Testament (10 page)

While I stood staring at the place from across the street, a woman emerged from the stable into the front courtyard and looked out at me—his mother, I presumed, though she did not look nearly as old as I would have expected, her hair pitch-black and her eyes blacker still. She was the first woman I’d seen in the town in whom there was any sign of an intrinsic beauty, though it was clear from her look, which had something of the Arab to it, and from her bearing, which was that of a city woman, that she did not belong to the place, and that indeed she would gladly have kicked the dust of it from her heels. She held my gaze an instant, though distractedly, with a sort of hollowness that seemed to suggest her life had failed her in some way. I was almost tempted to go to her, to bring her some word of comfort: I come from your son, who sends his greetings. But as abruptly as she’d come she turned away and retreated into the shadows, and I saw no more of her.

I returned to Kefar Nahum. After the tension and ferment of Caesarea, the town seemed like the end of the world, hopelessly backward and remote, and Yeshua himself perhaps the madman, after all, that his fellow townsmen had reckoned
him to be. I began to speak to him of the events in Caesarea but he was strangely distant and cool, treating me as if I had betrayed him by going off or by daring to learn things that might compete with his own teaching. Then several times he went out of his way to show favour to Kephas at my expense, even though Kephas, to his credit, was clearly shamed by such pettiness. For my part, I took the matter much more to heart than I would have admitted—I had come back from Caesarea in a sort of agitation, on the verge of some insight, it seemed, that I owed to Yeshua’s example; yet he had spurned me as if to say that I’d understood nothing, that we walked in different countries, that I was still too hopelessly far from any real grasp of things for him to stoop to instruct me.

I might have simply gone my own way then except that I lacked not only destination but means: at my departure, to repay any debt I owed, I’d left the bulk of my remaining funds to the common purse, which I’d left behind for Yohanan’s brother. The purse had now been given over to Matthaios again, with no suggestion it would be returned me; and so I was in some measure held hostage there, unless I chose to hire myself out in the streets for my living. It was as if while I’d been gone some enemy had worked every means to put me at a disadvantage should I return. Had I foreseen the reception that awaited me, I might just as soon have gone back to Jerusalem after all, where at least I was known and felt of some use, while here it seemed that for a few days’ absence I had become a stranger.

There had been some changes while I’d been away. Yeshua had added a new disciple to our inner group, a pagan they called Simon the Canaanite, the first heathen he’d included among us; and he made it clear to all of us that he
was to be treated as an equal, even though in so doing he seemed merely to emphasize the man’s difference from the rest of us. In the end, of course, none of us could shake the tinge of condescension that marked all our exchanges with him, particularly as he himself had the cringing manner of someone used to abasing himself for the sake of fitting in. Apart from the fact that his addition to the group brought our number to a portentous twelve, as if we were the twelve tribes reborn, the sole reason for his presence seemed to be to further rile the powers already set against us.

It had never been any secret that Yeshua considered his mission to extend to the heathens. But until now his proselytizing had always been seen in the same light as that of the Pharisees, aimed simply at winning converts for the Jews. Simon, however, had remained uncircumcised, and though he would surely have submitted to the knife at once had Yeshua required it of him, Yeshua seemed to want to make an example of him. The thing was never spoken about openly, of course, but as the rumour of Simon’s condition spread, the matter threatened to be an even more explosive one than that of the lepers. At every gathering a question would come up about the covenant; and Yeshua would use his usual evasions and riddles to avoid confronting it directly. Then when someone asked him outright if some different sign would replace circumcision in his new kingdom, Yeshua said it was only the weak of faith who required a mark of their covenant. On that occasion there were some in the audience who were ready to stone him on the spot had they not been restrained by the people around them.

In the end, however, the matter resolved itself quietly: it seemed Kephas and some of the others went behind
Yeshua’s back and convinced Simon to have the thing done. Yeshua was furious when he found out, railing at us that we were as simple-minded and faithless as the rest. Kephas took all the blame on himself, not daring to put up the least defence; but the truth was that he’d probably saved the lot of us, because once the word had got around that Simon had been circumcised, the tension at Yeshua’s gatherings dropped and the questions ceased. Even Yeshua, in the end, seemed content to let the matter rest—it wasn’t time, was his favourite refrain to us now, a sort of blanket forgiveness for our great ignorance.

