Great Lion of God (59 page)

Saul sighed and shook his head slowly, and the boy waited. Finally he said, “And what is your next memory, Amos?”

The boy did not answer for a moment or two. He was watching Saul with an incomprehensible expression. Then in a slow and deliberate tone, as if expecting ridicule and preparing to combat it, he said, “I heard a voice. I had never heard that voice before. It was the voice of a man, and it filled the whole transparent air and it was as if the mountains and the valleys and the river listened. And it said to me, ‘I say unto you, Amos ben Ezekiel, arise!’”

A chill unexpectedly seized Saul, and he fought it. He said, “I believe you, Amos, that you are not lying when you tell me of this dream. But you must tell me: What did your grandfather say when he heard that voice?”

“He wept.”

“He wept?”

“Yes. And he released my hand and walked with me to the river again, and again it narrowed and he indicated to me that I must cross over and be on the other side, and I wept also, for I did not want to leave that place of peace and singing joy and my grandfather. But I knew I must obey that voice, but why I should obey it I do not know. The voice had not commanded me to cross the river once more, but I knew that I had been commanded. So I leaped over the brook, and immediately it widened and was wide and running and my grandfather waved farewell to me and turned and descended into the valley and I saw him no more. I called him, but there was no answer and no singing, and where I stood it was dark. It became darker, and it was like night before my eyes, and my heart was filled with sorrow, and I had never known sorrow before. And then it was light again, but not the light I had seen. It was a dimmer light, and paler, and I saw that I lay on the floor of my bedroom—” He looked over his shoulder at his mother and grandmother, who were hiding their tearful faces in their hands now. “And my parents and my kinsmen and my brothers were on the floor with me, shedding tears and clasping my hand and kissing my cheek, and they were crying aloud, calling my name.”

His eyes fell away. A deep silence filled the room.

Saul was moved again, but his anger was growing. He put his hand on the boy’s shoulder. “And that was all, Amos? You saw no more?”

“I saw—Him,” said Amos. “I saw Him before I looked at the faces of those who love me. He smiled at me, and He was sad and, it seemed, regretful. His face was most beautiful, and He turned and left the room and two or three strangers left with Him, and I saw Him no more, though I wished to implore Him to remain.” “Why did you wish him to remain?”

The boy’s face visibly darkened with pain. “I felt He was my life, and my desiring, and it was a glory to gaze upon Him, and when He left it was as if the sun had retreated and everything was diminished.”

Saul now caught the boy’s shoulders in both his hands and he I drew him abruptly to him. “Amos ben Ezekiel, you must listen to me, for your soul may depend upon it! The man you saw in your bedroom, that miserable Nazarene, is not unknown to me! He is a sorcerer, la fraud, a mountebank, a blasphemer, and he was executed for his crimes, justly, and he had bewitched you in some arcane way before I he even entered this house! I do not know the reason. I am only I certain that is what happened—perhaps to delude this house, which is an influential one, great in Israel. You must listen to my counsel! You must forget him. You never died, Amos. You were drugged, or in a state of catalepsy, induced by sly enemies, or servants of the Nazarene, who wished to reveal ‘wonders’ and cause awe, and to receive. Had he never entered this house you would have recovered, you must believe me, Amos.”

But Amos, to Saul’s rising wrath and excitement, only shook his head from side to side in quiet denial. Now the sound of the women’s soft weeping could be heard.

Amos said, “I believe, my uncle, that you believe in your own words, and you fear for me. Do not be afraid. I know who He is.”

“Who?” exclaimed Saul, but he knew, with dread, what the boy would say.

“I know He is the Messias, and I know He rose from the dead, and I know He sits at the right Hand of our Father, as my grandfather told me. How I know I do not know, but I know.”

The awful and familiar words were like hard fists beating on Saul’s heart.

“You dreamed,” said Saul.

The boy sighed. “Then, I wish I had never awakened from my dream.”

The broken words, spoken in a man’s voice, made Saul, himself, want to weep. He touched the boy’s arm and put him away from him, and rose. He looked with coldly furious eyes upon his sister.

“You have let him believe monstrous lies, which threaten his soul,” he said. “May God forgive you, though I cannot, Sephorah has Hillel.”

He turned and left the room.

