Eternal Life

by Dara Horn

But Yochanan, his twelve-year-old voice still high as a girl’s, didn’t care if he insulted his father, so long as it was for what he saw as a higher cause of truth. Yochanan loved doing things for a higher cause of truth—a habit Rachel found endlessly exasperating, not least because he had so clearly learned it from Zakkai. “Father, that’s not the same teaching at all,” he said.

  Zakkai turned to Yochanan, grinning to hide his annoyance. “Of course it is. Weren’t you listening?”

  “All I do is listen,” Yochanan murmured meekly. “It’s my job.”

  Zakkai answered Yochanan, but turned his face to the sage. “One says ‘Do unto others what you would have others do to you,’ while our teacher here says ‘Don’t do unto others what you would not have others do to you.’ The wording is different, yes; one is positive and the other negative. But they are identical. And it’s an important teaching, so I’m glad it’s become popular,” Zakkai added, as though plastering over a dent in a stone wall.

  But Yochanan wouldn’t let it go. He never let anything go. “They’re not the same, Father. You’re a scribe. You should know. If they were the same, why would Master Hillel use different words to say it?”

  Zakkai fumbled. In the time since Azaria’s death, Rachel had noticed his lack of confidence, though he usually succeeded in hiding it in public. Now Rachel could feel her husband losing his mental footing, becoming, again, the bumpkin boy from Tekoa. “Two different sets of words can mean the same thing,” Zakkai muttered.

  “They are indeed very similar,” Hillel offered gently, in his delicate accent.

  “Not in this case,” Yochanan insisted. “Not at all. Think of it this way. Imagine that a king of flesh and blood was a pagan, and prayed to idols.”

  “I don’t need to imagine that,” one of the scholars laughed. To Rachel’s amazement, all eyes were now on her son.

  “Now imagine that the king’s son was ill, and one of the pagan priests told him to pray to an idol. So he prayed to the idol, and then his son was healed.”

  “A coincidence, if it was an idol,” Zakkai said.

  Rachel glanced at her healthy growing son, and felt her confidence in the world shaken. Suddenly she wondered: Could it have been a coincidence? What if Yochanan as a toddler had simply spontaneously healed? What if all of it—the Temple, the priesthood, the vows, all of it—was a fraud? She thought of what Elazar had said about the ritual for a woman accused of adultery, how the ceremony’s power came only from what it meant to the people doing it. As she recalled her own vow, a new thought entered her mind: Did it even matter whether it had been real or not? Wasn’t the vow’s sole power derived simply from its existence—that it had brought her a sense of control over her son’s future, that it had reassured her that there was hope, that it had given her a reason to see Elazar one last time? The world didn’t need to be created in six actual days, and the Temple didn’t need to actually heal the sick or bring the rains or reveal a wayward wife, so long as the metaphor had meaning. So what, she thought, if Yochanan’s imaginary king of flesh and blood wanted to believe in an idol? What difference did it make, in the end? None at all. In the years since she had burned her own hair on the altar, her hair had grown back a bit more brittle; her sunburnt skin had developed tiny wrinkles around her eyes; her breasts, after the years of nursing, now drooped slightly; evidently her body was already edging toward the grave. She had vowed away her own death, whatever that might mean, but she wasn’t going to live forever.

  “But now the king believes in this idol even more,” Yochanan continued. “And he says to the people of his country, ‘Dear loyal subjects! I have discovered the wonders of Jupiter, Healer of All, thanks to the good deed of this priest. And now I wish to do unto others as I would have others do to me. My priest brought me to Jupiter, and now I will bring Jupiter’s wonders to all of you! I now decree that everyone in my kingdom must bow before Jupiter.’ ”

  Rachel stared at her son. The scholars were silent.

  “ ‘Do unto others’ is cruel, even if it sounds like kindness. It’s arrogant to think that others want exactly what you want.”

  Rachel glanced at Hillel, whose gentle face was silver in the moonlight. “Thank you for teaching us,” he said to Yochanan. “That is why I told that man to go out and learn. It isn’t obvious how to be a good person.”

