My Glorious Brothers

by Howard Fast

  “You pitied him?” I whispered. “You pitied Judas?”

  “Simon, I pitied him, can’t you understand?”

  “No,” I said, “no—” She sat there in the moonlight, and how can I tell you what she was and what she looked like? I took her in my arms, and then I wrapped the folds of my cloak over her, and we lay there under the olive tree…

  Afterwards, we walked in the night, hand in hand, climbing from terrace to terrace, until at last we were on the wild hilltops where the wind sighed in the evergreens and where all the air was fresh and fragrant and scented, I, Simon, and this woman who took away all fear of death, of the future, of misery and sorrow—and made me know only that I lived the way I had never lived before, young and proud and strong, the son of Mattathias, with tears and laughter mingled inside of me.

  “And I had to make love to you,” she said. “And I had to plead with you, and beg you to take me in your arms.”

  “No, no.”

  “Yes, I had to.”

  “Oh, my darling, no, because I can remember. I can remember how I cut my knee once, and you washed it and bandaged it, and I told myself I would win the whole world for you and bring it to you—”

  “To Modin?”

  “Yes, to Modin. And when you brought wine to the Adon—”

  “I spilled it once.”

  “My heart broke for you. And when you cried, I cried inside of, all over inside of me.”

  “And when you were beaten because Judas broke the great goblet, I cried that way for my Simon, for my beautiful, good, gentle Simon.”

  “Don’t say that!”

  “Why? Why not? Simon, I love you. I love a man. First, I loved a little boy, and now I love a man—” Yet when I left her, I could only think, How will I tell Judas?

  ***

  There were four weeks of poignant happiness. It was no secret; in a place like Modin, where half the town is related to you in one way or another, there are no secrets, and anyone who saw Ruth when she looked at me—or me when I looked at her—knew all there was to know.

  It is hard to put anything down of those four weeks, yet I have to, if you would understand what came afterwards to me, Simon, and to my brothers—especially he who came to be called the Maccabee. I sometimes think that a Jew is a stranger on earth, someone who abides for a while and must perforce count each day as if it might be the last. We bind each other with bonds that are stronger than iron, and we make many things sacred that are not sacred among other people. But most of all is life itself sacred, our most terrible crime being an act which is matter of course with all other peoples, suicide—and because of this strange sacredness of life, love becomes almost an act of worship. We open our hearts wide, when we open them.

  It was that way with Ruth; it was that way with me. We became a part of each other. I don’t know what the Adon thought then; I was alive, and my heart was making its own song, and whether or not he condemned me, thinking, as I so often thought, that I had struck at Judas, I don’t know. I had Ruth and I had the whole world. We climbed the hills and lay in the fragrant turf under the cedars. We waded bare-legged in Tubel, the sweet brook, or stretched on the grass to watch the goats. It was the easy time; the harvest was in and we were not yet ready for the planting, so that work which might have fallen heavily on me with Judas gone could be neglected. John and Jonathan spent much time in the synagogue, a long and ancient stone building that served as a school by day and a village center at night and a house of prayer when the sun was rising or setting, studying and poring over the scrolls, but I was not so minded when the sun shone and the birds sang and my heart sang back. I was in love, and an hour without Ruth was dark and endless.

  We learned each other then. She made me probe myself, reach into myself and see what that subtle and bitter thing between Judas and me was, what it meant. How well she knew me, this tall and beautiful woman! How little I knew her! I remember once when I spoke to her—and I did not speak of it again—about Judas, and she turned on me almost in a fury:

  “You said you knew Judas—you don’t know him! And you don’t know me. I’m not a person to you, alive, a human being!”

  I looked at her, long-legged and high-bosomed and regal—and more of a person than anyone I had ever known.

  “Is it the old times?” she said. “A man had ten wives and ten concubines, and if a child was a girl, her name was not even recorded! If I have a daughter—”

  “You?”

  “If I have a daughter,” she said, “will it be precious to you, and good?”

  “If you have a daughter,” I said.

  “Simon, Simon—what are you afraid of? Judas is a great and beautiful man, and so are you. I’ve always known that. When I came into your house, I came into the house of Mattathias and his sons, and it was like no other house, no other house. Shall I get down on my knees to you, Simon?”

  “Oh, my darling, my darling.”

  “Simon, when you know me, you will not be afraid any more. I promise you. I’ll be strong for you, Simon. There are bad times coming; I know that, and I know where the sons of the Adon will be; but I’ll be strong for you, Simon. We have such a long life ahead, so much of it, so much—and someday it will be as it was, with the whole land quiet and gentle in the sunshine…”

  She loved the land the way I loved it, the way a Jew can love the land and the fruit of it. She was fertile and I would have sons and daughters to follow me—and the old seed would be planted again and ever again. I told the Adon that in a month we would be married.

  “You’re a man,” he said, “and past the marriage age. Why do you tell me?”

  “Because you’re my father and I want your blessing.”

  “Yet you didn’t ask me.”

  “I love her and she loves me.”

  “Where is your brother?” the Adon said.

  “Did I send him away? Did he tell me where he went? Is that my whole life—Where is my brother?—always, Where is my brother?”

