Dear and Glorious Physician (65 page)

His head began to reel in the heat and light, but a slow rapture was unfolding in his heart. “Let us go to the grave,” he said, and he took the husband’s arm. But the young man resisted like stone. “I have told you,” said the rabbi, “that he will not be reconciled, will not bow to God’s will.” And the old man wept aloud. “Be you reconciled, David!”

“Be of hope, David,” said Lucanus, and again drew the arm of the husband. David dropped his hands; he turned on Lucanus a face as dry as the dust itself, and thin and pale, and yet handsome. His eyes glowed like fire. “Hope!” he cried, in an awful voice. “I loved no one but my wife, and we were children together, and now she is nothing but clay, and her spirit has fled from me!”

Lucanus was trembling, and he did not know why. Everything appeared to expand and contract before him, and all things had a crystalline aura to his eyes, and there was a command in him, like a great and imperative voice. “Let us go to the grave,” he repeated.

David’s bitten lips shook; his eyes fixed themselves emptily on Lucanus. And now he did not resist; stumbling, he walked beside the Greek, his head bent. The others watched them come, followed by the praying rabbi. Then they stood by the grave and the coffin.

Lucanus was silent. He gazed at the coffin and felt the mounting tumult in himself, and the louder command, so that his ears heard nothing else. Then he said, “Open the coffin, so that I may see the girl.”

The others stood like black and gray statues, absolutely still, and looked at Lucanus with wide, wet eyes.

Lucanus’ voice rose strongly. “Open the coffin! I would see the girl.”

David’s face suddenly ran with tears. He leaned against Lucanus’ shoulder. “You have heard him,” he said, in a rusty voice. “I am her husband. Open the coffin. I would see her face for the last time.”

The bearded men glanced helplessly at the rabbi, whose old lips worked. Then he said, weakly, “He is her husband; I am only her father. Open the coffin, for he would not look on her face before.”

They opened the coffin, tugging at its black-shrouded thinness. The nails squeaked in protest. But the lid opened. Lucanus bent over the coffin and saw within its raw-wood depths a young girl, not more than fifteen, lying in her shroud, her hands folded on her breasts. Lucanus lifted the cloth from her face; an odor of herbs and fragrant oils rose in the hot air. David fell on his knees, sobbing aloud, and clutched the side of the coffin and looked at his dead wife.

She was very lovely. Her face was remote and serene, as if she slept. Her flesh was pale and as translucent as alabaster. Her black hair lay about her like a cloak, and her innocent lips faintly smiled. It was impossible to believe she was dead. Lucanus considered. The Jews buried their dead before sundown of the day they died. He bent closer over the coffin; the young bosom was breathless, the lips cold and unmoving, the nostrils motionless. He felt a vast shaking in him. Was it possible that the girl was not dead, but only in catalepsy? His physician’s eye eagerly studied the calm features.

He put out his hand and touched the smooth white cheek. It was as chill as alabaster, but not stiff. But then she had died only this morning, and the heat of the day would delay rigor. The imperious voice sounded louder in him, and now he heard words: “Take the woman by the hand and raise her!”

“Yes, Lord,” he said aloud. He took the girl’s hand, and it too was icy in that ferocious heat. Lucanus hesitated again. Then as he held the small flaccid hand he felt a familiar draining and weakness in himself, as if some virtue were flowing away from him. As at an enormous distance he heard the groaning of David and the weeping of the women. For some power was concentrating in him which held off the world and all in it.

He said, “Awake, Rebecca, for you are not dead, but only sleep!”

At these mysterious, these profound words, the others ceased their weeping, and David, kneeling beside the coffin, dropped his hands beside him and looked at Lucanus. And a great radiance shone on his face.

The still hand in that of Lucanus warmed swiftly. The nostrils dilated, the lips stirred. The young breast heaved a deep sigh. Her eyes opened, dark and misty and confused, and gazed at Lucanus. He smiled at her tenderly; drawing on her hand, he raised her in her coffin, and she sat up, throwing back her hair like a dreamer newly awakened.

