Testament (52 page)

To make myself less conspicuous I moved off to a little hillock near the city gate, from where I had a good view, and huddled beneath some trees there. But I could see they’d left a couple of guards at the entrance to the graveyard, who were warming their hands over a fire they’d made as if they were settling in for a long stay. I supposed they didn’t want anyone claiming the bodies, which belonged to the Romans. But still I couldn’t bring myself just to be on my way.

I’d noticed a small group that was lingering in the field beneath the hill. The family of one of the other men, I imagined, with maybe the same idea as I’d had about getting into the tomb. Sure enough, as soon as the other soldiers had gone and it was just the two watching over the dead, I saw the group move off towards the graveyard and go up to the
guards. There was a conversation then, though I couldn’t hear it, while the soldiers, who looked Syrian, kept peering one way and the other over their shoulders to see if they were being watched. Then they hunched away from the fire towards the dark with one of the group, growing secretive and strange, and I knew what was happening—silver was changing hands. From the smoothness of the exchange I guessed that this was probably the usual way, for those who knew how things worked—you paid your fee, and got through.

Things had happened quickly after that. A couple of the men from the group rolled aside the stone in front of the tomb, and took a brand from one of the soldiers and went in. I thought they’d just come to prepare their man and be off, but an instant later they came out of the tomb with him slumped over their shoulders. I caught only that glimpse of them before the whole group crept off into the shadows, jumping the fence at the back of the graveyard and disappearing with their load into the dark. Meanwhile the soldiers just quietly rolled the gravestone back to its place, looked over their shoulders again, and returned to their fire.

All this left me a little breathless, because of the daring of it. I was happy about the thing on Jerubal’s account—it was the sort of conniving that would have pleased him. But there was no thought of my doing the same on his own behalf, with the lowly denarius I had in my purse. Instead I went into the city and bought some supper in the streets, finally getting my mutton, which I ate sitting on the steps of the bazaar that I’d climbed up that morning, and in the end I even managed to find a bed for myself in an inn near the Dung Gate, sharing a tiny room with half a dozen sweating men, though I slept like the dead. Then in the morning, I bought up a few
provisions with what I had left of my money, and set out. And except to eat and to sleep I didn’t stop until I was back home again on the farm, and in my own bed.

Quite a bit of time has passed now since all that. Huram, when I came home, just looked me up and down as if I’d only been to market, and had kept him waiting for supper because I was late, and in fact the truth of it was, though it almost passed belief, that less than a fortnight had gone by since I’d left. But things were different between us afterwards, and he had more respect, and I saw how he’d pause an instant before telling me a thing so as to put it more as to a brother than to a slave. With Moriah it happened that not three months after I’d come back she ran off taking her son, and was never heard from, and Huram, to my surprise, didn’t lift a finger to go after her, nor did her name or even the boy’s ever so much as cross his lips. So it turned out that I was the one to give us an heir again, marrying a girl from Baal-Sarga who already had a child in her that I’d put there. When it came, and was a boy, I named it Huram, though I couldn’t have told you why except that it seemed the proper thing.

Jesus’s troupe I never had much to do with again. On the way home I’d passed through Capernaum and found out that most of them were just staying quiet after what had happened, confused by it all and afraid they’d be next. But Jesus’s brother Jacob had come back with them, interested in finding out what Jesus had had to say, and he and the Rock more or less took over things and kept the inner circle together. When a few months had gone by and the Romans hadn’t come after them, they started banding together some of his old followers on their side of the lake to keep up his teaching. In
all of this, Jesus’s bastardy never seemed to have come out—maybe that was the difficult thing, as much as the crucifixion, that the Rock had had to come to understand. It wasn’t for me to say he did anything wrong not to let out the truth, when often enough it happened that a truth of that sort, that didn’t mean anything, stood in the way of one that did.

Nowadays rumours still come across the lake about that band, and how they get stranger by the day so that soon they’ll be worse than the Sons of Light. It was probably the shock of Jesus’s death that started twisting them, and that they had to strain to make sense of the thing, and that in time, with someone like Jesus, things got distorted. Now for every little thing he did when he was alive some story gets put in its place, and if he’d lanced somebody’s boil it turned out he’d saved a whole town, and if there were fifty in a place who’d followed him, now it was five hundred. Then there was the story that went around that the morning after Jesus was killed, Mary and Salome went to the grave and his body was gone. That might have had to do with the group who had come to the tomb for their relation, and somehow the story had got skewed, or maybe it had happened that the group had taken Jesus’s body by mistake. But eventually it got told that he’d risen from the dead and walked out of the place, and there were people enough to come along then to say they’d met him on the road afterwards looking as fit as you or me.

