Mary of Nazareth

by Marek Halter

  As usually happened in cases like this, each household closed in on itself. The villagers bandaged their wounds, dried their tears, calmed their fears. It was only at dawn that they ventured out and spoke to each other about the terror they had been through.

  Miriam had to wait for quite a while before she could slip out of bed. Hannah and Joachim, still shaking with fear, took a long time to fall sleep.

  When she finally heard their regular breathing through the thin wooden partition separating her bedroom from theirs, she got up and, wrapped in a thick shawl, climbed the stairs to the terrace, taking care this time that no step creaked.

  A crescent moon, veiled in mist, lacquered everything in a pale light. Miriam advanced confidently. She could have found her way in pitch darkness.

  She easily found the plank that kept the hiding place closed. As she moved it, the trapdoor was pushed violently from the inside, and she just had time to step aside and avoid it hitting her. The boy was already on his feet.

  “Don’t be afraid,” she whispered. “It’s only me.”

  He was not afraid. Cursing, he shook himself like an animal to get the straw and wool from the bottom of the hiding place out of his hair.

  “Not so loud,” Miriam whispered. “You’re going to wake my parents—”

  “Couldn’t you have come earlier? A person could suffocate in there. And there was no way to open the damned box!”

  Miriam chuckled.

  “You locked me in, didn’t you?” the boy growled. “You did it on purpose!”

  “I was in a hurry.”

  The young man merely snorted.

  To placate him, Miriam showed him the mechanism that opened the trapdoor from the inside, a piece of wood that just had to be pushed hard. “It isn’t complicated.”

  “If you know how it works.”

  “Don’t complain. The soldiers didn’t find you, did they? If you’d been hiding behind the barrels, you wouldn’t have stood a chance.”

  The boy was starting to calm down. In the gloom, Miriam could see his bright eyes. He might even have been smiling.

  “What’s your name?” he asked.

  “Miriam. My father is Joachim, the carpenter.”

  “For a girl your age, you’re brave,” he admitted. “I heard you with the soldiers; you handled them well.” The boy rubbed his cheeks and neck energetically, to wipe off the wisps of straw that still clung to them. “I suppose I have to thank you. My name’s Barabbas.”

  Miriam could not help laughing. Because his name wasn’t a real name; all it meant was “son of the father.” Because of his serious tone, too, and because she was pleased that he had complimented her.

  Barabbas sat down on the logs. “I don’t see what’s so funny,” he said grouchily.

  “It’s your name.”

  “You may be brave, but you’re still as silly as a little girl.”

  The barb displeased Miriam more than hurt her. She knew boys’ minds. This one was trying to make himself seem interesting. There was no need. He was interesting without having to make an effort. He was a pleasant combination of strength and gentleness, violence and fairness, and did not seem overconscious of the fact. Alas, boys of his kind always thought that girls were children, whereas they, of course, were already men.

  Intriguing as he was, though, he had brought the soldiers down on their house and the whole village.

  “Why were the Romans looking for you?” she asked.

  “They aren’t Romans! They’re barbarians. No one even knows where Herod buys them! In Gaul or Thracia. Perhaps from among the Goths. Herod isn’t capable of maintaining real legions. He needs slaves and mercenaries.”

  He spat in disgust over the low wall. Miriam said nothing, waiting for him to answer her question.

  Barabbas peered into the dense shadows of the surrounding houses, as if to assure himself that no one could see or hear them. In the weak light of the moon, his mouth was handsome, his profile fine. His cheeks and chin were covered with a curly beard as thin as down. An adolescent’s beard, which probably did not make him look all that much older in the full light of day.

  Suddenly, he opened his hand. In his palm, a gold escutcheon glittered in the moonlight. It was instantly recognizable: an eagle with outspread wings, a tilted head, and a powerful, threatening beak. The Roman eagle. The gold eagle fixed to the tops of the ensigns carried by the legions.

