Testament (34 page)

It was near dusk when we reached Kefar Nahum. When we had arranged for our sleep we went to the house where he stayed, getting directions in the street. A woman came to the gate who surely could not have been one of the wives about whom the merchants of Notzerah joked, for she was homely and simple and old.

I said to her, We have come for my son Yeshua, to invite him home with us.

She did not have the courtesy to invite us through the gate, but rather left us there in a fright as if we were thieves who had come. Some time passed before another woman emerged, or a child as I made out, for she was little more than a girl. I wished to be harsh with her, because of the insult we’d been dealt in having her sent to us, but could not find it in me.

We wish only to speak with him, I said. We have come from Notzerah.

But she said he would not come.

I asked her then, not without some spite, if she was his wife. She grew ashamed and said that he had none, though I saw that she wished it.

My pride would not suffer me to remain there, held out by a girl.

If I could offer a bed, she said.

There’s no need, I said. And we returned at once to our lodgings.

I could hardly bear to spend the night in that place, but there was no thought of leaving in the dark. It seemed a tremendous mistake now to have come, only to trouble myself with humiliation, to be sent a girl to turn me away so that I might understand the fullness of his contempt.

In the morning, just after first light, I roused Yaqob for our departure.

We’ve learned nothing, he said, and I saw he still hoped to see his brother.

We have learned he rejects us, I said, and would not hear any argument.

While we were rolling our blankets, however, a boy came to us with fish for our breakfast and two loaves of bread, saying only that someone had left them for us at the gate.

Yaqob, still hoping to convince me, said, Surely it’s Yeshua who sent them.

I saw how the fish was wrapped in three layers of leaves to keep it warm, the way I had done with the food I had brought Yeshua in the streets at Alexandria.

But to Yaqob I said, No doubt it was the girl who sent them, and still would not give in to him.

We left the town the way we had come, by the road that ran along the lake towards Tiberias. We had not gone more than a mile, however, before we came upon a gathering of some kind there at the roadside, of people who seemed stopped on their way to the fields, many with their animals or their hoes. There were two boats pulled up by the lakeshore as well, with some men there who stood a bit apart from the rest of the crowd. It was only when we came close that we saw what had drawn the crowd together, for there in the midst of them, changed again from how I had seen him in the desert, fair and well groomed but also manly in a way he had not struck me as then, stood Yeshua, preaching.

So it seemed he had preceded us on the road, as if by design.

It’s my brother, Yaqob said, and I saw the excitement he felt, and the strange power his brother still held over him.

We stopped there at the edge of the crowd. Yeshua’s glance went to us as he spoke but he gave no sign that he knew us, and indeed I thought that perhaps he did not, for many years had passed since he had laid eyes on us. Despite the anger in me that he had turned us away, still I was drawn in by his words, and was amazed how he spoke to these people as if he was one of them, and knew their lives and what they were. It was clear as I listened that there was no madness in him as people said, since he smiled and showed patience and for every question had a ready response. And yet there was a sort of devil in him, for though he smiled, still he was contrary, and though he was wise in his manner, still his words, as Gioras had said, often appeared to make little sense. He told the story of a Samaritan who helped a Judean along the Jericho road, but his meaning was uncertain, for some were angry that he praised a Samaritan and others could not believe him and others still were merely amused at the Judean’s humiliation. For each of these he had a word and yet none of them did he answer clearly, instead merely posing another riddle or turning the questioner on himself.

There was one man who said, Better to strike the Samaritan dead than take his help, at which there was laughter. But Yeshua answered, You would take from your enemy his land or his house or his goods but not his good will, which it costs him much more to give. And it was clear the man could not refute Yeshua’s argument, though perhaps as much because of its convolution as its sense.

He did not look towards Yaqob and me again while he spoke. But when he had sent the crowd away he came to us
immediately, and so showed he had known us from the start. Only the men by the boat remained then, though out of hearing now, and I understood they must be his acolytes, though they appeared the lowest sort of fishermen and menials.

I said to Yeshua, A Samaritan shows love for his enemy, and yet not a son for his mother.

