Testament

by Nino Ricci

We went out at once to check on Yeshua: his hut was empty. Simon let out a wail at this discovery. But there was no blood nearby, so far as we could tell, nor had there been any sounds of struggle; it was possible, therefore, that he had simply fled. Clearly we had to wait until morning to begin a search, given the fog and the dark and the danger of falling prey to the very beasts we had just been saved from. But Simon had grown frantic, weeping and lamenting as if the entire blame for the calamity fell on his own shoulders, and before Yohanan or I could stop him he rushed out into the dark, calling out for his master. We tried to chase after him to bring him back, but within a matter of paces we already seemed in danger of losing our way.

  We had no option except to wait, huddling once more in our little tent. The time seemed interminable; at one point we heard distant sounds in the underbrush again, called out, got only an animal moan in return, and decided to repair after all to the little temple nearby, shoring up a small pile of stones inside as ammunition and stopping up the entrance with a few boulders and rotting logs. The place was drafty and dank, with a smell of lamp oil and smoke and old blood; we tried to build a fire but couldn’t get it going. Out of sheer exhaustion and cold we finally fell asleep, only waking when the first light had begun to show through the mist.

  Our first priority was to look for Yeshua—we reckoned that if he had fled, logic would have sent him along the treeless upper slopes of the mountain, where it would have been possible to run in the fog and dark without fear of obstruction. We set out along the rough path that led up towards the mountaintop, able to pick our way even though the fog was so thick at first that we could not see more than half a dozen paces ahead of us. Then, as we rose higher, the fog began to thin and the light to grow stronger. We had not gone very far, however, before we heard shouts in the distance: Simon. He was coming down the path towards us.

  “I’ve found him!” he was saying. “I’ve found him!”

  He emerged finally, breathless, out of the fog.

  “He’s on the mountaintop!”

  “Is he safe?” I said.

  “Yes, yes! He’s with the others!”

  “What others?”

  “Come and see!”

  He was babbling. We tried to calm him but couldn’t get much sense out of him.

  “Come and see for yourselves!”

  We followed him up. Soon we had risen above the fog into brilliant morning light. It was as if we had entered the heavens: at our feet the fog stretched, a great cloud spread out for as far as the eye could see; then, before us, bathed in light, the snow-covered peak of the mountain. At the very peak we could make out the figure of Yeshua, alone.

  “They were there before!” Simon said. “I swear it!”

  Angels, he said they were, all in white; who knew what trick of the fog and light and of his own fevered mind had induced in him this vision. From what we gathered, he believed they had interceded to save Yeshua after the demons had carried him off to the mountaintop.

  “I assure you I came up here entirely on my own,” Yeshua said, when we reached him. It turned out he had been there most of the night, and had not even been present when the animals had attacked. As to our own miraculous escape, he put it down to God or blind luck.

  “If there had been angels, I would have been the first to see them.”

  But he didn’t manage to shake Simon of his belief; and later, of course, when we returned to Galilee, it was Simon’s version of things, being the most fantastical, that seemed at once to gain currency.

  Yeshua showed no particular joy that we had survived our attack, and indeed I had the impression he might just as soon have had us devoured and been rid of us. What seemed of greater concern to him, when we returned to the camp, was that we had been so foolish as to leave our sack of food within easy reach, and the animals had made their supper of it.

  “So it seems you’ll keep me company in my fast,” he said, and thus gave us to know he would not give up his retreat, though we were without food and at the mercy of the wild animals.

  There was no thought of abandoning him. But a plan had to be devised to keep safe our own lives. In the end it was Simon, again, entirely calmed now that he’d seen that Yeshua’s magic was greater than that of his demons, who proved indispensable: it turned out that for all his fanciful notions he understood a thing or two about the wild, pointing out, for instance, that most animals would be loath to leave the wooded lower slopes of the mountain for the barren ones higher up. Accordingly we moved our camp to the mountaintop, where the air was colder but actually less damp than on the slopes; and for added security we built a little fortress of mud and branches and stones for the three of us, then a smaller one, again, for Yeshua, which, however, as far as we could ascertain, he seldom used. It was Simon also who found a spring for water, and who fashioned traps so that we were never in want of meat; and though with each day that passed there seemed less and less to distinguish us from the wild beasts, it was also true that our survival no longer ever seemed in serious threat.

