My Glorious Brothers

by Howard Fast

  The Adon didn’t move, but a cry, almost of anguish, came out of our people, and Judas, standing beside me, lurched forward. I caught him and stopped him, and the leveled spears stopped the others. It was only the beginning of my acquaintance with Apelles, but already I was recognizing that sick and perverted lust for blood that made so many wardens turn so many Jewish villages into shambles.

  “I don’t like insolence and I don’t like disobedience,” Apelles said. “I am warden and my duty is to spread through and among your benighted people some understanding and some appreciation of that noble and free culture that has made the name of Greece synonymous with civilization. It is hardly likely that the West will ever understand the East, or the East the West, but for the sake of mankind in general, certain attempts must be made. Naturally, this costs money, and the money will be forthcoming. I don’t want to be a hard master. I am a just man, and justice will be the rule. However, the representatives of the King must walk in safety; we cannot have it otherwise. Pericles did not walk into a cloud and vanish. Pericles was murdered, and that murder cannot go unavenged. Each village will have to share a degree of the responsibility. Thus will law and order be established throughout the land, and thus will peace and security prevail.”

  He paused, passed the handkerchief under his nose, and suddenly called out:

  “Jason!”

  The captain of the mercenaries, dirty and sweating under his brass armor, strutted up.

  “Any one of them,” Apelles lisped.

  The captain of the mercenaries walked along the line of villagers. He stopped opposite Deborah, daughter of Lebel the schoolmaster. She was eight years old, a bright, lovely slip of a thing, alert and white-faced now, her dark hair plaited in two long braids down her back. In one quick, calculated motion, the captain of mercenaries drew his sword and thrust it into the child’s throat, and with never a sound she fell in the spurting pool of her blood.

  No one moved; only the anguished wail of the mother, the cry of the father—but no one moved. What Apelles wanted was only too apparent. Then a noise came from the people. Then Apelles climbed back into his litter, and the mercenaries, swords and spears ready, gathered around it. Then the slaves picked up the litter, and Apelles left Modin.

  The screaming of Deborah’s mother followed him, pitching itself higher and higher and higher.

  ***

  It was strange to see Lebel in his house of mourning, rocking and lamenting where the body of his daughter was laid out, this little pinch-faced man who for so long had taught me the aleph, the bes, and the gimel, driving in his lessons with a rod—a rod that fell so often on Eleazar that he grinned with embarrassment if a morning went by without it—this little man bereft of all his dignity and power, twisted and mutilated with grief. In another room, his wife wept and the women wept with her, but Lebel sat among his sons, his clothes rent and torn, ashes streaking his face and beard, rocking and whimpering…

  “The Adon will be here for min’cha,” I said.

  “The Lord has abandoned me and abandoned Israel.”

  “We will hold services then.”

  “Will it bring back my daughter? Will he breathe life into her?”

  “With the sundown, Lebel.” What else could I say?

  “My God has abandoned me…”

  I went to the house of Mattathias, and he sat there at the big table of cedarwood which had been the center of our family’s life for as long as I remembered, where the morning bread was eaten and the hot milk sipped at night, where the Passover was celebrated and the fast of Atonement broken; there he sat, his head in his hands, still mantled in his long striped cloak. Eleazar and Jonathan crouched by the hearth, but Judas paced back and forth, tearing bitter music out of himself.

  “Here is Simon,” the Adon said.

  “And Simon knows!” Judas cried, whirling and facing me, stretching out his hands toward me. “Is there blood on my hands, or are they clean?”

  I sat down, poured milk from the pitcher, and broke bread.

  “But you held me!” Judas cried, standing over me. “When that dog struck my father, you held me! And when the girl—”

  “Would it be any better if you were dead?”

  “It’s better to die fighting!”

