Testament (32 page)

It was Yaqob, finally, seeing how unhappy I had become and understanding me more than I knew, who came to me and said he would seek out Yeshua and bring him home.

Why seek him out when he has abandoned us, I said.

Because he is the eldest, Yaqob said, and our father is dead.

I might have preferred then the stupor I had fallen into to reopening the wound that Yeshua was for me. But Yaqob was determined, and I could not bring myself to forbid him. The truth was I had little hope that he would find Yeshua, or that finding him, would be able to bring him home—we had lost our chance when we had first come from Alexandria, and I did not think we would see one another. Even then he had been like a restless animal that suffered itself out of loyalty to stay with its master but in the end must run wild.

After only three days, however, much to our surprise, Yaqob returned to us with his brother. He had found him at Sennabris—it seemed he had returned there for the high season.

I might have shown some pleasure then but did not dare to, since I did not know in what spirit he came, or if he would stay with us. But he said to me, If there’s work for
me, I am here to take the place of the eldest, to show that he would stay.

I could not find the words to answer him.

I have purchased a field for you, I said in the end, like a girl with a trinket, since it was all I could offer.

So it was that Yeshua returned to us, and was part of our family again. In the beginning, none of us could escape the strangeness of his presence or how he was different from us in his looks and his manner, so that there seemed a silence that spread around him like a pool, and even the kinship I had felt with him against the others when he was a child appeared to have faded, and they were the ones now I felt allied with. But true to his word he took his place among us, and together with his brothers worked the olive grove I had purchased and rented land for barley and wheat. And for a time it began to seem that in the death of Yehoceph I had after all found a new life, since I had my son at home with me now without my husband’s shadow and the darkness that had dogged me for so many years seemed lifted. As to the others, because Yaqob accepted Yeshua, so his brothers did, and my daughters were happy to see him with us on my account. Even the people of the town found nothing peculiar to remark in his presence, for just as they had thought it fitting, when he was on his own, that with so many sons in the house he should have gone his own way, so they thought it fitting now, after Yehoceph’s death, that as the eldest he should return.

At the olive harvest we purchased a mill to make our oil and set it at the edge of our grove. While the others shook the fruit from the trees, I helped Yeshua to press it, tending the olives while he guided the wheel. In those weeks it seemed we grew together again, because of the silence of the hills
there and the air and the sky and the rhythms our bodies fell into, which were deeper than speech. In his exertion I saw Yeshua was as beautiful as any Greek, fair-skinned and fair-haired, and it took my breath sometimes to look at him and know he was my son. There was that part of me that wished to dote on him now, to make up for what I had denied myself, and indeed sometimes I felt that because I had never known the love of a husband, I was drawn to him with all the excess of emotion I thus had not spent. Once in the market, because I had kept young, it in fact happened that he was mistaken for my husband, which shamed him. But I was strangely pleased at this since it seemed I thus possessed him more, or that he was bound to me not by blood but by choice.

None of these things, however, did I say to him or in any way make apparent, instead simply showing him a mother’s love, in my deference to him and the care I took in the things that touched on him. But where with my other children I was equitable and calm, with Yeshua I knew only extremes, so that there seemed little difference in the end between the restraint I had shown towards him when he was a child for the sake of shame and the restraint I showed now to keep my dignity. For his part, he remained inscrutable—indeed in many respects he brought to mind Yehoceph, fair and beyond reprimand in every thing but sparing in any emotion. For this, I blamed myself, since I had been mother to him. But also I thought he punished me in this way, knowing that I hung on any sign of affection from him. Sometimes it appeared he went out of his way to make me see what I missed, bringing gifts for his sisters or praising them before me to show he was capable of such displays, but then presenting to me always the same dutiful forbearance.

Because of these hurts, over time, even if the very restraint I had taught him was their cause, I began to find fault with him. It was over the smallest things at first, his appearance or his manners, some tiny oversight, so that it was easy enough for him to let my censure pass. But soon enough a bitterness crept into my voice. Then after the barley harvest in the spring, because he had sold the crop without so much as consulting me, I complained of the price he had got, though it was not insufficient.

What do you care of the price, since I was the one who sweat to earn it, he said.

I lost my temper then.

You would not have needed to sweat and to work the fields like a common labourer, I said, if you had followed my counsel and taken a trade.

This was the sheerest hypocrisy in me, for I had been the one to disdain Zekaryah’s advice when he had given it. Yet when I had made the complaint I could not bring myself to retract it, though I knew the stubbornness of Yeshua’s mind and that he would not let my words pass. So when he had finished with the wheat as well, he came to me and said he had apprenticed himself to a shepherd.

This was the lowest thing, good only for criminals and the simple-minded.

You’ve done this to shame us, I said.

Yet I knew it was wrong to talk of shame to him, when I was the one who had put him always in its shadow.

With some virulence he said, I’ll rather spare you shame because I’ll sleep in the open, and our neighbours won’t see me returning to your house in dirty clothes any longer.

True to his word, he took to the pastures then and was gone from Notzerah for many days at a stretch. Since we had little to do in our own fields at that time of year, it might have happened that no one would have taken much note of this, for though the work was low, it was more respectable than idling. But during his respites he did not come home to us as he might have but rather took to the streets of Notzerah and began to live there as Artimidorus had in Alexandria, to show everyone in the town he had left his own house. He would sit at the edge of the market or near the assembly house like a beggar, and people did not know what to make of him, since they recognized him as my son. If they went up to him and asked him what his business was, he made some reply they could not understand, like Artimidorus used to do, except that in Notzerah, where there were no Greeks and where no one had ever seen the likes of an Artimidorus, he seemed merely to have lost his mind.

