Authors: Nino Ricci
What happened next was hard to follow. The examiner didn’t make any accusations but just began to put questions to us matter-of-factly on one thing and another, where we were from and how we’d got to the city and who we were with, now and then coming back to things we’d said as if to confirm them. But each time he came back to a thing, though often it was innocent enough, he’d seem to give a small weight of suspicion to it. In Aram’s case that had the effect of tripping him up—he’d say one thing and then contradict it, lying in the way of someone who had something to hide and didn’t know what it was that would betray him.
The examiner pretended hardly to notice Aram’s mistakes. But slowly his attention shifted entirely over to him,
almost as if in a friendly way, as a Jew to another. He seemed especially interested in Jesus, already aware he was among the arrested and wondering what he taught and who his followers were and so on. Aram, to his credit, called him a man of peace and said he owed him a debt for his help, and he would have done well to stop at that. But the examiner, by way of stoking Aram’s natural boastfulness, encouraged him to tell what he knew more intimately. It was here that Aram showed he was a fool—he began to relate bits of gossip then to show off his authority, the scandal Jesus had had with his women and the enemies he’d made and the like, as if he’d forgotten we were in a Roman prison. And the examiner just let Aram go on like that, with nods and half-smiles, until Aram’s tongue grew looser and his stories broader, and he made the mistake of mentioning Judas.
The examiner’s back straightened at the name. He gave a nod to the humpback to write and then his questions grew more pointed—what did this Judas look like, and where did he come from, and how did he and Jesus meet. Aram was seeming a little alarmed—he’d mentioned Judas in his same loose-tongued way, even boasting that he’d thought him a spy, and must have been frightened now at what he’d started.
“Was he with you on the journey?” the examiner asked him, and Aram said he’d left us at Jericho. When the examiner pressed him for a reason Aram couldn’t say why, but mentioned the confusion there and the searches.
It was clear Judas was known to the man. There was a new energy to him now and he seemed anxious to move on, and he rose suddenly and called a guard in from the corridor. Aram seemed as surprised as I was when he had the guard remove Aram’s shackles.
“What’s going to happen to me?” Aram said, afraid at being singled out. But the examiner said, “I’ll take care of you.”
The examiner took him away then. I had a sinking feeling, seeing them go off. Meanwhile I’d been left to the guard, who motioned me up and led me back into the castle’s maze of passageways. I was sick at the thought of going back to my cell. But suddenly the guard shoved me through a gate and into the out-of-doors, where I saw it was the dead of night, and for a moment I thought that I’d got my wish and was free, and my heart jumped to smell the air and see the stars above my head.
When my eyes adjusted, though, I saw we were in the castle’s courtyard. In the dark it looked to be just a large empty square, cold like the underside of a stone, the castle walls looming up in every direction. There was a fire in a corner, and some soldiers around it warming themselves, and then some paces away a kind of wheeled cage of the sort you might keep animals in during a spectacle, which my keeper pushed me off towards. When we got near I saw it was full of men, seeming heaped there as if someone had just driven the thing through the streets and hauled people in to fill it. They were mostly asleep, one up against the other, and there was a smell coming off them that carried in the night air, a human stink of excrement and sweat that was almost reassuring now.
Before my guard shoved me in with them he took a dipper of water from a barrel near the cage door and handed it to me. Stale as it was, I was grateful for it. Then the cage itself seemed the finest palace after the cell I’d been in—there was air blowing through and a view of the stars and
those bodies to keep you warm, and I wedged myself in between two of them and settled in for sleep. I felt a bit of hope then. It seemed the first time since we’d been arrested that I could manage to clear my head. I thought how different things looked at the end of this day than they had at the beginning, and how that morning I’d been sleeping next to Jesus in our olive grove as innocent as a lamb, the way it felt now. Then I thought back to what I’d been on the farm before I’d set out, and it seemed I’d been just a child then. I’d come chasing after Jesus looking for his special kingdom, where all my troubles would be done, and instead had ended up in a Roman prison. And I had to ask who Jesus was who could lead me on such a luckless journey, and if he wasn’t the devil the Rock had said, or if there was something in all this I’d take away and understand that would make it seem worth the passage.
