by Gerald Kersh
‘No. Go on.’
‘Why, then I began to worship my father.’
‘Until you observed that he worshipped and obeyed your mother, eh?’
‘True, more or less. Very well then, Diomed – what happened to me after that?’
‘You found yourself utterly alone in a world of women.’
‘It must have happened to you!’ cried Paulus.
‘No. Yours is a woman-dominated people, Paulus, and has been ever since Abraham’s wife Sarah drove the unhappy girl Hagar into the wilderness with Ishmael. I’ll wager that if anyone had remonstrated with Abraham about this treatment of his concubine and his first-born son, he would have said: “God told me to let Sarah have her way.” God being Sarah…. No, no such things happened to me. I loved my mother and my father. A child should be his mother’s for the first seven years; but the father should be fit to command the mother; both parents being, in the finest sense of the term, friends. They should love and respect each other, and the child should be judiciously ruled by both in equilibrium. But we were old-fashioned people. There was only one emotional outburst in our house,’ I said.
‘How was that?’ asked Paulus.
‘When the news came of my brother’s death. It happened one evening. We were standing on the terrace when the messenger came. Marcus was dead in the German forests. We did not say a word until my father said: “How did he die?” The messenger said: “Last but three of his company, and in a ring of German dead, with eleven wounds, all in front.” My father said: “Good lad!” The messenger said: “He had stooped to disengage his sword when his dying enemy struck upwards into his bowels. Marcus fell forward.” “Good lad!” my father said again. Then my mother cried: “Oh Marcus, my son!” and covered her face. My father said to her: “Thank the gods, rather, that he died like a Roman. If it had only been me! And I must die in my bed!” I begged permission to leave, went where nobody could see me, and threw myself on the ground, and wept; for Marcus was my hero. Soon, young Sergius – old Pugnax, that is now – found me and said: “Get up, young sir; your father’s coming, and you’d better not let him catch you crying.” So I did. We were quite a well-regulated family.’
‘You resemble your father, I imagine,’ said Paulus.
‘A little. But I am a pup by the side of him.’
‘Do lions have pups? … But which of my parents am I?’ Paulus asked, falling into the Jewish rhetorical style.
Answer such a question and you find yourself knee-deep in metaphysical quicksand. Actually, when he was at his most vivacious, when he was brightest and sharpest, when his company was most worth having – as, for example, at Soxias’s table – Paulus was remarkably like his mother when she was drawing on her considerable reserves of charm and wit to fascinate strangers. But I did not want to spoil his self-revelatory, confidential mood by telling him this; and since I, too, can play rabbinical Cat’s Cradle, I said: ‘A man is his own father and mother. He must fill his own skin.’
‘No, but I mean in point of actual resemblance.’
‘As I believe I said just now, a man resembles most the one he most desires to resemble.’
‘And what if I say “I would be like Diomed if I could”?’
‘I should ask why.’
‘I should reply: “Because Diomed is a whole man.”’
‘What is that?’ I asked.
He began to count on his fingers: ‘Calm of spirit, strong of mind, great of heart, sure of purpose, clear of vision …’ He paused.
‘Start on the other hand,’ I said, smiling.
‘Clever but honest, meticulous without womanishness, alert but steady, far-sighted in detail, tortuous yet direct like a mountain path –’
‘Enough,’ I said. ‘You have no more fingers.’
‘Learned without pedantry, cool to refresh but not to freeze, warm to thaw but not to burn, bright to illuminate but not to bedazzle …’ He stopped to think.
‘You might find all these qualities in your diametric opposite and your deadliest enemy,’ I said.
‘How could I find such qualities in him and still consider him my deadliest enemy?’
‘I said, you might find them. Only you would not look for them. You would say, first of all: “This is my enemy,” and act accordingly. And if you stumbled over his virtues, you’d turn them into dirt to throw at him – they’d strengthen your fear of him, and your determination to exterminate him – they would make him all the more dangerous. So you’d find some way of saying to yourself: “In my case, these qualities are virtuous, but in my enemy they are vicious.” Besides, in your little catalogue of manly virtues, haven’t you merely served the bone without the marrow?’
