Testament (2 page)

Like the Zealots, we worked for Rome’s overthrow though, unlike them, we did not imagine that only God was our commander or that it was profanement to know more than what was written in the Torah. So we had a few men of experience amongst us, at least, who understood how the world worked and the forces we were up against. But many of those who had joined us in the hope of imminent revolt had, over time, lost patience with our leaders’ caution and
our lack of progress. It was our strategy, for instance, that we stir up unrest in the entire region before risking any action of our own. Yet the fact was that we did not have the contacts for proper embassies abroad, and that outside our borders we had won to our cause only the most minor of tribal lords. So our grand hope of a revolution that would spread across the whole of the empire, and be unquenchable, appeared increasingly the merest fantasy. In the meantime we had begun to descend into factions, and even those who ought to have been our allies often proved, over some point of doctrine, our fiercest enemies. The Zealots, for instance, considered us cowards and collaborationists because we did not protest every smallest infringement of Jewish law; yet they thus wasted in a thousand little outbursts the resources that ought to have gone to a single great conflagration.

In the face of our failures abroad we had begun to put our energies instead into infiltrating the Palestinian outposts, not only those in Judea, which the Romans controlled directly, but also those in the territories of their vassals Herod Antipas and Herod Philip, on the reasoning that in the event of revolt we would need to take the outlying fortresses at once if we were to stand any chance of holding back the Roman legions based in Syria. Most of us were kept in the dark, of course, about our actual strength, going about our little tasks with hardly any sense of the whole we formed part of, not only because our leaders so arranged it but because even amongst ourselves we did not dare to confide in one another or pool our knowledge, for fear of spies. In my own case there were two men I reported to, one a teacher and grain merchant who lived near the stadium, and the other a lawyer who worked in the city administration; outside these I spoke to no one
except in the most general terms. For my work, I ran a shop just beneath the Antonia fortress where I sold phylacteries and also various foreign texts, and where I offered services as a scribe. It was in this latter office that I made myself useful to our group—the soldiers from the fortress often came to me to prepare their letters home, and so I learned the comings and goings of the procurator and the movements of the troops and so on. In the beginning, because I had been raised in Ephesus and knew something of the world, I had also a number of times been sent abroad, even once as far as Rome. But eventually it grew clear that I did not have the character for diplomacy. So I was given other duties, though from time to time was still sent on small assignments outside the city, which I increasingly welcomed as the atmosphere among us in Jerusalem grew more and more oppressive.

En Melakh was barely a day’s journey from Jerusalem but seemed much further, at the bottom of the long, bleak road that led down from the city to the Jordan plain. I had left Jerusalem under clear skies, but here a dust-filled wind had daily blown across the flats like the Almighty’s angry breath, blocking the sun and dropping grit in every nook and crevice. The morning after the holy man’s arrival, however, dawned clear. During the night I had hardly been able to sleep for the thought of him sitting out there in the cold—I did not know why my mind had so fixed on him except that he seemed an obscure sort of challenge to me, to my own smug sense of mission, sitting there half-dead yet asking for nothing.

When I awoke, just past daybreak, I did not take the trouble to so much as wash my hands before going out to check on him. My heart sank when I saw he was missing
from his spot beneath the fig tree—my first thought was that he had died in the night and had already been carted away, to prevent the desecration of buzzards alighting there in the middle of the town. But then I caught sight of him amidst the early morning traffic a little ways from the square, padding along in the dim red of sunrise towards the stable that served to house the pack animals and goats of the local market. It was a shock to see him fully upright, all skin and bones the way he was, little more than a wraith against the dawn, walking with that strange light-footedness of the very thin and the very frail that makes them look almost lively and spry even when they are at death’s door.

At the stables he ducked into one of the stalls and squatted to ease himself. It was only when he had emerged and had begun to move back towards the square that I noticed he was no longer wearing my cloak, only the shawl he’d been given, which gave him a slightly comical, womanly air despite his wisps of beard; and I saw now that my cloak in fact lay neatly draped over the low mud wall of the tavern’s porch. Clearly his wits were sharper than I had imagined them, if he had known enough to track me down. But rather than being pleased that the thing had been returned to me, I felt a prick of injury at how speedily he had seemed to wish to rid himself of it, as if it were some curse that had been laid on him.