It seemed I’d hardly closed my eyes before it was morning. Some of the guards came around to throw water on us to wake us, then lined us up in rows in the courtyard and gave us all a scoop of water to drink and a small loaf of barley bread, the first bit of food I’d had since the morning before. We were a motley lot, I saw now, lined up there in the grey of dawn, some beggars and some in good coats, some looking like they’d been dragged from their own comfortable beds just that morning and others like they’d been holed up in that cage for weeks. I couldn’t make out Jesus or any of the others in the group. But when they started to lead us away I got a flash of a familiar face, and was just able to assure myself, before we passed back into the castle, that it was Jerubal.
I felt a thrill go through me—my first thought was that it was sure now that we’d be freed, since I’d never known any hardship that Jerubal hadn’t been able to find the way out of. But then we were back in the castle’s dark corridors and the thing didn’t seem so certain. I couldn’t get another look at him since we were being marched in a file, up a rough stairway and into a strange hall with a large room on one side, separated from us by a marble rail, and a series of barred cells on the other, which the guards put us into as we came up. There were window slits at the far end of the cells, angled narrowly into the stone, and people made for them at once, desperate for a view of the outside. I managed to get my own glimpse—we had a view right out over the temple square, the temple itself rising up almost directly in front of us. Though it was early, the square was already crowded, people starting to line up with their sheep to get them blessed for the feast. I almost envied those sheep then—at least they knew what was coming to them.
It was my good luck that among the last few they shoved into my own cell was Jerubal. “It’s Simon the Wise!” he said when he saw me, with his grin, and I thought I’d break into tears then at seeing his face. He said he was in for next to nothing, just for taking the side of a hawker in the street who the soldiers had been harassing—it looked as if they were going around picking up any beggar they could lay their hands on, to show the governor they’d squashed the plot. Half the men in our cell, he said, were the same as him, pickpockets and the like who’d been hauled into the castle and whipped until they’d confessed to being rebels. He showed me the welts on his own back but said they hadn’t got anything from him, so he thought he was safe.
“By tonight we’ll be out having our mutton like everyone else,” he said. And to hear it from him, I could almost believe it was true.
We passed a long while in that cell, the only sign of activity the sound of footsteps and chains as more prisoners, it seemed, were brought into the adjoining ones. Jerubal and I took our turns at the window—the crowd had grown vast now, separated into groups by wooden barricades, and people had started moving triple file into the temple courts to slaughter their sheep. It was an amazing spectacle, the people coming and coming and the priests, all in coloured robes now, moving back and forth to splash blood against the altar and toss bucketfuls of entrails into the fire. And the lines stretched all through the temple square, snaking around the barricades, so you saw it would just go on and on and on.
Some of the temple assistants had lined up along the ramparts of the temple courtyard and started to sing, their voices carrying above the hum of the crowd. The men in our cell got down on their knees then and started mumbling along with the words. One of the guards called for quiet, but the men kept up their singing. It must have hurt those men, to be captive here and see almost the whole of their race gathered out in the temple square. There was nothing in my life to compare to such a thing—the festivals in Hippus or Gergesa seemed only amusements next to this, an excuse for drinking, offered up to gods whose names changed each time the emperor did.
At some point there was a sudden flurry of movement on the other side of the marble rail. Slaves had come in carrying lamps and chairs and even incense pots and statues
of the gods. With the light you saw the room was finer than it had seemed, with painted pictures on the walls and coloured stone on the floor. A few men in white shirts drifted into the room, checking things and looking important and yelling at the slaves, and then the corridor started to fill as well, with some of the governor’s Samaritan guards and other men, more unsavoury-looking, who came strolling past the cells peering into them as if they were picking out livestock. There were assistants along with them toting scrolls in every pocket, and I wasn’t surprised when my and Aram’s examiner showed up as well, with his humpback.
