by Dara Horn
Yochanan laughed. “Then I’ve been an old man since I was twelve years old.” He looked at her, and in his eyes Rachel saw the boy he once was, the boy who ran to her with his forehead bleeding, the boy who lost the story. “Mother, am I making a mistake? Who was right, him or me?”
“I won’t live long enough to know,” Rachel said. “But maybe you will.”
AN HOUR BEFORE SUNRISE, amid his disciples’ chanted verses, Yochanan climbed into the coffin. The hunger had made all of them into living corpses, but Rachel shuddered in sudden revulsion when her son closed his eyes. His gaunt old body lay drained and silent. The lid came down before she could say a word.
When dawn broke, the disciples assembled around the coffin and raised it to their shoulders. Rachel was surprised by how easily they carried it. Her son’s body was whisked out of her house as if floating on water, carried on the current of everyone he had trained to take his place. She had no trouble playing the part of the mourning old mother; she trailed the coffin wailing aloud. They followed the path through the city she had run so often as a girl, through the alleyways and the marketplace and then down to the plaza in front of the southern stairs of the Temple mount, except now the streets were empty, hunger making it too hard for anyone to leave their beds at dawn. At last they came to the Dung Gate, with its twin pillars of teenage Zealot guards. Between them stood Elazar.
His white robes looked brighter, as they were when he and she first met; she imagined that he had taken pristine ones from his dead father. The Zealots crossed their spears as the coffin approached the locked doors. She watched as Elazar spoke to the two guards, passing them each something she could not see at a distance. The guards raised their spears and stepped forward, until they were blocking the coffin about four cubits before the gate.
“Who’s in this coffin?”
“Our teacher, Yochanan son of Zakkai,” Rachel’s nephew said. “He died early this morning. We cannot keep his body in the city overnight.”
Rachel imagined she heard a sound from within the coffin, but no one else seemed to notice. The guards were younger than her grandchildren. One of them yawned.
“Open it up so we can see,” one guard said.
“Our teacher of blessed memory taught us the laws of purity regarding corpses,” one of the disciples tried. “We cannot—”
“Fine then. Let’s just stab through the coffin and make sure no one inside it is alive.”
“And defile our teacher’s corpse?”
“Stand back,” Elazar announced. His voice was unlike Rachel had ever heard it before: a heavy rolling bellow, like his father’s on the holy days calling out to crowds of thousands. “Stand back and let him pass.” The two guards glanced at Elazar. Then they unbolted the city gates and thrust them open.
Before the coffin could come closer, Elazar slipped along the wall and into an alley. When the coffin reached the threshold Rachel glanced into the alley, but he was already gone. The coffin passed through the doors quickly, the men carrying it almost running, with Rachel following behind. By now Rachel was weeping again, wailing like she had when Yochanan was a sick little boy, unable to understand why she was crying, her eyes blind with tears. But when she reached the doors, one of the guards thrust his spear across her waist.
“Not you,” he said. “You stay.”
The gates closed before her, and her son was gone.
RACHEL STAYED.
Not alone, because no woman is ever alone; every woman has her own unchosen assortment of parents or children or siblings or nieces or nephews or cousins or uncles or aunts, her own babies or elders or someone else’s, a clutch of needy people always hanging on her neck. But the siege went on and on, and the weight on Rachel’s neck became ever lighter. Her three oldest daughters starved to death. Six of her grandchildren followed; a seventh, a teenage boy, left the city on a rebel sortie to attack an enemy camp, and never returned. And then, one hot summer morning, battering rams smashed down the city walls.
Rachel woke to the sound of screams, and bolted upright on the old sheepskin her youngest grandchildren had sucked on as they starved. To her horror, her house was empty: her last living daughter, the mother of the Zealot, must have fled with her younger children in the night, thinking the old woman might hold them back if she tried to say goodbye. Afterward Rachel would tell herself that they had surely escaped the city somehow, that the half-stripped woman she later saw in the upper marketplace, bound and tied to ten others, was surely not her daughter but someone who happened to resemble her, some other unfortunate woman who would soon find herself on an auction block in Rome, which was, after all, perhaps a better fate than the women and men whose bodies Rachel tripped on as she ran as fast as she could through the bloodstained streets. For an instant there seemed no point in continuing—not in running through the city, nor even in breathing. She might have offered herself up to the soldiers then, or run into one of their spears. But she remembered Yochanan and kept running, searching for a way out.
