Secret Magdalene (27 page)

Yeshu and I fall to talking. I speak again of my old teacher, Philo Judaeus of Alexandria, and of his hope of the Jewish Mysteries. By now, Yeshu knows much of what I know about the Passion of Osiris, that Philo and his Therapeuts name as Moses. Yeshu has come to understand that Philo and others like him, those Seth calls men of maturity, meaning those with understanding, seek to do as Pythagoras once did in Greece; they would establish a godman among the Jewish people in order to free them from the shackles of the Law. But knowing how this would outrage the Sadducee and the men of the Sanhedrin, as well as the Pharisee and the priests of the Temple, all of whom live fat on the fear of others, knowing how it would drive to murderous frenzy those who call themselves zealous for the Law, Philo would do as Pythagoras once did. Pythagoras made the godman seem a Greek idea by transforming a minor Greek deity called Dionysus into Osiris. Philo thinks to slip Osiris past the Jews—who have no gods save Yahweh—as the One Who Comes, their promised Messiah. In Greek, the word for Messiah, or the Anointed One, is Christ.

Understanding this, Yeshu is very quick. Before I need tell him how my brother, Simon Magus, he who was also taught by Philo, sees John of the River, he has surmised it; he sees suddenly and clearly that Simon Magus would also create the Jewish Mysteries, and would use a living man to effect it.

This is what we speak of in a nameless Samaritan village, when two men fast approach us, talking each to each. Their voices so carry, we cease trying to hear our own. When they are but a pace or two away, one of the two puts back his head and howls. I find this so surprising, I clutch at Yeshu’s mantle, and Eio pulls her head out of the trough, lips spraying water, yellow teeth bared, eyes rolling back in alarm. But the companion of the howling man, a fellow whose hair, both head and beard, is entirely white, is not a bit surprised, rather, he flushes with impatience. “Hush, Ismael. You do him no good.”

But the man, Ismael, howls all the louder, loud enough for Jude to hear, and to cause him to come running back from halfway through the small village. “
I
can do him no good, Gadia? You tell me this, who have done him nothing but harm!”

At this, the second man stops still, his mouth an
O
of indignation. “Nothing but harm? If not for me, he would be already dead.”

“He
is
already dead!” shrieks Ismael, who stumbles on, tearing at his beard.

Yeshu stands away from the wall. He slips his head cloth from his head so that his face might be seen and puts himself before the man Ismael, who seems not to see him and so continues blindly walking forward. Yeshu must stop him by reaching out his hand and laying it on the man’s shoulder. It is only now that Ismael looks out of his eyes and at Yeshu before him. What does he see? I know for a certainty that where before a man such as Ismael, a poor Samaritan living in a small village on the barren spine of Palestine, would see a warrior, a Zealot—for the bearing of a true Sicarii is not to be missed—and seeing this, would take fright as naturally as sighting an asp, now I swear it seems he
sees.
Perhaps because he suffers so, perhaps his very suffering would allow him sight; whatever it is—and while the man Gadia continues another few steps on his way—Ismael stops his howling and stands quietly staring into the face of my friend, Yehoshua the Nazorean.

“How may I help you?” asks Yeshu of the man Ismael.

“No one can help me. My son is dead.”

Yeshu speaks quietly, asking, “Where is your son?”

Tears coursing down his cheeks and into his beard, lips bit and bleeding from grief, Ismael points at the village before us, in particular to the first small house on the road, the one with an open door, the very house that Jude now trots by on his way back to Yeshu.

Yeshu touches the man again, this time low on his forearm. The man Ismael shudders in his limbs; his eyes roll back in their sockets. Yeshu says, “Take me to him.”

I stare at Yeshu. What good will this do the man or his child?

Gadia has walked back to us. Seeing only his own anger, he does not see what Ismael sees. By now, Jude is with us as well. Jude has not heard what has passed between Gadia and Ismael, nor between Yeshu and Ismael, but it does not matter. Yeshu follows Ismael to the small house with the open door; therefore Jude follows Ismael. So here am I, following Jude. The man Gadia is left behind, but not for long. Cursing under his breath, he has caught up with us by the time we stand on the threshold.

Though it is brightest day, inside this house there is little light, no more than that given by a small lamp at the far end of the one room. Inside, there is no air, yet there is a stink to make me gag. Yeshu seems not to notice, nor does Jude. As for Ismael, slipping off his sandals, he walks forward until he comes to stand by a mat near the back wall. Barefoot, Yeshu comes to stand beside him. I go in as far as I dare, allowing room to rush out again if I should heave.