  “I took it from one of their storehouses,” Barabbas whispered, and laughed proudly. “We set fire to the rest before those stupid mercenaries even woke up. We also had time to pick up two or three bushels of grain. It’s only fair.”

  Miriam looked curiously at the escutcheon. She had never seen one so close. She had never even seen so much gold in her life.

  Barabbas closed his hand again and slipped the escutcheon into the inside pocket of his tunic. “It’s worth a lot of money,” he muttered.

  “What are you going to do with it?”

  “I know someone who can melt it down and turn it into gold we can use,” he said, mysteriously.

  Miriam took a step away from him, torn between conflicting feelings. She liked this boy. She sensed in him a simplicity, a frankness, and an anger that appealed to her. Courage, too, because you needed courage to confront Herod’s mercenaries. But she did not know if she was right. She did not know enough about the world, about what was just and what unjust, to be certain.

  Her emotions drew her naturally to Barabbas’s enthusiasm, his anger at the horrors and humiliations that even young children suffered daily in Herod’s kingdom. But she could also hear her father’s wise, patient voice, and his unswerving condemnation of violence.

  Somewhat provocatively, she said, “You’re a thief, then?”

  Offended, Barabbas stood up. “Certainly not! It’s Herod’s people who call us thieves. But everything we take from the Romans, the mercenaries and those who wallow in the king’s sheets, we redistribute to the poorest among us. To the people!” Underlining his words with a gesture, he went on, his voice full of barely contained anger. “We aren’t thieves, we’re rebels. And I’m not alone, believe me. I’m one rebel among many. The soldiers weren’t only after me tonight. When we attacked those storehouses, there were at least thirty or forty of us.”

  She had suspected as much even before he admitted it.

  Rebels! Yes, that was what people called them—usually not approvingly. Her father and his fellow carpenters in Nazareth often complained about them. They were reckless, dangerous young men their parents should have kept locked up at home. What did they gain by provoking Herod’s mercenaries? One day, because of them, every village in the region would be wiped out. A rebellion! A rebellion of the weak and the powerless, which the king and the Romans could put down whenever they chose!

  Not that there weren’t plenty of reasons to rebel. The kingdom of Israel was drowning in blood, tears, and shame. Herod was the cruelest, most unjust of kings. Now that he was old and nearing death, his cruelty was compounded by his madness. Even the Romans, soulless pagans that they were, were not as bad as Herod at his worst.

  As for the Pharisees and Sadducees, the custodians of the Temple in Jerusalem and its wealth, they were not much better. They shamelessly submitted to the king’s every whim. The laws they made were not there to promote justice, merely to help them hold on to the trappings of power and increase their wealth.

  Galilee, far to the north of Jerusalem, had been ruined by the taxes that enriched Herod and his sons and all those who shared in their shameless ways.

  Yes, Yahweh, as he had done more than once since he had made his covenant with Abraham, had turned his back on his people and his kingdom. But was that a reason to answer violence with violence? Was it wise, when you were weak, to provoke the strong and risk unleashing widespread carnage?

  “My father says you rebels are stupid,” Miriam said, trying to make her voice sound as reproving as possible. “You’re going to get us all killed.”

  B
arabbas laughed. “I know. A lot of people say that. They complain about us as if we were the cause of their misfortunes. They’re scared, that’s all. They prefer to sit on their backsides and wait. And what are they waiting for? Who knows? The Messiah, perhaps?”

  Barabbas dismissed the word with a gesture of his hand, as if to scatter the syllables into the night.

  “The kingdom is full of messiahs, fools, and weaklings, men, every one of them. You don’t need to have studied with the rabbis to know that we can’t expect anything good from Herod and the Romans. Your father is deceiving you. Herod was slaughtering, raping, and stealing long before we came on the scene. That’s what keeps him and his children going. They’re only rich and powerful thanks to our poverty! Well, I’m not the kind of person who waits. They won’t find me cowering in my hole.”