At this the mourners lifted their voices in a fearful cry and fell back. But the rabbi and David remained beside the coffin, speechless, the old man bending like a black bough over his child. It was David alone who threw himself at Lucanus’ feet and pressed his forehead against them, and covered them with tears and kisses.

The rabbi broke out into a rapturous hymn, clasping his hands together and lifting his bearded face to the sky. “She was dead, and You restored her, O King of Kings, O Lord of the Universe! Blessed be the Name of the Lord!”

Lucanus bent and lifted David to his feet, and the young man clung to him. “He sent you to us!” he cried. “Oh, blessed are we that you visited us, in His Name!”

“Praise God, for He did this, and not I,” said Lucanus. “For He is the Resurrection and the Life.”

He turned away, smiling and rapturous, but weak in all his body. He looked back only once. The women were helping the girl from her coffin; her husband was kissing her hands. The old man was praying. Now all the air rang with rejoicing and confused exclamations.

The men in the entourage had seen everything, and they watched Lucanus approach with terror in their faces. He smiled at them reassuringly. “The girl was not dead. She only slept,” he said, and climbed into the chariot again. They clattered on their way in silence.

Then Pilate, leaning from his chariot, said to Lucanus, and there was a shrill tremulousness in his haughty voice, “The Jews bury their dead before sundown. She was not dead then?” It was as if he were pleading.

“She was not dead,” said Lucanus. But Plotius gave him a long glance, and his soldier’s face was deeply moved, and reverent. Lucanus suddenly fell asleep, like one overpoweringly exhausted.

Lucanus awoke at the changing of the horses. The afternoon air was cool; Plotius had covered him with his own rough soldier’s mantle. To the right the sea was one huge and blazing plain of light, too brilliant for the eye to dwell upon it, and without color. The sky had become a hollow arch; the cerulean hue had burned away in the purity of white flame. The country had changed; against the pale and burning heavens reared empty mountains of a blackish hue, fold on fold of heavy stone. High cacti bordered the road, bearing brown and thorny fruit, and dusty tangled thistles like dead hedges wandered over dun fields as lifeless as the fields of death. Even the cypresses were gone; no olive or palm trees redeemed the earth or the mountains. Here and there the bitter mountains showed outcroppings of whitish and broken stone; flat houses, the color of the parched earth, stood in silence and abandonment.

But the roads were filling with noisy people on camels and on asses, on the way to Jerusalem. Echoes rose on all sides. The entourage turned away from the sea and quickened its pace with the fresh horses. Lucanus looked upon the desolation which the Romans had wrought when they had taken the cypresses, and he thought that the very earth was cursed. Even the occasional dull pools of brackish water where goats drank appeared lifeless, and the color of pewter. This was the progress of which Pontius Pilate had spoken, this wild devastation, this loneliness, this encroaching desert. Where man walked, greedy and rapacious, death followed, and the ground was blasted.

“A hideous land,” said Pontius Pilate. And Lucanus answered, “It was not hideous until man came here. Ugliness walks in his steps; he deforms everything he sees and touches.”

Pilate frowned at this sharp answer. Then he said, “You will find Jerusalem without charm, and peculiar. I regret that you will not be with me in my house; you have said you will be the guest of Hilell ben Hamram, who awaits you. My dear Lucanus! The Jews can tell the strangest stories! You will bathe in mysticism.”