The atmosphere of the house had mysteriously changed. Saul knew it at once, as he advanced to the atrium. It was an atmosphere of serenity, of peace, of composure. It was—and the very thought to him was absurd—like the air of a quiet enclosure of a garden in the Temple.

His kinsmen were awaiting him, Shebua ben Abraham, David ben Shebua and Sephorah’s blue-eyed husband, Ezekiel, who rarely spoke but whose very eyes always seemed to be listening gently but surely. The two younger men rose and embraced Saul, who accepted their greetings impatiently. Over their shoulders he looked at his grandfather, who appeared much older, not suave any longer, not urbane and superbly smiling, but calm and untroubled. He was like a prophet and he wore, for the first time Saul could remember, the ritual hat of the Tribe of Benjamin but not an elaborate one. It was simple and austere. He was a veritable patriarch. He accepted Saul’s brief kiss on “his cheek and pressed the younger man’s shoulder with his long white hand.

“Welcome to this house, my grandson,” he said. “We have longed for your return.”

Saul’s mouth curled somewhat wryly. Shebua’s voice was not the voice he remembered, arrogant and smooth. Shebua clapped his hands and when a servant appeared Shebua asked that the Greek servant, Cephalus, be sent to the atrium at once, as Saul had requested.

“You have come to doubt, and to express your doubt, Saul ben Hillel,” said Shebua in a mild tone. “I do not censor you, nor complain, for had I not seen with my own eyes what had occurred in this house I should doubt also, and probably with more contempt. For I had never believed, no, not in the God of our Fathers, the God of Abraham and Jacob, not once in my life, not even in my youth. But now I believe.” His pale eyes dwelt on Saul without rancor or challenge. They were kindly, and steadfast. He said, almost in a whisper, “Hear, O Israel! The Lord our God, the Lord is One.”

To Saul’s angry and amused amazement David and Ezekiel repeated the words, their heads bent, their hands clasped, as they stood near Shebua.

“The sorcerer, the necromancer, is more powerful than I thought,” Saul said.

As if he had not heard Shebua said, “Blessed is this house, that He entered here, for there was no holiness amongst us, no faith, no piety, no humility, no trust. Blasphemy had dwelt here and all the trappings of a meaningless and secular world, whose name is confusion and whose voices are like those of beasts raving in the wilderness. Yet, He came to us and raised our child from the dead, and delivered him once more to our arms, and I saw His face and I do not know why, but I knew Who He was.”

“I also know,” said Saul, and his teeth clenched together. The old servant entered and came to stand before his master who touched his arm with the affection of a brother.

“Cephalus,” said Shebua, “this is a son of our house, Saul ben Hillel, of whom I have spoken. He would like to put some questions to you.”

Saul regarded the old man with detestation. He was not even an apostate Jew, not even a member of the Amaratzim—the peasantry, the market rabble. He had been a slave, bought in his youth by Shebua ben Abraham and later freed, and his tasks were humble, as he carried wood for baths, emptied the kitchen refuse, swept floors, weeded the gardens, picked fruit, washed walls, and carried burdens. He was unlettered. He was thin and bent with labor, and had a long but meager white beard and thin white hair and a crooked nose, and his countenance bore the stigmata of generations of laborers in the dust and the fields.

But his eyes were great and bright and brown, like the eyes of a youth, and they radiated joy.

Saul had been prepared for a lip-sucking, sly, sniveling old slave, lull of the arts of the malicious poor, fawning, nodding, eager to please and just as eager to do mischief. But as Cephalus looked at him respectfully and with interest Saul could not detect any falseness in the old man’s face. He had a curious dignity in spite of his obviously undistinguished origin. He folded his hands and waited for Saul’s questions, and there was no apprehension about him.

It was plain to Saul that Cephalus was simple and that he believed what he had decided to believe, without hypocrisy and falseness or a desire to be singular.

Before he could speak Shebua said, “Cephalus, show my grandson your right hand.”

Cephalus immediately extended his right hand, wrinkled and worn, to Saul, showed him the back of it, and then the palm. Saul frowned. Shebua said, “Cephalus came to us as a young man with a withered hand, twisted and gnarled and bent like a claw. He had had an evil master who, when Cephalus had been a child, punished him for some small crime by forcing his hand into a fire. I bought him out of pity, when we were youths together, and he has been in this house ever since. You will observe, Saul, that the hand, though worn and veined and discolored like my own, is not maimed but healthy and clean. His withered hand had been restored to its present condition in the winking of an eye—by Him the Romans call Jesus of Nazareth, but Whom we know as Yeshua.”

