Iscariot: A Novel of Judas (13 page)

Instead, I found myself staring at his feet, stretched out before him. At his simple sandals, and the worn and dirty toes. At the muddy hem of his tunic and his hands, dangling over his knees, fingers calloused and rough. They were not the hands of a scholar but of the laborer who works with stone, or in the field, or with wood when he can get it--or at anything that will earn him a day's dinar.

Introductions were made, but I hardly heard them.

My mind was on the Nazarene.

Come.

And we had.

As we pulled away through the opening in the breakwater I could see the crowd forming along the shoreline, following us.

"You look a little ill, city man," Peter said, taking up one of the oars.

"It's my first time in a boat," I confessed.

Jesus chuckled, and Andrew joined with him. And soon the others were laughing.

I didn't realize just then that in the short distance of shoreline between Heptapegon and Capernaum, I had begun the great journey I had waited for all my life.

At that moment, with the sun lowering against our backs, I knew only that the world of the Temple, of Jerusalem, seemed very far

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away. That here, beneath the Galilean sky, the coming kingdom might truly be a seed taking root in the Golan hills or even between the mismatched boards of a fishing boat.

If only I had fallen overboard or drowned with a millstone around my neck.

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12

Capernaum.

In the weeks and months to follow I would come to know her streets, her wine and oil presses, the basalt of her houses and synagogue. The winds that came down from the hills to the north, gusting through her streets on their way to the lake.

But the first Capernaum I knew was a tangled mass of faces, of arms and hands, all reaching for one man. Some came to lay eyes on him, others their

hands, to touch him as one touches a relic or rubs the foot of an idol.

In such a crowd one cannot shy away from those noticeably deformed or ill.

Cannot shirk the grasping of the desperate, the old, the mothers with their babies. The twisted faces of the weeping, the mesmerized, and the frantic.

They came to him as though he were wheat to feed the hungry, only to melt back into the press with beatific expressions. I didn't hear what he said to them, but I saw the way that Simon, standing closer by, stared at the teacher in the waning light of that day he'd called us to come with him. He was stunned, as though the sheer

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multitude had at last spoken mystery to him with the clamor of one voice.

I was still wary of his pronouncements of Jesus as a magician, however, and so did not ask him about it, even that night as we lay down to sleep.

IT WAS STILL DARK when I got up and went out to relieve myself around the side of Peter's house. His wife was already at work in the courtyard; I could hear the sound of sticks splintering as she broke them apart for the oven, the grinding of the hand-mill. The cook fires of the fishermen glowed orange on their boats in the distance. They would be back by morning, bringing the catch to market as they had yesterday, and a year ago, and a hundred years before that.

And yet today nothing was the same. Not the mist on the lake or the tiny dots of fire upon it. Not the thinning darkness of the eastern sky or the dogs coming to sniff at my feet.

Nothing.

And though I did not know how or what it meant, neither was I the same.

I pulled my mantle up around my shoulders and walked to the edge of town past the sleeping forms of those poor who had no other shelter than the sides of houses and shop fronts. The Shema was burning in my throat, and I knew today that I would not cover my eyes as I was accustomed, but that I would walk along the edge of the lake and sing the words with my soul: Hear O Israel, the Lord is One.

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I had just come to a path outside the city when I heard the soft scrape of a step in front of me. I instinctively reached for my dagger. Some things about this world had not changed.

But even as the figure came toward me I sensed he was no bandit. He walked too simply, without a ghost of caution. It was by that uncanny ease that I knew it was Jesus.

And then there he was, an arm's reach from me: the man who had laughed in the boat and grasped the hands of the throng in the streets of Capernaum.

Who had staggered to the back room of Peter's house last night to fall down, exhausted. I tried again to reconcile him with the gaunt man at the Jordan, John's cousin, wasted and skeletal as though he had not eaten once in the forty days of his absence.

His mantle lay draped around his neck. It was embroidered with blue thread, the tassels prescribed by law on each of their corners dangling together in front. He had been praying.

"Judas," he said, and I realized that I had stopped dead before him.

It was the first time I had found myself alone with him and could truly see him--not from a distance as an emaciated man, not through a crowd of others or the shield of his disciples, but standing directly before me. And here is the truth: He was so plain that I might not have known him from any one of the peasants or poor that surrounded him. His eyes were the brown of any man of Israel, his beard thin in spots, his face hinting at a slight lack of symmetry so that he might not even be called handsome.

I was looking for a sign of the miracle-worker, a glimpse of mystery or power.

But I saw only the brown skin and creased eyes of a Galilean laborer, looking back at me.

