Authors: Nino Ricci
Huram had got her at the market in Raphanah. A whole milking cow he’d paid for her, so you’d see he must have been taken with her, if you knew Huram. But then he got her home and treated her worse than the cow he’d traded her for. It was only sons he was after—he could have had himself any girl in Baal-Sarga or even Gergesa, he was rich enough for it, but he didn’t want the trouble with the families or to have to go begging. So he got a slave and said when she gave him a son he’d set her free. Not for her sake, you understand—it was only that he didn’t want it said that his sons were the children of a slave.
She wasn’t much more than a child herself when she came to us, like I was, so of course I was the one who she turned to. That was how we both looked at it then—there was Huram, and then there were the two of us. I’d take her around to my favourite spots on the farm, and show her the flowers that came up, and throw almonds to her from the tops of the trees. Then there were all my secret places, that I’d never told Huram about—the caves by the lake, for instance, which the brigands must have used before the Romans chased them off but which were empty now except
for one that I found by accident, when my hand went through the wall that closed it up. I could hardly believe what I found there—a whole family had been buried there, to judge by the bones, all laid out with their bracelets and charms to be ready for the other side. But when I took Moriah to see them, she got a terrible fright and said it was no place for us, and straightaway she had me kill a bird for her and did her prayers and chants for those gods of hers I’d never heard of.
Not even Moriah herself could have told you where she’d come from. Before Raphanah she’d been in Damascus, where she’d had a baby though they’d killed it, since it was a girl, and before that, when she’d been small, she remembered going in a cart for quite a while and then a boat. But she hadn’t known the names of places, and no one had bothered to tell her, and so one was fairly much like another. The way she reckoned things she’d done well for herself to get Huram, and I could see it was true she hadn’t had much of a life before him. But still it made me boil, the way he treated her. He’d have her make us supper and then give her just our leavings for her own, which he’d scrape into the same bucket we used for our pigs, to remind her who she was. Of course I’d sneak things to her, even meat now and then, though it was a waste, because half the time she’d just burn it up for her strange gods.
When quite a while had gone by and Moriah wasn’t pregnant yet, Huram began to take it out on her, beating her for every little thing and threatening to sell her off. So she’d come to me, not really crying, because she could take a lot, but just a bit sad the way she was, and I’d help her to laugh the thing out. It was around then that we started to watch
for the holy man across the lake from the back pasture, to pass the time. It was also around then that Moriah began to come to me in my bed—Huram made me sleep in the stable, to keep an eye out for bandits—after Huram had thrown her out of his, which he didn’t much like her in once he’d finished with her. She showed me things then, though I hardly knew what I was doing, and it got so all I thought about was her coming to me, though I was sure Huram would kill us both if he saw us.
After a while of this, Moriah was pregnant. I was young at the time but I wasn’t a fool—I knew the baby was mine. So I said to Moriah, “I’ll just tell Huram to give me my share of things and then we’ll run off, the two of us.” But Moriah, changed now, said, “Don’t be an idiot.” I imagined she was thinking Huram would come after us and slit our throats once he’d worked out what had happened, or maybe just that we’d be better off to wait and see if she had a son, so she could get her freedom. So I held my tongue. Moriah said, “We shouldn’t see each other as much, in case he gets suspicious,” and never came to my bed any more or out to the fields with me, and pretended to be a good wife. And I went along with this, believing everything would work out in the end.
It wasn’t long, though, before I understood things weren’t the same between us. Even if Huram wasn’t around now she’d put me off, half the time treating me like a servant and saying “Don’t be a child,” if I tried to make her laugh. “It’s just Simon,” I wanted to say to her, so that things could be the way they’d been before. But I’d grown a little afraid of her now. Of course, things had changed between her and Huram as well—he didn’t beat her any more, on account of
the baby, and he let her set a place for herself at the table. But still it wasn’t as if he ever had a kind word for her.
