Iscariot: A Novel of Judas (6 page)

echoing up along the stair.

I held very still, looking around at the charred remains of Eleazar's house, at this nightmare version that had replaced the home I'd known.

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When Mother returned to the front room her face was streaked with tears and grime. She blinked at me as though only just remembering I was there, and then took me by the hand.

I don't know how many houses we went into after that. Each of them told the same tale: fire, looting. Everywhere we went, Mother called Joshua's name.

By the time we had made our way halfway through the residential quarter, she was screaming it.

We saw a few others coming into the area, stumbling their way through the streets in a daze. But when Mother cried out, "Where are the rest?" their gazes fell away from her to stare at the burnt shells of the houses, of bodies covered with insects on the street.

After searching the entire city, we left.

On the road there was a woman propped up against the foot of a cross.

Several strands of her hair were stuck in the dirt of the toes of the man upon

it. Mother went to her, bent down to look her in her face, which was so bruised and swollen that had it been my own mother I could not have recognized her. Twin milk spots stained the front of her tunic.

"Where are the others?" Mother whispered. The woman gazed dully at her and Mother shook her until she whimpered. "Where are the others? There were thousands here the day the Romans came!"

The woman's voice gurgled--no, it was her tongue. She opened her mouth and I saw that she had none, and that her teeth were broken and her tongue had been cut out. Mother's eyes were stark as the woman took one of her own wrists in her other hand as though it were a shackle--the same I had seen on the slaves sold at market in Jerusalem.

Mother sank to her knees.

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They were gone. The ones who stood grisly sentry over this pass and those sprawled in the streets were all older men and women. The rest--those younger and more able-bodied--had all been taken for slaves.

I would never see my brother again.

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5

Some of the peasants who came to stagger at the sight of the crosses, who had taken down the man still alive, helped us take Father down and carry him to the hillside cave where we had sheltered just days before.

I carved his name into the rock above Joshua's and mine. We had no spices to anoint him, but piled whatever stones we could find before the mouth of the cave. We had no monument for his burial except our own survival. The words of our prayers seemed stolen by the air.

That night one of the peasants took pity on us and brought us to his house where his wife fed us bread and olives and gave Mother a veil to cover her hair.

The next day, we left.

Those were not safe days. They were not safe for a mother traveling with a child. They were not safe for any man. Soldiers and bandits roamed the hills, the soldiers gathering up men to crucify or sell into slavery to satisfy their Roman masters, the bandits preying on anyone they found.

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We came to Scythopolis, where we had stayed the mystical night of the eclipse. Now that we were back, I was frightened of the pagan temple, of the wide Roman street . . .

. . . of the soldiers within the city.

At the sight of their crimson my bowels loosened on the spot. I soiled myself, shamefully, before Mother could get me to the public toilet.

Mother sat with her hand out near the city gate, but there were many beggars in worse condition than us. When, by the end of the day, she had acquired only a few small coins and those not even enough for bread, she took me to an inn.

It was small and dirty, and the innkeeper looked Mother up and down in a way I had never seen a man look at a woman.

"That boy stinks!" he said. "You can't bring him in here."

Mother took me outside and went back in to speak to the innkeeper in tones I couldn't hear from the street. I didn't know what she was saying but I didn't trust him to talk to her honorably. I should take her away by the arm and shake my fist at the man. But I was in the throes, by then, of the summer fever, stupefied by grief and fatigue.

A few minutes later she came for me and we went in and a skinny servant girl brought us some water to bathe and, wrinkling her nose, told Mother she would take and wash my tunic.

Finally clean and having been fed a few spoonfuls of lentils, I fell asleep on some straw in a back room. That night, when the street outside was the quietest it had been since our arrival, Mother got up.

"Go back to sleep," she said, covering me with her veil. And then she went out. She came back a little while later but just when I started to sit up, to say I was thirsty, I realized she was not alone.

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I could hear the heavier step of another entering our tiny room behind her. I could smell him.

I huddled under the too-thin fabric of her veil in the dark, mouth dry, heart pounding. I screwed shut my eyes against the rustling of clothing, the hot stink of him in the stale air. Against the strained grunts of this man who was not my father, who did not talk to her in low tones as Father had, but got up as soon as he was finished, tugging his tunic on the way out as though he had just used the toilet.

I lay still long after he left, until the sound of Mother's quiet weeping subsided and I was sure she had fallen asleep. I stayed silent so she would not know that I had seen what he had done to her, or what she had allowed him to do.

We stayed there for weeks, waiting for the countryside to be safe, listening to reports of Romans, Syrians, and Arabs overrunning the region--all under the standard of Rome. Of Jews nailed to crosses still warm from those crucified before them. The new king was in Rome pleading, it was said, for his crown.

I recovered from the fever and took up with a band of wild boys in the city.

We would rough up our faces and beg copper quadrans off of foreigners near the pagan temple. Sometimes we would steal. But when I pointed out that the boy who was our leader had not divided the coins evenly, they beat me up, called my mother a whore, and took every coin I had.

