Testament (47 page)

After a series of twists and turns we came finally to a shady square where some children were playing. Off to one side was a gate that led into a courtyard, and in the courtyard was a little pool with a fig tree overlooking it. Under the tree, sitting on a mat with three or four fellows my own age dressed in brown robes, was Jesus’s friend Joseph. He got up when he saw Jesus and made his four charges get up as well and kiss Jesus’s hand.

“So you’ve come,” he said to Jesus, and you could see he was pleased.

He had his charges bring food and a bit of wine. It turned out the school wasn’t much more than what we saw right in front of us, the courtyard and then a handful of small rooms that came off it. The other teachers weren’t around—they had their jobs in the day and only taught at night. Joseph looked a little embarrassed now about how humble the place was, after the trouble he’d gone to to get Jesus to come to it. He said they got some money for rent from the Jewish council but were hoping for more, since they wanted to keep their teachers during the day but didn’t like to charge fees.

Jesus said, “If the truth could be bought, even kings would be wise.” But I could see that the Rock and the Zealot were a little surprised at the place, and had been expecting something grander.

It happened now that one of the boys we’d met when we’d come in, and who’d gone off, returned trailing a thin,
narrow-eyed man dressed in a fine coat of the same scarlet as the robes of the temple officials.

“I brought Zadok to meet Jesus,” the boy said. But it was clear Joseph wasn’t pleased to see him. It took only an instant to understand what was going on—the boy must have been some sort of spy for the man, who it turned out worked for the council. Sure enough Zadok took one look at Jesus, in his old shirt and coat and without any shoes, and said, “So this is our Galilean,” in a tone as if Jesus was some shoddy animal Joseph wanted to sell.

From there the tone of things only worsened. Jesus had gone to stone, standing there not saying a word, while Zadok went on talking only to Joseph as if Jesus wasn’t there.

“I wonder if you knew your Galilean was a great magician,” Zadok said. “I heard he was going to people’s graves last night and raising them from the dead.”

I could see Joseph was caught out by this, and hadn’t heard a word yet of the rumours going around. His eye went to Jesus but it was plain Jesus wasn’t going to stoop to answer the man.

“You can’t blame him for the lies people spread,” Joseph said.

You knew Jesus could have put Zadok in his place in a moment—I’d seen him do it a dozen times before with his sort. But the longer he stood there silent, the more Zadok seemed to be in the right.

“I suppose we have enough teachers in Jerusalem that we don’t need to go looking for wonder-workers from Galilee,” Zadok said finally. Then he added, almost offhandedly, “Though I hear the man isn’t a Galilean at all but a Jerusalemite, at least on the mother’s side. On the father’s side it’s not as clear.”

He looked Jesus in the face then for the first time.

“Who was he, your father?” he said. “I might have known him.”

He stood there in front of Jesus, giving him time to answer, but still Jesus didn’t say a word. The silence grew eerie then. But Zadok just smiled an unfriendly smile at Joseph, and said he had to go.

Joseph was full of apologies the instant Zadok left, even though his spy was still there. But at the same time everything felt different now.

“Even if they take this place away from us we’ll find another one,” Joseph said. “I know some people who’ll help.” But there was something in his voice that said he didn’t quite believe this.

Jesus had remained standing where he was with the dead stillness he had.

“It was my mistake to come here,” he said now, “and to bring any shame to you. But it’s not because of what I’ve taught or what I’ve done but because of something I can’t change, which is that I don’t have any father but my god, and am a bastard.”

Joseph went white as marble. We all stood in silence, and it seemed the walls of the place might fall in. I don’t think any of us had followed what Zadok had been hinting at and so we were stunned, as if one man had been standing in front of us and had suddenly become another one.

Joseph couldn’t meet Jesus’s eye. It seemed his mouth was struggling to come up with some sort of utterance but without any success.

“I’m sorry to have brought any trouble to you,” Jesus said, and then he kissed Joseph’s hand and went out.