  “Is it your life?” the Adon asked somberly. “Your life is God’s, not mine, not yours. There is grief all over Israel, yet nothing matters but your happiness.”

  “Is that wrong?”

  “Do you talk to me of right and wrong, Simon ben Mattathias, or of what is just and what is unjust? Have I whelped you so poorly that you are not a Jew, that the Law is not a covenant with you? Have you forgotten already that we were slaves in Egypt?”

  “A thousand years ago!” I cried.

  “And was it a thousand years ago,” the Adon said coldly, “that you went to the Temple and saw what I saw?”

  ***

  I told Ruth.

  “He is an old man, Simon,” she said. “What do you expect? When he went to the Temple, his heart broke.” Her eyes searched mine. “Simon, Simon—”

  “God help me!”

  “Simon, do you love me?”

  “As I never loved anything on earth.”

  “It will be all right, Simon, I promise you.”

  I avoided Mattathias’s roof tree when I could. I sat in the house of Moses ben Aaron, who had loved me since I was a child, and listened to his rambling tales. This was her home and she was with me, her hand ready to touch mine, her eyes ever looking for mine. Moses ben Aaron had traveled and seen things, a rare matter with us who are close rooted to our own soil and not a people of commerce like the Greeks or Phoenicians. He had been to the great wine bazaars in Gebel and Tyre, and even to Alexandria where they will pay almost any price for a Judean vintage. He had seen the purple slaves of the Mediterranean coast, and the yellow-haired German mercenaries of the Romans. He had seen black men and brown men, and he liked to talk about it. Yet always he said:

  “Simon ben Mattathias, there is so much a man can travel and no more, for when his belly is full of slavery and cruelty
, he has to go away from the nokri and come to his own; otherwise the world spins, as if the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob turned his face away, and there is nothing but the greed for money and more money, power and more power…”

  With Ruth, I talked of the child that would be ours. Deborah if she were a girl and David if he were a man. If she had been beautiful before, there was a new glow to her beauty now. Even in our village of Modin, where they had seen her in swaddling clothes, where they had seen her grow and mature, even here she was new and people turned their heads to look after her, and said, “That is a queen of old Israel, a red Kohan of the ancient times.” And when the old men met me on the street, along with “Shalom” (Peace) they said to me, “Breed a race of kings, God willing.”

  When we were alone on the hillside, she would sing in her deep, rich voice that love song that comes from a time out of memory:

  For love is strong as death…

  Many waters cannot quench love,

  Neither can the floods drown it:

  If a man would give all the substance of his house for love,

  It would utterly be contemned.

  So it was and so it finished; that was a long time ago, and tears dry like everything else. I spoke before of how it became worse, not all at once but bit by bit, so that in the two or three weeks that elapsed between the visits of Apelles the warden, or one of his men, we could forget, we could resume our lives. Modin was spared longer than other villages. Our taxes became heavier; we were insulted more frequently and the insults became a little worse, and once the Rabbi Enoch was whipped almost to death. But it was nothing that we couldn’t bear. And then, when Judas had been gone five weeks, Apelles himself returned with one hundred men and called all the village folk into the town square.

  A curious man, Apelles; he thrived on cruelty the way normal people thrive on love and gentleness. It was not merely that he was perverted; the perversion reversed things in him. He had become fatter since he was warden; he had become jollier; he was the image of a full and satisfied man. The killing of Jews, the whipping of Jews, the torturing of Jews, was meat and drink to him—and you could see that as he hopped out of his litter, tossed back his yellow mantle and flicked his little pink skirt. He was a happy man, and he smiled at us before he explained his current visit.

  “A nice village, Modin,” he lisped, “but too fruitful, too fruitful. We must see to that. My friend, the Adon!” he called.

  My father came forward and stood in front of the people. The past months had wrought a great change in him. His beard was white. His gray eyes were paler than ever, and all over his face there was a network of deep wrinkles. Nor was his giant frame as upright as once; he had lost height; there was a quality of defeat and default about him that had increased slowly but steadily in all the time Judas was gone. Now, wrapped in his striped cloak, he stood silently and impassively before Apelles.

  “You will be pleased to know,” Apelles said, his voice high and eager, “that the King of Kings has devoted considerable thought to the Jews. At the last meeting of his council—and I am proud to note that I participated—a decision was reached to hasten and complete Hellenization of the province. Certain measures must be taken, and decisions will be enforced—lawfully and justly, of course, but enforced—and, naturally, defaulters will be punished.”

  Apelles took a deep breath, wrinkled his nose, and arranged and patted the folds of his yellow mantle. One fat little hand sought in his sleeve and found his handkerchief and touched it delicately to each nostril.

  “But there will be no defaulters,” he smiled. “You will recognize that the vile superstitions of your religion and what you call your Law place an insurmountable barrier before civilization. Dietary rules in particular are considered an affront to all Greeks; you will cease to practice them. Reading and writing serve merely to extend and deepen all other vile practices of Jews; your schools will be permanently closed. And since the repository of superstition and ignorance among you are your five books of Moses, these books will be neither read nor intoned. To enforce the last provision, my men will enter your synagogue, obtain your scrolls, and publicly burn them. By order of the King,” he finished—with one delicate flick of his handkerchief.

