by Dara Horn
“Maybe,” she said, “or maybe not. Maybe it was an hour. Or maybe it was seven hundred thousand years.”
Yochanan turned toward her. Usually an invisible wall stood between them, a little boy’s pride that broke down only when he was sad or frightened or needed his mother. But now his dark eyes were wide and his mouth hung open, as though he himself had disappeared, replaced by a thought. She had not seen that look of wonder on a boy’s face since she first met Elazar in the tunnel, when he said to her, I didn’t think you’d come.
“Why would it say that it was the fourth day, if it wasn’t the fourth day?” Yochanan asked. It was not an objection; it was a question. “What’s the reason for writing ‘the fourth day’? If it were a mistake, Grandpa would correct it. He corrected lots of things, but not this.”
Rachel said nothing, and combed through the wool.
Yochanan was thinking now: not waiting for answer, not trying to be right, but thinking. “Maybe it says that for people, because people have days, even if God doesn’t?” he asked.
“Maybe,” Rachel said, and picked out the burrs in the wool.
“Or maybe it’s like a secret message? Simeon once told me about a Greek messenger who had words tattooed on his head so that the words would be hidden under his hair after it grew back, and when he got to where he was going, the officers shaved off his hair to read the secret message.”
Rachel remembered that Yochanan was seven years old. “Maybe,” she said.
But Yochanan no longer needed her approval. He was thinking. “Actually, everything in the story is kind of like a secret message,” he said, “because God has to tell everything to people, in people’s words, but people aren’t as smart as God, so everything is like a stupid version of the real story.”
Rachel had not considered this. She looked at her little boy with sudden and frightening understanding: her entire life, every person’s entire life, was a stupid version of the real story, a tiny glimpse of a tiny sliver of the briefest of moments, a few days out of eternity. But the boy was turning away from her. “Mama, can you please leave me alone now?” he asked. “I want to read.”
She left him, as she always would.
The next day Rachel stood at her ink and parchment stall while Yochanan ran through the city, delivering her father’s scrolls. On market days Yochanan would meet her at the stall at sunset. He liked to sneak up on her, creeping up behind her as she was packing up her cart and pouncing on her with his fanged seven-year-old grin. Each time she pretended to be surprised. When she felt a weak tug on the back of her skirt that evening, she spun around with eyebrows raised, ready to shriek. And then she shrieked. Before her stood her little boy, his forehead covered in blood.
My baby! she screamed, soundlessly, sucking in a sob. Already she knew how essential it was for him not to see her cry. Instead she poured water from a skin onto a rag from her cart and wiped it on her little boy’s brow. His curls were matted in the blood, but it wasn’t flowing anymore, she saw. A large lump crowned his forehead, the skin raw. “You fell,” she told him. Told, didn’t ask. “You fell, but you’re all right.”
“I was reading the story for the new year, the one about Abraham tying up Isaac,” he said. He was babbling, incoherent. “I brought it from home to read. I was reading it while I was walking, just reading it while I was walking, walking,” he stammered.
“Don’t read while you’re walking,” she told him, still wiping his face.
“I didn’t see them. I really didn’t see them.”
“Who?”
“The soldiers. I walked right into them. I didn’t see them. They wanted the message I was delivering.”
“I hope you gave it to them,” she said warily. What was it, she wondered?
“I did, but then they also took the story I was reading. That wasn’t fair, so I tried to take it back.” His lips crimped. Rachel sickened as she suddenly understood. He had been holding his jaw steady, but now his voice broke, his little boy mouth quivering. “I lost it. I lost the story. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry—”
“I care about you, not the story,” she said softly.
“But I care about the story,” he wailed. She put him on top of her cart, still wailing, and wheeled him home.
That night she sat with Yochanan on the bench where he slept, rubbing a salve into the raw skin on his forehead. It was dark in the house, and Yochanan was almost sleeping, a suspended state that reminded Rachel of five years earlier, of holding him as he hung, barely breathing, between life and death. He was drifting now, unconscious and beautiful. “I lost the story,” he groaned, and rolled away from his mother.
