Testament (5 page)

Yeshua, no doubt sensing the uneasiness of his men at having me included among them, seemed therefore to throw us together, for much of the journey walking some paces ahead of us and out of hearing so that we were forced to make our way with one another. For their part, his men, after the first awkwardness, made a genuine effort to integrate me into their party, and regaled me with stories—some of them, however, utterly fantastical—of the great works that Yeshua had already wrought in Galilee. (Later, of course, I would hear them recount in these same exaggerated tones the story of Yeshua’s treatment of the young girl in Tyre.) Even Kephas, in the end, maintained the strictest civility, passing his flask first to me whenever we stopped to drink and in the evening, when we set up camp at the side of the road, carefully portioning out the bits of food he had in his pack—I, assuming we would be having our supper in Gush Halav, had neither brought my own provisions nor purchased any along the way—so that everything was perfectly equitable.

In amidst the tales Yeshua’s men passed on to me I was able to pick out that Yeshua had come to Kefar Nahum early that spring, which would have been not long after we’d met in En Melakh. The men were very mysterious about how he had ended up there and how they had come
to be his followers, saying only that he had called them, giving to the words that special weight with which converts invested their particular terminology. I thought perhaps he had chosen the place for the refuge offered by the hills in the area should he need to flee, since as far as I knew it was otherwise without distinctions or charms. But it came out he had family nearby in Notzerah, a town just outside of Sepphoris, the former Galilean capital. I was surprised when his men said they had never met with any of his family; it appeared, however, that they had little to do with Yeshua’s past, nor indeed did they seem curious of it.

We crossed the frontier at Gush Halav not long after dawn the following day, getting through without incident. I immediately felt my blood quicken at stepping back onto native soil. It was just coming on to the end of the summer and the grape harvest was in progress, the vineyards already alive with workers and the air rife with the sweet, half-fermented smell of must. After the gloomy woods that had lined the road to Gush Halav, it was a relief to see open fields again and signs of human presence. I had never been in that part of the country before or indeed spent more than a matter of days in the Galilee and so was surprised at the level of cultivation, not only in the valleys but even on the hilltops, which were covered in olive groves. I imagined it was the Jews who had so tamed the place, in the generations since the Maccabees had won it back for us, though many of the olive trees we passed looked so gnarled and old they might have gone back to the ancient Canaanites.

It seemed that Yeshua and his men livened up as well when we crossed the frontier, perhaps at the prospect of returning home. But it turned out there was more to it than
that—they were recognized here. In each village we passed there was someone who knew them, and came quietly offering homage; in one town, where we stopped for our midday rest, there seemed a whole little colony of Yeshua’s followers, who came slowly filtering in to pay their respects at the house where we’d put up. Yeshua appeared different among them than he had among the crowd in Tyre, more at ease, though it wasn’t the elders or even the men of standing who came to see him but the merest peasants and the like.

It was twilight by the time we reached Kefar Nahum. The town lay along the Damascus road and the caravansary outside the walls gave off the noise and stench of animals and men. But the town itself had a dulled, neglected air. Just outside the gates we found a little crowd who had heard of Yeshua’s approach and had come to await him, most with some particular ailment they wished him to minister to. For the better part of an hour, until it grew too dark to see, Yeshua tended to those gathered. There was one boy, writhing in pain, who’d been brought to him with a broken shin bone, the fractured end of it protruding through the skin; Yeshua, with a few smooth motions, massaged the bone back into place, so that with a splint affixed the boy was practically able to leave on his own two feet. Surely it was more than simple learning that Yeshua brought to this work; he had a gift. You saw it in the concentration that came over him like a possession, the way every fibre in him seemed devoted to the task at hand.

Afterwards we made our way to Kephas’s house, where Yeshua stayed. It was a small compound just off the main street, dank and cramped and swarming with animals and children. There we had our supper, which was ample
enough, and then Yaqob and Yohanan—who were brothers, it turned out, a point no one had mentioned before—returned to their own home. Kephas invited me to sleep on his roof, which hardly seemed fit to hold my weight. But in fact the late summer heat sent several of the children and a couple of the men of the household up there as well, though not Yeshua, who apparently had his own little closet to sleep in at a back corner of the compound.

