Testament

by Nino Ricci

  When at last the child was born, Yehoceph came to me and said we must leave the town, for the truth was becoming known and his brothers stood in peril of dishonour. In my pride I said, It must be circumcised like any Jew, for it was a male, though I did not know if the law allowed this. But Yehoceph said it was my own concern and so I made arrangements in Jerusalem, naming Yehoceph as the father. When the thing was done, Yehoceph told me again that we must go. But I insisted we wait until after the thirty-third day, so that I might make my sacrifices. This time Yehoceph said, The child is a bastard and can never enter the assembly. But this only hardened me, and seeing my stubbornness, Yehoceph gave way.

  So it was that after the thirty-third day he led me to the temple, and again my pride would not suffer me to purchase only pigeons or doves but I must have a lamb for the burnt offering, which I paid for from my dowry. I did not know why I insisted on these things, or why Yehoceph allowed them, for we both knew they were for nothing. Yehoceph, perhaps, was happy enough to let the world think the child was his own, and so save himself from scandal. Yet I knew that was not his way, that he did not court such open deceit, and thus that in some respect he indulged me. Perhaps it was the actual child that moved him, for it was beautiful and gentle, though again, as I later thought on the matter, it seemed there must have been some small part of fear in him, that he did not know what this child was or where it had come from.

  The following morning we left Bet Lehem, before dawn. Yehoceph brought with him only his tools and a cloak, while I was made to carry our provisions, for because the child had been born and the time of my purification had passed, I was no longer unclean in Yehoceph’s eyes. Yehoceph had not told me our destination, nor had I brought myself to ask it of him, and so I hadn’t known whether to prepare myself for a journey of a day or of many. But as I had only my dowry to think of, and no other possessions save the dress I wore and the one I had been married in, it made no great difference. It was only the child I was concerned for, in the heat, for it was coming to summer, but we followed a stream the first day that had not yet run dry and so I was able to bathe him.

  Now that I was purified Yehoceph wasted no time in claiming his due from me, the first night of our journey, in a caravansary where we had taken a place outside Betogabri. We had only a corner to ourselves, beneath an arcade, and the child was awake. But the moon was new and so we had the cover of darkness at least. Yehoceph did not speak or ask my leave but merely forced himself on me as we lay there beneath his cloak, his skin rough against mine like the hide of a goat. I had thought that in marriage the thing would prove less cruel than it had in sin, but that was not the case, nor did I feel less sense of violation.

  Beyond Betogabri the hills gave way to lowland. I knew nothing of that country, since in all my life I had not travelled twenty miles out of Jerusalem, and was surprised at the fields that we passed and the orchards, for I had always thought only wilderness lay in those parts. The child, however, looked sickly from travelling in the heat and was not feeding well, and it occurred to me that it might die from the journey. We would be free then, I thought, could simply turn and retrace our steps to Bet Lehem, and no one would be wiser. Except we would only return to our hovel and I would be tethered still to Yehoceph, with nothing then that was my own, that set me apart from him.

  On the third day, we came to the Western Sea. I had heard it described to me as a child, but no description could have prepared me for that first vision of it. We had come out of a town, Azotus, where we had joined to a caravan, and the road crested a dune and at once the blue of the sea lay spread before us. I could not have said what feeling I had in that moment—disbelief, perhaps, as though some trick had been played on me, for in my thoughts I had imagined that as wide as the sea might be, still the other shore must by force be always visible. But here the water stretched to the horizon as if the world had ended suddenly, as if we had come to its very precipice. All the notions I had held until then seemed changed in some way by that vision—what was it to live in Jerusalem, or Bet Lehem, when the world held such strangeness and wonders.

  We travelled on for many days after that, so that I lost count of them, and I learned from those we had joined with that we were headed into Egypt. Some of these were from Ptolemais and Tyre and it was difficult to speak to them, so different was their language from our own. But we were all Jews, for Yehoceph had made certain of that. Because Yehoceph and I were strangers to them, people took us for what we appeared to be and asked us no questions, so that it seemed briefly that we had shed our old lives and the troubles that had burdened them. At the border, where we were made to sign the registry, it was Yehoceph this time, to save us trouble, who named the child as his own. We needed a name for him then for we had not chosen one, and since we were hurried I chose the first that came to my head, Yeshua, which was my brother’s name.

  We ended our journey in Alexandria. So much had happened by then that I seemed a different person from the one who had set out—I had seen the varied customs of people, and the varied ways in which they spoke, so that finally I wondered how I had managed in the world until then when I had known so little of it. All these thoughts I kept to myself, of course, for Yehoceph was not curious in this way, and indeed it was likely he would not have understood me had I tried to discuss such matters with him. There was an old couple who travelled with us, from Emmaus, who I sometimes saw with their heads bent in discussion as if they truly took comfort from one another, and I thought then at how hardly a word had passed between me and Yehoceph the entire journey, and at all the years of silence that still lay before us.

