Iscariot: A Novel of Judas (30 page)

Late that evening I went out to the hills where I knew he would be praying.

When I came to him, he lifted his head. His face was streaked, and I knew he had been weeping.

"Peace, Master," I said, coming to join him, wrapping my mantle over us both. I did not ask about Lazarus or Talmon but simply sat with him through the night.

The next morning Talmon returned to Bethany, weeping and alone.

A day later, Jesus said, "Today we go."

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I saw my alarm mirrored in the faces of the others.

"Teacher, we can't go back to that place--they'll kill you."

A bandit standing nearby whose name was also Jesus said, "We will come with you."

But how could we keep him safe, even with their protection? What if the Temple guards were already waiting near Bethany for him? What spy wouldn't know or hear about Jesus' friends there--he had gone down from Jerusalem to their house often enough. What if they were lying in wait for

him?

"Lazarus is sleeping," Jesus said. "I am going to wake him up."

"Then he is well!" James said. Fear and frustration were plain on his face.

He had been there with us the day the men had picked up the stones in the Temple to kill him.

Our master turned away from the group of bandits and said, very quietly, so that only we few could hear him: "Lazarus is dead."

"But you said--"

"Now we go to him."

Peter threw up his arms and walked away from us. I went after my master, and James fell into step beside me. On the other side of him, the look on John's face was grave.

"Let's go," James said. "He is our teacher. We will die with him." And I remembered what Simon had said.

But I did not want to die. I watched the form of my teacher as he prepared to leave and could not reconcile these words from him. Now that the multitude had begun to grow again would he walk blithely to his death?

But I went. I went, because I had learned by now that he was the author of the unlikely. And I went because I could not stay back and live if he were to die.

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MARTHA CAME OUT TO meet us. Her eyes were swollen and I hardly recognized her at first.

"If you had come he never would have died!" she cried, beating my master on his chest. But after the first few blows, her fists seemed weighted down with iron so that she no longer had the strength to pull her arms back. He didn't stop her, but only turned his head as I had seen my sister-in-law do when one of her children flailed at her face.

"Your brother will rise again," Jesus said, his voice thick and guttural as tears ran down his cheek to his lips.

"Yes, I know . . . I know!" Her face twisted in grief. She shook her head with it, as though she had wrestled through the night with this very thing. "He will rise on the last day in the resurrection. I know!" But it was no comfort to her now.

Just as it had been no comfort to me when Susanna had died.

And then I heard him whisper in her ear, "I am the resurrection . . . the life. Do you believe this?"

Martha turned her face up toward him and though swollen, red, and splotchy, it was beatific--beatific as though filled with the raw need for something even greater than her dead brother. Her expression crumpled and she cried, "I believe you are the Messiah, the son of God."

I blinked to hear such words from a woman. Son of God. By all accounts, she might be guilty of sedition for even saying the words we had danced around for so long. I flinched, that she had spoken them so loud.

He whispered something else to her that I could not hear. She 254

nodded, lowered her head as he helped her to straighten her veil, which had come askew. And then she smoothed her tunic and turned and went back toward the house.

Mary came out and broke into a run. She threw herself down at Jesus' feet, weeping over them, her tears making dark splotches in the dust that coated them.

Jesus lifted her like a rag doll in his arms.

"Come and see, Lord--" It was all she could manage, her lips pulled back in the grimace of grief. "Come, I will show you."

She took us to a place nearby where tombs had been cut into the side of the hill and stopped before one of them, unable to even level her chin at it. They stood there together, Lazarus' sister weeping, her forearm held before her face as though shielding her eyes from the sight . . . and my master, his shoulders shaking with the cries of a man whose heart has broken, and who has had no strength in him now for days. Here was the man who had prayed through the night, who had grown gaunt with some great burden that only he could see or know. He bent over, his hand on his knees, great sobs wracking through him.

Behind me, the bandits were silent. I sensed in them a profuse respect for the dead that only comes from those too familiar with it. At last a few of them turned away, to fasten their gazes on the hills in the direction we had come.

Finally my master straightened and said, "Take away the stone." When no one moved, he cried, "Take it away!"

Mary grabbed his arm. "What are you saying? He's been in there four days.

There will be a terrible stench!"

"Take it away," he said again.

And then the bandit Jesus and the brothers James and John were 255

there, straining against the rock, their faces turned toward their shoulders against the smell of rot from within. I thought I heard the tomb open with a gasp as though sucking at the fresh air and I instinctively covered my nose.

