All his notes were gone, but he had left those sandals he had bought. They were in the closet, under a duffel bag. She ought to throw them out, right now, she told herself. That is, if she could stop holding them to her chest.
But she couldn’t let go.
“Jim,” she sobbed, feeling her legs go, falling on the bed. “Jim. Jim.”
She didn’t know how long she had been on the bed, or how long she had been crying. The person she wanted to share this pain with, the only one she could really share something this deeply painful with, was gone.
She thought of phoning her brother and Rani to share this grief, but when she started to dial, going over the words she would say, she could not control the wracking sobs.
And then she realized her brother and nephew had too much grief of their own. And she knew what she had to do. There had to be prayers for Jim. But who would pray for her Jim? Who would say her prayers for the holy man?
His family certainly wasn’t going to want to hear from his mistress.
So the next day she put on her long-sleeved dress and covered her head and went to Mea Shearim to ask a favor of the Reb Nechtal. She took along a translator who knew both Yiddish and English.
And what she said was this:
“I know you think of me as a loose woman. But I also know you had respect for the Gentile who knew the Talmud, the righteous one. He is dead, and I want prayers said for him, Kaddish. I thought you would be the right one to do that. You know what a good man he was.”
She heard a quotation from the Reb Nechtal about what it meant to perform services for the good man.
The Reb Nechtal told her grieving was good to do, but when it passed, she would have life again. And there could be happiness only through living the laws of the Holy of Holies.
“Good Rabbi,” she said, “I don’t remember when I stopped believing I should be happy. But I once was happy, and it was not according to your laws.”
And the translator told her the rabbi answered that then it was not real happiness.
“Oh … but it was. It really was,” Sharon answered.
24
The Third Day
The cry went through Jerusalem that “Pilatus will be replaced. Pilatus will be replaced.”
And many said Glaucus would replace him, and that he was even harsher than Pilatus, for Glaucus was known to have said he would keep the Jews in line.
But for one merchant there could be none harsher than Pilatus, the murderer, the butcher.
The merchant’s son was being crucified and had hung on the cross two days, as crowds gathered. And when the father begged the guards to let him put some water on his son’s lips, the crowd began to chant:
“Water for the boy. Water for the boy.”
Fearing a riot, the officer finished off the young man quickly with a thrust of the spear into the heart, and retreated with his small execution detail to Antonia Fortress to get help. But by the time he returned with a full maniple, the body was gone.
Now, everyone knew the father must be crazed to have stolen a body from a cross, because the punishment for that was also crucifixion. And Roman informers took this back to Antonia Fortress, where it was decided not to pursue the matter, since the man had no following. So crazy was the father that they said he claimed he knew a way to make his son alive again. That certainly was not a man to worry about.
Now, the father had a plan. He took the boy to a storeroom, hewn out of stone for the safekeeping of valuables. And inside that, he put the boy.
When his wife warned him of the danger of losing everything they owned, he threw a handful of Roman coins in her face to let her know what he thought. His son, Ygal, was everything.
He let her busy herself trying to pick up the coins outside the hewn cave. He had work to do. It was not all lost. Oh yes, they said he was crazy, but they always said that of people who knew things they didn’t.
He was lucky Ygal was killed by a lance. That meant there was a chance to bring him back. Careful he was to make the proper words, the words of magic on a clay disk, the magic words which were placed over the rabbi they said had risen.
Come back to life, they said, crucified, finished by a lance stroke and everyone thought he was dead. But he rose again. And why? There could be only one answer. God would not allow anyone called a Jewish king, even in mockery, to be killed in crucifixion. He was showing He was God and not the Roman emperor. And He would do it for Ygal, too.
The father baked, with the magic words, a disk, and put it upon poor Ygal’s stomach. And he waited for God to bring him back to life. But on the third day, the body gave off strong odors. And his wife prevailed upon him to seal it off with fresh clay bricks, lest the odors attract attention where no graveyard should have been.
