The Artifact (51 page)

For her part, Steven had assembled his entire wealth and pledged his home for a journey to far-off Constantinople to purchase thousands of precious spices, glass and silverware, silk and cups of gold he planned to sell to our affluent military Roman governors and Pharisees, a last financial undertaking that would ensure his retirement and Yentl’s well-being for the remainder of her eventual widowhood. He hired fifty armed guards to protect his money from bandits on his passage east, and the caravan bringing his costly merchandise home. Unfortunately, poor, honest Steven chose the wrong escort. According to subsequent reports, once in the barren Syrian Desert, his own guards murdered their employer and disappeared with every last drachma that he owned.

Although the bankers took her home and everything in it, including her jewels and fine clothes, the one thing no one could take from Yentl was her spirit. When she found herself homeless and destitute, she submerged her pride and indentured herself to the family of a prominent Pharisee for three years as maidservant to the man’s wife. At the end of that service she had saved enough money to purchase a loom
,
rent a modest house and establish herself as a weaver of cloth blankets for either the Roman toga,
stolae
or universal robe she designed with colored trim and pleats for women. She seemed to be working long hard hours to make a living in that way, primarily because her wealthy clients, as is common knowledge, were very slow to pay.

Drinking much unwatered wine that night, Yentl and I fell to weeping like newborn babes together at our past adversity, touching, embracing, consoling one another again in violent copulation that left us panting and exhausted between brief, haunted fits of sleep.

We saw the dawn that morrow from a rear window overlooking Yentl’s littered rear plot, my eyes darting to her fair profile and the curved outline of her form through her diaphanous shift, in wonder at the kindness the intervening years had bestowed, not only upon her visage, but firm breasts and narrow waist rarely seen in a woman at the advanced age of twenty-seven years. When I left her that morning, I recall that she did not cling or ask me to return or if I would. She just smiled her knowing little grin, touched her fingers to her lips, then to mine and closed the door before I had mounted Nubia. Cantering back to Nazarat in the crisp autumn breeze, I found myself whistling. Where had that come from? I never whistled.

Yehoshua and Mary returned to our mother’s home the following day, and after effusive greetings, my older brother sat at table before the remains of his morning meal enjoying our mother’s interrogation of my whereabouts the evening before.

“I have twenty-six years,” I told her. “Is that not sufficient to enable me to run my own life without having to account for my whereabouts every hour of the day?”

“Not while you live under my roof.”

“It was to be a surprise,” I said. “I slept at a house in Sepphoris that I intend to purchase for you.”

“For me! I have a perfectly good home here,” she assured me. “Why would I wish to move to Sepphoris? Have you gone daft in your absence, Shimon? Where did you come by so much money to buy a house in the City?”

After his initial glee at our mother’s treatment of her youngest son still as a child, Yehoshua managed to extract me from the situation by suggesting that we go out for a walk to leave Mother and Mary to discuss my housing offer beyond our presence. We walked at a leisurely pace along the path to the Sepphoris road, then turned without purpose across the field to the edge of the forest where we had harvested trees for Father what then seemed so many years ago. No longer seated in my mother’s home, his long legs still oblivious to my limping gait, walking slightly before me in the warm sunshine, Yehoshua appeared as a different man than the last time I saw him by the campfire planning his escape with James and Judah of the rebellious Sicarii. His beard was shaved to present a smooth visage to the world, his hair cropped, his body had shed a good deal of its previous bulk under an unbelted robe badly in need of mending. More than his physical appearance, he seemed distracted, less the impetuous man of action of old than the contemplative individual striding ahead of me then, as though he were pondering some complex issue, until a posed question or remark brought him back to his surroundings.

Extracting information from Yehoshua had always been difficult, but I would rather pull the roots of an oak felled from the earth than continue in that vein. He turned the conversation before I could continue the direction of my inquiries. “I understand your wish to spare Mother the heartache of your true activities during your absence. I am deeply sorry that you were taken as a Roman slave on my account.”

He stopped and faced me with a pained look as we approached the large boulder where we used to sit eating a midday meal. “How in the name of Yahweh could you survive as a gladiator, Little Brother?”

“As long as we are sharing secrets, I am torn, Shimon.” A frown covered his brow as he gazed off into the distance. “I have been baptized in the Jordan by our cousin John, who preaches that we should confess and repent our sins, for the Kingdom of God is at hand.”

I could not suppress a smile at mention of our fanatical relation. “Does he live in the forest still, wearing a robe of camel skin with the hair turned in?”

“I sometimes wonder if God wishes people in such poor circumstances due to Roman oppression to be burdened further with guilt,” he said.

“And adherence to the strict laws of the Torah, which intrude on every hour of their lives.”