For all I know, it might have happened that way—wasn’t I there myself when Jesus brought Elazar back, who’d been dead as stone. The truth was it wouldn’t have surprised me to run into him one day on the road, and even less if who should be with him but old Jerubal, working some wile and
grinning his grin. I used to imagine sometimes that he and Jesus had had the whole thing worked out between them from the start, the broken leg and then pretending to die and then those fellows who had come by afterwards to the tomb, their own confederates, it turned out, who’d come to spirit them away. And I’d see them setting off down the road and stopping for a bit in Capernaum to pull a little joke there on Jesus’s troupe about his rising from the dead before they headed off together to the ends of the earth.

It won’t be long, of course, before everyone has forgotten the man, or remembers only the trouble he had with his women or how he died a criminal or that he was a bastard, which sooner or later is sure to get out. But however things get remembered, you can be certain it won’t be how they actually were, since one man will change a bit of this to suit his fancy, and one a bit of that, and another will spice it to make a better story of it. And by and by the truth of the thing will get clouded, and he’ll be simply a yarn you tell to your children. And something will be lost then because he was a man of wisdom, the more so when even someone like me, who when I met him didn’t know more than when the crops came up and how many sheep it took to buy a bride, had come to understand something of him in the end.

It happened that I was in Gergesa once and heard someone in the market speak of a trip he’d made down the King’s Highway to the southern sea, through the land of the Nabateans with their great hidden city and on through the long stretch of the desert you had to cross full of bandits and wanderers with their camels and tents. Then finally you came to the sea, which was bordered by mountains so rocky and bare you’d think the gods themselves had deserted the place.
You could go for days there, the man said, without meeting a soul, and all you saw was red rock to the one side of you and the grey of the sea to the other. But if you walked out from the shore, and put your face just underneath the water’s surface, it would astound you what you saw there, because a whole other world was going on under that greyness, as rich as the one above it was lacking, with coloured fish of every sort and where even the rocks were of colours that beggared the mind and of shapes such as you wouldn’t imagine in nature or the world.

Normally I wouldn’t have given a story of the sort much credit, since you heard all kinds of things in the market, and hadn’t I been guilty of the occasional tale myself. But I remembered the vision that Jesus had told us about after he’d raised Elazar. And for a moment it was as if some curtain had been pushed aside in my head and I had a glimpse of something I understood but couldn’t have put into words, like some beautiful thing, so beautiful it took your breath away, that you saw for an instant through a gateway or door, then was gone.

I suppose Jesus was like that for me, something I saw as if in the twinkling of an eye. It was just the week or so that I was with him, in the end, and what was that but half a breath in the middle of all the years of my life. But still when I look out at the fields now or at the sheep grazing on the bit of pasture that overlooks the lake, a sort of haze seems to come off things that wasn’t there before, as if I’m expecting something good to come along at any minute, though I couldn’t tell you what it is. And though I’m happy enough to be at home, I’ll never see the likes of the times I had then, for better and worse, when it seemed that every good and ill
that could come to a man, and every wonder and devilry, had passed in front of me. I often think of the night with Elazar, and seeing him rise up—for the longest time I thought that was the greatest wonder you could do, to bring a man back from the dead, since as pleasant as things might be on the other side, still I reckoned I’d rather be alive and kicking for as long as I could on this one. But now I think of the light Elazar saw in his dream, that was beckoning to him at the mouth of his cave from what place he didn’t know, and wonder what further realm there might be that we see nothing of, and that seems to call for me there in the glow that comes off the fields.

This is a work of fiction. While it takes its inspiration from the figure who has come down to us as Jesus Christ, it does not purport to be an accurate historical representation of that figure. At the same time, I have made every effort to work within the bounds of historical plausibility, based on what is known to us of the time and place in which Jesus lived. In my research I have drawn on many sources, including the work of the Jesus Seminar and of other contemporary scholars who have tried to arrive at an understanding of the historical Jesus.

In the case of one of my characters, I have repeated an error that initially entered the Jesus tradition through the mistranslation of the Greek “simon kananites” as “Simon the Canaanite” rather than “Simon the Zealot.” In the novel, the character appears as both. I chose to retain the error since it seemed a way of entering a greater truth about the Galilee of that time, its cultural heterogeneity.

For their help with this book, I am deeply indebted to Erika de Vasconcelos, Don Melady, Anne McDermid, Maya Mavjee, and Martha Kanya-Forstner.