Judas (2 page)
Caesarea Maritima
Our street stretched from the open market around the corner to the gate in the city’s southern wall. I spent my childhood watching caravans assemble there. The animals would swing into line and then the caravan masters would shout “
Sah
,
Sah
,
Sah
.” Camels and asses, piled high with bundles and bales, trundled off, harness bells jingling, drivers yelping, traveling to places far away.
Those were the good days, the days before the madness. Not my madness—the empire’s. I am not mad. I am a murderer and a thief. That is what they have made of me, my former friends and, of course, the mighty Roman Empire. Neither am I possessed or the willing tool of the Evil One. That is what they wish people to believe, what they require. “Give us someone not of our number, not from the Galilee to be the instrument of evil,” they say. It was to be expected this betrayal of the Betrayer. It is in the Book. But I didn’t know it at the time. He knew, of course.
How to explain the intense hatred we had for our Roman oppressors? Certainly, history will not record it. Conquerors write history, not the conquered, not their victims. History is about great men, not the terrible things they do. Battles cease but not the flow of suffering humanity. Oppressors need to put down their conquered people even after the war is finished and the blood has been washed away by a thousand rains. No one writes about the lives they grind beneath their heel—crushed with no more concern than for a lizard caught under a chariot’s wheel. It’s important to know the way it was then and how I, Jesus’ most trusted disciple, became the man people revile.
***
“Judas,” Mother bawled, “come in here right now.” Awkward with Dinah on her hip, her eyes glanced up and down the street, searching for me. I had no desire to go back into a dark house. I spent too much of my life in darkness and shadows, but I am not unique in that. Roman society leaves most of its noncitizens clinging to its fringes like dust, an annoyance to be brushed away. My childhood in Caesarea and the three years in the Galilee with the Teacher were the only exceptions to a life of chronic darkness.
It seemed like the sun always shone in Caesarea. I did not know its name then. It was just the place where we lived. I remember our house and the beach, especially the beach. When we went there, we entered another world—windswept, clean, warm, and bright. I remember the blinding sun and how it hurt my eyes, so hot, so bright. The sea seemed to be on fire, glittering and flashing and alive.
Sometimes soldiers marched by, those men I would come to hate with such passion that even three years with the Master could not erase. The sun burnished their armor into molten copper. They tramped past our door nearly every day, rapping their shields with their spears, headed south to Jerusalem or Joppa or somewhere. And when the sun shone, I had to squeeze my eyelids together just to look at them.
I sat in the cold green water of the Great Sea and felt its depths in the wash and tug of the surf. The sea sucked at my legs, inviting me in to become a permanent resident of its murky depths, and blinded me as it mirrored the sun. The only way I could look at it was to hold my hands to my face and peer through sandy fingers. Sometimes I wonder if I wouldn’t have been better served by accepting that invitation. A cool, clean end would be preferable to the living death forced on me now.
Ships from far away, from those places the men talked about, laden with the treasures of the empire, sailed toward me, around the jetty, and into the harbor. I went to the harbor only twice, once to visit the Greek surgeon who made me a Jew, and once to flee the police and certain death. But that would come later.
***
My mother entertained men. That is how she put it. She had visitors who came, and went, and left money—most of the time. My mother was not a woman of the streets, not then. She entertained men. For her it was an important distinction. Some would say that was a distinction without a difference.
“Judas,” she said, the furrow between her eyebrows meant she was serious, “I entertain important men. It is how we live, Sweet. You will understand someday. Do not make Mummy’s work harder. When my visitors are here, stay out of sight and for heaven’s sake, don’t let the Greeks see you.” She lived in fear of
the Greeks,
by which she meant the eunuchs and the boy lovers, our neighbors in the south end of the city.
She served her visitors golden dates, dark figs, plump ripe pomegranates, olives, and honey cakes with wine. When they arrived and she was distracted, I would grab one of the cakes and stuff it into my mouth before she could turn and catch me. To this day, I believe those purloined honey cakes were the sweetest things I ever ate. I can still feel their stickiness on my fingers; savor their sweetness in my mouth. Only once did a honey cake betray me. I sat in our back court eating one left over from the previous nights entertaining. I laid it down next to me for a moment to lick my fingers and a wasp, a honey thief, settled on it. I foolishly reached to brush it away and it stung my finger. I howled so much I woke Mother. She explained the way of wasps to me. “They are evil,” she said. Evil or not, I did not stop coveting honey cakes.
