by Nino Ricci
In the morning, because his followers would not leave him and others had begun to join them, Yeshua hardly stopped at Kefar Nahum before making for the hill above the town where he often spoke. All morning, by ones and twos, the crowd continued to grow, which surprised me, given how divided and in disarray his following had seemed at his departure. At one point the crowd had swelled to such a number, well up into the hundreds, that Ventidius arrived with some men from the Roman camp to see if there was any trouble. But seeing Yeshua teaching peacefully there, he quickly withdrew.
It was towards midday that I noticed someone eyeing me nervously from the edge of the crowd: it was the same Yekhubbah whom I had met at Caesarea. My heart fell at the sight of him—my first thought, given the news I had heard out of Jerusalem, was that he had been sent to accuse me as a traitor.
“I’ve come to call you back to the city,” he said when he had taken me aside, making it seem he came in good faith by naming the lawyer I had reported to in the city administration as one of those who had sent him. Yet he wouldn’t meet my eye.
“What of your friend?” I said, meaning Rohagah. But he answered only that Rohagah awaited me as well, and thought I might be of use.
I wasn’t sure what to make of him. It seemed he had been waiting for me there for many days, which did not bode well. But perhaps he had simply not known what to do, being sent to fetch me by his betters and finding I had gone.
I did not know what path to take. Yet in the end my way was clear, because though with Yeshua I felt quickened in a way I had not for many years, still I didn’t belong with him, while in Jerusalem, even if I was vilified by my own people, at least they were my own. I was certain that this time I would not find the way to return to Yeshua if I left, and so did not know how to part from him.
“We’ll go in the morning, then,” I said to Yekhubbah.
But Yekhubbah would not be put off.
“It would be better to leave at once,” he said, which did not boost my confidence in him. “You may say that your family has need of you.”
I realized then that he would not leave my side, and that therefore there was no thought of speaking frankly with Yeshua. Indeed I did not wish to speak to him at all, with such a one as this at my elbow.
“Then let’s go immediately,” I said rashly.
“You don’t wish to take your leave?”
“No.”
He was clearly bothered by this but didn’t know what to do.
“We’ll go, then,” he said finally.
It happened that I still had my few things along with me from our retreat, so there was nothing for us to do but set out. Yeshua had a crowd around him then, and I saw that Yohanan too was in the midst of it. Only one of the women noticed me there at the edge of the crowd and caught my eye, with that coldness the women reserved for me.
“I’ve heard troubling news from Jerusalem,” I said to Yekhubbah.
“There are many lies being spread,” he said. “In Jerusalem you’ll learn the truth.”
And it was on that comfortless note that I set off with him towards the Jerusalem road.
It took us three days to reach the city. From the outset Yekhubbah was tight-lipped and anxious, which raised my concern; though what news I eventually loosed from him only raised it further. He referred to Rohagah as one of our leaders, which confirmed my fears—surely all was lost, if we now looked to such as him to set our course.
When we reached Jerusalem, however, I found the situation much worse even than I had imagined it. Yekhubbah led me at once to Rohagah’s quarters in the lower city, where there was much toing and froing and many whispered words; and I saw how the others deferred to him, and the fear in them.
To me, he said only, “It was good of you to return, now that we have need of you,” in a tone devoid of inflection.
However I was not invited to speak to him again for many days, nor was I given any mission, and it seemed that those I had known before in our cause were at pains to avoid me. When I asked after my former contact in the city administration, whom I had trusted, I was told he had left the city for Alexandria; my other contact, following his arrest, had been deported. So I was alone, with no one to turn to. It was only by chance once, at the temple, that I met someone who was willing to speak to me, a pock-faced tanner named Abram whom I had known only in passing, and never much trusted because of his boasting manner. Now, however, fear seemed to have humbled him.
“We’ve done a better job killing our own than the Romans ever did,” he said, and he described how it was not only those suspected of betraying us who had been killed off but even several of our own leaders, whose deaths had been arranged by those who opposed them, then blamed on the Romans. To do the work the sicari had been hired, named after the daggers they used—they would attack their prey in a crowd and slip off before they’d been noticed. So the old leaders had quickly been done away with and no one dared to oppose the new, because of their ruthlessness.
I had no way to gauge the truth of these accusations, since even to repeat them was a danger. But I grew increasingly uneasy in the wake of them, watching my back each time I stepped from my gate and feeling spied on at every corner. I had put up at a cousin’s house, since I had abandoned my own when I’d left the city; but he knew nothing of my cause and so found me increasingly peculiar, because I made no effort to reopen the shop I had run in the bazaar, nor did I leave the house at all for days at a time, afraid as I was for my life. When Tabernacles approached, he said to me that his brothers would soon come in from the countryside for the feast and I must give up my bed, and so made it clear that he wished to be rid of me.
