Stateless (2 page)

‘That Stalin cocksucker! He made me like this. A pauper. A fucking pauper! A Jewish fucking pauper! And you . . .' Judit didn't have to see her father to know that his huge stubby finger was pointed at her mother. ‘You just fucking complain. And look at this house! A shithole. I work for nothing and you do nothing!'

Little Judita didn't really understand what her father was saying, but knew from the terror in her mother's voice that it was very bad.

‘Quiet. You'll have us all arrested!' And as her mother's tears distorted her words, Judita could only make out ‘Siberia' and ‘gulag' again and again.

Ekaterina, Abel's wife of seventeen years, was terrified when he came home in one of these moods. Abel never laid a finger on her when he was sober; in fact, he was rather quiet and sombre. But the moment he was drunk, which was often daily, Ekaterina knew what was to come. She would comfort the children when Abel Abramovich was asleep, telling them not to worry and that their daddy was only joking, but none of the children believed her. They'd lost trust in her words of reassurance long ago.

At the end of his working day, it had become a tradition that he'd go into a drinking circle around one of the bonfires on the building site, and the bottles of cheap vodka would be passed around along with the even cheaper cigarettes. The workers bought bowls of soup from an old woman trundling her pram from site to site, corner to corner. Cheap booze, cheap borscht and hours sitting on the filthy ground smoking and drinking
with his comrades until the freezing cold drove them home.

Ekaterina wondered if her husband sounded off so vocally to his drinking friends about his disdain for Stalin. She suspected not. Such words were death. The OGPU, the secret police run by Vyacheslav Rudolfovich Menzhinsky, had ears everywhere; even children were known to report their parents. No, Ekaterina knew her husband saved these dangerous rants for when he got home. But she knew how thin the walls of their tiny two-room apartment were and feared his voice more than his fists. His blows only hurt her, but his words could be the death of them all; they would simply disappear in the night, leaving behind only the whispered rumours of their neighbours. It was these thoughts that brought strength back to her voice.

‘Abel, shut up,' she hissed over the noise of the children's whimpering. ‘Shut your mouth or you'll get us all killed.'

Abel was stunned by his wife's admonishments and opened his mouth to reply but was silent. He stared at her, blinked several times, tried to remember what he was going to say, and then fell forwards onto the floor like an overbalancing statue. His huge frame hit the wooden boards, and the room descended into a sudden, peaceful silence.

Judita redoubled her efforts to hold back her tears. On this night of all nights, Judita realised she hated her father. In turn, with her child's logic, anything her father hated must be something good. She'd grown up to fear the uniforms of the police but now with the sounds of her father's bellowing still echoing in her ears, she found herself imagining the uniformed police dragging her father away. And she smiled grimly.

Ekaterina didn't try to move her husband. He was too big, too bulky; so she let him sleep where he'd fallen on the floor. She reached under the table, and pulled out little Judita Ludmilla, comforting her with kisses and a soft Yiddish melody she'd learned from her own mother. She stroked her hair gently,
kissed her on the cheek, the neck, and blew softly into her ear. Then she walked into the bedroom, pulled back the bedclothes, and gently lay Judita alongside her older sister and brother, who had crawled out from under the sheets.

‘Father is sleeping,' she said. ‘He's very tired after a hard day's work. You must understand, my little ones. Your father works to support us all.'

The children nodded, and Ekaterina lay down beside them. They all snuggled into her body, and her son, Maxim, whispered, ‘I don't like it when he shouts. And when he smells like that.'

‘I'm frightened as well,' said Galina, Maxim's younger sister.

‘Then let me tell you a story,' Ekaterina said. ‘A nice story about a nice place. A story about Israel, where it's always warm and there's lots to eat. That's the place where the Jewish people came from. That's our real home, my children, not Moscow. And one day, I'm going to go back so you can enjoy your heritage. Do you remember me telling you about Israel? Do you want to hear that story, my babies?'

Judita scowled. ‘I'm not a baby, Mama.'

