The Liars' Gospel (10 page)

“Ah, Judas”—Calidorus pronounces his name in the Greek fashion—“we were beginning to think you had forgotten about us entirely.”

There is acid in his tone.

“Never,” says Iehuda. “I was detained by some business in the market, that is all. My apologies, gentlemen.”

Calidorus eyes him suspiciously.

“Business? I thought”—he puts on a laugh—“that all the business you would ever have is been and gone.”

“My apologies,” says Iehuda.

It is time for him to perform.

He is not exactly a guest at the banquet, just as he has not exactly been a guest in Calidorus’s house these past months.
Not a slave, no certainly not that, but neither precisely a friend. He has been treated well, allowed to roam as he please,
fed and supplied generously with wine, given clothes and two rooms of his own and even writing instruments and certain books.
But there have been these parties. His presence has been requested in a way which is slightly firmer than an invitation. He
has begun to wonder what might happen if he refused one of these generous offers of “an evening with some friends.”

He takes a stance in the center of the room. The other men hush each other loudly, one spitting into the fish with an excessively
enthusiastic “shhhhh.” In a dark corner of the room, Iehuda notices, two slaves are standing almost motionless.

Calidorus introduces him with the usual flourish.

“Behold the man before you,” he says, “once a follower and close confidant of a man some called the King of the Jews, but
now a guest in my house. Since the subject of debate tonight is the gods, whether they are wise or foolish, to be loved or
to be feared”—Calidorus had produced a series of such topics for debate at his symposia since Iehuda came to stay—“his assistance
will be invaluable!” He beckons a slave to fill his wineglass again. “Come, tell us, Judas of Cariot, tell us about the God
of the Jews and how your master was very nearly mistaken for him!”

“We have heard,” says one of the men, his face flushed with drunkenness, “that you Jews believe that your God lives in only
one house in Jerusalem! Is he not as wealthy as our gods, then, who can afford to keep up many homes?”

The others find this hilarious. One laughs so long and loudly that he begins to choke, and the slave to his right has to help
him to some wine.

Iehuda sighs inwardly. It is one of the things that every gentile has heard about the Jews. Like the lie that Jews worship
the pig and that is why they do not eat it. Like the lie that at the center of the Temple in Jerusalem, in the most sacred
place, there is a donkey and its shit is piled up around it. Like the lie that Jews hate their bodies and their wives so much
that they only make love through a hole in a sheet. How do these things begin? Which debased mind invented them? Who chose
to pass them on, unthinking?

He has learned to play along with such tales rather than challenge them. Or to circumnavigate them, like a boatswain foreseeing
choppy waters. He tries to tell the truth jokingly.

“Ah,” he replies to the drunken fool, “perhaps it is that our God is more loyal to us. Like a loving husband, he stays close
to home. While we all know how Jupiter spreads his…favors.” He mimes the thrusting motion of the body, the bunching of his
thighs reminding him suddenly, overwhelmingly, of the musk scent of the red-haired woman in the temple.

But the trick works. The other men laugh. One punches the drunken questioner gently on the arm.

“You’d do well to learn from them, hey, Pomponius? Stay a little closer to home and maybe your wife wouldn’t stray so much!”

The others laugh and Pomponius, a jowly man in his fifties, though still with a fine head of thick black hair, reddens and
scowls and drinks more wine.

Calidorus, Iehuda notes, looks nervous. Rein it in, Iehuda says to himself, don’t embarrass important guests.

“Ah”—he fakes a little laugh—“perhaps it is just that our God, like a wise husband, knows he cannot trust us, as no man can
trust a woman! If he left us for a moment, we would start rutting with some other god.”

He does a comical little mime of a woman peering through the curtain of her house, seeing her husband leave, and immediately
grabbing the nearest slave and mounting him. The men laugh uproariously, toasting each other with wine, spilling more than
they manage to get in their mouths. He has them now.

“Yes,” rumbles Pomponius, relaxing a little, “you can’t trust women.”

Calidorus gives Iehuda a small smile.

