The Damascus Road

by Jay Parini

  “Did your parents say anything to you?” I asked the boy.

  It was quite pointless, I could see, to persist in this way. The children had no information, and whatever they had witnessed, they couldn’t say. The words would never come. So I put a coin into each of their hands, a weak gesture of thanks.

  A thick swirl of ash blew toward us, a cloud of red-hot cinders, and I fell to my knees. My face felt on fire, and I couldn’t see. When the cloud passed, I looked up, but the boys had vanished.

  “Boys!”

  I staggered to my feet, rushing into the nearby alleyway between their house and another building. I could not let them go. But another whirlwind caught me with a blast, and I fell to the pavement, and I could not move.

  But the boys!

  I dragged myself toward an opening in the smoke, leaning into what I thought was the direction they must have gone. But the alleyway branched in three directions, and there were flames at the end of each, massive clots of fire. Turning back, I hoped to follow them another way. The streets in this part of Rome all circled upon each other and, at some point, converged. For an hour or more I searched through the smolder before abandoning hope of finding them.

  In a quiet spot apart from the fire, near the river, I sat on a rock and prayed. Prayer was my only refuge. And I begged God for guidance. I could not possibly discover a way forward without divine intervention. But I could not bend my will to God’s will, accepting that Paul had vanished and that I might never speak to him again. Do not let this happen! I prayed.

  It was late afternoon by the time I rose, exhausted, to cross the capital on foot once again. The flames had spread from the slave quarters near the base of the Circus Maximus, where it caused a claustrophobic huddle of human misery. I pushed ahead through the imperial city, where the Temple of Luna was reduced to blackened stones and smoldering char. Vesta’s shrine was damaged too, and flames licked the edges of the Forum.

  Was this the apocalypse that Paul had predicted? “He is coming soon,” Paul would tell gatherings in the early days of our efforts. “Waste no time! You might not even get to sleep through the night!”

  Many in Rome would not sleep through this night.

  * * *

  Somehow I made it back to my room in the house of Atilius, a young friend and follower of the Way, on the other side of Rome. That I was alive at all surprised me. Though exhausted, I could hardly sleep, and my thoughts turned to all the ways I had failed Paul, small and large. How could I even pretend to be his physician? In the past few months he had spent many days in bed, complaining of vicious headaches that shot from temple to temple and distorted his vision. I treated this condition—not unfamiliar to those who practice medicine—with an herbal compound, a mixture of ginger bark and clove, with extracts of willow. Yet he slept badly, and the headaches continued without pause, though it helped a little to apply a wet cloth soaked in the dust of eucalyptus leaves to his forehead. I would sit beside him, listening to him gasp until he fell asleep.

  Some nights, as Junia told me, he wandered alone in the city streets, returning with the next day’s sun on blistered feet, which she insisted he soak in brine. Walking in pain with a stick at night, he told her, was preferable to tormented sleep. I objected to these nighttime prowls, too. “Rome is full of thieves and murderers,” I told him. “One night you’ll disappear, and we’ll have no idea what happened.”

  Paul would shrug and say, “Luke, you’re a physician. My dear friend, summon your magic!”

  But I was not a magician, and I could not rescue my dearest friend. I could not make him sleep soundly, without pain.

  A few weeks before the fire began, Paul and I had visited a gathering of the Way near Ostia, a port some miles to the west of Rome, where we spent a few nights with Lucina. She had been a Godfearer—that is, she was a Greek like myself, a gentile drawn to the God of Israel, to the richness of Jewish traditions and the glorious Hebrew scriptures, where God had spoken with eloquence and force. Like me, she had turned to the Way of Jesus, as had so many Godfearers over the years. (They had become our richest source of converts.)

  She owned a fine villa on an estate that had belonged to her family for generations, and had become our close friend and benefactor. She suggested that Paul and I retreat to a small house near the coast that belonged to her. This could, she said, become our “final refuge” after years of wandering on the distant roads of empire, over mountains and through long valleys, from city to city, by ship or foot, donkey, cart, or camel.

  “Your work is done,” she told us.

  Paul thanked Lucina, saying that he liked the idea of a peaceable time by the sea. It would not, of course, mean the end of his work. His trenchant, eloquent letters to followers of the Way often provoked controversies and required elaborations and clarifications; he could easily spend the rest of his life responding to their questions and clarifying his positions. For my part, I would try to finish my life of Jesus, which had preoccupied me for decades. And I would write, if God permitted, an account of my travels with Paul, our journeys through the empire with the Good News, as we called it, in hand, this message of God’s love.

  In safety and seclusion, in Lucina’s seaside refuge, we might finish our projects.

  That was the dream, now scorched by flames.

  Paul had envisioned the end of history in fervid and often beautiful dreams. But the sky had not opened with brass trumpets and voluptuous choirs of angels, with the eyes of the Christ burning into the world as he descended from the clouds. The bodies of the dead had not risen through the packed dirt over their graves, becoming light itself. We had not been transmogrified, turned into angels.

  Not without the pain of loss, Paul had begun to modify his sense of what Jesus meant for us and how the final days might unfold.

