by Shlomo Kalo
“So, that leaves Darius. Old Darius was much impressed by the miracle of the lions’ pit. It was the talk of the day among the slaves and artisans of the prison, a miracle guaranteed to impress the pagans, and I have to admit, it impressed me too – to the depths of my soul. And I was filled with pride: to think that a son of my race, an alien and an outsider, considered no better than sub-human no matter how many distinctions are awarded him - had proved his courage and his strength of spirit! And most important of all – he had proved that God loves him, and loves his people too, this race renowned for its stubbornness but also for its faith and its prophets and its visionaries. I was proud of you! And here, in the prison, I again enjoyed some prestige on your account. I say again, because the same thing happened in the time of Nebuchadnezzar, with the episode of your three friends in the blazing furnace. Before that they had despised and reviled and humiliated me, and sometimes I was punched or kicked, or robbed of the scraps of food that some charitable soul had put into my hand. The slaves here are insolent and disrespectful, and there’s no limit to their cruelty to anyone who has fallen from grace, descending from the heights to the depths. And that was the way I was treated, until the miracle of the furnace. Then I was shown nothing but deference and respect – for a whole month. The truth is, they were afraid of me, as one belonging to that race whose God can save his servants from the flames of the furnace. But as is usually the way with reverence that is based on fear, this was soon forgotten and they reverted to their former ways – assault and abuse and contempt – until along came your miracle of the lions, sparing you but ripping your adversaries to shreds. This time I had lower expectations, not trusting the slaves and bondswomen here, having seen their volatile nature. But the miracle in itself impressed me, and as I have said – I was proud of you! And I must confess to some remorse for the pleasure that I felt when Belshazzar, the foolish King, attacked you and undermined your status…”
“But I still feel it is I who owes you an apology,” he interrupted him, “I am at fault, having forgotten you!”
“Well, you have my forgiveness, although I don’t see your forgetting as any kind of a sin! On the contrary, my blindness and all the things inflicted on me, the cruelty and the torture – have helped me greatly. I tell you, Daniel my friend, if a different fate had been allotted to me, and after all that my eyes had witnessed, I had been given a comfortable home and attended by servants, looking upon the world with the same eyes that saw the murder of my sons and daughters – I would have put out these eyes myself! Nebuchadnezzar was a wise king, wise and valiant as they called him, and rightly so. He granted my last request, although I never put it to him, and he showed me mercy – as the valiant and the wise are always capable of showing mercy! In his mercy and his wisdom, and his courage – King Nebuchadnezzar enabled me to live out a life that I was capable of enduring, without losing my mind and without taking my own life – either because of what I had done, or because of what my eyes had seen. Ah, how considerate to me was Nebuchadnezzar! I was grateful to him. Yes, deep in my heart, I was grateful. From that day to this, and all days that are yet to come! My own days are numbered, and I know this and I’m glad of it. For these few remaining days of mine I shall take up your offer and accept the hospitality of your house, lie in a bed and eat food other than the scraps left over by slaves. And these shackles – would you be so kind as to have them removed?”
He ordered the guardsmen to remove the shackles and they picked up the prisoner and carried him to the anvil in the prison yard, where the smith detached the chains with a few deft blows of the hammer and discarded them.
Zedekiah’s lean body was washed, the bruises inflicted on him by the shackles were soothed with wine and anointed with oil, his hair and his beard were combed and he was dressed in a blue robe – the colour that promotes health and conveys the blessing of the angels – and a cloak, also of blue, though this was something he was unlikely to need.
The blind king was too weak to stand on his feet, and food was brought to him in his bed. But in spite of the many delicious meals offered to him, Zedekiah ate very little, and even the light young wine, from the verdant vineyards of Jahanur, was not to his taste. His body seethed with fever and yet, on the skin of his cheeks, drawn taut over the bones of the skull, there was a strange smirk of satisfaction and bitter disdain. The smirk did not extend to the blind holes of his eyes, which resembled open graves.