‘Have I?’ Paulus asked.
‘In one way or another, to what does man aspire? Shall I say, not to become god-like, but to become one with God, if you will?’
‘For the sake of argument, yes. Ultimately, yes.’
‘There is no argument. Forgetting, for the moment, your six hundred and thirteen articles of Law, each, I dare say, with its six hundred and thirteen by-laws – what does man, ultimately, ask of God?’
‘Mercy.’
‘Then what is this “whole man” of yours without a little kindness? And how can he be kind without understanding? And how can he understand without humility? And I do not mean what your ragged prophets call humility, when they wear their own excrement as arrogantly as a millionaire’s favourite whore wears her paint, and nurture their lice as lap-dogs or jewelled monkeys, and boast that they are dust – God’s chosen dust. I mean the humility that must come to any honest man whose courage is strong enough to let him read his own heart.’
‘Yes, I should not have forgotten modesty,’ said Paulus.
‘Modesty? Who said modesty?’ I asked. ‘I said humility, not modesty. Modesty is an affectation of humility. Modesty is a hypocrite. Modesty is sackcloth fashionably draped, and with a silk lining. Modesty sprinkles herself with costly perfume, saying: “Oh, this is nothing but some stuff out of squashed old dead flowers.” Modesty bows her head to show off her neck. Modesty is a beggar; humility never begs. Modesty is flagrant. Humility is a thing of the spirit – a private matter between a man and his gods. Modesty is for slaves, sly whores and common politicians. Humility is a noble quality of the free –’
I caught myself on the edge of eloquence, and silenced myself with a draught of wine.
‘But not in excesss,’ said Paulus.
‘How is it possible for a noble quality to exist in excess? In excess it ceases to be noble – it upsets the balance of the spirit…. Drink a little wine, Paulus, and tell me why, when we left Soxias’s, you wanted to come here?’
‘Suddenly I was lonely,’ said Paulus.
‘Suddenly?’ I asked.
‘No, not suddenly.’
‘Lonely, with the loneliness that wants company?’
‘No.’
‘With the loneliness that needs love?’
‘No.’
‘The loneliness, then, that yearns not to be beloved, but to love?’
‘It is possible. What do I know? How can I know?’
‘But over all, a feeling of being as yet only half-born? A stifled craving to be your self alone and entire, your own man, free and with a whole heart to give away?’
Paulus shrugged a shoulder towards his chin, or nodded ambiguously towards his shoulder. ‘And what then?’ he asked.
‘If that is so it is good for you,’ I said. ‘Other kinds of loneliness are whimperings and bellyaches. Yours is the true growing-pain. Cheer up, old fellow – a healthy man soon gets over being young!’
‘I am no longer a child, Diomed.’
‘I didn’t say you were. Paulus, there are two kinds of torment you must suffer – the first, when you must squeeze yourself into a space too small for you; and the second, when you must force yourself to be great enough to fill a space too large for you. You are undergoing both at the same time. Happy is the man who finds and fits his space in the world!
But you never will, you know …’
This did not displease him. He said: ‘Happiness is something I don’t take into consideration. But what space shall I fit? Am I to be too big or too little?’
‘Both,’ I said. ‘Too great for today, and too small for tomorrow.’
‘That,’ said Paulus, slowly, ‘could mean a man of power, or an unborn babe, or it could mean a big plant in a little pot.’
‘That’s right,’ I said.
So it was, and so it is right: ‘Too great for today, and too small for tomorrow’ holds good for every man in the throes of growing; every man, every beast, every tree. A safe syllogism, this one. But one may learn something of a person by the way he accepts it as applied to himself. If he takes it as a compliment, he is a plain fool; if he takes it as an insult, he is a vainglorious fool; but if he sees through the membrane with which he covers his poor pride and perceives the meaning of the statement, he is not a fool at all.
And Paulus was a proud and ambitious young man, and a hard-grained one; for he is a brave and implacable man who dares to hunt himself down, and come to handgrips with himself, and still keep hold of his self-respect – which is what Paulus was so stoutly trying to do. Not many men have the will to try it, and of these few escape whole from their own black lairs. Paulus would.
