by Howard Fast
That was still before the time when they decided that ours would be a better land in a better world with no Jews at all, and Pericles’s work was to squeeze us. From three hundred and twenty-one villages, his contract was to deliver to Antiochus Epiphanes—the King of Kings, as he liked to style himself—one hundred talents of silver a year. A lot of money from a tiny district of a tiny land, but as much as it was, Pericles was determined to make one talent for himself where he delivered two to the king. That took squeezing, and Pericles squeezed, and each of the four hundred mongrel mercenaries who worked for him squeezed on their own.
He was a huge, fat, powerful man, Pericles, the pink flesh hanging in folds from his round, clean-shaven face, and while he was not much of a man, he was a good deal of a woman. When Reuben ben Gad’s four-year-old boy, Asher, was found in the cedar copse with half of his entrails torn out, justly or not word went around that Pericles did it; he did other things that we knew about, in any case, and there was a story Jonathan told that was not good to remember.
At this time too it was Jonathan whose scream we heard, Judas and I, climbing to the little valley where he pastured our goats.
We broke into a run, and a few minutes later reached the lip of the valley. The goats were milling around and in the center of them, Jonathan struggled in the grasp of Pericles. Two Syrian mercenaries grinned as they watched, sprawled out on the grass, their weapons thrown about carelessly.
It happened quickly then. Pericles let go of Jonathan as he saw us, took a step back, and then Judas, knife drawn, was on him. The Greek wore a brass breastplate, but Judas cut under it, two sharp blows, and I remember how astonished I was at the gush of red blood. The mercenaries seemed to move with amazing slowness; the first was not yet on his feet when I caught him in the jaw with a rock the size of his head. The second scrambled for his spear, tripped, clawed to his feet and began to run—and at that moment Eleazar appeared, took in the scene at a glance, and leaped at the mercenary. In ten paces Eleazar caught him, swung him into the air, one hand about his neck, one gouging the underedge of his breastplate, spun him, and then tossed him like a ball. Eleazar was only sixteen then, yet already taller and stronger than any man in Modin. The Syrian fell with a sickening thud, and picking up his spear, Eleazar stood over him. But it was finished. The other mercenary’s head was crushed in, the gray brains oozing onto the ground, and Pericles lay still in a pool of blood.
There were three dead men, and we had slain them; our childhood was over and finished.
***
We found the Adon and my brother John terracing. This way, from time immemorial, the land came into being. We build a wall on a hillside and then fill it in with baskets of soil from the bottom lands. At one end we build a cistern and an apron for the rainfall, and out of a piece of land so wrought will come five crops a year. The old man and my brother John labored there in the sun, their long linen trousers rolled up to the knee and dirt-stained, their bare backs glistening sweat, the Adon with his heavy stone hammer which with a shrewd blow here or there shaped the rocks for the wall—straightening then, the hammer hanging from his gnarled arm as he watched us approach.
Jonathan still wept. Judas was white as a sheet, and Eleazar had become a boy again, a frightened boy who has slain his first man, the unforgivable and absolute sin of murder. I told the Adon what had happened. “You’re sure they were dead?” he said quietly, rubbing the hammer in the heel of his palm, his great red beard glistening on his bare chest.
“They were dead.”
“Jonathan ben Mattathias,” he said, and Jonathan looked at him. “Dry your eyes,” the Adon said. “Are you a girl that you anoint yourself this way? A dog is dead—is that reason to weep? Where are the bodies?”
“Where they fell,” I said.
“You left them there! Simon, you fool—you fool!”
“A Kohan—” I only started to speak of the law that forbids a Kohan to touch the dead, but the Adon had already started off. We followed him to the little valley, and there, without another word, he swung Pericles onto his shoulders. We took the other two bodies and followed him back to where they had been terracing. With his own hands, the Adon stripped the Greek and the mercenaries of their armor and weapons.
