The Liars' Gospel (3 page)

She had been fast, but scorpions are also fast. It had grazed the skin of her hand with its sting, leaving a faint red score
on her flesh. As the day passed, her hand grew hot and heavy, her limbs ached. Her heart pounded, her knees buckled. She thought:
I shall die like that man in the village, but it is better that I should die than my baby. When Yosef came home from the fields
in the evening, expecting his supper, he found her lying on the straw-filled mattress with hot dry skin and glassy eyes and
the baby crying in her arms.

It was three days like that. Yosef brought her well water and she drank a little, and vomited, and the baby would not cease
from crying though Yosef fed him goat’s milk from a skin bag. But at the end of three days the fever broke. Yosef had to bring
her a pot to piss in because she could not walk to the stone outhouse. Her right arm and right leg, the side the scorpion
had stung, were numb like a fallen branch.

She recovered slowly. It was hard, with a small baby, but she was young and strong then and with God’s help she grew well.
Her right hand never regained all its cunning. Still it is slower than its fellow, still it will not close into a tight fist
only a loose one. She cannot use a needle with the right finger and thumb and had to teach herself to use the left. But she
never regretted her action, not as she saw him grow tall and wise and strong. When he was a grown man of twenty she would
thank her own hand sometimes for his life. Her hand, and the guidance of God.

But this past year, she thinks: what was it for? What had been the point of all those thousand thousand acts of work and love
that go to raise a child? What was the point of any of it, seeing what has happened, and that he has not left even a grandchild
from his body to comfort her?

The boy Gidon works hard, there is that at least. Her own grown sons will help her if she is ill, but they have their families
now, and Iov, the littlest one, is too small to be much use lifting and carrying. He minds the sheep, but he can scarcely
keep his thoughts even on that. Gidon has the single-mindedness that impressed and frightened her the first time they met.
He has cleared the back field, which has lain untended since her husband, Yosef, was with them. They will be able to plant
wheat in it, or barley, in a month’s time.

He has not asked her more questions. She has not mentioned Yehoshuah. Whenever she speaks of her sons, she says “my son Yirmiyahu,
the second one” or “my son Iehuda, the fourth.” So that he will know, and not think she is inviting conversation. He asks
her, sometimes, questions about the Torah. She has taught him, a little. It is hard not to, when his yearning is so open within
him.

He sees her once giving food to one of the beggars who pass through even an out-of-the-way village like this. A blind woman,
making her way with a stick and a bundle of little dolls whittled from wood in her backpack. Miryam slips a few extra apples
into the woman’s pack before she walks on with some other travelers.

After she leaves, Gidon says, “My teacher said that the poor will always be with us.”

And she cannot help herself.

“If he wasn’t a fool, he meant that each of us can find someone who has less than us. Don’t you know that every Jew is obliged
to give charity? Even the beggars must give.”

“Tell more,” he says.

And she teaches him what she had learned when her parents took her to hear the great Rabbi Hillel speak, that our duty to
love each other is the highest of all the commandments of God. That our duty of charity extends even to our own bodies, and
we must care for them because our souls are guests in them.

He wants a mother, this boy, she can read it in the lines of him as he sits in the dust by her feet listening to her teach,
until it is time for supper and the children come in bustling and hungry. He wants a mother to notice that he is there, and
to teach him.

Later, Iov and Michal are sleeping and she tends the fire, banking it high so that it will burn slowly through the night.
Gidon is still in the house, leaning his long, thin frame against the wall, whittling a wooden stick to a sharp point with
his knife.

She says, “Who are your people?”

He says, “My family are those who believe what I believe.”

She has heard of such groups. The Essenes are one—they live together and follow the same customs although they are not kin—and
there are other small groups, those who follow the same principles or who gather around a teacher.

“And where are they?” she says, because she thinks he will say that it is a group who live in the caves, or in the desert,
or in the wooded hills near Jerusalem.

“We are scattered,” he says. “Now we who followed your son Yehoshuah are wandering. Teaching. We are spreading his words.”

