The Liars' Gospel (14 page)

There had been a fight, a week earlier, between some of those different factions. A man had been stabbed with a knife and
they had left him in Rafa’at for his wound to mend. Iehuda had not thought of it after that day. But he found himself thinking
of it now. What would happen if he argued with this crowd of angry men? He felt afraid. And ashamed of his own fear.

Yehoshuah knelt down and clasped the farmer’s hands.

“Are you dead?” he whispered softly.

The man, pulling one rough paw from Yehoshuah’s grasp to wipe away the tears from his eyes, looked bemused.

“I say again,” said Yehoshuah, “are you dead? For you say you must bury your father,” and then he turned to the crowd behind
him, all straining to catch his words, “but I say,” and he raised his voice to a shout, “let the dead bury their dead. You
must come with us to announce that the kingdom of God is here!”

The men standing behind Iehuda cheered, for they understood this to mean “nothing is important but our own work,” and the
people far back in the throng who could not see what was happening cheered. The tenderhearted women did not cheer, for their
hearts went out to the farmer, from whose eyes tears were falling like ripe fruit. And Iehuda did not cheer.

Yehoshuah stood up and walked on. Iehuda looked back at the man in the mud and dust at the side of the road, who would have
to bury his father that afternoon.

There grew to be an inner circle within the inner circle. Iehuda was not part of that group. It was Shimon, and Jeremiah,
and Jona. They had not been the first to join the wandering rabble, but they were zealous. Jona saw signs and wonders in every
speck of dust. Jeremiah muttered darkly about the days that are surely to come when the Lord will destroy all those who do
not hearken to his holy name. Shimon was a steady man: he was not enraged by doubters but filled with sorrow and pity for
them.

There was a day when Yehoshuah took those three alone up into the hills to pray. They were gone for a night and a day with
no food or water. Something happened there, but Iehuda could never root out exactly what it was.

Shimon, the most solid of the three, said that he had fallen into a deep sleep and dreamed that Yehoshuah was standing with
Moses and Elijah, and this dream had the marks of truth to it and he was convinced by it in his own breast. Jona said he had
seen the gates of heaven open and the very voice of the Lord had spoken to him by name, but Jona had been known to hear the
voice of the Lord in the honking of geese. Jeremiah would say nothing of what he’d seen, only that it had been vouchsafed
to him that Rome would burn and the kingdom of heaven would come to earth, which was no more than he had always said.

The longer Iehuda asked, the less this tale became. And yet he heard in the camp that the three men had been taken up in a
fiery chariot to the heavens, where the good Lord had spoken to them and told them Yehoshuah was His promised one. He found
one man selling white pebbles which he said had been taken from the holy place where they ascended to heaven. Women were sewing
them into the hem of their clothes to keep off the evil eye.

Iehuda wanted to discuss the matter with Calidorus, who continued to travel with them, waited on by his body-slave, even as
it pleased him to walk like a pilgrim. But he felt somehow repulsed by the idea. He contented himself with imagining what
Calidorus would say. Something Greek, he imagined, something from philosophy. Calidorus often quoted from the philosopher
whose very name—Epikouros—was a byword for heresy among the rabbis.

He might say, “The gods, if there are gods, do not concern themselves with us. How can they, when we see the crippled and
lame all around us? If it pleases your friends to think that they saw the gods, so be it. It pleases me to go to a play and
imagine I have seen Helen of Troy or Agamemnon in his war cry.”

This answer, from an imaginary Calidorus, pleased him. He welcomed the worm into his breast.

An insanity came upon them. They argued over who could sit closest to Yehoshuah, like children fighting over a toy. As if
he were already dead and they were arguing over his clothes or the scraps of flesh adhering to his body. Iehuda felt it too.
He had always felt it, the desire to be close to the man. The sense that it was impossible to be too close, that he would
allow himself to be utterly consumed by Yehoshuah and consider it an honor. This had always been why he struggled so hard
to remain separate, to find a place deep in his breast which did not belong to Yehoshuah.