***
Men would sometimes tell stories about
The Mighty Heroes of Old
, which is how they would speak of them,
The Mighty Heroes of Old
. They would amuse me while Mother prepared herself for the evening. I wondered about the stories. They filled the ears and mind of a child to overflowing. I had creatures lurking and skulking about in every corner of my head. Sometimes sleep would not come, so busy were these occupants, these tenants I had invited in but could not evict. Were they true? I needed to know.
“Yes, even I know because it is in the books of Moses that were read to me when I was little like you,” Mother said, when I asked her after one of my particularly restless nights.
“You saw giants?”
“No. No, the giants were in the book. They are called Nifillim. There were other creatures, too, that came to earth and beautiful ladies entertained them. And David, our great king, killed Goliath, a giant, and saved the nation.”
That was how she remembered the story. In her home, before she was taken away, education in the holy books was deemed a poor expenditure of time for girls and women, an education denied me as well. In Caesarea, the doors where people worshiped Mother’s god remained firmly shut to us.
In the morning, her visitors would be gone and then we had money to spend. We walked to the market around the corner. It always excited me to see it, filled with hurrying people bargaining, buying, and selling. I remember the scents best. Meat cooking on spits, roasting lamb and goat, filled the air with smoke and the aroma of coriander. Spices exuded the mix of cinnamon, nutmeg, cardamom, curry, pepper, and ginger. There were things to eat, things to buy, copperware, fish, everything anyone could possibly want or need, or so I thought. If the entertaining went particularly well, we visited the cloth maker and the sandal maker and bought things to wear and the flashing, jangling ornaments Mother fancied. When there was no entertaining for a while, Mother took them back to market and sold them. That way we always had money to buy food.
I learned very early the power money wields over men. And that a man’s life—any man’s life—is worth more than a paltry thirty pieces of silver.
“What have you done?” My mother stood in the road, hair flying, her face fractured with worry. “Where did you take her?”
“Who?”
“Your sister, where is she? You were supposed to watch her. She is your responsibility.”
The road shimmered in the shadowless light of the sixth hour. The buildings, set side by side, were washed to whiteness by the sun. Mother had been sleeping and Dinah and I, unwilling to disturb her, walked down the road to see the stonemason’s new lambs, born the day before.
“She is there.” I pointed to the road where it turned and at that moment Dinah rounded the corner, swinging her arms and singing. Her steps made the dust puff up between her toes.
Mother had the disheveled look of someone brought suddenly from deep sleep to wakefulness. Her hair, unbound, spilled across her shoulders in a cascade of polished ebony. The heavy scent of nard clung to the air around her. She had thrown a loose azure robe over her shoulders which covered her, but not very well. The women from the shop next to ours shook their modestly covered heads, hair tucked out of sight, and clucked their disapproval.
“You should have told me,” she said somewhat, but not wholly, mollified. “You should have told me.” With that she wheeled and retreated into the house, into its cool gloom.
In truth, I had taken Dinah to see the lambs. I had other business with the stonemason. The day before, I had found a stone carving in the sand high up on the beach. It looked like a peculiarly plump woman with large breasts, short legs, the stomach of advanced pregnancy, and a painted face. It was crudely done, but I thought the stonemason would find it interesting. He turned it over in his hand. I watched his eyes.
“Astarte,” he muttered under his breath, but I heard him. “Do you know what this is?” he said.
“Yes, it is Astarte.” I said. I had no idea what that meant but I guessed he thought it important.
“Do you know what it is worth?” he asked, surprised at my presumed knowledge. He had me there.
He offered me a denarius and I asked for ten. His eyebrows shot up and he inhaled sharply. We settled for five. That is the way of the world. Men find profit from their neighbor’s ignorance. If I were managing that transaction today, I would get the ten, perhaps more.