When I first got word of what he did, I went to him at once.

Now it’s you who imagines we are still in Alexandria, making a nuisance of yourself in the streets, I said.

But he said that he had found his trade now, which was precisely to be a nuisance, and refused to follow me home.

Thus the gloom I had felt for many years, and that I thought had passed, now came back in force, so that there were many times I wished Yeshua had never returned to us, but left us in peace. For though he would not stay with us, neither would he let us forget him, coming more and more often to the town now until his employer, I heard, set him free because he could not depend on him. Subsequently,
he was in the town every day, and because he had no livelihood, he had indeed begun to beg for his food.

Once more I went to him.

Your orchard needs tending, I said, since it was coming on to the harvest again.

Woman, I don’t have any interest any more in olives or barley, he said, and I could have struck him then for his insolence.

So I left him there in the street and told my children not to mind him, though I knew they went out to him and brought him food. And I mistakenly imagined again, as I had when he was a child, that he could not persist in his stubbornness but must come around to me in the end. But a number of the young men of the town, having discovered that he was not afraid to speak his mind, had begun to go to him now where he was and put questions to him for their amusement, hoping to draw from him some outrageous reply. They asked him what he thought of such and such a leader or if this or that trader was honest or if it profited them to study the scriptures when they could earn nothing by them. And because he always had an answer ready, which often enough showed some truth, he began to be known in the town for the things that he said.

It was not long, however, before he began to incur people’s enmity in this way. There were those who were ready to chase him away at the end of a stick because he had insulted them or called their good name into question, and many others who said he was a bad influence, since he had left his own home to beg in the streets and often called into question what people had learned from their teachers. Then there were some, because on several occasions he had complained against
Herod and said he had little respect for the Jews, who would have had him arrested for sedition. Yeshua was quick to point out then that many of the town’s leaders depended on Herod for their wealth and so feared to go against him, for they served as the contractors for his workers or as the middlemen for his goods. In this way the town began to divide between those who supported him because he spoke honestly and those who hated him for the same reason.

It happened at the time that there was a woman in Notzerah, a Jewess by the name of Ester, whose husband had run away with the brigands. After his absence had gone on a year or more she had taken another man into her house, though there was no news whether her husband was alive or dead. The elders condemned her for this and wished to drive the couple from the town, to free us from their example. But Yeshua, when the question was put to him in the street, asked what purpose it would serve to drive them away when we only forced their example on others. It seemed from this that he did not believe they should be punished in any way but merely left to follow their lusts. Yet there was a logic to his words. For as he said, it was no punishment to a thief if he was merely banished to the next town for his crimes, while in so doing we made ourselves into sinners by forcing on others the thing we ourselves could not bear.

But is it not also a sin, people asked him, to see those who commit a crime and do nothing.

Yeshua gave the example then of the child who blasphemed.

He isn’t banished to strangers, Yeshua said, or put to death, but rather looked to by his mother and father, who
teach him his error. So do we need to see to our sinners and not pass our work on to strangers.

There were many who were amazed at such wisdom in someone little more than a boy, and it was not long before the very youths who used to come to taunt him now came because they thought he spoke more truthfully than their own teachers. But the elders in the town were furious at the position he had taken. One of them apparently went to him and said, What authority do you have in the scriptures for what you say.

But he answered, Do you require authority for what’s merely common sense, which enraged the man.

For my part, I too was surprised at the arguments he made, not because of their wisdom, since I knew the acuity of his mind, but because he had attached himself to the cause of a stranger and shown compassion for her when he showed none at home. It seemed to me then that he took her part only in argument, from the rhetoric he had learned at the hands of Artimidorus. But perhaps I was mistaken. Perhaps he showed others the affection he could not to a mother as I showed him that owed a husband, for years later I heard how he preached forgiveness and love like the teacher Hillel, though I had never known these things from him.

Some of the elders, when they saw how openly he defied their authority and the power he had begun to have over the young, came to me at my home.

He will corrupt people, they said, since he speaks outside the law.

And they told me to look to him and to take him from the streets, or risk my own name.

I began to fear that they would discover what he was, and how much greater their censure would be then and how
much more severe the dishonour they would visit on all of us. And it seemed a tremendous bullheadedness in him that he should do everything in his power to keep us from an ordinary life, raising troubles for us and calling attention to what it cost me so much to hide.

I sent Yaqob to him, hoping he would fare better with him, though indeed Yaqob was one of those who thought Yeshua did well to question the elders and so had little argument to make. But then Yeshua came to me of his own accord.

Why do you try to silence me, he said, when I merely tell the truth.

But because of his arrogance I said, What can you know of the truth when you’re just a child.

The truth is that you’re only afraid for your own reputation, he said.

I grew enraged then, thinking how I had always thought of his protection, and still he accused me.

It’s you who needs to be afraid, I said, because you are a bastard and will be chased from the town.

From his look then, from the way his spirit fell, it was clear that even still he had not yet known the thing for certain. I was mortified, for I understood he had only taunted me all these years from his own fear, and had hoped against hope, and had perhaps all his life, from the days when Tryphon had first made clear to him his talents, wondered what thing it was that conspired against him, and kept him from the path of a normal life.

Return to your home, I said. You have a place with us.

It seems I have found my place, which is in the streets, he said.

This was in his sixteenth year. He left the town then, for all I knew to join the brigands, and this time I did not go in search of him, for there was all the world to search in and no thread, as I believed, that held him to me.