Testament

by Nino Ricci

  The house we finally stopped at turned out to be one of the nicer ones, with a big pool out front and palm trees all around. Three or four fellows came to the gate straightaway to take our coats and wash our feet, and then the owner himself came out and his face lit up the instant he saw Jesus.

  “Get some supper ready for my friends,” he told his men.

  I’d never been in a house like that—I’d thought only kings or princes lived that way, with servants everywhere and where everything looked as if it had been washed down and polished just an instant before. I wouldn’t have thought Jesus would want to be caught in that sort of place, but he was calling our host, whose name was Zacchaeus, his good friend, and didn’t seem to mind his servants looking after us or the wine they brought out while we were waiting for supper. Along with the wine the servants had brought crushed olives and bread and dried dates and figs wrapped in some kind of salted meat, and I could see Jesus’s men were a little awkward at helping themselves, maybe because we were sitting in a beautiful courtyard with palm trees around us and jasmine and good food and wine while the rest of the group was back at our dreary camp with their same old smoked fish and stale bread. But Zacchaeus managed to put them at ease with his courteousness and his talk. Only Judas couldn’t seem to settle, with a look as if Jesus had come here exactly to spite him, taking the time to feast with his rich friend despite Judas’s warning and the soldiers at the gates.

  I could see that everything about the place was irritating Judas, the carpets we were on, the bits of coloured stone in the floor, the glass bottles the wine had come in, which were as clear as air.

  “I see your wine comes from the Romans,” Judas said, barely taking the trouble not to be rude about the thing. But Zacchaeus answered politely, “I get my wine from them and my wages but not what I believe.”

  Judas looked down with his scowl as if this was just what he’d expected. But Zacchaeus pretended not to notice. He had started to tell us how he and Jesus had met—Jesus had been begging food at the Jericho gates when Zacchaeus had seen him, all skin and bones the way he was then, and invited him home, afraid he wouldn’t survive past sunset. They got to talking then, and it was the next morning before they stopped.

  “I thought I was doing a good deed for a beggar,” Zacchaeus said. “But it turned out I was the beggar, since I only gave him food but he gave me wisdom.”

  When supper was ready we went into a large room with couches all around and a big table in the middle piled high with every imaginable thing, fruit and roasted meat and big bowls of honey and nuts. Judas looked even more disgruntled now than before, pretending it was the extravagance of the food that upset him though it was probably Zacchaeus’s story, and his remembering back to when he himself had met Jesus and how things had gone wrong since then. He stood to the side now though Zacchaeus had invited us all to sit, and only at the last minute did he finally take his place on one of the couches, but right at the edge of things. Zacchaeus was telling us about his work—he ran one of the balsam farms outside the city, that the Romans used for the juice that came from the trees, which was good for medicines and perfumes.

  You could see Judas could hardly hold himself in any more, listening to this.

  “So you help the Romans take what belongs to the Jews,” he said finally, not even bothering now to try to hide his contempt.

  Everyone fell silent. It was the worst you could do, to insult a man who’d invited you to his table. Even Judas seemed to realize he’d gone too far, but there was no taking the thing back. Zacchaeus just sat there not knowing what to say, so in the end it was Jesus who had to save him.

  “You mean to say that Herod the Great,” Jesus said to Judas, “who planted the trees, used his profits for the Jews.”

  “Herod wasn’t a Jew any more than the Romans are,” Judas said, a bit too quickly.

  “Then the trees never belonged to the Jews in the first place,” Jesus said, smiling to show he was offering Judas the chance to make light of the thing. But Judas’s face stayed clouded.

  Zacchaeus excused himself then, apologetic, lying and saying he had business to attend to. Almost the instant he’d gone, Judas, still seething with his humiliation, said to Jesus, “I don’t know how you expect your fishermen to understand you, when the people you criticize in daylight are the ones you whore for at night.”

  It was clear again that he’d put the thing more powerfully than he’d intended. There was a look on Simon the Rock’s face then that I’d never seen before, nearly of violence. But Jesus didn’t balk.

  “In a hundred rebels,” he said, “there are ninety-nine who never gave money to a beggar, or helped someone who needed it, or showed mercy even to their own friends, but if you had to judge them you’d let them by, because they fought the Romans. But here’s a man who respects his god and treats everyone fairly, but because he works for the Romans you’d throw him to the fire.”

  But Judas had gone too far to give in.

  “You can get away with an argument like that with your heathens in Galilee, but not in Judea,” he said.

  Simon and the others seemed ready to chase Judas away with their fists then.

  “Why did you come back,” Simon said, “if it was just to make us argue again?”

  “I came back to save your lives, but Jesus doesn’t seem to mind giving them up. If that’s what you want, then you can march off to your deaths the lot of you, for all the good it’ll do anyone.”

  And he got up and left the room, and we heard him yelling out to one of the servants to bring his coat.

  No one spoke. For a long moment the echo of Judas’s departure seemed to hang in the air. Finally someone said, “Master, what did he mean?”

  Jesus explained to them then about the chance of a rebellion, telling them the risk Judas had taken in order to warn them.

