the suggestion, since the notion apparently hadn’t occurred to any of the others.

  It was agreed that three of us would go with him. Kephas put himself forward to lead the group, but it was the height of the season for him, and his mother-in-law was ill and near death, and we rightly discouraged him from going off on a sojourn of uncertain destination and length. It was the same with Yaqob and several of the others, so that in the end we were left with Yohanan and Simon the Canaanite and also myself, because no one, I supposed, had been quick enough to voice an objection to me.

  I went out in search of Yeshua then and found him on the beach just outside the town. He had walked out along the breakwater there, which sat low at that time because of the rains, so that he seemed to hover on the surface of the lake.

  I told him the plan we had made, and who would accompany him. He did not put up any objection but seemed surprised, perhaps even disappointed, with whom we had settled on for the purpose.

  “So you see how the last are first,” he said, which was a saying of his, meaning that Simon and I had been the last to join the twelve.

  I, however, felt a throb of anticipation at the journey, though I would not have foreseen this. Perhaps what drew me was simply the prospect of leaving Kefar Nahum, which had begun to be a prison to me. But it was also, I had to admit, the chance of being in close quarters with Yeshua again, for it seemed now I had missed him in these past weeks and months as if he had been away from me, and I wished for his return.

  Yeshua wasted no time now in setting out, rousing us before dawn the next morning and saying nothing of our destination except that we would be heading north towards the Syrian highlands. We followed the Jordan Valley road as far as Lake Huleh and then crossed over at Thella into Philip’s territory, though there was not so much as a tollgate there to mark the passage. I had never made this trip before and was amazed at the lushness of the valley, particularly around the lake. There were all manner of trees and vegetation, reeds three times as high as a man, birds and animals of every sort, as if we had stumbled upon the first site of creation.

  From there on, it was clear that we were in foreign country. The landscape became increasingly rugged and wooded; the villages we passed were like little pagan fortresses, high-walled and forbidding and seeming cut off in some absolute way from the rest of the civilized world. All along the roadside were shrines to the local gods, little altars in the middle of nowhere or strange, demonish faces carved into the cliffs or just arcane agglomerations of rocks and stones that only the slightest bit of order distinguished from the random rocks nearby. It was hard to believe this land had formed part of old Israel, so completely had it reverted. As it turned out we were lucky to have Simon along with us—he spoke the dialect, and helped to mitigate the instinctive distrust that most of the locals felt for Jews.

  We put up for the night in the woods just outside Paneas, or rather Caesarea Philippi, as Philip had now renamed it. Simon warned us that we would be much safer in the town; but Yeshua, who had hardly spoken the entire trip, refused to pass through the gates. In the morning, Yohanan and I went in to fetch some food and managed to steal a glimpse of the cave of Pan where the Jordan began. The entire site was dominated now by Herod the Great’s temple to Augustus, one sacrilege laid over another; though at least the worship of Pan had the virtue of being rooted in the honest feelings of the people. Even that early in the morning the shrine was already filled with pilgrims, some of them caught in fits of ecstasy. Niches carved into the cliff face were filled with idols; everywhere were offerings of food and garlands and coins and bits of silver and gold. Yohanan, who had never seen such a sight, was very affected by the visit—no doubt he had never imagined that pagan gods could inspire such a level of devotion.

  Though Yeshua had not told us as much, it was clear by now that we were headed up Mount Hermon. Simon appeared to grow agitated at this prospect—the mountain was a site of worship for his people, and he seemed to fear some vengeance from his former gods for his desertion of them. His panic increased when in the woods we passed a group of acolytes of Pan writhing and moaning in the morning fog. So his conversion had not quite taken after all; later it came out that what he had feared the previous evening when we’d slept in the open had been not the threat of thieves, as we’d thought, but rather of Pan visiting mischief on us in the night. All of this he tried to hide from Yeshua, of course, only reluctantly confiding in Yohanan and me when his fears began to get the better of him.

  Though well worn by pilgrims, the road up the mountain was not much more than a sheep path, irregular and stony and steep. We passed an altar where a sacrifice was in progress, the smell of blood heavy on the air; it occurred to me that we were not far removed here from our own forefathers, slaughtering their lambs in the high places of Canaan. But Yeshua continued forward in his single-minded manner, always slightly ahead of us, seemingly unmoved by the strange, pagan atmosphere of the place, the sense that a thousand spirits hovered around us. The higher we went, the more alien and savage our surroundings became; but Yeshua did not even so much as look back at us, climbing the slopes with the agility of a mountain goat while the three of us struggled to keep up. At one point a patch of mist cut off our view of him entirely and Simon, in a fit of panic, shouted out to him.

  We found him waiting for us in a clearing.

  “I was afraid we’d lost you,” Simon said.

  “And what would you do then?”

  The hardness in Yeshua’s voice made Simon redden.

  “I would look for you.”

  “How long? An hour? A day?”

  “Until I found you,” Simon said, and I saw there were tears in his eyes.

  By sunset we had reached the point where the wooded slopes of the mountainside began to give way to barren rock. There was still a bit of snow at the mountain’s peak, which gave a bitter chill to the wind that blew down from there, and as we had not brought any tents Yohanan and I suggested we spend the night in a little temple nearby, a crude construction of wood and unfinished stone. Yeshua, however, would have none of it, and insisted we build huts from what branches and saplings we could scrounge together. We built a separate one for him and then, a little apart, a large one for the rest of us, since Simon had made it clear that he was too frightened to sleep alone. Yeshua retreated into his own the instant darkness fell, declining to share our supper. A while later we heard sounds from his tent that we took at first for sobs, but he was merely praying. Nonetheless, Simon was thrown into a panic again, and edged up to his hut.

  “Master!” he said.

  “What is it?”

  “Ah! I’m sorry. We thought—I was frightened.”

&nbs
p; Silence.

  “Master, we’re wondering why you’ve come here,” Simon said.

  “What is it to you, why I’ve come? Is it such a burden to keep me company?”

  We passed a miserable night. A fog had set in that chilled us to the bone; and then all night long Simon plagued us with his fears, growing more and more crazed. I gathered that in his mind the gods that had peopled his old life had not so much vanished with his conversion as been transformed into demons, all of them now intent on his destruction. To be fair to him, there was something about the place that inspired this kind of madness; and then in the middle of the night, as if his worst fears had materialized, there was a great crashing in the underbrush and wild animals of some sort—we were never able to determine what they were—encircled our camp. For the longest time we sat huddled in our tent trying to keep silent while the animals rampaged around us; Simon, despite our imprecations, finally broke down and began whispering atonements to his old gods, believing the animals to be demons that had been loosed upon us. It seemed only by some fluke that the beasts didn’t knock down our flimsy hut and make off with us. Then, as suddenly as they had come, they were gone.