‘I said: ‘You will be a man of power. Your roots will burst the pot of –’ I stopped myself.
‘Of?’
I had almost said ‘of Israel’, but I changed it to: ‘Of your family. You’ll feel your way through the dirt in a thousand different directions and suck up strength from the world at large. Meanwhile, be patient with yourself. Forgive yourself for being young. You still have a lot to unlearn.’
‘I am a Jew, Diomed. How far can a Jew go in a Roman world?’
‘Far,’ I said. This was not the time to say to him that Judaea was a dunghill, a useless fuming ferment alone in a heap, but potent to sweeten and be sweetened if it were spread and mixed with the other muck of the world. I said: ‘Far and wide, deep and high.’
A Melanion would have asked how far a Jew could go in a Jewish world; and he would have contended, citing chapter and verse from their own holy writings, that the Jews had nobody but themselves to blame for whatever slight inconveniences they had suffered, that they had been suffered to clamour so long in their strip of territory only by the charity of their several conquerors; that their very patriarchs were mostly rascals who deceived their dying father in order to swindle their brothers, who got swinishly drunk and copulated with their daughters, who grew rich by profiteering in grain during famines … and so on, indefinitely. But I said: ‘It takes a broad mind to rule a wide world, Paulus, and Rome has a broad mind. Also, she knows what is good for her, and she has given provinces to less likely men than you.’
‘Jews?’
‘Now I ask you,’ I said, ‘would it be sane policy to put the peace and prosperity of a province into the hands of someone to whom its inhabitants were by holy law filthy and abominable?’
He shook his head.
I said: ‘A somewhat corrupt governor – perhaps. A somewhat brutal governor – quite possibly. But an idol-smashing governor? Unthinkable. We smash gods only as a punitive measure, never as a matter of religious principle. We are a practical people – we know that it pays to be tolerant. Furthermore, we are a strong people; we keep our gods in their place, with all due respect, of course – no priest rules Rome. Jealous little bloody-minded tribal deities, like the comic travesty of the Soul of the Universe that the Jews worship, don’t suit us at all. They foment discord, where we want a strong state of balanced calm. It seems to be that only bafflement and bewilderment born of ungratified vanity mixed with an ingrained slavish cowardice can breed the secretive, dreamy, hungry arrogance that characterises the average Jew … I hope I do not offend you by these generalisations?’
Paulus smiled, and said: ‘Go on, go on! I know my Diomed. He is something like a bear – when he is at his clumsiest, then he is most dangerous. You are coming to something short, sharp and deadly. Continue; crush my bones!’
‘I said: ‘Oh, I was only talking. You asked how far a Jew could go in a Roman world, and I was trying to answer in a general kind of way over a friendly cup of good wine from my own vineyards, which always makes me feel easy and conversational….’ I spoke easily, lazily, as a man talks when he is comfortable with a good dinner. ‘Talking around and around the point you raised, it seems to me that the Jews derive a certain acid pleasure from hearing the word “jew” used as an opprobrious epithet. It sharpens their exquisite sense of uniqueness. Similarly, they have taken to relishing their various “captivities” – much as you or I sometimes enjoy being scrubbed with a rough brush after a sweaty day – as a kind of regimen of purifying punishments. It is true, I think, that left alone the Jews would have annihilated themselves completely by now, in an endless series of tribal wars of extermination over differences in points of doctrine. No, no, a country, however small, cannot be ruled from a temple or a college of priests. So, as a force to be reckoned with, Judaea existed only for a few years – and precariously at that – under David and Solomon. But they were great kings. Oh, the blood is there, the blood is there!’
‘So?’ said Paulus, watching me.
‘So, nothing. The pity of it is, that the Jews have never been able to keep the peace among themselves; for with all their insistence on the oneness of their god. they split him into as many different little Jehovahs as they have dissenting sects – worship the same god in a different way, and you pray to a different god. How many sects have the Jews?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Paulus, with an impatient shrug.