There was something slightly disturbing in this refrain, and in the hints he had begun to drop that there was some moment we were moving towards when all the criticism and misunderstanding that now confronted us would fall away. It was as if he could no longer bear his own contradiction, that he so openly courted controversy and dissension in all he did, seemed in fact to thrive on it, then counselled love and forgiveness towards those who hated us as a result. So he had hatched this notion that even our enemies, in the end, would be won to us. As I discovered, he seemed willing to go to some lengths to prove his point on the matter—a few weeks after my return, for instance, I learned that in my absence he had somehow worked a reconciliation with that same Aram who had earlier split with him over the question of force. It was only by chance that I heard of the thing, from Yohanan, who had always been my faithful informant but had kept somewhat shy of me since my return, on account of the grief he had suffered; as I understood the matter, Yeshua had managed to win Aram back mainly because of Aram’s fear, however unjustified, that Yeshua would turn him in as a rebel.
So Aram had renounced his views and come meekly back to the fold, and Yeshua had been able to show his great mercy in accepting him. But to me it seemed a manipulation—surely Yeshua had merely preyed on his insecurities, which I myself had seen ample evidence of in my own frustrated overtures to him. Indeed they continued to manifest themselves even now: still unconvinced of my own trustworthiness, Aram kept well wide of Yeshua after my return, so that in the end I never even so much as laid eyes on him.

I now understood, however, some of Yeshua’s coolness towards me, for Aram had surely told him of my attempts to contact him, which must have made it seem that I had been courting his enemies behind his back. If I had known of the thing at once, I might have found the way to smooth it over. Yet the truth was that I held the whole matter against him, and could not bring myself to go to him now as if in apology. At any rate, it was seldom that I found myself in private audience with him any more, on account of the women, who having rejoiced when I had gone, as they no doubt hoped for good, now found the way to keep him from me at every instant, and so to keep alive the disaffection between us.

It was perhaps inevitable that in the light of these tensions I should begin to see Yeshua differently, and I wondered now if I had not earlier been as besotted with him as the rest. The contradictions in him that before had made a sort of sense now seemed held together only by the strength of his character; and his contentiousness, at first engaging, suddenly appeared so much theatrics, directed as it always was at petty local despots and leaders rather than at our true enemies. It was this that most struck me, though I still
had the cold in my bones of my meeting with Rohagah and Yekhubbah, that I had deluded myself into believing I might find with him some better way. Perhaps it was exactly that I expected more of him now when before he had been merely a diversion, and so I judged him more harshly. Yet it was a bitter disappointment to have returned, as I thought, to a sage, and to have found instead someone arrogant and petty and vain. All the exhilaration I had felt in Caesarea had drained away from me—now I had neither one thing nor the other, nothing to hold me here with Yeshua yet nothing to return to.

Yeshua’s growing popularity had made him increasingly bold. In the towns we went to there were a number of elders and teachers who had trained under Pharisees of the school of Shammai; and these Yeshua had begun to take a particular pleasure in baiting and goading. Yet while it was true that many of them, in those towns, took their superior learning as an occasion for condescension and sententiousness, others were among the most pious and respected members of their communities. Yeshua did not always take the trouble to separate the one from the other, nor was he without duplicity in decrying Shammai’s excessive legalism, which he seemed to use as an excuse for his own laxity towards the law. The attitude had begun to wear off on his inner circle as well, some of whom, for instance, openly flouted the sabbath now by travelling from their villages to join us for evening prayers in Kefar Nahum. When Yeshua was challenged over these matters, he shrugged them off.

“How can you fault them for coming to pray with their teacher?” he said.

“They have teachers in their towns.”

“And if the Messiah came,” Yeshua said, “would you tell them to keep to their towns rather than worship him?”