Yehoshua, Jesus, shook his head in puzzlement. “I do not entirely disagree with some of your concerns about the strictures of our laws.”

“From what I have seen, God either ignores us or has set His mind to burden our existence.”

His eyes became moist and he could not meet my gaze. “I am sick of heart when I think of what you must have been compelled to do to survive.”

“The followers of a Greek named Diogenes, who lived on the Black Sea about 350 years ago. He taught that happiness could be achieved by freedom from desire, from authority, the ownership of property, and from public opinion.”

“According to James, the Commandments of Moses and scriptures of the Torah are all the laws we need to observe.”

“There seem to be many confounding philosophies in the civilized world,” he said. “It is not easy for a mortal mind to find the most suitable and dismiss the rest. There seem to be useful beliefs in many precepts.”

I smiled at him. “You are beginning to sound as blasphemous as me.”

“There is but one true God, Shimon. Keeping the major laws Yahweh has inspired our holy

ancestors to lay down are the only sure path for us to gain His Kingdom.”

“With no indication of how to free us from Roman rule.”

“Would you rather enjoy an easy existence on earth, or happiness throughout eternity?”

“Why are we faced with that choice? We are here on earth, what guarantee do we have that there is a Kingdom to be had at the end of the world? How long must we wait for the promised Messiah?”

strangers.”

“Is it not attractive to shuck all material goods and responsibility to wander through life without care or caution, harming no one, coveting nothing, following Yahweh’s great plan?”

“What plan? Being poor and powerless, I was enslaved. Which is not my idea of freedom.”

“Greed is the single root of all sins. The hunger for money, material possessions, the lust for another man’s wife, power over others. It seems that every man has an innate weakness to ignore the ethics of civilized behavior, morality.”

My brother was not forthcoming regarding the details of his activities during his absence as was his wont, and disinclined to probe the details of my activities in the arenas. He was curious about my escape from Roman slavery, but having no knowledge of my trysts with Vespasian’s sister Tanya here in the Galilee, I simply told him that a Senator and his wife who had a son with a twisted leg such as mine bought my freedom from my
lanista
out of empathy. That was almost the truth, and regardless of Jesus’ suggestion that I become a pauper, I remained determined to keep my entire savings earned on the sands for myself and family, plus the twenty thousand
sisteres
Fabian gave me in guilty compensation for tricking Nubian and me into that last
sine missus
single combat. That story, which accounted for my substantial wealth would never be told--those hard won earnings holding the reassurance of seeing me through the end of my years.

As Jesus predicted, Mother refused to move to a house in Sepphoris. But after much persuasion, agreed to leave our old house on the outskirts of town. Thus, I purchased a new home with modern conveniences in the center of Nazarat where she could receive and visit her few relatives and many friends. I remained for almost a month with her in that house which was brighter, had running water diverted from a nearby aqueduct, new furnishings, including a raised bed, and a recessed place for a cooking fire with enclosed chimney. All of which she at first found fault, but finally pleased her. I soon longed to be on my own, however, particularly out from under the constant urging of that good woman to allow a matchmaker to find me a wife. Although she realized that my crippled leg might be a deterrent to finding a propitious spouse, she rightly believed that many fathers would gladly ignore it in light of my substantial wealth. She also did not know that a gladiator/slave, although revered on the sand, was considered no better than a prostitute, who had sold his body for a different purpose.

After my youthful affair with Tanya, then carrying her since in a place in my heart, finally seeing her from afar with my son and her Senator husband in the Circus Maximus, I felt little enthusiasm for other women except in lust, nor the slightest inclination to be bound for life in marriage. Maybe it was the irrevocable loss of Tanya, my enslavement, the brutality of the arena, drinking wine to excess, the absolute freedom to do whatever I pleased after years in bondage, the disaffection I felt with my life...I cannot say. Jesus once said that my discontent was due to my bitterness at being born with a twisted leg--that I should take solace in the worse plight of lepers, the blind and mindless. How do they minimize my limp, my embarrassment, my inability to run, to charm women, who either pity or shun me?

Yentl had also changed, yet in different ways. Having seduced me as a virile boy to fulfill the sexual duties of her elderly husband, we came to enjoy one another’s company, I relished her irreverent sense of humor, our post-coital conversations, partaking in meals--being together. Friendship, I suppose. I did not love her then, and she spoke not to me of love. Her needs were day to day as were mine, apparently eschewing the concept of permanence as I, and seemed to wish for naught but the happiness of the moment. In the end, I believe my attraction to Yentl was her ability to transport me from the bleak reality of my existence into the pleasant atmosphere she could build around her regardless of her circumstances.

After our evening meals we would sit for a time on her pallet in her back room with the door open in good weather, leaning against one another in comfortable silence or talking, attempting to ignore the clutter in the rear plot and the unkempt buildings beyond.