My Glorious Brothers (3 page)

“From your father, Moses ben Aaron ben Simon ben Enoch?” He prided himself on having at least seven generations of everyone in Modin at his fingertips.

Ruth would nod; later, many years later, she told me what terror and awe the Adon inspired in her.

“A new vintage?”

If it happened to be a blend or a spicing or a honey mixture or a souring, Ruth would wince with shame and regret.

“For the Adon's judgment and pleasure,” she would usually say, forcing each word, casting furtive glances at the door, but beautiful, how beautiful, with her red hair and her wonderful coppery skin, pulling the heart out of me and making me think and dream of the day when I would defy the Adon and do her honor and her will.

Then the Adon would wash his crystal cup, which had belonged to his grandfather and his grandfather's grandfather. He would pour a measure. He would scan it in the light. He would say the blessing,
“…boray pri hagofin!”
Then he would drain it down. Then he would render the verdict.

“My felicitations to Moses ben Aaron ben Simon ben Enoch ben Levi”—an extra generation if it pleased him particularly. “A noble wine, a gracious wine. You may tell your father that the table of the blessed King David ben Jesse served no better.” And then Ruth would flee.

But she was ours. She wept with our hurts. She suffered with our sorrows. When they overcame their fear of the Adon, she and her mother cooked for us and cleaned for us and sewed for us—even as other women in Modin did. But we are a people blessed with fruitfulness; only Moses ben Aaron was cursed with a single child and that a girl, so for Ruth's mother the five sons of Mattathias became a recompense. But on my part, it was no curse, not of that sort. I loved her, and I never loved another woman.

***

So we lived in the endlessness of our childhood under the iron grip, the iron hand, and the unbending dignity of the old man, the Adon, our father—until suddenly childhood ended and was no more. When we did wrong, we were punished, as no other children in the village were. And, believe me, the Adon knew how to punish. There was a time when Judas was nine years old—already possessed of that unbelievable beauty and dignity that stayed with him all his life, already so different from me, Simon, already adored when he walked through the village, already offered the choicest of tidbits, sweets, cakes—and that time he was playing with my father's crystal wineglass, which he dropped and smashed.

Only he and I were in the house when it happened; the Adon was out, plowing with John; Jonathan and Eleazar were somewhere else, I don't remember where—and on the hearthstone were the slivers of that wonderful and ancient glass, brought back from Babylon when our people returned from the exile there. Never will I forget the abysmal terror on the face Judas turned up to me.

“Simon—Simon,” he said. “Simon, he'll kill me! Simon, what will I do—what will I do?”

“Stop crying!”

He couldn't stop crying; he wept as if his heart would break, and when the Adon came, I told him, calmly enough, that I had done it. Just once, the Adon struck me, and then for the first time I realized the mighty force in the arm of the old man, the blow hurling me across the room and against the wall. And Judas, who had to let it out of him somehow, told Ruth—who came to me as I lay in the sun in the courtyard behind the house, bent over me and kissed me and whispered, “Oh, good, good Simon ben Mattathias, oh, good and sweet Simon—” I don't know why I write of that, for Judas was a child and I was already a man, as we reckon manhood, although close enough to Judas in age; and in any case, our childhood was not made of such things, but of a slower and sweeter pace.

We lay on the hillsides, watching the goats and counting the fleecy clouds in the sky; we fished in the cold streams; we once hiked to the great trunk road that passed north to south, and lay there in the underbrush as twenty thousand Macedonian mercenaries marched by, a proud show in their shining armor, on their way to fight the Egyptians; and we crouched on overhanging cliffs and pelted them with stones as they slunk back, turned away by the quiet word of Rome. And once, for a whole morning, we five of us traveled westward until from a high rock we saw the endless, shining expanse of the sea, the blue and gentle Mediterranean, with one white sail to mar its fine surface. It was Jonathan who said then:

“I'll go that way, westward, someday—”

“How?”

“With a ship,” he said.

“Have you ever heard of a Jewish ship?”

“The Phoenicians have ships,” Jonathan said thoughtfully, “and so have the Greeks. We can take them.”

Three of us laughed, but Judas didn't laugh. He stood there staring at the sea, the first fair shadow of a beard on his clean-cut face, something in his eyes that I had never seen there before.