Next to Jesus, Mary's hands shook over her mouth.

Jesus was speaking quietly to someone--at first I thought it was to her. But then I realized that he was praying. When he had finished, he lifted his head toward the grave.

"Lazarus!" His voice broke.

Silence. I imagined that I heard my master's voice ringing off the back of the tomb itself, the echo of Sheol.

I covered my face. Finally, he had gone too far.

"Lazarus. Come out!"

I turned toward him to take him by the shoulder, to tell him to stop and let them grieve without this cruel trick.

But then someone gasped. James, beside me, screamed.

I lifted my eyes, my heart drumming in my chest, fearful to see what I knew I would see, even before I had seen it.

I staggered back as cries erupted around me.

Ahead of me, Peter sank to his knees in the dirt.

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They came in droves to see and hear the teacher who had raised the dead, to touch him and gape, and to be healed.

I was rapt, drunk with anticipation I had not felt since the day I first saw Susanna and knew she would be mine. Since the night of our wedding, when I knew I would have her in my arms. My hopes had died at the hand of tragedy before but it had all given way to something greater. Nothing could ruin my happiness.

Two days later, I received a coded message.

Leave. Go away, far from the lands of Herod or Judea. Your master has performed one sign too many. Caiaphas is jealous to keep the high priesthood and knows one single sneeze in the wrong direction and Pilate will relieve him of it. Do you think he has forgotten that his predecessors held their office only a year apiece? And so he has increased the Temple guards, supplementing them with Roman auxiliaries--Samaritans. What's more, he has "prophesied" that your 257 master will die lest Rome take away the religious privilege that Israel already "enjoys" under Roman rule, and the power that the Sadducees enjoy as a result. He has put out an edict that any man with information about your teacher should come inform on him. And so he will make him the scapegoat for us all. Your teacher will die--is even now as good as dead.

Take this warning as proof of my love for you and let your proof be that I never see your face again.

--Nathan

I stared at the message for a very long time, hollow, sick inside.

We had eluded Caiaphas' informants before, but now every man would be obliged by Mosaic law to report Jesus if he saw him. What one of us had not heard the words from youth:

If anyone sins because they do not speak up when they hear a public charge to testify regarding something they have seen or learned about, they will be held responsible.

I showed the message to Simon. When he read it his mouth set as though his jaw had been carved of stone.

"That 'prophecy' of Caiaphas is no more a true prophecy than Caiaphas is the true High Priest," I said. "Except that he has the power to make it come true."

Simon looked at me oddly then. "How do we stay faithful to our master, who said he came not to do away with the law but to fulfill it . . . and to the law that demands we report him?"

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I shook my head. It was an impossible situation.

"Even the sages said often that it was better for one life to be risked than for all to certainly die."

That night I made an excuse to go to town. There, I inquired about the nearest mikva. It cost me several prutah to use and I took the coins straight from the moneybag, reasoning that it was better for me to be clean than for us to have coin.

I immersed three times.

Two days later, we retreated to the rugged hills of Ephraim.

It was five weeks until Passover.

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PASSION

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The day after Purim, Jesus spoke the words that filled me with hope and dread in toxic measure.

"We will go up to the Holy City. The time is near."

A month ago, we would have cried out for fear.

But now . . . The crowd in Ephraim had swelled with pilgrims come down from as far as Tyre and Damascus and Syria. Fire had reignited in the eyes of our master and only those of us closest to him heard the way weeping hitched the words of his prayers in the middle of the night.

The Pharisees condemned him. The High Priest Caiaphas condemned him.

Herod Antipas wanted to kill him. With the growing throng surrounding us, we could no longer hide.

And so our options had dwindled now to two: march on Jerusalem or die.

That was all.

We all knew it, and had suffocated with not speaking it all these days and weeks.

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Now, as he said these words, I saw the way Peter sat unmoving as though he had not heard. Only his eyes, darting this way and that, gave him away.

James and John glanced at one another. John had aged in these last three years--the rogue curves of his face that made him look young even for a Galilean fisherman beneath sun-dark skin had leaned into the angles of a man constantly vigilant. James, who had always been more boisterous than his brother, had become more and more quiet in these last weeks and months. But now he lifted his head and looked at the master as though he would say something, but then he only nodded.