by Fast, Howard
“Bear him beyond arrow shot—and the Romans will help me.”
They carried Shimeon’s body halfway toward the Roman wall, and set it down there, and then one of them said, “We could not have prevented his death, Queen Berenice, but that doesn’t wash the blood from our hands. The nashi is like a saint in heaven, and he sits at the side of Moses and at the side of God—and we all share his murder. The Almighty knows that, and because the mark of Cain is upon us, the Almighty will do what He must do. What is left in that city will die, and we die with it—and God willing, the Jews will never know the like of us again. We have all made us a pact with death, and we only desire to live that we may die. Don’t hate us, Queen Berenice—pity us. Pity us.”
Berenice wept now, not for her husband, but for these three skinny, nameless Jews who now turned away from her and walked hopelessly back to their doomed city. The dam opened, and as she wept, she was saved.
Could he help her? Could he do anything for her, Titus desired to know? Even if in the largest sense, he had failed her—could he help her now?
There were things she needed. She needed a coffin of plain wood, and he said it would be ready within the day. She needed plain white linen for a winding shroud, and she needed spices to pack the body with, so that it would bear the trip to the north. All of this Titus promised. It was a small matter, and it was done for her.
She washed the body herself. It was laid out in her tent, and she refused the services of the Roman embalmers, who had studied their craft in Egypt and who swore to her that they could preserve the flesh of Shimeon for a full eternity, whatever that might mean. Berenice was not interested in preserving his flesh for an eternity—and it was an abomination to a Jew for the flesh to be cut after death. The man she had loved was gone. The body was nothing; she honored it only because it had been his, and because it gave her a sort of surcease from despair to do these things. So she cut away his rags, washed the flesh clean, washed the hair and beard and combed them. Because he was an Israelite, the most common clay of the Jews, without blood or gens to matter, she could dispense with ceremony. The Roman soldiers helped her to wrap him in the linen winding sheet and lay him in his coffin, after which the spices were packed all around him. During these tasks, Joseph Benmattathias came to the tent to offer his condolences. Berenice nodded. She could not trust herself to speak to him.
Titus provided a wagon for the coffin, and he offered a guard of honor to ride with them, but Berenice refused it and said that she and her slave, Gabo, would travel alone. Gabo had been a source of help and strength; they had become closer than ever before; and as she had done several times in the past, Berenice offered her manumission. As always, this led to tears and great emotional distress on the part of Gabo, and Gabo said that it was a cruel thing on Berenice’s part to bring up the subject now—with the body of the nashi lying there in his coffin.
Titus attempted to insist that Berenice travel in the manner that a queen should, but Berenice was not easily moved—and she tried to make him understand that she was less a queen than a Jew, and that as a Jew she could travel in Palestine on foot and no one would look askance at her.
“And you intend to go from here to Galilee in that cart—with the body?”
“With my husband,” she replied, “and Gabo will be with me.”
“But you cannot!”
“But I can,” she said.
They left the following morning, Berenice and Gabo, driving a team of mules that drew a wagon bearing a coffin. They left at the break of day, and a few hours later Titus ordered the first assault on Jerusalem.
The news ran ahead of her, and all the way through northern Judea, through Samaria and into Galilee, the people came to the roadside to watch silently as the queen of Chalcis drove by in a wagon drawn by a team of mules. Two women were in the wagon, and behind them a coffin covered by a pale blue cloth; and such was the curious nature of people that even though a great city was experiencing its last mortal agony only a few miles to the south, it was not for the city that the Jewish peasants wept, but for this red-haired, green-eyed woman who was taking the body of her husband back to Galilee—for the pathos of the queen who lowered herself thus, and of the nashi—that most noble title on all the earth—who lay dead in the coffin.