  Ruth stood beside me, and I recall the pressure of her fingers on my arm as Apelles finished speaking. But I watched the Adon; I never took my eyes off him, and I knew that somewhere in that crowd Eleazar and Jonathan and John were watching him—as everyone else was—for him to say whether this was the end or not. And as had happened the last time, the Adon never moved. Not by the flicker of a muscle or an eyelid did he betray what he felt. A mercenary stood by him; mercenaries ringed the people; and twenty mounted mercenaries sat on their horses watchfully, bows strung, arrows loosely held in their fingers.

  We stood there while four of Apelles’s men went into the synagogue, tore down the draperies behind the pulpit, and brought out the seventeen scrolls of the Law that belonged to Modin. How well I knew those scrolls! How well every man and woman and child in the village knew them! I had read from them from the time I was able to read; I had pressed my lips to them; I had fingered the ancient parchment and traced out the black Hebrew words. Eight of the scrolls had been brought from Babylon hundreds of years ago, when the Jews returned from the long exile. Three of them were said to date back to the kingdom of David, and one was said to have been David ben Jesse’s own, annotated by his own hand. With what loving care they had been preserved, each of them receiving every seven years a new envelope of the finest silk, stitched with stitches too small to be seen by the naked eye, and embroidered all over! How well they had been hidden through catastrophe, fire and flame! And they were now to be burned by the perverted servant of a pervert—in the name of civilization!

  A moan of agony went up from the people as the scrolls were thrown carelessly on a pile of hay. A mercenary went into one of the houses, returned with a jug of olive oil, knocked off the head, and poured it over the scrolls; another mercenary found a coal in a fireplace, fanned it, and then set the oil-soaked pile on fire.

  Borne by his slaves, Apelles was already on his way—and still the people watched the Adon. I think it would have been the end of the village, of every living soul in it, if my father had been anything else than the man he was. I can’t tell what went on inside of him; I can only guess. I watched him and saw his body tense, become rigid, and vibrate a little—but not enough for the people to notice, since they said afterwards that Mattathias stood like stone. It was not stone, but a man whose heart bled as Apelles and his mercenaries marched away. The horsemen waited; watching the pile of burning scrolls, watching the people, they sat with notched arrows, dirty men on ill-kept beasts, men who never bathed, never hoped, never dreamed, never loved—brutal, ignorant men whose trade was murder, whose pleasure was a night with a prostitute or a twist of hasheesh, whose relaxation was drunkenness, debased, dehumanized men with special hatred for Jews, since come what might, Jews would never hire them; these men sat on their horses and waited, and there was one scroll apart from the fire, an inch from the flames, not burning yet but yellowing and browning at the edge; and as they waited, a nine-year-old boy—he was Reuben ben Joseph, the son of a simple farmer—ran forward, nimble as a squirrel, seized the scroll, and turned to flee.

  One arrow caught him in the thigh, and he rolled over like a flung stone, and Ruth, my tall, brave, wonderful Ruth, had reached him in three strides and raised him in her arms. The mercenaries let go with the rest of their arrows, wheeled their horses, and galloped away—and I only remember that I ran after them, shrieking like a madman, knife in hand, until Eleazar caught me, wrestled with me, and held me until the knife fell from my fingers.

  Ruth was dead, but the boy lived; she had held him protected with her arms and body, using herself as a shield from the arrows. She couldn’t have suffered very much, for two of the arrows pierced her heart. I kn
ow. I drew them forth. I picked her up from where she lay and carried her to her father’s house, and all night long I sat there by her body; and in the morning, Judas came.

  ***

  There are some things I cannot write of, nor are they particularly important to this tale of my glorious brothers. I cannot tell of my feelings through that night, which was a night without end that somehow ended; and then the people went away and Moses ben Aaron and his wife slept from sheer exhaustion, and I was alone. I don’t think I slept, but there was a lapse of sorts. My head was in my arms on the table, and then I heard a step and looked up, and the dawn was in the room and Judas stood there.

  It was not the Judas who went away five weeks before. There was a difference which I did not see all at once, but sensed rather—sensed that a boy had marched away and a man come back. The humility was gone from him, yet he had become humble. There was a gray streak in his auburn hair and there were lines on his face. And on one cheek, there was the raw welt of a half-healed scar. His beard was untrimmed, his hair shaggy, and the dirt and grime of travel were still on him. But all that was the surface, and underneath something else had happened—yet what was on the surface made him seem vastly older, larger, a somber giant of a man, not beautiful as he had once been beautiful, but almost splendid in a new way.

  For what seemed a long, long time, we looked at each other, and then he asked me, “Where is she, Simon?”

  I took him to the body and uncovered her face. She appeared to be sleeping. I covered her again.

  “There was no pain for her?” he asked simply.

  “I don’t think so. I drew two arrows from her heart.”

  “Apelles?”

  “Yes, Apelles,” I said.

  “You must have loved her a great deal, Simon,” he said.

  “She had my child in her womb, and when she died, everything in me that ever wanted anything died too.”