The Ironsmith (41 page)

“‘I am the Lord,'” the old man repeated. “I heard a story once of a famous teacher who was approached by a gentile who said he would become his student and embrace Israel if the teacher could tell him the essence of the Law while standing on one foot. The teacher lifted one foot from the ground and said, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself. I am the Lord.' And the gentile became his student.”

“I have heard that story,” Noah replied, smiling as he experienced a surge of love for his grandfather. He hoped Benjamin lived long enough that his own children would have some memory of him. “They tell it of Hillel, and probably others. There are, I suspect, several variations.”

“There are always stories about men famous for their piety,” Benjamin said. “Some of them one believes, some not. Some, it doesn't matter if they are true or not.”

*   *   *

The next morning, as Benjamin had predicted, Joseph was not in the prayer house. His sons sat together and were silent during the discussion of the reading. When it was over they returned to their father's house, without a word to anyone. It was as if Noah and his grandfather were somehow included in their anger against Joshua.

“‘You shall not hate your brother in your heart,'” Noah repeated, as if to himself.

“‘I am the Lord,'” his grandfather murmured.

*   *   *

On the following morning, before it was even light, Noah set out for Tiberias. It was late afternoon before he reached the door of his friend Priam.

“What are you doing here?” Priam asked, forgetting his manners in his surprise. “Usually you write that you are coming.”

“There was no time. I apologize for the intrusion.”

“It is not an intrusion, for I am always glad to see you. It is merely unexpected.”

“For both of us.”

Then he told Priam about Judah.

“And what is your interest in this man? Or is it better I do not know?”

“You do not want to know. Who in Tiberias would have managed his affairs?”

Priam shrugged and pulled thoughtfully at his beard.

“It would have to be someone of standing,” he said finally. “In all, perhaps a score of merchants.”

“Can you give me a list?”

“I will do better than that. I will go with you. Business is slow, and it will give me something to do.” Looking his friend over from head to foot, Priam shook his head. “But you can't appear before these men looking like that. You are covered with dust.”

“An inevitable consequence of walking for ten hours.”

“Yes, but you must take a bath and have my servants attend to your clothes. There is nothing more to be done today.”

Noah could only shrug with resignation.

“Besides,” Priam continued, “you must drink some wine and tell me all your news. Are you married yet? I am eager to hear how this second experiment is turning out.”

*   *   *

Priam was nearing forty, and there were rumors that he had come from Sardis to escape his wife. Whether this was true or not, he lived in Tiberias as a bachelor. His household servants were all women, some very pretty, so probably he did not lack for amusement.

He listened to Noah's praise of his bride with patient cynicism.

“And yet I notice, since here you are, that her charms could not hold you in place for even a week.”

“It was an emergency. Trust me when I say I prefer her company even to yours.”

Priam laughed. “I am insulted.”

The next morning they began their inquiries. By noon they had been in the counting houses of six of the most prosperous merchant traders in the city, and none of them knew of a rich wastrel named Judah who had lost his money and disappeared. Noah was beginning to believe he was chasing a shadow, that Judah had simply concocted the whole story. He wondered if Judah was even his real name.

Noah felt horribly exposed, as if he were playing his part upon a stage, in view of the whole world. It was like Damascus all over again.

Was he being followed? Had Eleazar once again given him a minder?

It was the middle of the afternoon before they found what they were looking for.

“Judah bar Isaac? Where has he taken himself off to?”

The question, in response to Noah's, was posed by a certain Onesimus, a trader with offices on the Street of the Palms.

“Sepphoris,” Noah answered, consoling himself with the reflection that it was no less true than a number of other locations he could have cited.

“Well, what is your interest in him?”

“He is employed by a relative of mine—in a confidential capacity. I was asked to inquire about him.”

Onesimus considered this response, probably deciding it was too vague to be quite the truth, but he too was curious.

“Well,” he replied cautiously, “he didn't lose his money, I can tell you. He is still on my books, and the profits from his investments have done nothing but increase.”

“I wonder why he left, then.”

After glancing about, as if afraid of being overheard, Onesimus leaned forward heavily against his desk.

“I can hazard a guess,” he said, in a low voice. “He favored a certain prostitute. She was found in her room with her neck neatly broken, and after that no one ever saw Judah again. It might be a coincidence, but he also might have killed her and then fled.”

“When was this?”

“Oh, six or seven months ago. I would have to check my records.” Onesimus smiled indulgently. “You can tell him he is free to return whenever he likes. No one is looking for him. No one cares anything about a dead whore.”

*   *   *

“It's an interesting story,” Priam said that night, over dinner. “A young man, possessed of wealth and leisure, disappears one day, leaving a dead prostitute behind him. Do you think he killed her.”

Noah, who was thinking of something else, did not immediately answer.

“Do you remember the way he put it?” He looked up, and the expression on his face suggested he had a bitter taste in his mouth. “‘No one cares anything about a dead whore.' She was probably some poor farmer's daughter, sold to a brothel keeper when she was ten years old. And after that her fate is of interest to no one.”

“Your heart is too tender for your own good.” When he didn't receive a response, Priam repeated his initial question. “Do you think he killed her?”

“I doubt it. He doesn't seem capable of it.”

Then Noah seemed to disappear inside himself. He was concerned with quite a different mystery.

“Judah bar Isaac disappears six months ago,” he began at last, “and then two months ago, he attaches himself to my cousin Joshua. That leaves four empty months.”

“Where do you think he was?”

“I don't know,” Noah answered.

It was the truth. He didn't know. But he could hazard a guess.

 

34

On the long, winding way back from Nazareth, Joshua seemed a different person, as if the break with his family marked the beginning of some shift in the way he saw himself and his work. Everyone noticed it, even Simon, who was not a very acute man.