"Teacher, the leper. How? How did you know you could heal him?"

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He glanced past me toward the low wall of the town. "The same way I know I could repair that wall."

His gaze returned to rest on me.

"The thing you seek is not along this shore, or in the hills. But with me.

Follow me."

Yes. I said it in my heart. I do not know if it made it to my lips.

It defied logic. He was a laborer and one of questionable birth and I was an educated businessman. But in that moment I felt I had found a thing, a person, worth the resurrection of my every hope. The thought terrified and exhilarated at once.

I meant to tell him that my father had been a hero. That I knew Torah and was considered as schooled as Simon or any student of Shammai.

But I said none of this. None of it mattered.

"Come with me where I am going, Judas," he said. "And you will find the thing you seek."

In that moment, I believed him. I believed him with all my heart.

We returned to town together, the crowd already gathering to greet him.

Simon was quiet all that day. But I didn't ask his thoughts or engage him.

Something had happened to me. I felt part of something more profound than I had ever known before. Something greater than the schools of the porticoes or even the Sons of the Teacher. Greater, even, than the Baptizer . . .

. . . than the pain of a past that had brought me to this moment.

That day, I knew that God had spoken to me at last which way I was to go after so many missteps before.

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IN THOSE FIRST DAYS, I was overwhelmed by the sheer number of people who came to see him. That came to be touched by him, complaining of ailments, who stayed to loiter near him as though he were a lantern, as surely as we, ourselves, did.

I didn't always hear what he said or see what he did in the jostle of those crowds. I only knew that some of them stayed and others went away, shouting. They came back with others until the crowds became so unmanageable that one of Jesus' followers, a fisherman named John, inevitably had to bring around a boat. It was the only way to accommodate them all, to not be caught in the crush as the people came in droves to hear Jesus tell his strange stories.

"A farmer went out to sow his seed," he would begin. I had heard this story, by now, several times. "As he was scattering the seed, some fell along the path, and the birds came and ate it. Some fell on rocky places, where it didn't have soil. It sprang up quickly in that shallow soil."

It was not the language of the Pharisees or the sages but of farmers and day-laborers and yes, fishermen, too. And Simon would frown, because this was not the way the sages in the Temple or synagogues spoke.

A few days after our arrival in Capernaum, a few teachers from the synagogue came pressing through the crowd. One of them wore the tefillin of the Pharisee. I watched as people made way; Simon gave up his own seat for him.

Jesus seemed not to notice their arrival. "Listen!" he said. "Two men went up to the Temple to pray. One was a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee stood by himself and prayed, 'I thank you I am not like other people--robbers, evildoers, adulterers--or even like this tax collector.' "

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At mention of the tax collector, a few people in the crowd hissed. Across from me, the Pharisee had an indulgent expression on his face, as one on the verge of receiving praise. It was, I thought, an expression I had seen often on the faces of many of the Pharisees I had known. They were, after all, men to be admired.

"But the tax collector stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, 'Have mercy on me, a sinner!' " A few smug nods in the crowd. Everyone knew no tax collector would ever say such a thing.

"I'm telling you that this man, rather than the other, went home justified before the Lord. All those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted."

The Pharisee looked around in confusion, red-faced at the perceived insult.

"Why would he tell such a story?" he said, craning to look at one of the other teachers, and lastly at Simon, who appeared struck. "Why does he say these things?"

I stood stunned as the Pharisee gathered his robes around him and made his way past the other teachers through a crowd gone awkwardly quiet.

I was troubled that evening as we went with Jesus to the house of a well-known man in town. Nahum bar Saul was round-faced and beaming with pride at all the attention his house was receiving. Seeing him, it was as though I could read his thoughts: I will be the talk of the town for this.

The crowd had followed us, and when we had gone inside, their faces filled the windows, which were open to admit the afternoon breeze, though I thought they were also thrown extra wide so that anyone might see the company within.

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As those few of us that the teacher had invited with him--Simon and me, the brothers John and James, the brothers Andrew and Peter--came into the house, I felt my heart drop. There was the Pharisee from earlier with a second man wearing the tefillin and the slight ennui of the learned.

So the one had gone and gotten another to take the teacher to task. I had seen meetings like this many times in my years at the Temple and in my association with scholarly friends--and had often been the second man brought in for such verbal wars.

But I sensed no nervousness in Jesus. As the servant came to pour water over each of our hands, he greeted the host and each of the Pharisees, too, with a kiss.

"I hear, Jesus son of Mary, that you told some stories today near the water,"