He took up his place beneath the fig tree again. There was a little more life in his eyes than there had been the day before—it seemed he had crossed back, after all, to the land of the living. From somewhere he’d got hold of a gourd that he’d filled with water and now he set about doing his ablutions, with the careful frugality of a seasoned desert-dweller, a few drops for his hands, his forearms, his face, a few more
for his ankles and feet. When he had finished he leaned in low on his haunches, arms outspread, to say his prayers.

It seemed shameful to watch him while he prayed. I took my cloak up and drew it over me against the lingering cold and went into the courtyard, where the tavern-keeper’s daughter, Adah, a girl of fourteen or so, was preparing some porridge at the bit of fire there. She was a strange girl, as unblemished as her father was vile but also not quite present somehow, a bit simple perhaps. Sometimes her father would send her half-undressed to my room to bring me my meals or wine, with a conniving that chilled me.

“I never see you go out to the market like the other girls,” I said to her. “Maybe your husband’s there.”

But she misunderstood.

“I don’t have a husband,” she said with a panicked look, then hurried off to bring her father his breakfast.

I was accustomed enough to biding my time in those days but the holy man had made me restless—simply that he was there, fired by a sense of purpose different from mine, or perhaps the waste that I saw then in his sort of devotion. I went out after I’d eaten and he was still sitting beneath his tree, the sun just rising above the houses behind him to cast his shadow all along the length of the square. Without quite knowing what I intended, I walked out to where he was.

I tossed a coin on the ground in front of him.

“For your breakfast,” I said. But he didn’t pick it up. Up close I saw he still had a dulled look, his eyes sunken, the skin sagging against his bones.

“Bread would be better,” he said.

His voice was stronger than I would have imagined it, seeming to echo in the hollow places in him.

“With a coin you can buy bread.”

“All the same.”

There didn’t seem any arrogance in this, only stubborn-ness—I thought perhaps it was part of his vow, to abjure any coinage, or that he was one of those who wouldn’t touch coins on account of the images there. I bent to collect the thing and went at once into the market, where I bought a bit of stew that I brought back to him. He thanked me roughly and set into it with a barely controlled vehemence, his appetite clearly returned.

“I lent you my cloak,” I said.

He didn’t look up from his food.

“I recognized it.”

And yet did not think to thank me. So it seemed I must wrestle him for my blessing.

“And you returned it. For which I’m grateful.”

“It seemed so fine I thought you’d miss it.”

“But you haven’t returned the shawl you were given.”

“It’s less fine. I thought it would be less missed.”

He put me in mind of those barefooted Greeks I’d seen as a boy in the squares of Ephesus, who lived on air and made it their job to poke fun at the least hint of pretension.

He had finished his food.

“Should I send another bowl?” I said.

“If you like.”

I paid a boy to bring out more stew, then moved on through the market. En Melakh was one of the towns that the madman Cassius had razed when he was in Syria, for failing to pay him tribute, and it had been rebuilt in crude Greek style with an open market just inside the gates. There wasn’t much of interest to be had in it—a bit of coloured wool from
the coast, a few trinkets and hair combs, some dried meat and fruits. At the back, where the concessions gave way to the narrow alleys of a bazaar, an old woman ran a shop out of her house that I’d noticed people hurrying from carrying secret parcels wrapped in sackcloth: potions and charms. A carved figurine of three wise men wrapped in fish skins stood in a niche above the woman’s lintel. These were our God-fearing Jews, I thought, hedging their bets, worshipping icons of old men dressed up as fish.