Berenice thought of this, and the more she thought about it, the more her heart and her mind returned to that strange massive city of rock and its wild, half-insane defenders. Hurt and pain and remorse and pity churned inside of her. Can one weep for one man when a hundred thousand must die? Yet the people who came to the roadside to stare silently and to weep silently knew that Jerusalem was dying. Even in Samaria, they knew full well that the city of Yaweh was perishing and that soon enough His Holy Temple would be in flames. Thousands of Samaritans had gone into the city to fight for its life. They had put aside or forgotten that ancient hatred of Israel for Judah, and they had become Jews again so that they might join in that Jewish fratricide which had repaved the streets of Jerusalem with flesh and blood. Those Samaritans would return no more—and who had killed whom, no one knew. Death stalked the treeless hills of Judea, and it was for this that the people wept. Already, by the time Berenice’s lonely wagon drove across the lowlands of Samaria, Titus had brought his great battering rams up to the city’s wall. The Jews poured out of the city, and from morning to night a wild and awful battle raged around the battering rams. But even the death-hungry Sicarii could not drive back the iron maniples of the Romans; and there, that first day of the attack, half of the Sicarii died—and with them died the life of the sword and the god of the sword, that keen-edged phallic god that took worship by ripping the cover of a man’s guts—the iron penis that made its sexual union in death. In all the history that man knew to that time, no great city, no mighty city of teeming, uncounted thousands had ever died the way Jerusalem would die, utterly, totally, every human life extinguished or removed from it, every building crushed, gutted with fire, sown with salt, and sealed with blood. But neither would any other people see so quickly and completely the murderous bastard of the old gods that was called war.
If it was the beginning of Hillel’s victory, then the whisper of that beginning was unheard. Neither Berenice nor any other man or woman could bridge the countless centuries that lay ahead, and she only knew what she knew. It was the season of death, and people wept.
But in Galilee, it also appeared to be the season of life. The Passover was only days away, and the air was sweet as honey with the cool winds of springtime. The newly sown crop had begun to break ground, and the rich fields showed a delicate veil of yellow-green. The cedars swayed in the wind and filled the air with perfume, while in the distance the mountaintops had not yet shed their white caps of snow. Everywhere, the peasants were making their dwellings ready for the blessings and purity of the Passover, and whosoever could afford white lime dressed their dwelling places and their barns and their walls in shining coats of white. In Galilee you would not know that Jerusalem was dying; here the signs of war were gone; and the Jewish population, swollen by a quarter of a million refugees from Judea, was entering a period of prosperity unmatched in all its past.
And in Galilee, the House of Hillel still stood in its peaceful valley—unchanged, and here Berenice came with the body of Shimeon Bengamaliel, the last nashi of Israel, the last prince of the Jews, not in a land or place or city, but all the world over the prince and liege lord of all who belonged to the body Israel. He was the last. There would never be another.
The House of Hillel rejected tombs and considered funerary cults and the worship of the dead an abomination. Hillel himself had said, “Man’s concern is with life, and he must live his life not with his eyes upon death but with his eyes brightly fixed upon eternity, for life is his eternity and the riddles of death are not for him to solve but for the Almighty’s whim—” The riddle remained. There was always a riddle at the core of what Hillel taught, for he plucked at life and in life there are no final answers, only a pat
h from question to question.
Berenice thought of this as she stood with the rest of the family and some servants and slaves on a hillside above the farm compound and listened to the voice of Shimeon’s brother. A grave had been dug in the small cemetery where the blood of Hillel was buried, and now the box containing Shimeon’s body was being lowered into the grave. “What shall I say of a good man?” asked Hillel Bengamaliel, Shimeon’s brother. “He is voiceless. But if he had a voice, would he not proclaim, I am for myself? I am for myself—thus it is at the root of all that the saintly Hillel taught. But is it simple to ask, as Hillel asked, ‘If I am not for myself—who is for me? And if I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now—when?’ Oh, my brother, Shimeon—there are no mysteries, only eternity. It takes patience to be a man and more to be a Jew—and there is no judgment here for one who was strong and good and capable of love.”
Then he prayed, while they put dirt into the grave. He was only forty-nine years old now, this brother of Shimeon’s, even as Shimeon would have been only forty-seven, but he seemed older than that to Berenice, his shoulders bowed with a great weight. When he had finished with the prayer, he came over and kissed Berenice; but his mother, Sarah, tiny, wrinkled, ancient in her woe, stood by the grave keening and weeping out her grief. Berenice did not weep now, and when Hillel’s wife, Deborah, kissed her, Berenice said, “Don’t pity me. I was like an empty bowl of dry, chipped clay, and he filled me full.” Now Gabo joined the old woman. In the manner of the Benjaminites, Gabo rubbed dirt into her eyes and hair and filled her mouth with dirt, screaming it out. Then she cast herself on the grave, twitching and beating her head with her clenched fists. Hillel looked at Berenice, who said, “Better take her away. She doesn’t know anymore. She loved your brother, and when love or hate hurts them, they can become mad. I wish I could.” Then Hillel told his slaves and they took Gabo away, but her hysteria was contagious, and many others were weeping and keening now. Hillel led them back down into the valley, but when he saw that Berenice remained by the grave, he returned for her.
