The Liars' Gospel (16 page)

“You shall not take him!” shouted out Shimon, and stood between Yehoshuah and the guards.

Yehoshuah’s closest men were awake and with him in the orchard. There were probably as many of them as of the soldiers. Several
of the other men hefted their staffs meaningfully, shifting their stances to legs apart, knees slightly bent. The soldiers
drew their swords.

“Give him to us,” said the leading soldier in heavily accented Aramaic. “He is accused of treason. He must be taken for trial.”

He nodded to two of his deputies, who came forward. One of them took Yehoshuah by the arm. And then it began.

One of Yehoshuah’s friends raised his cudgel and struck the soldier a glancing blow on the side of the face. Iehuda, hanging
back, remembered Yehoshuah saying, “If a man strikes you on one cheek, give him the other to hit,” and thought: why, then,
are they fighting? But they did fight.

The soldier fell to the ground. Shimon thrust Yehoshuah far behind him as the leader of the soldiers barked three words at
his men and they advanced in formation, holding small shields before them, a forest of blades. Two of the soldiers lashed
out with their weapons and two of Yehoshuah’s men fell—one with a gaping wound to his neck pumping rich red blood, the other
clutching his side.

Yehoshuah’s men looked less certain now, but their anger was up and some ran forward, flailing and yelling. In a lucky strike
Jeremiah pulled one of the shields forward and leapt over it, hacking at the face beneath the helmet with his knife, and suddenly
blood was spurting from the soldier’s face, and Jeremiah was shrieking because he had cut off the man’s ear. It flopped limply
in his hand. A piece of gristle cut from an undercooked joint. He brandished it, grinning. Another soldier hit him hard in
the stomach with a shield and he fell to the ground.

They were outmatched, Yehoshuah’s men. They were dealing the odd blow to the soldiers, but more of them, five, six, had been
felled already. There were awkward wrestling matches, soldiers attempting, as far as Iehuda could tell, not to kill if they
could avoid it. Several men were knocked out by a heavy shield blow. One of them, a young man Iehuda did not know, was attempting
to fight although he was wearing only a wrapped linen sheet. Two soldiers grabbed the garment, trying to throw him to the
ground, but he wriggled out of it altogether and ran away naked.

Angry, the soldiers returned to using their swords, and more men would have been cut down if Iehuda had not raised his voice
above the din and shouted, “No! More soldiers will come! They have told me! All of us will die if we do not give Yehoshuah
to them.”

It was then that they realized.

“You,” said Mattisyahu, “it was you who brought the soldiers.”

The shock of it made them stare.

Ah, thought Iehuda, so there is no going back for me now. No returning to the person I was. Now they know.

He had to walk with the soldiers as they took Yehoshuah away. What else was he going to do? He could not stay with the other
disciples. They would have torn him to pieces.

They walked as far as the Temple. There was a form to these things. First a hearing in the civil court of Israel, then justice
at the hands of Rome.

Yehoshuah was quiet as they walked. They did not have to bind him or carry him or prod him with the points of their swords.

At the gate of the Temple, he clasped Iehuda’s shoulder and said, very softly,

“Now we will see.”

And as much as Iehuda has thought of that since, as much as he understands the world of dreams that spoke in those words,
he cannot experience it as anything but courage.

They led his friend away through the dark doors. He tried to follow but Caiaphas, standing at the doorpost, shook his head.
Thus far and no further. His job was done.

As he left the Temple, the head of the Levite administrators, kinder than the rest, pressed a purse into his hand. He shook
his head, but the Levite frowned and said, “You cannot go back to your friends now. Use this to go home. Buy a piece of land
and begin again. Forget everything that happened here. You have done a good service to keep the peace, remember only that.”

He had thought about it, what he would do if he were free. And suddenly he was more free than he had ever been or ever thought
to be. What is freedom, in the end, but that no one cares any longer to try to restrain us?

In the marketplace, he bought a sharp blade of the kind the Romans use to shave themselves, a jar of good sheep’s fat and
a pail. And he walked out of the city to the north, until he came to a place he knew, under the shade of three fig trees,
with a fast-flowing brook of icy water.