***
I arrived, my mother told me, wet and screaming in a small hut on the coast of the Great Sea along the
Via Maris
in one of the dusty outposts set every fifty
stadia
or so along the roadways to assure travelers safe passage throughout the empire. Legionnaires are assigned to them from time to time. I dropped into her life during one of my father’s stints in such an outpost. She named me after my grandfather, Judas of the Galilee, an irony lost on my father. We lived there for about two years. Whether my mother was happy or sad I cannot say. She had no choice but to bear her lot as a soldier’s wife. She never admitted that she was wife to no one and that her son was a
mamzer
, a bastard
.
My mother would have been twelve when she arrived at the outpost, thirteen when I was born.
One day he disappeared, his cohort called north to put down some minor insurrection. I suppose he believed whoever replaced him would also assume proprietorship of my mother. She waited a week, and when she realized he was not coming back, decided to go to him. To a thirteen-year-old, that seemed the logical, sensible thing to do.
“Then,” Mother said, “His detachment marched away. One morning at dawn, off they went, no good-byes, no notice, and no provision for those left behind—nothing.”
Her eyes gazed past me, into the past, I suppose, inspecting it for some clue to explain what went wrong.
“What was I supposed to do? He did not even ask me to follow. I did not know about those things. I only knew he could not marry me. Because I was an Israelite and he a Roman soldier, it could not be. I knew that, but I thought we were like man and wife, and then there was you. Men do not desert their children, do they? So we joined a caravan going north.”
Mother’s eyes were wet from remembering.
A man in the caravan, an Egyptian, took a fancy to her. Zakis left his home in Alexandria and traveled north to Caesarea to work as a designer and maker of mosaics. He was very proud of his skill and, to amuse her and some of their fellow travelers, he took a handful of small tiles and, in a wink of an eye, created a picture of a camel or the face of one of his onlookers. His hands would fly about the stones like swallows in the evening. The people clapped and smiled when he finished.
They, Mother and Zakis, got along and one night, abandoning any lingering hopes she had of finding my father, we moved into his tent. It is from Zakis that Dinah received her golden curls. He moved us into the shop in Caesarea and worked there for a while, making floors for rich and important people. Then one day, he disappeared just like my father. I do not remember much about him, just that he seemed kind and smiled a lot.
Not long after he left, a rich merchant came by to commission a floor. Mother persuaded him to stay for a honey cake and some fruit. An hour later, a bargain struck, he took Zakis’ place, though he did not live with us. She managed to meet his friends and when he, in turn, vanished, it was a simple matter for her to adopt a new way of life. That was when Mother began entertaining.
I did not understand the position it put us in at first. As a child, it was enough that we lived together and knew some measure of security. Later I grew to resent it and the burdens it placed on us.
“Judas, do not be angry with me. It is all that is left for me to do. I am unclean in the eyes of the Law. No one else will have me.”
“It is a stupid law then. Only stupid people would make such a stupid law.”
Mother gave me a look, not of anger, as I expected, but of fear. Not fear of some heavenly retribution, but rather for what might become of me. She had no family to turn to, and the thought that her son, born half pagan, might acquire the other half, made her tremble. I would not know that until later, of course. At the age of eight I had no real sense of it. To me there were the pagan gods and goddesses and then there was Mother’s and the two never seemed to meet. It remained a mystery to me how all the other gods and goddesses seemed to get along very nicely and had not much to say about how people lived, and certainly not who or what was acceptable, but they were never able to join with Mother’s, who did.
***
I have red hair, my only inheritance from my father. Not the gold-red they say King David had, but just red, like the “hennaed whores of Babylon.” One of Mother’s friends said that. He meant me and assumed I would not know because he thought me too young to understand. People called my mother a whore but I thought, childishly, that it could not be true because her hair was as black as obsidian.
My father soon became the pebble in my sandal. I learned to hate the man who left us and drove my mother into the life she led. I chafed at the thought of being the illegitimate son of someone named Ceamon. There is no Ceamon in this part of the world so it became what it sounded like, Simon. Simon the Red, because of his hair.
Skyr
is the way we say it—red. No one called me Judas bar Simon. My status did not allow me the use of my father’s name. I had no father and, therefore, no patronymic. I became Judas Iscariot, Judas the Red, like my father, no, like my grandfather. I would never be like my father, but I ached to be like my grandfather, to be a hero.