Testament

by Nino Ricci

  I have come to learn if my son is arrested, I said.

  But they said they knew nothing of any arrest, and that perhaps he had been taken in by way of the entrance off the temple courts.

  The gates up to the temple had been opened again. There was a great deal of activity in the courts, with many thousands praying or milling about while the Levites prepared the ground for the sacrifices the following day, setting out barricades to divide the crowd. But there was no sign of the disturbance that had gone on. It seemed hopeless then that we who were nothing should get to the bottom of it, when it was already forgotten.

  We made our way to the fortress end of the courts and there indeed found a passage into the fortress beneath the colonnade, but it was also heavily guarded. Here the guards were Samaritans, who were the procurator’s special corps.

  I said to them in Hebrew, My son has been brought here, but they pretended not to understand.

  Yaqob brandished some coins then, and spoke in Aramaic.

  We wish only to learn the charges against him, so we might defend him.

  But the Samaritans merely took offence at the coins and said that several Jews had been arrested that day, cutpurses and such, and they could not be expected to know one from the other.

  I regretted now that we had shown any arrogance in our approach to them, for we were at their mercy.

  We beg you, I said.

  But they claimed they could not be of any service to us, and that at any rate there would be no trials until after the festival, so we might try our fortunes then.

  We did not know what other options lay open to us. I still had my family in the city, but it chafed me to turn to them—I had seen them only twice since returning from Egypt, after the reception I had had from them then, and not at all since my mother’s death a few years before. But I knew that one of my brothers, indeed Yeshua’s namesake, had followed in my father’s place and found work as a clerk for the Roman administration, and so might know the way to be of help to us. Yaqob and I went to his house and found him with his family preparing for Passover.

  My son Yeshua has been arrested, I said.

  He did not turn me away but told me what he could, though little that gave me cause for hope. He said that as the Romans were scrupulous in their adherence to their own laws, they seldom punished unjustly, but also that the present procurator could not be trusted. In any event, in the case of a public disturbance the procurator’s power was absolute, since by Roman law any hint of insurrection was punishable by summary death.

  My son is not a rebel, I said, nor has he ever counselled violence.

  Yet by your own account you have hardly spoken in many years, my brother said. How then can you know what he counsels.

  But it seemed he merely sought an excuse to condemn him.

  I did not come to be accused but only to seek your help, I said.

  He could no longer hide his enmity.

  You ruined our family once, he said, and now you wish to ruin it again, by having me risk my position for a rabble-rouser and a bastard.

  I regretted now that I had ever come to him, or that I had let Yaqob accompany me, to hear such things.

  I said to my brother, You are truly your father’s son, for he also sold me when I most needed him.

  And I left his house.

  In all this time I had not dared to look at Yaqob. Now, in the growing dark of the street, I said to him, Do you still wish to help your brother, now that you know the truth.

  But he said, I have always known it.

  I hardly knew how to answer him.

  How could you.

  From the streets of Alexandria, he said.

  I was silenced by this. I had given Yaqob so little credit, over the years, but had only taken him for granted.

  Yet you never loved him less, I said.

  It did not seem a reason to.

  I was glad of the dark now, which hid my tears. I asked him if his brothers also knew, but he said he had always found the way to protect them.

  You did right to love him, I said finally.

  And I felt comforted then, and less alone, that his love was not different from mine.

  I could not bear to return to our tents, to sit there uselessly. I told Yaqob to go to the others and say we made progress, to comfort them, and then to join me again at the fortress.

  I made my way to the fortress through the twilight traffic. The sun had warmed the city during the day, but with nightfall the air had turned cold again, here and there a patch of snow that had lingered in some shadow or cranny giving off its particular smell. At the fortress nothing had changed except that some of the soldiers had built up a fire on the pavement at the base of the fortress steps. I put myself close to them, to warm myself and to hear their gossip, in case anything touching on Yeshua should fall from their lips. But I could not follow the dialect they spoke amongst themselves, which hardly resembled any Greek I knew.

