Under Tiberius

by Nick Tosches

  “Renounce your sect, dear brothers, as God has renounced it. There is one Word, and there is one Way. Embrace them, or be gone.”

  They were stunned, speechless, as was I. I marveled at how his words, his own words, were becoming ever more powerful. I told myself that he had learned well from me.

  “And you, Andreas, or Judas, or Judah, or whatever it is that you are called, what is it that you do? Fisherman who does not fish, boy who does not grow to manhood, disciple who does not follow my discipline—what is it that you do? The others pay their way, or they earn it. But you do not.”

  The young man’s response came fast and in defiance of all deference.

  “You tell us to consider and admire the lilies of the field, which toil not, and now you preach to me of toil.”

  And the response of Jesus met his just as quickly, and was without ruth:

  “You are no lily of the field whose beauty is a blessing to behold. You are to be likened more to a carbuncle, a curse most dreadful to consider.”

  The young man’s jaw was slightly lowered, and it slightly trembled.

  Some of the newer disciples, whom we barely knew, backed away and withdrew, and were not to be seen again.

  “And you, Peter, and you, Gaius.” He paused long amid the bated breath all round. “You are good men,” he said at last.

  Things were not the same after this day.

  The Sadducees did, with some reluctance, renounce their sect, and the priest did put away his priestly sash; but, at the same time, they seemed more remote. The young fisherman did indeed occupy himself with meeting the quota of donations imposed on him by Jesus after his drubbing, though the resentment in him was often apparent. Even Peter looked differently on his Lord at times.

  It was like a new strangeness in the air within the greater and growing strangeness in the vaster air of the world through which we moved.

  No, things were not the same after that day.

  25

  NEW MIRACLES WERE ATTRIBUTED TO THE LORD, AND THESE fictions were spread far and wide, taking on revisions and embellishments as they traveled by the telling. The disciples themselves often believed in these tales, taking them as accounts of wonders that Jesus had worked at times when he was not in their presence.

  Our Lord had come to disparage his miracle-workings, both the feigned and the fabulated. He had quit perpetrating the former, and he had quit responding to rumors of the latter. He no longer reacted to the tales of his miracles with a pose of humble modesty. He reacted with a stern countenance and disapproving silence.

  He likened miracles to entertainments for those who sought signs of his divinity through cheap tricks. The very idea of them, he told me, was a vileness.

  “Your Messiah has not come to you as a juggler, or as a conjurer, or as a presenter of prestiges. Your Messiah has come to you to reveal the Word and the Way of your salvation. He who is my Father has given you signs enough, and now would forgo them. There is no meaning in them. The meaning is in the Word and the Way.”

  These were his words to the many who gathered around him as we made our way from Narbata, when one among them asked him the meanings of his miraculous signs. His tone was adamant.

  I had brought from Caesarea a whimsical gift for him: one of those amphorae encountered in Rome, by which clownish prestigiators bedazzle audiences of aristocratic children. You surely witnessed it when you were a little boy: the so-called magical amphora that, by means of a hidden belly within its belly, and an occult lip-hole, is seemingly filled with clear water from a fountain pool, then, when tipped—praesto!—flows with water that appears to have been turned to vibrant liquid gold, which is in fact the saffron-imbued water that was already concealed in the hidden outer belly of the amphora.

  His words about jugglers’ tricks were heartfelt. But he took delight and found laughter in the magical amphora I gave him.

  “Ah!” he said. “A true miracle at last!”

  We meandered south, and found ourselves on the eastern slope of Mount Olive, approaching Bethany, the house of misery, where long ago, at the beginning of all that came to pass, we had prepared the key-of-David narrative he delivered outside the gates of Bethlehem. It was like returning to a vision vaguely retained, vaguely remembered.

