Him, p.28
HIM, page 28
She fought her way closer to him and asked where the Son was. The Rock looked utterly weary – creased and baggy, his massive shoulders hunched almost up to his ears. “With Yakob.”
“Where?”
He jerked his head in the direction of the hills. “This is no place for you, Mother.” The Kana’im spun away from the merchants laughing. “Sell your hides!” they shouted. The Rock shook his head, and took her arm. “Let’s get you home.”
The house was flooded with afternoon light and that felt wrong.
Maryam had nothing to do, which she hated, and that made her fret more. Where was Yehush? What on earth had gone wrong? Yakob finally brought the Son back at dusk, holding up a hand against any questions. The Son still had a scowling face. He went off into a corner and took up the house’s one scroll of scripture and sat reading it. Yakob bowed his forehead to touch Maryam’s. It had been a terrible, long day for him. Maryam could smell bitter sweat and exhaustion.
Maryam approached the Son, said something motherly, was not rebuffed, and so took his stiff shoulders in her hands. Still he did not move or speak. She asked him if he was feeling angry; why he had struck people.
What he said then was so far from making any sense. What kind of love was it that loved freedom so much it let all things either burst or freeze? What kind of love would let even itself go dark and cold?
“It will make everything one even temperature,” he said, staring ahead, angry and somehow desperate. “No hot, no cold, no difference to do work, just death.” He turned to her with agonized eyes. “How could something like that love?” She hugged him, but found no words. His eyes kept staring.
He ate nothing that night. Maryam was on the upper floor and heard footsteps on the roof. She climbed up the ladder. The Son was sitting bolt upright, staring at the stars.
She sat next to him. He said, “It’s all so small, really.” He looked at her and told her, “Sleep.”
And suddenly it was morning and she was folded up on the roof, hips and elbows stiff and splayed.
She drank water, broke bread, and swung her bad leg down and then up the hill, this time with Shem who was carrying Shushan.
Shushan was looking at the hills around them. “This is the best time of year,” she said. “Clear skies, but still cool, you can gather in the forecourts and listen all day.” She looked up. “You feel your spirit could go up into the clouds. Leave this sick old body.” Her teeth were broken and stained, gummed over with something. Was everyone talking about death all the time?
A line of scowling merchants stood across the Stoa steps, arms folded. Worse, there were some Empire soldiers, in leather armour with swords, spears, shields, ready for trouble. The Son was not allowed on the steps, so the eklesia – the smallest group yet, no more than thirty – sat in a circle around him.
Mattit-yahu was cross-legged on the pavement, scroll across his lap. Maryam got out her own tiny jar, and the reeds that kept splitting and freckling her hands.
It did not start out as a good day’s Calling Out. He talked about stars like dust, how suns thought, how time was a river that flowed in all directions at once. Again, she gave up trying to write.
Then suddenly in that keening voice that drew attention, he started to speak plainly. She had learned to hate the keening – it could break words into rubble. But he told a recognizable story, though partly singing it with sudden elevations into eagle-like notes. He hardly sounded human.
There was a wayward boy
whose mother fought him
out of love
to stop him being hurt.
So is your Father in Heaven
sometimes stern
to help you avoid pain
God knows your pain
that cannot be avoided.
God burned beyond ages until
the universe first opened its mouth to speak.
The Word was fire and light.
The Word was heavy shadow,
denser than rock.
Know your mother loves you.
Your father who is also your mother.
God sees and knows your pain
Your mother’s love is your lodestone star.
Always shining,
never leaves you,
always there.
Maryam wrote none of that down out of embarrassment. She was angry, confused; a fly flew into her open mouth, and all the light in her eyes seemed to shine upwards with the solidity of pillars.
“Love,” the Son whispered but somehow they all heard. Could there be a miracle of hearing? If words could be heard over the sounds of the market, was that a miracle?
Suddenly the Son’s posture and expression had cleared. He looked like a stonecutter.