She thought of the tunnel; of course she thought of the tunnel. But so had half the city, including the Zealot warriors; the mouth of the tunnel was stuffed with corpses, and the pool ran with blood. There was nowhere to go. Then she thought of Elazar and his dead father, of the power of the vow, and hurried toward the Temple.
It was nearly impossible to enter the outer court. Thousands of people had gathered there, knowing that nowhere else in the city would God protect them anymore, that at least this one last place of divine favor remained. Rachel pushed her way through the crowds, mostly women and small children and old men, until she passed through the outer gate and no longer had to push, for the crowd pushed her, driving her toward the eastern colonnade of the outer court where she had first met Elazar. The Temple court looked like the morning of a holiday, thousands upon thousands of people gathered to beg forgiveness. If somehow she could reach the inner court, Rachel thought illogically, if she could fight through the crowd and reach that place where she had once climbed the fifteen steps and stood at the threshold before the altar, she still might be able to find a priest, press her face to the floor, make a final vow so she could escape the city alive and live to see her son again. Or if all else failed, at least she might find Elazar.
When Rachel realized this was hopeless, it was already too late. The bowmen and catapults around the ramparts had begun their attack, a hailstorm of stones and flaming arrows falling like burning rain. Rachel was trapped in the panicking crowd, the towering Temple visible high above the screaming people around her, arrows whizzing in all directions in front of the shining edifice—some fired by Roman soldiers, others by Zealots inside the inner court. Moments later, soldiers on the outer court’s colonnades began throwing lit torches at the Temple itself.
The Temple did not burn, not at first. It melted. Silver and gold plating on its surfaces heated until the precious metals shivered and slid down the massive limestone walls, solid becoming liquid. Only then, as she watched the tops of the gleaming walls melt in the hot wavy air, did Rachel see the flash of a torch soar across a patch of blue sky and disappear inside one of the golden apertures near the roof. For an impossibly long time the walls continued dissolving, thin curls of smoke from the priests’ courtyard around it inscribing the sky like incense. And then the House of God erupted in flames.
The massive bronze doorframes groaned and crumpled inward as the planks of the cedar doors slowly transformed from wood to ash, until the doorway stood open like a vast mouth, vomiting fire and smoke. The fire spread quickly, and the crowds near the gate to the inner court were consumed by the flames. Soon Rachel saw flaming people climbing up onto the parapets surrounding the outer court, screaming as they fell into the city below. Others rushed toward the gate to the inner court, scrambling over piles of burning bodies to plunge themselves directly into the furnace, final sacrifices to purge their sins. The flames grew and swallowed the priests’ quarters, fire flowing across melting silver and cedar beams and renderi
ng whoever remained inside into ash. As the colossal Temple vanished behind a towering column of thick black smoke, Rachel smelled the burning flesh. At that moment she knew with total certainty that life in this world had ended.
As the fires spread to the surrounding buildings, the crowd around Rachel pushed toward the inner court, then pushed back again as flaming wooden beams collapsed onto waves of people, fire spreading from one person to the next as people pressed against one another, unable to escape. Heat smothered the crowd from above, the air wavy and thick with ash. All around her people were gasping, slipping and disappearing beneath one another, and the ground rose and fell with bodies underfoot. Rachel’s corner of the crowd pushed toward the eastern gate, a wooden door on the outer court—locked, her father had taught her, until the arrival of the Messiah. If it were opened, it would lead to the deep valley on the mountain’s edge, a precipitous ravine facing the cemetery where her parents were buried. The door had never before been opened, but today it was a gaping maw of smoke and flame, the wooden doors on fire and the metal doorframe dripping molten gold. The people around her pushed out of the fire’s way, climbing over one another to the colonnades beyond the flames’ reach. But Rachel saw that flaming gate and understood that there was no longer any purpose in being alive, that the door had been opened for her. She ran through it, her body catching fire as she leaped to the valley below.