Those who deceive, and thus live in dread of discovery, are perhaps quicker to discover changes in others, to anguish over their meaning, and to find the truth. It is the burden of such men to see clearly.

Thus Judah was probably the first to understand that Joshua was struggling to accept his own isolation. Now, it seemed, he belonged only to God.

The route they followed took them first east, as far as Beth Yerah, at the southern end of the Sea of Kinneret, and then north along the western shore. When they reached Tiberias, Joshua, to Judah's intense relief, refused to enter the city, so a fisherman who had been attracted by his message took them around by water.

Judah sat in the boat, gazing at the city that had once been his home, with a mingling of revulsion and nostalgia. Was Zebida still there, plying her trade? Had she forgotten him? Had she loved him, even a little? He could not disguise from himself that he missed her caresses.

Everywhere Joshua preached the coming of God's kingdom and the redemption of the land. God would soon set everything right for those who stood before Him with contrite hearts. Joshua made the world as it was seem like a prison. Soon, he said, soon all would be set free.

Yet one could not avoid the impression that Joshua was growing impatient. Why did God stay His hand? What was He waiting for?

And more and more—in private conversation, for it was not something at which he even hinted to the crowds that collected around him—the answer seemed to be, for Jerusalem during the Passover.

But if the heavens opened, Judah often wondered, and God's messenger came to judge the children of the earth, would he be cast into the fire like the nettles and weeds of Joshua's parables? Judah seemed never to have a moment when he was free of fear. Fear of God, fear of Caleb, fear of not knowing where to find the truth.

More than once he had made up his mind to go to Joshua and confess everything. He would tell him the whole story and beseech his mercy. But always his courage failed him.

Did he really believe in Joshua's message? He didn't know. He believed in Joshua, in his goodness and his love of God, but he did not know if he could believe in the Kingdom. Perhaps he was just too empty a man to have faith in anything.

And Caleb was real. Caleb was waiting—Caleb with his prison and his cross and his relentless conviction that he was the true servant of heaven's will.

So, with his divided heart, Judah could see quite clearly that the worm of doubt had found its home in Joshua. Doubt not about God or about the Kingdom, but about himself.

The message was true, but was he, Joshua bar Joseph, the carpenter from Nazareth, really the messenger?

When Judah first met him, he had rarely used the word
prophet,
and never applied it to himself. The Baptist was a “prophet” who spoke with an authority that was God's gift to him. Joshua revered the Baptist and quoted him constantly: “John said” and “John taught us”—these words were always on his lips.

Now he spoke less of John, although still with vast respect, and now openly referred to himself as a prophet. Often he would begin a teaching with “The Pharisees say thus, but
I
say…” Did he believe that he had assumed the Baptist's mantle?

Or was it more that he needed to believe it?

Judah, the deceiver, understood that need, and felt compassion for Joshua.

Perhaps only men like Caleb did not doubt.

“I will be glad to see Capernaum again,” Simon told him, smiling companionably as they ate their dinner, leaning back against the hull of a damaged boat. “I haven't seen my wife in two weeks and three days.”

After an initial hostility to the Judean man from the city—the man who had once been rich—Simon appeared to have accepted Judah. That mattered, because Simon was closer to Joshua than anyone else. Joshua would sometimes laugh at Simon, and even mock him, but he trusted and confided in him. Simon had been the first to follow Joshua.

Simon also did not doubt. He was a simple, straightforward Galilean, little given to subtlety. He was also, after Joshua, the leader, not only by seniority but by temperament. He would have been a good soldier, but God had made him a fisherman with a window in his heart open to heaven.

“I wish Deborah was still there,” Judah answered. “She would feed us. We would eat meat.”

“Well, now she is feeding the ironsmith.” Simon laughed, appreciating his own joke, if that was what it was. “At least we will eat lamb in Jerusalem,” he went on. “It's something to look forward to. I always like the Passover in Jerusalem. What a place!”

“I know,” said Judah. “I was born there. My father is a Levite in the Temple.”

Simon looked at him as if dumbfounded, and Judah could only laugh.

“Don't worry, I'm not bragging. He cast me off, and with good reason.”

“All men are sinful,” Simon told him, putting a thick hand on his shoulder. “God forgives us.”

He was not sure why, but suddenly Judah found it necessary to close his eyes and struggle against the temptation to weep.

He recovered, however, before Simon noticed anything.

“I could use a jug of wine,” Judah said, glad there seemed to be no thickness in his voice.

“A whole jug? Would you share it?” Simon laughed again, and his hand pounded on Judah's shoulder good-naturedly.

*   *   *

What would his father think? Who would he choose, Joshua or Caleb? It was a question that haunted Judah's mind like an evil spirit.

For his father would be aware of Caleb's history. He was a friend of Old Jacob and had doubtless heard all the circumstances of his son's banishment. But would he say that Caleb had redeemed himself in the service of God?

And what would he think of the peasant preacher, Joshua? Would he see a prophet or merely a carpenter turned agitator?
Could
he see the prophet, or would he be blinded by the calloused hands and the Galilean accent?

In a nameless village less than a day's walk from Tiberias, a woman who was subject to convulsions, so that she could hardly speak or walk, approached Joshua one morning, begging to be healed. Joshua knelt with her for almost two hours, his hand caressing the back of her head, their faces almost touching while she whispered her story to him and he told her of God's limitless forgiveness if she truly repented her sins.

She stayed close to him all the rest of the day, and her convulsions seemed to have left her. She was smiling and happy and at peace with herself. Whether, after they were gone, she was once more seized by her illness, Judah could not say, but for that day Joshua seemed to have worked a miracle.

“I have seen him do such things before,” Simon told him. “He can drive away demons. It is a power he has from God.”