Ekaterina smiled. She closed her eyes, but held her children even tighter. It was hard to picture a land of warmth and security, but she tried. It was a place she'd never seen with her own eyes, only in picture books. She tried to remember what the images looked like. There was a sea-shore, and sand dunes and a city of white stone with a beautiful golden dome in the middle.

Ekaterina took a deep breath, and began. ‘In a city called Jerusalem, there once lived a man called King David. And he had many wives, as happened in those days. But one day on the roof of his palace, he looked down, and there he saw another beautiful woman called Bathsheba . . .'

The town of Yavne, Roman province of Judea

161 CE (first year of the co-emperorship of Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus)

T
zadik bar Caiaphas flicked away a fat and lazy fly that had just landed on the scrolls resting on his desk. Tzadik was the exiled High Priest of Jerusalem but as the city had been occupied as a Roman military base for decades, he, like all Jews, was forbidden for all time from freely entering Jerusalem and so his home was made beyond the city walls.

The insect, black and bloated from feasting on rotting summer meats left in the refuse heap on the outskirts of the city, rose to the ceiling the moment the priest's hands approached. It buzzed around the smoking oil lamp, and then settled upside down on one of the wooden beams. Tzadik looked at it in wonder; why had the Lord Almighty created such a creature that could spend its days living the wrong way up?

Tzadik had lost count of how many flies and midges and other irritating insects had interrupted his thoughts while he was working. It was a fiercely hot day, and although the drawn shades kept the blistering rays of the sun from entering the office, nothing could stop the enervating heat from draining all
of his energy. It was like working in a tar pit. Beneath his robes of office, his golden turban and his prayer shawl, his body was prickling in the airless cauldron that was his room. But he had work to do and nothing must distract him.

These were troubled times. Things in Judea were always fraught but, during the past few weeks, it was as though the very fabric of the nation was the skin of a drum and some manic musician was pounding out an erratic and unpredictable beat. The death of one Roman emperor had seen the enthroning of two in his place: a conjoined rule between Antoninus's adoptive sons, Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus.

Tzadik and his fellow priests were well used to the tides that flowed through the fractured and torn cities and towns of the Roman province and, by and large, knew how to ride their rise and fall. The priests of Judea were nothing if not pragmatic. But the end of one reign and the beginning of another was always tumultuous and posed many questions for the priest.

How would the new emperors treat their captured peoples? Would war begin in the north against Syria or the restive Mesopotamia? Would the new reign of the two emperors be filled with anti-Jewish edicts, new commands, new decrees, that would further damage his people?

Above all, would this new emperor allow them to enter the city of Jerusalem once more? The once beautiful city that King David and King Solomon had built had been destroyed by the emperor Titus to be little more than piles of rubble. The emperor Hadrian had rebuilt it but as a Roman command post and without the temple that was the centre of the Jewish world. Would they one day be allowed to rebuild the temple?

These were the questions that filled the mind of the priest but he was not so removed from the truth of the world to be ignorant to the reality faced by his people. Roman soldiers who would thrust a spear into a Jew just for the pleasure of it.
Constant skirmishes between their Sadducee brethren and the Pharisees, from the remnants of the Zealots who still dreamed about an Israel free of Rome, from those who wanted to live in peace with the Romans, from those who wanted to worship the gods of other peoples and from those who demanded that only Yahweh be worshipped. This was the cacophony that troubled the nights of Tzadik bar Caiaphas and he had set himself to accommodating the Romans as best as possible so that there was no repeat of the massacres that had decimated his people in the past.

The Romans were good administrators, and terrible enemies. Provided that neither he, as High Priest, nor any Jew in the nation, went against a Roman decree, his people might be left alone. The Romans had many problems on the distant borders of their empire and were ruthless at crushing dissent.

It was a fine balancing act, but if he plied the road between the ambitious Romans and the intemperate Jews, acting as the water that doused both furnaces, then perhaps peace and hope could be maintained.

To that end, it had been peaceful in Judea for the past twenty-five years, since Simeon bar Kochbar had revolted against the Roman emperor Hadrian. So surprised were the Romans by the bar Kochbar rebellion, that Hadrian ordered his general Sextus Julius Severus to leave Britain and crush the rebels. And crush them he did, killing hundreds of thousands of people until the very rocks themselves cried out in grief.

