Iscariot: A Novel of Judas (35 page)

I, too, had played my move.

I had taken an action that would absolve me of guilt under the law but condemned my heart.

Even now I held out hope that he might confound us all. That in direct confrontation with Caiaphas he might work one more mighty act.

Either way, he would live.

But either way, I had forfeited him forever.

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That evening as we sat down, I felt severed from myself. The dates and the bread on the table seemed both real and not real, as though having coalesced from a waking dream. The faces of the others were familiar and those of strangers at once. And yet Simon sat down next to me with the normal offhanded familiarity.

Did no one see it? Did no one notice?

Simon was silent. He was brooding. Across the table James seemed lost in his own thoughts, glancing up on occasion from under his brows at the others.

And then it came again: the sense that I did not belong here as I once had.

That I was as much a stranger here in this company as I had been staring at the white face of the Temple. I had crossed from the familiarity of the Holy City to Galilee, from Temple to wilderness, from the worlds of the learned to the poor and diseased, from the courts of the Sadducees to this upper room here, vacil ating between realms like a spirit in an arid place.

What was left to me now?

But it wasn't only me. The entire company was quieter than 300

usual. Even Peter kept his own counsel and I began to look around, the prospect of their silence somehow most disturbing of all.

Jesus had not yet made the prayer for bread, and we were waiting on him when he abruptly got up from the table. My heart stuttered. My pulse was a dizzying drone in my head.

I should tell him what I had done. What to expect. Perhaps he would be glad for the confrontation--but either way, I couldn't bear the burden of my secret.

Every moment was torture.

I had to leave, to get out.

"Master," I said, feeling that I was choking as I said it.

I don't know exactly what I said in that moment--something about wanting to procure some special items for the Passover meal from some merchants my brother knew. That I must go before it was too late.

Jesus had not yet reclined at the table, but removed his tunic. Laying it aside, he wrapped a towel around his waist and poured some water into a basin.

I was stymied. After so many meals without washing our hands, would we wash before this one?

He brought the water to the table right before Peter. Setting it down, he reached for Peter's foot--at which Peter jerked back.

What was he doing? It was the posture of a servant ready to wash the feet of his master or of his master's guest! Even Abraham did not stoop to wash the feet of his angelic visitors whom he called "my lord" in the absence of slaves. Even the High Priest washed his own feet on the Day of Atonement.

And not one teacher should ever wash the feet of his followers, but the other way around.

Jesus reached for his foot again. This time, Peter leapt up, stumbled several steps away.

"What's this--you wash my feet?"

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"You don't realize what I'm doing now, but you'll understand later," Jesus said, his hand outstretched over the bowl. Peter glanced back at us helplessly.

No one moved. No one knew what to say.

"Master, no," Peter said, gently, as one speaks to the confused. "You'll never wash my feet. Let me wash yours," he said, reaching slowly for the towel over Jesus' lap.

"Unless I wash your feet you have no part with me," Jesus said.

It was a moment like a boil. So taut, so full with tension that one breath might lance it.

Peter slowly sat back down. He leaned back, glancing once at James beside him as he extended first one foot and then, as though the water were scalding, a second, into the bowl in this contrarian act of submission.

The first will be last, and the last will be first.

Peter extended his hands. "Then . . . not just my feet, but my hands and my head as well," he said.

An exhaled expression from farther down the table. Heads craned to watch with incredulity.

And then Jesus was smiling, pouring water over Peter's feet. "Those who have had a bath need only wash their feet. Their whole body is clean. And you are clean."

The words stole the breath from my lungs.

How long had I waited to hear words like that?

All my life.

His were no longer the rough hands of a day-worker, but hands to heal. To bless babies. To pray. Murmurs around the table drowned out his next words, so that only those of us closest to him heard him say, "But not every one of you."

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I didn't understand him or his topsy-turvy teachings anymore. I saw, too, the confused look of James beside me. His awkward posture as he put his feet into the bowl next.

When Jesus came to me, the water in the bowl was dirty. Clouded since the last time he had emptied it out, and I stared into that water feeling as grimy as it. I put my foot in.

But the moment he began to wash it, I no longer saw the dirty water of a basin, but the waters of the muddy Jordan where I had burst from the surface after that weightless and sublime moment. I closed my eyes as he lifted my foot to his lap to dry it, and something within me cried, No. Do not finish with me yet.

I was beside myself. What had happened to me? I began to wonder if I might take back the charge I had filed with the Sanhedrin. I could live out this fellowship, even if it were a charade, for as long as it lasted. Hours. A day.

Two days. It didn't matter--I wanted it. Like Peter, bowing to Jesus' insistence that he wash his feet, as one humors a beloved madman.

And what if I urged him to flee? Was it too late? I flailed at the sudden thought that I had set some great machine in motion. Even now I wanted to beg Jesus to come away, to let us go. I would live without a mikva, without the law, without the Temple, and without my family, if it meant staying with him.

He finished with the last of us and poured out the water. Putting on his tunic, Jesus prayed the blessing of bread, and I lowered my head to hide the tears running into my beard.

"This is the fulfillment of the scripture that he who shared my bread has turned against me."

I glanced up, belatedly, having been lost in my thoughts. His voice had wavered and he covered his face.

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Silent glances around the table.

What? What next?

Each thing he said made less sense than the thing before!

"I am telling you," his voice broke, "one of you is going to betray me."