The rest of us stood there not knowing what to do. You could see Zadok’s spy was itching to run off to tell Zadok what had happened, and Joseph turned to him and said, “Get out and don’t come back.”

It was the Zealot who finally started out after Jesus, with a panicked look. I followed after him and then heard the Rock coming up behind, though it was all we could do to make our way through those twisting streets. The Rock had a look of amazement as if the world had fallen away underneath him—it seemed beyond the scope of his mind, that the man he’d just seen revealed to him was the same one he’d trusted and followed.

We only caught up to Jesus towards the Temple Mount. He hardly seemed aware we were behind him, just making his way single-mindedly through the traffic. We couldn’t even be sure where he was headed and I was relieved when he went out the gates and made for our old camp. We found things in total confusion there—our landlord had already sold off our place to another group, who’d knocked down our tents and started putting up their own. To make matters worse, there was space for only half of us at the Roman camp, which in any event had been reduced to mud pits by the melting snow. John and Jacob, however, had got our sheep, who stood there in the mud bleating to the heavens.

For Jesus, though, the chaos turned out to be a godsend, because it took all of our minds off what had just happened. He set to work sorting things out, dividing the camp and sending half of it straggling off with some of his men to the new campground. Of the rest he sorted out those who had some family in town they could go to, and sent a few others to stay with Elazar and his sisters, and a few more to the
room in town where Mary and some of the other women were putting up. That left a straggling band of some forty or so, including we three Simons, who somehow had ended up huddled together there at the edge of the field as if some yoke held us together.

Jesus set off with us for the house of Joseph’s friend. I thought the Rock might just stay behind sitting hunched in that field, from the way he was looking, or let us go on our way and then start off back home. But at the last minute he went to the load of goods there was to move and like an ox took up twice his fair share, though he wouldn’t meet anybody’s eye. The Zealot, on the other hand, couldn’t keep his eyes still, looking anxiously from the Rock to me and back again, trying to get some message as to what we should do.

We had to cross a long stretch of muddy fields, up one slope and down another, but then the road we were on got rockier and more solid and the going easier. The place we came to was a large country house in the middle of an olive grove, perched well up the hillside and with a view out over the whole of Jerusalem. The owner wanted to put the lot of us up inside his house, but Jesus said no, we only wanted a corner of field, insisting on the thing so that the man gave in. No doubt Jesus didn’t want it said that he’d taken advantage, if the word got back from Joseph of their falling-out. Still, the owner went so far as to kill one of his own sheep for our supper, sending it out already roasted and prepared so we couldn’t refuse it.

By the time we’d eaten it was well past dark. We’d hardly had time to think with the work of settling ourselves, and not the Rock nor the Zealot or I had spoken a word since we’d come from the school. But when supper was through
and people started preparing for sleep, Jesus came to us and led us into a little moonlit garden that came off the back of our host’s courtyard, a walled-in cranny of a place hidden away there like a secret, with oleander and jasmine and dozens of flowers I couldn’t even have named. In the middle of the place was a pool so deep you couldn’t see to the bottom of it, and in the corner an ancient olive tree, gnarled and twisted and bent like an old wise man.

I didn’t have any idea what Jesus planned to say to us. But once we were inside he didn’t say a thing, simply sat us down on some stones there and passed around a flask of water he’d brought in. I could see the Rock was desperate to get some word from him, but still he just sat.

“You cheated us,” the Rock said finally, spitting it out.

Jesus took in his anger but still sat there dignified, in the way he had, like a rod that wouldn’t bend.

“Was there anything I taught you that wasn’t true?” he said, and the Rock couldn’t bring himself to answer him.

Jesus went off to the corner of the garden then, leaving the three of us sitting there, and got on his knees to pray. He had that intensity he got when his mind was set on a thing, until it seemed he’d brought his god right there into the garden with us by the force of his will, to be called to account. I felt ashamed watching him, because you could see the emotion in him, as if he saved for his god all the things he wouldn’t show to the rest of us.