Jonathan was smaller than the rest of us, even when he reached his full growth, wiry and fast as a gazelle. He ran down a wild pig once, threw it nimbly and cut its throat. Judas, in a rage, struck his arm a blow that paralyzed it, so that his knife fell to the ground. When Jonathan would have leaped at Judas, I caught them both and hurled them apart.

“He kills for the sake of killing!” Judas cried. “Even when the meat is unclean and no good to anyone.”

“You don't strike your brother,” I said slowly and deliberately.

But I tear these things out of a past that was like a golden time. We were five of us always together, the five sons of Mattathias the Adon, growing like pups first, then together working, building, playing, laughing, weeping sometimes, browning under the golden sun of the land.

***

And then a man was slain by our hand and it was over—that long sun-drenched childhood in the old, old land of Israel, the land of milk and honey, of vineyards and fig trees, of wheat fields and barley fields, the land where our plows turn up ever and again the bones of another Jew, the land of valleys where the topsoil has no bottom, and of terraced hillsides that make it a more wonderful garden than ever the famous hanging gardens of Babylon were. Our play was over, our running wild and thoughtless, our games in the village street, our hours lying in the sweet grass, our sullen times with Lebel the teacher, his growling, “Would you be like a heathen, so that the holy word of God drummed on your ears, but you could never see it with your two eyes?” We were done with our wandering in the pine forests, our caves in the snow, our traps for the wild partridge.

We shed blood and it was over, that time that has no beginning, and the brief, glorious manhood of my brothers began. Yet that is what I set out to tell, to put down here, to make both a tale and an answer to the riddle of my people, so that even a Roman may understand us, who of all the world's folks live without walls to guard us, without mercenaries to fight for us, and with no God that man can lay eyes on.

There was a warden of all the hill country from Modin to Bethel to Jericho, and three hundred and twenty villages were his to bleed and suck and squeeze. His name was Pericles, and he had a little Greek in him as well as other things. Those are the worst Hellenes, those who have just a trace of it or none at all, for it becomes a passion with them to become more Greek than the Greeks. Along with other things, Pericles had a little Jew in him, and for that reason, to purge himself over and over, his hand was more heavy than it had to be—which was, indeed, heavy enough.

That was still before the time when they decided that ours would be a better land in a better world with no Jews at all, and Pericles's work was to squeeze us. From three hundred and twenty-one villages, his contract was to deliver to Antiochus Epiphanes—the King of Kings, as he liked to style himself—one hundred talents of silver a year. A lot of money from a tiny district of a tiny land, but as much as it was, Pericles was determined to make one talent for himself where he delivered two to the king. That took squeezing, and Pericles squeezed, and each of the four hundred mongrel mercenaries who worked for him squeezed on their own.

He was a huge, fat, powerful man, Pericles, the pink flesh hanging in folds from his round, clean-shaven face, and while he was not much of a man, he was a good deal of a woman. When Reuben ben Gad's four-year-old boy, Asher, was found in the cedar copse with half of his entrails torn out, justly or not word went around that Pericles did it; he did other things that we knew about, in any case, and there was a story Jonathan told that was not good to remember.

At this time too it was Jonathan whose scream we heard, Judas and I, climbing to the little valley where he pastured our goats.

We broke into a run, and a few minutes later reached the lip of the valley. The goats were milling around and in the center of them, Jonathan struggled in the grasp of Pericles. Two Syrian mercenaries grinned as they watched, sprawled out on the grass, their weapons thrown about carelessly.

It happened quickly then. Pericles let go of Jonathan as he saw us, took a step back, and then Judas, knife drawn, was on him. The Greek wore a brass breastplate, but Judas cut under it, two sharp blows, and I remember how astonished I was at the gush of red blood. The mercenaries seemed to move with amazing slowness; the first was not yet on his feet when I caught him in the jaw with a rock the size of his head. The second scrambled for his spear, tripped, clawed to his feet and began to run—and at that moment Eleazar appeared, took in the scene at a glance, and leaped at the mercenary. In ten paces Eleazar caught him, swung him into the air, one hand about his neck, one gouging the underedge of his breastplate, spun him, and then tossed him like a ball. Eleazar was only sixteen then, yet already taller and stronger than any man in Modin. The Syrian fell with a sickening thud, and picking up his spear, Eleazar stood over him. But it was finished. The other mercenary's head was crushed in, the gray brains oozing onto the ground, and Pericles lay still in a pool of blood.