  The people of Bethany preferred to interpret the name of their town as “the house of unripe figs” rather than “the house of misery.” The accommodating flexibility of the recondite language of Judea never ceased to amaze me. That “misery” and “unripe figs” could be construed from the same allophones of the name by which the Judeans called this place, Anania, whose root, anan, was a verb meaning “cloud over” or “bring” or perhaps a thousand other things unknown even to those who lived here. But figs, unripe or otherwise? As I have said, I had learned enough of the rudiments of the language of the Book to know that I would never understand it, and to know that no one truly understood it.

  It was not long after entering Bethany that we were approached by two familiar figures. They were lovely to behold. We soon recognized them as Maria and Martha, the sisters of our erstwhile disciple Eleazar, who was also known as Lazarus.

  The sisters did not approach the Lord with the lust that had been so hard to resist when they followed him with their brother for a while in the days before the Magdalen Hag. They approached now not in lust, but in distress.

  Martha, who seemed to believe that Jesus had arrived here on purpose, lamented that he had not come earlier. Her brother, his dear disciple, she said, had been so very terribly ill. She said this as if she felt that Jesus was aware of Eleazar’s sickness, and that this was the assumed purpose on which he traveled here.

  “You could have healed him,” said Maria.

  This was not a time to be speaking of healings, not after Jesus’s recent denunciation and renunciation of all such miracle-doings.

  But he forbore the sisters, and looked kindly on them. I did not know if this was out of fond remembrance or a lust of his own.

  A mass of people grew around us. We saw that most of them were in mourning. One of them cried to us that Eleazar—Lazarus—had been claimed, and was now four days in his tomb.

  “You must raise him and return him to us,” this person pleaded.

  Jesus did not look to her, but instead to Martha and Maria, who clung to him and wept. He seemed to enjoy the weeping movement of their breasts on him.

  “After three days, the spirit flees the body,” he said. “One cannot ask the Father to relinquish what he has taken up into his eternal embrace.”

  “Our brother is dead,” sobbed Martha.

  “You who are the Son of God must restore his spirit to him,” said the woman in the crowd.

  Jesus raised the heads of the sisters Martha and Maria. He wiped at their tears with his finger. He said to them:

  “I am the resurrection, and the life. He that believes in me, though he be dead, yet will he live. And whosoever lives and believes in me will never die.”

  It was then that I witnessed what I had not witnessed before, and what I had not imagined I ever would witness.

  Jesus wept.

  As his weeping continued, there could be no doubt that his emotions had overtaken him. His weeping grew more uncontrollable, and more inordinate. His emotions had more than overtaken him. He was coming apart. He was not well.

  He followed the mob to the tomb of Lazarus. He stood and commanded that the covering stone be rolled away from the tomb.

  Martha covered her face and wailed anew, imploring the Lord to replace the stone and go no further. Jesus seemed to be praying, or incanting.

  The terrible stench of decomposition caused all to cover their noses with the wadded cloth of their sleeves. Most backed away. A few swooned and fell. Some retched and vomited.

  The sun entered the tomb of Lazarus. His putrid corpse lay in gray grave-clothes in a slime-pool of foul decay that drizzled from the shelf of rock. The face protruding from the grave-clothes was grossly bloated and black. Gre
asy slippages of the skin marked the holes in his cheeks and forehead where fat white maggot-worms fed, squirming in the holes they had eaten into him. These fat white worms also filled one of his eye sockets and churned a thick pus-like substance that foamed in the open sore that had been his mouth.

  A few moths fluttered and a few flesh-flies buzzed near the corpse in the sun-bared thick dust of all that was horrid.

  “Come forth!” commanded Jesus, from beneath the wadded cloth of his own raised sleeve.

  Maria fainted to the earth. Martha screamed: “No!” The woman who had implored Jesus to raise Lazarus, now implored him to let him be. Others in the dispersing mob besought the same. There were cries even among the disciples.

  I shouted to him amid the uproar: “This man is man no more!”

  Jesus stood there, staring at what others could not bear to look upon. He spoke no more to the corpse. He spoke no more to anyone. He turned away finally, and went to place his hand on the shoulder of the fallen Maria, who now sat and sadly wept as Martha held her. When Jesus put his hand to her, she withdrew from his touch.