It was around this time that the holy man from across the lake—Jesus, his name was—started coming over to our side to see what he could make of us. I’d see his boats setting out, from Capernaum or Tarichea, or Magdala, as the Jews called it, and I’d know it wasn’t fish he was after because he’d make straight for our shore. This was strange enough, for a Jew, to come out in search of us Syrians and Greeks. There were Jews at Gergesa, of course, and then there was the colony just down the beach, which had been there as long as anyone remembered and which we all just assumed was made up of Jews, though we never saw hide nor hair of them. But mostly Jesus went further down to the Gadarenes, who didn’t normally have much use for the Jews, though I saw from the pasture that he got up quite a crowd whenever he was there.
Then once I looked out and saw that his boats had put up right beneath the farm. He and his men had set up a few tents and made a fire and were cooking up fish as if they were settling in for a long stay. Meanwhile they must have sent out their messengers because soon enough people started to wander in from the fields and from the villages nearby to hear what he had to say to them. There were dozens of them, coming all the way from Hippus and Gergesa, from the looks of it. And I asked myself, who were all these people to go listen to him when I was the one who’d been keeping an eye on him. So finally I closed the sheep off in one of the corrals, hoping Huram wouldn’t notice, and hiked myself down the hill.
It turned out it was a feast down there, his men cooking up fish as if tomorrow wouldn’t come and handing it around
to every beggar who put a palm out. And in the middle of the crowd was Jesus, talking with people and asking their names and making sure they had something to eat. It was the first time I’d ever laid eyes on him from close up and it was a bit of a shock—he was wearing the cheapest kind of homespun and just a bit of bark on his feet for shoes, which made him look like someone who had just crawled out of the woods. Then he was long-haired and bearded the way most of the Jews were, that gave you the sense it was all work and seriousness with them. But soon enough I saw he wasn’t like that. There was one man in the crowd, from Hippus, who said to him, “What do I have to do to follow you?” And Jesus said back, “Go home and sell everything you’ve got and give the money to the poor, then you’ll be ready.” Everyone in the crowd broke out laughing at that, and you should have seen the look on the fellow’s face, since you could tell from his clothes he was fairly well off.
Now it happened at the time that there was a madman living in one of the caves along the shore there, because he’d been thrown out from the colony down the beach. That colony—the Sons of Light or some nonsense, they called it—was all madmen, from what I could tell, but as I said they kept to themselves, and had walls all around their place, so nobody knew what exactly they did. They had some fields near the lake, and raised some sheep, but from the looks of it they hardly had time for their work, since they were always washing themselves or saying their prayers. All in all, there were maybe fifty of them, though even if some new beggar should wander in one day to join them, you could be sure that another day they’d be turning someone out, for breaking some rule of theirs that only they could understand.
It seemed one of these men they’d turned out didn’t take it well, and every night when the rest of them came in from the fields he’d be waiting at the gate howling to be let in again. But the others weren’t having it. By now the man was looking rough, just eating roots and so on and living in a cave the way he was. Sure enough, though, when he smelled our fish he came right over. People made a path for him fairly quickly, seeing the devil that was in him. But Jesus, when he saw him, didn’t move. “Would you like something to eat?” he said, and then made him sit down right next to him. And the fellow went along with him, since it looked like the first time in a while someone had treated him with a little respect.
Everyone had gone quiet now, to see what would happen next. So after the man had had his bit of fish, which he ate right down, Jesus said to him, “What’s the matter with you?” just like that. And the fellow started sobbing then, and told Jesus that the Sons of Light had turned him out because they’d caught him talking with a girl when he was in the fields.
We all thought Jesus would side with the colony, because they were Jews. But he said, “Was she pretty, at least?” and everyone laughed. Then he went on and asked how it could be wrong for one person to talk to another one, and what they could be thinking in that colony to turn someone out the way they had and to close themselves off as if it was the end of the world. “If you had a lamb,” he said, “and it got out of the pen, would you let the wolves have it to teach it a lesson or would you bring it back?” And he made sense, when he put the thing that way. In the end, even the fellow himself could see he’d been lucky to get away from that lot. “Go out and find yourself a wife and forget them,” Jesus said to him. And to look at the man now, calmed down after his
cry, you’d think he was cured. Jesus took him down to the lake then and made him wash a bit, then gave him his own coat to wear and said to the crowd, “Who has a daughter for our man here?” And everyone laughed again.