One of those who came up to the roof was Kephas’s brother Andreas, who had taken a strange liking to me at supper, leaving his own place to come sit at my feet like a dog in search of a scrap. It had taken me a moment to realize he was simple—as I later learned, he had suffered some accident as a child. The others seemed uncomfortable when he came to me but did not really try to stop him. So for the rest of the evening he stayed close by, and then that night came up to the roof, setting his mat close to mine and giving me a huge child’s grin. The truth was I took comfort in his attachment to me—it was such a guileless thing, and so undemanding, that it made me feel welcome there, among strangers though I was, in a way that the mere protocols of hospitality could never have done.

It was not until the following morning, when I awoke there on Kephas’s rooftop, that I had a chance for a proper view of Kefar Nahum and its situation. My impulse then was to revise my original harsh judgement at Yeshua’s choosing it as his base. The town itself—a city, Yeshua’s men had called it, though it had the most makeshift of walls and no battlements of any sort—did not amount to much, just a straggle of compounds similar to Kephas’s stretching along its few streets, all in the coarse black stone of the area and each
looking as forbidding and cramped as the next; and then to the south the harbour, which was large enough but built with a confusing disarray of jetties and quays and crammed with every sort of ramshackle craft. It was the prospect, however, that struck me, the view out over the whole of the Sea of Kinneret, which seen from there—unlike from Tiberias, where it seemed merely a backdrop laid out for the king’s amusement—appeared truly to merit the name of sea, not from its size, perhaps, but from the sense of being in some way on a distant shore. Jerusalem felt very far from here, in another world; Rome, non-existent. Of course, all this was perhaps no more than the feeling one often got in the provinces, the illusory sense that nothing beyond the immediate was important or real.

I was surprised, however, to make out just a couple of miles east of town what looked like a military camp, with Roman eagles flying. I had not heard of the place and wondered how it had come to be there, and that Antipas allowed it. Since the household had not yet come fully to life, I took the chance to slip away and make my way out to it, imagining I might learn something of use that I could then bring back to Jerusalem to show my superiors I had not been idle.

The camp lay right at the Jordan, which fed into the lake there and formed the frontier of Herod Philip’s territory. It looked large enough to house perhaps a hundred men, and stood watch over a sizeable customs house that controlled the border crossing. A sleepy-eyed guard, a young Cilician, told me the Romans had set the place up a number of years before to deal with the brigands in the hills—freedom fighters, I took him to mean, though it was true that many of them
were no better than thieves—after Antipas and Philip had shown themselves unable to. The so-called brigands had been more or less eradicated, but the camp had remained; no doubt the Romans were happy to use it to keep an eye on their client kings, and on the revenues coming in from the customs house. At the moment only a meagre twenty-five men were stationed there, commanded by a captain who was apparently quite well liked by the local population and who in fact had recently married a girl from Kefar Nahum.

I made my way back to Kephas’s house. It was still not an hour past daybreak and so I was surprised to find a small crowd had already gathered in the narrow street outside his gate, imagining them to be supplicants for Yeshua’s attentions. But there were no ill with them, nor indeed did they seem there for instruction, for there was a tension among them and an angry murmuring that died down only when I came near and they saw I was a stranger.

I asked one of them what had brought them there and he said bluntly, “They’ve killed the prophet Yohanan.”

I was shocked. As we’d heard, even in Tyre, Yohanan had lately been taken down to the fortress at Macherus, to rot there, we assumed, until he was forgotten; but this was unexpected. There had been no trial, not even a charge—the Romans would at least have taken the trouble of that, though perhaps that was why they had left the job to Antipas. No doubt Antipas had assumed he might simply append Yohanan’s execution to the recent spate of political ones, not reckoning how much greater was the affection Jews felt for their prophets than their insurrectionists.