Lucanus said, “I have wondered why God chose to be born of the Jewish people, and not the Greeks, with their culture, or the Romans with their power. But now I know.” He shivered under the mantle which Plotius had thrown over him, and he drowsed again for his exhaustion was very great. But in his sleep his mind was busy and sad. He thought of the two thousand Jews in Syria whom the legate Varus had crucified for preaching rebellion against Rome; he thought of the execution grounds near Caesarea where Jews were regularly crucified for ‘inciting against the Empire’. He thought of the myriad and countless crimes man committed against man, all through the ages, and the groaning which incessantly reached the ears of God, and he asked himself, in his drowse, why God did not destroy this human race of devastators, this horror upon the bright earth, this hater of his brother and the hater of all innocent things, this pariah from which all sinless animals fled in dreadful fear and loathing, this razer of his own cities and civilizations, this looter, warmaker, and vilest criminal, this hypocrite and liar, this murderer and traitor, this restless evil spirit which walked, like Lucifer, up and down the earth looking for whom and what he could destroy. But I too am without merit, thought Lucanus, for I had once believed that man was the sinned against, and not the sinning.

Lucanus opened his eyes. The chariot in which he was riding was climbing up a stony blackish-brown mount. Here it paused, and Plotius pointed with his whip. “Jerusalem,” he said.

There Jerusalem stood on Mount Sion, to the west, the shadow of the earth, on this evening, a dusty dim blue against a pinkish horizon arching over the city. All about Mount Sion rose other mounts, whitish brown, folded together in stone or covered with narrow terraces like wandering steps on which grew cypresses, laurel, olive trees, palms, and grapevines, pomegranates and carob trees, and trees yellow or green or plum-colored with fruit. High on its own mount, Jerusalem appeared part of it, of a pale brown, seemingly convulsively pushed up from the earth rather than having been made by man. The winding and battlemented walls, pierced and forbidding, twisted protectingly around the city, its gates and towers guarded, the pennants of Rome fluttering on the topmost heights. Gray-brown steepness rose to the walls, simmering with dust; caravans for the night were already camped below the walls, fires already lighted, and the restless bobbing of lanterns moving about. No one could enter the city after sunset; those caught by the evening lifted their tents, seethed about their temporary little village, tended their horses and their camels, and waited for the morning. The gates were locked, the sharply rising paths and stairways to the walls empty.

Even as Lucanus watched, the swift night began to flow like dull water over the city and its surrounding mountains, and the red flicker of torches sprang up inside the walls and lanterns brightened within them. A copper moon rose over a mount of the selfsame color, and Mars was a topaz jewel near it. Color left the few mountains which were still fertile and planted; the whole scene was stark yellowish brown beneath a sky turning purple above a lake of desolate crimson fire. Lucanus thought he had never seen so barren a sight, so contained, so gloomy, so lifeless except for the campfires and the torches and the lanterns. A cool mountain wind, empty of scent and fragrance, struck his face. Accustomed to cities awakening at night and sounding with laughter and high voices, Lucanus was aware of a heavy silence over this city, as if it had swallowed in itself all echoes and clamoring. From this height he could see over the walls and observe the narrow and twisted streets redly shadowed by torches and filled with voiceless throngs. And there, tall, wide, and impressive, stood the Temple, marble yellow and quiet and golden-towered, surrounded by motionless gardens and, beyond the gardens, by crowding multitudes of flat-topped houses all built of the pervading yellow brown of the earth and the mountains themselves. Only occasionally did clumps of black cypresses appear in the city, crowded together as if for protection.

“Compare that with Caesarea, which we have built,” said Pontius Pilate in a cold and disgusted voice. But Lucanus understood that the city had withdrawn to itself for protection against the conqueror, and that if many of its hills were dead the Romans had done this greedy and evil thing. The ancient city had repudiated its masters, and its brooding air was the air of desperation.

The entourage swept down the mountain rapidly, the legionnaires riding ahead with their flags and their fasces. The acridness of the dust of the ages was in Lucanus’ nostrils. Slits of light brightened in the battlements of the walls which now rose before them. The chariots and the horses drove ruthlessly through the encampments; by the flare of the torches near the tents one caught the sudden glaring whiteness of eyes, sullen and watchful; asses, horses, and camels lurched aside for the company, squealing and protesting. Children gathered in groups to watch the passage. Now from the echoing mountains came the sharp howling of jackals, weird and unearthly. The moon was a yellow skull in the dark sky.