I would have stayed on then, but his talk about sheep had started me worrying about my own. Sure enough, when I got back to the farm Huram was standing there at the corral looking fit to be tied. Without a word, he gave me the back of his hand.
“You’re not a boy any more,” he said, “to go playing whenever you want.” And he told me I’d be spending the night with the sheep on the hill, and any one missing was out of my own inheritance.
You’d have had to know Huram to understand this was the worst thing he could think of. Huram believed there were bandits behind every bush, ever since they’d killed our parents, even though it was years now since anyone in our parts had been attacked. So he must have supposed I’d be lucky to survive the night myself, let alone save the sheep. But he was ready to make that much of a lesson of the thing, to risk even the sheep, not to mention my life. For my part, I was more frightened of the wolves, who in a night could pick off half your flock. That would be my inheritance gone—ten sheep was what I was entitled to when I married, and two cattle and one pig.
I thought Huram was a little disappointed to come out the next morning and find me alive and the sheep all accounted for. But I’d had some time to think out there, under the stars. And what I’d thought was, ten sheep and two cattle and a pig. That was all I was worth in the world, what a wolf or a thief could take from me in an hour. I got to thinking
about Jesus then, and what he’d said to the rich man from Hippus, and it didn’t seem such a joke any more. What was the point, to care so much about your little bit of this or that, when it was nothing. When Moriah and I had been getting along, it wouldn’t have mattered if I hadn’t owned my own shirt, just to be with her. So what were ten sheep, if I didn’t have her.
I couldn’t have said I’d worked all this out in my head but it was how I was feeling then, with Huram the way he was and Moriah so changed. And I stole down to the lake to see Jesus again a few more times, and more and more the things he said made sense to me, how it was always the lowest ones who got the worst of matters when they didn’t deserve it and how people never missed a chance to put on airs and lord it over anyone who was weaker than they were. A lot of times what he said went against what you might have thought was the case, or what you’d been taught. But he had a way of leading us towards a thing as if we were ones who’d found it ourselves, taking us this way and that until finally we turned a corner and the answer sat in front of us as plain as stone.
Once he picked a man out of the crowd and asked him what god he worshipped.
“Augustus,” the fellow said, because we’d had to pray to him ever since he’d died and they’d made him a god.
“Good, he was very powerful,” Jesus said.
But then he started discussing with us and asked what Augustus had done, precisely. And people said he was the king of the world, and built cities all around, and when he died, or so people claimed, a cloud came down from the heavens to take him up with it. And Jesus nodded at all this
as if he was considering. Then he asked, “How many of you, if you had the tools, could put up a building?” And everyone said that they could. So he went on like that, and asked if we could fight a war if we had the weapons, or make a road if we had the stones, or do nearly all the things that Augustus had done. But then he said, “Now how many of you could make a bird?” and we were all stopped by that. “How many of you could make a flower or a tree? Could even Augustus do it? Could even Augustus, out of nothing, make as much as a grain of sand?”
It was clear from this, though he wouldn’t say it because it was treason, that Augustus wasn’t much of a god in his opinion. And everyone was happy to hear it, because none of us had ever taken to him. But Jesus went on, “Think of the strongest god you’ve ever heard of, then think of one a thousand times stronger than that, and even that one wouldn’t be a thousandth as strong as the real god I’m going to tell you about.” We all just assumed he was talking about the god of the Jews, since that was how they always made him out, as the strongest—Yahweh, I’d heard his name was, though the Jews weren’t allowed even so much as to say it. But Jesus asked who had told us there was a god for the Jews and a different one for the Syrians or the Greeks. Where was the logic in that, he said, when then they’d be battling all the time in heaven and it’d be even worse than it was on earth. And what he meant to say, and it made a great deal of sense, was that there was just the one god who ruled, the way our Hadad was always said to before the Romans came.