If I love you, he said, it does not mean I do your bidding, nor should I leave the many who love me here for the few at home.

You shame me before strangers, I said.

There’s no shame to you if you’re blameless, but only to the one who rejects you, if he does so wrongly.

I said, Does he do so wrongly.

But he would not answer me.

I only know that I must leave behind my old life, he said, and embrace my new one.

Yaqob, who had stood by silently, asked him then, What is your new life if you must reject your brothers and sisters to have it.

But Yeshua said, Who are my brothers and sisters but those who love me and don’t pursue me in the streets for fear I’m mad.

So he rebuked us, and out of pride I could not bring myself to correct him.

I have been in the streets since I was a child, he said, and you did not object. Why then do you wish to chase me from them now.

And he left us for the boats that were waiting for him at the lakeshore.

When the boats had pulled away and Yeshua had not so much as turned his head to look back at us, Yaqob said, Let
us go home, and I saw how he had been hurt. I thought then of the sons that I had and not the one I had lost, and the comfort they might have been to me, and yet how often I had neglected them for the sake of the bastard one who only brought grief.

We must put your brother from our minds, I said.

So we might have done and forgotten him except that month by month then his infamy grew, until it seemed his name was on the lips of all the Galilee.

I often had cause in those days to think back on Tryphon, Yeshua’s teacher, and his prediction that Yeshua would be a famous scholar. So it might have been, had I followed Tryphon’s advice and not induced rebellion in my son. I could hardly remember now what it was I had tried to save him from in thwarting him from his natural path—the humiliation of his conception, I’d imagined, except all I had managed instead was to keep that thing always before him. For if I had simply left him to his abilities, he might have been a great philosopher like some of the Jews had become in Alexandria, and even the Greeks would have respected him then and none given much thought to his parentage, in that city where eunuchs and orphans and bastards were commonplace and where no one, if they had ability, was held back on that account. Instead, because I had blocked him, he had at every turn chosen the hardest path and the least respectable, so that upon the shame of his birth he had heaped up other shames and made himself conspicuous, where I had thought only to hide him away.

It seemed now from the reports I had of him that I had erred even to make him a Jew, for he appeared neither able
to take to the thing nor to reject it. So I heard how he accepted pagans among his followers, and rejected circumcision and the law, yet still proclaimed the one God. All this, I thought, must come from the knowledge of his own bas-tardy and of his exclusion from God’s assembly, such that he sought all means to make a place for the outcast and thus justify himself. Perhaps I would have served him better if when we had lived in Alexandria, where we were freer, I had simply offered him up to the pagan gods, for surely no pagan god was as cruel as our own, who so barred a man and all his generations from the assembly of his own people.

Because of his views, because he flouted the law on one hand and claimed to affirm it on the other, there was hardly a town around the lake where he had not brought down on himself the wrath of the leadership. But he continued to attract many followers among the ignorant and the outcast, who no one else would have anything to do with and who he was able to impress with the skills and tricks he had learned as a boy in Alexandria. Soon enough he had gained a reputation as a healer and even a worker of wonders, though I imagined he did little more than apply ointments and salves, which because they did not kill his patients, so made him seem much superior to the charlatans and thieves who passed for doctors in those parts. My son Shimon in Ammathus had cause to see him from time to time as he moved through the towns on the lake, and never witnessed him do more than preach his stories and perhaps give a packet of herbs for a fever. But still the tales of him were spread around, and grew more fantastical with each retelling.

In the end, I hardly knew what to make of all the reports I had of him, if he was merely bent on destruction or truly
believed in the mission he followed and the message he hoped to impart. I had never known him, even as a child, to speak frivolously or without logic and cause, and so even now imagined, for all the contradictions people spoke of him, that there must be some deeper wisdom to what he did. Yet I could not believe that only the ignorant saw through to it when those of learning could not, for the fishermen followed him and the peasants and even the toll collectors, whom everyone shunned, yet the teachers did not, nor many of the elders in the various towns, nor even our handful of Pharisees, though Yeshua preached resurrection as they did and followed their teacher Hillel. Then always there were troubling accounts of him in which I could not sort rumour from truth, for as I knew that he broke certain laws that many called sacrosanct, so was I unsure what others he might break.