  It was only as we approached our destination that Yehoceph brought up any question with me, taking me aside from the others one evening as if to discuss a thing of great import.

  Because of the child, he said, with the air of having weighed this matter for many days, you shall pay the expenses for the journey from your dowry, for otherwise we should not have needed to make it.

  I might have said to him, We should not have needed to make it had you not married me, but held my tongue.

  It was night when we arrived in Alexandria, so that I saw only the lamps that lined the central boulevard and the great arcades there. For the longest time this was all I knew of the city proper, for we went at once to the district set aside for the Jews and did not emerge from it for many months. In the Jewish quarter there were many splendid homes as in Jerusalem, but also many hovels, and it was to one of these that we made our way, the house of a cousin of Yehoceph by the name of Yirmeyah who had lived in the city for many years. He gave us a room at the back of his courtyard for which we paid rent, and we shared our meals with him and with his children and his wife, an Egyptian woman as dark as an Ethiope who spoke neither Hebrew nor Aramaic.

  As it fell out, there were problems at that time between the Jews and the Alexandrians, for the Jews had petitioned Augustus for all the rights of citizens but the Alexandrians opposed them. So it was that Yirmeyah said to Yehoceph, You have come at the worst time, since there is no work for Jews with the Greeks, but only with other Jews. Thus Yehoceph came to work for his cousin, at half the pay he had earned at the temple and doing many jobs that were difficult for a man of his age, since Yirmeyah, to keep him employed and so earn his own commission, contracted for every sort of work that came their way, whether it be carrying bricks or laying pavement or digging latrines.

  We went on in this way for some time, though it did not seem just to me what Yirmeyah paid us for Yehoceph’s work nor yet what we paid him in rent, for once our lodging and board had been accounted for, there was next to nothing that remained to us. In the end I spoke to some of the other women of the quarter and discovered from them that Yirmeyah cheated us, taking advantage because we did not know the ways of the city and spoke no Greek. I went to Yehoceph and said, Your cousin is a thief. He seemed ready to strike me then, because he could not imagine that one of his own family would cheat him. But because I would not retract
my accusation Yehoceph agreed to bring it to Yirmeyah, since he judged it fair that he respond to it.

  Yirmeyah, however, did not dispute the charge but immediately made his own.

  You have defiled my house with a bastard, he said, though we had told him nothing of this matter. So we saw that my sin had followed us from Judea and we were to be cursed by it.

  There are many who would have turned you away, Yirmeyah said, but I took you in, so to make it seem that he had committed no crime in cheating us, or that he himself was purer than we were though he had married an Egyptian.

  But Yehoceph did not rebuke him.

  You’re right to say we defile your house, he said, whether out of pride or simply to agree with him, I did not know, and so he had us take our leave of him, and we were left without lodgings and without work.

  The child was not yet six months then. Yehoceph would have had us return with it to Palestine, to the Galilee, where we were not known. But I said to him, If the truth has followed us into Egypt, then surely it will reach us in Galilee, at which he was silenced.

  He might have returned me to my family then, except that I was already with child again, and perhaps carried his son. So we set about to make our way in the city, finding lodgings with Jews who were strangers to us and using money from my dowry to pay our rent until Yehoceph could find new work. Every day I feared our landlords would learn the truth of me and we would once more be turned out into the streets. But in the end they asked us no questions, and seemed to care nothing of what we were or were not except that we pay our rent. It was only to cover his own sins with our shame that Yirmeyah had put the fear in us that we would be driven away, for I soon understood that the Alexandrian Jews did not hold to every particular of the law as the Judeans did, nor were they so rigid in judgement. Indeed, in time I discovered that there were many women of the quarter who were in my own situation or worse who suffered no abuse on that account and even had respect, as I myself came to.

  Around this time it happened that the Romans, to appease the Alexandrians and keep them from rioting, began to undertake many projects in the city. So it was that the foremen could no longer be bothered to ask if a worker was a Greek or a Jew, since there were many places to fill, and Yehoceph, though he had learned no word of Greek, was able to find employment in his own trade. From that time until we left the city many years later he was never without work, and though he grew old and though his bones must have rebelled at the punishment they endured, he never spoke a word of complaint. Out of his first pay he restored to me what we had spent in rent from my dowry, holding back nothing on account of the boy, since he was still feeding. Then eventually, when my first child by him proved a son, he lost his concern that I might try to get the better of him in some manner and began to bring all his pay to me for me to husband it, since as he did not drink or indulge himself in any way, he had no use for it except that it should feed us and pay our taxes.

  In the end he took not a penny from my dowry for himself, though he might have, and after I had given him an heir he came to me and said that I should find the way to make the most of it, because the time would come when my son, being a bastard, would have need of it. So it was that I invested the greater part of it with a merchant in the city, holding some back for the boy’s upkeep and education, and over the years more than doubled its value. Nor, however, was I content with only this surety against destitution, but, remembering how precarious was my situation and how we had once been put in the street, I also undertook to make my own way in the city and learn the Greek tongue, finding bits of work for myself at weaving or making trinkets for the Greeks and Egyptians. But in this I was no different from the other women of Alexandria, be they Greek or Jew, for they did not believe there, as in Judea, that a woman was only a chattel but that she might make her own life.

