Authors: Nino Ricci
Somehow the sight of a man lying there in the mud with his skull cracked seemed suddenly to quiet everyone down. The soldiers, for their part, were apparently satisfied they had their man now—their captain barked out an order and in an instant, as if it was just the one mind that controlled them all, they put away their clubs and lined up on the double in rows of a dozen or so through the crowd to keep it cordoned off and in order. And it had hardly been more than fifty breaths from beginning to end before the disturbance was over and the place was calm again, and people were already carrying away anyone who’d been hurt and even the man who’d been killed had been wrapped up in a cloak by his friends and carted off.
The Romans, though, weren’t taking any chances—they were closing the market. When they made the announcement, there was so much railing from the crowd it seemed there’d be another riot. There were thousands of people still
waiting there to get their sheep, and this was the special day, according to their rules, that it had to be bought. But the Romans were quick—some reinforcements had already arrived from the fort and had lined themselves up in front of the sheep pens, so that finally the crowd started to disperse. And we had to leave along with the rest, as empty-handed as them, and John and Jacob and the Rock looked miserable at how they’d failed Jesus.
To our surprise, though, when we got back to camp and told Jesus what had happened he said it didn’t matter about the sheep, we’d find the way to make do. What about the laws, his men said. But Jesus, getting angry, said, “What kind of a god do you think we have, if he cares more for your sheep than for somebody’s life?”
We had just started supper when a boy came running out of the dusk, gasping for breath, and said he’d been sent to fetch Jesus. Someone was sick—it turned out it was the Rock’s cousin, who lived nearby in a village on the other side of the hill. It was dark by the time we got to it, just some fires showing here and there from people’s yards and the occasional lamp through a doorway. With the dark the cold had come back, breathing off the snow that still lay over everything and giving a smell to the air like water from a mountain spring.
There were people standing at the roadside as we came to the house, and then two women at the door, wringing their hands.
“You’re too late, he’s dead!” one of them cried, but half-raving, so you didn’t know whether to believe her.
Jesus went straight into the house. It was a small place and we couldn’t follow, but a moment later he said we
should bring the man out to the cooking fire in the courtyard to warm him. Simon and Jacob carried him and set him down on a carpet next to the fire, which one of the women, the calmer one, shored up a bit. The two women were his sisters. The younger one, Mary, was the prettier of the two, and the more level-headed. The other was Rachel, hair pitch-black and coarse as wool, who had cried that her brother was dead. And when I saw the man in the firelight, not moving and his face grey as stone, I had to think she might be right.
His name was Elazar. As near as we could gather, he’d been at the sheep market that afternoon when the riot broke out, and had taken a blow to the head. From what he’d told Mary the blow hadn’t even knocked him down, just made him bleed a bit, and he’d got home fine on his own. But after a while he’d started talking some kind of nonsense, so his sisters didn’t know what to make of it, and then in the middle of it he’d just sat down on the floor and passed out. They’d called some neighbours in to look at him, but when they came he’d started to shake like a devil had got hold of him, and that was when they’d sent someone down to fetch Jesus.
When I heard all this I thought there wasn’t much hope. To look at the man he seemed stiff as a beam, and then when Jesus knelt beside him and put a palm up to his nose to check for breath, he didn’t seem pleased with the result. He lifted the fellow’s eyelids then, one and then the other, and from the way his eyes stared out at nothing, the darks of them different sizes from each other like I’d never seen, I would have said he was already dead.
Jesus, though, didn’t balk at any of this.
“Get a blanket on him,” he said, “and keep the fire up,” and then he took the fellow’s head in his hands and started
to feel all around it, softly, as if it was a baby’s. This went on for quite a while, and we all stood there holding our breaths. And looking at Jesus intent the way he was, I had the feeling that he could save the man, that he could bring him back.