WHEN SHE AWOKE, she knew she was dead. It did not occur to her that death involved no waking. She opened her eyes and found herself lying pressed into the ground, one cheek hot against limestone and her breasts and belly pushed against her threadbare robe on the burning dust. When she scrambled to sit up, she saw the mountain she was on, a bare rock-strewn hillside bereft of people. Its emptiness frightened her. In her entire life she had never left the city, and the strange silence on the hilltop only made her more certain that she was dead. She shakily rose to her feet. Before her was another empty hilltop, nearly identical to the one she stood on. To her right and left stood more empty hilltops, each as desolate as the last. It was only when she turned fully around that she saw the city in the distance, its entirety on fire, a massive burning pillar of thick black smoke rising up to a clear blue sky.
So she wasn’t dead, she understood. She had survived—which was like being dead, only worse. Surely something had happened that her memory had erased, some mindless journey from there to here. Perhaps she had jumped through the gate and hit her head, became a temporary idiot, and then wandered for days. Not much later she became even more certain she was alive. It was summertime, the sun was high in the sky, and she was overcome with thirst. She heard a noise nearby and suddenly saw a ram, a large and majestic animal, stepping through a thorn bush near the hilltop’s edge. In the city she had often seen rams being led up to the Temple for sacrifice; as a girl she had looked into the animals’ eyes and imagined that they understood their importance, their essential part in the world’s maintenance and repair. The ram on the hilltop lifted its head and stared at her blankly, its eerie eyes devoid of meaning. The animal defecated, then turned and headed back down the hill.
She followed its horns until she came to a well. So there were people nearby, she thought with relief. In the distance she could even make out a low stone wall, with a row of tents behind it. She pulled at the well’s rope and desperately hauled up a full bucket. But as she bent down to plunge her mouth into the water, she saw a reflection in the water’s surface: the soft, smooth, uncertain face of an eighteen-year-old girl.
She dropped the bucket, barely noticing as it plummeted back into the well. She reached up, frightened, and felt her bare head, noticing suddenly that her hair was uncovered outdoors, for the first time since she had married fifty years before. With growing horror, she pulled a handful of her hair around to her face and saw it: thick black hair, the same hair she had when she was a young girl. As she dropped the hair, she looked at her hand, her thin, uncertain, ungnarled, unwrinkled young girl’s hand, and stopped breathing.
By then the Roman soldiers from the garrison down the hill had arrived on horseback behind her, the captains pointing their spears at her as the others bound her and took her back to their camp for the entertainment of the officers. Seven years passed before she managed to steal enough money to escape, to make the journey to her still-living son, the famous Yochanan.
“YOCHANAN, YOU IDIOT!”
Yochanan sat up in his bed, taking her hand in his. “Mother, don’t you understand? When Vespasian asked me what he could give me, I knew exactly what to ask for. I asked for permission for the Torah scholars to be protected near their garrison in Yavneh. That way, no matter what happened to Jerusalem, there would still be people who could teach the Torah in the future. That way the Torah would be safe.”
“But you could have saved the Temple!”
“I don’t think I could have done that. If God wanted to destroy the Temple, God would destroy the Temple. God destroyed the Temple before.”
“The Romans destroyed it! And you could have stopped them!”
“I did what I could. I did what was possible.”
“You’re like a child! You saved your favorite book!”
“Yes! Because nothing matters but the story!”
Rachel pulled back from her son, and buried her face in her smooth, unwrinkled hands. She pressed her palms against her eyes and saw the flames again, saw her whole life in flames, saw her own body burning, her skin sliding off her flesh like molten gold, saw her tiny son almost dying in her arms—and then pulled away her hands and saw her son, her old, old son, dying before her. She held her breath.
“We saved you, Yochanan,” she said, measuring each word. “Your father and I, we saved you, when you were a baby and almost died. We saved you again when you were old, we put you in a coffin and carried you out of the city.”