“What kind of stone will you cut for him?” she asked Hillel.
“Did Shimeon ever say anything about that?”
“Only that a single stone should cover both of us—a plain stone.”
“You are a young woman—what a way to talk!”
“Forty-two. That’s not so young, brother; but this is something I want very much, to lie here. He will rest in peace here. He suffered such pain. Can I tell you what the Sicarii did to him? And tell me this, brother—is it true that your grandfather, Hillel, himself was a friend of Shammai?”
“Yes,” Hillel nodded. “They were friends. They loved each other.”
“And Shammai was a gentle person?”
“A good rabbi—very courteous, very gentle. Never would he permit bars or locks on the doors of his house, lest by some accident a hungry or tired man should be turned away—”
“And from this to the Sicarii in less than a hundred years?” Berenice wondered.
“Yes.”
“Why—why? Why did they torture Shimeon and starve him and destroy him and rob him even of his soul and his pride—in the name of Shammai? Why did they turn Jerusalem into hell in the name of Shammai?”
Hillel shook his head miserably. “It’s no use to think about these things, sister.”
“Only tell me—or I must think about them every hour of my life!” She went close to Hillel now, staring at him, measuring him. “Or don’t you know?”
“I know.”
“Then fell me.”
“Because above all,” Hillel answered slowly, “Shammai taught to hate and to fear. No man was his brother. He shared blood and God with the Jews, and he would share his bread with the pagan, but he would kill his daughter with his own hand before he gave her in marriage to one who was not a Jew, and he would kill his son with his own hand if he saw him eat meat from a pagan’s table. So what was his life worth and what was his gentleness worth and what was his charity worth? Could he ever ask, ‘If I am not for myself—who is for me?’ He was never for himself. He shriveled his own soul, put blinders on his eyes, and made love a thing you parcel out on a grocer’s scale—and in the end, he was the inheritance of the Sicarii. It was natural—what else could have happened? If you believe that God is something that lives in a box called an ark in a gold-plated temple on a hill in Judea, and that He can only be placated by burnt offerings and that He is a creature of whim, stupidity, and superstition—well, if you believe that God is of that nature, and this was very much what Shammai believed, and that He exists only to enrich the party of priests, and that a thousand men must perish before one sight of Him or His Temple is tolerated—well, if you believe this kind of senseless mind-gibberish, then the Sicarii are the natural end product of your teachings. You see, Shammai was always righteous. Hillel was never righteous. There was the whole difference.”
Days passed, and Berenice remained at the House of Hillel. She had no plans, no thoughts about the future, no dreams, and no hopes—only memories. Gradually, the sharp edge of her pain was blunted and it became possible to think of Shimeon without agony in the tightening of her heart. She did little. At first she would go each morning to the new grave on the hillside, but she soon found that it gave her neither comfort nor inspiration. Wherever or whatever Shimeon was, or whether he was not, he was surely not in the clay that had been buried, and she was in no mood to bury her sorrow in a worship of the dead. It was better to turn to the living, and when she sat at the edge of the shade of the ancient terebinth tree and watched the children being taught by Hillel, his own son, Gamaliel, among them, she was as close to a sort of dulled contentment as she would ever hope to be. Often she wondered about the persistence of this school, generation after generation of children sitting under the great live oak and listening to the gentle wisdom and wise tolerance a certain rabbi had taught almost a hundred years before. From all over the world some of these children came, sent by parents who wept to part with them; and again they would go to every corner of the world to teach others what they had learned and to begin the shaping of a landless, nationless, sprawling thing called Jewry and based on the astonishing proposition that one should love his neighbor as himself—for thus taught Hillel; and Berenice, sitting quietly, working on some piece of embroidery or sewing a seam and sometimes alone and sometimes with Deborah and Sarah and younger women and suckling infants around her, would hear a thin, squeaking voice telling by rote what might or might not be understood years hence, “Who hurts man diminishes me and who slays man slays me; for the Almighty having given life, man has yet to find an adequate reason to take it away—” Squeaking voices committing to memory the noblest sentiments man had as yet proposed, and then fleeing from the task of it to play and shout and be children—and watching them, listening to them, Berenice would ask herself over and over,
“Why did we have no child, no flesh, no seed to be planted again?”