As I was coming out of the far end of the market there was a commotion near the town gates. Some sort of detachment was coming into town—Romans, I thought at first, but then I recognized the standards of Herod Antipas. I made my way through the gawkers who had already lined the street to get a better view. They were a bit of a rabble, it seemed, around a dozen in all, arranged in rough formation around their captain, a bearded colossus who was the only rider. It took me a moment to see what it was that had caused such a stir: they had a prisoner in tow. He was being pulled along, virtually dragged, by a rope attached to the captain’s saddle, though because of the soldiers and the crowd I could not get a good view of him. Then a gap opened up and I saw his face and was stopped dead, for though he was badly beaten I recognized him at once as my contact.

I did not know how to react. The truth was that nothing in my experience had prepared me for a situation of this sort, so that it seemed as if what had been merely trifling until then, playing a part, had become suddenly real. I moved to the back of the crowd to be out of the soldiers’ path, afraid some look or glance from the man might give me away. But he looked too far ruined for that. Both eyes were
swelled to slits from whatever beatings he had got; one of his ears had been cut away, but crudely, so that there were still ragged bits of flesh left hanging, encrusted black with flies and dried blood. As he went past he stumbled and fell and did not get up again, so that he ended by being hauled along the street on his backside while one of the town dogs ran barking half-crazed around him and the townspeople laughed, no doubt taking him for a simple criminal.

His name was Ezekias. He was not much more than a boy, a messenger for the court in Tiberias who had been scouted out because of his position and then recruited during a visit to Jerusalem for one of the feasts. My only dealings with him had been a short encounter in the city at the time of his recruitment and a further one in Jericho some months later—he had struck me then as young, loyal, earnest, and entirely unaware of the danger he had entered into. It seemed more and more we relied on this sort, who could be easily replaced; indeed, I myself had not been so different when I had joined.

His use to us had been that he was often able to bring us news from the Macherus fortress, which was second only to Masada in impregnability, and with it formed the backbone of the southern defences of the Palestinian territories. We had been working to infiltrate the place for some time, in which task we had some reason to feel hope since, unlike at many of the other outposts, there was a large contingent of Jews among the company there. But there were also many Edomites, whose lands lay nearby and from whom Antipas’s father had descended, and who therefore could not be trusted. The Edomites held all the positions of command, and found every means of keeping the Jews subordinate. Yet
there were one or two Jews who by dint of sheer perseverance and faultless service had got ahead, and these were the ones to whom we had directed ourselves and so gained a foothold.

The soldiers had come to a stop in the middle of the square. There were a couple of hitching stones there, near the well; they tied the captain’s horse to one and bound Ezekias to the other with the rope he’d been dragged by, haphazardly, as if he were a sheaf of wheat they were binding. After they’d drawn up their own fill from the well, they watered the horse but left Ezekias untended, not so much out of malice, it seemed, but more as if he were something they’d lost interest in, in the oafish way of boys who tired of some creature they’d caught. Ezekias, however, seemed aware neither that water was near nor that he was being denied it, his head drooped and his body straining against the rope that bound him so that it seemed the only thing that held him upright.

After the days of cloud and dust the clear sky now seemed an assault, the sun already beating down like a hammer. I stood there in the street but could not form a plan, felt only a general outrage as if some trick had been played on me. I could not know what Ezekias’s capture meant or who else had been implicated by it; I reasoned the soldiers knew nothing of our meeting or they would not have come into town so openly, but even that wasn’t certain. They had moved off now towards the tavern where I was staying, the tavern-keeper hurrying out to greet them, putting on his most servile of appearances, smiling and bowing and scraping and promising wine and meat, which I myself had hardly seen a trace of in my days there; and meanwhile the townspeople
were still lingering uncertainly about the square, in the hope, perhaps, of some sort of violence.

I looked to Ezekias again and thought, He must be killed, for his own sake and for the sake of those he might name, when the king’s men in Tiberias put their wits to his torture. Then once the idea had entered my head, there was no putting it out, because of its logic. All of us had heard the stories of those who’d been taken and the things that were done to them, and how sometimes, for instance, to make them name their accomplices, their children or wives were brought before them and their fingers severed one by one or their eyes gouged out. So it was not simply a matter of sparing Ezekias—my own life stood at risk if I did nothing, for surely I would be among the first he would give up, if he had not already done so.