  It was some time before I noticed another woman in the shadows at the far end of the steps. It seemed modesty or fear kept her standing alone there far from the soldiers, but finally the cold drove her closer to the fire. Her face was hidden by her shawl so it took a moment before I recognized her—it was the girl who had come to the gate to refuse me when I had gone looking for my son at Kefar Nahum.

  I went to her and said, I am Yeshua’s mother, and she instantly broke into tears.

  So grateful was I to find a stranger who shared sympathy with me that I forgot all resentment towards her and embraced her, also falling to tears. For a moment we stood there unable to speak for emotion.

  Do you have any news of him, I said finally, but it came out she knew no more than I did.

  Her name was Miryam, like my own. She and some others had been preparing for the feast at a room in the Upper City when the word had come of Yeshua’s arrest. All of those there had fled then except she and another woman, Shelomah, the two of them waiting for some further word. When after some hours no news had come, they had made their way back to their camp, only to find, however, that their own people had been removed from it and had left no trace of their whereabouts. So Miryam had come to the fortress, while Shelomah had gone to search the neighbouring camps for any of their group.

  Even to say as much as this left her in tears again, for she feared the lot of them had been arrested. But when I pressed her it grew clear that some hundred or more had accompanied Yeshua to Jerusalem, whereas only a dozen, as I had seen, had gone with him to the temple. So we had reason to believe that some of them would be discovered still, and would have further news for us.

  It was growing late now. Miryam was upset that she had heard nothing yet from Shelomah, while I wondered that Yaqob had not come to join me. We went over to the Sheep Gate, which was the gate nearest the fortress, to see if we might catch sight of them, but learned from the guards that all the entrances to the city had been closed for the night. So it seemed we were left to our own resources, and we returned to our place at the fortress steps and waited there by the soldiers and their fire. One of the soldiers, taking pity on us, asked us in halting Aramaic what our business was and assured us that if my son was innocent, he would be set free. But I was no longer certain that he was innocent or what that might mean, for by Jewish law he was not innocent but a bastard, and by Roman law was perhaps less innocent still, for he was someone who spoke his mind and accepted the yoke of no one.

  I said to Miryam, I will watch while you sleep.

  But she broke into tears again, and said how it had troubled her to turn me away at Kefar Nahum, and how I had seemed a woman of stature. And I saw that she did not say these things to flatter me but meant them sincerely.

  I took no harm in what you did, I said, but was only troubled on account of my son.

  So grateful was she at this forgiveness that she at once opened her heart to me, and sought to assure me of Yeshua’s virtues and of the great things he had done. And I saw how besotted she was with him and how she w
orshipped him, so that she could not see him clearly. She spoke of the deed he had worked here in the city, that the women at the temple basilica had joked of—it turned out it involved a cousin of one of his followers who, in Miryam’s telling of the thing, had been brought back from the very grave by Yeshua’s tending to him. So I gathered she was a simple girl of Galilee, with the credulity of Galileans. Yet it was true that when she spoke of my son the wonder I heard in her voice was not so different from what I myself had felt, that sense of a doorway Yeshua stood before, to some new understanding. Except that she had passed through it, and saw things in a different light, and who was I to say that the miracle she had witnessed had not occurred, for those who had eyes to see it.

  So we spoke off and on into the night, sitting there at the base of the fortress steps just outside the light of the fire, and in the end I took some comfort from her. And I thought of Yeshua’s life, and where it had brought him to, but though I turned every detail of it over in my mind, I could not see the sense of it or why someone so gifted by God should be so punished by him. I thought to speak to Miryam of these things but she was only a child, nor would I risk shattering her innocence by revealing to her the truth of what he was. And yet I might have wished to unburden myself then, and say every last thing as I knew it, and so perhaps for a moment lift the stone I had carried every day since Yeshua’s conception.

  We sat there through the night, and kept up our vigil, until the guards changed to ones who knew nothing of us and bid us move, handling us roughly when we did not at once obey. Thus we were at a loss again as to our actions, and the sun was just rising over the walls, and it was the morning of Passover.