“Go back and watch the goats,” he told Jonathan. “Dry your eyes.” Suddenly, he threw his arms around Jonathan and held him close, rocked him back and forth for a moment, and then kissed his brow. Jonathan began to cry again, and the Adon said, harsh suddenly:
“Never cry again—No more. No more.”
Still we were unseen, and unseen we rolled the three bodies against the inner side of the new wall, covered them over with dirt and then worked all the rest of that day until the terrace was completed. When we threw in the last basketful of dirt, the Adon said:
“Sleep forever, sleep deep. May the Lord God forgive a Jew who shed blood and a Kohan who touched the dead; may he tear out of your heart the lust that brought you to our land—and may he cleanse the land of all the filth like you.” And turning to us, “Say you Amen!”
“Amen,” we repeated.
“Amen,” the Adon said.
We put on our tunics. Jonathan came with the goats, and with him we walked back to Modin, Judas carrying the armor and weapons, all wrapped in leaves and grass.
That night, after dinner, we sat at the table with a single lamp burning, and the Adon spoke to us. With a deep, old-fashioned formality he spoke, addressing us each in turn, and giving us each four generations, as:
“To you, my sons, to you John ben Mattathias ben John ben Simon, to you Simon ben Mattathias ben John ben Simon, to you Judas ben Mattathias ben John ben Simon, to you Eleazar ben Mattathias ben John ben Simon, to you Jonathan ben Mattathias ben John ben Simon—to you my five sons who have borne me up in my sorrow and my loneliness, who have comforted me in my old age, who have felt the weight of my hand and the bite of my anger—to you I speak as a man among you, for there is no turning back for them who have broken God’s commandment. We who were holy are holy no longer. It is said thou shalt not kill, and we have slain. We have exacted the price of freedom, which is always counted in blood, even as Moses did and Joshua, and Gideon too. From here on, we will not ask for forgiveness, only for strength—for strength.”
He stopped then, and suddenly his age was apparent, the wrinkles deep on his face, his pale gray eyes clouded over with sorrow, an old Jew who had desired only what other Jews desired, gentle and peaceful years into the soil where his fathers lay. From face to face, he looked, anxiously, uncertainly, and I wonder what he saw there—the long, bony, sad face of John, the eldest; my own plain, almost ugly features; Judas, tall and beautiful, clean brown skin running into a curling brown beard; Eleazar, broad-faced, childlike, good-natured, wanting only to do my bidding or Judas’s or Jonathan’s, all the strength of a Samson with even more simplicity—and Jonathan, so small in contrast with the rest of us, yet like a knife-edge, pent-up, restless, a boundless desire for some unknown abiding all through him; five sons, five brothers…
“Put your hands on mine!” he said suddenly, laying his big, fleshless hands palms up on the table, and we laid our hands in his, leaning toward each other—and how will I forget that, my brothers’ faces almost touching mine, their breath mingling with my breath? “Make a covenant with me,” he went on, almost pleadingly. “Since Cain slew Abel, there has been hatred and jealousy and bitterness among brothers. Make a covenant with me that your hands will be one—and you shall lay down your lives for each other!”
“Amen—so be it,” we whispered.
“So be it,” the Adon said.