As if to spite us then, the fire suddenly cracked and a big ember flew out onto a bit of the fellow’s leg that wasn’t properly covered. Mary reached out quickly to brush it away. But the man’s leg hadn’t moved at all. The ember had sat there long enough that I could smell the skin burning, yet there hadn’t been so much as a twitch in him. Jesus, though, hadn’t seemed to notice, still feeling around the fellow’s skull. Then finally there was a point when he seemed to find whatever it was he’d been looking for—suddenly he grew even more intent, and closed his eyes as if he was sending them down to his fingers to see. There was a strange moment then, the light from the fire dark and red and making shadows so I wasn’t sure any more what I was seeing—it looked as if Jesus had put his fingers right down inside the man’s skull, right through the bone like that, and after he’d felt around in there for a bit, something gushed out from the fellow’s head into Jesus’s hands, dark and alive. Rachel was standing close by and she sucked in her breath, surely thinking it was some devil that had come out of him. And I thought the same, because when Jesus tossed the thing into the fire it sizzled and squealed there like something dying.
For a moment then Jesus knelt there with the fellow’s head still in his hands looking down on him grimly as if he was thinking, Too late. And that was when it happened, and we all of us saw it, that the man simply opened his eyes, and was alive.
We all stood there speechless. At first Rachel looked even more frightened than before, seeing him come back to life like that. But then realizing what had happened, she fell down on her knees kissing her brother and calling out to her god to thank him. Soon everyone was down on their knees with her, and the only one who didn’t seem to understand what was going on was Elazar himself, who was still lying there with his head in Jesus’s hands blinking his eyes as if wondering how we’d all come to be in his courtyard.
Jesus got Mary to bring out some cloth so he could bandage up Elazar’s head. He looked tired, as if the thing had taken a lot out of him.
“Do you know who I am?” he said to Elazar, to see if he had his senses back. And Elazar got a big grin and said, “You must be the son of god himself, if you brought me back from the dead.” And there was a pause and then everyone laughed, even Jesus.
After Jesus had bandaged him, Elazar sat there in front of the fire and had something to eat, and told us what it was like to be dead. And what it had seemed to him, the way he remembered it, though it was already slipping from him, was that he was in a cave and there was a group of people in with him around a little fire, though he was the only one standing up. And he was saying to the rest, I’m going out, because he could see at the entrance to the cave that it was sunny and bright outside, and didn’t want to sit in the dark. But everyone was saying, Don’t go, and he couldn’t make sense of that. At the time he’d thought he was just having a dream but now he knew that wasn’t so, since a lot of the people in the cave were the very ones sitting at the fire with him now.
He pointed at me.
“I could see this fellow and I’ve never even met him before,” he said. Everyone laughed at that, though I wasn’t sure why—it gave me a chill to think I was there in that cave with him when he was dead.
Jesus said something similar had happened to him once as well, when he’d been knifed during a riot as a boy. But he’d seen a lake instead of a cave, and had thought, I should walk off into the water, though he knew it would kill him to do it. In the end he’d actually set off, and had walked under the waves seeing all sorts of things he’d never have known were there, fish and rocks of amazing colours and shapes. And when he came to again he didn’t know if his god had been saying to him that that was what his heavenly kingdom was like or just that he should open his eyes, since most people looked at the world and all they saw was grey like the surface of the lake, but some people saw underneath.
The Rock was so relieved to see his cousin alive again that he said we should bring him back to our camp and have a feast for him. But Jesus said he needed his rest, and made us promise not to spread rumours of what we’d seen, since all he’d done was a bit of medicine and the rest had been the work of his god. It was no use, though, his being modest—we’d all seen the thing with our own eyes.
In the end, the story travelled fairly quickly. Not that everyone believed it—most Jerusalemites, for instance, couldn’t imagine someone from Galilee doing such a thing, and then it was almost every day for them that some charlatan came along to the city claiming this or that. But by the next day the word about Jesus had started to spread, with the handful on one side ready to believe in every wonder and the handful on the other who thought Jesus should be
thrashed as a fraud. And then there were those in between who just laughed to themselves about the holy man of Galilee, who built temples out of snow and brought his friends back from the dead.