  He fell silent, choked with anger. Miriam did not say a word.

  “If we don’t rebel, who will?” he went on, his voice even harder. “Your father and all the old men like him are wrong. They’ll die whatever happens. And they’ll die as slaves. But I’ll die as a Jew, a son of the great people of Israel. My death will be better than theirs.”

  “My father is neither a slave nor a coward. He’s as brave as you are….”

  “What good did his bravery do him just now? He had to beg when the mercenaries found you hiding on the terrace!”

  “I was only there because you needed saving! They broke everything in our house and our neighbor’s houses, my father’s work, our furniture. All that, just so that you could show off!”

  “Oh, be quiet! I’ve already told you, you talk like a child. Such matters are not for children!”

  They had tried to talk quietly, but had both been carried away by the argument. Miriam ignored the insult. She turned to the staircase, her ears pricked, to make sure that there was no noise inside the house. Whenever her father got out of bed, the bed emitted a particular creak that she always recognized.

  Reassured, she turned to face Barabbas again. He had walked away from the logs and was now leaning over the low wall, looking for a way to get down from the terrace.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “Leaving. I don’t suppose you want me to go out through your father’s precious house. I’d rather leave the way I came.”

  “Barabbas, wait!”

  They were both wrong and both right, Miriam knew. So did Barabbas. That was what made him angry.

  She went close enough to him to put her hand on his arm. He shuddered as if she had stung him.

  “Where do you live?” she asked.

  “Not here.”

  What an irritating habit that was, of never answering questions directly! All part of being a thief, she supposed.

  “I know you don’t live here, or I would have seen you before.”

  “In Sepphoris…”

  A sizable town, an hour and a half’s walk to the north. You had to go through a dense forest to get there. No one would ever dare venture into it at night.

  “Don’t be silly,” she said gently. “You can’t go back now.” She took off her woolen shawl and handed it to him. “You can sleep in the hiding place…Leave the trapdoor open. That way, you won’t suffocate. And if you put this shawl around you, you won’t feel too cold.”

  His only response was to shrug and look away. But he did not refuse the shawl, and he abandoned his attempt to escape over the wall of the terrace.

  “Tomorrow,” Miriam said, with a smile in her voice, “as early as I can, I’ll bring you some bread and milk. But when it gets light, it’s best if you close the trapdoor. Sometimes, my father comes up here as soon as he rises.”

  BY dawn, a thin, cold rain was falling, and everything felt damp. Unseen and unheard by anyone in the house, Miriam took a little pot of milk and a hunk of bread from her mother’s reserves, and climbed to the terrace.

  The trapdoor was closed. The wood glistened with rain. Making sure that no one could see her, she pulled on the plank. The panel tipped just enough to show her that the hiding place was empty inside. Barabbas was gone.

  He had not been gone for long. She could still feel his warmth in the woolen shawl, which he had left behind, carefully folded. So carefully that Miriam smiled. It was as if he had left her a sign. A sign of gratitude, perhaps.

  Miriam was not surprised that Barabbas had vanished like this, without waiting for her. It went well with the image she had of him. Restless, foolhardy, unable to settle. Besides, it was raining, and he must have been afraid of being seen by the people of Nazareth. If anyone had discovered him in the village, they would have been sure to connect him with the young men who were being hunted by Herod’s mercenaries and might have been tempted to take revenge on him for the fear they had felt.

  All the same, as she closed the trapdoor again, Miriam could not help feeling slightly disappointed. She would have liked to see Barabbas again, to talk to him at greater length, to see his face in the full light of day.

  It was highly unlikely their paths would ever cross again. Barabbas would most likely want to avoid Nazareth in the future.

  She turned away to go back down to the house, and as she did so she shivered. The cold, the rain, her fear and anger—it all came together within her at the same time. In turning, she had caught sight of the three wooden crosses that stood on the hill overlooking the village, and although she was accustomed to the sight by now, it never failed to arouse a sense of horror.