There it was. The weeping I had seen on the donkey the day we had entered the city. The burden that he carried with him. The burden, whatever it was, that he had carried with him now. It broke through the surface so that he was breathing deeply, his breath catching as he covered his face with a hand.

I glanced around the table. Was he speaking of me? Surely not! Was there any man here who loved him more than I? Who would choose his life over even the dream of Messiah?

Had someone gone to the street gangs to tell them where we were then?

Was it even now too late, and his life in danger? I glanced sharply at Simon, who looked away. Could he have contacted the Sons after all this time? Had Peter opened his great mouth one time too many--and to the wrong person?

Or was it true that my master's mind had never healed from the grief of John's death, but that he grew more fractured--and paranoid--by the hour?

It wouldn't matter. Soon, he would be in the hands of the guard. He would be safe from death, and we would be safe from the edicts of the law that demanded we turn him in. But more greatly than that, he would be forced at last to rise above this storm and calm it, if he could, once and for all.

He could. He must.

For all our sakes.

"Surely it isn't me?" James blurted, his face, so weathered in this last year especially, near-childlike in the lamplight.

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"Or me?" Nathanel said.

Down the table, Thomas stared, stark-eyed, not speaking. He glanced at Simon, who was looking from one of us to the other, but said nothing.

Which one of us had not thought at some time of abandoning him, of condemning him, of betraying him in some way?

"One who dips the bread in the bowl with me," Jesus said, his face filled with such pain that I thought he would break down completely.

I looked away, my fists clenching.

We had given up everything, abandoned everyone, for him. Would he accuse us like this? Us? Even now, when he went to these mad lengths, didn't he see that we stayed with him, that we played along with his foot-washing and accusations of betrayal?

He gave the blessing for bread, and I was glad for that, eager to get on with this, having no true stomach for food.

We ate in awkward silence, the uneasy brotherhood of confusion, fear, and yes, even anger, on the table between us.

"Listen," he said. "Take this. It is my body."

He passed it to me.

I stared at it. His body. That again.

"And this," he said, lifting a cup of wine. He gave the blessing for it, and then said, "This is my blood for the covenant for the forgiveness of sins."

Again with the blood. The drinking of blood.

He must stop. But this was not the time for confrontation.

I glanced at him, barely managing a small bite and sip before passing it to Simon beside me. My stomach threatened to revolt.

This was more than not keeping the law. Even to symbolically 305

drink the blood of another was nothing short of abomination. No true Messiah sent by God would make such a claim.

Anxiety was raw on my every nerve.

You follow a blasphemer. Does it matter if he washed your feet?

Unclean. Unclean. It rang through my head.

The sweat that had broken out on my neck was trickling even now down my back. I had to get out. I could not stay. I felt ill, that my bowels would explode at any moment. I would be sick and needed to find the latrine. I was sweating now in earnest.

I started to push back from the table, dizzy, and then jerked at the touch of Jesus, when he leaned over to me. "What you are going to do, do quickly."

I didn't wait to see the way he looked at me.

I got to my feet, my breath expelling in a rush as I hurried down the outside stair.

I ran down the street for a long ways before finally stopping, hauling in a breath, my gut twisting.

Did he think I had to go procure the things for Passover? Or was it possible that he knew what I had done, as he had known in the stern of the boat that we would wake him? And for what--so he could rebuke us afterward for our lack of faith?

Then rebuke me. Better that I should do this now before the one who would betray him--whoever it was--did it indeed.

My bowels stopped churning, twisted into a knot.

Malchus, the High Priest's man, waited.

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Another Passover I might have listened to the hymns sung from rooftops.

Chanted along to the snippets of prayers raised like incense to the wind.

Sniffed the smell of food wafting out through open windows.

That night, there was only the stamp of feet making their way down the street. Heads swiveled and anyone near hurried to get out of the way of the Temple guards following me.

"So many?" I had said in some shock when we had assembled near the Antonia Fortress. I rapidly tallied nearly two hundred guards in addition to a contingent of Pharisees and teachers of the law--one of whom I recognized as Joezer from the council chamber--all come to help identify my master in the case that I should turn and flee, no doubt.

"It's Passover," Malchus had said. "You yourself have said that a great crowd follows him everywhere. With a few soldiers, they might be inspired to overtake us, and then we would have the riot that my master has labored to prevent."

Perhaps that is what it will take. Perhaps we have been wrong all these years to try to avoid the very thing.

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Ahead of us a group of men were walking with their arms around one another, singing. They might have been Simon and me, or Peter and Andrew, come in from Galilee. But the song flagged as we approached them and I saw the way they looked at me, walking alongside Malchus as we passed.

It is not like that, I wanted to say to them. I am a Jew, like you, and a patriot.

I saw the way the guards at the gate let us go by, eyes sliding this way and that. The way the pilgrims camped throughout the Kidron Valley looked up from their fires and gatherings, their conversations cut short. The way they hurried away even from their own belongings.

For one bare moment, it was intoxicating to feel the power of the soldiers behind me, the stamp of their feet, to hear the jingle of their swords and breastplates, their helmets gleaming in the night.

And then I was horrified. Was I seduced so easily? So easily corrupted?

Had I been so easily led astray by my master as well?

Five hours. By now the others would have left the upper room. The fine wine Malchus' steward had given me when I went to his house had worn off. He had not spoken much to me, Malchus. He was a good servant. As was I. A better servant than he. Malchus must only pander to the pageantry and ego of Caiaphas. I must labor to deliver my master. Soon, he would be safe.