At first, he pulled great tufts of the hair of his beard out and cut them with the blade—remembering Elkannah wriggling on
his lap and feeling that sorrow which would never now leave him. When the bulk of the beard was gone he filled the pail and
let the water go still, so he could look at his own face in the reflecting surface. He looked different already. Not a pious
man, not a good Jew. A madman, with sprouting clumps of hair on his face. No longer a person who believed in anything.

He rubbed the sheep’s fat onto his face. It smelled half delicious, like a good meal, but with a rancid edge. He massaged
the fat into the coarse beard hairs with the heel of his hand, feeling the bristles and tufts scratch his skin. And then he
began to scrape the blade slowly, carefully, down his cheek.

He had never done this to himself before, but he had watched with interest as some of the Greek and Roman hangers-on at Yehoshuah’s
camp had made their toilet in the morning, so he had a rough idea of how the thing was accomplished. When he had scraped half
a cheek of hair off and rubbed the bristle–sheep fat mixture on the dry grass, he looked at the smooth patch in the mirror
of still water. It was like the skin of a woman’s face. Soft and pink, though a little raw in places from the blade. Suddenly,
he desperately wanted a woman.

He shaved the rest of his face more quickly. He had the knack of the blade now, keeping close to the skin but not piercing
it. He cut himself once or twice, but they were only small nicks. His face felt cold and the skin was stinging. And when he
was done he stared at himself again in the water and saw a different man. He had not seen his own face thus since he was fifteen
years old and his beard came in. But the face that looked back was not that of a boy. It was a Roman man. An idol worshipper.
The man he had been was as dead as if he had cut his own throat with that razor. Good.

This new face did the work for him when he returned to the market. He had passed through the invisible veil separating Jew
and Roman. The Jewish men scurried away from his gaze, the Romans met his eye approvingly. The whores by the market wall called
to him as they had never addressed a word to him all those years when he was pious.

He paid one of the whores—a woman about his own age, with dark eyes and gray hairs streaked through the black—he gave her
a small coin and had her in a small tented enclosure at the edge of the wall. She did not undress, just bent over the straw
bales and flipped up the back of her skirts to show herself to him. The power of it was overwhelmingly arousing, the absolute
lack of consequence, her lack of interest in him. As he fucked her, he remembered his wife and knew that what he had grieved
for all along, when he thought he grieved for her and his God, what he had grieved for all along was the young man he had
been who would never now return. The whore didn’t even see his circumcised cock, that young man’s last trace. He could be
a Roman now, if he wanted.

He waited by the gates for news of Yehoshuah, and when he heard what had happened he went to the crosses. He wore a wrapped
scarf like the tent-dwellers, shielding his face, and one of their cloaks bought for two small coins, more than its value.
But he need not have bothered. Few of Yehoshuah’s friends were there, and those who were could not see him. Their eyes glided
over his face as if he were just another Roman, or Jew-turned-Roman.

Even Yehoshuah gave no sign of knowing him. He was near death—the day was hot and several of the men around him had already
died. Iehuda wondered whether, if he had come hours before, Yehoshuah would have berated him, or screamed at him. But by this
point his eyes were glazed and the flies were settling at the corners of his mouth. He would not have recognized his own mother
if she had come then.

Iehuda waited there until he saw the light go out of his eyes. Even till then, though it took until the sun was low in the
sky. He squatted on his haunches and watched it out. And even till that moment he had thought that perhaps God would make
some miracle. But he saw his friend die. And at the moment that the limbs went limp and the head slumped forward and the chest
became still, he thought: well, then, now we know. The Messiah becomes king, he does not die as a traitor. So now we know.

He should have known the moment he saw the nails through the wrists. Or when he had arrived at the Temple. Or when the snake
first began to twist inside him, he should have known that nothing was keeping his friend alive but the faith of those around
him. And he went and slept in an apple orchard near the walls of Jerusalem.

