The Liars' Gospel (25 page)

“Come, come,” says Pilate, “you’re letting your injured pride get the better of you. And yet you are right…perhaps this city
is not yet worthy of the statues of Tiberius, their God-Emperor.”

The conversation continues. This, here, is the work of Caiaphas’s life. This.

There are only two outcomes to the ritual for a man who has a suspicion about his wife. She must drink the bitter waters.
And if she is guilty the curse will fall upon her and she will die. And if she is innocent she will conceive a child. And
if neither of these things happens?

Caiaphas’s wife does not die. She does not talk to him any longer except about matters connected to the family and the running
of the house. She sits and comments on his conversations with Annas and gives her opinion. Her belly does not swell and her
thighs do not wither.

But nor does she conceive a child. How could she, indeed, since he does not lie with her for several months? He waits, and
no sickness falls upon her and no child grows in her womb. In the end, without conversation, he begins to lie with her again
in the nights. If she conceives a child, then at least he will know, he thinks, as he plows her again and again. She does
not resist him. It is fierce between them now, as it never was when they lied and pretended to love one another.

There is another option. The rabbis tell us that if a woman has studied Torah in great detail, the merit of her learning may
delay the enactment of the curse on her body. Her knowledge is a shield, keeping her husband’s will from blighting her. If
a woman is learned enough, the curse against adultery may never kill her. This is why it is vitally important never to teach
a woman Torah.

Caiaphas doubts whether Annas bore these strictures in mind when deciding upon his daughter’s education. She does not conceive
a child. She does not die. He reminds himself that he did not perform the ritual entirely properly: that she should have made
a meal offering at the Temple first, that it should have been done in front of several priests. Nonetheless. She drank the
bitter waters willingly, having accepted the curse on herself. Perhaps Annas taught her a great deal of Torah. But perhaps
there is another reason.

Something has gone now. The presence of God that howled like a whirlwind, that spat blood and fire upon the Egyptians, that
stalked by the side of the Children of Israel through the desert, protecting and terrifying in equal measure, that is gone.
There was a time when every man saw God face-to-face at Mount Sinai, there was a time when His wonders were as clear as the
edicts of Rome and when His might toppled mountains and destroyed nations. There was a time when He raged for us and nothing
could stand before Him.

But not now. Not since that first stone tumbled from the wall and Jerusalem was breached. We must have done something wrong,
for that almighty righteous power to have withdrawn itself, to have become so small that it sits, alone, in the Holy of Holies
inside the Temple, and does not bestir itself to protect us even from faceless men following their leader’s orders. The only
explanation is that we did something terribly wrong.

Natan the Levite comes to inform him that, all being well, Hodia’s daughter will be betrothed after Yom Kippur is over. She
is older than the previous girl, it is not right to make her wait much longer. They have found a good man for her—he names
a man over twenty years her senior who is thought much of in the Temple. Caiaphas holds the man in his mind, trying to recall
him exactly.

“Itamar? That dried-up husk?”

The man is nearing forty and has never married, nor ever shown much interest in women. Caiaphas cannot imagine that Hodia’s
daughter will take much delight in the marriage, though it will cement a solid bond of loyalty for her father, for Itamar
is the brother and cousin of important men.

Natan nods his head slowly with a rueful smile. “I know. A girl like that. So…” Natan moves his hands unconsciously, as if
imagining squeezing her breasts.

“Ah, well. It will happen only if my wife should chance not to die,” he says, with that practiced smile.

Natan the Levite laughs. “Yes, only if the faint possibility comes to pass that your young and healthy wife does not die.”

She will not die. Someone has done something terribly wrong, but he does not know who.

Later, in the autumn, it is Yom Kippur again. He is sequestered for seven days. He fasts and prays. On the day of Yom Kippur
itself he, like all the Jews, does not eat or drink even water from sunset to sunset, so that they may pray for forgiveness
of their sins. He dons his golden robes for part of the ceremony. He sacrifices the bull. And then he wears the pure white
linen garments, for it is time for him to go into the Holy of Holies, to risk death in order to secure the Lord’s forgiveness
for His people.

He balances the shovel with the glowing coals on its blade in his armpit and on the crook of his elbow. He plunges both his
hands into the basin of incense, bringing out two thick, sticky handfuls. He walks slowly—the body moves more slowly when
it has taken no food or water—towards the Holy of Holies, the place where he will meet God. Two of his priests, with eyes
averted, draw back the curtain.

He enters the room. The curtains close behind him. The only light is the dull red glow of the coals. He relaxes the grip of
his shoulder muscles, placing the shovel on the raised platform where the Ark of the Covenant once stood.