“Cooking a meal.” he said in a normal voice. “This is a parable about cooking a meal. How many of you here have cooked a meal with someone you love?”
A murmur of assent. Most of them had.
“Do you remember the joy you had in the work?”
One woman spoke up, “Not in our house.” That got a laugh.
The Son laughed too. “Remember when every task was done in order? All the vegetables peeled, laid out, cooked to time? How the flour and water and sage were kneaded together when there was no meat, and how someone else bought the broth to a boil to cook them? And how the feast was ready for the guests?
“So love brings together the flour, the water, the herbs, and makes the work a delight. When we are angry, we hate the work. The chopping and the kneading and the boiling feel like slavery.
“Love makes all tasks easy. And so this task I am about to undertake will go simply and well.”
“What is the task?” someone shouted.
Towards the end of his life, old Yosef would sometimes look at Maryam with such a light in his eyes, which were narrow not wide, as if he were about to cry, except the face overall was joyful. So the Son looked now.
“Saving you,” he shrugged, as if it were something small. “All of you.”
The cheer spread slowly like ripples across a pond.
And the Son clenched his mouth, pushing up his lower lip. Staggering very slightly, he stepped down.
And somehow Maryam knew: he’d finished speaking. The Calling Out was done.
CHAPTER 27
THE OLIVE PRESS
The first dusk of Pesach came.
Yoanna’s uncle felt that he was head of the house. He tussled with the Son as to who would wash the guests’ feet.
The Son was immoveable. “You will be here in this house next year,” he said, and carried the bowl, and kneeled in front of his students. Then everyone insisted that the Son sit at the head, with all the others fanning out, couching themselves around the table.
The first cup came and the uncle recited the Kuddush. “Blessed are you, O Lord our God, king of the universe.” The questions, the first drinking, the singing of the Hallal Tela, all went well.
The Son started to talk. Both Maryam and Matt lunged for their reeds; but it was another stretch of nonsense. Their eyes met; they now both wrote down what they could and compared.
For Maryam, these words were shrouded in fog; she could not even wrench them into grammatical form. Matt shifted closer to Maryam with his scroll. His version of the words were clearer and may even have been what the Son was trying to say – that the lamb they were eating was actually him. He was the sacrifice. The wine was his blood. Then the unleavened bread was his body. And that somehow they would go on eating him?
The Son stared at the walls. Maryam recognized the frozen face, the air of distraction from his return to Nazareth. She knew that he was seething inside. This is how he had looked just before he walked off into the night.
He was going to bolt again. Trying not to alert anyone, Maryam slipped on her sandals.
When he jumped up, she was ready. Without saying anything, the Son strode out of the door with Maryam limping after him. Behind her Yakob was hopping one-footed into his sandals.
The Son marched out of the courtyard, up the road with its high blank walls and bolted gates. With her hip, Maryam could not keep up. As he walked, the Son punched the air.
Amid the sprawl of the city was an old olive press.
It was ruined, but still had a small garden around it. After Seder it was now full of families and children strolling, enjoying the view. Some pilgrims were sleeping rough.
The Son prowled around the park, his hands in fists. A woman’s face fell when she saw him, full of fear. The Son growled and suddenly thrust his way through shrubbery to sit folded and hidden in the midst of a thicket. Maryam was able to slip along his trail of broken twigs.
Silently, she took his hand. It was shaped exactly like hers: thick with stubby fingers almost as wide as it was long. The two hands intersected like links in a chain.
They sat in silence as the students called for him. “Rabuli? Rabuli?”
The Son hissed at her not to speak and lifted up the mingled bundle of their hands and kissed them. His face was wet. She made to cup his head, but he fought down her hands and shook her, quite hard: stay still. Say nothing.
They waited. Anxious voices asked, “Have you seen a man? Very short. Clean shaven. Walk through here?” or “I know you, you are one of us. Have you seen the Son of Adam?”