She looks at him. He is leaning forward on his haunches now, observing her. He moves towards her. Not to touch, but closer
to her body.

“Become one of us,” he says to her, softly. “Mother Miryam, listen to the teachings of your blessed son and tell us what you
know of him. There must be stories”—his voice is low, so as not to wake the children, but he is speaking more quickly, with
a dreadful urgency—“you can tell the holy stories of his birth, his childhood. No one sent me to ask this, but I had a dream.
It was as the winter came on. In my dream, the clouds parted and a voice spoke from heaven telling me to find you. It said
that I must come and help you and work with you, to learn the stories you could teach me.”

She is tired now. Not angry anymore, barely afraid. He’s a good worker and a kind lad, but she is tired.

“There are no stories,” she says.

He reaches out towards her.

“There are no stories. He was a baby and then he was a child and then he was a man and then he was killed. That is the story.”

“But,” he says, “what kind of baby was he? How was his birth? What manner of child? How did his great wisdom first show itself?
And where did he get his learning?”

She sighs.

“Gidon,” she says, “you are a good boy. And you have no mother. Let me be a mother to you.”

He toys with his pointed stick, saying nothing.

“If I were your mother, I would tell you this: take a wife. I know you have only eight of your fingers, but there are many
girls who would have you willingly.”

The daughter of Nechemiah for one, her mother has mentioned this to Miryam casually more than once now, has happened to ask
if she knows whether Gidon has a wife somewhere.

“Learn a trade. You are skillful with your hands even still. Then take a wife. Fill her belly with sons and with daughters.”

He blushes a little at this, his face becomes bashful.

“Then you will think of your wife and your craft and your sons and your daughters, and forget that you came here for any other
reason. That is a good life.”

But she sees from his face that this business is not over.

He had been, she admits it to herself now, a distant child. Not always distant. Often helpful, often sweet. But a child given
to entertaining himself for hours. Yehoshuah could sit staring at the waving barley and when Yosef said, “What are you doing
there, boy, sitting idle?” he would reply strangely, with an odd question, “Why did God make the locusts?” or simply say,
“I am thinking, father.” But for all that, he seemed happy. He made friends easily. He had a way with him that was charming.

She remembers a small boy, Ze’ev, the child of Batchamsa from the village. Yehoshuah and Ze’ev played together, some game
of catching a ball and counting the throws. They were eight or nine. Yehoshuah threw the ball too far, Ze’ev made a lunge
for it and fell in the mud. It was funny. Miryam, half watching while sifting the dried lentils for stones, laughed. The boy
was covered in mud, brown streaks over his clothes and in his hair. Yehoshuah didn’t laugh, he simply looked.

Later, when he was settling down to sleep, he asked her, “What did it mean, Ima, that Ze’ev fell down?”

“It didn’t mean anything, sweet. He just fell.”

“But what did it mean?”

He returned to this thought again and again. What did it mean that the rain fell? What did it mean that the dog died? As if
the world were a book and each person and event in it had been carefully chosen, and their meanings could be understood if
one only read aright.

She and Yosef argued about him.

“He’s always hanging around your skirts,” said Yosef, when he came in from his workshop and found Yehoshuah reading, or thinking,
or whittling some wood by the fire when the other children were out playing in the orchards.

“He’s different to other boys,” said Miryam. “He doesn’t like their rough-and-tumble games.”

“You’re making him weak,” said Yosef. “You give in too easily.”

“Give in what? I should throw him out of the house and force him to play?”

“Yes! Or give him work! He’s nine, he’s old enough to work! Give him some of your jobs, working your fingers to the bone.
Set him to chop the wood, or carry the water. If he wants to be a woman, let him pluck the goose!”

“A woman? He should be like you?” said Miryam, and this was the start of their troubles.

“Like me? What do you mean like me?”

“Like you, never studying anymore as you did when you were young, never going to learn with the rabbi.”

And so it went on. And Yehoshuah sat by the fire, and although he must have heard every word he said nothing, did nothing.