There were three dead men, and we had slain them; our childhood was over and finished.

***

We found the Adon and my brother John terracing. This way, from time immemorial, the land came into being. We build a wall on a hillside and then fill it in with baskets of soil from the bottom lands. At one end we build a cistern and an apron for the rainfall, and out of a piece of land so wrought will come five crops a year. The old man and my brother John labored there in the sun, their long linen trousers rolled up to the knee and dirt-stained, their bare backs glistening sweat, the Adon with his heavy stone hammer which with a shrewd blow here or there shaped the rocks for the wall—straightening then, the hammer hanging from his gnarled arm as he watched us approach.

Jonathan still wept. Judas was white as a sheet, and Eleazar had become a boy again, a frightened boy who has slain his first man, the unforgivable and absolute sin of murder. I told the Adon what had happened. “You're sure they were dead?” he said quietly, rubbing the hammer in the heel of his palm, his great red beard glistening on his bare chest.

“They were dead.”

“Jonathan ben Mattathias,” he said, and Jonathan looked at him. “Dry your eyes,” the Adon said. “Are you a girl that you anoint yourself this way? A dog is dead—is that reason to weep? Where are the bodies?”

“Where they fell,” I said.

“You left them there! Simon, you fool—you fool!”

“A Kohan—” I only started to speak of the law that forbids a Kohan to touch the dead, but the Adon had already started off. We followed him to the little valley, and there, without another word, he swung Pericles onto his shoulders. We took the other two bodies and followed him back to where they had been terracing. With his own hands, the Adon stripped the Greek and the mercenaries of their armor and weapons.

“Go back and watch the goats,” he told Jonathan. “Dry your eyes.” Suddenly, he threw his arms around Jonathan and held him close, rocked him back and forth for a moment, and then kissed his brow. Jonathan began to cry again, and the Adon said, harsh suddenly:

“Never cry again—No more. No more.”

Still we were unseen, and unseen we rolled the three bodies against the inner side of the new wall, covered them over with dirt and then worked all the rest of that day until the terrace was completed. When we threw in the last basketful of dirt, the Adon said:

“Sleep forever, sleep deep. May the Lord God forgive a Jew who shed blood and a Kohan who touched the dead; may he tear out of your heart the lust that brought you to our land—and may he cleanse the land of all the filth like you.” And turning to us, “Say you Amen!”

“Amen,” we repeated.

“Amen,” the Adon said.

We put on our tunics. Jonathan came with the goats, and with him we walked back to Modin, Judas carrying the armor and weapons, all wrapped in leaves and grass.

That night, after dinner, we sat at the table with a single lamp burning, and the Adon spoke to us. With a deep, old-fashioned formality he spoke, addressing us each in turn, and giving us each four generations, as:

“To you, my sons, to you John ben Mattathias ben John ben Simon, to you Simon ben Mattathias ben John ben Simon, to you Judas ben Mattathias ben John ben Simon, to you Eleazar ben Mattathias ben John ben Simon, to you Jonathan ben Mattathias ben John ben Simon—to you my five sons who have borne me up in my sorrow and my loneliness, who have comforted me in my old age, who have felt the weight of my hand and the bite of my anger—to you I speak as a man among you, for there is no turning back for them who have broken God's commandment. We who were holy are holy no longer. It is said thou shalt not kill, and we have slain. We have exacted the price of freedom, which is always counted in blood, even as Moses did and Joshua, and Gideon too. From here on, we will not ask for forgiveness, only for strength—for strength.”

He stopped then, and suddenly his age was apparent, the wrinkles deep on his face, his pale gray eyes clouded over with sorrow, an old Jew who had desired only what other Jews desired, gentle and peaceful years into the soil where his fathers lay. From face to face, he looked, anxiously, uncertainly, and I wonder what he saw there—the long, bony, sad face of John, the eldest; my own plain, almost ugly features; Judas, tall and beautiful, clean brown skin running into a curling brown beard; Eleazar, broad-faced, childlike, good-natured, wanting only to do my bidding or Judas's or Jonathan's, all the strength of a Samson with even more simplicity—and Jonathan, so small in contrast with the rest of us, yet like a knife-edge, pent-up, restless, a boundless desire for some unknown abiding all through him; five sons, five brothers…