  As it happened the retreat lasted many days and weeks, so that we had only the moon to tell us the time and sometimes could not even say for certain which day was the sabbath and which was not. Yeshua, at first, had little to do with us, and would take his food apart if he ate at all and spend his time praying alone on the mountaintop or wandering in the woods or caught up in some little project that would then take up all his energies. Once he borrowed a knife from Simon and spent the entire day carving and whittling away at a log he had dragged up from the forest; and when evening came and we dared to look at what he had done, we saw he’d carved our own three likenesses, Yohanan and Simon and myself, so amazing in their accuracy that even Yohanan and I, despite our unease, stood a moment speechless at his skill.

  “But, teacher,” Yohanan said finally, “it’s forbidden.”

  “You’re right. Burn it.”

  And without further ado he had us throw the thing into the fire.

  But after some time it seemed he slowly came back to himself. It started with his joining Simon on his morning rounds to his traps, which pleased Simon no end, and had him instructing Yeshua in every detail of how he set the traps out, and laid the bait, and studied the animals’ habits so that he knew how such and such a placement or such and such a trick would catch them up. We’d see the two of them go off every morning like seasoned hunters, and hear Simon’s chatter, and somehow all seemed right with us again. By then Yeshua had begun to join us for our meals and the small, crazed glint of his fast had left him, so that he began to seem happy with us out there in the wild, with no one to pester him or make demands. What I understood then was that he was not one of those who felt his very existence threatened if he did not have the adulation of the crowds, but rather someone who felt most himself exactly alone like this with his few friends and unremarked, and who suffered leadership only because he could not find the way to avoid it. For my part, I felt we had returned at last to the simple friendliness there had been between us at the outset, uncomplicated and unfraught, when we had often talked into the night in Kephas’s courtyard or on the beach.

  Once, when we were alone, we came to discuss Ephesus and he asked after my family, the first time he had ever done so. I told him then that my parents had died in the famous fire there some ten years before, during the riot against the Jews. I was already in Jerusalem then, finishing my studies; when I returned to Ephesus to settle my father’s affairs I saw that the entire block where we had lived had been reduced to cinder.

  “It affected you deeply,” Yeshua said, which was not what I’d expected.

  “It changed the course of my life.”

  “Because you blamed the Romans for what had happened.”

  “In short, yes.”

  I expected an argument from him, how the Romans protected the Jews, how they everywhere granted us special privileges; it was not the Romans, after all, who had burnt my father’s house but the ignorant masses, who hated us exactly for
our special treatment. I did not know what to put against this logic except the arguments I had made to myself as a young man—that a Jew must be free, and did not go on bended knee to ask for privileges, and that until the bond to Rome was broken we would remain the target of the world’s persecutions, because we claimed to be chosen yet were in chains. But I did not know if I believed in these arguments as I once had.

  To my surprise, however, Yeshua said only, “I’m very sorry for your parents’ deaths,” and did not challenge me, for which I was grateful.

  In the end, his silence on this matter did more, perhaps, to question my convictions than any argument from him might have, for I understood in the wake of it how my hatred of Rome was as much a loyalty to the memory of my parents as a reasoned stand. I remembered my anger when I’d learned of their deaths, how I had wanted a target for it—I had been an easy prospect then for whatever cause or creed had first got hold of me, and might just as soon have become a Zealot. For the truth was that there were not many of those I’d met in the movement then who had struck me as men of great integrity or vision, and had I not been so blinded by rage and grief, I might not have been so quick to follow them. I wondered what I would have made of a Yeshua, had I met one then, how different the course of my life might have been. Yet it was likely I would not have heard him, or given him any heed, when even now it seemed always that I fought him in some part of myself and could not give in to him.

