Testament (36 page)

We returned immediately then to our tents, so that I might speak to Yaqob. He wasted no time in questioning me as to circumstance, but said we must go at once to the Roman fortress to find the thing out for certain. The streets were thick with those making their purchases for the Passover meal and even in the alleys and side streets we had to fight our way, nor did the soldiers help our progress, standing squarely in the middle of every intersection to make their presence
known. Then when we reached the fortress we were not allowed so much as to mount the steps to the gate, held back by the line of soldiers who stood watch there. When we tried to question them we discovered they spoke neither Hebrew nor Aramaic, and so I needed to make my way with them in Greek, which by now was almost lost to me.

I have come to learn if my son is arrested, I said.

But they said they knew nothing of any arrest, and that perhaps he had been taken in by way of the entrance off the temple courts.

The gates up to the temple had been opened again. There was a great deal of activity in the courts, with many thousands praying or milling about while the Levites prepared the ground for the sacrifices the following day, setting out barricades to divide the crowd. But there was no sign of the disturbance that had gone on. It seemed hopeless then that we who were nothing should get to the bottom of it, when it was already forgotten.

We made our way to the fortress end of the courts and there indeed found a passage into the fortress beneath the colonnade, but it was also heavily guarded. Here the guards were Samaritans, who were the procurator’s special corps.

I said to them in Hebrew, My son has been brought here, but they pretended not to understand.

Yaqob brandished some coins then, and spoke in Aramaic.

We wish only to learn the charges against him, so we might defend him.

But the Samaritans merely took offence at the coins and said that several Jews had been arrested that day, cutpurses and such, and they could not be expected to know one from the other.

I regretted now that we had shown any arrogance in our approach to them, for we were at their mercy.

We beg you, I said.

But they claimed they could not be of any service to us, and that at any rate there would be no trials until after the festival, so we might try our fortunes then.

We did not know what other options lay open to us. I still had my family in the city, but it chafed me to turn to them—I had seen them only twice since returning from Egypt, after the reception I had had from them then, and not at all since my mother’s death a few years before. But I knew that one of my brothers, indeed Yeshua’s namesake, had followed in my father’s place and found work as a clerk for the Roman administration, and so might know the way to be of help to us. Yaqob and I went to his house and found him with his family preparing for Passover.

My son Yeshua has been arrested, I said.

He did not turn me away but told me what he could, though little that gave me cause for hope. He said that as the Romans were scrupulous in their adherence to their own laws, they seldom punished unjustly, but also that the present procurator could not be trusted. In any event, in the case of a public disturbance the procurator’s power was absolute, since by Roman law any hint of insurrection was punishable by summary death.

My son is not a rebel, I said, nor has he ever counselled violence.

Yet by your own account you have hardly spoken in many years, my brother said. How then can you know what he counsels.

But it seemed he merely sought an excuse to condemn him.

I did not come to be accused but only to seek your help, I said.

He could no longer hide his enmity.

You ruined our family once, he said, and now you wish to ruin it again, by having me risk my position for a rabble-rouser and a bastard.

I regretted now that I had ever come to him, or that I had let Yaqob accompany me, to hear such things.

I said to my brother, You are truly your father’s son, for he also sold me when I most needed him.

And I left his house.

In all this time I had not dared to look at Yaqob. Now, in the growing dark of the street, I said to him, Do you still wish to help your brother, now that you know the truth.

But he said, I have always known it.

I hardly knew how to answer him.

How could you.

From the streets of Alexandria, he said.

I was silenced by this. I had given Yaqob so little credit, over the years, but had only taken him for granted.

Yet you never loved him less, I said.

It did not seem a reason to.

I was glad of the dark now, which hid my tears. I asked him if his brothers also knew, but he said he had always found the way to protect them.

You did right to love him, I said finally.

And I felt comforted then, and less alone, that his love was not different from mine.

I could not bear to return to our tents, to sit there uselessly. I told Yaqob to go to the others and say we made
progress, to comfort them, and then to join me again at the fortress.

I made my way to the fortress through the twilight traffic. The sun had warmed the city during the day, but with nightfall the air had turned cold again, here and there a patch of snow that had lingered in some shadow or cranny giving off its particular smell. At the fortress nothing had changed except that some of the soldiers had built up a fire on the pavement at the base of the fortress steps. I put myself close to them, to warm myself and to hear their gossip, in case anything touching on Yeshua should fall from their lips. But I could not follow the dialect they spoke amongst themselves, which hardly resembled any Greek I knew.

It was some time before I noticed another woman in the shadows at the far end of the steps. It seemed modesty or fear kept her standing alone there far from the soldiers, but finally the cold drove her closer to the fire. Her face was hidden by her shawl so it took a moment before I recognized her—it was the girl who had come to the gate to refuse me when I had gone looking for my son at Kefar Nahum.

I went to her and said, I am Yeshua’s mother, and she instantly broke into tears.

So grateful was I to find a stranger who shared sympathy with me that I forgot all resentment towards her and embraced her, also falling to tears. For a moment we stood there unable to speak for emotion.

Do you have any news of him, I said finally, but it came out she knew no more than I did.