Whether on account of his fever, or on account of a longing repressed for so many years, Zedekiah talked, and talked like a raging torrent, not caring whether his words were heeded or not. In fact, the whole family, Nejeen, his sons and he, sat in a half-circle around Zedekiah and listened to his impassioned words:
“I know you are a miracle worker, and God pays heed to you and answers your prayers, and you have cured people who were beyond the help of other mortals. I have been told it all! And my plea to you is this, and remember it well and comply with it. Do not pray to your God on my behalf! Don’t ask Him to grant me pardon and compassion and love and health and long life. Not only because, as you know so well, I am the last man on earth to be worthy of the grace of God, or His mercy or His love, but also and most of all – because I have no wish to add further days to the span of my life! To put it as plainly as I can – I don’t want to go on living! On the contrary, I long with all my heart and soul, my spirit and my mind, to be gathered, and soon, to my people and to my ancestors. If indeed,” – and again the strange smirk flickered on the lips of the speaking skull that was Zedekiah – “they are willing to accept me in their company. There is hope in my heart that they will indeed accept me; Jeremiah said quite plainly that I would be buried amid the tombs of my fathers, and nothing said by Jeremiah is to be taken lightly! It was God who spoke through him, again and again. And I listened and I believed, but I did not have the strength to resist my ministers!”
Zedekiah was silent for a while, then bowed his head and declared in a changed voice:
“Now I am adding sin to my sin and folly to my folly! I was quite capable of imposing my will on my ministers, but I chose not to do so. I acted with cunning. I incited others to stand before me and urge me to spurn Jeremiah and ignore his words. To the last moment of their lives they thought I had been incited by them, and it never occurred to them that the opposite was the case.
“Jeremiah was warning me of the folly of my ambitions, even before I became King. And at the very moment that I swore allegiance to Nebuchadnezzar, I knew that I was going to break this vow; I had no intention of keeping faith!
“I always yearned with a yearning stronger than Hell itself to acquire praise and respect, to be a King, and not just of a small country that is all obsessed with a worn-out, antiquated faith, that the world derides and ridicules, but to rule over many lands, over half the world, the whole world! This was my ambition, and I longed for it so much that it hurt, I was going out of my mind! And God, who reads minds and looks into hearts, was quick to send me His holy prophet, to warn me against the effects of my lunacy while there was still time. And then it occurred to me I could get the better of Jeremiah, and of the one who sent him! What stupidity!” – the narrator chuckled, a hollow, bitter sound – “Any man of the meanest intelligence would realise that this is the shortest route to the edge of the abyss, to the torments of Hell – and only I, the young and the ambitious, could see no further than the end of my nose, or see where my insanity would lead me, or more precisely – I closed my eyes and refused to open them. God, like a father loving his rebellious and unruly son, never tired of making His voice heard to me, with promises – and with warnings of the dangers awaiting me. Such was my folly, I rejected them all! I longed to wallow in silver and gold, and all the riches of the world. In my mind’s eye I saw my palace soaring into the Heavens, its walls of pure gold, its roof of ivory and silver, and its pinnacles sparkling with precious stones. I saw myself dressed in crimson and purple, accompanied by liveried escorts, mounting my high throne,
and the rulers of all peoples and nations prostrating themselves at my feet and kissing the floor, and the crowd bowing before me and extolling my name and crying out with one voice: ‘Long live the great King, the King of Kings of Kings, the divine Zedekiah!’ All this I was seeing at night in my bed, and sometimes when I was awake, walking in my garden. And I had no rest, I was forever conspiring, and inciting with guile disguised as innocence everyone who could be incited, meaning – everyone! And to the very last moment I believed that my luck would change, and all would turn out in the way that I wanted, and my dream take on skin and sinew and become reality. I was like a sleepwalker!
“And God thought otherwise, and I was unable to make Him my ally!” He breathed heavily, gargling sounds emerging from his throat and spittle glistening on his thin lips – pink spittle that did not augur well.