And here is the howling man’s son, his dead face as perfect in the lamplight as an almond blossom, his body as perfect as an almond. No more than four, he will reach no higher age. Ismael howls again and rends his clothes. Comes now a whimper from the corner, and I turn my eye to see what must be the wife of Ismael and the children of Ismael. Her arms held tight at her sides, her fists balled, the mother weeps quiet tears of quiet sorrow. Her young, three little ones but each older than the dead boy and, most tellingly, all girls, huddle behind her skirts. This is a dark dead place, and it reeks of excrement and sick. I would be out sooner than I would leave a tomb.

But Yeshu drops to his knees and leans his head over the child’s chest, his red hair falling on the dead face. We watch this, even the indignant Gadia, in perfect silence. Yeshu touches the child’s cheek. At this, I hiss in shock and surprise—Father would never touch the dead. But Yeshu is touching the poor cold cheek, the still temple, then the dead boy’s neck up under one ear. Here, he holds still, keeping his first two fingers pressed against the tender blue skin. Now he leans his ear against the child’s chest. We watch as Yeshu raises his head, looks down into the unbreathing face, as he himself breathes out and in, in and out. And then, worse than his gentle touching, his odd probing, he begins to rub the child’s unmoving chest.

I am barely breathing myself, have almost forgotten to breathe. I have seen dead things; the dead are everywhere among us. I have seen dead children, younger than this sweet boy, even babies lately at their mother’s breast, but I have never seen a dead body touched, never. This is for those who do such things, lowly people Father and his friends scarcely know exist. It is unclean; it is forbidden by Noachite Law. Yea, Balaam! Father and his friends would be expected to go to the Temple. They would be required to ritually cleanse themselves with lustral water.

Yeshu takes the body in his arms, he raises it from the mat, and then he raises himself from the dirt of the floor. Carrying Ismael’s dead son, Yeshu walks out into the sunlight, and—perfectly transfixed—so do we all. Yeshu does not stop until he comes to the trough Eio has drunk from, the trough Eio still stands by, switching her tasseled tail against the tormenting flies. Leaning down, he places the boy on the ground by the trough, and then he takes the end of his mantle and plunges it into the water. With this, he begins cleaning the body, beginning with the face. By now we—the mother, the father, Jude and Gadia, the little girls, and John the Less—all stand in a disbelieving circle around them, each of us peering down at this amazing thing. Yeshu pays us no mind but goes on wiping the sick from the body, rubbing its hands, its legs. And then there comes something I think I might swallow my tongue to see. The tender eyelids flicker; lids blue with death move.

All back away in fear. Except Jude, who moves not at all.

The eyelids flicker again, a corner of the small mouth moves. Yeshu is once more dipping his mantle in the trough, and I see he means to daub more cold water on the child’s brow, but before he can do so, the wife of Ismael throws herself between him and her son. “Ahhheeeiii,” she screams. “Matti! Matti!” I am sure she would push Yeshu away if he had not already quietly removed himself.

He stands beside me, the end of his mantle dripping, and I look at his face as he looks down at the child and its mother. To me, his face grows more beautiful by the day.

Ismael has slipped to his knees and holds the mother who holds the child. The child, Matti, who has opened his eyes, looks about him in immense surprise, and who should not be surprised, finding himself alive when he was dead?

Gadia, he who no doubt tried curing the boy in some way or another, has been standing over all three, his face a picture of ill temper mixed with superstitious awe, when suddenly he twists his head to look directly at Yeshu, more white in his eye than iris. “Who are you to have brought back the dead?”

Yeshu’s voice is as low as Gadia’s is high. “The boy was not dead.”

“He was dead!” Ismael, it seems, is not done with howling. “Matti was dead! But now, he is alive!”

And the whole family sets to sobbing and wailing and exclaiming that the man come among them is a magician! That he is surely a famous healer! That he must be a great this! And without doubt a wondrous that! While the man Gadia has decided to call out to Adonai in a tremendous voice, yelling would he please take notice of what miraculous thing has happened here! And then it occurs to all of them at once to demand to know Yeshu’s name. This terrible clamor calls others out of their houses, and in moments I see we will be swallowed up by all who live in this village.