  “Stay calm, and love God,” he had said, when I pressed for answers. “He will know you when he returns. Time does not concern us.”

  But I wanted and needed more. I needed to find Paul.

  * * *

  The next morning Atilius, a kindly soul whose ministrations always surprised me with their gentleness, brought a plate of orange slices to my room. His hand trembled, and he sat beside me silently. I could see that something troubled him. I forced myself to eat and did not ask for news, as it could only discourage me. Only when I had chewed and swallowed the last segment did he tell me, in tears, that Nero’s soldiers had herded dozens of our friends into a stadium, stuffing them into the skins of beasts. Wild dogs had been set upon them, tearing them apart for the entertainment of crazed onlookers, many of whom scavenged in the crowd for a crust of bread or drink of water.

  “I’m leaving Rome,” he said in a low voice, as if even within his own house he might be overheard and seized. “And you should too, Luke. It’s not safe.”

  “I’m going to look for Paul.”

  “This is foolish.” But he saw I could not be dissuaded, and he sighed.

  * * *

  Near sunset, I headed to the foot of the Aventine, by chance meeting Marcus, another Roman convert to the Way, who told me that only the night before, in a garden called the Circus of Nero, the site of chariot races in recent years, they had burned our people alive, transforming them into human torches. They were likely to do the same again tonight.

  I knew the garden well, as Paul and I had often gone there to pray in that green enclosure, once a shrine to Cybele, with its tidy rows of poplar, its fragrant oleander beds, yellow roses, and sword lilies. It had been a tranquil place for us.

  “I must go there,” I said.

  Marcus looked at me with fear. “It’s not safe for any of us,” he said.

  But what did safety matter? What was my life anymore? Paul might be there in the Circus of Nero, ablaze, in agony. Though my skills were hardly equal to this outrage, I would do whatever I could for him and assist the others as best I coul
d. If they arrested me and burned me to death as well, so be it. Paul’s words came back to me: “The suffering of the present moment is meaningless, especially when we think of the glory to come, with the Christ, who is revealed in him.” Helpless though I was, I would be glad for a way to show my allegiance to the Kingdom of God and my affection for his son.

  Marcus grasped my hand to say goodbye, and I set off toward the garden by myself.

  As darkness dropped, I fell in with a Roman mob, folding myself in their chaos, hiding amid their raucous cheers and bellowing. They surged through the streets, some of them lifting torches. Their violent energies, and hatred, appalled me.

  And then I heard it: The agony of voices peeling over the rooftops. The sound cut my heart into strips.

  “They’re burning them,” said a toothless man beside me in demotic Greek.

  “Who? Who are they burning?”

  “The Way,” he said. “The ones who set this fire. They follow the Christ.”

  He used the Greek word for messiah, “the Christ,” and in spite of my terror I felt a rush of satisfaction: Jesus was indeed the Christ and not simply the Jewish messiah. He was the Word itself, before and after time, the pulse of consciousness, the shaping spirit of the Almighty. As Paul had written, “Our Christ is one in whom all things come together.”

  The garden blazed with dozens of human torches. Soldiers had poured black pitch over our people and set them ablaze. Not even Gethsemane had known such anguish.

  I pulled the cowl over my face and crouched behind a glistening ivy. My nerves rippled, hot lines in the sleeves of my arms and legs. I burned with my friends, ablaze myself and screaming inside.

  The lucky ones were, thank God, already dead, so beyond this horror and anguish. The flesh had melted from their faces, and the black eyeholes in their skulls outstared infamy.

  I took this inferno as a sign from God and could hardly doubt its meaning. Paul was right: The end of time had drawn near. It was, perhaps, here. Our Lord would at any moment appear, and the mighty of the earth would collapse beneath the weight of his glory.

  But where was Paul?

  Chapter Two

  PAUL

  “You’re lazy,” my father said, as he pruned an olive tree in our garden. “God hates lazy people.”

  He was slightly stooped, his head sloping forward like a vulture, with his shoulder blades like folded wings; the back of his neck glowed like a stalk of cinnamon, the consequence of long days in the sun. His name was Adriel, and he had a pronounced dimple in his chin, deep and dark, that had carried over generations. I had the same mark in my chin.

  I was twelve years old, with the first hint of a mustache dawning above my lip, and too old to treat like a child. The charge of laziness passed through me like a hot blade. Had I not been piling branches on a heap for him, stacking them all afternoon under a ferocious blast of sunlight?

  “Goddamn you,” I said.

  It was not the best choice of words.

  He knocked my head to one side with a flat palm, drawing a welt along my jawline.

  I tried not to cry, bending forward to conceal my pain. I never cried, though my neck would hurt for a week. And this wasn’t the first or only time he had slapped me, though it felt like an assault on my dignity.

  For whatever reason, I remember that slap, even as a fully grown man who has been stripped, flogged, stoned, and beaten many times over. But none of that violence stands out more vividly than the day my father swatted me in the garden.