By the next morning a warm wind had come in and most of the snow had melted, the fields just one big sea of mud. Our little huts had wasted away by then into the strangest shapes, rounded and stunted like the stubby limbs of lepers, so that it almost frightened you to look at them.
While we were having our breakfast, an old greybeard came along to our camp looking for Jesus. He was a dignified sort, and well dressed, and had somehow managed to pass through all the muck without getting a speck of it on him. When Jesus saw him he went right to him and kissed his hand, clearly knowing him. But his men had grown wary, lurking nearby as if to hear every word while Jesus and the fellow talked.
His name was Joseph. I gathered he ran a school of some sort in the city, and wanted Jesus to come see it. All this seemed innocent enough except for the dark looks on the faces of Simon the Rock and the others.
“I’ll come with some of my men,” Jesus said, as if to appease them, and it was set that he’d go around later in the day.
Joseph wanted to introduce Jesus to a friend of his near there who owned the local olive press and Jesus went off with him, taking only Simon and John and Jacob. He’d hardly been gone a few instants, though, before two young men showed up, long-haired and a bit savage as if they’d just walked out of the desert, and said they’d come searching for
the man who’d raised someone from the dead. It wasn’t long before a family showed up who’d come from Elazar’s village, and then a cripple who came along on his crutches. But our landlord, seeing the crowd that had started to gather, got his hackles up and went over to ask them their business. Hearing the story of Elazar from them, he started thinking he had some sort of conjurer staying on his land, and he chased off the lot of them and then came up to Jesus’s men.
“You’ll have to move on,” he said, bald-faced like that. “I have my own people coming in.”
We hardly knew how to answer him.
“Where will we find another place?” one of the men said, because you could see that all the fields around us were already taken, with more pilgrims still coming in.
But the fellow just shrugged his shoulders and said it wasn’t his business, and if we had an argument we could make it to the soldiers.
While we were still wringing our hands over what to do, Jesus came back in a foul temper over some argument he’d had with Simon and the others about Joseph. It didn’t help his mood when we broke the news to him about the camp, and how we’d allowed the people who’d come looking for him to be chased off. He sent a few of his men out then to see if there was any place for us at a camp the Romans had set up on the other side of the city, and said the rest, if we needed, could move to the field of Joseph’s friend. John and Jacob he again charged with finding sheep for us, then he said that for himself he planned to keep his word to Joseph, and visit his school.
It turned out it was only the two Simons among his men who were left to go with him, and seeing me lingering nearby
Jesus told me to join them. I couldn’t do less than hurry to fall in. Jesus set a quick pace and the three of us just followed quietly behind, hardly daring to speak because of Jesus’s mood. Then even before we got to the city gates we saw how tense things had become after the riot the previous day, with soldiers everywhere, stopping people on the least suspicion and searching every basket and pocket and sack until you thought they’d crack open your eggs to see if you’d hidden any stones inside. We were all of us on edge thanks to Judas’s warning—any minute, we thought, the slaughter could begin.
In the city, every speck of snow had been swept up and carted away. Then as we were walking along the wall of the Temple Mount, a line of soldiers marched through and practically knocked us off our feet to clear us out of the way. It turned out the governor had decided to parade himself through the city—we could see his gold sedan descending the steps of the fortress, servants running in front to run a purple carpet where he was going to pass. About fifty of his special Samaritan guard went ahead of him, their feathers flying and their breastplates stamped with eagles that were sacrilege to the Jews, and already as they approached you saw people in the crowd holding a fist to their chest with the first finger out, to show defiance. I got just the one glimpse of the governor himself as his car went by—he looked like a boy, fat-cheeked and mean like the children of the rich who got their pleasure from mistreating the slaves.
The procession left a bitterness in the air you could taste, as if the city had been contaminated. All the decorations that had been set out for the feast, coloured banners and bangles and great painted torches set along the streets that would be
lit on the actual night, seemed suddenly out of place. But we moved on past the Temple Mount into the older section of the city and some of the tension seemed to die away, the little winding streets full of cooking smells, and fires burning in every courtyard.