  “Yes,” I agreed, eating out of ravenous hunger. “There were eighty of them, armed and in armor, and there are less than eighty men in Modin, and no spears and no swords—and no armor except what we took from the mercenaries. So it would have been short and sweet and the blood would have been enough to cover the village. We have knives and our bows and arrows—” I chewed and gulped milk, and the bitterness poured out. “And the bows and arrows are buried, because we, who were known not so long ago as the People of the Bow, pay with our lives if a bow is found among us.”

  “So we live on, this way,” Judas said.

  “I don’t know. I’m Simon ben Mattathias, a peasant, a farmer; not a seer, not a prophet, not a Rabbi—I don’t know.”

  His arms spread, his hands flat on the table, Judas stared at me. “Are you afraid?”

  “I’ve been afraid—I was afraid today. I’ll be afraid again.”

  “And someday,” Judas said, slowly—and I began to realize that this nineteen-year-old brother of mine was something different from other men—very slowly, “I’ll ask those who aren’t afraid to follow me. And where will you be then?”

  “Enough,” the Adon said. “Must you always be at each other’s throat? There is sorrow enough in our land. All of our hands are washed in blood. Go tonight to the house of Lebel, and beg his forgiveness and God’s forgiveness, even as I will do.”

  I went on eating, and Judas paced back and forth. Then, suddenly, he stopped, faced the Adon, and said:

  “I ask no man’s forgiveness from here on!”

  ***

  Time passes, and ours is a healing land under a healing sun. I found Judas, one day not long after, sprawled on the hillside with the goats, and he looked up at me and smiled. The smile I remember well, for the smile of Judas, my brother, was not something easily forgotten or easily resisted.

  “Come sit with me, Simon, and be my brother,” he said,

  I sat down beside him. “I am your brother.”

  “I know—I know, and I hurt you and I don’t know how. All my life, I hurt you, Simon. That’s true, isn’t it?”

  “It’s not true,” I said, won already, his the way anyone he desired to be his became his.

  “And yet when I myself was hurt and it had to be made better, when I wept and my tears had to be dried, when I was hungry and I wanted bread, it was not to the Adon I went, not to my mother who was dead, not to John—but to you, Simon, my brother.”

  I couldn’t look at him; I didn’t want to look at him, at those strong clean features that might have been cut from stone, at those wide, pure blue eyes.

  “And when I was afraid, I came to you to hold me in your arms and quiet my fear.”

  “When will you and Ruth be married?” I asked.

  “Sometime—how did you know, Simon? But you know everything, don’t you? Sometime—when things are better.”

  “They won’t be better.”

  “But they will, Simon, believe me.”

  Then we lay silently on the grass for a while, I staring at nothing, but Judas with his eyes fixed across the valley to the tangled passes that led down to the coastal plain.

  “How do men fight?” he said suddenly.

  “What?”

  “How do men fight?”

  “That’s a strange question—”

  “That’s all I’ve asked myself,” Judas mused. “Day in and day out, I’ve asked myself nothing else. How do men fight? Why don’t you answer me, Simon? How do men fight?”

  You had to answer him. Whether you were Jud
as’s brother or his servant or his follower, you could not have the relationship with him that other men had with you. He took you into himself; he absorbed you; you found yourself hanging onto his words as if the words themselves were entities.

  “How do men fight?” I repeated. “With weapons—with armies.”

  “With armies,” Judas said. “And armies are mercenaries, always mercenaries. Men for hire—in all the world, mankind is divided into three groups.” He stretched out on his back, arms spread, staring at the sky, at the blue Judean sky, where the thin, lacy clouds shred themselves back and forth, like new flax on a loom. “Three groups,” he said softly: “the slaves, those who own the slaves, and the mercenaries, those who kill for hire, who murder for hire—for Greece, for Egypt, for Syria—or for that new master in the West, for Rome. You’ve heard that, Simon, for Rome; and Rome makes them citizens and pays them less. But it has always been that way, mercenaries—” He lay silent for a moment. “You remember, when we were children we watched the Syrian mercenaries marching south to attack Egypt? War among the nokri, always the same. A king hires ten or twenty or forty thousand mercenaries, and he marches against a city. If the king of that city can hire enough mercenaries, they meet on a plain somewhere and hack at each other until it is decided. Otherwise, they close the gates and a siege begins. There’s profit in war, and nothing else. Only—Simon, has it ever occurred to you why we free our slaves after seven years?”

