by Ann Swinfen
And a little over a week later he was back. Tired and subdued. For a short time he sat with Yehûdâ and me, before the others discovered he had returned and joined us.
‘Well,’ said Yehûdâ, ‘did you persuade more to believe in your message?’
‘A few. But I think I did something foolish.’
We both looked at him in concern.
‘I healed a leper.’
‘Surely that was good,’ I said.
‘No. He was nearly recovered already and desperate for the final purification. I took pity on him, and said, “Be thou clean”. The man rejoiced, but I should not have done it. Only the chief priest is permitted to perform the final purification in a case of leprosy. I told him to say nothing to anyone, and to go at once to Jerusalem to the chief priest for the purification ritual, but if word spreads . . .’
‘Yes,’ said Yehûdâ. ‘There will be trouble. You must be more careful, Yeshûa.’
He sighed. ‘Well, our preparations are complete. We should set off within the next few days. But I have had a request from Jairus, one of the elders of the town. His twelve-year old daughter is on the point of death, and he has been here every day, begging for your help.’
I saw how tired my brother looked, but I knew he would never refuse to help a child. Not after the death of Daniel. Ever since Daniel’s death, I knew he was haunted by the thought that he might have saved the life of his small brother. It was as if Daniel in his short life had made something clear to Yeshûa, illuminated some essential truth which was the foundation of his teaching. For the rest of his life, all children were precious to him.
By the time we came out of the door, a crowd had already gathered, and we set off across the town jostled and squeezed together through the streets. Suddenly Yeshûa stopped.
‘Who touched me?’ he said.
We looked at each other in astonishment. Some even laughed aloud. Dozens must have touched him in all that crowd. Then a woman fell at his feet, weeping. Her clothes were blood-stained and her face milk white.
‘It was I, Lord. I brushed the fringe of your mantle with my fingers. I have bled without ceasing these many months, and I knew that your touch would heal me.’
‘Daughter,’ my brother said, ‘your own faith has healed you. Go in peace.’
As we went on our way, I whispered to him, ‘How did you know that she had touched you? How did you know?’
‘I felt the power flow out of me,’ he said simply. ‘When Yahweh acts through me, I am nothing more than . . .’ he looked across the street and pointed, ‘nothing more than that conduit pipe in the fountain there.’
At the house of Jairus, we were told that we had come too late, the child was already dead. From an upstairs room we could hear the mother and the other women wailing in lamentation. Climbing up to the child’s room, Yeshûa sent away all the mourners and went in with none but the parents and three of the disciples, Ya’kob, Shim’ôn and Yôhânân. I stood with the other disciples in the doorway and saw the look of agony on my brother’s face. I knew he was thinking that, if he had not gone out into the countryside, he might have been in time to save the child. Had he misjudged, and failed again? And I saw the exact moment when his face lit up.
‘The child is not dead,’ he said, ‘she is deep asleep.’
He took her hand and said, ‘Talithâ, cûmi!’
The girl opened her eyes and began to breathe. Yeshûa laid her hand down gently on the bedclothes and stroked her hair.
‘Give her a little food now, some broth and milk, and she will sleep naturally afterwards. But I beg of you, speak of this to no one.’
I do not know if the parents broke their word, or some of the mourners who had been sent away, or if perhaps one of his own followers spoke of it, but by sunset everyone in Capernaum was whispering that Yeshûa ben Yosef had brought the daughter of Jairus back from the dead.
My brother promised to preach one more time in the kenîshtâ before we set out on our travels. By then the rich woman Yoanna had joined us, and another younger woman called Susanna, so with Salome and me there would be four women in the group travelling round the Galilee. As I came to know Yoanna, I found that despite her aristocratic upbringing she was a resourceful and doughty member of the group, never afraid to speak her mind. At first she suffered terribly from the blisters on her feet—not being accustomed to walking any distance, and certainly not on the rough surfaces of country drove roads and goat tracks. But she bore it with great patience and only the women knew what she endured in silence.