But those weeks, the thing began to tip over into madness. There were more of them every day and at the edges of the group
there were more soldiers watching. They all knew that with a rabble this large there would be spies from the Prefect, there
would be those who would report his words and deeds and the size of the crowd for a coin or two. But Yehoshuah did not tell
them to disperse. It was unwise. They looked now like the kind of rebellious multitude which the Romans dealt with so swiftly
and so successfully. They looked like bodies waiting to be nailed up along the road to Jerusalem.

None of the others would say this to Yehoshuah, so it fell to Iehuda again and again to say, when they ate bread together
in the evening, “We should be circumspect. We should disband now and re-form in a few weeks, like we did before.”

Yehoshuah did not reply, except with a smile. The others hated Iehuda for saying it. He saw that they were enjoying the sense
of danger, for it was also a feeling of power. He could not tell truth from lies anymore. He heard someone say that the priests
at the Temple were plotting against them and this sounded like absolute insanity. He heard someone else say that King Herod
Antipater in the north had paid for information on Yehoshuah and this also seemed madness. But there was such certainty in
the group and he was embedded in it so completely that he could not see them from the outside any longer. Perhaps they really
were the most important thing in Judea.

It was coming towards a hot, late Passover. The days and months had fallen out so that it was already full spring by the week
before the festival. The air was ripe with the green scent of acacia trees and with the hum of hovering insects.

They came to the house of a friend—a merchant by the name of Shimon, whom people had called Shimon the leper because he was
so unpopular. Shimon had been impressed with Yehoshuah’s teachings on the value of riches. The man had given much of his wealth
to the poor and every day now the beggars of Beit Ani came to the back door of his home to receive bread. They were to stay
there one night, with Yehoshuah in the bed of honor, and then walk on closer to Jerusalem.

The house was heavy with the smell of a great crowd of the sick and the dirty and the poor. The smells all mingled together:
body odor and dirty clothes and women’s menstrual blood and a man with fetid sores on his leg and the animals and the tanned
animal hides and the half-soured milk in the jars on the floor and the onions on the breath of the camel drivers.

People came for cures, but Yehoshuah performed none that day. His mood was merry and indulgent and he let visitors come with
little gifts—a sheepskin, a basket of dried fruits, a silver charm—or to tell him, bowing and twisting their bodies in attitudes
of worship, that his face was the face of a holy man, a true prophet of God. Every time they did this, Iehuda felt more uncomfortable.

Towards the end of the afternoon, a wealthy woman wound her way through the crowd. She was dressed in a fine silk robe, her
hair elaborately turned in several plaits around her head, and she was mad. Either mad or drunk, as was clear from her unsteady
movements, from the way her eyes darted around the room.

She was carrying a small alabaster jar of perfumed oil—the stone was thin, expertly worked, the jar much longer than it was
wide, a cool narrow vial. The container alone would be worth a month’s wages. She stopped in front of Yehoshuah’s chair of
honor, bowed low, ceremoniously but with a curious simpering smile on her face. She cracked the stem of the jar so that they
could smell what she had brought. It was spikenard, a dense scent of mint and spices and a meaty richness. The smell traveled
up and around the room, cutting through the sweat and garlic and sour milk with its scouring sharpness. This was a precious
gift—people brought them valuable possessions now, she was not the first, but spikenard was one of the rarest components of
Temple incense, brought from Kush in India.

The woman smiled lopsidedly. Her eyes rolled back in her head. Iehuda wondered where she’d got the perfume from, what she’d
done to obtain this vial worth more than a year’s work for a laboring man. She held the jar in her left hand, and reached
out her right to touch a lock of Yehoshuah’s hair. Yehoshuah smiled at the woman. She was breathing very quickly, her breasts
rising and falling. A sheen of sweat coated her skin. Iehuda wondered if she was about to throw herself bodily onto Yehoshuah—this
had happened before.

Instead, she spoke in a slow, slurred voice:

“May I anoint you?”

Iehuda waited for Yehoshuah’s easy smile, his way of turning a refusal into an honor. He would say no, but he would show her
by his kindness that her offer had been accepted in the spirit if not on earth.