“But now,” says Iehuda, “to my own small role in the downfall of a god. It is hard now even to recall how different I was
back then. If you can believe it, I had a full beard.” He cups his two hands upwards at his waist, to indicate a beard so
long that these clean-shaven Romans grimace.

“Not only that, I was a virtuous and honorable man. I prayed every day, I observed the festivals and the Sabbath, I kept to
the old ways of cleanliness in foods and in washing my body and in making sure I fucked only my own wife, and not anyone else’s.”

He winks broadly, as if to say that he is exaggerating slightly here. The men chuckle. Iehuda has read Ovid, with the stories
of gods fucking women, women fucking animals, animals turned into human beings so that they can rut and grunt and screw. He
understands what these people are like. They would not really believe that any healthy young man could have been a virgin
at twenty-eight when he took a wife, that it would never have occurred to him to be unfaithful to her. Perhaps they would
not even believe that he had never eaten the flesh of a pig.

So he tells them the story they want to hear. It is a jesting version of tale, he has rehearsed it many times at many such
dinners. He knows exactly where to pause, where to emphasize a joke, where to undercut a tragic moment, turning it to ridicule.
In the version he tells, he is the impudent puck, the fool who dares to challenge the king. In this story, Yehoshuah—his friend,
the man he loved best in all the world—becomes a puffed-up little prince who waved his needlelike sword at Roman rule. Iehuda
becomes the naïve innocent who says, “If you irritate their skin, they will swat at us all.” He paints himself as foolish,
giving his friend up and believing that Pilate would do no more than scold him. The men laugh. They drink more wine. Calidorus
is pleased.

And while he tells this liar’s tale, Iehuda reminds himself of how it really was. He does this every time, although it pains
him, because he must know it, if only in his heart.

He had been so holy and abstemious that no Roman would believe it. His father had died when he was a boy. He had worked the
farm, and attended the Temple on holy days, and cared for his mother and his two younger sisters, and only when they were
fed, and wed, did he think of himself. He was a boy who loved the Lord too much, if such there is. Loved Him too much and
thought of Him too much, and wanted only to do His will and know His words. The days in Jerusalem for the three festivals
were his only respite from work, and they were joyous indeed, for then he was close to the place where God lived. And when
he married—yes, at twenty-eight, and yes, a virgin, and yes, this had not seemed a special hardship to him—a thoughtful and
hardworking and quiet man, when he lay with his wife that first time he thought of the deed as much a joining with God as
with the shrewd and lusty woman, Elkannah, who had consented to marry him.

She worked in the fields by his side and spun wool and wove cloth and baked bread, and he felt lucky past imagining—though
he was too serious a man ever to be freely joyful. His beard was long and full, though Elkannah used to sit astride him on
the bed and trim it with the knife when he let her. He still remembers the curve of her behind and how neatly it fitted into
his two cupped palms, and how his cock would rise to meet her while she wriggled on his lap and laughed and told him to hold
still or she would end by stabbing him with this knife and who then would provide for her and the children they would surely
have, would he think about that?

But when he was twenty-nine a hard fever passed through the village of Qeriot. It had been a long hot spring when they were
taken down and water was short in the mountain streams. Only the well gave a good supply and some days they were too weak
to lift and turn the bucket. It was a blinding fever, putting black spots in front of the eyes and then making it too painful
to look out in full sunlight. But it was his fault, he knew, even though he had been as sick as her. He should have found
a way to get water.

On the third day, he managed to leave his bed to walk to the well. He tottered like a newborn lamb all the way there and all
the way back, with the black spots hovering at the edges of his sight, but when he brought back the water Elkannah was dead.
Quiet in the bed, as if she had slipped out between one breath and the next. As if she had simply forgotten to take that next
breath and might remember in a moment, wipe her hands on her apron, chide herself for her foolishness. But she was gone.

And then something else was gone, suddenly and without his consent.

