Great Lion of God (15 page)

He saw, on the physician’s face, what there was to see, and he kt his hands and head fall and did not speak.

Aramis visited young Saul, who was delirious and tossing wildly on his bed, held there by the strength of two men servants. He had the bubonic form which, though desperate, held more hope than his mother’s affliction. His buboes were leaking pus and blood and the white linen sheets were stained. But Aramis reflected that the youth was strong and sturdy and of a vital constitution and had never been ill before. He had a possibility of survival. Aramis gave his orders to the servants, and two potions in flasks, and ordered cooling baths scented with verbena. He returned to Hillel and tried to smile.

“Pray,” he said. “I have hope for Saul, for youth and life are with him.”

“My wife, my sweetest one, my child,” said Hillel, and began to weep. He pulled his shawl over his head and addressed his God with numbed lips, asking for mercy.

Aramis remained in the household of his friend until sunset, when Deborah bas Shebua, the child in spirit, the infant in true knowledge, died with one soft and final cry. Aramis put his arm in support about the shoulders of Hillel ben Borush, who watched a servant gently close the eyes of his wife and fold her hands on her breast, and then cover her face with the sheet. Hillel began to tremble violently. He pulled his shawl over his head and cried aloud:

“‘The Lord gives. The Lord has taken away. Blessed be the Name of the Lord!’”

His voice broke and his shoulders bent, but he recited in a low and steadfast voice the Psalm of David:

“
Out of the depths have I called You, O Lord!

Lord, hearken to my voice.

Let Your ears be attentive to the voice of my supplications
.

If You, Lord, should mark iniquities, O Lord, who could stand?

For with You there is forgiveness

That You may be feared.

I wait for the Lord; my soul does wait,

And in His Word do I hope.

My soul waits for the Lord,

More than watchmen for the morning
,

Yea, more than watchmen for the morning.

O Israel, hope in the Lord!

For with the Lord there is mercy,

And with Him is plenteous redemption
—”

He paused and clasped his white hands together and said in a louder voice:

“
Hear, O Israel! The Lord our God, the Lord is One!
”

Then he could stand no more but fell on his face beside the bed of his wife.

Aramis shook his head in compassionate wonder. He could not understand why a man, so deeply stricken by the loss of a beloved, could recall his God and adore Him, and cry aloud to his people to remember His Name. But then, he reflected, the Jews were an incredible people, as his own people had reason to remember. None could comprehend them. Their trust in their Deity, their meekness before His blows, offended the Egyptian’s sense of civilization and pride, and manliness.

His mother had been in her tomb for a number of days before Saul awoke to consciousness, weakness and pain and drenching cold sweat. He awoke to the sight of Aramis’ face, bent over him in the morning light, and the feel of his palm on his forehead.

“Saul?” said the physician gently. “Do you know me, Saul?”

The first red rays of the sun were striking on the gleaming white walls of the cubiculum, and a warm sweet wind of early spring blew out the curtains over the windows. Saul’s cracked and parched lips moved in a faint whisper, and Aramis smiled contentedly. The boy would live. He ordered a cool draught for him, half wine, half water, mixed with raw eggs, and held it, himself, to Saul’s mouth and bade him drink. The youth obeyed, looking fixedly at the Egyptian’s face. His own was sunken; the broad and heavy bones of it were like stone over which gray skin had been stretched. The flesh was gone. Only the red hair had vitality now. The strenuous blue eyes were remote, as if remembering a far place and time.

The youth whispered, “I thought I had died.”

“Not yet,” said Aramis, pleased that Saul had swallowed all the draught. “You have defeated death, as you will defeat him again and again.”

The neck of his tunic had fallen forward and Saul saw what hung about his throat on a golden chain, and even in his weakness and prostration he was startled. For the object was as long as his middle finger and made of gold, and it was a cross with a looped top which held to the chain. Saul felt a dim astonishment at the sight of this infamous object, this symbol of a shameful Roman death, of criminal execution. He could not take his eyes from it and Aramis, seeing this, touched it with his forefinger.

“It is the sign of man’s redemption, given to my people from the ages, the sign of the resurrection of the dead,” he said. “From everlasting to everlasting.”