  Many of those who were there looked on him with awe. Many looked on him with confusion. Many, with fear.

  I later heard that some were said to have reported the incident to the religious authorities in Jerusalem. I also heard, among other things, that the remains of Lazarus now walked the hills dragging behind him the tatters of his winding-sheet, neither dead nor alive.

  Leaving Bethany, we were very close to Jerusalem. But Jesus said that it was not yet our time to enter there.

  We moved west, and then south, to Callirrhoe, on the eastern shore of the Dead Sea. I advised Jesus that he must rest. I told him that he would rest in Callirrhoe, a place of beautifully flowing hot springs, a place whose name in the Book meant “the splendor of the dawn.”

  As we made our way, we passed through a snowfall. Most Judeans had never seen one in all the winters of their lives. It was brief, but for an evening and a night, our path and the fronds of the tall palms glistened with a dusting of soft purest white.

  The sense of distance and drifting apart that had settled on all of us in the recent months was lifted in the jubilation that overcame us for this rare wonder. But by morning, the pleasant warmth of the sun had returned, and the path and the broad fronds of the high palms were as they had been on any other day.

  It was in the late afternoon of that buoyancy of falling snow, as the others frolicked about, that I asked him about what had happened in the house of misery.

  “I do not know,” he said.

  “What did you mean to accomplish by calling forth that monstrous, rotted thing to rise?”

  “To show the people the ugliness of their hungering for miracles, for what is against nature.”

  “The sisters had no such hungering.”

  “Was it not they who spoke of healing? Exorcism, healing, raising the dead. It is all the same.”

  I sighed. I did not know if what he said and what he truly believed were one and the same; I did not know if he himself knew.

  “It was a perfect performance,” he said.

  I was sure this notion had come to him only just then, but that he wished to make it sound as if he were stating the obvious.

  “How so?” I asked him.

  “They wanted me to raise that stinking, swollen, leaking black sack of worms. I began to do so. Or so it seemed to them. Then they stopped me. This was proof of their belief that I could perform the miracle they sought of me. In beseeching me to desist, they affirmed their faith in me.”

  “But I thought that you rightly wanted nothing more to do with the trumpery of miracles.”

  “I accomplished that as well. As I said, I showed them the detestable atrocity, the utter ugliness, of their hungering for miracles, for what is against nature.”

  I countered him with calm silence. I made it seem calm, in any case. As far as I was concerned, this conversation was ended. I hoped that the biles of his spleen and gall-bladder had been vented through his mouth, and that my studied quiet might be conducive to a repose from, rather than an increase in, this bilious venting.

  After some time had passed, I said:

  “We departed that debacle without one shekel for the new temple.”

  I thought that this reference to “the new temple” of our own personal pursuits might bring a smile to him, or at least a lightening of his umbrous spirits.

  “Is that what this is all about? Money?” he demanded.

  “Yes,” I said. If he would not smile, I should; and so, then and there, I did.

  “We are already rich,” he said flatly, yet with an ambiguity lurking somewhere beneath that flatness.

  Men complain when they are destitute. Men complain when they are rich. That is the definition of a man. He is a creature of complaint. A finite being with an infinity of complaints.

  “Then why not draw the curtain?” I said. “Why go on?”

  He did not answer. I thought that he might be feeling anger toward me. I thought that there was something I was failing to understand. Then at last he answered, with no trace of anger.

  “I do not know,” he said. “I do not know.”

  The little miracle of the snow was ending. The others were returning from their private little worlds nearby.

  “I do not know,” he repeated.

  With my eyes I sought the eyes of the Jesus I knew. The eyes of the loiterer. The eyes of the Lord. The eyes of my friend. I found something like them, and peered into them.

  “You will rest,” I said. “You will rest well, and you will know.”