  BOOK IV

  SIMON OF GERGESA

  LOOKING AFTER THE SHEEP in the back pasture I’d see his followers there on that hill, hundreds of them there were, and I’d say to Moriah, my brother Huram’s wife, “I’ve got half a mind to join him myself.” That was before the trouble between us, so she’d laugh. What I wouldn’t do then to get a laugh out of her, and she needed it too, seeing how Huram was. I used to say to her, “Huram thinks it’s like money, he’s saving it up. One of these days he’s going to have a laugh they’ll hear clear across the lake. Halfway to Damascus they’ll hear it.” And she’d laugh again.

  Our farm was just above Gergesa, in the hills over the lake, so we had a good view of things. You wouldn’t think you could see much, all the way to the other shore like that, but you’d be surprised. Most days I could pick him out in an instant, the way he stood in the middle of the crowd like a stone that had been dropped in the water. And I’d say to Moriah, “He’s got his sheep on his hill there, and I’ve got mine.” Or sometimes he’d take them to the beach and go off in the shoals a bit to preach at them, and I’d swear then he was standing right on the lake, which some said he could do. I’d heard it told that once he’d hiked himself straight across the water from Capernaum to Tarichea, just walking along like that as if it was nothing.

  I won’t say I didn’t actually wonder sometimes even at first what it might be like to join up with him and see the world, travelling around the way he did. Because in all my life I’d been only to Hippus and Gergesa and once to Gadara, and I was sick of the boys I saw every week at Baal-Sarga, our village, which was just a couple of stones thrown together, though Sargon the Great himself had chosen the spot where it stood when he’d come through to conquer the Hebrews. But there was the farm to think about—more than thirty sheep we had then and five cattle and three pigs, and almonds and olives and grapes and a bit of barley and wheat, and our parents dead. And then there was Moriah.

  Huram had got her at the market in Raphanah. A whole milking cow he’d paid for her, so you’d see he must have been taken with her, if you knew Huram. But then he got her home and treated her worse than the cow he’d traded her for. It was only sons he was after—he could have had himself any girl in Baal-Sarga or even Gergesa, he was rich enough for it, but he didn’t want the trouble with the families or to have to go begging. So he got a slave and said when she gave him a son he’d set her free. Not for her sake, you understand—it was only that he didn’t want it said that his sons were the children of a slave.

  She wasn’t much more than a child herself when she came to us, like I was, so of course I was the one who she turned to. That was how we both looked at it then—there was Huram, and then there were the two of us. I’d take her around to my favourite spots on the farm, and show her the flowers that came up, and throw almonds to her from the tops of the trees. Then there were all my secret places, that I’d never told Huram about—the caves by the lake, for instance, which the brigands must have used before the Romans chased them off but which were empty now except for one that I found by accident, when my hand went through the wall that closed it up. I could hardly believe what I found there—a whole family had been buried there, to judge by the bones, all laid out with their bracelets and charms to be ready for the other side. But when I took Moriah to see them, she got a terrible fright and said it was no place for us, and straightaway she had me kill a bird for her and did her prayers and chants for those gods of hers I’d never heard of.

  Not even Moriah herself could have told you where she’d come from. Before Raphanah she’d been in Damascus, where she’d had a baby though they’d killed it, since it was a girl, and before that, when she’d been small, she remembered going in a cart for quite a while and then a boat. But she hadn’t known the names of places, and no one had bothered to tell her, and so one was fairly much like another. The way she reckoned things she’d done well for herself to get Huram, and I could see it was true she hadn’t had much of a life before him. But still it made me boil, the way he treated her. He’d have her make us supper and then give her just our leavings for her own, which he’d scrape into the same bucket we used for our pigs, to remind her who she was. Of course I’d sneak things to her, even meat now and then, though it was a waste, because half the time she’d just burn it up for her strange gods.

