The Last Temptation of Christ (6 page)

“My children, have faith in the people of Israel. Forward—all together. Do not be afraid. Rome is smoke. God will puff and blow her away! Remember the Maccabees, remember how they expelled the Greeks, the rulers of the whole world, how they put them to shame! In the same way we shall expel the Romans, we shall put them to shame. There is only one Lord of Hosts, and he is our God!”

Swept away in a divine ecstasy, the old rabbi jumped and danced upon the giant’s broad shoulders. He had grown old, devoured by fasts, prostrations and great hopes, and had no strength to run. The huge-bodied mountaineer had grabbed him and was running with him now in front of the people, waving him back and forth like a banner.

“Hey, you’ll drop him, Barabbas,” the people shouted.

But Barabbas advanced without the slightest worry, tossing and dandling the old man on his shoulders.

The people were crying for God. The air above their heads caught fire, flames bounded forth and joined heaven to earth. Their minds reeled: this world of stones, grass and flesh thinned out, became transparent, and the next world appeared behind it, composed of flames and angels.

Judas caught fire. Thrusting forward his arms, he snatched the old rabbi from Barabbas’s shoulders, threw him astride his own and began to bellow: “Today! Not tomorrow, today!” The rabbi ignited in his turn and began to sing the psalm of victory in his high voice, the voice of a man with one foot in the grave. In a moment, the entire people intoned:

The nations compassed me about; in the name of my

  
God I disperse them!

The nations girded me round; in the name of my

  
God I disperse them!

They encircled me like wasps; in the name of my

  
God I disperse them!

But while they sang, scattering the nations in their minds, the enemy fortress suddenly loomed before them in the heart of Nazareth: square, stoutly built, with four corners, four towers, four enormous bronze eagles. The devil inhabited every inch of these barracks. At the very top, above the towers, were the yellow and black eagle-bearing Roman standards; below these, Rufus, the bloodthirsty centurion of Nazareth, with his army; still lower, the horses, dogs, camels and slaves; and lower yet, thrust in a deep, dried-out well, his hair untouched by shears, his lips by wine, his body by women—the Zealot. This rebel would but toss his head, and men, slaves, horses, towers—all the accursed levels above him—would come tumbling down. God always works in this way. Deep in the foundations of wrong he buries the small despised cry of justice.

This Zealot was the last of the long lineage of the Maccabees. The God of Israel had held his hand over his head and kept the sacred seed from perishing. One night Herod the aged king of Judea—a wicked, damnable traitor!—had smeared forty adolescents with tar and ignited them as torches because they had pulled down the golden eagle he had fastened to the previously unsoiled lintel of the Temple. Of the forty-one conspirators, forty were caught, but the leader escaped. The God of Israel had seized him by the hair of his head and saved him, and this was this Zealot, the great-great-grandson of the Maccabees, a handsome adolescent at the time, with cheeks still covered with fuzz.

For years after that he roamed the mountains, fighting to liberate the holy soil which God had presented to Israel. “We have only one master—Adonai,” he used to proclaim. “Do not pay poll tax to the earthly magistrates, do not suffer their eagle-shaped idols to soil God’s Temple, do not slaughter oxen and sheep as sacrifices for the tyrant emperor! There is one God, our God; there is one people, the people of Israel; there is but one fruit on the entire tree of the earth—the Messiah.”

But suddenly the God of Israel drew his hand away from him and he was captured by Rufus, the centurion of Nazareth. Peasants, workers and proprietors had set out
en masse
from all the near-by villages; fishermen had come from the lake of Gennesaret. For days and days now an obscure, cross-eyed, doubled-sensed message had been leaping from house to house, fishing boat to fishing boat, and also catching passers-by on the road: “They’re crucifying the Zealot; he’s done for too—finished!” But at other times the message was: “Greetings, brothers, the Saviour has come! Take large date branches and forward, all together—march to Nazareth to welcome him!”

The old rabbi stood on his knees atop the redbeard’s shoulders, pointed to the barracks and began once more to shout: “He’s come! He’s come! Standing in that dried-out well is the Messiah—erect and waiting. Waiting for whom? For us, the people of Israel! Onward, smash down the door, deliver the Deliverer, that he may deliver us!”

