Testament (24 page)

Ribqah was barely conscious and showed no sign that she recognized any of us, even Yeshua. Yeshua had her moved to my father’s house and put in my own bed there, and while the others waited by the door, I stayed next to him to help tend to her, full of remorse now that I had not shown Ribqah more comfort when I had had the chance. There was an abscess on her ankle where it seemed she’d suffered a bite of some sort, but when Yeshua went to lance it we saw it didn’t resemble the bite of anything that we knew except crudely, as if a thorn or spur of some kind had been taken to the place
in imitation. Then we saw the purple stains on the skin there and also on her lips, the colour of the gall that grew among the rocks on the lakeshore.

Yeshua opened her mouth. Her tongue was purpled like her lips, and bits of foliage still stained her teeth.

Finally Yeshua said to me, She has poisoned herself.

I was stunned. I couldn’t believe that I had been with her only the night before and had not seen the state of her mind, that she should have been driven to such a thing. I wondered how it could have been that she had admitted to me her pregnancy, yet I’d done nothing.

I confessed to Yeshua then what she’d told me.

You should have come to me at once, he said.

I was afraid who the father might be.

But he didn’t rebuke me for this.

The father has already made himself known by his actions, he said, though at the time I didn’t understand his meaning.

The others were still waiting outside the room. Yeshua said nothing to them of what we’d discovered, but it was clear he had lost heart now for his ministrations, merely kneeling at Ribqah’s side with her hands in his own. By now the poison seemed already well advanced—she had gone limp, as happened with gall, and had lost any sign of consciousness.

Within the hour, she was dead. Yeshua wept.

I did nothing for her, he said, and it seemed that all his mission was dismissed in this, for here was one he had apparently tried by every means to save yet she had taken her own life.

I was hardly aware of what happened next. Yeshua said nothing to the others of how Ribqah had died and so left them believing she had suffered a bite of some sort; but
because of this they couldn’t be any comfort to us, nor could they understand the strange mood we had fallen into. In our confusion, it was left to my mother to bring us back to our senses and arrange for the body to be dressed for burial. To the surprise of all of us, it was Yihuda who undertook to go into Tiberias to purchase linens, though in all his time with us I didn’t remember that he had exchanged so much as a word with Ribqah or shown the least awareness of her.

By midday my father had returned, having learned of the tragedy on the road and hurried back to us. He took charge now of the preparations, sending for mourners and pipers. But to our bewilderment Yeshua said he wouldn’t accompany us to the burial.

Surely you loved her enough to see her buried, my father said.

I love the living, he said. I’m no use to the dead.

What of the rest of us, one of the twelve asked.

Do as you wish.

Even I who knew the circumstances of Ribqah’s death didn’t know what to make of this—if it was a reproof to us or to Ribqah or simply that his grief had overwhelmed him. I would have welcomed his solace then, since I could not put from my mind my own guilt, which sounded in my head more loudly than the keening of the mourners.

In the end we made a poor procession, with only a handful of the twelve and few from the town except my own family and Ribqah’s, her mother slack-faced with grief as if some of her had died along with her daughter. Urijah, though no one showed any remorse at this, could not be found; indeed, he had left town like a skulking dog at the first word of Ribqah’s death, nor had he dared to repeat any more his
charges against Yeshua. By now it had also been discovered that the bag of coins he had returned contained barely a third of what he’d been given—no doubt he had already spent the rest, and had only made a show of returning the money intact to give credence to his accusations.

My father had Ribqah put in our own family tomb, since her family had none and she would otherwise have had to be buried in the earth. We were all concerned over the matter of resurrection—Ribqah was one of the first of us who had died since we had come to Yeshua’s teachings, and we were unsure whether some different custom applied in the burial of her. Afterwards there were those who had the cruelty to mock us and say we should not have closed the tomb at all, but left it open for Ribqah to walk out of it. But I wondered if indeed we hadn’t failed in some important way and so doomed Ribqah to darkness, she whose life had already been one of perpetual dark.