Perhaps it was different when those holy items were here: not only the Ark, but also the stone tablets on which the Lord had
written the laws in letters of fire, the jeweled breastplate whose stones illuminated to give messages from the Lord, a jar
of the manna which fell in the wilderness, still miraculously fresh and delicious after so many centuries. We know that these
things were here because our tradition is clear on the matter. It was so, but somehow the things were lost when the Babylonians
invaded the country and burned the Temple and took our people into slavery more than five hundred years ago. This generation—obsessed
with wealth and status—does not, perhaps, merit the miracles vouchsafed to our ancestors. So perhaps it was different then.
It must be that it was different.

He drops the incense onto the shovel. The room becomes full of the scent of the burning resins and gums and spices at once,
a thick choking heady multilayered aroma. He breathes through his nose. He kneels. He prays, using the words he has learned
by heart, words of the psalms of David, who found favor in the eyes of the Lord. He begs the Lord for His forgiveness for
His people, he gives his service faithfully and holds the love of the Lord in his heart. This is the moment for which the
whole edifice was constructed: not just the holiest place but the priests and their courtyard, the men and their sacrifices,
the women and their prayers, the Temple herself. And not just the Temple, but the whole holy city of Jerusalem. And not just
Jerusalem but the whole of the land of Israel. For this moment here, when he will speak to God face-to-face.

And it is true that other men have died in this place, that their fellow priests have had to pull them out by the rope that
is even now tied around his own ankle. But he does not know what has killed them. He prays here until the incense smoke has
filled the whole chamber. And his heart yearns to the Lord, as it does when he prays to Him every day, and his mind is full
of the love of the Lord. But there is no crackling light, no sounds that are also shapes and colors, no miracle and no mystery.
No force pushes him to the floor, no voice rebounds in his head. He prays, and that is all.

And when the room has filled with the thickly scented smoke, he pulls back the curtain and leaves the empty chamber. And the
people rejoice, for he has returned from death to life and so they know that God has forgiven their sins. And his own experience
of the moments is entirely irrelevant.

THERE IS A
Roman sport. It is called “one of two will die, and the crowd will decide which.”

They love this sport. It is their most glorious entertainment. They play it with slaves and captured enemies, they roar and
cheer at the spectacle of it. They set up two men—perhaps one with a sword and shield, the other with a net and trident—in
a round patch of burnt sand with the smell of other men’s sweat and blood still in the air. And they say: fight. And if the
men say: we will not fight, they say: then we will kill you both. If you want to have a chance to live, you must fight.

And when one man is beaten and bloodied and breathing in ragged gasps on the floor, the first man raises his sword and looks
to the Governor or the Prefect or the Emperor, who listens to the shouts of the crowd. Mostly, the people like to see a death,
but if the crowd shout loudly enough for some beloved gladiator, the man may be spared to fight another day.

In this way, the Governor or the Prefect or the Emperor seems to have the gift of life in his hands. In this way, he appears
to be rescuing one man from death. Rather than the truth. Which is that he has condemned both men to die someday, in some
place if not in this, for no better reason than that the sport and the sight of it please him and the crowd. It is a good
trick, to kill a man while still appearing to be the one who saves a life.

When the time comes for Bar-Avo to look into the face of the Prefect, he knows that he sees a man who, like him, has killed
so many men that he can no longer remember their names or count the number or think of how each death felt as it escaped between
his fingertips. Men like these recognize each other, and Bar-Avo sees the same sense in Pilate of looking back and thinking:
so many and still not done yet? So many dead and still the business is not finished?

But Bar-Avo rarely looks back, if truth be told. For a man like Bar-Avo, everything is a constant present. Like a fight, where
each blow must be landed or dodged now, and now, and now. The life that he lives is like that. He is always looking into the
face of the Prefect, and he is always listening to the crowd calling out, “Barabbas! Barabbas!” and he is always, always feeling
the knife in his hand and advancing on the old man and attempting—he knows not exactly why—to comfort his shuddering as he
brings the blade towards his throat and bleeds him in less time than it takes to draw one in-breath.

There is Giora to his left, and Ya’ir to his right, and they are roaring at the soldiers. Ya’ir is shorter, stocky, already
sprouting hair across his chest although they are only fifteen. Giora is tall, athletic, nimble. He, in the center, is neither
particularly strong nor particularly fast, but he is brave and clever.

“Come on!” he shouts to the soldiers, and it’s easy because he knows Giora and Ya’ir will back him up. “Come and get us if
you’re not too fucking scared!”

It was like those dare games they’d played as children. Dare you to climb that tree. Dare you to walk into the dark cave alone.
Dare you to dive from that rock.

“Did you leave your balls back home, Samaritan scum?”

That one’s his too. It makes Ya’ir and Giora crease up laughing.