  “You’re free to turn back,” he said. “It wasn’t fair of me to hold my tongue. But I thought of the bloodshed, if there was no one to counsel peace.”

  When he put the thing to us there wasn’t one of us who said a word against him. It felt strange to me, to be part of the secret we shared now, like a pact we had made in our blood.

  In all this hardly anyone had touched a bite of food. It was Jesus, finally, who leaned in and broke some bread and passed it around to us. There was a feeling amongst his men like they’d failed at something important—you knew Judas had probably been trouble to them from the day he’d joined them but at least they’d always found the way to put up with him until then, just as Jesus taught.

  Zacchaeus came back after a while to look in on us, though not saying a word about Judas or all the food we’d left behind, simply having his servants put it in baskets for us so that we could take it back to our camp. On our way there, Jesus walking silently ahead of us, some of the men were whispering among themselves wondering if Judas had truly gone. But I was wondering instead if Jesus hadn’t planned the whole evening to turn out just as it had—that Judas would get angry, and see how he and Jesus were different, and go off then and at least save his own life.

  There wasn’t any sign of Judas when we got back to the camp—he hadn’t even bothered to come back for his satchel. When the next morning Jesus turned it over to me to use, I saw there wasn’t anything valuable in it, just a shirt and some undergarments, and I remembered Judas’s dagger, and how he hadn’t liked to give it up. Maybe he’d returned for it after all, and crossed the border again, and would just keep walking into the desert until the itch in his back had gone.

  All the high spirits we’d had when we first spotted Jericho were gone by the following morning. We set out at dawn, going past Herod the Great’s old winter palace, half-abandoned now, and through the palm plantations that flanked the city. But then the road started into the barren hills, with just rubble and scree up on one side and more rubble and scree on the other. In between was the sorriest sort of riverbed, with only the odd oleander bush poking up out of it here or there, though it looked
as if the river hadn’t seen water in years.

  From Jericho the road just went up and up, the warm breezes we’d had on the plains turning bitter and cold. In the old days, I’d heard, the road had been plagued by bandits, but now holy men came to live in the caves along it. It wasn’t the sort of country I’d wish on anyone, about as forbidding and cold as I’d ever seen, and with each step we took it seemed to get more forbidding and more cold. Jesus, though, seemed in his element, walking briskly out front, his face hardened against the wind though he looked not so much soured after his fight with Judas as a little relieved.

  Soon the road had climbed to follow the edge of a cliff, the riverbed snaking along far down below us and the valley walls dropping sheer on either side. It was as if someone, maybe the god of the Jews, had taken those dirty hills and split them open, trying to get at something, except they’d found only more dirt and stones. But it took my breath away, staring down into that huge crack in the earth, so deep I could barely see to the bottom of it, and then looking along the road at the little row of pilgrims crawling along the cliff edge. It made me think there was something to their god—I almost felt him in that stone, and saw what drew the holy men to the place, the world stripped down the way it was so that it must seem you were alone with him out there.

  Just when you didn’t think it could get colder, it did. Everyone was saying they didn’t remember it cold that way, not at that time of year, and the clouds had come in so we didn’t have the sun to warm us. We stopped for a rest and tried to get up a fire but we didn’t have much wood along with us, and there wasn’t a stick of it to be had along the roadside. Then finally the road came out of the chasm it was following to join up with one from the south and we started to see trees again, and also hawkers who’d set up for the pilgrims coming in and the occasional little village or town, walled up and huddled tight against the cold. There was quite a mass of us going up the road and you wondered where the city would put us, and if the Romans wouldn’t simply say, go home. We passed checkpoints along the way where the soldiers stood watching everyone who passed and picking out anyone who looked suspicious, and we all seemed to feel the weight of their eyes on us, and to hunch a bit when we went by them.

  Around sundown we came over a hill and suddenly there was the city in front of us. After the places I’d seen and the things I’d been through, with Jerubal and the rest, I’d been thinking that Jerusalem wouldn’t impress me. But I couldn’t have said what it was about that first view that took my breath—maybe it was being part of that column of pilgrims, some of who got right down on their stomachs and kissed the dirt when they saw the place, or just seeing the city walls the way they were, rising up the sides of the hill the city sat on as if to say, The road ends here. Then there was a bit of sun coming through the clouds so that the temple, which you could see the top of over the walls, had a glow to it from the gold around the roof as if Yahweh was in his home, waiting for us there.

  It was getting late so we went straight to a campsite in a farmer’s field that Simon and the brothers Jacob and John had scouted out for us, a mile or two from the city on a slope that looked out towards the eastern walls, where the temple was. We’d been lucky to find the space—the hillside was already dotted with campsites, set up in fields and olive groves and even to the edge of a graveyard. The cold had got into our bones by then and we were all just looking to get a fire up and eat our supper. But just as we were setting up our tents, it started to snow, gently at first but then more and more heavily until you could hardly see your hand in front of your face. People thought it a sign and Jerubal said it was a sign we would freeze, if we didn’t get a proper fire going. I saw him eyeing some olive trees at the edge of the field but the farmer whose plot we were on had all his sons and cousins out there keeping watch on us, so we had to make do with the bit of kindling and brush they offered to sell, at twice what it was worth. You could see they’d pegged us for provincials, and were ready to take whatever advantage they could. But Jesus, when we had a fire up and our food on, invited them along to supper and they didn’t seem sure any more what to make of us, if we were having them on or just didn’t mind how they were cheating us.