This was not what happened.

Yehoshuah’s glance met the woman’s eerie, glazed eyes.

He bowed his head before her for the anointing.

She tipped the vial. The oil began to flow out over Yehoshuah’s hair. It was enough, more than enough, plenty. Someone rushed
to stop her—every drop that fell was a meal for twenty people, every thick glug was a pregnant goat, a pair of good shoes,
a field golden with high waving wheat. She laughed and cracked the vial between her hands. The whole fortune of it poured
out upon Yehoshuah, coating his head, his shoulders, filling the room with the thick, nauseating, choking scent.

There was no other smell now. The aromas of life—of bodies and animals and dirt and fermentation—all those smells were gone,
as if the sounds of the world had been blotted out by the clanging of a terrible gong. This one, too-clean odor, the smell
of new-cut pine wood, was all that remained. Beautiful, yes, in a way. But revolting, because it was too strong and because
it had destroyed everything else.

The woman was giggling still, crushing the alabaster to smaller and smaller pieces in her oil-covered and now blood-streaked
hands. One of the other women pulled out a rag to wipe those poor hands. It was not purely a charitable gesture. Even a rag
soaked with spikenard would be worth something. The woman did not resist, even when they led her out to the well.

The house emptied quickly. No one could bear to be near the smell of too much goodness gone to waste. The floor was stained
with the oil.

“The worms will enjoy their heaven-scented earth,” said Shimon.

There were only three or four of them left around Yehoshuah. Those who never left.

Something was building in Iehuda now. Like vomit, it would not be denied.

Iehuda said, “Why did you let her do it? We could have sold that perfume and given the money to the poor people all around
us. It’s worth a year’s wages to any of these men.”

He kept his voice low and spoke quickly. There was nothing to be done now about the spikenard. The oil was dripping still
from Yehoshuah’s face and hair onto the floor, every drip a meal, a blanket, a handful of good seed. In the streets they would
smell the intense foolishness which had been done in this house. Half the village would know it by walking past the door.
The earth floor might smell of it for a year or more.

Yehoshuah looked at him, that bright burning look.

“Iehuda,” he said, shaking his sorrowful, dripping head, “Iehuda, why do you insist on seeing only with your eyes?”

I don’t, he wanted to say. I saw you with my heart, and you have led me here, to a place I do not understand.

Iehuda had heard it said: if the rabbis tell you that day is night and night is day, believe them. He thought perhaps he had
once been capable of this. He did not know whether he was luckier then, when he could, or now, when he found he could not.

Iehuda tried to swallow it, like a Nile crocodile eating a new lamb. But he could not make it go down. Certain things cannot
be right, no matter how you squint at them.

“We could have sold it,” he said again, “to feed the poor.”

“Do you think I will be with you for much longer?” said Yehoshuah. “When God himself lays waste to the whole world, do you
think anyone will care that some oil was poured on the earth here?”

And Iehuda shook his head.

And Yehoshuah said, “If you cannot see, I cannot make you understand.”

He trailed behind the group as they walked on from Bethany, pretending to be tired, but he was muttering to himself and the
words in his mouth made his pulse quicken.

He said, out loud, to the broken yellow hillside and the scrubby bushes: “Everything can be justified this way.”

He said it again. In different words:

“If the world is to come to an end, how can we know that one thing is right, another wrong?”

He thought of a dozen problems to ask his master. How if the woman had thrown chests of spices into the ocean for Yehoshuah’s
sake? How if she had cut herself with lancets, as the Moabites do? How if she had sacrificed her own child? How much waste
of wealth, and self, and life, would have slaked him, made him cry, “Enough! Too much!”?

In his mind, he asked him, “How much do you think is due to you? Have you not yet honor enough?”

He could not find it in himself to speak aloud.

They camped that night and he was quiet.

Yehoshuah said, “We have come away from Bethany, but the stink of that perfume is still on your head, Iehuda.”

And he thought: how dare you know me so well as this? How dare you use myself against me?