  The scholars looked at Yochanan in awe. Zakkai, Rachel saw, was humiliated, and struggled to contain himself. Finally he couldn’t. “But if you believe in yourself, how could you not do your utmost to share the best of yourself with others?” he asked. He looked at Hillel rather than at Yochanan. “Master, you taught us that you have to be for yourself, or no one else will be.”

  “Yes, but I also have another teaching: Don’t believe in yourself until the day you die.”

  Zakkai looked down at his food, and Rachel felt a deep pity that almost resembled love.

  “How could anyone know the day he’s going to die?” Yochanan asked.

  “Exactly,” said Hillel, and smiled.

  That night after the guests left, Zakkai left too, walking through the city in the night, steaming with anger and shame. But as Rachel finished clearing the table upstairs, she was surprised to hear the ladder creak. She glanced over the table to see her son’s curly head emerging from the hole in the floor. “Yochanan?”

  “Yes, Mother,” he said. His voice seemed lower again, though perhaps that was Rachel’s imagination. But when he emerged onto the roof, she stepped back. Tall and thin in a fresh evening robe, Yochanan stood before her in the dim moonlight. She saw for the first time how much he resembled Elazar.

  “I cleaned out the ashes from the oven,” he said.

  “Really? Why?” Never before in her life had a man done a household chore for her; nor would it happen again for another two thousand years.

  “Do I need a reason?” Yochanan said.

  Rachel knew the reason: to make up for his father’s humiliated absence, to show his mother that she wasn’t alone. She also knew that her son did not know the reason, which meant he was still a child, dizzyingly still a child. She reeled as though peering over the edge of a cliff, and sat down on the parapet. He noticed, because he was still a child, and sat beside her.

  “Cleaning out the ashes made me feel like a priest,” he said.

  “It doesn’t make me feel that way,” Rachel murmured. Over the years, as it became clear that Yochanan would be her only child, Rachel had found herself silently resenting the labor of daily living, the thousands of threads woven and water buckets carried and bowls of dough kneaded and animals skinned and floors swept and garments washed—all those tasks that other women her age performed with a pack of descendants accompanying them. To her, it all seemed more and more meaningless with every passing year. Yet here before her was her only child, oblivious.

  “That’s the first thing they do in the Temple each morning, clean out the ashes from the sacrifices of the day before,” he continued. “Every single thing they do is an act of total devotion.”

  If that’s true, then every parent who ever lived is a priest, Rachel thought, but did not say. Then Yochanan said something she would remember for many years.

  “Maybe we wouldn’t need a Temple,” he said, “if more people knew how to be priests.”

  She looked at Yochanan and saw him as a tiny boy again, dying in her lap as she pleaded with God. There was so little that children knew.

  “Thank you for cleaning it, Yochanan,” she said.

  For the sliver of a moment before Zakkai returned, she sat beside her half-grown son in silence, her son’s still-small hand in hers, full of wonder and devotion.

  AT TWELVE, BOYS START PULLING away from their parents. Rachel would notice it later with many, many others, but she first noticed it with Yochanan. Most of the time he was at the academy, from early in the morning until late at night. When he wasn’t, he worked as a scribe, or alongside Rachel in the marketplace, selling parchments and ink. Even when they worked tog
ether, it was rare that they talked. One hot day when business was slow, she seated herself on the street beside Yochanan. They slurped water from a skin as they waited for customers. A Roman soldier stood across the street from them, a teenager barely older than Yochanan whose uniform showed too much hairy skin. Two little boys walked by and spat at his feet. Rachel thought he might kick them, but he only wiped his foot with the end of his spear and yawned. Boys were a conundrum, Rachel noticed, their minds clouded with incense, politics, sex, war—anything to drive off the boredom and fear at the root of their souls. She turned to her son and wondered what lay within him.

  “Do you like working at the academy?” she asked.

  She was surprised when he answered, “Yes, because it’s hilarious.”

  “Hilarious? Why?”