  Though I loved my father, I never liked being home. It was more than comfortable, even among houses on the western fringe of Tarsus, where the wealthiest merchants had a wide view of the green sea below. We had four bedrooms with raised beds and two public rooms, including a peristyle with tapestries on the wall; there was an expansive garden and a spring-fed well. A dozen guests could dine comfortably in our tablinum, and my father often brought associates to meals there, where they would recline on soft cushions and discuss business matters. Our three slaves went to the market every morning and cooked and cleaned the house. They treated me, a motherless boy, like their own child, especially Gila, a white-haired woman with astonishingly wide hips, her hair pulled back and tied with a ribbon. She considered me her son, and laid out a fresh tunic for me every day and made sure that I ate and slept enough. “You must eat more fruit,” she would say.

  My mother passed when I was eleven months old, so I have no memory of her. Not even the haziest image survives, however much I try to envision her. My sister, Esther, was ten years my senior, but I hardly knew her, as she went off to Jerusalem at seventeen, where she married a man twice her age, a rabbi who had been my father’s friend. Her letters were infrequent, and we saw her only on periodic visits to Jerusalem.

  My grandfather came to Tarsus from a village near Jerusalem as a young man hoping to study philosophy as well as Torah. This had been a center of learning for centuries, the Athens of Asia, the birthplace of Antipater, the Stoic writer and exalted teacher.

  Much as he liked the idea of it, my grandfather had no head for study, and he eventually turned to business, gathering from valley farmers the skins of goats. After buying a mill on the Cydnus River, he engaged dozens of slaves to work the fine goat hairs into a durable and coveted fabric, which he sold throughout the world. Large bundles of this cloth were shipped in wooden crates as far as Greece and Egypt, even to Rome. He also made tents that could easily be rolled and carried on the backs of mules by Roman legions on military expeditions. His assets accumulated, with profits in profusion, and he soon bought land on the outskirts of Tarsus. Before long, he had several villas, factories, warehouses, and a fleet of vessels in the harbor.

  All of this wealth would eventually come to me, though my only interest was to spend everything I had in the name of Jesus. I would happily become a poor man for his sake.

  My father would never understand this. He had no depth of spirit, even though he became a figure of weight in the local synagogue, where he would read from the scroll on the Sabbath: an honor in this city, where scholars often wandered into Sabbath gatherings, many of them gifted linguists. He would shift to the rostrum slowly, gazing through eyes like slits, furtively. His performance impressed the congregation, as he could utter the sacred words with some authority, though Greek was his first language, like mine. In truth, I could detect a stiffness and inexactitude in his Hebrew even before I myself knew the language well enough to be discerning. Then again, a boy is always skeptical of his father’s public face, and I felt his incompetence in every performance. I vowed that nobody would ever have cause to doubt the depth of my knowledge, the range of my learning, the ferocity of my devotion to God. I would become everything my father only seemed to be. I would inhabit fully the reality I dreamed about as a boy.

  Each morning at home my father read the scriptures aloud, in the Greek translation. Because of its familiarity, this version felt to me more like God’s revelation than the Hebrew original. Its strong and beautiful if bracing words dug grooves in my heart, and my feelings flowed naturally in those grooves.

  I was a Jew, and would always remain a Jew, even as my mission to the gentiles grew wider each year.

  In my early years I sometimes traveled with my father, who had business in distant parts, with visits to Alexandria and throughout Asia. We would occasionally visit Esther and her husband, Ezra, during the week of Passover in Jerusalem, and attend the Temple worship. How could I forget that overwhelming vision of gold-and-white marble that Herod had built? As we approached its steps, the full-throated choirs of the tribe of Levi welcomed us with their angelic singing, and even then I had visions of God on his throne, the king of heaven, and I wanted only to bathe in this glory.

  My father explained that the tribal elders, the Sanhedrin, met in the Hall of Hewn Stones. “They are great men,” he said. “You will sit among them one day.”

>   This seemed inevitable to him, at least during my childhood, when the evidence of my scholarly abilities grew abundant, and tutors praised my gifts. “Your son is a bright star,” they would say, pleasing him so well that he would lavish gifts on them.

  This approbation only made my life difficult, as expectations rose. And I kicked against them, feeling reckless at times, wishing to revolt. I would steal fruit from the market or go abroad at night, often walking down to the harbor when my father assumed I slept safely on my pallet. I became a nocturnal creature for a period, a vagabond at heart, and thought of escaping to sea. I vowed to myself that I would wander in the world, no longer the pride of Adriel. No longer the perfect son whose life gave flesh to his father’s fantasies.

  But my scholarly nature kept reasserting itself. I could not deny the appeal of learning, the lure of the Greek and Hebrew languages, and the shimmering light of truth reflected there.

  When I was twelve, my father took me with him on a trip to Jerusalem and, much to my surprise, he introduced me to Gamaliel, a well-known Jewish scholar (who was the grandson of Hillel, the famous rabbi). Quite terrified, I held my father’s hand tightly as we walked into Gamaliel’s school, where young men chanted portions of the Psalms. They nodded as they prayed, some of them dipping to the floor in their avidity, even kissing the tile with their foreheads. I caught sight of Gamaliel himself at the end of a colonnade, a marvel with his bountiful and hoary beard and purple skullcap; the voluminous robes he wore failed to disguise a multitudinous belly that he pushed before him like a cart. At a glance, I worshipped him and wished only to serve his needs.