The destruction of Jerusalem in the wake of the two rebellions was so great that even now, a quarter of a century later, the blood of the Jewish martyrs still stained the white walls of what remained of the city. And the Romans took great pride in the rebuilding of their quarters on what had once been Jerusalem, using those bloodstained blocks of stone.

It was after bar Kochbar's revolt that Hadrian had renamed
the country Syria Palaestina, but Tzadik would never call it by that except when in the presence of Romans.

For all the violence and bloodshed he had wrought, Hadrian had died peacefully in his bed and his place was taken by his adoptive son Antoninus Pius. Though he continued to forbid the Jews to enter Jerusalem except for one day of the year to mourn their temple, life was at least peaceful. The persecution of the Jews, which had given such pleasure to Hadrian and his soldiers, was stopped, as was the depopulation of the cities.

During the reign of Emperor Antoninus, the Jews had slowly returned and the intellectual and social life of Israel resumed. Antoninus even repealed those edicts of Hadrian that denied burial of Jewish soldiers and martyrs who had fought the Romans, and whose bones had lain on the battlefield.

Tzadik bar Caiaphas sighed as he struggled to read his scrolls, his eyes misted by sweat from the burning heat of the day. He stared out of the open window in the airless atmosphere and recalled the days of his youth. They were not pleasant memories. The stench of decomposing bodies; the ravaging dogs and wolves that roamed the streets with impunity, tearing rotting limb from rotting limb, crunching on bones that had once been worshippers. Even prides of lions marauding.

Whenever he began to recall these events, he deliberately stopped his thoughts and instead contemplated his responsibilities now that he was High Priest, acting under sufferance from Rome.

He sighed and wiped the sweat from his eyes. He was roasting and had to leave his office to find some sanctuary from the burning heat.

Carrying his scrolls under his arm, Tzadik walked out of his house and into the garden, where a breeze from the distant sea rustled the leaves. He headed towards a desk that his servants had set up the previous day underneath the gigantic canopy of
a cypress tree. But as he walked through his garden, he saw movement behind one of the bushes in the distance. It looked like the shadow of a very small man.

‘Who's there?' he shouted. ‘Come out. My servants are nearby.'

He stood and waited, and after a moment, the shadow revealed itself as a boy, seemingly ten or eleven years old. But as he walked nearer, Tzadik saw that he was older, perhaps fourteen or fifteen. A man, but still a boy. A boy dressed in rags, his sandals broken, his clothes torn and filthy.

‘Who are you?' demanded Tzadik.

The boy came closer, obviously in awe of the High Priest's sumptuous regalia, his jewelled turban and heavy golden seals of office hanging around his neck. The child was looking up in amazement at Tzadik's head. The High Priest understood that the boy's incredulity was because he came from the country and had probably never seen such dress – or any priestly garments.

‘What's your name, boy, and why are you in my garden?'

‘I'm Abram ben Yitzhak. I've walked from the north of Israel . . .'

‘Silence, child.'

Tzadik knew he was alone and safe but still cast his eyes about involuntarily to ensure they were alone and no one had heard the name he'd called the Roman province. ‘Israel' was never to be used. It was death. When Emperor Hadrian had crushed the Jewish rebellion, he had set about ensuring the dissolution of national identity that could lead to such rebellions. Hadrian had attempted to rob the Jews of their sense of self by making it a crime punishable by death to even call the land by its ancestral Jewish name. It was known to all as Syria Palaestina.

‘Never use that name, boy.'

Abram looked at the priest with curiosity.

‘What do you want here?' Tzadik asked.

‘I've been told to come and see the High Priest of Israel to bring him greetings from –'

At the repeated transgression, Tzadik cut the boy off. ‘Who told you to seek me out? And what do you want with me?'

Abram looked up at the High Priest. At first, he hadn't been in awe of him, but the man's imperiousness did make him nervous. Despite the privations and hardships of his three weeks' walking from the Northern Galilee to the coastal city of Yavne, the constancy of his hunger and fear of bandits and nocturnal animals, he'd maintained his confidence and courage until now. Suddenly, he was tongue-tied.