Testament (29 page)

What then does he say of the gods, I asked him.

He says nothing, since he says we cannot know them.

I was uncertain what to make of this, and whether to be afraid for him. But the truth was I myself did not know what to teach him, since what had seemed certain in Judea was less so in Alexandria, where there was every manner of belief even among the Jews and where even in our own assembly houses I had seen the worship of the gods of the Romans and the Egyptians.

I was not able to learn a good deal more about Artimidorus from the talk of the street, for though everyone had some story to tell of his insolence, there were few who could make any sense of his teachings. It was said that one day he preached defiance of the Romans, the next acquiescence, or that he refused the alms of the rich in the morning and in the evening ate in their homes. When it became known that one of the boys who followed him was a Jew, it was put to him whether the Jews should have equal rights, and he said then that as the Jews themselves chose to set their race apart, it should not surprise them that others did. But when he was asked who found the greatest favour in the eyes of the gods, he named the Jews, because for the sake of their god they would suffer any persecution.

The thing, however, that I could not fathom about Artimidorus was that Yeshua had chosen him, and could see wisdom in him, though only a child of eight, when so many others could not. Yet often it seemed a kind of thraldom in which Artimidorus held him, through that same power that I myself had been drawn to, the great indifference he had to men’s opinions. So it was that one minute he might call white, black, and in the next reverse himself, because it did not matter to him the rules others lived by, and it was the spectre of this freedom, I thought, that drew Yeshua to him, that one might be slave to no one’s judgement and remake oneself at one’s whim. Except in so doing, as it seemed to me, one must also renounce all the things of this world, and so risk gaining freedom only at the cost of every other good.

I spoke with Artimidorus only once again after our first meeting, passing him by chance when I had gone to the market outside our quarter to sell the rugs I made then. It happened that he was alone, and had seated himself on the pavement and drawn a circle around himself in chalk. The purpose for this was not clear, except that it had the effect of keeping people from him, for they instinctively would not cross into the circle, which seemed to please him.

I greeted him, but when he did not reply I said, I am the boy Yeshua’s mother.

I know it, he said, but it did not seem reason enough to greet you.

I knew it was his manner to speak in this way and yet I was very affected by what he said, as if he had somehow taken Yeshua away from me in that moment or erased any claim I had to him. Many years later, when Yeshua had truly
renounced me, I would have cause to remember this instant and see the future laid out in it.

As it happened, however, I had Yeshua back to me not long afterwards, for that winter Artimidorus fell ill and died one night in the streets. Yeshua, because he had been home that night on account of the cold, at once blamed himself for his teacher’s death, since he had not been by his side to save him.

I said to him, Surely he did not mind losing his life, when he seemed so little to value it.

But Yeshua replied coldly, You don’t know what you say, and would neither share his grief with me nor relinquish it, retreating into black silence.

I could not, however, suppress a secret relief at Artimidorus’s death, not only at having Yeshua returned to me but that he had been saved the life that Artimidorus offered him, of homelessness and renunciation and even of threat, for because he was outspoken Artimidorus had had many enemies. In the hope that Yeshua would cleave to me and be my son again, I remade his place for him in our home, asking nothing of him and treating him with the deference and respect due to an eldest. To the others, by now, he was nearly a stranger, as much from the look of him and his manner as from his absence from us. Yet, for my sake, they showed him what warmth they were able to and hid their discomfort.

We might have gone on in this way, and Yeshua found his place among us again, for he was still a child, had not the infant I was nursing then died. The infant, a girl—as it fell out the last child I was to bear to Yehoceph, for afterwards I did not allow him to come to me again—was some ten weeks when Yeshua returned to us, and healthy and strong. Indeed all of my children had been so at birth, and I had lost only
one of them, a boy, Hosheah, at six months, to a plague that had gone through the city. But the girl had shown no sign of illness. So it was a horror to us to wake and find her dead, with no mark on her of any sort, as if a devil had taken her.