“In the name of the God of Israel!” Barabbas cried in a wild voice, and he raised the hatchet he held in his hand.

The people bellowed, daggers stirred under their shirts, the children loaded their slings and everyone—Barabbas in the lead—charged the iron door. But all eyes had been blinded by the great light of God, and no one saw a tiny, squat door in the barracks which opened just a crack, revealing Magdalene, as pale as death and wiping her tear-filled eyes. Her soul had pitied the condemned man and she had gone down to the pit during the night to give him the ultimate joy, the sweetest which this world can offer. But he was of the wild battalion of the Zealots and had sworn that until the deliverance of Israel he would neither cut his hair, put wine to his lips, nor sleep with woman. Magdalene sat opposite him the whole night and looked at him; but his eyes were on Jerusalem, far far in the distance behind the woman’s black hair, not the subjected and prostituted Jerusalem of that day, but the holy Jerusalem of the future, with its seven triumphant fortress gates, its seven guardian angels and the seventy-seven peoples of the earth prostrate at its feet. As the condemned man touched the cool breast of the future Jerusalem, death vanished and the world about him sweetened, grew circular, filled his grasp. He closed his eyes, held the breast of Jerusalem in his palm and thought of one thing only—of the God of Israel, the God whose hair had never been touched by shears, whose lips had never been touched by wine, whose body had never been touched by woman. The Zealot held Jerusalem on his knees all night long and constructed the kingdom of heaven deep down in his bowels, not out of angels and clouds, but as he wanted it, warm in winter, cool in summer, and made of men and soil.

The old rabbi saw his disreputable daughter emerge from the barracks. He turned his face the other way. This was the one great humiliation of his life. How had this prostitute issued from his chaste, god-fearing bowels? What devil or what incurable pangs had hit her to make her go the way of shame? One day, after she returned from a festival in Cana, she wept and declared she wished to kill herself, and afterward she burst into fits of laughter, painted her cheeks, donned all her jewelry and began to walk the streets. Then she left the paternal roof and set up shop in Magdala—at the crossroads, where all the caravans passed by. ...

With her bodice still undone, she advanced fearlessly toward the crowd. The rouge on her lips and cheeks had been washed away; her eyes were cloudy and dull from having watched the man all night long and wept. When she saw her mortified father look the other way she smiled bitterly. She had already left shame far behind her, as well as fear of God, love of her father and care about the opinions of men. Scandal had it that she was possessed with seven devils, but her heart did not contain seven devils; it contained seven knives.

The old rabbi began to shout again. He wanted the people to turn and look directly at him so that they would fail to see his daughter. God saw her, and that was enough—he would judge.

“Open the eyes of the soul and regard the heavens,” he cried, pivoting on the redbeard’s shoulders. “God stands above us. The heavens have opened, the armies of angels have come forth, the air has filled with red and blue wings!”

The sky turned to flame. The people raised their eyes, looked above them and saw God—armed and descending. Barabbas lifted his hatchet. “Today! Not tomorrow, today!” he screamed, and the mob charged the barracks. They fell upon the iron door, applied crowbars, put ladders against the walls, brought flaming brands to set the place afire. But suddenly the iron door opened and two bronze cavalrymen appeared. They were armed to the teeth, sunburned, well nourished, sure of themselves. With fixed expressions, they spurred their horses, lifted their lances—and all at once the streets filled with howling feet and backs which had begun to flee toward the hill of crucifixion.

This accursed hill was bare: nothing but flint and thorns. You found dried drops of blood under whatever stone you happened to lift. Every time the Hebrews raised their hands against the Romans in order to seek freedom this hill filled with crosses, and upon these the rebels writhed and groaned. At night the jackals came and ate their feet, and the next morning the crows flew down and ate their eyes.

The people halted at the foot of the hill, gasping for breath. More bronze cavalrymen overwhelmed them, rode up and down, crowded the mass of Hebrews together into one area, then formed a cordon around them. It was almost noon now and the cross had still not come. At the top of the hill two gypsies waited, holding the hammers and nails in their hands. The village dogs arrived, anxious to eat. The faces of the people were on fire, turned up toward the hill, under the torrid sky. Pitch-black eyes, hooked noses, sunken sun-baked cheeks, greasy sideburns. The fat women, their armpits drenched, their hair splattered with drippings, melted away under the sun, and reeked.