This kind of provocation struck me as foolhardy, particularly as there was no shortage of fanatics attached to him now who might be inclined to take such statements literally. But while logic suggested that his insolence would increasingly marginalize him, in fact the opposite seemed to be occurring—the more brazen he became, the more the crowds grew, even if half of them came merely for the spectacle and many of the rest out of superstition, hoping that some good fortune would descend on them by being near him or that some ailment they had would fall away. So his rise had begun to resemble that of the usual charlatans and false prophets, for whom it could truly be said that the more outrageous their promises and claims, the greater their sway over the people. Yet with Yeshua there remained this distinction: that for all his irreverence there was always a core of truth in whatever he said. Perhaps even now this was why I did not simply leave him—there was still that sense at the back of my mind of some answer he might hold to me, like some intractable nut he had cracked open.

Once, just among the group of us, Yaqob put a question to him about Simon’s circumcision, still troubled, as we all were, by how Yeshua had handled the matter. It was my suspicion that Yeshua’s views were even more radical than he had dared to say, or than any Jew could accept. But he answered Yaqob now by citing Hillel’s reply to the heathen who wished to learn all the law in an afternoon, that its sum was to do to others as you would have them do to you. It was one of the few times I heard Yeshua cite an authority, unlike those teachers who could not so much as put on their
shirts without quoting the Torah; though it was typical that he should choose a teaching that even in its day had caused no small amount of bafflement, and that indeed had helped Shammai in gaining ascendancy over Hillel. Now, however, Hillel’s meaning seemed obvious enough—wasn’t there more virtue, in fact, in a single kind act than in the keeping of every covenant and code?

With regard to Simon, anyone could see that circumcision or no, it would have been hard to find a more faithful proselyte: it was not only that he hung on Yeshua’s every word but that he set all his teachings into almost immediate practice, with an earnestness that would have put even the most pious of Pharisees to the test. It happened, for instance, that not long after he’d joined us he heard Yeshua in one of his sermons chastising those hypocrites who made a great public show of their praying; and for some time thereafter we could not get him to join us in our prayers on the beach, so frightened was he of falling into the same hypocrisy. To ward off the least possibility of pridefulness he even went so far as to deny that he prayed at all, though we would see him stealing off to some closet every morning and hear his whispered offerings. So it seemed true that his circumcision had not the least bearing on his piety, though it was the work of a Samson for any Jew to separate the two in his own mind.

When Passover approached there was an assumption amongst Yeshua’s followers, many of whom had abandoned their teachers in the towns on his account, that he would lead their pilgrimage to Jerusalem. It was in my own mind, however, to advise him against any journey into the city, because I feared that the action Yekhubbah had hinted at was imminent, since it was always for the feasts that such things were
planned, to take advantage of the crowds then. I travelled into Tiberias to see what news I might gather there and in fact was very troubled by what I heard. It seemed there had been a spate of assassinations in Jerusalem, though there was much confusion over these—some said it was the Romans who had hired assassins to root out any remaining rebels, others that the rebels themselves were purging their own ranks of those suspected of any betrayal during the reprisals. I did not know what to make of these rumours, what to discount in them and what to believe, or whether they showed us under siege or on the assault. On my own account, remembering my exchange with Rohagah, I had cause enough for concern—surely if they were attacking those under suspicion, I must number myself among the threatened.

Afterwards I was unsure how to proceed. While I wished to protect Yeshua from risk, I did not want to bring any more to myself or to break the oaths I had made to the movement by revealing what I knew. But in the end it was Yeshua who one night took me aside from the others—it was the first time since my return from Caesarea that he’d sought me out in this way—and led me out to the lakeshore to speak. It was a moonless night and pitch black, but he insisted on rowing out onto the lake in one of Kephas’s fishing boats, which struck me as peculiar and even frightened me a little. I had the instant’s foolish thought that he intended me harm in some way, as if I had misunderstood him until then; though the truth was that for all that he preached peace, there had always seemed this side to him that was volatile and unpredictable and slightly sinister.