It wasn’t long before Yeshua’s enemies found the way to use Ribqah’s death against him, saying it was shame that had kept him from her funeral and a sign of his guilt that he had been unable to cure her, when he had worked so many other wonders. Then, only days after her burial, Urijah, who had not appeared again in Migdal but had several times been seen drunk in the streets of Tiberias, was found dead at the bottom of a cliff near the Tiberias gates. Whether he had merely stumbled to his death or willingly flung himself to it no one could say; but still there were many who were again ready to put the blame to Yeshua, saying it was grief over his daughter’s death that accounted for the thing. Those of us who knew Urijah, however, could not believe that grief was behind his actions. I began to think about what Yeshua had
said of Ribqah’s pregnancy, and about Urijah’s behaviour, yet could hardly admit to my mind the conclusion that began to urge itself on me.

I went to Yeshua then.

Surely Urijah’s death was a judgement against him, I said, not able to put the thing directly.

But to my surprise Yeshua said, If a tragedy is a mark of sin, who are we to accuse others when we ourselves must be the most sinful.

Still I wouldn’t desist.

If he was guilty of a crime, it must be made known, to show our own innocence.

Where is our innocence, Yeshua said, when two people are dead and we were unable to save them. Don’t think there’s any happiness in heaven at Urijah’s death. If there’s any judgement now, it’s against us, that we didn’t help him when we could.

So he would say nothing against Urijah, not even to clear his own name, when all along he had been amongst our bitterest enemies and a man of such evil, as it now seemed, that his crimes could hardly be named. It was difficult for me to fathom Yeshua’s silence, when even the alms he gave to Ribqah’s family now so that they might not starve to death were seen as payments for his own guilt; nor could I share the matter with the twelve or the other women, since they didn’t know the circumstances of the thing and I couldn’t bring myself to reveal them. What occurred to me again and again was my own failure, that I hadn’t seen Ribqah’s distress or done anything to relieve it, but had thought only of the disgrace she would bring to us. Yet it was perhaps in this that I seemed to have an inkling of Yeshua’s meaning, for I
realized that if I had not thought of accusation then, I would have seen what was more important. It took a great stretching of the mind, yet it was possible to conceive that we had erred in this regard even with respect to Urijah, for it was true that not one of us had ever gone to him to understand him or to try to change his ways. How differently things might have unfolded then, if we had somehow tried to win him to us even though he was despicable.

For many days after Ribqah’s death Yeshua conducted himself like a penitent, refusing to eat and hardly emerging from his quarters. The twelve, on the excuse of respecting his mourning but perhaps also because they had grown afraid of his behaviour, seldom went in to him in this period or had any word with him. But I went to him almost daily, afraid he would imagine we had deserted him. The truth was that he seemed almost to wish this, that we would cease to believe in him, so that he might be freed for a time of the burden of leading us.

Once he said to me, Why do you come to me, when surely my enemies will find the way to turn even this against us. But I hardly listened to him, knowing the state of his mind then. It was a sort of test to me, as I saw it, for him to say such a thing when surely he knew by then what little store I set by the opinions of the world. Perhaps he feared that my devotion to him was so abject and blind that at the first sign of reproof from him I should feel compelled to flee; but that was not the case. So I continued to go to him every day and urge what food on him he would eat, though many days he would take no sustenance except water, and he had begun to waste away to the point where we feared he must die.

Then one evening when we were gathered together he finally came out to us, breaking a loaf of bread with us and putting some morsels of it in his mouth, though more, it seemed, to appease us than his hunger.

I have to leave you for a time, he said, since I’m no use to you.

This was the thing we had most feared. Simon the Canaanite instantly fell prostrate before him and said he would not leave his side, for he was his master now.

Then you’ve learned nothing, Yeshua said, and are a fool, or you would know that only the Lord is your master.

Afterwards, some of the men felt he had meant to say that he didn’t want any of them to accompany him when he left. But it was Yihuda who brought them to their senses.

How can we abandon him when he needs us most, he said.