The crowd continued to grow. I could see how he’d been loved even this far along the lake, many of those who came
looking stricken as if one of their own family had died. At one point a wail of mourning started up, and slowly filled the street; but still Yeshua did not come out. I could not tell what the crowd wanted of him, simple condolence or something more—there was that peasant anger to them that I’d seen elsewhere, born of helplessness but more dangerous for that, if it found an object.

When Yeshua finally did emerge, however, he looked so naked in his own mourning, his robe torn and his forehead blackened with ash, that the crowd seemed instantly quelled. For a few minutes he talked, though without great conviction, I thought, of how Yohanan’s death merely confirmed his greatness, invoking the usual scripture and the familiar stories of the rejected prophets. The speech appeared to have less the effect of reassuring the crowd than of bringing home to them their loss. Yet in this way the threat of violence that had been palpable moments before seemed to dissipate.

As he finished, there was a commotion at the far end of the street: a contingent of soldiers had arrived from the military camp. They’d clearly been roused in a hurry, given that there hadn’t been any sign of activity when I’d been out there not a half-hour before. The captain—Ventidius, I’d learned his name was, after the famous general—left his men at the back of the crowd and made his way through it to Kephas’s door. He was a man of forty perhaps, not young at any rate, and too old surely to be commanding such a forgotten outpost. But he had a natural dignity to him and carried authority, to judge by the ungrudging way the crowd let him through. He addressed himself at once to Yeshua, with an intensity and familiarity that surprised me.

“I assure you Rome had no hand in this,” he said.

He seemed almost to believe this, though it couldn’t have been true. Yohanan’s only crime against Antipas had been to denounce his lusts, which in any event were well known.

To his credit now, Yeshua said only, “The Romans have many hands besides their own.”

Whatever the case, it was obvious that Ventidius had been caught off guard, and also that he was angry not merely at having been left in the dark but at the actual outrage of Yohanan’s death. Later I learned he was a God-fearer, as they called them, one of those sympathetic to the Jews.

He stood there awkwardly an instant, not able to look Yeshua in the eye, then faced the crowd and asked it to disperse. Everything had gone strangely quiet, and it seemed for a moment that things might turn again. At the foot of the street the soldiers stood by uneasily, seeming to hem the crowd in because of the narrowness of the space. But Yeshua, for his part, did nothing to relieve the tension, turning and retreating without another word back through Kephas’s gate. A kind of panic seemed to go through the crowd then at being left suddenly leaderless. But finally this too passed and people began to drift away, until Ventidius gathered up his men and led them off without further ceremony.

In the end only a small group remained there in the street, huddled outside Kephas’s gate. Seeing that the brothers Yaqob and Yohanan were part of it, I went over and Yohanan, the younger of the two and the more friendly, introduced me around to the rest of the group. The men were mainly fishermen and labourers, from the look of them; there were a few women as well, to whom I was introduced, however, with the same blunt lack of formality as to the men. I was amazed when Yohanan said that all these, too, were
among those whom Yeshua had called to be his intimates, for it was clear at once that there was not a person of education or of standing among them. The whole group of them looked chastened and subdued with the news of Yohanan’s death, and I sensed as well a measure of fear in them.

Soon Kephas came out. We followed him around the corner to the harbour and from there out through one of the town gates and onto the lakeshore. Yeshua was already there by the water, still in his torn robe; he had apparently slipped out of the house by a back way. The barest of greetings were exchanged, and then a couple of the women set about preparing a cooking fire, into which some fish were heaped with some onions and leeks. One of the women had brought bread; for water, Kephas filled a flask directly from the lake. When the meal was ready everyone sat in a circle right there on the stones and a little ritual of deferment was played out, the disciples first offering the food to Yeshua who in turn offered it back to them, so that in the end it was Kephas who broke the fast.

It was not until we had eaten that anyone broached the subject of Yohanan’s death. Yaqob—I took it that he and his brother were thought the hotheads of the group, by the group’s measure—was of the opinion that a protest should be lodged directly with the governor in Damascus, or with Caesar himself. But a few of the others felt rather that they should remain quiet for the time and perhaps even disband.