He starts a chant: “No balls! No balls! No balls!”

“I dare you to throw a pebble at those soldiers’ shields. Just a pebble. I dare you,” he says to Ya’ir.

A boy, dared to do something, can he refuse? Would he even want to refuse? When the pebble is so shiny and smooth in his hand,
and the sea of shields is so gleamingly tempting. Ya’ir stares at the pebble, feeling it with his fingertips. For a moment
they think he won’t do it. Then he throws it. It bounces off the metal and pings on the ground. And nothing happens. Behind
their helmets the soldiers are impassive.

A few other boys are watching them now. Standing behind them on the street. Maybe backing them up, maybe ready to run if something
kicks off.

“Come on,” says one of them, “something bigger. Come on.”

Come on. That pottery jar, the small one. Giora, greatly daring, spins around, noticing the dark-eyed girls watching them
from a rooftop. He hurls the jar, it shatters and still the soldiers do nothing. The boys are getting bigger by the moment
now, strutting and squaring their shoulders. They smell of boy sweat and bottled-up anger. They’re remembering how the soldiers
treat them, how they get pushed to the back of the line in the market, how the soldiers laugh at them, how they accuse them
of thieving when they were just looking, how they search them for weapons in the street like criminals. All of them are suspect
just because of who they are. They’re remembering how one of these soldiers took out that girl they like. Because isn’t this
always how it is, over and over again?

Come on. It’s his turn now, Bar-Avo’s. He hefts half a brick, feeling the weight of it, then hurls it in a wide arc. It bangs
against a shield. It leaves a dent, and the boys laugh and shout, “Look what you’ve done!” just like their mums would. They
surge forward towards the soldiers but then lose their nerve before they reach the line of bronze men. They jeer at each other,
fall back.

Someone throws a cobblestone. It gets a man on his head, he falls down. He’s all right, he’s moving, but the boys are shocked
for a moment. Bar-Avo can see him holding his head, moaning. It’s a nasty sight but at the same time exciting. Something’s
going to happen, his whole body knows it. The soldiers start shouting: angry barked commands. The boys don’t understand, the
soldiers’ accents are thick, the words they’re using aren’t Aramaic or Hebrew.

Bar-Avo feels himself becoming strong, the blood coming to all the right places as if his heart knew that this is what a man
is made for. Now he’ll be a man, right here, father or no. The soldiers start to advance, orderly in their phalanx, and now
it’s on. Giora runs towards the soldiers, roaring and throwing cobblestones with both hands, and he gets another one, knocks
him down, and then the line breaks, because one of the other men decides to chase, even though his commander shouts at him
to come back, to hold the line, not to be an idiot.

Bar-Avo shouts and laughs and grabs his friend’s arm and now they’re off, leaping and running, the blood surging and their
limbs singing, and shouting with fear and delight like a toddler chased by a parent pretending to be a monster. They whoop
as they scramble over stalls and climb lumber piles, and grab on to roof struts to run along thatch or tile, grabbing handfuls
of mud or broken pots to hurl at the soldiers. It is like the feeling when they first held a girl, because even though they
had never done the thing before they knew exactly what to do somehow.

Ya’ir is the first one to set a torch of straw and oil aflame and throw it among the soldiers with a jar of oil, which splashes
fire onto the men’s legs and feet, causing a great howl. He laughs when he hears the sound, baring his teeth, and the others
let out a rallying cry and begin to find flaming things to hurl.

And now it is a running battle on the streets. The soldiers advance, and the boys retreat, but each time they retreat they’ve
done a little more damage, and the soldiers are a little more ragged, and the boys are a little deeper into the streets of
houses where they’ve known everyone all their lives and anyone would take them in. Bar-Avo and Giora slip through the tiny
gap between the house of Shulamit the seamstress and Zakai the spice seller, the gap that doesn’t look like it’s there at
all, just wide enough to take their skinny frames, and collapse in the courtyard for a moment, their bodies aching from laughter
and fear and exertion all at once.

They climb up onto the roof. Bar-Avo shows his bum to the soldiers. All around the streets, there’s laughter and shouting.
From another rooftop, three girls are watching the battle, whispering behind their hands and giggling. The boys fighting down
below spot them and play up to it. Giora does a backflip along the street as other boys throw pots and bottles. The girls
applaud and shout—commentary to the boys on where the soldiers are coming from, admiration for the acrobatics, anger to the
advancing troops.

The thing turns from comedy to violence and back again as swift as a knife. One of those flaming jars of oil hits a soldier—his
leg and arm begin to burn and his screams are hideous before his fellows smother the flames with a blanket and even still
he whimpers as they carry him off. A red-headed boy is caught by the soldiers and, as he struggles to escape, one of them
pulls out a sword and cuts off—somehow, in an awkward close-fought struggle—three fingers of his left hand so he is suddenly
howling and bloody.