“You are the story,” she whispered, and kissed him goodnight.
RACHEL’S MARRIAGE WAS DIVIDED in two: life with Zakkai, and life without him. For two weeks of every month—for that was the law, according to the scrolls her father copied—she was free, unmolested, untouched by any male besides her little boy. At the end of those two weeks she would visit the ritual bath with absolute earnestness. She immersed herself naked in the cool water of the stone cistern each month and imagined an unquestioned love for her husband; each time she burst through the water’s surface, she willed that serene stasis to emerge along with her. But by the time she put her robe back on she was already dreading the thick heat of their tiny curtained chamber, the hot sheepskin under her bared backside, the suffocating smell of Zakkai’s breath on her face, the weight of Zakkai’s hairy body pressed against hers, as though he thought he could crush her into believing in him. Her deep desire to be crushed into believing in him never made her loathe him any less.
Zakkai never noticed that anything was wrong, and this great mercy was the solid slab of fiction on which their marriage stood. Rachel had hoped at first that things might change between them, that something might grow, and she was right. The thing that grew was her revulsion. To her astonishment, and against all reason, honest and blameless Zakkai—Zakkai who asked for her opinions about writing and the law, Zakkai who sang her praises to everyone he met—became more repulsive to her with each night she lay beneath him. During the first years she sometimes tried to fantasize that Zakkai was Elazar. But so much was so different—the hot air in place of cool water, the crush of lying on the floor instead of standing face-toface, the forced silence of her parents’ and child’s presence behind the curtains, and something more than that, something that no amount of Zakkai’s kindness or generosity could replace—that this proved to be beyond her imaginative powers. Instead, she imagined that she herself was a different woman, one of the household slaves.
One evening as Rachel returned from the baths, slowly unwinding the scarf that covered her wet hair, her mother sat in the house crushing herbs by lamplight. “It fades,” her mother said, without looking up.
“What?” Rachel asked.
“What you feel, what you want, what you can’t have,” her mother said, accenting each phrase with mortar against pestle. “It fades. You get older, you have more children, and you forget you ever felt it. Give it time, and it will fade for you too.”
Rachel stared at her mother, who still did not raise her head, and marveled at the hidden life of every old woman. Rachel’s wet hair dripped on her shoulders, soaking the back of her robe as she went, renewed, to Zakkai. For a time she lived with the dim hope her mother gave her, and waited for the memory of Elazar to dissipate like a smell. But to Rachel’s surprise, her mother was wrong. It never faded, even after a dozen years. Rachel’s marriage was an act of endurance that almost resembled faith, and Rachel was rewarded—or cursed, according to Zakkai—by never becoming pregnant. As the years passed, Zakkai’s yearning for more children transformed into an obsession with Yochanan. Zakkai loved Yochanan, admonished him, encouraged him, pressured him, would do anything for him. The feeling was hardly mutual, but Zakkai didn’t care. He was a father, and a father thinks only of the future.
By the time Yochanan was ten years old, the old master scribe Azari
a was dead, collapsed on his writing table with blood leaking from his nose onto parchment. His death instantly transformed Zakkai into head of the household and master scribe, recording not only holy books and court documents, but also the arguments and discussions of the sages. Zakkai could hardly have done the job if it weren’t for Yochanan. For Yochanan, in a very short time, had developed a specific gift, one that brought Rachel into a state of awe. By the age of ten he was a tanna, or in other words, a living book.
Every scribe memorized long texts; that was as commonplace in Jerusalem as a sacrificial goat. But a tanna memorized conversations, sitting beside the scholars in the academy and recording in his mind every word spoken, every nuance of the unspooling, contentious, unending oral law, which of course was also given by God at Sinai, even if only these conversations between scholars revealed it. The tanna’s job was to remember it all, and to report back what the scholars needed from yesterday’s discussion, last month’s discussion, last year’s discussion. A tanna, until now, had always been a grown man. But Yochanan already sat in the academy, committing to memory every spoken word, and the academy needed him. Zakkai could not believe his good fortune. His only son was a miracle, a vindication of his own small life. Until Yochanan began coming up with ideas of his own.