I stayed away after that, and could not bring myself to look my mother in the eye.

By the time we left Scythopolis late that summer, it was said that two thousand Jews had been crucified for the rebellions throughout Israel, so that the stench of bodies lining the roads to the Holy City rose higher than the smoke of the Temple itself.

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I cried when we came to Kerioth, but not in the same way that my mother did, falling into her sister's and her aunt's arms. I cried because although I immersed in the mikva and fasted for the first time without incident, I knew it changed nothing. It would not return my brother from slavery or my father from Sheol. Nor would it restore my mother's honor or take away the bastard already growing in her belly.

I went to work writing letters for others in the village and studied in the synagogue. By the time I turned twelve I could read in Aramaic, Hebrew, and Greek. I recited my brother's best rhetoric and amazed my teachers. But their praise was hollow in my ears, because I knew I didn't deserve it and that I was as false as a coin struck from bad metal. I stayed away from lessons for a while after that and got into trouble so that my mother threw up her hands, not knowing what to do with me.

I harbored little hope by now of becoming a sage. The others might not know about the uncleanness we had all suffered, but I did, bearing it like leprosy beneath my skin.

By the time I turned sixteen, Herod's son Archelaus failed utterly as king.

Despite setting several captives free--several well-known brigands among them--and promising to lower taxes, he proved as ruthless as his father. He was banished and Judea came under direct Roman rule while his brothers, Philip and Antipas, retained Galilee and the northeast reaches of Israel.

There was an uprising that year--the first of any real note since that terrible year a decade before--in response to the new procurator's call for a census so that Rome might inventory Judea in order to tax it. That year, Judas bar Hezekiah came out of hiding. All this time, I hadn't known whether he lived or died.

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This time, Judas did not wage war, but began to teach that to pay taxes to an emperor worshipped as Divi filius--the son of God--was tantamount to idolatry.

Hearing this, something stirred in me for the first time in years. That evening, the Shema was renewed to me in a way it had not been since I had watched Joshua pray it in Galilee. Hear O Israel! I was now a man with a mother and a younger brother to provide for yet I knew that I must go to join them. But by the time I had made preparations to leave my mother in the protection of her uncle just a few days later, word came that the revolt was already over and that Judas bar Hezekiah had been killed.

It was then I realized that not only did I not mourn Judas bar Hezekiah, but that I despised him. I despised him as much for squandering the hope of a bleeding nation as for his failure. Because in failing he had proven again that it was impossible to stand up to the satan that was Rome, and that the lives of men like my father had been spent cheaply.

The next day I went to accept an offer of betrothal from the father of a girl in our village. And then I wrote to my father's former patron, Nicodemus, in the Holy City.

That winter, I moved my bride, my mother, and my brother Nathan to Jerusalem.

I will never forget the day we entered the city gate. Walking through the streets, I imagined that I breathed for the first time in years. That I was finally home.

But I was not truly home until I came to stand before the Temple. As I emerged from the mikva and put on my clean tunic to enter her gates, I felt that I had woken up from a years-long sleep . . . from a years-long nightmare.

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It was not the same Temple I had known--the burn marks of that Pentecost still scorched the upper reaches of her porticoes. But neither was I the same.

Standing in the inner court, I inhaled the smoke of the holy altar and knew that my life before had passed away and that a new one had begun at last.

That day, I set aside dreams of messiahs and rededicated myself to the keeping of God's law.

I knew a kind of peace after that for many years.

And then, shortly after Purim in my thirty-eighth year, that peace shattered.

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IMMERSION

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6

I loved the Holy City best at two times of day: at dawn and at the going out of day.

Jerusalem in the morning was a city full of promise. When even the streets most rank with urine seemed on the verge of renewal, the stones of the oldest city gates set in tension as much as mortar, as though waiting, in silence, for something.

And there was nothing more stupendous than the moment just before sunrise, when the Temple, hulking over the upper city, seemed to stir. When the first rays of morning struck the stone so that it glowed ruddy as skin. It gave me pause whenever I saw it, as though it had nearly assumed human flesh . . . before the sanctuary became the gleaming white of the most beautiful building on earth. And then again, at sunset, that glimpse of russet stone, as though the blood that ran from the great altar's drains to the Kidron Valley was not the blood of animals, but the blood of the Temple itself, poured out for the lush life beyond the city.

My steps fell smartly on the southern stair as I ascended to the Temple. They were proud and purposeful and with good reason: My

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wife, Susanna, was pregnant and soon to deliver what the midwife was certain would be a boy.

My hope soared. This was the longest Susanna had carried a child in years since the two that had never come to term and the daughter we had lost while she was still in swaddling. And a son! The Lord had remembered me, and the day would come when I would see the covenant carved into the flesh of my flesh by circumcision. Though I had been a man since the age of thirteen and studied Torah all my life, I felt for the first time that I was on the cusp of some promise, some mystery between the Lord and me alone.