by Colm Toibin
‘You must believe me when I say that they will come looking for you. You must leave.’
I remained standing and I asked him what he would do.
‘I will leave now but I can give you an address where you will be safe in Jerusalem.’
‘Where I will be safe?’ I asked.
‘You will be safe for the moment in Jerusalem.’
‘Where is my son?’
‘Close to Jerusalem. The site for the crucifixion has been chosen. It will be near the city. If there is any chance for him, it will be there, but I have been told that there is no chance and that there has been no chance for some time. They have been waiting.’
I had seen a crucifixion once, carried out by the Romans on one of their own. It was in the distance and I remember thinking that it was the most foul and frightening image that had ever been conjured up by men. I remember thinking also that I was old and getting older and that I hoped I would die before I ever saw anything like that again. It stayed with me, the sight in the distance, and it made me shiver and I had tried to think of another subject to obliterate the memory of this, the unspeakable image, the vast, fierce cruelty of it. But I did not know precisely how the victim died or how long it took, if they used spears or tortured them while they were hanging there or if something else, such as the hot sun, caused the body to expire over time. Of all the things I had thought about in my life it was the one that was furthest from me. It had nothing to do with me and I believed that I would never witness it again or come close to it in any way. I found myself now asking Marcus how long a crucifixion takes as though it were something surprising but ordinary too. He replied: ‘Days maybe, but sometimes hours, it depends.’
‘On what?’ I asked.
‘Don’t ask,’ he said. ‘It’s better if you don’t ask.’
He left me then, apologizing that he could not travel with me, that if anything could be done he would need to keep his involvement with me distant and private. He advised me to wear a cloak and move carefully and be sure, as I travelled, that I was not being followed. Before he left, I asked him to wait for one more minute. There was something about his briskness, his businesslike way of dealing with this, that had unsettled me.
‘How do you know all this?’ I asked him.
‘I have informers,’ he said solemnly, almost proudly. ‘People who are well placed.’
‘And it has been decided?’ I asked.
He nodded. I had a sensation that if I could think of one more question to ask, one more thing to say, the meaning would shift and soften. He waited at the door to see what I wanted to say now.
‘Will I find him if I go to Jerusalem?’ I asked.
‘At the address I have given you,’ he replied, ‘they will know more than I do.’
I almost asked him then why I should trust someone who knew more than he did, but I watched him as he hesitated at the door, and even in the last second before he finally departed I thought there was one more thing I should have asked or said. One more thing. But I could not think what it was. And then he went, and, perhaps because there had been no one in this house for so long, he left behind a smell of pure unease. And the more I sat alone the more I realized that, for whatever reason, I should not go to the address he had given me, that I would return to Cana, to Miriam, and then I would find Martha and Mary, and I would ask them what to do.
I dressed as he told me to dress, wearing a cloak. I kept my voice low if I had to speak. I found a convoy moving towards Cana and I joined it and I rested when the others rested and I was careful not to remain apart in case they noticed me too much. The talk was freer than I had heard before, and it was against the Romans, the Pharisees, the Elders, against the Temple itself, against laws and taxes. And women spoke almost as much as men. It was like living in a new time. And then the talk turned to the miracles my son and his followers could do, and how many were desperate to follow them now, or merely to find where they were.
Already, what was to occur weighed on me. At times, however, I forgot about it, I let my mind linger over anything at all only to find that what I was moving towards was waiting to spring as a frightened animal will spring. It came like that, in sudden jolts and shocks. And then it came more slowly, more insidiously. It entered my consciousness, it edged its way into me as something poisonous will crawl along the ground. On one of the nights during my journey I wandered out under the sky which was lit with stars and I believed for a moment that soon these stars would cease to glitter, that the nights of the future would be dark beyond dark, that the world itself would undergo a great change, and then I quickly came to see that the change would happen only to me and to the few who knew me; it would be only we who would look at the sky at night in the future and see the darkness before we saw the glitter. We would see the glittering stars as false and mocking, or as bewildered themselves by the night as we were, as leftover things confined to their place, their shining nothing more than a sort of pleading. I must have slept on those nights, and soon there was no time when what I was moving towards did not fix itself in my waking and my dreams, did not take over every thought.
Miriam had already heard rumours and I could see by the fear in her eyes when I arrived that she did not want to tell me what they were. I told her that I knew. And that was why I had come. But she still seemed uneasy. She did not move beyond the hallway of the house and left the door ajar while I stood there and it struck me then that she was not going to allow me beyond where she stood, that she was in fact blocking my entrance.
‘What do you know?’ I asked.
‘I know,’ she said, ‘that they are rounding up all his friends and followers.’
‘Are you afraid?’
‘Would you not be?’
‘Do you want me to leave?’
She did not flinch.
‘Yes, I do.’
‘Now?’