  “Like this,” Yochanan replied with a grin. “One person will say something like, ‘Don’t trust the government, because they never help anyone unless it benefits themselves,’ and then the next person will say, ‘Pray for the welfare of the government, because if people didn’t fear it, they would swallow one another alive.’ Those two teachings are almost opposites. But I have to memorize both of them, because supposedly both of them are true. And not just true, either. These arguments are supposed to be the word of God, in our time, through the sages’ mouths—and it’s completely impossible for all of it to be true! The last time they had an argument like that, with two ideas that were total opposites, they told me, ‘These words and those words are the words of the living God.’ Which is impossible if you think about it. But almost everything is impossible if you think about it. See why it’s funny?”

  Rachel looked up at the Roman soldier, who was idly scraping his spear against an ancient inscription on the wall. She looked at the boy who should have been dead and told him, “I think so.”

  Yochanan was still grinning. “Maybe it isn’t funny, exactly. It’s something different from a joke. But I can’t help smiling when I think about it. All of these sages are arguing about what God wants from us. But I think God actually wants us to live an impossible life. All the evidence points in that direction.”

  “Why would God want that?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe it makes him laugh,” Yochanan said. “It makes me laugh. Once the sages in the academy had an argument about whether or not people should have been created at all. Guess how long they argued that one for.”

  “Three whole days,” Rachel guessed, and hoped she was wrong.

  Yochanan laughed out loud. “No. Three whole years! Or maybe it was two and a half. I was only there for the last six months. In the end they even voted on it.”

  “What did they decide?”

  “That it would have been better if we had never been created. But since we’re here, they decided we might as well try to improve our deeds. See what I mean? Sometimes I miss a line in an argument because I’m trying too hard not to laugh.”

  “Does Father also find this funny?” Rachel asked.

  Yochanan scrunched his mouth into a hideous pout, then screeched, in Zakkai’s voice, “ ‘What did you learn today, Yochanan? Recite!’ ‘What did you learn yesterday, Yochanan? Recite!’ ‘What will you learn tomorrow, Yochanan? Recite!’ ” The imitation was perfect, and wicked. Rachel was alarmed by how much it hurt to hear it.

  “He gets angry when he sees me smiling,” Yochanan continued in his own voice. “He thinks I’m not taking it seriously. Once when I couldn’t stop myself from smiling, he even beat me afterward. But obviously I’m taking it seriously if I’m laughing about it!”

  Rachel thought of the Zakkai she knew, the one her son had never met: the taunted country boy, the frightened slave standing at the curtain, the person burdened with something to prove. Where had she been, she wondered, when Zakkai beat her son?

  “I don’t think he likes the academy,” Yochanan was saying. “He hasn’t been there at all for the past two weeks.”

  Rachel was confused. “He’s left the house with you every day.”

  Yochanan smirked. “Sure, he walks out the door with me, but then he tells me that he’ll meet me later, and I don’t see him again until the evening.”

  “Maybe he has business at the High Court,” Rachel tried.

  Yochanan pursed his lips. For a brief moment he resembled Elazar. Then he said, “Or maybe he doesn’t.”

  Before she could ask what he meant, a customer approached: a clean-shaven Roman in official dress, asking in Greek for the price of a blank scroll. Yochanan served him with a broad smile, his head bowed before him. As Rachel watched her son, she couldn’t decide: did her boy with his head bowed look like a young man who never did hateful things to his neighbors, or did he simply look like a slave?

  “MOTHER, WE NEED TO do something about Father,” Yochanan told her one early summer evening. It was a few days before the pilgrimage festival; the city teemed with people, and Zakkai wasn’t home. He often wasn’t home. His absence blew through the house like a fresh breeze, pure relief.

  “What are you talking about?” Rachel asked.

  Yochanan led her to the wide bench below the window where he slept and pulled back a corner of the folded sheepskin mat. Beneath it lay a dagger, its sharpened blade gleaming in the fading sunlight. “I found it in the wine cellar this time,” Yochanan said.

  “It must belong to one of the slaves,” Rachel muttered, though she already knew it didn’t. Then she asked, “What do you mean, this time?”

  “This is the second one I’ve found. The first one was under his cloak a few days ago, hanging on the hook by the door. He has a strap sewn inside the cloak to hold it in place.”