One of these accounts involved a certain man of influence from the town of Bersaba by the name of Chizkijah. This was a person, it was said, burdened both with an undistinguished family and a crippling deformity who nonetheless had been able to raise himself up and gain a position at court. In the early days he had been opposed to Yeshua’s teachings on various grounds, but then by dint of listening to him over time he had gradually been won to him. In this way he came to be close to some of Yeshua’s intimates and saw the ways in which Yeshua comported himself in private, outside the view of the crowds. He began to be troubled then by some of the things that he saw, for there was a young woman, as he claimed, whom Yeshua tried to bend from the will of her father and take to himself for his own pleasure. Those closest to Yeshua, because of their loyalty, would say nothing of this. But Chizkijah could not hold his tongue. When he was
unable to get satisfaction from Yeshua’s intimates, he began to enquire more broadly amongst Yeshua’s other followers, to see if he only imagined impropriety or if others saw it. So, as I heard, many who had harboured concerns but had feared to voice them had them strengthened, until finally even the girl’s father confirmed them, admitting the girl was pregnant and naming Yeshua as the culprit.

These charges, regardless of their truth, would have been harmful enough in themselves, and indeed Yeshua’s followers had already begun to desert him on their account. But then it happened that all three of those who were at the core of the accusations against him, the girl, her father, and Chizkijah, mysteriously died, within a matter of weeks of each other. There were those who were quick to see the hand of evil in the thing, and to say it was Yeshua’s own followers who were behind the deaths. I could hardly credit that Yeshua would have encouraged murder, or even that he had had any part in the pregnancy of the girl, who indeed was well known for her behaviour. Yet it was surely possible that some of Yeshua’s followers had been overzealous on his account. The entire matter left an air of corruption and threat around Yeshua’s ministry like the menace one associated with the Zealots in Jerusalem, who would stop at nothing to reach their ends.

In all this time I had not laid eyes on Yeshua again, after our meeting outside Kefar Nahum. In some sense I had ceased to think of him as my son, since everything I heard of him struck me as wholly foreign to the life that I lived now. Even Yaqob by now had resigned himself to his rejection of us, and no longer spoke of him, and in Notzerah I was not so much disdained on his account as held in sympathy, as if
I had lost him in some way, as one might lose a son to illness or war. So I might have forgotten him, and dismissed what I heard as the fabrication of his enemies or simply shut my ears to it, except that there was always that part of me that could not drop the fear I felt for him and the sense of a reckoning that must come, if not from the Lord, then from his own pride.

After the scandals that hit him on Chizkijah’s account, Yeshua descended into increasing strangeness. It was only the most fanatical who remained attached to him now and the most destitute, with the least to lose, so that they seemed in danger of becoming like the cults one heard of, which practised the strangest rites and held their leaders as gods. Yeshua would hardly deign to enter a town any more, but only wandered the countryside with his ragged band of followers like some brigand overlord, eating roots and wild fruit for his supper and spending the nights in caves or in the open air. No doubt he thus hoped to emulate his old mentor Yohanan, except that people only saw in this the sign of a growing lunacy, and had confirmed for them the madness they had always suspected in him.

When the Jubilee was ushered in Yeshua told his disciples that all the old laws must be respected, that their land must be left fallow and any debts they were owed be forgiven. This would have beggared many of them, who relied for their very sustenance on the bit of land they had or who could not count on their own debts to be absolved as they absolved those of others. So he thinned the ranks of his following again, as if he sought to winnow it down to some sort of purity, with no taint of compromise. I thought often in those days of his teacher Artimidorus, and how he had spoken
in riddles and contradictions so that anyone trailing behind him must either conform to every intricacy of his thought or lose his way. Likewise, Yeshua had set out on a path on which many had accompanied him at first, but at each difficult turn some had fallen away until he was left with only his handful.