  “It’s the law,” I said, “and it’s always been that way. For we were ourselves slaves in Egypt—and how can you forget?”

  “The Adon would answer me like that,” Judas smiled. “Egypt was a long time ago. But consider—instead of three, there are four kinds of people on this earth, the slaves, those who own them, the mercenaries—and the Jews.”

  “We hold slaves,” I said.

  “And we free them—marry them, make them a part of us. Why is it that we don’t have mercenaries?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I never thought of it.”

  “Yet we don’t. And when war comes, when the Syrian or the Greek or the Egyptian comes down on our land, we take our knives and our bows and go out to meet them, a rabble against their trained, armored murderers, against their faceless men who were born for war, bred for war—and live only for war. And they cut us to pieces, the way they would have cut us to pieces in Modin the other day.”

  “We can’t have mercenaries,” I said after a while. “If you hire mercenaries, you must make war; otherwise, where will the money come from to pay them? We fight only to defend our land. If we fight as the nokri fight, as the strangers fight, for gold and for slaves, then we will be like them.”

  “I could break Apelles in two,” Judas mused. “I could squeeze him like a ripe melon. Never has he done a day’s work, used a muscle. When he bathes, a slave lifts his parts—providing he has any—to dry beneath them. Yet he comes with eighty mercenaries, and the power of eighty thousand stand behind him.”

  “That’s right.”

  “And he calls me a dirty Jew—and he slaps my father’s face—and he cuts the throat of a little girl; and this he does in three hundred villages, and I remain silent.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Until it’s more than we can bear, and we go out like a rabble against them—and they slaughter us.”

  What could I say, but to stare at this brother of mine who saw it as I had never seen it?

  “We don’t keep slaves,” Judas went on evenly, “because when you hold slaves, you must have mercenaries to hold them down, and you must have gold to pay your mercenaries—and you must always war, always, because there is never enough gold—until someone else is stronger, and then you must have the walls of a city to wrap around you. And we have none of those things, neither cities nor slaves nor gold nor mercenaries.”

  “We have none of those things,” I agreed.

  “Only our land. But there must be a way, a way to fight without being slaughtered, a way to turn our land into walls. There must be a way.”

  ***

  Early one morning, I woke in the gray part of life, in that absolute pause between day and night which is, as the Rabbis tell us, a perpetual reminder of the time when there was only the void—unbroken, unseparated, neither day nor night nor month nor year. We slept, as always, in the big single room of our house, on the floor on our pallets, my brothers and I and the Adon, only five of us now that John had married. I rolled over on my side and saw the Adon standing before the window, a dark silhouette—and in his hand he held the sword of Pericles, which he must have taken from its hiding place under the roof beams during the night. As I watched, almost without a sound, he drew the sword from its scabbard and held it—not as a man holds a strange thing. Minutes went by, and he stood there, holding the bare sword, yet I felt neither fear nor apprehension, only a deep curiosity as to what lay in his mind, so old, so closely wedded already to the minds of all the old men, all the venerable of old Israel.

  He hefted the sword, as if he was taking the weight of it, the feel and balance of it, so that he would remember when the time came. Then, still moving silently, he went to an alcove where we kept the big earthenware jugs of olive oil. He took off the cover of one of these jugs and placed the sword inside, in the oil, and then put the cover back. There it was safe and close at hand.

  I rolled over and slept.

  ***

  It was about two weeks after that, a little less perhaps, or a little more, that three women, half-naked, disheveled, their feet bleeding, staggered into Modin. One of them carried a dead baby at her bosom; one was young and one was very old—and they were the beginning of a stream of refugees that poured into Modin and into every other village in the neighborhood over a period of four or five days.