I sold off some of the inventory from my shop then that I had put away before my departure and took a room in a boarding house near the Dung Gate. There I passed the time of the festival, hardly daring to go out into the crowds, which were thick then because the year of Jubilee had been proclaimed, yet not wanting either to leave the city, for I was determined to do nothing that could be used against me. Then when the feast had ended and the city had emptied again, I was finally called back to Rohagah. This time we met in the upper rooms of the old school building that his quarters stood behind, and that served to mask the many comings and goings. There were several others present whom I did not recognize and whose faces I could hardly make out, since it was night and the room was dimly lit.
Rohagah said, “Because there have been many traitors among us, we must make sure of you,” and I understood that I had been brought to stand trial before them.
I might simply have flouted them then and gone my way, and so at least kept my dignity. Perhaps it was only cowardice that kept me from doing so, since I surely had reason enough to believe by then that they would take my life if they saw the need. But the truth was also that I did not wish to give them that satisfaction. They thought my kind could not be trusted, that we would not lay down our lives for our nation, simply because we had been abroad or had read more than the scriptures or had shown ourselves open-minded towards the customs of the world. But I wished them to see it was not a crime to seek education and knowledge, nor did it make you a traitor to your people.
As it happened my trial lasted many days and weeks, and was as much in the silences I endured as in the interrogations. Thus they would ask about some obscure episode in the past, often hardly memorable, as if it had given rise to the suspicion over me; and when I had accounted for every action and cleared every hint of doubt they would make as if they had acquitted me and assign me some little mission in the city. Each of these, however, was more insignificant than the last, and seemed only to push me further and further to the margins of their work, until finally after weeks had passed I would be called in to them again and they would recommence their questions. The chief accusation against me, as I gathered, was that I had been the one to betray Ezekias, since I had fled then and had been so long out of communication; but even this seemed only an excuse for their general distrust of me. In the meanti
me I was kept in the dark about their activities and so learned only the barest rudiments of the great action they had put their hopes in, which was set for the coming Passover. In this, at least, it appeared they had planned well: because of the Jubilee the crowds would likely number into the hundreds of thousands then, who, if they rose in revolt, would easily overwhelm the few thousand who guarded the Antonia fortress.
Towards the end of my interrogations I was several times asked about Yeshua, who I was surprised to learn was well known to Rohagah and his group. It grew clearer to me now why they had sent for me: they wished to know if Yeshua might be of use to them, having somehow formed the opinion that he was a firebrand and a rebel. I ought to have disabused them at once of any hopes they had on this front. But either out of pride or sheer contrariness I somewhat encouraged them in their notions, even if only by ambiguities, since I did not want to make it appear that I had merely been biding my time with Yeshua, which would have given force to their accusations against me. I soon had cause to regret this strategy, however, because Rohagah was quick to call my bluff.
It seemed his informants were much more extensive than I had imagined, and had learned that Yeshua planned a pilgrimage with his followers for the Jubilee Passover.
“You must find the way to put yourself among them again,” he said, “so that you can turn them to us at the right moment.”
I was at a loss. It was on my lips to blurt the truth, and be blunt about the sort of man that Yeshua was. Yet in those few words I would have undone all the work of the previous months, since I knew Rohagah was angry at having proved nothing against me and would take the least chance to have me convicted. So I let my silence give him cause to believe I would do the thing, when I could not.
It was only a matter of weeks then to the Passover. The mood in the city was one of great expectation, and already the streets had begun to fill and barricades were being built to control the crowds and every corner was being swept and scoured, so that God should not find us derelict. Yet it did not seem now, after all, that Rohagah and the others had judged our time well, or that we remained anything more than the merest anomaly in the city’s life, or that there was any stomach in people for insurrection, when all their thoughts were on feasting and profit. It was true the Roman procurator was hated, and that he had already committed many other offences large and small since the first one of the standards; yet he did not much occupy people’s thoughts. Indeed, returning to the city after an absence from it, and living as I had amongst the peasants and fishermen of Galilee, I saw now how prosperous the Jews of Jerusalem were despite their foreign yoke, and how they lived well and ate well, and perhaps thought of the Romans as a godsend after the many abuses they had suffered under their own rulers.
Some days after my final meeting with Rohagah a messenger came to me at the boarding house where I was still staying to give me instructions to set out for Galilee. There I was to insert myself again amongst Yeshua’s men and join them in their pilgrimage, though saying nothing, of course, of our plans; once back in Jerusalem, I was to report for further counsel. I knew very little at that point of what Rohagah and the others had in mind—an attack on the fortress, I assumed, and then perhaps the formation of some makeshift battle force once the armoury had been breached. It was all madness, of course, I saw that, and was amazed that Rohagah and his cronies did not: we would all be slaughtered, either quickly and cleanly at the outset, or more slowly and more disastrously. In the process our cause would be set back many years, and many innocents who knew nothing of us, and perhaps did not even care what we stood for, would be slaughtered along with us. So I did not know what to do, for if I did nothing I would be killed, yet perhaps also if I fled; and if I said nothing to Yeshua he would march his own lambs into the slaughter, yet if I warned him, I still put him at risk.