She nodded and whatever it was about the expression on her face and her posture and the aura she gave off I knew in that split second more than I had known before. I knew that I was facing something ferocious and exact, something dark and evil beyond anyone’s comprehension. I expected to be taken there and then at the door, dragged away somewhere, never to be seen in the world again. I understood everything then, and I almost cried aloud except that I was sure that Miriam would have done something to stop me. Instead, I thanked her and turned. I knew that I would not see her again in my life and I made my way to the house of Martha and Mary and I was ready to be turned away by them too.
They were waiting for me. Their brother lay again in a darkened room and could not speak. His sleep was peppered with moans and cries. Martha said his howls in the hour before dawn harrowed up the soul of anyone who heard them. I told Martha and Mary of Marcus’s visit and what had happened in the house of my cousin Miriam. I explained that I may even have been watched and followed, and that I was ready to walk out of their house without delay. They told me that they also believed that their house was watched and that one of them would have to stay, but they had already decided that if I came to them looking for help, then Mary would accompany me to Jerusalem, we would both slip away under cover of night. Even if we were followed there was nothing we could do except work out a way to evade our followers. And then I saw the difference between the two sisters as Martha told me that she knew he was to be judged by Pilate and that he was to be offered to the multitude to see if they wanted his release, but instructions had been issued by the Elders, she said, so it would mean nothing. Both the Romans and the Elders wanted him dead, but both were afraid to declare this openly.
Mary argued that something new would happen which would make such judgments and predictions meaningless, that the world’s time had come and these days would be the last days and the days of the beginning. As she spoke, I dreamed of us escaping somewhere, to anywhere. I dreamed of taking my son through the crowd, him meek, humbled and oddly afraid, moving carefully, his eyes cast down, his followers all dispersed. But the Temple had th
e people in the square, Martha insisted again, they had ordered them to call for the release instead of the thief Barabbas, and the people would do what they had been told to do. My son would not be freed.
‘He is already in custody,’ Martha said, ‘and it is already determined what is to be done with him.’
They both watched me now, afraid to say the word that had not been uttered yet.
‘You mean he will be crucified?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ Martha said. ‘Yes.’
And then Mary spoke: ‘But that will be the beginning.’
‘Of what?’ I asked.
‘Of a new life for the world,’ she said.
Martha and I ignored her.
‘Is there anything that can be done?’ I asked Martha.
Both of them appeared perplexed now and Martha nodded in the direction of the room where Lazarus lay.
‘Ask my brother. My sister is right. We are coming to the end of the world,’ she said. ‘Or the world as we know it is coming to an end. Anything can happen. You must go to Jerusalem.’
We found lodgings in the city. It seemed strange to me as I passed each person, or saw groups of people to whom I would never speak, whom I would never know and thought how odd it was that we looked the same, or appeared the same, moved on the same earth and spoke the same language and yet we shared nothing now, not one of them knew what I felt or shared anything with me. They looked utterly apart and alien. It seemed astonishing to me that I carried a burden that no one could instantly see, that I must have looked ordinary to everybody I saw who did not know me, that everything was held inside.
I realized that we were lodging in a house filled with his followers, the ones who had not been arrested, that Mary had been told to take me here and she assured me that I would be protected, that the house was safe even if it did not seem so. I wondered how she knew this and she smiled and said that witnesses would be needed.
‘By whom?’ I asked. ‘For what?’
‘Do not ask,’ she said. ‘You must trust me.’
On our first night the door was locked by one of those who had come to our house in Nazareth years before; he eyed me coldly and suspiciously.
My son was already in custody, a real prisoner. He had allowed himself to be taken, and in this house during the hours that I spent with his followers they all seemed to feel that this was planned, part of a great deliverance that would take place in the world. I wanted to ask them if this deliverance would mean that he would not then be crucified, that he would be released, but they all, including Mary, once she was in their company, spoke in a maze of riddles. No question asked, I knew, would elicit a straight answer. I was back in the world of fools, twitchers, malcontents, stammerers, all of them hysterical now and almost out of breath with excitement even before they spoke. And within this group of men I noticed that there was a set of hierarchies, men who spoke and were listened to, for example, or whose presence created silence, or who sat at the top of the table, or who felt free to ignore me and my companion and who demanded food from the other women who scampered in and out of the room like hunched and obedient animals.
The next day, all of us left the house. One of the men, the one who comes here still, was given control of Mary and myself. He told us to stay with him at all times and speak to no one. We moved through the narrow streets in the morning until we came to a vast open space filled with people.
‘All of these people,’ our minder told me, ‘are in the pay of the Temple. All of them are here to shout for the freedom of the thief when the moment comes. Pilate knows this, the Temple knows that it will succeed, and it is possible that even the thief has been told. It is the beginning of our redemption, the great new dawn for the world. It is mapped out as the sea and the land are mapped out.’
By the time he had finished speaking I was tired of walking, one of my shoes hurt. As I closed my eyes and listened, I noticed that there was something about his voice and his tone; I felt that he did not mean what he said, but had learned it and come to believe it was all the more true and impressive because of that.