***
My brother John married. I remember because it was the last day of grace, the day before Apelles came to take over the wardenship left empty by the death of Pericles. He married a sweet and simple girl, Sarah, the daughter of Melek ben Aaron, who performed c
ircumcisions and who raised the sweetest, largest figs in Modin. “A fruit of her father’s tree,” they said of Sarah—and the pride of Modin was such that eight of the twelve slaves in the village were given their freedom, well in advance of the sabbatical, when they could have claimed it. That day, Modin was packed with our kinfolk—from as far as Jericho, for when you come down to it, who is there in Judea who cannot claim kin with someone else? Forty lambs were slaughtered and set to cooking. Zalah filled the whole valley with its smell, and pots of that savory sauce, merkahah, bubbled on every hearth. A veritable flock of chickens were killed and plucked, stuffed with bread, meat, and three kinds of old wine, and set to roasting in the common oven. I call it to mind because it was the end of something, the end of a whole life. There was a horn of plenty, flowing with grapes and figs and apples, cucumbers, melons, cabbages, turnips. The fresh baked bread, round, golden loaves, like the discus the Greeks throw, was stacked in pillars, then broken all through the day, dipped in savory olive oil, and then eaten. Four times during the day, the Levites danced, and the girls still unmarried played the reeds, singing, “When will I have a fair young man? When will I have a suitor bold?” And then, in the common meadow at the end of the village, they joined hands and danced the marriage dance, a circle of laughing, swirling girls, while the men stamped their feet and clapped their hands to time.
I found Ruth after the dance. I was two years younger than John, and I knew what I would tell her. I found her in the courtyard of her house, in the arms of Judas.
***
It seems I hunger to search for and seek out fault in Judas—whom no man ever found fault with; but the fault and the uncertainty and the confusion, fear, and terror were in me, not in Judas. I, Simon, long of arm, broad and ugly of face, balding already at twenty, slow of movement and almost as slow of thought—I, Simon, accepted and considered only how we laid our hands one on the other. Neither of them knew. Yet for all that—may God forgive me—I was filled with such hatred that I went out of Modin, away from the dancing and drinking and singing, walking for hours, even after night set in. I had the thought, and for that surely I will not be forgiven, that I could have slain my own flesh and blood—and at last, when half the night had passed away, I came back. Before the house of Mattathias, the old man, the Adon, stood, and he said to me,
“Where were you, Simon?”
“Walking.”
“And when a Jew walks alone on a night like this, there’s no peace in his heart.”
“There’s none in mine, Mattathias,” I said bitterly, calling him by his name for the first time in my life. But he did not react. He stood there in the moonlight, the venerable and ancient bearded Jew, wrapped from head to foot in his white cloak, the black stripes making an awesome pattern as they fell first lengthwise from where his head was covered, and then girdling him round and round until finally the earth rooted him, beyond passion and beyond hatred.
“And so you’re no longer a boy but a man to stand up to your father,” he said.
“I don’t know if I’m a man. I have my doubts.”
“I have no doubts, Simon,” he said.
I started to go past him into the house, but he stopped me with an arm that was like iron. “Don’t go in there with hatred,” he said quietly.
“What do you know about my hatred?”
“I know you, Simon. I saw you come into the world. I saw you suckled at your mother’s breast. I know you—and I know the others.”
“The others be damned!”
There was a long moment of silence; and then, in a voice that almost shook with grief, the Adon said, “And ask me now if you are your brother’s keeper.”
I couldn’t speak. For a while I stood there helplessly, everything gone out of me and empty inside, and then the Adon clasped me in his arms. He held me for an instant, and then I went inside and left him standing there in the moonlight.
***
Much can be explained, and then nothing; for the more I tell in this tale of my glorious brothers, the less it seems I understand; and the only thing that remains unchanged, unmarred, unblurred, is the picture of the old man, the Adon, my father, standing in the moonlight in our ancient, ancient land. I see him as I saw him then, this old man, this Jew, in his great shawl that covered him from head to foot, the singular among peoples and nations, only able to say in affirmation, “We were slaves in Egypt—and we will never forget that we were slaves in Egypt.” So it must have been then, in the long ago, when our people, twelve tribes of them, sick with wandering and longing for rest, came out of the desert and saw the wooded hills and the fertile valleys of Palestine.
***
Pericles was dead, and they sent us Apelles. Pericles was a wolf; Apelles was a wolf and a pig in one. Pericles had a little Greek in him, and Apelles had none at all.