  Six months earlier, Herod’s mercenaries had hanged three men there, three “thieves” captured in the area. By now, the three corpses were nothing but shriveled, putrefied, shapeless masses half-eaten by birds.

  That was what awaited Barabbas if he got caught. It was also what justified his rebellion.

  PART ONE

  THE YEAR 6 B.C.

  CHAPTER 1

  THE torpor of early morning was shattered by the cries of children.

  “They’re here! They’re here!”

  In his workshop, Joachim was already at work. He exchanged glances with his assistant, Lysanias, but did not let himself be distracted by the noise. In a single movement, they lifted the cedar beam and placed it on the workbench.

  Groaning, Lysanias massaged his lower back. He was too old for this heavy work, so old that no one, not even he himself, could remember when exactly he had been born, in a village somewhere far away in Samaria. But Joachim had been working with him forever, and could not imagine replacing him with a young apprentice. It was Lysanias, as much as his own father, who had taught him the trade of carpentry. Together, they had made more than a hundred roofs in the villages around Nazareth. Several times, their skills had been demanded from as far away as Sepphoris.

  They heard footsteps in the courtyard as the cries of the children still echoed around the walls of the village. Hannah stopped in the doorway of the workshop. The morning sun cast her shadow across the floor as far as their feet.

  “They’ve arrived,” she said.

  The words were unnecessary, she knew. But she had to say them, to give an outlet to her fear and anger.

  Joachim sighed. “I heard.”

  There was no need to say more. Everyone in the village knew what was happening: The tax collectors of the Sanhedrin had entered Nazareth.

  For days now, they had been going from village to village in Galilee, and the news of their coming had preceded them like the rumor of a plague. Each time they left a village, the rumor grew. It was as if they were devouring everything in their path, like the locusts inflicted on Pharaoh’s Egypt by the wrath of Yahweh.

  Old Lysanias sat down on a wooden block and shook his head. “We should stop yielding to those vultures! We must let God decide who to punish: them or us.”

  Joachim ran his hand over his chin and scratched his short beard. The previous evening, the men of the village had gathered to give vent to their fury. Like Lysanias, several of them had decided they would give nothing more to the tax collectors. No grain, no money, no
objects. Let each person step forward empty-handed and say, “Go away!” But Joachim knew these were just words, the hopeless dreams of angry men. The dreams would fade, and so would their courage, as soon as they had to face reality.

  The tax collectors never came to plunder the villages without the help of Herod’s mercenaries. You might be able to present yourself to the tax collectors empty-handed, but anger could do nothing against spears and swords. It would simply provoke a massacre. Or drive home your own powerlessness and humiliation.

  The neighborhood children stopped outside the workshop and surrounded Hannah, their eyes bright with excitement.

  “They’re in old Houlda’s house!” they cried.

  Lysanias stood up, his lips trembling. “What can they possibly hope to find at Houlda’s? She doesn’t have anything!”

  Everyone in Nazareth knew how close Houlda and Lysanias were. If it had not been for tradition, which forbade Samaritan men to marry Galilean women, or even to live under the same roof, they would have become husband and wife a long time ago.

  Joachim stood up and carefully tucked the ends of his tunic into his belt. “I’ll go,” he said to Lysanias. “You stay here with Hannah.”

  Hannah and the children stood aside to let him pass. No sooner was he outside than he was startled to hear Miriam’s clear voice. “I’ll go with you, Father.”

  Hannah immediately protested. This was no place for a young girl. Joachim was about to agree with her, but Miriam’s determined expression dissuaded him. His daughter was not like other girls. There was something stronger, more mature about her. Braver and more rebellious, too.

  The fact was, her presence always made him happy: a fact so obvious that Hannah never failed to make fun of him for it. Was he one of those fathers besotted with their daughters? Perhaps. If so, where was the harm in it?