From the lake of Gennesaret a group of fishermen, their childlike eyes wide with wonder, had come like the others to see the miracle: as the unlawful pagans led the Zealot to be crucified, he was going to throw off his rags, and an angel would then bound forth from underneath, scimitar in hand. ... Their faces, chests and arms corroded by sun and wind, the men had arrived the night before with their baskets chockful of fish. After selling these for their full value and then some, they settled down in a tavern where they got drunk, forgot why they had brought themselves to Nazareth, remembered Woman and sang her glory, then began fighting among themselves, became friends again, and at daybreak suddenly recalled the God of Israel, washed, and set out, half awake, half asleep, to see the miracle.

They had waited and waited, and soon grown weary. A lance blow on the back was all that was needed to make them strongly regret they had come.

“I say we should return to our boats, lads,” said one with a curly gray beard. He was well preserved and vigorous for his age, and had a forehead like an oyster shell. “The Zealot will be crucified like the rest, and mark my words, the heavens won’t open. There’s no end to God’s anger, or to the injustice of men. What do you say, son of Zebedee?”

“I say there’s no end to Peter’s foolishness,” laughed his companion, a wild-eyed fisherman with a thorny beard. “Forgive me, Peter, but you haven’t developed good sense to match your white hairs. You flare up in a flash and burn out just as quickly, like kindling. Wasn’t it you who roused us to come here in the first place? You ran like a madman from boat to boat and shouted, ‘Drop everything, brothers; a man sees a miracle only once in his life. Come on, let’s go to Nazareth to see the miracle!’ And now you’re smacked once or twice on the back with a lance, and right away your mind turns upside down, you change your tune and shout, ‘Drop everything, brothers; let’s go home!’ You’re not called ‘Weathercock’ for nothing!”

Two or three fishermen heard this conversation and laughed; a shepherd who smelled of goats lifted his staff and said, “Don’t scold him, Jacob, even if he is a weathercock. He’s the best of all of us, and has a heart of gold.”

“You’re right, Philip—a heart of gold,” they all agreed, and they extended their hands to caress and pacify Peter, who was puffing with rage. They can say what they like, he was thinking, whatever they like—short of calling me Weathercock. Maybe I am one, maybe I’m prey to every breeze that blows, but it’s not out of fear; no, it’s because of my good heart.

Jacob saw Peter’s sullen expression and felt distressed. He regretted having spoken so hastily to the older man and asked, in order to change the subject, “Peter, how’s your brother Andrew? Still in the Jordan desert?”

“Yes, still there,” Peter answered with a sigh. “They say he’s been baptized already and eats locusts and wild honey, the same as his teacher. May God prove me a liar, but I wager we’ll soon see him making the rounds of the villages and screaming ‘Repent! Repent! The Kingdom of Heaven has come!’ like all the rest. What kingdom of heaven—this around us? Have we no shame, I ask you!”

Jacob shook his head and knit his thick brows. “I’ve seen the same thing happen to that know-all brother of mine John,” he said. “He went to become a monk at the monastery in the desert of Gennesaret. It seems he wasn’t made out to be a fisherman, so he left me all alone with two old graybeards and five boats, to bang my head against the wall.”

“But what did the blessed fellow lack?” asked Philip, the shepherd. “He had every gift God could give! What came over him just at the flower of his youth?” He asked, but inside him he rejoiced secretly that rich men also had a worm which devoured them.

“He grew uneasy all of a sudden,” Jacob answered, “and he began to toss and turn all night long on his bed like a youngster in need of a woman.”

“Why didn’t he get married? There were brides for the asking.”

“He said he didn’t want to marry a woman.”

“What, then?”

“The kingdom of heaven for him—just like Andrew.”

The men burst out laughing.

“And may they live happily ever after!” shouted an old fisherman, rubbing his calloused hands together mischievously.

Peter opened his mouth, but before he could utter a word, hoarse cries filled the air: “Look! The cross-maker, the cross-maker!”

Simultaneously, they turned their bewildered heads. Down the road the son of the carpenter could be seen mounting on unsteady feet, and panting under the weight of the cross.