A darkness came into the house then. Yehoceph said, There is a curse on us, and we all understood him to mean Yeshua, though he would not say it. And because of the manner of the girl’s death, I could not bring myself to contradict him.

In later years, as I looked back on the thing, it seemed foolishness and superstition that we should have blamed the boy. But in those days there was never a time when we felt safe from God’s judgement, when we believed that the sin that marked me would escape punishment. Even Yeshua, I was certain, felt in some manner the weight of this retribution that hung over us, and his place in it, and much of his defiance of us must surely have been born of his own shame. Thus there seemed a complicity among us that this death be our expiation, and that Yeshua take it upon himself like the scapegoat.

So it was that after the child had been buried and our mourning had ended, I awoke one day to find that Yeshua had gone. He was just past ten years old then. I did not expect that I should see him again.

In the time after Yeshua left me I began to travel more freely in the city, expanding my work and taking commissions in every quarter. It was not that I had any true need of money then, and indeed I might have stayed in my home and looked to my children rather than wandering the streets like a common peddler. But a restlessness had overtaken me, and I could not sit still then in the small world that had been circumscribed for me, with my husband who came home at
dusk and my sons who resembled him. For with Yeshua gone I felt sometimes like a stranger in my home, as if all my children, whom I loved, were yet not quite my own.

Thus, with the excuse of my work, I wandered to many places I had not seen before, and learned every face of the city. In those days Alexandria was a place of extraordinary beauty, for which it was justly renowned, but also of putrescence, which I saw with my own eyes. There were children there who were stolen from the streets and then used in the most vicious manner, and also women and men so enslaved to their lusts they would seek any means to indulge them. Then it was a place where there was not only every sort of idolatry and belief but also every kind of person, Romans and Gauls and Armenians, priests and great princes and greater thieves.

I thought at first that it was only for Yeshua’s sake that I ranged so widely, that I might find him and make amends, for it was my intention then to turn over the inheritance I had set aside for him so that he might make the life that he chose and not be a beggar in the street. But as it fell out, the city was not so large as I had imagined it, nor was it so difficult to find my son. Only a matter of weeks passed after his departure from us before I received some news of him, from a woman of the quarter who had seen him, and afterwards I myself had many sightings of him, though I seldom spoke to him at any length. The first time I did so I did not offer him his inheritance as I had resolved but rather proposed to apprentice him in the trade of his choice, which caused me some bitterness, for I remembered the words of Zekaryah.

Yeshua said, There is no trade I am suited for.

Then you will be a vagrant in the street.

I am no vagrant now, he said, for I have taken myself to another teacher.

I did not know why I did not simply offer him his freedom then, and give over the money intended for him. That he was a child, surely, was my excuse, and so would unwisely squander what he had or renounce it as he had learned from Artimidorus, and be left with nothing. But it was something more than that. Perhaps it was that seeing him alive and within my reach, I was loath to give him his independence, hoping I might still find the way to bind him to me again. Or perhaps it was simply that I feared his refusal of me, for then I should truly have no power over him, and no reason more even to search him out.

With some bit of spite I asked after his teacher, believing he had spoken of one only out of pride, and if, like Artimidorus, he required no fee.

I keep his house for him, Yeshua said.

Then you are his slave.

And you are your husband’s, he said to me, and he is slave to his foreman.

My anger rose then and I could not bring myself to answer him. So it was that though I had the means to save him—and as I learned I had been right to think that he lied to me, and lived in the street—I could not find the way to let him make use of them, or to move past his enmity and gain his trust. Or not enmity, perhaps, but just the habit we had fallen to, for I knew that he did not hate me but only held himself hard to me, against what threat not one or the other of us could have said.

