Great Lion of God (20 page)

In the smaller towns and villages and little cities there had been a certain gaiety, raucousness and ease, even under the ubiquitous eyes of the Romans. The people went about their business, farming, selling, manufacturing and negotiating. Life went on, they appeared to say with a shrug of fatality. A man must live in spite of disaster. But Jerusalem, that great and resounding city, that center of Mid-East culture and trade and commerce and wealth, and filled with many races, had a certain indescribable somberness about it, a certain darkness and heaviness of spirit. Yet, here the Hellenistic arête glowed very conspicuously among the cosmopolitan Jewish Sadducees and there were many flourishing and active Greek colonies of merchants and traders and academicians and indolent wealthy residents, and there were many Roman soldiers with their wives and families living here, not to speak of Roman bankers and businessmen and bureaucrats and administrators, many of whom had married Jewish beauties with handsome dowries. Here lived Syrians, Persians, Arabs and Phoenicians and others of the Semitic races, including Egyptians who taught in the academy of medicine or who were valued as cooks in the noblest of houses. If ever there was a heterogeneous city, as heterogeneous as Rome, herself, Jerusalem was that city.

Therefore, the intangible darkness and heaviness which lay on the city seemed incomprehensible. Even spring exuberance and summer bloom could not lighten it, nor its multitudinous gardens, nor its fine public buildings, handsome villas, clean streets, banking and brokerage houses, and the markets and the rich mercantile establishments. A thousand different dialects and tongues could not lift its air of brooding and weighty contemplation, nor its wealth. Some said that it was because Jerusalem was so old and was bending under the history of the ages, and the devout Jews said Jerusalem mourned that she was now but a province of the Romans and could not endure Roman occupation. Hillel loved Jerusalem, but he recalled now that even as a boy he had felt the grave and subdued atmosphere of the city—and the Romans, then, were not so conspicuous as now.

The more rigid of the Pharisees declared that God, in His Temple, had wrapped Himself in His cloak, and had covered His face, because of the Romans and the defections of His people. (Apparently, said some of the more erudite Romans with wryness, He had no other affairs to supervise.) God, said the Pharisees, had thrown His Face into shadow and withdrawal, until the day when His Messias would be born and the Jews delivered forever from slavery and oppression. In the meantime, before that day arrived, God was incommunicado except to His elect, namely the Pharisees.

True it was that Jerusalem was profaned with Greek and Roman temples and theaters but Hillel doubted that this particularly enraged God. He had been wise, enough, however, to keep this heretical opinion from his fellow Pharisees. But he often pondered on the gloomy air of Jerusalem. As she was at the juncture where east met the west there should have been a certain naughty sophistication about her, a certain lightheartedness. But this was not so. Even the Greeks and the Romans found her oppressive, and they often cast troubled eyes at the mighty golden Temple, with its golden dome and spires and its golden gates and vast gardens and courts. Some of them, in a spirit of conciliation and even fear, frequently went to the Court of the Gentiles within the purlieus of the Temple, and paid for sacrifices and bought amulets. It did not harm to please and placate Eastern gods, who were noted for capriciousness. They had heard that the God of the Jews lacked humor and was famed for ferocity and was a valiant Warrior, Himself, and had a distressing way of smiting suddenly, and so the superstitious Greeks and Romans hoped to disarm Him with their tolerance. Privately, they thought Him without beauty and grace and gaiety, all civilized attributes. The music they heard distantly in the Court of the Gentiles did nothing to lift their hearts. It sounded like warning and mourning and all other ominous things. They had never heard that David had urged his people to “make a glad noise unto the Lord,” for certainly the Temple in Jerusalem Wade the very reverse of “glad noises.” Nor could the Romans truly believe—if it had ever occurred to them—that God resented their Presence anywhere, for were they not the people of the Law? And was not the first command of the universe the command of order? Without law and order there was only chaos, and even the Jewish God should appreciate that.