A curious thrill ran through Saul’s weakened flesh but what had caused it he did not know. Yet he thought that he had discerned a flash somewhere like lightning, like the tearing of a fabric which had concealed a blazing lamp. He was still pondering on this strangeness, pain and confusion mixed with a sense of premonition, when he fell asleep, and it was a sleep undisturbed by the nightmares which had haunted him and had driven his feeble soul into dark caverns of terror.

When his father visited him at sunset he had vague memories of seeing his face bending like this over him many times during his almost mortal illness. But now he saw clearly. Hillel had aged; the brightness of his hair and beard had paled; his face was thin and filled with suffering, and his brown eyes were scored by many tears.

Then Saul recalled that he had been struck down the day after his mother. He stared at his father, and he knew. Pain took him, pain of the spirit, not for Deborah but for Hillel whom he deeply loved. He sought his father’s hand weakly, and Hillel’s fingers closed over his. Hillel bowed his head, and he repeated:

“The Lord gives. The Lord takes away. Blessed be the Name of the Lord.”

Saul began to weep, silently, and again his grief was for his father. Hillel wiped away his tears. “I have my children,” he said. “God is good, blessed be His Name.”

A servant lit a lamp on the table nearby and its yellow tongue fluttered in the evening wind. Saul turned his head to look at the last light and it seemed to him that he was no longer a youth but a man. His hand tightened over his father’s. His heart expanded painfully with love for this tenderest of fathers, but Saul felt that he held the hand of a child, and he did not know why he should feel so and why he desired, above all things, to protect Hillel.

It was many weeks before Saul recovered even a measure of his strength. Never again was he to feel the bodily power of the years before his illness, and the tirelessness of it. From that time henceforth he was driven less by his youth and vital energy, now much depleted, than by the strength of his spirit. He was to know weakness of the flesh and weariness to the day he died, and no more did his soul bound in him like a newborn lamb in the morning of life. He had returned from a far place and had left much behind him, never to be regained.

During the weeks of his recovery, he sometimes thought of his nother, but as the days passed he found it hard to recall the beauty of her face and the sound of her voice. This grieved him. He felt himself an unnatural son that he could not mourn her as a son should mourn. He denounced himself for his lack of sorrow, and forgot that his mother had not loved him. When he stood with his father, saying Kaddish, he hated himself for what he believed was his arrant hypocrisy. He wanted to beg his father’s forgiveness for lack of sensibility and hardness of heart. But he could not increase Hillel’s suffering, and so he recited the prayers for the dead with him. He despised himself because he could not truly believe that his mother’s soul had survived her light and trivial existence in this world; she had died as a flower dies, sinking crumpled into the earth, the petals decaying. Women, he would think, were not worthy of the grief of a man, nor his pain. He thought this even when before her tomb, watching his father lay a sheaf of summer flowers upon it.

When he thought of Dacyl involuntarily he would shiver as at an intrusion of evil, and would pray to be delivered from her memory. He considered his sister, Sephorah, less delightful to him, and he was less indulgent with her airiness and mockery and often found her laughter displeasing. When she cried for her mother he was impatient and restless.

He desired something with a great desiring and a mighty and starving hunger, but what it was that he desired in place of what he had lost he did not know.

Chapter 6

T
HOUGH
it was the custom for a bridegroom to come to her father’s house for the bride, Hillel had long ago decided that when his Daughter married it would be under the light of Jerusalem, the city of her fathers and of her people, the city of Sion, the holy place of God and the Temple.

It was autumn again before Hillel ben Borush took Sephorah and Saul to Israel and to Jerusalem, and Hillel wept afresh that his beloved wife was not on this journey to take joy in her daughter but must remain behind in her tomb. He had taken Deborah from her father’s house, and never had she seen it again, and he reproached himself that he had delayed. He could not endure it that Deborah would not see her daughter’s wedding garments and her jewels and the gifts the bridegroom, Deborah’s nephew, Ezekiel, had sent Sephorah. He would stroke the girl’s shining hair, so like his own and gaze tenderly into her golden eyes, and he would sigh. Yesterday she had been but a babe. Now she was fifteen years old, and a woman. Tomorrow, she would be a mother, herself. Hillel endured the weight of time and sorrow on his shoulders and he felt old and exhausted.