Her name was Miryam, like my own. She and some others had been preparing for the feast at a room in the Upper City when the word had come of Yeshua’s arrest. All of
those there had fled then except she and another woman, Shelomah, the two of them waiting for some further word. When after some hours no news had come, they had made their way back to their camp, only to find, however, that their own people had been removed from it and had left no trace of their whereabouts. So Miryam had come to the fortress, while Shelomah had gone to search the neighbouring camps for any of their group.

Even to say as much as this left her in tears again, for she feared the lot of them had been arrested. But when I pressed her it grew clear that some hundred or more had accompanied Yeshua to Jerusalem, whereas only a dozen, as I had seen, had gone with him to the temple. So we had reason to believe that some of them would be discovered still, and would have further news for us.

It was growing late now. Miryam was upset that she had heard nothing yet from Shelomah, while I wondered that Yaqob had not come to join me. We went over to the Sheep Gate, which was the gate nearest the fortress, to see if we might catch sight of them, but learned from the guards that all the entrances to the city had been closed for the night. So it seemed we were left to our own resources, and we returned to our place at the fortress steps and waited there by the soldiers and their fire. One of the soldiers, taking pity on us, asked us in halting Aramaic what our business was and assured us that if my son was innocent, he would be set free. But I was no longer certain that he was innocent or what that might mean, for by Jewish law he was not innocent but a bastard, and by Roman law was perhaps less innocent still, for he was someone who spoke his mind and accepted the yoke of no one.

I said to Miryam, I will watch while you sleep.

But she broke into tears again, and said how it had troubled her to turn me away at Kefar Nahum, and how I had seemed a woman of stature. And I saw that she did not say these things to flatter me but meant them sincerely.

I took no harm in what you did, I said, but was only troubled on account of my son.

So grateful was she at this forgiveness that she at once opened her heart to me, and sought to assure me of Yeshua’s virtues and of the great things he had done. And I saw how besotted she was with him and how she worshipped him, so that she could not see him clearly. She spoke of the deed he had worked here in the city, that the women at the temple basilica had joked of—it turned out it involved a cousin of one of his followers who, in Miryam’s telling of the thing, had been brought back from the very grave by Yeshua’s tending to him. So I gathered she was a simple girl of Galilee, with the credulity of Galileans. Yet it was true that when she spoke of my son the wonder I heard in her voice was not so different from what I myself had felt, that sense of a doorway Yeshua stood before, to some new understanding. Except that she had passed through it, and saw things in a different light, and who was I to say that the miracle she had witnessed had not occurred, for those who had eyes to see it.

So we spoke off and on into the night, sitting there at the base of the fortress steps just outside the light of the fire, and in the end I took some comfort from her. And I thought of Yeshua’s life, and where it had brought him to, but though I turned every detail of it over in my mind, I could not see the sense of it or why someone so gifted by God should be so punished by him. I thought to speak to Miryam
of these things but she was only a child, nor would I risk shattering her innocence by revealing to her the truth of what he was. And yet I might have wished to unburden myself then, and say every last thing as I knew it, and so perhaps for a moment lift the stone I had carried every day since Yeshua’s conception.

We sat there through the night, and kept up our vigil, until the guards changed to ones who knew nothing of us and bid us move, handling us roughly when we did not at once obey. Thus we were at a loss again as to our actions, and the sun was just rising over the walls, and it was the morning of Passover.

L
OOKING AFTER THE SHEEP
in the back pasture I’d see his followers there on that hill, hundreds of them there were, and I’d say to Moriah, my brother Huram’s wife, “I’ve got half a mind to join him myself.” That was before the trouble between us, so she’d laugh. What I wouldn’t do then to get a laugh out of her, and she needed it too, seeing how Huram was. I used to say to her, “Huram thinks it’s like money, he’s saving it up. One of these days he’s going to have a laugh they’ll hear clear across the lake. Halfway to Damascus they’ll hear it.” And she’d laugh again.

Our farm was just above Gergesa, in the hills over the lake, so we had a good view of things. You wouldn’t think you could see much, all the way to the other shore like that, but you’d be surprised. Most days I could pick him out in an instant, the way he stood in the middle of the crowd like a stone that had been dropped in the water. And I’d say to Moriah, “He’s got his sheep on his hill there, and I’ve got mine.” Or sometimes he’d take them to the beach and go off in the shoals a bit to preach at them, and I’d swear then he was standing right on the lake, which some said he could do. I’d heard it told that once he’d hiked himself straight across the water from Capernaum to Tarichea, just walking along like that as if it was nothing.

I won’t say I didn’t actually wonder sometimes even at first what it might be like to join up with him and see the
world, travelling around the way he did. Because in all my life I’d been only to Hippus and Gergesa and once to Gadara, and I was sick of the boys I saw every week at Baal-Sarga, our village, which was just a couple of stones thrown together, though Sargon the Great himself had chosen the spot where it stood when he’d come through to conquer the Hebrews. But there was the farm to think about—more than thirty sheep we had then and five cattle and three pigs, and almonds and olives and grapes and a bit of barley and wheat, and our parents dead. And then there was Moriah.