  Rachel looked at her son, astonished. “What did you do with the first one?”

  Yochanan pulled back the sheepskin a bit more and revealed the second blade.

  “You can’t keep them here,” Rachel whispered. Since the riots during the pilgrimage festival two months earlier, the Romans had begun arresting people at the slightest sign of trouble; everyone was living in fear. “He could be crucified for this. You could be crucified for this.”

  “I know,” Yochanan said. “But I don’t know what to do with them. I tried burying them outside, but there were too many people around. I tried it at night, but even then there are night watchmen on patrol. And whenever I take one, he gets another, so what difference does it make.” He didn’t make it a question. Rachel was shaking.

  “Where was he going this evening?” she asked.

  “To deliver a message to the procurator’s house.”

  Rachel didn’t need to hear any more. She yanked the skins back over the blades and ran out of the house, pulling her son by the hand behind her.

  THEY RAN THROUGH THE neighborhoods the way she had when she was a girl—through alleys and over garbage heaps, between columns and market stalls, up and down hills and stairs, around cisterns and past soldiers and beggars. The number of people in the streets had swollen for the pilgrimage; there were lines of people clogging every alley, and the garbage heaps had grown. The sun was still bright in the sky, blinding them as it gilded the stones while they ran together, riding thick waves of air blending smells of food and incense and dung. Her son’s hand sweated in hers, melded to her as though they had once again become one body, running and running and running until they reached a mass of people in the street in front of the procurator’s villa, a noisy crowd in front of a row of soldiers brandishing spears. Rachel pushed through the people with her son at her side, looking around desperately. It was Yochanan who said, at last, “Mother, there he is.”

  And there he was, stripped to the waist, his arms and legs shackled, surrounded by a phalanx of Roman guards. His face was radiant.

  “Father!” Yochanan shouted.

  Zakkai turned toward them and smiled.

  “I’m happy now, Yochanan,” he called. “It’s the day of my death, and that means I can finally believe in myself.”

  His eyes glistened with a strange and terrifying power. As Ra
chel and Yochanan watched, he laughed out loud and lunged at one of the guards, biting the man’s cheek until it bled.

  The soldiers closed in. One turned his spear toward Zakkai; another shoved him to his knees. The crowd behind Rachel and Yochanan pushed at their backs.

  In a haze of heat Yochanan rushed toward the soldiers. Rachel grabbed his arm and yanked him back, the way she had when he was a little boy running away from her. She turned her shocked son around and pushed him with all the force she had, shoving him through the tide of people until they both emerged again behind the crowd, fighting for breath.

  “I need to go back to him,” Yochanan gasped.

  “No,” said Rachel. “You are not going to die today.” The crowd behind her was growing, throwing garbage at the soldiers, who responded with clubs and spears. She pushed Yochanan into an alcove in a wall and shielded him with her body. In seconds the riot became a stampede. Behind them waves of people roared and crashed until blood ran between the stones beneath their feet. And then there was nothing to do but carry Zakkai’s body home.

  FOR THE NEXT THIRTY DAYS Rachel followed the orders of her twelve-year-old son. The sages had created elaborate rules for mourners, and Yochanan remembered them all. They removed their sandals, tore their robes, wore sackcloth, didn’t bathe, smeared their faces with ash. For seven days they sat on the floor as visitors filed in and out, bringing food and platitudes; for thirty days they barely left the house. On the thirtieth day the sages assembled with them, reciting psalms and repeating arguments about reward and punishment that Rachel barely followed. At dawn on the thirty-first day, Rachel prepared to go back to the marketplace. She moved as though underwater, dressing herself with careful movements and slowly assembling the parchments on her cart beside the door before undoing the latch. When she opened the door, a man was standing on her threshold, dressed in white and staring at her with weary green eyes.

  “Elazar,” she whispered.

  “Rachel!”

  He looked different from how she had imagined him over the past ten years. His hair was longer, almost to his shoulders, and his body had thickened, his waist bulging a bit, like his father’s. But his eyes gleamed with a secret thrill, as though he were about to laugh. She clutched the doorpost with one hand and struggled to breathe.