One night when Yochanan was twelve years old, Zakkai lay at Rachel’s side and turned toward her, brushing her hair away from her face. Moments earlier she had barely tolerated his body against hers, but now the gentle touch of his hand across her hair made her feel a strange affection, an emotion she wished she could exaggerate into something more. In a voice quieter than she had ever heard him use, he asked her, “Do you ever think about Yochanan’s future?”
“It’s the only thing I think about,” she said. She tried to decode what Zakkai meant. Yochanan already had a trade, and it was hardly time to find him a bride. Was there something else she was supposed to be doing for her child, other than preparing him for some distant life without her?
“We can’t allow him to live like this,” Zakkai said.
This puzzled Rachel. She propped herself on an elbow and faced him. “Allow him to live like what?”
“Like a slave,” Zakkai answered. He lay back on the floor, and contemplated the ceiling in the dark.
“What are you talking about?” Rachel asked. She recalled Zakkai’s first entrance into the house, his seven-year contract to repay his brother’s debts, his straw mat in the wine cellar among the slaves, seven-year slaves like him, while she slept upstairs, the daughter of his master. “Yochanan is a free person.”
“Yochanan isn’t a free person, and neither are you or I,” Zakkai said.
Rachel recalled the recent arguments she had heard in the house among the scribes and sages. She felt the words that were coming next before they arrived, like a breeze before a storm.
“Ours is the only province in the entire empire that refused to worship Caesar,” Zakkai began. “The sages all think it’s some great victory. But look how we’ve paid! The Roman procurator helps himself to the Temple treasury like it’s his personal account. When crowds gather to protest, the Romans put their soldiers in civilian clothes and then surprise everyone by clubbing people to death. The priests are in the Romans’ pockets, the High Court has no power over anything but domestic disputes, and our own laws are subordinate to the Romans’ whims. I was a slave, Rachel. I know what it’s like. This is only different if we pretend it is.”
Rachel stifled a grimace. So why not pretend, she thought, like every girl or woman, or really, like nearly everyone in one way or another—every person who ever lived a daily life formed from other people’s whims? Wasn’t that simply what being alive demanded? But Rachel said nothing.
“I just don’t see the point of any of it,” Zakkai said. He stared again at the soot-covered ceiling. “What’s the purpose of being a sage when wisdom has a limit, when you can only say what’s true until you offend some Roman guard? I feel like I’m living my life as though I had all of eternity, as though one day the kingdom will be restored and everything will matter again, but until then I’m just waiting,” he said. “Lately I can’t stop thinking about it. And I just keep thinking that while I’m waiting for something to change, what I’m really doing is stealing Yochanan’s future.”
Rachel sat up and struck a flint, lighting the lamp beside their bed. Now she could see Zakkai’s glistening face, his curly hair stuck with sweat to his beading forehead. His body had thickened since their marriage, but his face was still as narrow as a boy’s. “There’s no need to worry about Yochanan,” she told him. “He already knows how to get along with everyone, how to tolerate everything. He’ll do better than either of us.”
“That’s exactly what I’m worried about,” Zakkai said. “I’m worried he’ll become like me, pathetically grateful for living less than half a life.” Suddenly he sat up and took her hands. Usually she resented his touch, but his hands were warm and agitated, trembling in a way that made her feel all of his sweet and sickly innocence. “Rachel, may I tell you something?” he asked. “I shouldn’t tell anyone, especially not a woman. But I have to tell someone or I’ll go mad.”
He really was like a boy, Rachel thought. “What is it?” she asked.
“There’s a priest on the High Court who’s also a sage, one of the high priest’s deputies,” he told her. His words were low and quick, as though he were trying on a new voice. “He passed me a message today while I was recording the proceedings, telling me to meet him afterward, privately. When I did, he told me he and some other people—important people, Rachel, people on the High Court!—are making plans. They want me to join them.”