As he grew to adulthood she feared, for a time, that she had done something wrong. Her fears were only calmed when she saw
that her younger sons were normal. Yirmiyahu was married at seventeen. Iehuda went to the wedding canopy at twenty. Shimon,
the quiet one, developed such an ardent passion for a girl from the next village that no one could hold him back and the wedding
was arranged when he was barely fifteen. But although they suggested girls to Yehoshuah, he would not meet them, and though
they tried to persuade him, he did not hear their words.

As a young man, when he and Yosef could no longer be in the same home together, he began to travel. He stayed for a time among
the Essenes, those men who live without women and refuse to defecate upon the Sabbath day. He took, for a year, more difficult
vows. She had grandsons and granddaughters from her younger boys and the oldest was still unwed.

He came back home for a time when he was twenty-seven. Still no woman with him, though she had hoped that after his wandering
he might return with a sweet bride and surprise them all with…what? With normality at last. But no. He was odder than ever,
more distant and strange. He would not meet anyone’s gaze, seemed always to be staring at something just out of view. He and
Yosef argued. When would he found a family of his own? Build a house? There was that far field, if he wanted he could build
himself a place there, but he could not live with them anymore, it wasn’t right, a fully grown man living like a child, waited
on hand and foot by his mother.

Yehoshuah was different now, though. Not quiet but angry, suddenly, with a violent rage that swept over his body and made
him go stiff and white-faced.

“You know nothing,” he said quietly, “old man.” And then, his voice rising to a shriek, “You know nothing, you know nothing.
You. Know. Nothing!” and he picked up a pot from the table and smashed it on the ground.

The other children were not there. They did not see what happened. Yosef and Miryam looked at the broken shards. Yehoshuah
stared, with flared nostrils and rolling eyes, at his father and then darted for the door. It was three days, that time, before
he returned.

He spoke to himself. Or he heard voices. Or demons. Only sometimes—not all the time, she told her other children when they
complained. He does not do it all the time. He is engaged in his studies, she said. He is reciting the words of the Torah,
to keep them pure and complete in his heart. Is it not praiseworthy? Yosef looked at him like a stranger at their table. Not
a son, an odd, full-grown man, whom they had taken in for no reason.

The arguments grew worse. There came a day, if she was honest she had known it was coming, when Yehoshuah hit Yosef in a rage.
Yosef had provoked it, probably. With a critical tone, angry words. And Yehoshuah rose up from his place by the fire and with
the heel of his hand whacked his father hard on the temple. Yosef was a man nearing fifty and Yehoshuah was young and strong.
Yosef stumbled, almost fell. Yehoshuah looked at his hand in disbelief. And Miryam found that she was saying, “Yosef! Why
did you speak to him like that?” Because what will a mother not do for her son?

After that, Yehoshuah wandered farther from their village, into the desert, for days sometimes. He had not founded a family,
he had no crops to tend or harvest to reap. When he returned from the wilderness he would not say who he had seen there or
what he had done. And she remembered the charming child he had been, the one who would reach his little hand out for hers
and show her a lizard he had seen, or a new fern, and she wondered when she had lost him.

Then one day, a week had passed, then two, and he did not return. For a month or two she thought he had died out there. In
her dreams the scorpion returned, or its parent to exact vengeance on her son for her murder of its offspring. Her hand ached
in its old wound and she thought perhaps it was a sign.

She and Yosef quarreled about it.

“Why were you always so hard with him?” she would say, and although she knew in her heart that there was no answer here, she
could not stop. “Why could you never show him kindness?”

“He needed less kindness from you, woman! He needed to be taught to be a man, instead of you constantly keeping him near,
mothering him!”

“I am his mother. What else should I have done?”

And Yosef made that disgusted noise he kept specially for arguments he knew he could not win with her.

She saw Yosef one day talking closely with the daughter of Ramatel, the blacksmith, a tall, well-built girl, but at that time
she thought little of it. Her mind was occupied with chewing over Yehoshuah and what had become of him and whether she would
ever hear from him or see him again, or if he had died somewhere out there in the desert and the wolves had had his bones.