And yet over here Bar-Avo is clambering between buildings when a goat rushes out from a backyard enclosure, panicking at some
small fire, and knocks him to the ground so that his friends laugh and point and howl with mirth. He picks himself up. His
pride is a little injured and he makes up for it with a brilliant scheme, luring the soldiers down an alleyway with taunts,
then scrambling up the wall with his friends’ help while, from the rooftops, the others pelt them with rotten fruit in a box
they’d found left over from the market.

There is no conclusion to the battle. It goes on like this until nightfall, with the soldiers making sudden rushes, capturing
a few boys, and the boys throwing stones and sometimes fiery things and sheltering in houses and shouting rude slogans. A
storage barn burns and they watch the flames together, fascinated by the slow crumbling tumble of the building folding in
on itself. The fighting peters out before dawn, and Bar-Avo has still not been caught.

He has had a good riot. He was one of those young men throwing fire bottles but they did not take him, although a soldier
had his leg at one moment and at another he scaled a wall to find on the other side a soldier waiting for him with a red shouting
face. He and Giora helped one another escape through a soft place in the roof of a cowshed and then patched it up so that
the soldiers who followed them in could not find them. Giora laughed so much that he fell to his knees and almost sank through
the roof again.

There were girls watching them, and there was much pretence of protecting them even though the girls could easily have got
away, but they nonetheless stayed on that roof, playing at being protected. And after sunset, as the day began to grow dim
and the sky was the color of bright blossom shriveling to black and the night sounds of the mountains began to rise up, the
soldiers slunk away back to barracks. They were dragging a captive or two but went so sullenly and having taken so little
that the boys shouted catcalls behind them and the girls whispered, “You won, you really won.” There were two sets of hands
around Bar-Avo’s waist in the dark and two sweet pliant bodies pressed against him and the girls did not seem to mind sharing
as the night closed in and their hot mouths found him ready.

That is his first riot, and it seems as far away from death as it is possible for any experience to be. When he wakes the
morning after, his head so clear and alive that he feels that God has made the sun rise inside his own skull, he wants to
do it again, and again, and again, and wishes with his whole heart that every day would be a day of climbing and shouting
and throwing and goats and manure and backflips and oil jars, and that every night could be like the night that has just passed
sweet and warm and that every morning for the whole of his life would be like this blue radiant dawn.

He’s been taken notice of already. His cleverness and his daring and his eagerness for the fight—that last one most of all.
Men older than him, men who’d kept to the old ways and whose fathers hadn’t given up the battle even when that stone in the
wall fell in and the Romans breached the citadel, those men look at the rioters and pick out which ones seem to have something
more than the rest.

There is a man, Av-Raham, who sits in the marketplace most mornings, sipping occasionally from a bowlful of smoke. He has
a little potbelly and his hair is thin at the crown, but he has a shrewd eye, and men come to him all morning long with questions
and requests. He is the one who knows where those cartloads of wheat looted from the Romans ended up. His friends are the
people who receive the extra measures of oil which somehow appear when there are bandits in the north. It is he who owns the
sharpest swords in Jerusalem, and he to whom one goes if one needs medicine, or aid, or revenge.

They bring Bar-Avo to him the morning after the riot. Bar-Avo is cocky, at least at first. He’s only fifteen and he doesn’t
know what he’s doing here. A small corner of him suspects that he’s in trouble. A larger part of him doesn’t care, because
last night he had two girls and nothing that happens this morning can ever erase that. He’s still buzzing from the fight.

They’d found him naked under a pile of old sacks, fucking one of those two girls again, his hair a cloud around his face,
both of them moving slowly, tired but unable to stop. They’d waited until he was finished and then said, “Av-Raham would like
to see you.” And Bar-Avo had taken a swig of water from a jug by his side, swirled it around in his mouth, spat it out into
the straw and said, “What if I don’t want to see him?” They had explained most politely that Av-Raham was a good friend to
his friends. And, swaggering, Bar-Avo had gone.

There was something he liked about the deferential air surrounding Av-Raham. He couldn’t help imagining how it would feel
to be the man whom others talked to in low voices, asked favors of and consulted. He was old—over fifty probably—and not handsome,
not like Bar-Avo, but there was something charismatic about him. Over the years Bar-Avo would watch him closely to see how
he did it. The formation of the inner circle within his group of followers. The constant denial that he was a man of any importance
whatever. The impression that he was holding secrets and that, perhaps, he spoke to God. These are the skills by which a man
leads, inspiring both love and fear.