He convinced us that we must insist some of us go with him wherever he went and put himself forward to be one of the group, since of the men he was the only one without any occupation. There was some discomfort among the others at letting him take the lead like that, yet no one could argue with his logic. The truth was we had in large part accepted Yihuda by then, as our greater troubles had made him appear a smaller one; and so he was elected, along with Simon the Canaanite and Yohanan, who had offered themselves wholeheartedly while many of the others either could not leave at that time of year or were reluctant to set off for they knew not where. I saw that Yaqob, who for reasons of work had not volunteered himself, reddened when Yohanan did so; yet it seemed that much as he couldn’t bear to see him with Yihuda again, neither could he be happy if neither he nor his brother accompanied Yeshua.

Listening to the men make their arrangements, I felt trapped once more in my woman’s skin, like a cage I lived in. It occurred to me that if I had been married, it might have been of no consequence if I travelled amongst a group of men; and so for the first time it seemed to me there might be some freedom in marriage. In any event, I would gladly have taken the first man who had offered himself to me, should I have thus been permitted to go along with Yeshua and the others. Yeshua had said he would travel north, into the Syrian highlands—the mountains my mother was from, wild, pagan places that I recalled from my own journey there as a child. I remembered a lake we had travelled near, savage and rank; a bird that I saw there, of purest black and as large as a man, so astonished me that for many years I believed it was a god I had seen, such as we knew nothing of in Galilee.

Nearly a year had passed since Yeshua had left us for Tyre. Then, I had felt broken with the fear that he wouldn’t return to us. But this time there was a part of me that almost wished for his release, that he might find some new following there among the pagans and grow old with them, bringing them to our god. For I felt that we had not proved worthy of him, that we had descended to pettiness though he had tried to raise us up, and had let the ways of the world infect us. I thought of what we had been in our first days and longed to return to the innocence we’d had then and the strength of purpose, to the way our minds had seemed opened like doors to the sun.

In the end Yeshua had never spoken to us of Ribqah’s resurrection, nor had we dared to ask him. For the truth was that even among the twelve we had not fully understood
his teaching on the matter, if she would rise in body or in spirit, if now or at the end of days, if she would go to the heavens or return to earth. For my own part, I didn’t see how the body could rise, so quickly was it corrupted, nor how the earth could be peopled with those who had risen, since surely then from the beginning of time the number of those who had risen must be greater than all those who lived, whereas we saw no evidence of them among us. But I thought that in this as in other things, Yeshua’s word could not be understood in any simple way. For as he said, we needn’t die to be born again, by which I took him to mean that even in this life the world could be made new for us, if we had the eyes to see it. So I had imagined that death, then, was only a small thing, a place we could cross to as over a river, that we could see waiting for us on the other shore. Yet I could not see that place now, nor Ribqah in it; I could not see whatever life it was she had entered into. And it seemed to me that neither could Yeshua or he would not have been so broken by Ribqah’s death, and so at a loss that he must leave us.

The time of Yeshua’s absence was a difficult one for those of us who had stayed behind. There was confusion among the twelve as to whether he would ever return, and a few of them, led by Thomas, said we were discredited and should disband. In the end it was Shimon who held us together, saying that if what he had taught us was true it was true, also in his absence, and making us look to those of his followers who had stuck by him and to the poor and sick who came seeking help.

The fact was that after the slanders that had struck us, Yeshua’s following was much reduced. We continued to go
around to our meeting houses in the various towns along the lake, but often only a dozen or so would come out to us and occasionally even the meeting houses were closed against us. It sometimes felt then that all of Yeshua’s work had come to nothing or that what he had feared had shown itself true, that people had come to him only for his wonders and cures or because of the force of his person and not because of his teachings. But Shimon would not desist, and he and I would often travel together to Bet Ma’on or Arbela or Ammathus and meet with our people in their homes; and we saw that despite all that had happened, there were still those whose faith was unwavering and who greeted us with love. We drew courage from these, since it seemed that if even a handful remained who were loyal, these too must be tended to, just as Yeshua had tended to the handful we were when he had first come to us. Shimon found it difficult at first to lead us in instruction, since he was a man of few words; but because he spoke plainly people listened to him, and I saw how much he had understood of what Yeshua had taught us. So it wasn’t true that Yeshua’s work had come to nothing, when we had only to look to ourselves who were so changed. I thought of the girl I had been when Yeshua had first come, so coddled then and innocent, when now I had travelled half the roads of Galilee, and had respect, and saw things differently.