And to make it even more safe, she ordered a great stone put before it. Several times robbers, thinking something valuable was inside, took a great effort to roll the stone aside, and, seeing nothing, they left it there. Eventually, everyone said there was nothing worthwhile in that cave, and no one bothered to move the heavy stone anymore.
Afterword
Father James Folan remained custodian of the body for forty-seven years, until his death, during which time he was called to the bedside of an ailing Pope. And he was asked how he was faring.
“Well, Holy Father, He came to me in my pain, and He bore my burden with me,” said Jim. “I just had too much that needed forgiveness and He was the only One who could do it.”
“I knew He would,” said the Pope.
The Pope died shortly thereafter, and everyone said that there was never so sure a cardinal to become Pope as His Eminence Almeto Cardinal Pesci, most papabile of them all, a diplomat for troubled times.
But by some small miracle of Vatican politics, this somehow did not happen, and a simpler, more religious man was elected Pope who guided well the Church for another generation while waiting for the return of the Messiah.
Jim could not forget Sharon and stopped trying. Often he would say Mass for her. He told Jesus that, even though he knew it was wrong, he could not feel it was wrong. All he could do was thank God for the time he knew Sharon and loved her, and all the good things she gave him to remember during that lifetime.
“I’m sorry, Jesus. I just loved her. And I always will.”
James Folan died without anyone in the Vatican quite knowing what his function was. And since the old priest had no family or friends to attend the funeral, he died without a friend in the world, they said.
Sharon went on to become head of her department and achieved her prominence with a major dig that proved the exact western line of the eastern fortification of the third level of the lower city of David. This was important, because there were disputes about whether the lower city had a third level.
The report on the find was four hundred pages and had fewer readers than its pages. About fifteen people understood all of it, eight of whom disagreed with it.
As the economy got better, she bought both a new car and an apartment.
She took other lovers, but there was only Jim, and only Jim remained. She was offered marriage but she refused, using the excuse that she could not find her first husband, but she knew she could.
Every year around Passover she went to the Sea of Galilee, alone. She stayed three days and two nights, and then drove back along the coastal plain.
In her last year of life, because she could not take care of herself any longer, she assigned herself to a nursing home. And just before Passover she said she wanted to go to the Sea of Galilee because every year she did that.
The nurses told her she could not go because she would need too much assistance. Besides, they said, the entire world came to Jerusalem at this time of year, what was she doing going to the Sea of Galilee?
And because she was a very old woman, even though she was a respected scholar, they treated this request like some form of senility.
She did not live through Easter Sunday.
&nb
sp; And she was buried in Jerusalem.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book had the help of many people, researchers, and editorial critics. They are:
Judith Netzer, Lisa Drew, Will Murray, Shira Nahari, Joseph McCormick, S.J., Dr. Joseph Feger, Joan Poulin, Dr. James Morris, Richard Senier, Linda Sloss, Betsy John, Reid Boates, P. K. Chute, Elizabeth Coffey Chute, Rosaleen Regan, Jay Acton, Dr. Joseph Sapir, Martha Feinstein Sapir, Mary Chute Brownell, Ken Rosen.
Two Israelis asked that their names not be used.
About the Author
Richard Ben Sapir (1936–1987) was born in Brooklyn, New York, and he graduated from Columbia University. He worked as a journalist for the Associated Press before becoming a fiction writer. He was the coauthor, with Warren Murphy, of the Destroyer series of men’s action-adventure novels, which later became the basis for a movie titled Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins. Sapir’s first hardcover book was Bressio, followed by his favorite, The Far Arena. His novel The Body was adapted into a film starring Antonio Banderas and Derek Jacobi. Sapir’s fourth novel was Spies.
The author died shortly after submitting the manuscript for his final and highly acclaimed work, Quest, which his editors found to be so well written that no changes were made before publication. It was named an alternate selection for the Book of the Month Club. That same year, the New York Times called Sapir “a brilliant professional.”
Photo © Cindy Pitou Burton
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1983 by Richard Ben Sapir
Cover design by Mauricio Díaz
ISBN: 978-1-5040-2161-6
This edition published in 2015 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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