They waited motionless in near total darkness. Maryam began to hear the Son breathe – regular and deep. Had he fallen asleep? She nudged him. It seemed to her that he sat up, had indeed slept.
He kissed her hand once more and released it. There were crickets wheedling all around them. The Son coughed and spoke.
“The thing, one thing, that gives me strength. Is. God does not just live in all times at once, but all worlds at once. The world is made of tiny burning stars that do not have a defining shape until they are seen. God sees them and decides, but the other decisions exist as well. World on world on world – all different, branching like a tree, the tree of the Kingdom. God is whole and seen whole only from all those worlds. And at all those times.”
“I don’t understand,” said Maryam. “No one will understand.”
“So only God can know God.” His voice was breathy, low, like wind. As lonely as wind can sound.
The Son coughed. Or it may have been a sob. In the darkness, Maryam couldn’t see, so she gave an extra stroke on top of his hand and then squeezed it, and he squeezed back.
“It means there is a world in which God does not kill me.”
“What’s different in that world?” Maryam wanted to make this world like that one.
“I can only glimpse it and it’s like a fan opening over and over with the same faces only slightly different. Sometimes different stars. Sometimes… sometimes I was born a man.”
As he breathed, he creaked like old leather. “There’s so much about being human that I will never do. I will never have children, or raise them. I’ll never have a wife, someone of my own. God wanted to live all those things too. Here, it wants me to die.”
“Why?”
A voice, the Rock’s called, “Rabuli, is that you? Rabuli, are you all right?”
Maryam raised her voice. “He’s fine Shem, he’s OK.”
The Migdali’s voice. “What’s going on? Is there a change of plans? Is he all right?”
“We are talking.”
Andreas’s voice, barTalemi’s, all of them. “Can we see him? Can we get in there? Rabuli, can I help you?”
Something burbled up in Maryam, something she hadn’t let herself know was there. “Leave us alone! Let us talk. Please!”
She heard the Migdali herding them. “You heard what Ami said. They’re talking. He’s good. Come on. We can sit over there. Believe it or not, Andreas, we are not needed right now.”
The silence settled.
The Son whispered. “I can’t understand it all. But God does not have to do things in order. Here, my dying and its dying with me creates the sympathy. The forgiveness. The understanding that it is horrible to die. And what’s horrible about it is. Is that each time someone dies a part of the universe dies too. And so over time, whole peoples go – their songs, stories, wisdoms.”
“What does that mean?” Maryam shook their hands hard.
“I must die. So that God lives through the death and so changes. And so God will let you all live in the spirit.”
The voice faded. Sounds of night. That bulbul again, and crickets. Maryam waited.
“I’ve had a glorious life, Ami. Being a kid in Nazareth, running around the place. Aba reading to me over and over until I would never forget a word of scripture. Our mule. Babatha bossing everyone around. Yakob always there, my best friend. And then this. Hosi-ana.” He kissed Maryam’s hand again.
He’s frightened. Maryam took him in her arms and rocked him. Bulbuls and crickets. She said, “You say there is more than one world, this one many times over.”
He was almost asleep and murmured. “Dreams are just the lives you live in those other worlds.”
“And they are all real.”
“All real.”
“Then ask God to make it be that you have to die now in just one of those worlds. It can learn from that, can’t it?”
In the dark, she could feel his flesh shake no.
But she pressed on. “Then live in just one. Just one world you can die at eighty in your bed. Let this God of yours live through that.”
He went still, and everything was held in balance, and then he shivered. “There are too many.”
It wasn’t rage or anger or even fear she felt, nor boredom when he spoke for hours of incomprehensible things. It was despair that her flesh and blood should know all this and it all be so beyond her.
He slept a little while longer. Then he sat up. “They’re coming. It’s here.”
Then she heard it too, the clatter of leather strips over moving legs and slight metallic noise of swords.