Things got confusing then. Without warning it seemed there were a hundred things going on at once, men being pulled out of the cells and scrolls being passed from the scribes to the examiners and back again or sometimes over the railing to the men in white. Then a trumpet sounded and another line of Samaritans filed in, on the far side of the railing, and behind them came the governor himself, though in a plain linen robe as if he’d just got up from his bed. The men in white bowed so low their shirts touched the floor when he came in, though the examiners were more halfhearted, as if he didn’t matter as much on their side of the rail. Meanwhile a curse went up from one of the cells at the sight of him and quickly spread to the rest, though some of the Samaritans banged their clubs against the cell bars, smashing the fingers of anyone clinging there, until people had quieted down.
One by one, then, men were dragged out of their cells to face the governor. If they’d made a confession—and you’d see a scroll being handed over to one of the men in white—they’d hardly have a chance to so much as say their names
before they were dragged away again, though they might be so bloodied and blue that it was clear the thing had been beaten out of them. More than a dozen were taken away like that. Most of them seemed people who had just been taken off the street, the way Jerubal had said, one whose indictment said he was just a baker in the lower city, another a tanner. And the whole time there was a babble of talk going on, the examiners speaking Aramaic and the men in white Greek and the prisoners crying out when they were convicted and the soldiers shouting for quiet.
When they’d finished with those who had confessed they moved on to the ones who’d been betrayed. Now the charge sheet was just the statement of some witness who didn’t even appear, and each of them read almost exactly the same, how so and so had conspired against the Romans and had consorted with certain men—and there was a shifting group of names that was given—who were known to be rebels. After three or four men had been dispensed with in this way, Aram’s examiner moved to the front and Jesus was brought out from one of the cells.
It looked as if he’d passed a hard time, his face swollen and black and his coats in tatters, lines of blood showing where he must have been flogged. It seemed an obscenity to see him reduced like that, so that I could hardly bear to look at him. But still he cut a figure, standing there in front of the governor straight-backed and not afraid to look him in the eye. One of the men in white asked for his name and he gave it as Jesus of Galilee. Then he said straight out, speaking directly to the governor, “You’re either a fool, if you believe what you’ve heard here is the truth, or a scoundrel, if you’re only pretending to.”
There was an uproar from the cells at this, because Jesus was the first one who’d had the courage to speak his mind. One of the Samaritans hit him with his club, but the shouts only grew louder then. Jesus in all this simply stood there and said nothing, though the blood oozed from his lip where he’d been hit.
We all thought the governor would simply have him carted away. But he had taken on a bitter sort of smile as if to say he would indulge the man, to show he couldn’t be bested by a Jew. He looked to one of the men in white and said to him in Greek, “Ask the man what he means to say by the truth.”
But Jesus answered back, in Greek as well, “Don’t ask for something you can’t understand.”
The governor’s smile faded then.
“What do you mean to say by that?” he snapped. But Jesus wouldn’t answer him.
The governor was furious. He called the examiner up at once then to read the charges. But the examiner looked uneasy—instead of reading out the same charge as the rest, he said the man’s only crime, from what he could learn, was that he had associated with a certain Judas of Keriot, a suspected rebel.
“Isn’t that crime enough?” the governor said to him.
“We could get no confession,” the examiner said. “They say he teaches peace.”
“Do you defend him because you’re a Jew?”
The governor didn’t wait then for the examiner to present evidence but turned at once to Jesus.
“The charge is treason,” he said. “How do you answer it?”
But still Jesus stood there and wouldn’t say a word.
Everyone had gone silent, waiting to see what would happen. The silence had the effect of making the governor look more of a fool—there was nothing he could do to make Jesus bend to him.
Finally, almost spitting the thing out, the governor said, “Take him!” and one of the guards led him off.
There was another uproar from the cells at this, and the Samaritans banged their clubs against the bars again. The governor sat there pretending to take no notice—he’d made his decision, and his word was the law. If he was nervous at what Jesus had said, that the trial was a farce, he wouldn’t show it.