Susanna was one of Salome’s lost lambs, the young childless widow of a fisherman, drowned during a storm on Gennesaret, which had also robbed her of her father and brother. For many weeks she never spoke except in answer to a question, and kept her head veiled and her eyes turned down.
As well as travelling about the Galilee, we might also, Yeshûa said, take a boat across Gennesaret and visit the Decapolis. We were instructed to take very little with us, no more that a small bundle of belongings. A few, like me, wrapped these in a bedroll. Others vowed to live more hardily and carried no bedroll, nor even a staff to help them over the rough places. Yehûdâ insisted, however, that everyone should take a water skin.
‘You and I know what can happen on a long journey on foot, without water,’ he said to my brother. ‘I do not forget that, when we met north of Qumrân, you were as shrivelled and dry as a fallen leaf. They must carry water.’
‘The hot weather is nearly over,’ Yeshûa said mildly, but Yehûdâ insisted and carried his point.
The kenîshtâ was so full that day that every seat was taken, people sat on the floor, and the doors were left standing open so that those gathered outside could also hear. Yeshûa spoke for a long time about the brotherhood of man, and answered questions, and entered into discussions with many of his listeners, who were eager to engage in cheerful debate. This was when he was happiest, talking informally amongst friends and setting forth his vision of a new kind of world, in which life on this earth became a kind of reflection of what the righteous might expect in the company of the Lord of the Heavens.
We began to hear a disturbance outside, but that was nothing unusual. I suppose we all thought at first that it was another hysteric, possessed by evil spirits, or some of the people arguing amongst themselves. Then one of the stallholders I recognised from the market pushed his way through the crowd that had now gathered casually around Yeshûa, who was arguing and laughing with them.
‘Master,’ he said, ‘your mother and your brothers are outside and desire to speak with you.’
I saw then that my brother Ya’aqôb was elbowing his way through the packed doorway, with my mother beside him.
‘He has run mad!’ my mother cried out. ‘My son Yeshûa is possessed. We have come to take him home.’
A gasp came from the crowd, and some began muttering angrily.
‘Yeshûa!’ Ya’aqôb shouted over the heads of the crowd, for he could force his way no further in. ‘Yeshûa, your mother orders you to come home to your family, as is fitting.’
Yeshûa met his eyes from across the room and shook his head. He swept his arm out, indicating the whole of that crowded room.
‘Behold my mother and my brothers!’ he said with a laugh. ‘They are here. For those who do the will of my Father in Heaven, they are my brothers and sisters and mother.’
Then he turned away. I saw my mother begin to sob. She drew her mantle over her face to conceal it. Oh, that was cruel! I thought. I pushed my way through the crowds and out into the street beyond. They were walking away, my mother and all my other brothers: Ya’aqôb, Yehûdes, Yoses and Shim’ôn. I saw that my father had no part in this. I ran after them and laid my hand on my mother’s arm.
‘Please, wait, Mother! He has not turned his back on you.’
She shook off my hand angrily. Her mantle had fallen back and she drew it forward, covering all her face but her eyes, which looked away, beyond me.
‘Wait, Wai
t!’ I stumbled after them, pleading. ‘He speaks in symbols and stories, it’s the way he teaches. What he meant was that all men and women are one family, one brotherhood.’
Ya’aqôb grabbed me by the shoulders and thrust me away.
‘It does not depend simply on ties of blood.’ I was sobbing, trying to find the words to explain. ‘Of course he loves his family still. He loves you, Mother. But if we live in true faith with Yahweh, we all become part of the family of the righteous.’
She would not meet my eyes.
Ya’aqôb turned on me, his face twisted, his fists clenched as if he would strike me.
‘I do not know you, woman. Who are you to speak to my mother thus? Some filthy whore, living openly with your paramour, with your brother as your pimp.’
I stumbled back, appalled at his vicious words, and could not speak.