He stayed in Jerusalem a few days after that. He went to his friend’s grave, hoping to take the body and bury it on that ridge
where they had talked, but one of the boys playing with a spinning top at the side of the road told him that the body had
been stolen. There was a trade in such things for magical purposes—the dried heart of a man who had died by violence, the
fingers or toes, all these things could be used to cast spells. Or, he thought, to fool the gullible and line the pockets
of one of Calidorus’s fakers.

He wept a little, thinking of his friend’s long bones and brown skin going to such a purpose. With the weeping, he touched
the corner of his sadness inside his heart. It was like dipping his hand in the ocean, allowing the waves to run through his
fingers, thinking for a moment that he had caught the whole sea in his palm, understanding at last that it was a sadness deep
enough to drown in. He closed the box in his heart on that sorrow. It is the only way to continue.

He waited for the last possible day to leave Jerusalem safely, when the final pilgrims were returning home after the festival.
And he struck west with a band of travelers—Syrians and Egyptians and Jews and Greeks mixed—heading for Caesarea. It was not
hard to find Calidorus’s house. The man, to do him credit, welcomed him and sent a slave to wash his feet.

Nothing ever happens except that God wills it. This was the teaching of Yehoshuah which Iehuda remembers every day. It is
the truth. Everything that happens has been willed by God.

This is not how he ends the story he tells to Calidorus’s guests. For them, he is witty and clever enough to make them feel
vaguely flattered by the way he tells the story. He brings up Greek myth, tells them that he would have gone down into Hades
to find his friend except—he winks—the Hebrew god frowns on such love between two men. The guests roar with laughter. They
are in their cups now.

He jokes that perhaps, like the Emperor Augustus, his friend is already transformed into a god by his death. The men grow
a little quiet at this—even to suggest that a criminal is on a par with Augustus is faintly seditious.

“But of course,” says Iehuda, “just as Augustus, who died in majesty, now reigns in majesty on high, I’m afraid my friend
Yehoshuah will still be dragging his cross around with him in the heavens!”

This is the best joke of all. One of the men falls on the floor he laughs so hard and pulls himself up still wheezing. Pomponius
chokes on his own laughter and has to take more wine, which sets him off in another fit of giggles.

When the men leave, they agree that it has been an excellent party. Calidorus smiles. Iehuda wonders how long it will be until
he has told this story to all of Calidorus’s friends and business associates, and what his use will be then.

It is not long after this that the thing is broken forever.

Iehuda sees the woman again in the marketplace. Her red hair flames under the modest veil which covers the length of it. She
is looking at some glass lamps—very pretty but impractical. He stands beside her, close enough to sense her body through her
clothes and his. She does not notice him until he speaks.

“You could never light it,” he says, his voice low, pointing at the lamp. “The heat would shatter the glass.”

She looks up. Her eyes are green. She shows no surprise that it is him. A wry smile is on her lips and he remembers his wife,
suddenly and with a sharp pain.

“Perhaps,” she says, “I do not intend to light it. Aren’t those the most beautiful things of all? The things that cannot be
used without breaking them?”

She is poised. She holds her shoulders just so.

“Like a woman’s maidenhead,” he says, without thinking. It is a very forward remark to make to a woman in a public place.

She blushes a little, but her expression does not change.

“Like a man’s unwarranted faith,” she says. And pauses. And then. “I know who you are. My husband is a friend of Calidorus.
Any man who has a fortune or wants one in Caesarea is a friend of Calidorus, you know.”

“Ah,” he says. “And who is your husband?”

“Pomponius,” she says. “He knows you and your funny little story.”

The thought of the arrogant self-satisfied prick of Pomponius thrusting inside this woman makes him hot and angry and, again,
aroused. And the little smile playing on the mouth of the woman when she says “funny little story,” this stirs him too.

“Did you know it was me in the temple that day?” he whispers low in her ear. “Was it my funny little story that made you so
wet?”

He grabs her arm, his fingers digging into her soft flesh so that she gasps, and this he finds even more exciting.