Saul was nothing but eyes as he entered the holy city of his fathers, and he forgot the onerous and distasteful presence of his kinsmen and their jovial comments to each other. He even forgot his kinsman, the Roman Aulus, and the standard and fasces of Rome. He was but a seeing vessel and he sat stiffly in the car of Simon ben Shebua and watched everything, his heart seemingly enflamed and obviously throbbing. He could hardly breathe. The air of the city was dense and hot and dusty, with a thousand disturbing odors, and there was no breeze to lift the scent of latrines, foliage, stone, dry earth and the pervasive aromatic smell as of pepper and spice and iron, and cheese. And from every street came the clanging rattle and beat of chariots, horses and cars.

As Jerusalem was a city on a hill it rose in terraces, one above the other, a city of marble and yellow stone, of domes and porticoes and spires, of neat and narrow cobbled roads, of alleys and cypresses and palms and tamarisk and karob trees, of Roman aqueducts, of marketplaces and twisting vistas, of gardens and villas and crowded tenements and of fountains. The earth was terra-cotta; what paths could be seen were of gravel. Everywhere were walls of saffron stone, except for Roman and Greek houses which now affected the “open” appearance advocated among Roman architects.

Jerusalem was mainly a heaped rising city of flat roofs, despite the domes and spires, and so crowded that it was boasted that a man could walk for miles on those roofs without touching ground. It was on these that the multitudinous families gathered of an evening after the heat of the day. Some of the roofs bore earth, carried up in basket after basket, and here little palm trees had been planted, and flowers, and sometimes vegetables. Many had striped awnings for protection against the sun.

Saul saw it all, in the spurting red glare of torches thrust into walls and the light of huge lanterns illuminating every street corner. He also saw the Roman patrols. He saw the crowds, emerging into what coolness might be expected after night advanced, and he heard cymbals and laughter and music and the dull roaring of any living city, magnified here. But, like Hillel, he also felt the brooding darkness and heaviness of the city though unlike Hillel he did not wonder why. He was certain he knew. He was also certain that here was the heart of Creation, the very center of God’s being, and all else was irrelevant. Jerusalem would remain, though nations would vanish through the and be known no more. He felt this with a passionate certitude and an avenging joy.

Chapter 8

T
HOUGH
Shebua ben Abraham had built his awesome Greco-Roman house on one of Jerusalem’s more secluded and quiet streets, and though his children had been born there and his wife had been ostensible mistress, he adhered to the Roman fashion and referred to it as “the house of my son’s wife, Clodia Flavius.” For Shebua was now a widower, his meek wife having died just before the death of his daughter, Deborah. He had paid a literal fortune for that building of white marble and gleaming columns and colonnades and statues, and expansive gardens, the porticoes decorated with fine murals and friezes, the atrium a court in itself, and every room full of scented air like the fragrance of fern and fresh fountains. It was guarded by a wall of white stone and with gates of iron, standing in the midst of fig trees and karobs and sycamores and palms and pines, with exotic flowers in large Chinese pots scattered everywhere, and with red paths neatly bordered with square or rectangular or round beds of many-colored plants and blossoms. From its rise on the tiered city it had a view of the whole countryside and the lavender hills and the meadows and pastures and, in the distance, little crowded Bethlehem. It was a commanding house, a true “insula,” and was highly admired even by languid and amused Greeks. Herod was often an esteemed visitor, and high Roman officials, for Shebua was known for his urbanity, his elegance, his learning and his delicacy both of mind and table and taste.

The Pharisees abhorred him. He not only had a multitude of slaves but he never freed them, according to the Law. He had two concubines in fine quarters, and not even the dark cold disapproval of Clodia could force him to dismiss them. One was an Arabian beauty of serpentine charm, the other a delicious Nubian. “After all,” he would Say, was not the Queen of Sheba black as night and as lovely as the moon?” The Pharisees not only disagreed that the Queen of Sheba “black as night” but they despised Shebua as a renegade from his religion and his race, and hated him as a Sadducee and therefore an oppressor of his people. All the members of the great court, the Sanhedrin, were his friends, and he observed, humorously, two or three of the solemn Holy Days, but he believed in nothing, and especially not in the stern God of his Fathers, nor in the coming of the Messias.