‘Neither do I. But your people are always casting each other out and hunting each other down: as, for example, you are at present doing, quite competently, with the Nazarenes. I say, “quite competently” – for a beginner, that is, and with a strictly local range; nicely, very nicely.’
‘Do I ask for a restricted range, Diomed?’ Paulus asked. I had spoken with calculated condescension, and was gratified to observe that he answered in perfectly even tones. ‘Slip my leash, Diomed; give me authority.’
‘It isn’t mine to give, but we’ll talk about that later, perhaps. Do take more wine. I’ve upset you. This is the hour for digestion and general conversation. What was I saying? Oh yes. The difficulties encountered by the man who would govern the Jews would, as old Tibullus would say, be well-nigh insuperable. And where would one look to find him? A man who would be acceptable both to the Jews and to Rome, an honest man but a true ruler, strong and steady enough to hold the balance? Clever enough to strengthen Judaea without weakening Rome? Do you know, such a man might rule half Asia! He must be a Jew, necessarily. But what Jew? One of the Herods? A bad stock at best, and seeded out, at that…. Let us think, now … who could be King of the Jews?’
If I was a kind of bear, well, now, in the second while Paulus was framing a ‘Who knows?’ – left paw, right paw, claws out – bearlike, I closed.
‘You!’ I said, striking the table.
If he had started, or laughed out loud, or told me not to be foolish, I should have been disappointed. But he simply looked me in the eyes quite calmly, although his heart must have made a great leap, for all the colour went out of his cheeks. His hand was firm as he took a sip of wine – still gazing steadily at me – and I was disconcerted, as if in some strange dream I had carelessly opened a familiar door and found myself blinking at the white heart of a furnace. Every man has his very secret dream. Know it, and you know the man. Idly fumbling, I had touched a secret spring and the mad vision of Paulus blazed naked for a moment, too hot for my eyes.
The memory of that night always brings with itself a sense of trapped heat and an image of soaring fire.
Paulus said: ‘Was Saul born to the purple?’ – in such a fashion that, with a shift of emphasis, his words might be construed in four different ways.
‘What is birth?’ I
said, for the sake of talking. ‘If my cat has kittens in the oven, do I call them cakes? No, Saul was not; and he was the first King of the Jews. Absalom was; and he died hanging on a tree –’
‘Absalom was a fool,’ said Paulus.
‘Life was too easy for him. The best kings come out of chaos – like Eurynome. True kings are makers.’
‘Perhaps I might have done better to keep that cup,’ said Paulus, half to himself. Then: ‘Judaea is a chaos.’
‘And by what name would you be crowned?’ I asked. ‘Saul the Second?’
‘No. Paul.’
He gave full mouth to the diphthong, so that the name had the sound of a war-cry. The door was closing now.
‘There is no harm in such jokes, between friends, after dinner,’ he said. ‘By ‘king’, one naturally means ‘fit to be king’. And it is better to be a plain gentleman who is fit to be a king than to be a king whose crown is too large for his head and too heavy for his neck.’ The fire was hidden again.
‘Oh, absolutely,’ I said.
But something that had puzzled me for the past six months was suddenly explained. I had wondered, sometimes, at the furiousness of Paulus’s hatred for the Nazarenes: they seemed too little for such a bitterly concentrated hate, in a great world where there were so many big things worth hating if one were that way inclined. I had thought, at first: ‘The Nazarenes are simply something on which this untried hunter uses his little skill and his great energy, burning up the drippings of a rich but half-cooked imagination while he chases the hare and makes believe that he is hunting the lion.’
Then, when I knew him better, I said: “No, he is a servant of the spirit of the hunt, but reason tempers his zeal: he would not be hunting if he were not driven by a conviction that the death of the poor little hare is somehow necessary to him. He will hate that hare, therefore, as long as it lives. It is in his way. He wants to prove both to Rome and to Jerusalem that he is a necessary man, and so he will kill that Nazarene hare if he bursts his heart in the chase. So Rome will say: “You have helped to keep our peace”, and Jerusalem will say: “You have helped to cleanse our house”. In a nutshell, Paulus is ambitious.’