My mother let her mantle fall from her face, which was blotched with weeping. The eyes she turned on me were cold and hostile.
‘Go to your other family,’ she said. ‘You are no child of mine. You are an outcast and shameless. Do not touch me with your defiled hand.’
Then they turned their backs on me and walked away.
‘Mother!’ I pleaded. ‘Ya’aqôb! Wait! You don’t understand!’
They neither looked round nor slowed their pace.
Behind me, the crowds at the kenîshtâ were laughing and debating as if nothing had happened to disturb them. I turned away and fled down a narrow lane to the lake, then along the shore to a copse of fig trees, where I hid amongst the undergrowth, as I used to hide in the straw of the goat shed as a child. I lay with my face pressed to the dusty earth, and dry sobs shook me as if they would tear me, bone from bone, muscle from flesh. I am lost! I thought. What have I done? What will become of me?
Chapter Twelve
The room is quiet except for my own breathing, which is irregular, sometimes so faint that it seems to stop for minutes together, and at other times a painful, rasping sound. It reminds me of the sound of my father’s saw, cutting through wood all those long years ago, and far away. I listen to the breathing as though it has nothing to do with me, but belongs to some creature in pain, for the pain seems also removed from me. As if I were floating in the air above the bed, I look down compassionately on the emaciated shape below and wonder whether I will actually be aware when the spirit separates from the earthly body. Perhaps they have already separated. But no. There is that breathing.
Although I rarely sit up and find talking difficult, for it interrupts that terrible laboured breathing, yet I have become acutely aware of other things. Instead of dwelling in a hazy, half-perceived world, I have found my senses sharpened. I can hear the minute scratchings of the mice in the walls of the house. I know the shadow of every leaf of the bay tree and would realise at once if someone were to pluck one from its stem. When I manage to eat a little, I can single out every ingredient in the cooking. Too much salt, and I am repulsed. And the skin of my arms, which seem to lie lifeless on the thin summer blanket, has become as sensitive as a blind man’s fingertips. Every tiny motion of the air is as tangible to me as the waves of the sea.
At the moment I am concentrating on scent, and close my eyes in order to savour it more delicately. Three or four days ago—or perhaps it was longer, my sense of time, unlike my physical senses, has become blurred—three or four days ago, or a week, or two weeks, they whitewashed the kitchen. It is a long way from my bedroom, but the cheerful smell filled my nostrils for hours. Such a clean, renewing scent. It has almost faded now, just a faint undertone lingering in the air. Today there is a new scent, one even more hopeful. The scent of new-cut hay. The weather has been fine for days, so the hay is imbued with the wonderful stored fragrance of summer which it will cherish all through the bitter days of winter, holding its promise of the cycle of the seasons. I have always loved the smell of hay, with a quite ridiculous passion.
Every year of my life there has been a hay-making, and they merge into one another, though they fall into a tripartite pattern. There were the years of my childhood and girlhood in the village, when I was one of the hay-makers as soon as I was big enough to wield a rake. Then there was the brief period when I followed my brother through the Galilee and Gaulantis, Phoenicia and Samaria and finally Judaea. We were not part of the labour then, but we moved amongst the hay-makers, my brother preaching and healing, and his chosen followers, the shelîhîm, carrying his message to hamlets and outlying farms. Salome and I and the other women would talk to the women who laboured with the men in the fields, who sometimes shared with us their cool buttermilk. And at last, the longest portion of my life, on our estate in southern Gallia, where in the early days I helped in the hay meadows, when Petradix had first begun to farm and could afford only one slave to work for him.
I remember one childhood summer with particular clarity, though it may be that the memory plays tricks and I am plaiting more than one together. Our fields lay below the village, around the lower slope of the hill, a short distance from the olive orchards. One was always put down to grass, to provide winter hay for the animals. On the others we grew wheat and barley and oats, and beans for drying. My father and brothers laboured in the fields when they were not in the workshop, and all the villagers helped each other at hay-making and harvest time. The village shared an olive-press and there were two wine-presses where the young men trod the grapes after washing in the ritual baths nearby.
