by Howard Fast
“I grew tired of the nokri, Simon Maccabeus, and of one Roman in particular, I grew tired to death. Wandering is for the young, my old bones ache, and when I lie down to sleep these days, I am not at all certain that the Angel of Death will not wake me before the dawn. I am out of Goumad, as my father was and his father before him, and also through my father, a Levite—” He grinned at me, half challengingly, half apologetically. “So I go to Jerusalem where I may be permitted to act as a Temple porter?”
“Why not?”
“Or a storyteller—I am not at all decided.”
“So long as you don’t have to work.”
“In that statement, Simon Maccabeus, as in everything, there is a little bit of the truth. Yet should I be ashamed of the past? Only a great cut here in my arm—” he stopped to roll back his sleeve and exhibit a cruel scar—“only this cut prevented me from being with you in that last fight on the seacoast, where only you and Jonathan lived, so my time is borrowed, by grace of the Almighty, blessed be his name, and should I use the little left of it to labor in the fields?”
“I should think that the Roman would have paid you well enough for you to do nothing at all for a good while.”
“And there you are wrong, Simon Maccabeus, for that Roman is a close and careful man, and he weighed every shekel three times in the palm of his hand.
“You didn’t like him?”
“Indeed, I hated him, Simon Maccabeus, and I think I would have slain him, were he not a stranger in Israel.”
“Why?” I asked curiously. “Why, Aaron ben Levi?”
“Because he was evil.”
I shook my head, smiling. “Three months he lived in my house. His ways are the ways of the nokri, that’s all. Hard and close he is, but thus he was trained.”
“And do you really believe that, Simon Maccabeus?” the guide asked me caustically. I nodded but said nothing, wondering what was in the mind of the little man as he marched along beside me, rubbing his beard thoughtfully. Several times he swallowed, as if each time there were words on his lips that he had rejected, and at last he said diffidently, “Who am I to advise the Maccabee?”
“And if I remember,” I murmured, “you were never backward with advice.”
“It is true that I am a poor man,” he said reflectively, “but nevertheless a Jew is a Jew.”
“Whatever you have to say, Aaron ben Levi, say it.”
“Lentulus Silanus hated you, and not as himself but as Rome, and between Jew and Rome, there is no peace and compromise. That comes from an old and foolish man, Simon Maccabeus, so you can take it or throw it into the dirt you walk on.”
And after that, we walked on in silence, for the little man was afraid he had offended me, and he kept his peace…
I dreamed that night in Jerusalem, and I woke up in an agony of fear. This I dreamed—that the Legions came to Judea. Never have I seen a Legion, but enough I heard of them to picture the long, heavy wooden shields, the heavy iron and wooden spears, the massed metal helmets, the close ranks. Thus I dreamed. I dreamed that the Legions came to Judea and we smashed them in our defiles; and they came again and again, until the whole land stank with the dead of Rome. And still they came, and again and again and again. And always we fought them and slashed them, yet there was no end to them. But to us there was an end, and one by one we died—until in all of Judea there was no Jew, only the empty land. And then I dreamed that a deep and terrible silence pervaded Judea, and from that I woke up, whimpering in fear and sorrow.
Esther woke too, and I felt her warm hand upon me as she said, “Simon, Simon, what troubles you?”
“I dreamed—
“All men dream, and what are dreams but nothing and the shadow of nothing?”
“I dreamed that the land was empty and lifeless and forlorn.”
“And that was a foolish dream, Simon, for where there is the good earth, there are people, and they will take the crops from it and grind the wheat and make their bread—always, Simon, always.”
“No. What I dreamed was true.”
“What you dreamed was a dream, Simon, my child, my strange and foolish child, just a dream.”
“And there was no Jew. As if I stood on a high rock, overlooking the whole land, and wherever I turned my eyes there was no Jew, only a whisper as if many voices said, We are rid of them, rid of them—”
“And when was a time when the nokri did not say We must be rid of them? Please, Simon.”
“Still I hear it.”
“Will others decide that, Simon, when we are such an old, old oak, with roots so deep? Men are never without doubt and fear, but a woman knows, Simon.”
“And somewhere,” I said, “through it all, was the Roman—that smooth, dark, knowing face of his—the way he smiled, lifting that thin lip of his. Evil—”
“Lentulus Silanus was a man like other men, Simon.”
“No—no—”
“Be quiet, my husband, and rest and be easy. There is too much of the past; it weighs too heavy. Be easy…”
Her hands stroked me, comforted me as I wanted to be comforted, until presently I sank into that land between sleep and waking, thinking of all the good and honor I had known, and how many had loved me even though I had loved so few.
I thought of my brothers, and it was an old oak, truly, that could send out so firm and mighty a limb as Judas Maccabeus, or Eleazar, or John, or Jonathan. Blessed are they and may they rest in peace, rest easily and in peace. Life is a day and no more, but life is also forever. Soon, soon enough, I, Simon, the least of all my glorious brothers, would go the way they went, but not so soon would it be forgotten in Israel—and among the nokri too—that there were five sons of the old man, the Adon Mattathias.