  After we’d been on the mountain for some time it began to happen that some pilgrims who had made their way up to the place for their own ends got wind of the holy man who had pitched his camp there and began to seek him out. These were to a one pagans, mainly locals but also from as far away as Damascus and Tyre, and I was certain it was Simon who had somehow managed to spread the word among them, though he denied this. Usually they brought little offerings of food with them, which Yeshua, despite their taint of idolatry, authorized us to accept. But he did not grant them much of an audience, and then was uncompromising in his treatment of them. When they asked him the path to wisdom, he told them to follow the one true God; and when they asked after their own gods, he said they were phantoms, inventions of their own errant minds.

  “But your own disciple here says they’re demons,” one of them said, referring to Simon.

  “He’s a child, and so he understands things as a child would,” Yeshua said, at which Simon, however, beamed and took not the least offence.

  I was surprised at how much these visitors indulged him—he had pitched camp, after all, on their own sacred ground, then had the audacity to blaspheme their gods. But most of them took this in stride, though I could not have said if they simply assumed he was mad or were genuinely drawn in by his strange air of authority.

  One day a man from Sidon arrived, a wealthy merchant of some sort, with an entire entourage of slaves and a gilded litter that bore his sick daughter, whom all his doctors had been unable to cure. He had taken her to the shrine at Caesarea Philippi, again without success; but while there he had heard of the holy man on the mountain, and so had come to him to try his fortune. Yeshua’s first reaction was to chastise the man for dragging his poor daughter across the countryside when she would have been much better off at home in her own bed. But then he set to work on her, draping her in a dampened cloth to bring down her fever and cooking up a pungent brew from a plant I was unfamiliar with that he found on the mountain slopes, small-leafed and bitter and brilliant green. Within a day her fever had begun to abate and her colour to return. Her father was ecstatic—he offered Yeshua a permanent place in his household, all the riches he could ask for, a temple dedicated to his god.

  “Will you worship with me there?” Yeshua said.

  “I have a dozen temples already to worship in. But if you want, I’ll join you in your own as well.”

  “And if I asked you to come only to mine?”

  The man laughed.

  “Now your price is too steep.”

  When they’d gone, Yeshua fell into low spirits again.

  “They were only pagans,” Yohanan said, to console him. “Why should you trouble yourself over them?”

  But Yeshua turned on him.

  “Wasn’t Simon a pagan? Do you think our god looks after only the Jews and doesn’t concern himself with the rest? Is he just some little wood nymph to make an idol of, who lives in his little cave?”

  The outburst silenced us, and left Yohanan red-faced with shame. But Yeshua’s anger had surely come from his own divided mind: he seemed both to resent the help he gave to the heathens and yet unable to find the way, within his own philosophy, to refuse it.

  We all feared the incident would send Yeshua spiralling back to the depths. But he recovered quickly enough, and even seemed heartened in the end, for he began to greet the pilgrims who came to him with some of his old humour and open spirit. Then one day, without any warning to us, he said the time had come to go home. At the news, Simon was so happy he began to scamper around like a foal and turn somersaults, until we were all in stitches. As for myself, I was pleased enough to be leaving the wild; yet already I regretted the loss of the closeness we had had there, with our fires and our makeshift meals and our men’s unthinking camaraderie.

  We spent the first night of our return journey at Caesarea Philippi. This time, however, we took rooms in the city proper, with alms the merchant of Sidon had given us. There we attended the baths, and walked through the city streets until late in the night. Yeshua spoke about his childhood in Alexandria, the first time I had heard him do so, and described some of the wonders he had seen including the Pharos, whose light, he said, could be seen halfway to Rome. When Yohanan asked which city was greater, Alexandria or Jerusalem, he surprised us by naming Alexandria, saying Jerusalem was the home of one great nation but Alexandria the home of many. He had never seemed so simply a man among men to me as he did that evening—we might have been soldiers on furlough, taking the town in, wending our way towards some final tavern or brothel to spend the night.

