Testament (15 page)

Many years before, when I travelled once to Rome, I was taken by the strange contradictions I found there in the worship of their gods, who seemed at once revered as the authors of human fate, yet also disrespected and mocked at every turn in a manner no Jew could ever countenance. It seemed that at bottom their gods were regarded as no better than mortals, except for their bit of magic that gave them power over us, and worship of them was not so much devotion as simple appeasement, in the way we flattered a tyrant to save our necks. I saw in this at the time a sign of our own superiority—how much greater our own god from whom our entire moral order flowed, who was so much above us we could hardly fathom his ways. There was the famous story of Pompey’s surprise upon entering the Holy of Holies at finding it not bedizened with all manner of riches as he’d expected but empty and barren as a grave: it was beyond the scope of the pagan mind, we had been taught, this sense of a thing larger than their own imaginations, unrepresentable. Yet how truly different was our god, in the end? What we called inscrutable in our own god, we called simple fickleness in theirs; and while our god, for all his greatness, had made our people insignificant and weak, the Romans, who debased
our temple and committed every sacrilege against us, ruled the world. What sense could we make of such an injustice, and how could our god, in the face of it, seem what we believed him to be? When I thought of the splendours I had seen in Rome, the great palaces and public buildings that were just the tiniest fraction of what the empire had built throughout the civilized world, it seemed the sheerest folly, while we struggled here for our few wretched acres of promised land, that we should imagine our god the one true one. And if he were, then surely we must surmise that we had displeased him in some final and absolute way, that he should so plunge us down and give such solace and strength to our enemies.

Though a man barely of middle age, I had often had the feeling I had come up against the brink of things, had reached the end of every path. As a young man, I believed I would define who I was through my actions; when that failed, when I became involved in what revealed itself as an endless process of deferral, I hoped at least for wisdom. But wisdom, too, eluded me. I had visited a dozen nations, and heard tell of a hundred philosophies; but what had most struck me in this was how little of value there was in the world, how men were deceitful and base and would espouse to you the loftiest ideals in one breath and contradict them in the next. When the chaff was sifted from things there seemed only further chaff, the same tired notions, the same predictable vice. Thus when I considered what it was in Yeshua that had held me to him, it seemed exactly the hope of something new: a new sort of man, a new way of seeing things. I thought, If there was a single person who had found the way to speak the truth, perhaps the rest was worthwhile; if there was someone whose vision was truly more than hope for his own
gain or greater glory, then perhaps God had not made us simply animals, a pestilence the world would be well rid of. I thought of the times in which we lived, of the murders and massacres, the kings who thought only of their treasuries and the bandits who robbed and killed the innocent in the name of justice; I thought how miserly and mean even the common people had become, so that in every village the gates were slammed shut against any stranger and the poor died of hunger by the road. Perhaps, then, we were truly at the end of days as some of the madmen in the desert preached. But there was in Yeshua that quality that made one feel there was something, still, some bit of hope, some secret he might reveal that would help make the world over. Tell me your secret, I had wanted to say to him, tell me, make me new. And even now, though I had left him, I often saw him beckoning before me as towards a doorway he would have had me pass through, from darkness to light.

W
E LIVED IN
M
IGDAL
and made our living curing the catch that the fishermen brought in from the lake, salting it or smoking it depending on the season and where it would go. Some of it we sold as far away as Jerusalem, though also north to Paneas and the highlands, where my mother was from. My father, of course, was a Jew, from the south, which was how
I
was raised; but my mother he found in the mountains when he first came here as a young man. In all the years she’d been with him she had never taken to the ways of the Jews, had never sat down with us to pray or accompanied us to the assembly house. Her own people, she said, had lived on these lands since the world was created, and had got on very well long before the Jews arrived with their one true God.

Our house was just off the waterfront, not far from the smoking sheds and the harbour. Though my father was a trader, it was modest enough, with only a bit of stonework above the lintel to set it off and a tessera floor in black and white at the entrance. But as there were just the five of us there, my two sisters and I and our parents, with no other family to crowd us in, we seemed to live in wealth, so that my friend Ribqah, who had hardly a corner to call her own, imagined our home a great palace. For my own part, I might not have minded the furor of a fuller household, and also the presence of boys, whom my mother, some said out of spite, had refused to offer up. She
had us three girls all in a row, with not much more than a year between us, and then of a sudden ceased her childbearing as if a spell had been cast on her. Nonetheless, my father loved us all and showed us kindness.

Though I was the eldest and had long been of marriageable age, I had no suitors. My sisters had inherited our mother’s beauty, and were both betrothed. But I was plain, like my father. It wasn’t true, however, that no one had ever asked for my hand—in the beginning there were several who had come, nervous young boys whom my father had rounded up from one place or another. They would stand near the smoking sheds and look at me while I worked, and I would pretend not to notice them. In the end I always found some reason to refuse them, which my doting father indulged, so that eventually the word went around that I had got only the worst of my mother, which was her wilfulness, and the men stopped coming. It wasn’t that I disliked these men—since I had hardly spoken a word with any of them, I couldn’t in fact feel one way or the other. Perhaps I was afraid that they’d grow tired of me, or that I’d be barren and they’d divorce me, and couldn’t bear the thought of such humiliations. But it was more than that—when I imagined myself as a mother or bride, it seemed a sort of death, though I didn’t hate these things and couldn’t say what other future it was I intended for myself, since there was none.