Jude looks at Yeshu and Yeshu at Jude: they mean to be away as fast as they can. With a cluck of my tongue for Eio, we are off up the road before another moment passes.

Later, the town safely behind us, I say, “Yeshu, you are sure the boy still lived?”

He smiles the smile I so love. “Would you have the dead called back from the Kingdom?”

I do not know how to answer this.

Two days later, we are in Shechem. The most wondrous thing about Shechem is that it is the city of my beloved Addai’s birth. Because of this, I look about me with much interest.

Shechem sits high on the back of a mountain. But unlike Jerusalem, there stands nearby a taller mountain, Mount Gerizim, and it is this mountain the Samaritans call sacred. Walking through the main gate in the city wall, I stare up at this farther mountain trying to mark the ruins I know must be there. If Father has shouted once about the abomination on this high place, he has shouted a dozen times, for there was once a temple on Mount Gerizim. To the people of Samaria—loathed men, women, and children by Father and his friends for not loving Father’s Sanhedrin, which means they refuse to recognize its authority, and for not believing as the Jews believe that God expresses himself through history but believing instead God expresses himself through the person—this Temple was the most important in all the world; for the Samaritan it was the
true
Temple, which must explain why the Jews in the form of the Maccabees took it in mind to destroy it. Yet Addai says his fellow Samaritans still go to their mountain as the Jews to their Temple.

Standing now in Shechem’s main market square, I see there is not much to tell a Samaritan city from one that is Jewish. The houses are jumbled one against the other. The streets are narrow. There are no parks or public buildings or museums or ways wide enough for a chariot. There are no chariots. There is sound, a constant hubbub rising up from whatever it is people are doing in a given moment. There are Greeks here, as there are Greeks everywhere. The Greek tongue is spoken around me, as I hear it spoken everywhere. Here, as everywhere, there are Roman soldiers, and catching sight of my first example, a splendid fellow with long strong legs, and on each leg a kneecap the size of Tata’s best pottery bowl, I try not to flinch, but I do shrink back behind Jude. As for the brothers, two noticeable “once Sicarii,” the sight of a Roman soldier seems not to stir a single red hair on their heads. In turn, the soldier pays them no mind, merely strides along on his wonderful legs with their wonderful knees and right out the gate we have just come in, shoving all out of his splendid way. No doubt to a Roman, all Jews look alike.

There are groups of travelers just like us. There are caravans great and small coming, and there are caravans great and small going. There are dense flocks of goats and of sheep, stirring up clouds of grit and dust, each flock raucous with stink. Pushing through the usual melee, there are a few wealthy townspeople such as I once was. Pushing against the rich are the sellers of everything under the sun. And, of course, there are thieves. But what is truly here, as they are truly everywhere, are the poor, whose numbers are as the ants in the dirt. These are as disregarded by soldiers, as by merchants, as by thieves. For once, I do not disregard them. Remembering how I first thought of Addai, poorly robed and without sandals, I stand regarding them intensely until I am pulled away by Jude. Looking back, I say, “The poor have at least the neglect of thieves.”

To which Yeshu says, “If all had, would any steal?”

I take this in as I can, as a farmer stores grain, against the day I might understand it. Of all those whose voice has rung on my interested ear, Yeshu’s is by far the most surprising, and a surprise is the most interesting thing of all. For where Seth and Philo asked questions of philosophy that I still struggle to answer, Yeshu now asks questions of moral right and wrong I also have no answers for. Perhaps because I am the daughter of Josephus, or perhaps because I am a Jew, or perhaps because I am simply human, I have taken such things for granted—but now? The most surprising thing of all turns out to be how hard it is to look at old things as if I have not seen them before.

Poor or rich, old or young, a speaker of Greek or a misser of an eye or a limb, a man or a woman or a child, even a thief, the people of Shechem go about in the same clothes, they wear their hair and their beards the same, there is the same smell to them; in short, there is nothing but a thought between themselves and the Jews, and an old thought at that. Yet Jude walks among them as if they might, at any moment, sprout horns from their foreheads. And he does this merely because they are Samaritans. But Yeshu goes among them as he would among flowers in a field, with a tender look for each. Some smile back, some do not. Some shy away from the pleasure he takes in them. It makes no difference. Yeshu seems content that we do what we do. Leading Eio, I am content to be doing anything, and not back in the settlement alone and without Salome. Though I admit that with all that we see and all we do, my grief lessens.