“You and Father,” Yochanan said, and coughed. He didn’t ask her to explain. Yochanan must have thought she meant it figuratively, that Zakkai’s ghost had haunted her. Or maybe he thought she meant a divine Father, some ridiculously abstract concept of a world that preceded him? Yochanan turned everything into a metaphor. “You taught me what mattered,” he said. He took her hand again, as if he had become the parent, comforting her. But his breathing was labored now. He leaned back on cushions like a philosopher at a symposium, drinking wine and wisdom. “That’s why I saved what mattered most in the world,” he rasped. “I saved the future.”
Children! “Yochanan, you don’t understand,” Rachel said. Her voice sounded like a teenager’s, angry and desperate. She was younger than her son. “I gave up my own death for you, with a vow in the Temple,” she whispered. “And now the Temple is gone, and I’m never going to die, Yochanan. You’re dying, but I’ll be here forever, in an eternal life.”
“Then maybe you’ll find out if I was right,” Yochanan said.
He smiled, breathed, and fell into a deep, deep sleep.
SHE COULDN’T WATCH HIM DIE. When she left the room, his oldest disciples rushed in to hear his last words, waiting until he arose with a cough and noticed their presence, succumbing to their demand for a final teaching. Rachel heard him speaking from behind the doorway’s curtain.
“May you fear God as much as you fear other people,” her dying son said.
“Not more?” one follower asked.
“No,” Yochanan told him. “Because a person about to do something wrong always says, ‘I hope no person will see me.’ If only they feared God nearly as much.”
And if God isn’t present, Rachel wondered, if God has pushed open the doors of his house and departed, and burned down whatever remains, if nothing at all is left, then what? Does one enter an empty world, running through an empty city with no one waiting and no one watching, delivering a message to a future that doesn’t exist? What then was the purpose of being alive?
Rachel heard her son’s death rattle from behind the curtain: a gasping, heaving sound. She heard it and could not cry. Instead she
looked down at her shaking young girl’s hands that once held her father’s scrolls, and ran out the door.
She ran down the hill, away from the village, away from every living thing, away from the world. Houses and shanties quickly thinned around her until the dirt road opened onto a stubbled plain, devoid of anything but rocks and olive trees and clusters of sheep. She would run until she ran into the sea. Ahead of her, a young man—no, a boy, she saw as she raced closer, a teenaged boy, gangly and thin-wristed, with a sparse beard and pauper’s robes—stepped away from the sheep he had been watching and into her path. She veered to the side, hoping to avoid him on her drive toward oblivion. Until she heard him call her name.
“Rachel!”
She skidded to a stop just past where he stood. She turned around slowly, a strange electricity coursing through her aching legs. When she faced the boy, she saw his smooth skin, his thick black hair, his bare pale wrists, and his odd green eyes.
“Elazar?”
He leaned back, and the fear in his face startled her. His voice shook. “I thought—I—I hoped it was only me,” he murmured.
Rachel glanced at the dirt, the rocks, the sheep, the sky, and remembered the house on fire. Had nothing changed? But everything had changed.
“He’s dead, isn’t he,” Elazar said.
It was unbearable to hear it. Rachel felt her skin burning again, seared like molten gold. She doubled over and gasped for air. When Elazar held her she had no strength left to push him away.
To her astonishment, his hand against her back steadied her. She breathed more slowly, each breath a tiny foothold out of the pit. And then he said something that comforted her: “I hope you didn’t watch him die.”
Rachel raised her head and saw the boy from the tunnel. Years evaporated like water. “I couldn’t,” she said. She looked again at Elazar, not remembering, but feeling in her body his fingers along her neck, cold currents against her feet, his mouth on her breast, her baby’s shriveled weight in her arms, cool air on her shaved scalp, wet smears of ink on her fingertips, blood from Zakkai’s body dripping on her sleeves, Elazar’s hand pressing on hers against the doorpost of her house, the shifting weight in her son’s coffin. What had been the point of the vow, if it had only come to this?