After Yeshua came to us, however, the question of my marriage ceased to seem important. The first time my father invited him to our home I made the mistake at the start, from how my father deferred to him, of imagining him another suitor, though he was still haggard and thin then from his time in the desert. But Yeshua was nothing like the
other men who had come. For one thing, he wasn’t a child—that was clear from the look of him and from his bearing, which was proud and erect, as if he knew his own mind. He came into our house entirely without pretension or affectation and at once made himself one of us, though our household was without distinction and we ourselves, because of my mother, somewhat outcast. My father offered him our good chair, a fine thing of leather and carved oak that had been a gift from a merchant my father had dealings with. But Yeshua refused it, saying he hadn’t come to our house to place himself above us.

My father had met him outside the Tiberias gates, where he had been preaching. This was in the time just after the arrest of the prophet Yohanan, who, because he had spoken against Herod’s marriage to his brother’s wife, Herod had put away. During his travels my father had often passed Yohanan’s camp on the Jordan and had been taken with his teachings, and hearing Yeshua defending him and calling himself his disciple, he had been moved to invite him to our home. For several days then, since he had just come from the wilderness and had nowhere to keep himself, Yeshua stayed with us in Migdal, sleeping in our courtyard. But then we heard that the neighbours had begun to chatter because there were unmarried women in the house, and my father arranged a place for him with one of the fishermen he knew up the coast in Kefar Nahum.

So attached had I already become to Yeshua by then that the day he left I shed tears and could hardly keep my mind on my work, certain I would never see him again, though he had promised to return. It was difficult to say what had so drawn me to him—not merely a girl’s infatuation with novelty, for
all that my life had been sheltered until then. Rather it was as if a door had suddenly opened, or a passage been granted to a country you’d hoped might exist but had never quite dared to imagine. I could smell the air of this other place on him, feel the wind of it, see its different sunrise, and felt inside me the sudden sure thought that I must travel there with him. While he was with us, he had come to me one night on the beach, where I often walked before sleeping, and talked to me in such a way as no man had ever spoken to me before, as if every subject was permitted; and though I could hardly recall afterwards what it was that we had discussed, still it seemed to me then that he had reached inside me with his words to touch the inmost part of me.

The day he left the mat where he had lain in our courtyard still lay on the ground when I came in from the smoking sheds, and I would have taken it then for my own simply to remember him by had it not seemed shameful to. But then the following week, when I had all but given up hope of his return, he suddenly appeared in the harbour one morning in the fishing boat of Shimon bar Jonah, to whom my father had entrusted him. My heart was so full at the sight of him that I ran out to greet him like a child, and I could see that Shimon was embarrassed for my sake. But Yeshua embraced me openly, the first time any man had ever done such a thing.

You see, I’ve kept my promise, he said.

He had Shimon tie up the boat and then invited my family and me to have breakfast with them on the beach, as the fishermen did. It was from that morning that Yeshua came to call Shimon the Rock, because he sat in such stony silence at the scandal of being there in the open with three unmarried women. That was how we thought in those days, the women
as much as the men. But Yeshua came to change us all, even Shimon, whom the four winds couldn’t move when he had set his mind to a thing.

It was not long afterwards that Yeshua began his meetings in Kefar Nahum. In the beginning there was just a handful of us who attended—our family in Migdal, which was to say, however, mainly my father and me, since my sisters’ betrothed were quick to forbid them; then Ribqah, who I invited and who came against her father’s wishes; then Shimon and his brother Andreas and a few of those that Shimon knew in Kefar Nahum, including Yaqob bar Zabdi and his brother Yohanan. We’d meet on the beach or in Shimon’s house or in our own and discuss Yeshua’s teachings, and Yeshua always encouraged us to ask him questions or even to contradict him. Many of us were alarmed at this, not least the women, since we had always been taught to hold our tongues, and indeed often enough we didn’t know at all how to respond to him, because his ideas flew in the face of what we had heard in the assembly house or from our elders. For myself, who had been raised a Jew yet had never dared to ask what a Jew was or what was our teaching on such a thing or another, it was a revelation to me that these matters could be put to the question at all, and required a mind to piece them together.

That Yeshua kept us women with him made him many enemies and caused much dissension even within our following. More than once it happened that some young man who had heard him preaching in the streets and been moved to attend one of our meetings instantly fled at the sight of Ribqah and me; and even Shimon, at first, seemed on the verge of bolting at every minute, barely able to settle himself and
sometimes rising to pace so that the meeting could hardly go on for the distraction he made. But Yeshua, though he listened patiently to every argument, didn’t relent. When the men argued that women were of weaker mind than men, Yeshua replied that it would be wrong therefore to exclude them from his teaching, when they must have greater need of it; when they argued that they were more given to evil, Yeshua said it was exactly those given to evil who concerned him. So he confounded the men’s arguments and left them without a response, though so strong was their resistance to our presence that they seemed to feel cheated by Yeshua’s logic.