  They all told the same short, tragic story. They were from Jerusalem; they were city people. Many of them had given up thinking of themselves as Jews. They were prepared to become Greek and more Greek. They were civilized people. They were cultured people. They had passed beyond the wearing of beards, of linen pants, of striped cloaks. They wore tunics, they went bare-legged. Many of them underwent painful operations to remove the signs of circumcision. Many of them spoke Greek and pretended to be ill at ease with the Hebrew or the Aramaic. Therefore, what happened was all the more terrible to them.

  Antiochus Epiphanes, the King of Kings, who ruled all the land from Antioch, appointed a new general for Jerusalem. His name was Apollonius, and on a larger scale he was to Jerusalem what Apelles was to Modin. He came in with ten thousand mercenaries instead of eighty, and he was largely unappreciative of the culture of the New Jew. In any case, on the Sabbath day, he told his mercenaries to go into the streets for their pay and to take it with their swords—on God’s day, the day when no Jew will raise an arm for his defense. All day long, the mercenaries killed; they killed until they could no longer lift their arms. They cut off fingers for rings, arms for bracelets. They turned the city into a butcher shop, and the half-crazed, half-hysterical survivors told us how the streets ran ankle-deep in blood. Then they broke into the Temple and sacrificed swine on the altar.

  And of one man who told the tale my father asked: “And where was Menelaus, the high priest?”

  “Apollonius bought him.”

  My father hated and always had hated the high priest, who wore a Greek name and Greek garb, but this he would not believe.

  “You’re lying!”

  “As God is my witness! For three talents, he bought him—and Menelaus prayed over the swine’s blood.”

  “It’s true,” others said.

  My father went to his house. He went to the hearth, took a handful of ashes and rubbed them into his face and hair. Then, with the tears flowing, he said the prayer for the dead.

  ***

  Judas told me. “Bathe and dress yourself,” he said. “T
he Adon is going to the Temple, and we go with him.”

  “Is he mad?”

  “You ask him that. I’ve never seen him the way he is.”

  I went to my father with the words on my tongue, Are you mad? Will you risk your lives and ours? Is there profit in putting your head into the lion’s den?—all this and more I had on my tongue; and when I saw his face, I said nothing.

  “Bathe, Simon,” he said to me gently, “and anoint yourself with oil and spices, for we go to God’s Temple.”

  So again and for the last time, Mattathias and his five sons went to the Temple in Jerusalem. As so many times in the past, we walked in a line, the old man, the Adon, first, and then my brother John, and then I, Simon, and then my brother Judas, and then my brother Eleazar, and lastly, Jonathan.

  And we were men, and the old times were done. Even Jonathan was no boy; a few weeks had taken the fragile grace of him and begun to make it into something hard and wiry and resilient. He would cry no more. I recalled then, looking at him, how once he had lied and Judas had beaten him for it; they were both of them new. The retiring arrogance, the humble arrogance, of Judas—the shy arrogance that knows so well its own beauty and charm, the worst kind of arrogance—that was beginning to turn into something else, into a singleness of purpose and intent that I only glimpsed at the time. If I had hated Judas, if I had always hated him, the hatred was at last beginning to wash away. Already, age meant nothing with Judas; he was ageless; he would be ageless until the day he died. John and Eleazar were simple and direct and understandable, but Judas was beyond my understanding already and Jonathan was mercurial, changing, and he would go on changing.

  We strode along through somber land. There was little joy in the villages we walked through, and less when they knew where we were bound. Those who recognized Mattathias and asked, “Where to, Adon?” and were told, “To the Holy Temple,” shook their heads worriedly.

  As we neared the city, there were more and more mercenaries in evidence. We saw them sitting and drinking at the wayside taverns. We saw them with their women—there are always women for mercenaries—and we saw them marching in cohorts.