The summer I remember, I must have been eight or nine, for it was not the first summer I had helped with raking the hay after the men had cut it. The women and older children would rake the hay into heaps, where it could cure in the sun. Every day or two we would come down again to turn the hay, tossing it with large wooden forks until it was dry enough to store. Then it would be tied in bundles on the backs of our donkeys—bundles almost twice as large as the donkeys themselves—and carried up to the village for storage.
I suppose I remember that summer with particular affection because for once (and it was rare) my two eldest brothers were at ease together. They were working beside each other, stripped to the waist, their arms swinging with the lovely rhythm of their sickles. I remember watching how the muscles of their backs rippled under the skin, like ripples on the river, and wondered if mine did the same as I followed along behind them, raking the hay together. I thought ruefully that probably my muscles did not show, for I was a little plump at the time, a plumpness I lost long before the time of my fasting, never to regain it. Yeshûa and Ya’aqôb were laughing together at some joke I had not heard. Usually I would have felt hurt at being excluded, but I was so happy at seeing them friendly with each other that I did not mind. I wished it could always be like this. I wished that Ya’aqôb was not always so severe, constantly finding fault with the rest of us.
Looking back now, after all these years, I realise that Ya’aqôb must have been unhappy. He yearned somehow for greatness, but must have known he did not have Yeshûa’s gifts. Not merely his gift of a quick scholar’s mind, but his vision of a new kingdom, his closeness to Yahweh, his sense of mission, his gift of healing. Ya’aqôb studied the Law with the dull pedantry of a man with dogged determination but no true illumination. He followed the minute rituals of the Pharisees with a kind of blind devotion, and could not understand how Yeshûa could sweep them aside in a joyous affirmation of a different kind of dispensation, in which love, compassion and brotherhood replaced the trivial rituals of washing hands and rigidly segregating dishes for different types of food. That terrible moment in Capernaum, when my mother and brothers walked away, it seemed our family would be forever rent in two. Yet afterwards, too late, after my brother’s death, Ya’aqôb and my mother joined the Christ cult. By then, of course, I was far away.
When we set out from Capernaum on the first stage of our mission to the countryside, we were soon caught up amongst the amê hâ-’erets, the local sons of the soil. That year, hay-making was over, and most of the grain harvest too, though men
and women were still working in the fields, finishing the work of the harvest and ploughing the earth for the next sowing. As chance would have it, in our early days and weeks we travelled through areas where there were large estates belonging to wealthy landlords, many of whom did not live in the country, but dwelt in fine houses in Sepphoris or Scythopolis or Antipas’s new city of Tiberias. The farms were worked by labourers, many of whom had once owned land of their own, which they had lost through the grinding taxes. The Temple taxes alone were a heavy burden. But the Roman Emperor demanded tribute taxes from the tetrarch Herod Antipas and these were then exacted on his behalf from every farmer, fisherman, craftsman and trader, however poor. It was hopeless trying to evade them. A farmer might not even remove a shovelful of his own grain until the tax collector had extracted his due, for the official would press his mark into the pile of grain as soon as it was harvested. The removal of even a spoonful would cause the pile to shift and the moulded mark to collapse, so that double taxes would be imposed.
The amê hâ-’erets we saw labouring over the last of the harvest were being worked like slaves in their own land, like our forefathers making bricks during the captivity in Egypt. I do not know if all farm stewards were so cruel, but where we went that summer the amê hâ-’erets were ragged and starved and worked terrible hours, day after day. Yeshûa went amongst them, and sent out his shelîhîm further afield, preaching redemption through love, promising a better world in which the poor would be raised up and comforted, the rich cast into everlasting despair. Of course they listened eagerly, for such a message brought hope into their wretched lives. We shared our food with them, poor as it was, nothing but a little bread and cheese and dried figs, and they wept with gratitude.