It was hard to credit that everything in the square had been arranged, but there was a different atmosphere here than there had been in the streets of Cana or at the wedding itself – there were no sudden shouts or shifts of mood, no sense of a wild-eyed gathering of people. Many of those in the square were older; they came in smaller groups. None of them seemed to recognize us, but nonetheless we stood in the shadows, Mary and I, trying to appear as though this was a normal place for us to come, or as though we too with our minder were part of the arrangement.
At first I could not hear what was being said from the balcony of the building across the square and it was difficult even to get a clear view. We had to move from the shadows into the sun and then push forward into the crowd. It was Pilate, everyone around murmured his name, and he was shouting louder each time he spoke.
‘What accusation bring ye against this man?’
And the people were shouting back in one voice.
‘If he were not a malefactor, we would not have delivered him up to thee!’
I missed the next moment as someone had pushed me to the side and there was too much talking around us but Mary heard it and she told me what it was. Pilate had asked the crowd to take the prisoner and deal with him according to Jewish law.
Pilate was still alone on the balcony with one or two officials standing to the side. Now I heard the response of the crowd because it came in ringing tones.
‘It is not lawful to put any man to death,’ they said, and it was clear in how they said it that all of this, every moment we were witnessing, had indeed been arranged. I did not know that such things could happen. Then Pilate disappeared and a new feeling grew among those around us, the talking and muttering ceased and I felt something fresh coming into the atmosphere as all of us stared in the direction of the balcony. I sensed a thirst for blood among the crowd. I could see it in people’s faces, how their jaws were set and their eyes bright with excitement. There was a dark vacancy in the faces of some, and they wanted this vacancy filled with cruelty, with pain and with the sound of someone crying out. Only something vicious would satisfy them now, once they had been given permission to want it. They had changed from being a crowd doing what they were told to being a mob in search of some vast satisfaction that could come only with shrieks of pain and torn flesh and broken bones.
As time passed and we stood there waiting, I noticed this hunger spreading like contagion until I believed that it had reached every single person there just as blood pumped from the heart makes its way inexorably to every part of the body.
When Pilate came out again, they listened but what he said made no difference.
‘I find in him no fault at all,’ he said. ‘But ye had a custom that I should release unto you one prisoner at the Passover, will ye therefore that I release unto you the King of the Jews?’
The crowd was ready. They shouted back: ‘Not this man, but Barabbas!’ And Barabbas the thief then appeared and he was set free to roars of approval from the crowd. And then there was a shout from somewhere and people at the front appeared to be able to see something that we could not see and there was confusion among the crowd and a sort of impatience as well, with people piling into the square so that we were no longer standing to the side but closer to the centre, all three of us staying together, saying nothing, making every effort not to be noticed. Everyone’s full attention was on the balcony; they knew what was shortly to appear and were merely waiting for this great satisfaction.
And then it came and there was a gasp from the crowd, it was a gasp of delight before it was anything but it also contained shock and a sort of unease that grew into a hunger for more and thus the gasping became shouting and cheering and yelling and catcalling because on the balcony with blood streaming down his face and a thing made of thorns pushed back into the side of his head, my son came wearing the purple robe of a king, which seemed to hang on his should
ers in a way that made me understand that his hands were tied behind his back. There were soldiers all around him. The crowd began to laugh and roar as the soldiers pushed him around on the balcony. I could sense from the way he responded to being pushed that something had happened to weaken him. He seemed beaten down, almost resigned. As soon as Pilate spoke again, the crowd began to interrupt him, but he demanded that he be heard.
‘Behold this man!’ he said.
At the front and, I noticed, all around the edges of the crowd, the chief priests began to lead the people in shouting: ‘Crucify him, crucify him!’ Pilate once more demanded silence. He moved closer to my son to hold him steady and prevent the soldiers from pushing him. He called to the chief priest: ‘Take ye him and crucify him, for I find no fault in him.’ And one of the chief priests shouted: ‘We have a law, and by our law he ought to die, because he calls himself the Son of God!’ Once more Pilate withdrew and ordered the prisoner to be taken back with him. I noticed as he turned – and I could see his face clearly – that he looked at the crowd with fear and puzzlement. Although it seemed at this point that Pilate was considering the idea of releasing him, I realize now that I was alone in letting that hope linger. Everyone else knew that something was being played out for the sake of the future, that nothing mattered now except the killing. So when they returned again and Pilate shouted, ‘Behold your king!’ it did nothing but enrage the crowd. All around they shouted the words ‘Away with him, away with him, crucify him!’ as though these words if put into action would mean infinite joy and pleasure, a sense of plenty and fulfilment. When Pilate roared again, ‘Shall I crucify your king?’ it was only as you would throw a stick to a dog. It was a game they seemed to be playing as they answered: ‘We have no king but Caesar.’ Then he was delivered by Pilate to the crowd and the crowd was fully prepared; each one of them would have personally helped to organize the suffering had they been called upon. We edged slowly and with difficulty to the side so that we were ahead of a group which had formed, with men yelping and shouting greetings to their friends, and a sense that everybody’s blood was filled with venom, a venom which came in the guise of energy, activity, shouting, laughing, roaring instructions as they paved the way for a grim procession to a hill beyond.