You must understand about Greeks—you who read this when I am dead, and my children, and their children too. This is not a people, this thing we call Greek, not a culture, not Athens—not a golden dream, lingering somewhere in our memory, of the glory that was once made by Greeks. In the old tales, they tell of a beautiful folk, far to the west, who found many things that were not known before. Who can grow up in Judea without handling this or that, a vase, a cloth, a tool—a way of speech too—and not know it was born out of Greeks? Such Greeks we never knew, only the bastard power-drunk lords of the Syrian Empire in the north, who made their own definition of what was Hellene and taught it to us through suffering. Thus they “Hellenized” us, not with beauty and wisdom, but with fear and terror and hate.
Apelles was the final result, the height and pride of Hellenization. He was part Syrian, part Phoenician, part Egyptian, and a few other things too. He came into Modin the day after my brother John’s wedding, riding in a litter borne by twenty slaves. Forty mercenaries marched in front of the litter, and forty mercenaries marched behind it—you could see right there that he was taking no chances in sharing the fate of Pericles.
In the very center of the village, where our market booths are, the litter was set on the ground, and in so doing, one of the slaves twisted his foot and fell. Apelles hopped out of the litter and looked around him. He carried a little whip of woven silver wire and when he saw the slave crouched on the ground, nursing his twisted foot, he leaped at him and opened his back in two places; a small man, but active, Apelles was, fat the way a pig is fat, rolls of pink flesh from head to foot, not pretty, but exhibiting his nakedness for the world, wearing a dainty little skirt and a dainty little tunic, and pleading with the world to examine the little he had under the skirt.
By the time the litter was put down, almost all of Modin, men and women and children, had crowded out to see the new warden. There had been a blessed two weeks without Pericles, an absence unexplained but well regarded; yet the people knew it had to end sometime, as all good things do. We stood there and watched silently as he opened the slave’s back.
In our tongue, the word for “slave” and “servant” is the same. No slave can be held for longer than seven years among us, and because that has been written into our law from time immemorial, the sabbatical of freedom to remind us everlastingly that we, ourselves, were slaves in Egypt, we have become almost a people without slaves—in a world where there are many slaves for every free man; where all society, where every city, rests on the backs of slaves, we alone have no slave markets—and it is forbidden to have a block for the sale of men or women. In our law, if a master strikes a slave, the slave can claim his freedom; among civilized people, it is different—and therefore we watched with interest this first manifestation of the character of the new warden.
His mercenaries pushed us back with their spears, and in the circle of space they made, Apelles strutted a bit and then struck an attitude. He drew in his chin, pushed out his stomach, and placed his feet wide, his hands clasped behind him. He licked his lips and then spoke—in
lisping Aramaic with the high-pitched tones of a capon.
“What village is this?” he asked. “This is a foul place—what village is it?”
No one answered him, and he took out a lace handkerchief and passed it delicately under his nostrils. “Jews,” he lisped. “I detest the smell of Jews, the look of them, the air of them—and the pride of them, filthy, bearded beasts. To make it plain, I repeat, I do not like Jews. And you—” pointing a fat forefinger at David, the twelve-year-old son of Moses ben Simon. “What is this place called?”
“Modin,” the boy answered.
“Who is the Adon?” he snapped.
My father stepped forward and stood silently, wrapped in his striped cloak and his enormous dignity, his arms folded, his hawklike face utterly expressionless. “Are you the Adon?” Apelles demanded querulously. “Hundreds of stinking villages and hundreds of head men—Adons, the lord of this and the lord of that!” His sarcasm almost whined. “What is your name? You do have a name, don’t you?”
“My name is Mattathias ben John ben Simon,” the Adon replied in his deep, ringing voice, deepening it even further to contrast the squeak of the capon.
“Three generations.” Apelles nodded. “Was there ever a Jew, whether he be the dirtiest, meanest beggar or slave, who couldn’t reel off three or six or twenty generations of his ancestry?”
“Unlike some folk,” my father said softly, “we know who our fathers are.” And Apelles stepped forward and slapped him full in the face.