  My second child, who we named Yaqob, was born to me only some thirteen months after the first and quickly grew to be his superior both in strength and in size, resembling as he did his father. For this reason, there was never a time when it was not clear to everyone that the first-born was foreign to us in some way, like some foundling we had taken in. This indeed was common enough in that city—children were often sold as infants, even among the Jews, those who had surfeit hence finding the way to satisfy those who had none. So we might have made our way, and no one taken great notice, had not the child himself seemed to carry so clearly the sense of his own difference.

  I made every effort to treat the child as I did Yaqob or any of the others, when they arrived. But in some ways this made me less of a mother to all of them, for as I had learned not to show any joy in Yeshua, lest my husband perceive it or the Lord, so did I show little joy in the others, in the end no longer certain if I merely suppressed it, or had none. Nor did I profit in any way from this, since the child still held himself apart, and I would have done better simply to love each one according to its need. Yet the truth was that I always felt jealous for Yeshua in some way, and felt more allied to him than to the rest except the two girls, who at least seemed to take some part of me, while the boys were so clearly their father’s sons. Yeshua, it could be said, did take from me some of his features, and there was that side of him that was subtle and frail and almost feminine. But even in this he stood apart, for there was much in him that was entirely distinct, and seemed to have no provenance. Unlike me, for instance, he was fair-skinned and fair-haired, which had no mirror even in the brute who had fathered him, who was swarthy. For this I was always grateful, since I could not have borne to look into his face and see the reflection there of his sire.

  Yaqob, from a young age, seeing this difference in his brother, seemed always to seek the way to make it small. It broke my heart to watch him, how he deferred to Yeshua as if to say, You see how I honour you, how I give you your proper place, which made me love him. But Yeshua was often cold with him and put him off, and soon enough they went their own ways. From the age of five, Yaqob began to accompany his father to work to learn his trade, which Yeshua had not, and so Yaqob understood that separate paths were laid out for them, and seemed to give in at last to the difference between them. I found a teacher for Yeshua then, though he was still young, to make it appear that as the eldest that was his lot.

  Until that time I had still had a hold on him, for he was seldom far from the house. This was not to say that he ever came to me as children did to their mothers or even that he obeyed me, for the truth was I seldom had heart enough to reprimand him for anything or to ask any chore of him. Rather it was as if we shared some common darkness, like people in the corner of a room while others went about their business. I felt his presence like a weight on me—he would come, stand near, and immediately the air would seem laden with the heaviness of him though he was only a child. It was the most peculiar sensation, at once oppressive and somehow comforting, as if some mantle had been laid over me.

  When he began his studies, however, a distance opened up between us. His teacher, a young man of the quarter named Tryphon who was anxious for students and so had not balked at Yeshua’s age, came to me not a month after Yeshua had begun his lessons and said, Your son has learned in a month what others do not in a year. I did not know what to make of this and wondered if it was a scheme to gain a higher fee. But then he brought the boy before me and made him read to me from the Torah, which he did, though with reluctance.

  Perhaps your son will be a famous scholar, Tryphon said to me.

  But still I did not understand.

  You see we are poor and of no consequence, I said.

  But Tryphon would not be put off, saying that one of the greatest scholars of the city had been the son of a fishmonger, and so had shown that poverty was no obstacle.

  I was left very troubled by Tryphon’s visit and did not know what course of action to take, for he had offered to tutor Yeshua privately at no extra fee in the hope that one day he would be remembered as the teacher of a great scholar. But I was frightened by the claims he h
ad made. If false, they would only raise illusory hopes in the boy, and perhaps bring him to arrogance, and if true, they could not help but lead him into public scrutiny, and so to harm. For what good would greatness do to a bastard, who would then only be ridiculed and have his shame exposed to all, while the better course, as it seemed to me then, was to remain in every way unnoticed and to make no claim for oneself.

  Thus, not long after Tryphon’s visit to me, I withdrew the boy from him entirely and placed him with one of the older teachers of the quarter, Zekaryah, who, deeming him too young to learn with his other charges, agreed however to allow him to run chores for him, and so learn by proximity. Tryphon was put out beyond measure at having the boy taken from him, and for many days came by my house and pleaded with me to reverse my decision. I might have done well in the end to give in to him, for Yeshua had grown fond of him, and as it seemed to me afterwards, it was from this moment that he began to suppose I too was against him, and wished to thwart him. But at the time I believed I acted for his greater good. Some months later when I heard that Tryphon, having grown destitute, had left the city for Judea, I felt a relief as if an accuser had gone, though also that I had chosen a turning for Yeshua that now there was no going back from.