She whispered. “How would they know you are here?”
“They’ve been searching everywhere.”
She shook his hand. Hide here.
They heard troops speaking Greek, demanding to know where the one calling himself Yehush of Nazareth was. Was he here? He had been seen coming here. Someone said, “Who? No, no, nothing like that.”
Then an anxious female voice. “They’re lying. They were all talking to someone hiding. I heard them.”
Shouting and threats.
The Son said, “I won’t be taken cowering in a bush.”
With a crackling of branches the Son stood up. The collar of his tunic caught and tore. The Son pulled himself through the branches and broke free. He said with a calm voice, “Here I am.”
Torchlight danced, burning the eyes and making everything dark. Maryam could see almost nothing. She stumbled, limped, and nearly fell.
“That’s a woman talking,” said one of the soldiers.
“Yeah, they say he’s a bit like that, you know, one of them.” A soldier mimed effeminacy, and the other soldiers laughed.
“They’re all like that, the whole bloody lot of them.”
Everyone, the families, the students, some of the eklesia were all standing up now in alarm. In the torchlight that masked all.
“Are you Yehush of Nazareth?”
When the answer was yes, they clustered round, soldiers, rough boys from rural places wearing round leather helmets and sweat-smelling wool. “You’ve made enough trouble,” said one of them, and pushed him. They encircled the Son with spears and then like wind in a bush fire, swept him away.
No, no, thought Maryam. Not this soon, not this quickly. He’s done nothing to hurt you Romans.
The apostoli and the students looked stunned, skittish. BarTalemi and Yake the Lesser had melted away. Yakob seized Maryam’s hand, as did the Migdali. Maryam began to pull them. They resisted. She pulled them harder, straining to march.
“Where are we going?” the Migdali protested.
“To the house of the High Priest,” said Maryam. “The soldiers have to take him there. It’s our laws that rule in Yehud.”
“Do you know where it is?”
“It was once my second home.” Maryam could feel the pulse of surprise go through Yakob and the Migdali.
Already across the vale of Kidron, she could see the centre of the city, its palaces and the villas of the priestly class. There was almost no light, no lamps in any windows. There was no singing or sound of prayer. Dogs barked – the darkest and quietest time of the night. Ahead of them and behind them the sound of feet, in darkness on dry soil.
CHAPTER 28
HIM
The Kohen Gadol was seated on a chair in his courtyard.
Caiaphas, that was his name. He looked cold and sleep-befuddled, still in his nightclothes with a shawl thrown over his shoulders. Eyanaphon, that viper, sat next to him, comfortably sprawled.
And next to both of them, Yoses, Maryam’s son.
In the white linen of the Sadducai, Yoses had grown into a polished young man. The two authorities were waiting while Yo-yo wrote with a stylus on a wax tablet on his lap. He saw Maryam and wilted, eyes closing briefly then opening again. His shoulders sagged as if under a weight.
The Son stood in his old homespun, mosaicked now with patches of dust and spots of grease. His feet in his sandals were cracked, the toenails broken. Two Temple guards stood either side of him with spears. And next to him, arms folded, at the ready, Yoanna.
Yoses finished writing and Caiaphas flicked a hand towards Maryam and asked the door guards, “Who’s this?”
Yoanna started to speak. “This woman is…”
Maryam cut her off, using her clarion voice, mustering her patrician accent. “I am that person’s mother.”
Caiaphas went very still. “I know you.” He peered. “Yes, you’re Maryam. Elisheba’s cousin. God of my fathers. You were exiled. To Nazareth!”
Caiaphas turned to the Sadduci. “Eyanaphon! This is the son of mad Yosef. We exiled him to Nazareth. Naggar from Nazareth. Well it makes a good story.”
They did not know who Yoses’s parents were. And so they would not know that this was Yo-yo’s brother. Maryam’s eyes were hard on Yo-yo. Are you that ashamed of us?