It was not the sweet soft scent of his wife in bed in the mornings that he missed the most—though he missed her beyond enduring.
He missed most the God who he had always felt watching over him, who in quiet moments he would speak to and imagine that he
heard a comforting response. Who he had wept to on long nights after his father had died and who had placed a hand upon his
neck and said, “I am your Father in heaven, and I shall give you strength.” He felt that the line joining him to heaven—like
the cord that connects a baby to its mother—had been severed. Perhaps the Father was still there, but Iehuda’s face was turned
so far away that he could not tell any longer.

He thinks now that it may have been a crime to feel as he did. To mourn for a God more than for a wife? But it is so.

Some time passed, but he did not measure it. A handful of seasons, and he worked still just the same, because what else was
there to do, and the people of the village—who had themselves lost parents and children, spouses and siblings—said to themselves,
“Before long he will take another wife, he will have sons and daughters and forget this first one.” They did not know that
his heart was as cold as the earth and as empty as a dry wheat husk.

And then the man came to the village. Iehuda had heard nothing of him. The decision to go and listen to him speak was merely
the choice between a long night alone in his home and sitting with the people to hear whatever foolishness they would hear.
He had seen dozens of such preachers over the years, he and Elkannah had gone to listen to them sometimes and joked over their
prattle or, occasionally, debated their wisdom.

This man had not been so much different, at first. Telling tales to illustrate his messages, talking about God’s love. At
a certain point, he fell silent. Sifted the earth with his hand. Rubbed his forehead. Looked up, as if searching through the
crowd, and with his eyes found Iehuda, and he held the gaze, and held it, and Iehuda could not look away.

“You are looking for God,” said the preacher, “but God is also looking for you. And He will find you. He has found you tonight.”

And Iehuda felt tears starting in his eyes.

“You have lost much.” The man spoke in a level tone, neither emphasizing nor attempting to persuade. He spoke as if he were
hearing the simple truth from heaven.

“God has felt your loss,” he said, “and He has not forgotten you, although you have turned your face away from Him. He speaks
to you today as a Father. Tell me whom you have lost.”

This was no secret. Any child in the street could have told him that Qeriot had been struck by the sickness. Every person
had lost something.

Iehuda said, “My wife.” It was defiant, the way he said it. Challenging the man to impress him.

“And your father?”

It was a lucky guess, Iehuda told himself, nothing more, a guess from a preacher. How many men of thirty have not lost their
fathers? The man could not have known that he had lost him especially young, that he had taken it especially hard.

But still he said, “Yes.”

And the man, whose name was Yehoshuah, unfolded his long limbs and stood up from the earth and walked over to Iehuda and gave
him a hand to lift him up. He put his hands on Iehuda’s shoulders and said, “You think that your Father in heaven has forgotten
you. But your Father in heaven is here. Now. Guiding me to you today. Listen,” he said, “this story is for you.”

And he told a story to the crowd.

There was once a man who had two sons. And because he had business both near and far, he sent one of his sons to do all his
commerce in the city and kept one by him to learn the ways of the farm. That son who was sent away burned with rage, for he
was kept from those he loved, and from his father. He sent angry letters back to his father, begging him to let him return,
but the father left him there for ten long years, while his brother raised a family, and lived at home, and tended the fields.
At last, after many years, the father brought the son home from the city.

“Father,” said the son, “why did you keep me away so long?”

And the father said, “My beloved son, you were always on my business, every moment you were away. And now that you have come
to understand all my doings, this farm and all that is in it is yours.”

“So it is,” said Yehoshuah, “with men. It is those who suffer who will inherit the kingdom of heaven, and our Father in heaven
has already picked out a golden seat for you, my friend. He loves you best of all.”

The man moved on with his talking and preaching. But it was as though Iehuda had been struck by lightning through the top
of his head and into the ground, because he wanted it so much to be true. Not like Job’s suffering, a test. But as this man
had said, a gift.

That night the man made camp near to the brook, with a small fire and some gifts of food for his trouble and three of his
friends, for few men followed him then. Iehuda, with about eight or nine others from the village, sat with them in their camp
and listened to them talk.