“What plans?”
Zakkai did not answer. Instead he lay down on his back again, his dark eyes shining in the lamplight. Rachel looked at Zakkai’s body, stretched out on the sheepskin bedding she once shared with her sisters, sweaty and hairy and trembling. He was smiling more brightly than she had ever seen him smile, with an excitement he had never shown before. He turned toward her, and still did not answer. “For the first time in my life I feel like there’s a reason I’m alive,” he finally said. “And that there’s a reason I’m Yochanan’s father.”
Rachel stared at him. Suddenly the full abundance of Zakkai’s innocence reared up before her, and she saw what was concealed beneath it: an extravagant stupidity. “I thought you said you were worried about Yochanan’s future,” Rachel said delicately. “Why would you—”
“That’s exactly why,” Zakkai interrupted. His eyes were radiant. He sat up again, once more taking her hands. “There’s a sage I want you to meet, one that Yochanan already knows well. I wasn’t sure what to do until I heard his latest teaching. Yesterday he taught us: ‘If I am not for myself, who will be for me? And if I’m only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?’ ”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Rachel muttered. She still could not get beyond what Zakkai had said, the colossal scale of his idiocy.
“It means what it means,” Zakkai said happily, as if that explained everything. “If I were Yochanan, I would want my father to do whatever he could for me. In any case, I’ve invited the sage to dine with us tomorrow evening. So please prepare something good,” he told her, still smiling.
As if she were a piece of furniture in his way, he leaned across her body and blew out the flame, then rolled on his side, content.
Rachel lay awake in the dark, afraid for Yochanan’s future.
HILLEL THE ELDER WAS rumored to be almost a hundred and twenty years old, but that only made sense if you counted two new years, the one in the spring and the one in the fall. He was old, but full of energy. He appeared at their door with several disciples and without a cane, and to Rachel’s surprise he made his way up the ladder to their rooftop for a moonlit meal like a limber young boy. He spoke with a Babylonian accent, which Rachel usually found pretentious. But what Rachel noticed most about him as they settled around the set table was an aura of pa
tience, a quiet, humble awareness of other people’s presence. He smiled not only at the men, but at her too. She watched in awe as he led the blessings, washing his hands in a basin at the table like a priest before passing around the bread and wine and barley stew, acknowledging each person with his cheerful face.
Zakkai stirred in his seat as the scholars began a tedious conversation about civil damages. Rachel could see that Zakkai was itching to speak, to stir the old man like a pot. At last, in a lull, he put in a word. “Our teacher told me recently about an amazing thing,” he finally said to the group. “A pagan came to his house and asked him, ‘Can you teach me the entire Torah while I’m standing balanced on one foot?’ Most of us would have sent the man away, but—well, Master, tell everyone what you said to him.”
“Really very little,” Hillel said. He seemed embarrassed. “All I said was, ‘What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. That is the entire Torah. Now go out and learn.’ ”
Rachel found this dubious. Was that really the entire Torah? Or was it the Torah, stripped of all its majesty and power? What about the divine presence alive in a cloud, the burnt offerings to God, the chance to die without dying? She glanced at Zakkai, who was smiling, basking in the sage’s presence. But Yochanan, she saw, was thinking. Her son’s face had become longer in recent months, a shadow of a mustache forming on his upper lip. He squinted at the old sage with dark eyes full of doubt. She considered asking a question herself. But being a mother meant something other than voicing one’s thoughts. Her task, she knew, was to bear witness.
“One of the wonderworkers in the city has taught the same thing,” Zakkai volunteered. “He teaches what he calls the Golden Rule: Do unto others what you would have others do to you. Your Torah has traveled far, if even wonderworkers are quoting it.”
Hillel smiled, though Rachel detected something insincere in his face—as though he didn’t quite agree, but didn’t wish to insult his host. He looked away, and took more bread.