Saul’s face expressed his cold disbelief and distaste. He said, “This is a minor miracle, my grandfather, but it is well-known that our wandering and holy rabbis frequently heal when implored for healing.”

“Speak, Cephalus,” said Shebua. The old man gave him a timid look, then faced Saul again.

“Lord,” he said to the young man, “I am not a Jew, but a Greek, and I knew nothing of these rabbis of whom you have spoken. I am not young. I have had reason to fear my fellows, and my health has been failing for many years. I rarely left this house, where I had known the only kindness in my life. I feared to leave it.” He spoke in a trembling and feeble voice, and his Greek was unlettered and unrefined, the accents of a slave. “But one day one of the maidens in the servants’ hall spoke of Jesu the Nazarene, and she is Greek, also, and she related that it was said that He was the Unknown God, worshiped by my people, who await His coming.

“My hand, through all these years, had never ceased to pain me, and as my years advanced the pain became stronger and there were nights that I moaned, for I could not sleep. It was useless to me. I tottered through my days in weariness and agony, longing for death. Then I heard that Jesu the Nazarene was in Jerusalem again, before the Jewish Passover, and I said in my heart, I will follow Him and if He is the Unknown God I will summon courage to touch His garment, without His knowing, so that I should not offend His majesty by speaking to Him.”

The old man paused, and a quick trembling ran over his face like the ripples of sunlit water and his joys widened to a blazing of joy.

“There was a great crowd about Him, shouting, ‘Blessed is He who comes in the Name of the Lord! Hosannah!’ And they were throwing I palm branches before Him and flowers, and the women were holding up their infants for Him to gaze upon and bless, and He rode slowly among them on an ass, a Man in rude dress but with the aspect of Ba King, of a Zeus, armed with lightnings. And His Face was beautiful, Sand yet it was not the beauty we call by that name, for I have seen many such as He from Galilee, and of His complexion. I crept behind Him, at a distance, insinuating myself through the ranks of His followers and the shouting and laughing and adoring crowds of men and women and children, who were tossing blossoms in His path. Many ashed to kiss His hands, His feet, to look up into His Face, and there were moments when that Face became that of a Father, loving, serious, grieved.

“And then I was behind Him, in the footsteps of the little ass He rode, and I crept closer to Him and stretched out my withered hand and touched His sleeve. A mere touch, a brushing, of my crippled fingers. The sleeve was of rough brown linen, such as slaves and workmen and field laborers wear.”

The old man sighed and now his eyes were tearful, though he was smiling in his rapture.

Jesu did not see me nor heed me, nor did He turn. But I believe that He knew that I had touched His garment, though the beast He rode carried Him on through the throngs. I halted, gazing after Him. Then I became aware that the awful pain in my hand had ceased as if it had never been, and when I looked down at it I saw the fingers uncurling like petals, the wrist straightening, the scars slowly disappearing, the skin becoming smooth and clean. And I raised my arms in the air and I gave thanks to the Unknown God, unknown no longer, but among us in His mercy and compassion, and I wept and others around me looked at me with wondering smiles and doubtless thought that I was mad.”

“Hysteria,” said Saul, and his expression was colder and full of aversion.

“Lord?” said the old man. But Saul did not answer. After a moment the servant continued:

“I blessed His Name and adored Him and prayed to Him, though He had vanished and then I returned to this house and showed the hand to the servants and they marveled. One of the cooks is a Jew, and a skeptical man, and he has known me for many years. When he heard my story he said, Truly, this is the Holy One of Israel, blessed be His Name,’ and the cook told me of the Messias of the Jews, and I knew it was He.

“Then,” said Cephalus, his voice dropping, “the child Amos ben Ezekiel became ill to the point of death, and there was lamentation in the house. Soon it was said that he was dying, and then we heard, in the hall, that he was dead, the lovely child to whom I had spoken but once or twice and had seen only from a distance since he was an infant. But we knew him to be fair and kind and virtuous, and we mourned.