He was a gentleman, an epicure, an exquisite, and in his soul—he believed—a true Greek. He had visited Athens scores of times and his true allegiance, he would often say, was to the Parthenon where beauty soared in stone and Phidias walked at midnight, and Socrates strolled amid the columns. He loved to go to the theaters in Athens and in Jerusalem, where he helped to pay for the presentations of the more glorious of the Greek plays, and was a friend and patron of actors and gladiators and athletes. His discrimination was superb, and even he often marveled at it gently. He was also deeply fond of the Romans, though he was inclined—when among Greek friends—to laugh at them softly and agree that they felt inferior to the Greeks in the matter of art and taste and nuances of thought. But he would waggle a translucent finger at his Greek visitors and say. “However, do not call them a nation of grocers, my friends! They are far more than that! Consider what they have done with the arch and all their other works of science, and the law and order they have brought to the world under the Pax Romana. These are no mean accomplishments.” He had the reputation of being a very cosmopolitan man indeed. Like Plato, whom he quoted frequently, he “found no message in fields and trees.”

He had many farms, many investments, many accounts in the banks and the stock market, many interests in mercantile affairs and in ships. Once Clodia had asked him with a sour smile why he did not live in Greece, which he adored, and he had answered her as if she were a child (though he feared her Roman soul), “My dear daughter, I owe it to my people to help in their enlightenment and to wean them from the contemplation of their God and to reverse their refusal to join the world, and to make them part of Humanity. Are we not one?”

“No,” Clodia had said, with firmness. “We are all human beings, but we are not one in the manner of which you speak, Shebua.”

Shebua affectionately insisted, though he did not like the cold eye Clodia had fixed on him, nor her narrowed mouth, “There is no longer room in this world for insular and provincial attitudes, nor nationalistic fervors, my dear. Men are part of me, and I am part of all other men.”

“So it would seem, unfortunately,” said Clodia, whom Shebua deeply disliked.

He persisted, with indulgence. “We shall never have any peace nor tranquillity until we bow before a universal government, my daughter, the government of the world under one standard, under one ruler. That is the dream of ages. It was the dream of Plato.”

Then Clodia astonished him. He had not thought her very erudite. She said, “I remember what Aristotle said: I love Plato, but I love truth more.’ Plato was a fool. He never knew mankind. His Republic was not a noble dream. It was a dream of the cruel elite and the slavery of humanity. Hence, living men will always refute him, for men in their hearts love freedom.”

In spite of his sweet smile of tender derision Shebua suddenly remembered the shout of Moses: “Proclaim liberty throughout the land, unto the inhabitants thereof!” Then he immediately thought, “If Plato was a fool, as this poor woman has said, then Moses was mad. Liberty—for all men. Absurd.”

But among friends, he seriously upheld the ideal of liberty for mankind. However, “mankind” to him was a theory, an abstraction, a poetic idea, and had nothing to do with the masses he saw in the various cities he visited. They smelled, and Shebua ben Abraham disliked smells. He scented himself, Clodia would think, like a male whore. All his reflections were as remote from reality as his financial affairs were as strongly rooted in reality. He thought of himself as a poet, serene, tranquil, judicious, discreet and polished.

He had had no influence with his sons, except for David, and his daughter had reverenced him. The plump and sleek Simon thought his father foolish; Joseph, the hard merchant, considered him not I quite intelligent. It was only David who admired and emulated him. All his sons were Sadducees, certainly, like himself. But they thought his dissertations, except for David, shallow and irrelevant. However, held his money in the most pious regard and admitted among themselves that Shebua could make ten shekels grow where one had been planted in spite of his absurdity. And sometimes, when he gazed at them thoughtfully they became afraid of him though they did not know why. Despite his smiles and ease and manners and elegances and air of tolerance, they occasionally suspected him of implacable ruthlessness, and in this, they were quite correct.

This was the man who greeted the entourage from Joppa with magnanimity, reserved affection, and solicitude, meeting them in the atrium which was lighted with many Alexandrine and Egyptian lamps, all filled with aromatic oil, some scented with jasmine and roses. He wore a white toga in the Roman fashion, his tunic underneath belted with a gold girdle, jeweled armlets on his arms, many glittering rings on his fingers, his sandals inlaid with gems. He spoke in perfect Greek, with the intonations and mellifluousness of a scholar, and statues as stately as he stood all about him in carved niches.