“Perhaps your honour would like to rest a while?” Nejeen suggested with urgent tenderness, trying, with some success, not to reveal the pain and compassion which this man aroused in her heart.
“A few hours from now, rest will be all that’s left to me!” Zedekiah snorted again, chuckled faintly and suddenly turned his skull to face them, fixed on them the blank stare of his empty eye-sockets and cried anxiously:
“Will you fulfil the prophecy of the holy Jeremiah and send my body to Jerusalem, for interment in the burial ground of my ancestors?” His voice betrayed tension and agitation of mind, which he made no attempt to conceal from his hearers.
“It will be done!” he assured him calmly, in a steady voice, a tone to inspire confidence.
Zedekiah made a sound that could have been interpreted as a sigh of relief, and went on to say, but at a slower pace and without the same ardour, almost as if he was beginning to relax:
“All that has befallen me I brought upon myself, with my own hands! You may not believe this, but it’s a fact: even being blind and after all my tribulations and the disaster that I brought upon my people – I still cherished ambitions. I thought to myself that even a blind ruler could still be a ruler, capable of earning respect and esteem, and enjoying all the worldly pleasures that he desires. A blind ruler, indeed!” Again he chuckled, but with mounting bitterness. “When Nebuchadnezzar died it seemed to me someone might yet call upon my services, someone would attack Babylon and conquer it, and then come to me, in this stinking dungeon, unfasten my fetters and restore to me my former glory! What a fool I was, an incorrigible fool! Even the death of Belshazzar gave me reason to hope! And only lately have I begun to perceive the unbearable darkness of my soul. And I have woken up to the simple truth, that the one who abandons his God and leaves Him far behind is nothing other than a creature deranged! And so I was – until the death of Belshazzar. It was then that I began to retreat and to recoil in disgust – from myself! Could this be a sign, a portent of God’s willingness to forgive me for my mistakes, my folly and my grievous sins?”
The speaking skull turned slowly towards him, with a strange urgency, the holes of his dead eyes fixed on him. And he answered him:
“God does not hide his face from those who return to him with full repentance!”
“Perhaps I have repented,” Zedekiah mumbled hesitantly, as if probing the recesses of his soul – “but I’m not sure that it’s full repentance! This is a wearisome question which will be answered for me in the full glare of truth a few hours from now, when I leave this world to go to the next!”
Zedekiah stretched out on the soft mattress, stuffed with sweetly smelling dried flowers, and said no more. The silence lengthened and one of the sons made a move as if meaning to leave, thinking the invalid was asleep, but he was mistaken.
“Please be so good,” Zedekiah spoke in a hollow voice, but not lacking in force, “as to be patient a little longer, and sit beside me until I give my soul to my Maker. I want to say what I have to say to the end, and confess it in full. And this in the hope that saying it will help me in some way when I step beyond this,” – he tilted his head upward – “and I’m still not sure that it has all been said. And even if it has all been said, I would not want to be left alone in this my last hour, and if you are doing all this in a dutiful spirit, I can assure you that I won’t be trying your patience for much longer!”
“You have no reason to worry on that account, King Zedekiah!” he told him. “We shall sit here, all of us, all the family, my wife and my sons, for as long as this is what you want.”
And after a long silence, broken by Zedekiah’s heavy breathing and loud, irregular gurgles, he addressed his host again:
“People are incapable of truly appreciating what has been put into their hands. If they could do this, most conflicts could be avoided. And this is because their faith is not true faith, and deep down they are hypocrites and sceptics!
“I used to consult God before every action that I was contemplating, and I complied with His word – so long as it suited my convenience, and accorded with my aspirations. And it was necessary for me to experience all the horrors of a lost war, the failed attempt to flee from Nebuchadnezzar’s soldiers, the humiliation of capture, being forced to watch the execution of all my household and then endure the gouging of my eyes, the binding in chains and the casting into the dungeon, to crawl between the legs of slaves in search of a crust of bread or a sip of water – it took all this to make me understand the simple truth and know myself for a fantasist and a hypocrite, a coward and a traitor! And I give thanks for this. This truth is worth all my afflictions, and no price is too high to pay for it!”