  Meanwhile the snow kept falling, making us seem lost in a wilderness instead of a hundred paces in any direction from another field and another group of pilgrims like us huddled around their own fire. But it felt warmer now, as if the snow was a house surrounding us, with its white walls all around. That might have been how Jerubal got the idea of building huts from the snow for those of us who didn’t have any tents—he started packing it together and squaring it off into bricks like a mason, and slowly building up his walls. Soon he’d set his whole group to it, half a dozen of their little houses rising up in the middle of the field, and finally even Jesus joined in on one, kneeling there in the snow and mud like a boy. When he’d finished, showing us how to round the roof over so it would hold, someone joked that the thing looked as fine as the temple in Jerusalem. “Herod spent forty years making his,” Jesus said, “and I did mine in an hour.”

  Our landlords didn’t know what to make of us, playing around in the snow like children. But by and by the word of what we’d done got out and people from the neighbouring camps started coming around to see, staring at the little village we’d made as if it was some miracle. There was just the light of our fire to see by and the snow was still coming down, and for a while all of us just stood there in the snow looking on, because it was true we had never seen such a thing, those little houses all of white. The new snow was already piling on top of them so that they seemed more real somehow, to have that blanket on them like any regular house in a snowfall, though you knew that in a day or two they’d all be melted away.

  The next morning when we awoke all you could see was white, even the trees covered over, the snow two fingers high on every leaf. Our little village was just a series of lumps in the snow, and even the tents were hardly distinguishable, just little hills like the mounds of insects, so that when people started digging out from them it was as if we were some colony of locusts or ants just scratching our way out of the earth. And still the snow kept coming down, though you didn’t think it could go on like that, since it seemed that another day of it and we’d all just be buried alive, and that would be the end.

  It was a job getting any work done in that snow. Somehow we got another fire burning—and the price for wood had already gone up from the night before—and made up some breakfast. Then Jesus sat us down and told us we had a busy day ahead, and gave out assignments. Jacob and John, who he called the Sons of Thunder, had to take a group in to buy us sheep for our sacrifice, and Simon the Rock and Mary and a few of the other women had to go into town to prepare a room Simon’s cousin had rented for us for our festival supper. The rest of us were free to join Jesus, who would be paying a visit to the temple.

  After coming all that way I was anxious to get a proper look at the temple, which people used to talk about even in Baal-Sarga. So I put myself in with the group, and Jerubal said he’d come as well. In the end, there were maybe thirty or forty of us who set out. One of them was Aram—since Judas had gone he’d gotten more forward, trying every way to catch Jesus’s eye. It turned out it was Judas he’d been afraid of, and the rumour he was a spy, though we might all have preferred it if he’d just stayed in his cave instead of being always underfoot now trying to get in Jesus’s good graces.

  We passed the sheep market, a big field outside one of the city gates with corrals at one end where the sheep were penned, and left John and Jacob there with their group. The market was already chaotic, with people everywhere and the mess from the mud and snow, and then all the sheep crying out for dear life knowing what was coming to them. A row of soldiers stood on each side of the field, looking merciless and tense, seeming ready to pull out their swords at the first sign of trouble. There were more soldiers at the gates and we had to be checked again, and then it was the same inside, with soldiers keeping an eye out f
rom the walls and more in the street making sure the snow got cleared away. There was so much snow by then that it seemed a hopeless job, the narrow streets there near the Sheep Gate so crammed with it that people had just burrowed little alleys down the middle and piled the snow up high on either side.

  The Romans had their castle just off the gate. The height of it cast a shadow like night over the street, the walls going up and up, sheer and windowless except for a few openings near the top. I’d heard the governor put up there instead of at Herod the Great’s old palace whenever he came down from the capital because he knew the Jews would be happy to slit his throat. He always came for the feasts to head off any trouble then, but from the sound of things he only made matters worse, strutting around with his special guard, who were all Samaritans, and throwing it in people’s faces that the Romans ruled them.

  Past the castle a wide street ran along the base of the fortress and of the wall that shored up the Temple Mount. The wall was almost as high as the fortress itself, dwarfing the houses across from it and made of stones as large as houses themselves. The wall stretched away so far that you could hardly see to the end of it, stone on stone on stone so that you wondered how it could have been built. The street along it was crowded with traffic, soldiers and peddlers and people going up to the temple, but we seemed no bigger than ants next to that wall, scurrying about on our bit of business.

  Part of the way along we crossed under an archway and came into a better part of the city, the streets wider and the houses more substantial. An old wall that must have gone back to when the city was smaller divided this section from the slums we’d just come from. Not long afterwards we came to a gate cut into the wall of the Temple Mount that was the start of a tunnel that led up to the top. As we were going up, Jesus warned those of us who weren’t Jews that there were certain places we weren’t allowed—he himself didn’t hold to the rule but we ought to be careful, since we could be arrested or worse.