  But already by morning, as we approached the border, he had begun to retreat into himself—I understood now the extra skin he put on to be with his followers, to become the teacher, the healer, what he must be to them. He had grown distracted and quiet with us; at Lake Huleh, where we stopped to refresh ourselves, he did not join us in the water, though he had bathed with us like any common Greek only the night before. The lake seemed to have a different aspect after our trip up the mountain, more pagan and desolate and wild, not part of God’s creation at all. I thought of what Yeshua had said, how our god was not some creature in a cave like the gods of the Greeks. But it was true that I had always thought of him in that way, perched above his little promised land not bothering himself with what went on beyond it, the whole insignificant pagan world. What a paltry deity it suddenly seemed I had made for myself compared to Yeshua’s, in whose dominion a place had to be found not only for us handful of Jews but for this savage lake, for the acolytes writhing in ecstasy in the forests of Mount Hermon, for the rich merchants who made temples to the gods of every nation.

  We were not far past Thella before we began to draw a little crowd of hangers-on of those who knew Yeshua. I was surprised to discover that tales of the miracles he had wrought on Mount Hermon were already circulating, along with Simon’s story of the angels; it was amazing to me, this hunger people had for wonders, and the speed with which they published them. I had almost forgotten the stature Yeshua had with many of his followers—alone with us in the woods he had appeared fallible and mortal and unsure, but here the adulation of his disciples seemed instantly to raise him up. The cloud under which he had departed appeared to have dissipated; it was the usual way of these things, that a scandal that one day was on every tongue, and seemed insurmountable, was all but forgotten the next.

  Because Yeshua stopped to speak with all of those who came up to him, our progress was slow. By sunset we had not yet reached Kefar Nahum, though by then some of the twelve includ
ing Kephas had got wind of our approach and had come out to meet us. We were still on the river then and I suggested we cross over to Bet Zayda on the other shore, where we could rid ourselves of the crowd and get a decent night’s rest. But Yeshua, to our surprise, said we should camp there in the fields so that he could be with his followers. There were perhaps fifty or more who chose to stay with us; a great fire was built and some of the women were sent into a village nearby to fetch food for us all with what was left of the alms we’d had from the merchant of Sidon. Yeshua stayed up teaching well into the night, seeming his old self in a way but also changed, more circumspect and controlled. Perhaps it was simply that I had seen him miserable and out of sorts and so understood now what he hid, and the struggles in him, which he would not show his followers.

  Out in the open there with our fire it seemed we were not so far from the pagan places we’d left behind, with the bit of woods nearby and the smell of smoke and the cool air off the lake. Even the disciples who had gathered were at bottom not much different from the heathens who had come to Yeshua seeking they knew not what, some magic solution to their dilemmas or some potion or charm against the world’s ills. I knew Yeshua did not encourage them in this and yet it was his lot to inspire extreme reactions in people, and to raise their hope, and to touch the need that was bottomless in them. So I had the sense that he was lost to me again, because his people had claimed him, and he could not be simply a man or a friend as I wished him to be.

  The truth, however, which it seemed the others had always known, was that I’d had no real place with him there from the start, because of that part of me that would not quite relinquish itself, that could do no more than love him. So the others could not accept me, because I reduced to merely a man the great notion that Yeshua was to them, the notion of their own betterment and redemption. I had understood this in an instant when Kephas had come and made his greetings, and I’d seen how he ached with emotion at Yeshua’s return and with the things he wished to say to him but held himself back on my account. And though I had never held Kephas to be a man of great intelligence, I wondered now if he did not see Yeshua more clearly than I did, because he understood him with his heart, while I had always striven to find the argument that would defeat him.