He stayed praying a long while. The Zealot looked miserable now that the Rock had declared his side—he’d hoped we were together and would stand by Jesus, and felt betrayed now and lost. But when Jesus came back to us, there was a fire in him. We shouldn’t expect him to come begging for
forgiveness, his look seemed to say. By now it was clear he wasn’t going to ask us for anything at all—it was up to ourselves, to make up our minds about him.

We went out to the camp. I’d lost track of Jerubal and his group by then and didn’t have a tent, and Jesus called me in to share his own. Suddenly I was lying there right next to him, feeling the heat of him against me, and it was the strangest thing, thinking of him as someone with a body like the rest of us. He had a smell to him just like anyone, and a slow rise and fall of breath, lying there asleep with his arms outstretched looking as unprotected as a child.

When I awoke the next morning Jesus was already gone from the tent, his place cold beside me. My mind had been racing the whole night, after everything that had happened, so that it seemed I hadn’t slept at all. Then at the back of my mind I had a niggling anxiousness about Jerubal, who I hadn’t seen since the previous morning—I had a bad feeling about that, and wondered if he even knew what had become of us when we’d changed camps.

Outside, it was cloudy and damp and threatened rain. I kept watching Jesus to see if he’d changed, what he planned to do differently, but it seemed he was just going to carry on the same as before. After breakfast he said he was returning to the temple, and I was surprised to see the Rock move in to go with him—it seemed he couldn’t leave him, still waiting for the sign that would make things clear. With the Rock joining him, and the Zealot as well, it seemed I was pulled along by force, hardly wanting to get near the temple again but drawn into the secret group we formed, as if my lot was tied in with it now.

It was a small band that set out, we three Simons and then Andrew, who the Rock was keeping close to him now, and Aram, and a few others I hardly knew. The Rock and Andrew brought up the rear, and you could see Andrew was more skittish than usual, sensing something was wrong, lagging a bit so that his brother had to hold his arm to keep him moving along.

A road led down from the farm to a city gate at the south end of the Temple Mount, where Jerubal and I had come out after our visit to the temple market. If anything, the mood in the city seemed even tenser than it had the day before, everyone grown irritable now, the soldiers and the citizens alike, and the air felt stifling and thick as if the clouds were pressing down on us.

The traffic was heavy along the street at the base of the Temple Mount. But as we were going along there, the crowd seemed to open suddenly, and a woman stood stopped in our path. Two men were next to her but it was the woman your eye went to, small and fine-featured and slender but planted there like an island, all the traffic shifting its flow to give her her place. She was looking at Jesus, with eyes as bottomless and dark as the pool in the garden where Jesus had prayed, and it took just an instant to see they were connected, and feel the force that passed between them.

Jesus went up to her. There was a tension between them as if it were a wall or a wind, so that it hardly seemed they could stand face to face. But Jesus turned to us and said, “This is my mother and these are my brothers,” as if there was nothing remarkable in this, and then he took the woman’s hand and brought it to his lips.

All the movement around us seemed to stop for an instant, and it was hard to say what was in the woman’s eyes,
surprise at what Jesus had done but also a hundred other things, and you saw how she looked him over in his ragged clothes, with his ragged band, and wondered at what he’d become. For a moment then it seemed that the feeling between them had to find an escape, and that what stood between them would crumble. But she had the same look of unbending will as her son, and the two of them stood there without a word, and finally Jesus turned and walked on.

He didn’t look back at us but made straight for the Rat Gates. I felt a panic then. But somehow I just got caught up with the crowd and before I knew it I was going up, with that sick churning in my gut again, the crowd so thick around me and the passage so dim and tight that it seemed impossible to turn and make my way back. When we came up into the square it was the same, people jammed shoulder to shoulder so that I could only follow along, trying to stay close to Jesus in the hope I’d be safe with him. I saw now there were soldiers stationed all around the top of the colonnade and outside the fence as well, the whole place seeming like kindling ready to burst into flame, the people jostling and all the shouting and flaring tempers and then the soldiers standing guard with their fists on the handles of their clubs, ready to put us down at the least sign of any disturbance.