They sailed from Tarsus on such a warm and golden autumn day that Saul was assaulted by emotions he could hardly control. Two unfathomable forces contended in him, both furious and contentious and denying, and he dared not examine them. He stood on the deck of the galleon and watched the fervid harbor recede and the multicolored city, as furious, noisy and busy as ever, and the traffic on the river with red and blue and green and white sails, and beyond the contorted scarlet barrier of the mountains which guarded the plains and the valley. The sun was passionate on the scene, giving it life and vitality and fervent movement, and the water was like yellow oil. Now the city became a medley of every color known to man, and the tiled roofs shimmered as if with fire, and the galleon carefully picked her way through massed ships in the harbor and her sails filled with hot wind and stood like the great white wings of birds against the ardent blue of the sky. Saul could smell warm resin and tar and hemp and heated wood and salt and the deck dipped and rose beneath his feet. It was strange to him. He had never left Tarsus before, and he tried to fix his mind on the novelty and perceive it. But the emotions that tore him like two fanged tigers would not let him go.

His father and Sephorah reclined under an awning on the deck and listlessly ate fruit, feeling sadness that Deborah was not with them, and nearby sat Sephorah’s two maidens who would live with her in her husband’s house and serve her. But Hillel, the simple man, had no servant with him. There was gray mingled in his golden hair and beard, for he was now nearly forty-seven, and sorrow had taken the brilliance from his eyes and had dimmed his flesh. But he smiled at his daughter and sighed. A maiden needed her mother at this time of her life, to counsel her and advise her and admonish her. But Sephorah had no mother. The family of Hillel ben Borush were to be guests in the house of David ben Shebua, and David’s wife was a Roman matron who had been described to Hillel as “an old Roman,” and not a licentious and worldly woman of modern society. She was so virtuous a woman, and of so distinguished and ancient a Roman house, that she was also extremely pious and had instilled in her sons and daughters not only the principles and precepts of the old stern gods but had insisted on their being given a rigid training in their father’s abandoned religion. Her daughters were as discreet and modest and retiring as she had been in her girlhood, and were trained to Jewish duties and reverence—as an “old” Roman Clodia was courteous to her husband and her husband’s family, for all she was of the gens Cornelius. Her sons had been circumcised; they meticulously observed the Jewish holidays because of their mother’s severe insistence though they smiled at her behind her strong square back. However, Clodia was respected and more than a little feared, and of this Hillel had heard and had few doubts but that Clodia would impart to Sephorah the secrets and the exhortations necessary for a bride. Hillel had been informed by other relatives that Clodia resembled a stalwart peasant woman from the fields of the Campagna rather than a great Roman lady, whose kinsmen were honored by, rather than honoring, the new Caesar, Tiberius Claudius Nero, in that monstrous and distant city of Rome. Her father and her brothers had served in his campaigns and had been famous for valor, and her family arms and the shields of her warriors hung on the walls of David ben Shebua’s house in Jerusalem.

“My wife,” David ben Shebua had written, somewhat ruefully, can at times be considered handsome, though never beautiful. She is frugal and stern, but kind and just, and would have made an excellent wife for one of the old patriarchs. She guards my purse, which I find a little onerous, but I know of her excellent investments and her large properties. Reserved and quiet though my Clodia is, rarely speaking in the presence of men, I have heard that in Rome she is the terror of bankers and stockbrokers. Her accounts would a moneylender, so correct are they. She visits the Court of the Gentiles on the Holy Days as sedulously as she visits and sacrifices to her favorite divinity, Juno of the harsh temper and the everseeing eyes—doubtless she considers me another Jupiter! Her domestic gifts are superb. My table is valued by Herod, himself, the Tetrarch, not to mention my Greek friends of the delicate palate and my Roman friends who admire her exotic cooks. Clodia is no provincial. You will notice I speak of Clodia’s cooks, not mine, for she considers her domain sacred and not to be invaded by husbands. We have a cook of Greek talent, an Egyptian cook who prepares dishes to make a Syrian envious, and, most certainly, a Jewish cook. To the amusement of many, my Clodia obeys the dietary laws of the Jews!”