A dry, persistent cough interrupted his speech. Again he sat up on the bed, in a desperate effort to control the coughing, but without success. There was a blue tinge to his face, and an ooze of blood glinted at the corner of his mouth and trickled down his chin. For a brief moment Zedekiah was silent, as the coughing seemed to abate. And he cried out in a hoarse voice, low but quite clear:
“May He be blessed and magnified, praised and glorified, the God who is love!”
And his head sank forward on his chest, and he was no longer in the land of the living.
As he had promised, he sent the body of Zedekiah to Jerusalem in a special cortege and there, so it was reported, he was buried in the graveyard of the Kings of Judah, in a modest ceremony attended by few.
“May his memory be blessed!” he replied when asked about him, and with this the episode was ended and the circle closed.
King Darius
King Darius fell ill and took to his bed. And all the physicians of Babylon, men whose renown was spread throughout the kingdom and even beyond its borders, were summoned to attend him. And the physicians pontificated and inquired, and examined the King. Some said it was the King’s liver that was ailing, some said it was his heart, while others were convinced that the problem was with his bowels. There were even those who declared that the King’s heart, bowels and liver were all in a parlous state; this on account of the monarch’s style of living and the fact, which could not be denied, that he was no longer a young man.
So the famed luminaries of Babylonian medicine gave the King herbal treatments and also prescribed incantations and charms, and recommended special diets. The King did all that required of him, taking the medications and bathing in cold water, and eating raw pigeon-meat and the flesh of young crocodiles, put on amulets and listened to incantations, and stood in the sun, and practised physical exercises. Instead of easing his physical symptoms and improving his state of mind, these remedies only made his sickness worse. And the King dispersed the quacks forthwith and expelled them from his palace and paid no more heed to their advice and threw away their medications, and called upon the wizards and the necromancers. And they worked their spells and brought in dancers costumed as monsters who danced before the King for hours on end in an effort to exorcise his demons, and they taught him special prayers which he should say, and all of to no avail. And the King sank into black depression, for long days and nights.
Meanwhile, Cyrus, King of Persia, went to war a
gainst Babylon, and crossed its frontiers and invaded the outlying provinces, storming remote outposts. And the mighty army of Cyrus the Persian marched on the Chaldean capital, Babylon, greatest of all the world’s fortified cities. And the King’s counsellors did not know how to break the news to him, and he heard them whispering among themselves beside his sick-bed, thinking him asleep. And he opened his eyes, and demanded to know what was being talking about and why they were so anxious. And when the counsellors hesitated to reply, he insisted that he was not to be deceived; they were to tell him everything that they knew and conceal nothing from him.
And the chief minister approached the King, bowed low and informed him that Cyrus, King of Persia, was intent on conquering Babylon and was advancing with a great army to lay siege to it.
For a moment an ugly cloud passed over the face of Darius and he looked utterly dismayed, but the next moment he brightened and ordered his ministers and senior counsellors to go and fetch Belteshazzar, otherwise known as Daniel, the King’s viceroy, as he wanted to talk with him privately. The ministers complied with the King’s demand, bowed to the invalid one after the other and left his bed-chamber, and sent word to Daniel, summoning him to a confidential audience with the King.
So Daniel left all his other work and went in haste to the King’s bedchamber. Sick though Darius was, he showed no symptoms of pain or fever; on the contrary, he was smiling and evidently on the way to recovery.
“Belteshazzar my friend!” the King began – “Until this day I have refrained from bothering you with this infirmity of mine, but in this critical state of affairs, with Cyrus the Persian, a truly astute and courageous King, advancing towards my capital city and intent upon attacking it, I am left with no choice other than to consult you regarding this affliction which is draining my energies and plunging me into gloom. What must I do to be rid of this disease, so I can rise from my bed and stand at the head of my troops and offer Cyrus some stiff resistance?”