I regretted now that I had ever come back to Jerusalem, and had not simply turned tail at the sight of Yekhubbah and set out for the hills. And I thought, We have been deluded from the start, the old guard as much as the new, not because of this failed plan or that, or this or that schism, but because of our great irrelevance. Yeshua, with his few hundred, had never made that mistake—he sought to bring along with him only those who understood him, and made no claim to the rest. Meanwhile, we with our dozens imagined instead that we spoke for the whole of our race, when they cared nothing for us, nor we, for that matter, for them. No doubt it was exactly this fear that drove the likes of a Rohagah, that we were powerless and insignificant and small, that history would erase every trace of us. Or perhaps it was the greater fear of every Jew—that God had deserted us, that he would no longer descend from the heavens to redeem us from our humiliations, and we, like an army whose commander had deserted, were merely skirmishing towards our doom.
Many years before, when I travelled once to Rome, I was taken by the strange contradictions I found there in the worship of their gods, who seemed at once revered as the authors of human fate, yet also disrespected and mocked at every turn in a manner no Jew could ever countenance. It seemed that at bottom their gods were regarded as no better than mortals, except for their bit of magic that gave them power over us, and worship of them was not so much devotion as simple appeasement, in the way we flattered a tyrant to save our necks. I saw in this at the time a sign of our own superiority—how much greater our own god from whom our entire moral order flowed, who was so much above us we could hardly fathom his ways. There was the famous story of Pompey’s surprise upon entering the Holy of Holies at finding it not bedizened with all manner of riches as he’d expected but empty and barren as a grave: it was beyond the scope of the pagan mind, we had been taught, this sense of a thing larger than their own imaginations, unrepresentable. Yet how truly different was our god, in the end? What we called inscrutable in our own god, we called simple fickleness in theirs; and while our god, for all his greatness, had made our people insignificant and weak, the Romans, who debased our temple and committed every sacrilege against us, ruled the world. What sense could we make of such an injustice, and how could our god, in the face of it, seem what we believed him to be? When I thought of the splendours I had seen in Rome, the great palaces and public buildings that were just the tiniest fraction of what the empire had built throughout the civilized world, it seemed the sheerest folly, while we struggled here for our few wretched acres of promised land, that we should imagine our god the one true one. And if he were, then surely we must surmise that we had displeased him in some final and absolute way, that he should so plunge us down and give such solace and strength to our enemies.
Though a man barely of middle age, I had often had the feeling I had come up against the brink of things, had reached the end of every path. As a young man, I believed I would define who I was through my actions; when that failed, when I became involved in what revealed itself as an endless process of deferral, I hoped at least for wisdom. But wisdom, too, eluded me. I had visited a dozen nations, and heard tell of a hundred philosophies; but what had most struck me in this was how little of value there was in the world, how men were deceitful and base and would espouse to you the loftiest ideals in one breath and contradict them in the next. When the chaff was sifted from things there seemed only further chaff, the same tired notions, the same predictable vice. Thus when I considered what it was in Yeshua that had held me to him, it seemed exactly the hope of something new: a new sort of man, a new way of seeing things. I thought, If there was a single person who had found the way to speak the truth, perhaps the rest was worthwhile; if there was someone whose vision was truly more than hope for his own gain or greater glory, then perhaps God had not made us simply animals, a pestilence the world would be well rid of. I thought of the times in which we lived, of the murders and massacres, the kings who thought only of their treasuries and the bandits who robbed and killed the innocent in the name of justice; I thought how miserly and mean even the common people had become, so that in every village the gates were slammed shut against any st
ranger and the poor died of hunger by the road. Perhaps, then, we were truly at the end of days as some of the madmen in the desert preached. But there was in Yeshua that quality that made one feel there was something, still, some bit of hope, some secret he might reveal that would help make the world over. Tell me your secret, I had wanted to say to him, tell me, make me new. And even now, though I had left him, I often saw him beckoning before me as towards a doorway he would have had me pass through, from darkness to light.
BOOK II
MIRYAM OF MIGDAL
WE LIVED IN MIGDAL and made our living curing the catch that the fishermen brought in from the lake, salting it or smoking it depending on the season and where it would go. Some of it we sold as far away as Jerusalem, though also north to Paneas and the highlands, where my mother was from. My father, of course, was a Jew, from the south, which was how I was raised; but my mother he found in the mountains when he first came here as a young man. In all the years she’d been with him she had never taken to the ways of the Jews, had never sat down with us to pray or accompanied us to the assembly house. Her own people, she said, had lived on these lands since the world was created, and had got on very well long before the Jews arrived with their one true God.
Our house was just off the waterfront, not far from the smoking sheds and the harbour. Though my father was a trader, it was modest enough, with only a bit of stonework above the lintel to set it off and a tessera floor in black and white at the entrance. But as there were just the five of us there, my two sisters and I and our parents, with no other family to crowd us in, we seemed to live in wealth, so that my friend Ribqah, who had hardly a corner to call her own, imagined our home a great palace. For my own part, I might not have minded the furor of a fuller household, and also the presence of boys, whom my mother, some said out of spite, had refused to offer up. She had us three girls all in a row, with not much more than a year between us, and then of a sudden ceased her childbearing as if a spell had been cast on her. Nonetheless, my father loved us all and showed us kindness.