  When quite a while had gone by and Moriah wasn’t pregnant yet, Huram began to take it out on her, beating her for every little thing and threatening to sell her off. So she’d come to me, not really crying, because she could take a lot, but just a bit sad the way she was, and I’d help her to laugh the thing out. It was around then that we started to watch for the holy man across the lake from the back pasture, to pass the time. It was also around then that Moriah began to come to me in my bed—Huram made me sleep in the stable, to keep an eye out for bandits—after Huram had thrown her out of his, which he didn’t much like her in once he’d finished with her. She showed me things then, though I hardly knew what I was doing, and it got so all I thought about was her coming to me, though I was sure Huram would kill us both if he saw us.

  After a while of this, Moriah was pregnant. I was young at the time but I wasn’t a fool—I knew the baby was mine. So I said to Moriah, “I’ll just tell Huram to give me my share of things and then we’ll run off, the two of us.” But Moriah, changed now, said, “Don’t be an idiot.” I imagined she was thinking Huram would come after us and slit our throats once he’d worked out what had happened, or maybe just that we’d be better off to wait and see if she had a son, so she could get her freedom. So I held my tongue. Moriah said, “We shouldn’t see each other as much, in case he gets suspicious,” and never came to my bed any more or out to the fields with me, and pretended to be a good wife. And I went along with this, believing everything would work out in the end.

  It wasn’t long, though, before I understood things weren’t the same between us. Even if Huram wasn’t around now she’d put me off, half the time treating me like a servant and saying “Don’t be a child,” if I tried to make her laugh. “It’s just Simon,” I wanted to say to her, so that things could be the way they’d been before. But I’d grown a little afraid of her now. Of course, things had changed between her and Huram as well—he didn’t beat her any more, on account of the baby, and he let her set a place
for herself at the table. But still it wasn’t as if he ever had a kind word for her.

  It was around this time that the holy man from across the lake—Jesus, his name was—started coming over to our side to see what he could make of us. I’d see his boats setting out, from Capernaum or Tarichea, or Magdala, as the Jews called it, and I’d know it wasn’t fish he was after because he’d make straight for our shore. This was strange enough, for a Jew, to come out in search of us Syrians and Greeks. There were Jews at Gergesa, of course, and then there was the colony just down the beach, which had been there as long as anyone remembered and which we all just assumed was made up of Jews, though we never saw hide nor hair of them. But mostly Jesus went further down to the Gadarenes, who didn’t normally have much use for the Jews, though I saw from the pasture that he got up quite a crowd whenever he was there.

  Then once I looked out and saw that his boats had put up right beneath the farm. He and his men had set up a few tents and made a fire and were cooking up fish as if they were settling in for a long stay. Meanwhile they must have sent out their messengers because soon enough people started to wander in from the fields and from the villages nearby to hear what he had to say to them. There were dozens of them, coming all the way from Hippus and Gergesa, from the looks of it. And I asked myself, who were all these people to go listen to him when I was the one who’d been keeping an eye on him. So finally I closed the sheep off in one of the corrals, hoping Huram wouldn’t notice, and hiked myself down the hill.

  It turned out it was a feast down there, his men cooking up fish as if tomorrow wouldn’t come and handing it around to every beggar who put a palm out. And in the middle of the crowd was Jesus, talking with people and asking their names and making sure they had something to eat. It was the first time I’d ever laid eyes on him from close up and it was a bit of a shock—he was wearing the cheapest kind of homespun and just a bit of bark on his feet for shoes, which made him look like someone who had just crawled out of the woods. Then he was long-haired and bearded the way most of the Jews were, that gave you the sense it was all work and seriousness with them. But soon enough I saw he wasn’t like that. There was one man in the crowd, from Hippus, who said to him, “What do I have to do to follow you?” And Jesus said back, “Go home and sell everything you’ve got and give the money to the poor, then you’ll be ready.” Everyone in the crowd broke out laughing at that, and you should have seen the look on the fellow’s face, since you could tell from his clothes he was fairly well off.