She found herself listening freshly, wonderingly to those piping voices, “And if I should offer a burnt sacrifice? But Hillel answered this pious man thus, Should you never offer a sacrifice and never speak a prayer and even deny the Almighty Himself, yet live with love and with charity, I tell you that you are keeping the Law—”
Did it have meaning? Or was this the ranting of haplessness and hopelessness? The children sat under the terebinth tree, and Jerusalem was dying. Each day word came from Jerusalem. Fifteen days after Titus had brought up his battering rams and opened the assault on the Wall of Herod, this northern wall of the city was breached. For four days after that, a terrible battle with no quarter asked and no quarter given raged in the streets of the Lower City—and finally the Zealots and the Sicarii, who had made common cause now, were driven across the Second Wall and into the Akra.
The reports were confused and very often contradictory. No one entered or left the city now, and the only information was what filtered through the Romans to their Egyptian and Greek
and Samaritan camp followers and camp servants and then through them to the Jews. It was a time when information was not only passed on freely but bought and sold as well by Jews who were desperate to know the fate of friends and relatives in the city; and if there was no news, the sellers were ready enough to manufacture it out of the whole cloth. Thus the word came to Galilee that in the Lower City the Romans had put every man, woman, and child to the sword, that they had killed only the able-bodied men, that they had killed only the women and children, preserving the men for their triumph, that they had killed no one since every single soul had escaped to the shelter of the Akra and from there to the impregnable Upper City and the temple citadel, and that they had taken over twenty-five thousand prisoners. The last was closest to the truth, but it could not be verified.
The battle for Jerusalem went on, and the reports continued to seep into Galilee—and then came word that the Temple, the eternal and indestructible Temple of Yaweh, had been put to the torch and had burned to the ground—nothing being left of it but the scorched foundation stones. The defenders had retreated from the temple area into the Upper City, which they had sworn to defend to the death. Already almost a hundred thousand prisoners had been taken by Titus. The city was in flames, a pillar of smoke hanging over it so high and dense that it could be seen from as far away as Samaria—and red at night with the flames of the burning city. And still the Upper City was defended.
Then it was August, and word came that the Romans had breached the wall of the Upper City and had set it aflame. The end was now in sight.
And still, at the House of Hillel the sun rose and set each day over the unchanging and bucolic setting—and each day the children sat in the shade of the terebinth tree, intoning the sayings of the sage.
Jerusalem was dead. Barring Rome itself, the most populous, the most strongly defended, and the proudest city on all the earth had perished. The unconquerable had been conquered; even if it had destroyed itself, ripped out its own gut, and cut its own throat and bled itself until every street was a river of blood—still, if there were ten thousand left to defend its walls against a million, its conquest was no small feat. The Jew was dead, and wherever the Roman looked in all the earth, there was no one to oppose him. And with the city died Yaweh, the angry old God of the mountain, Yaweh of the tabernacle, Yaweh of the ark, Yaweh of the Temple—Yaweh who had plucked the noblest Jews down from their concept of an invisible and formless Eternal and had charged them, “I am Yaweh, your God, who brought you out of Egypt to be my own chosen people. I am the just God, the angry God, the God of fire and war, of thunder and lightning, of vengeance and memory, the God of Horeb, of all the high places and ancient beginnings, of the burnt offering, the flesh offering, the foreskin and the stink of the sacrifice, I am your God—and no other Gods will you have before me.” So He had charged them over a thousand years—but now no more. His Holy Temple lay in ashes and molten metal, and even His name—Yaweh—would gradually fall into disuse among a people who would seek Him in their homes, their hearts, and their synagogues, but no more on a hill in Judea. The Romans celebrated; twice had they been threatened by cities—once by Carthage and now by Jerusalem, and twice had they destroyed the cities that threatened them. They were full of pride.