The riders and the chariots had some difficulty climbing the steep hill that led to the city; small stones rumbled behind them. A gate was opening, and a Roman trumpet sounded its greeting, awakening shrill and bounding echoes. They entered the city through rows of soldiers who saluted. And then they were in the dusty narrow streets whose shops were closed and whose people were silent. They clattered over black cobblestones. Groups of families appeared on flat roofs; they turned their faces aside from the Romans. Doorways glowed golden in the murky dusk; windows were pale with lamplight. It was a besieged city, silently wrathful, proud in its dust. To Lucanus, accustomed to the colorful East, Jerusalem did not seem Eastern, for it was without gaiety, laughter, music, hurrying footsteps, and merry voices. He had the thought that time had settled here like a stony tomb, and could never be moved, and that the torches thrust into sockets diminished rather than heightened the pent life of the city. The red shadows shifted on walls like the shadows of a conflagration burning in the habitations of the dead.

“It is livelier during the day,” said Plotius, as if sensing Lucanus’ thought. “The Jews do not frolic at night; they are a somber people.”

They swung down a wider street, filled with torchlight and citron moonlight, guarded by higher walls. Now Lucanus could smell the fragrance of gardens and the freshness of fountains, and could hear occasional voices, and, once or twice, the sound of a lute or a lyre tinkling timidly against the quiet of the night. Here lived the Roman administrators and the wealthy Jews who collaborated with the Romans and took on themselves something of the Roman customs. The entourage stopped at a gate, and Plotius said, “Hilell ben Hamram’s house, your host. We go on with the noble Pontius Pilate to his own house.”

A black iron gate swung open, and Hilell appeared, smiling and handsome in a white robe. “Greetings, my friends,” he said. “I expected you earlier.”

“Lucanus must stop to attend a Jewish funeral,” said Pilate, dryly. “Fortunately he was able to prevent a woman from being buried alive. How eager you Jews are to rid yourself of your dead before sunset! I often wonder how many unfortunates awake in the earth, and I reflect on their terror before they die, smothered in the dark.”

Hilell’s face changed subtly at this insult, but he remained smiling. He gave Plotius an affectionate glance and asked the company to join him for wine. But Pilate said he was tired; he moved restlessly in his chariot. Hilell extended Lucanus his hand and helped him to descend; his grasp was warm and full of warning, for he sensed anger in the Greek. Plotius gave Hilell a flashing grin and saluted, and the entourage swept on. Still holding Lucanus’ hand, Hilell led him into a large garden full of fountains and the fragrance of jasmine and night-blooming flowers. The big marble house in the midst of the garden reflected the moonlight like gold. Lucanus sighed with pleasure, conscious of weariness. Now Arieh ben Elazar hurried down shallow marble steps toward them, holding out his hands and crying Lucanus’ name aloud, and with delight, and they embraced.

The two young men led Lucanus into the great hall, and he gazed about him with interest. Hilell was a cosmopolitan; the marble walls, of many hues, were hung with the finest of colorful draperies, brocades and silks and jeweled fabrics, twinkling and sparkling in the light of many tall lamps and Corinthian-bronze candelabra set on carved tables of marble, ebony, and lemonwood. Great Persian vases and vases from Cathay stood about the walls and in the corners, from which sprayed tall and fragrant lilies and roses and branches of jasmine and glossy dark green leaves. Exotic Eastern lattices decorated the windows, inlaid with gold and silver and ivory; they admitted the cool and scented breath of the gardens. Chairs covered with brocades and tinted silks stood about on small Persian rugs. Lucanus had entered many fine homes before, but he thought this the most restful. He saw no statues, however. In the center of the vast hall a silvery fountain splashed into a round bowl and filled the air with perfume. The three men seated themselves on a soft Roman divan the color of pomegranates, and a servant brought them Roman wine and a dish of dates and figs rolled in nuts, and other delicate sweetmeats.