Thus I kept up my wandering not in search of him, as I might have fooled myself into believing, but because in some
way it pleased me to, or was necessary, though I did not know what it profited me or what wisdom I hoped would come of it. The truth was that through Yeshua some doorway had been shown to me that I would not otherwise have come to, for in seeing how he cut his bonds to the things of this world, and did not think twice about living in the streets and going his own way, I was put in doubt about my own verities and arrangements. So my restlessness had come to me, and I thought of Tryphon and how he had marvelled at Yeshua’s intellect, and I wondered at the ways there were of seeing the world and if Yeshua’s understanding did not surpass my own.

It was in the streets near the harbour that Yeshua kept himself. Some of these were the most wretched in the city, where there were no women except for whores and no worship of God, it seemed, except in the prayers whispered over the gaming boards. But it was also here that every sort of wise man and scoundrel washed up, vagrants from as far as the Indus who presented themselves as mighty wizards or priests but often enough were the merest charlatans. Among the educated and the rich they held little sway, for these saw through their fakery. But the poor and ignorant gathered there in large numbers, including many hopeful of cures, cripples and the infertile and even lepers, who smuggled themselves into the city through the harbour or paid off the guards at the city gates. Great horrors were performed there, as I heard, abortions as well as surgeries on Jews who wished to hide their mark, and many who went there in desperation ended up cheated of their money by those who promised wonders and cures they could not deliver. I myself had been foolish enough to come at the time of the plague
to seek medicines for Hosheah, for which I paid dearly but to no avail.

Still I found I was drawn to those streets, not only on Yeshua’s account and the hope of catching a glimpse of him, but because I had indeed seen wonders there that defied belief. For instance, there was a healer there, a surgeon, who with my own eyes and before many other witnesses I saw revive a man from oblivion by drilling a hole in his skull. The man had fallen from a building and crushed his head, and had the surgeon not agreed to look to him he would surely have been buried by evening. But there, before all of us, he burrowed through the man’s very bone, thus releasing from his head a great quantity of water and blood, and moments later the patient opened his eyes like someone brought back from the dead.

I heard tell of other such miracles, those who cured lepers, others who, with surgery, cured the blind. Whether such powers came of God or the devil, I could not say. Surely they seemed directed to the cause of good, even if there were many who were made to pay much above what they could afford, and many others who died under the surgeon’s knife or under some cure that had poisoned them. But it seemed to me there was much that was unnatural in what happened in those streets, and partook of powers that mortals should not take to themselves. It was said that in the city’s schools even the corpses of the dead were butchered so that the ways of the body might be known. But I thought that the body was God’s temple, and the ways of it were his mystery and not to be understood by the likes of men.

As for Yeshua, he was perhaps drawn to this quarter as any child would be, in the hope of seeing wonders. Indeed,
often I thought of him next to Yaqob his brother, who though not swift of mind was also thoughtful enough in his way. Yet Yaqob knew nothing except cutting stone, for he had worked all his life at his father’s side, while Yeshua, as I imagined, had witnessed all the wonders of the world, and the horrors, for all these could be seen in that quarter of the city. There were prophets there, and those who read entrails, and magicians from Meroe who charmed snakes or even gave themselves over to their venom, falling into a trance. Then also there were performances, one heard, that could not be described—every lewdness was practised in them, and sometimes children or slaves were dismembered or simply murdered on the stage, all for the amusement of the spectators. These were savageries learned from the Romans, with their circuses and their shows, who though they had many gods yet were godless, for because the emperor called himself God who was only a man, therefore his citizens had lost their faith.

For much of his time, I discovered, Yeshua made his living like any street urchin, running errands or working the ships at the port or begging alms as he had with Artimidorus, though, like him, he would not take money but only lodging and food. But he also had not lied to say he had a teacher, for indeed he had many, and often apprenticed himself for a month or three to this one or that, and did their business for them. To judge from how he moved from one to the other, it seemed he could not bear any of them for any great time, or that they themselves could not put up with him, for often, as I heard, he was let go for arrogance. But surely even then it might have been that he grew bored with them, or that his knowledge increased so quickly they feared it would surpass their own.