  26

  IT HAS BEEN SOME WEEKS SINCE I HAVE BEEN ABLE TO WORK ON this history that I write for you. I fell badly, and was bedridden and in pain. It was the sort of pain that, in my sleepless torments, took me beyond my acceptance of death, to a welcoming of it, and at times even beyond that, to a wishing for it. I could take only bread soaked in milk, and the concoction of opium and bitter herbal brew that was given me did more to make me vomit than to ease the pain. And thus I lost more blood and became all the weaker in my misery. When I could at last stand again, tremulously and with the aid of a staff, the first thing I did was dismiss my physicians. To me, such men are worthless. I now believe that they always were. A man’s life is his life, with them or without them; and so is his death. They call themselves healers, but have more in common with the death-worms that feasted on Lazarus. They are a waste of time and money, and they are more adept at removing those two things from us than they are at ridding us of ailment and disease. Death cannot be stayed by learned-sounding double-talk, foul poultices, and fouler medicines. After a thousand years, these charlatans still cannot cure the common cold, yet they would have us believe that they can save us from the common end.

  We dwell under the ruling shadow of Caesar and his whims and headsmen. Beyond that, we are the makers and breakers of our own lives. Neither implore nor cast blame on the fates, for the fates are you.

  As much as I welcomed and sometimes wished for death, the prospect that I might not live to finish this account for you was what brought me through. But I am frail, even more frail than I thought. There is now beside me always a shade: the shade of myself.

  I must not fall again. For no shade can tell you what I must. Good wine is the best medicine. Just a cup slowly drunk in the morning, a cup slowly drunk in the evening, set beside my bed. And whatever of raw fruit and cooked flesh my gums can mash and pulp. And the good air of the breezes in my garden. With my strong oak staff and the help of the two trusted old slaves, now faithful freedmen, who attend me, I have my wine and my food and my garden breezes. And, in these words to you, I have my reason not to recede from these things.

  There are moments, when sleep eludes these exhausted bones, that I think I may be setting down this history, this story of my life, to remove it from my memory to a safer place, before the breezes in the garden bear it away from me. Thus, the thought unwinds, the story is as much for
me as it is for you. But why, I ask myself, should this be? Of what use is the memory of a man’s life as he fades from it?

  Or could it be a confession? If so, what an odd confession that would be. The confession of a man who believes in no judge above him; who believes that, in this world predicated on wrongdoing and little else, culpability and forgiveness are mere fancies. The confession of a man who believes in no confessor but himself.

  I do not understand.

  Considering this simple declarative sentence that I have just set forth, I am prone to burst out in laughter, were I hale enough to do so without risking the splattering of fine vellum with a spray of blood. A life of long and deepening understanding, leading me to the realization that I do not understand. It is said that wisdom is measured by the degree of our awareness of how little we know. If this is correct, I truly have attained wisdom. Yes, just in time to leave my instructions that only rosemary be used to perfume the flames of my cremation, I have attained wisdom.

  I lead you nowhere with such talk. But I do not lead you astray, or at least not for long; for my narrative now continues. If I stop its course again before its end, I promise you that it will be only because I myself have been stopped and ended, removed forever from the breezes, or become one with them, if only as a few unseeable ashen particles too light to settle, destined for all time to be borne in the sweet air. May other fading old men find solace in them. May young lovers find passion and peace. As all of life is endless substantiation, may the transformation of substance be endlessly wrought by the breezes of those things that are without end.

  It is true. I do not understand. But nor are the natures of all things to be understood. By the everlasting breezes, perhaps. But not by us; not by we who are born and who die, and the sum of whose lusts and desires and inspirations and journeys and sighs and gold are reduced to the scent of rosemary burning.

  27

  THE PLACE OF IDYLLIC RETREAT KNOWN IN GREEK AS Callirrhoe, and in Hebrew as Zareth-shahar, had lovely meanings in both tongues: “beautiful flow” in Greek; “the splendor of the dawn” in Hebrew.