The Liars' Gospel (4 page)

And then she heard a tale from a merchant that he had been seen in Kfar Nachum, and he was preaching and working wonders like
a holy man. And they said another thing. They said he was out of his mind.

And it is evening, and it is morning. And it is time to prepare for the Sabbath. She washes herself and the children. She
bakes bread for today and for tomorrow. Just before sunset, she lights the oil lamps which will burn through the night and
makes the blessing. And it is Friday morning, and it is Friday evening. The Sabbath day.

The boy Gidon goes to pray with the men in Ephrayim’s field. She and the small children go to sit in the long barn and sing
the women’s songs welcoming the Sabbath. They share out bread and wine and make the blessings on it. They drink the sweet
wine made in years when they were young, the jars sealed with wax by their fathers, keeping in those long-ago summers until
this day.

Some of the women ask about Gidon. Not just, like Nechemiah’s wife, because they have a daughter who has taken an interest
in him. They have heard something. The news has come that there was a small rising in Yaffo several months ago, in the autumn.
A man appeared claiming to be the rightful king of Judea, the son of the king the Romans slew. He had followers, only two
or three hundred, but they tried to break into the armory. The soldiers quashed the rebellion easily enough, but the man himself,
along with several of his most important followers, had escaped.

Does she think…Gidon was from Yaffo, they knew, does she think that he might be one of those men?

She shakes her head.

“He is what he says he is: a fool, not a liar.”

Rahav puts a thin arm around her shoulder and hugs her.

“We still mourn with you.”

Rahav kisses the side of Miryam’s head. She’s a kind soul, especially with a glass of warm fragrant wine in her.

It’s Batchamsa who introduces a note of caution.

“They’re looking, though,” she says. “They’ve sent out armed men as far as S’de Raphael.”

“They won’t come this far north,” says Rahav, “not for a fugitive from Yaffo.”

“They might,” says Batchamsa. “They just keep looking.”

Rahav shakes her head. “One of his own people will betray him. They always do when they get scared or hungry and want to come
home. In a month they’ll have found him in a cave near Yaffo and that’ll be the end of it.”

Rahav does not say the part in the middle, Miryam notes. She does not say, “They’ll find him and then they’ll kill him and
that’ll be the end of it.” Miryam supposes that this is Rahav’s kindness.

She finds she feels a little protective of Gidon.

In the evening, they eat with her brother Shmuel’s family. His wife has made soup and roast goat leg with wild garlic. Gidon
eats with them. The village’s decision to treat him as an imbecile has faded. He has done good work on Miryam’s land. Those
who work deserve to eat.

Shmuel sets in on him again, saying,

“But you will return to Yaffo in the spring, yes? Before Passover?”

Gidon shifts his shoulders awkwardly. He is less comfortable here than he is with her alone. He does not talk so readily.

“I might stay here,” he says, and then seems about to say something more, but falls silent.

“He has been useful with the goats,” she says. “Iov can never bring them all in. We lost two over the winter. Gidon gathers
them safely in.”

Shmuel nods and takes more bread and goat covered in the thick paste of herbs and olive oil. Her brother is the patriarch
now, the one who makes the decisions since her husband has gone. But he’s not an unkind man. He dips his bread into the green
oil and swallows it, leaving a few emerald flecks in his beard.

“But you’ll tell me when you get tired of him, yes?” he says, then grins widely, “so we can send him on his way with courtesy,
of course.”

They said he was out of his mind. This, they came to tell her. The sympathetic women from the villages nearby came, when they
passed through for market day. “Passing through” was what they said, though Natzaret was a mile or more out of their way.
People who had not visited her for five years came to tell her that her son was mad. Just as a kindness.

He had desecrated the Temple, they said, and she could not believe it. He had loved going to the Temple as a boy, buying the
cake for a meal offering in the outer courtyard and accompanying the sacrifice.

He had done work on the Sabbath, they said, and she laughed and said, “Yehoshuah? Who never did a stick of work the other
six days of the week?” And they laughed too, because nothing is funnier than a mother mocking her own son, and agreed that
perhaps on this point she was right.

Yosef, she noticed, did not laugh at this joke.

As they were getting ready for sleep, he said to her, “It’s not enough that he’s run away? Now he brings disgrace on the family?”

She did not bother to argue. He wanted to lie with her that night, but she refused him, and he made that special noise again,
of unconquerable exasperation.

Those friends who loved her best told her simply that Yehoshuah was changed. That he seemed frightening sometimes, or frightened
himself. Those who loved her best told her that it had been hard to recognize him, that something in him had begun to work
differently, that even his face was changed. One said she heard he had been questioned by the Roman guard but they had not
held him.

“You should go to talk to him,” she said to Yosef one night.

He looked at her.

“It’s your job,” she said, because this sometimes called him to his duty. “You are his father. You should go and see that
all is well with him. I’m worried about him.”

“You’ve always worried about him over the wrong things.”

“Rahav said she’d heard that the guard questioned him. You should go there. Talk to him. Bring him home. Please.”

He stared at her levelly. His beard was all gray now, and his eyes wrinkled and his skin burnished, and where now was the
young strong husband who had lifted her up with one hand? And had loved her? She had thought that he had loved her.

“No,” he said, “he will have no more from me.”

“Then I will go myself.”

He breathed in and out. She saw in his face the same lines as Yehoshuah’s face. The same angry stiff mouth, the same twitching
brow. They had the same anger, that was the problem.

“I forbid it. Do you understand? You are not to bring disgrace upon us. I forbid it.”

She looked at him. Whatever he had been, he was not it anymore.

“I understand,” she said.

It was around two weeks after that when Yosef went north to take a look at some lumber and to trade. And she called her grown
sons to tell them what she intended, and they agreed to it.

She will not go with her family to Jerusalem this Passover. Her brother Shmuel will make a sacrifice for her. She and her
sister and Shmuel’s wife will stay behind, as they did when they were young women with many small children to care for. But
still, although she will not eat the sacrificed lamb with them in Jerusalem, there are duties to be performed. The house must
be cleaned, every jar that has held flour must be emptied and scoured.

Gidon helps her, carrying the wool blankets back from the stream when they are heavy and sodden and throwing them over the
rope she has tied between two trees. He climbs into the back of the clay-and-reed flour store and washes the stone floor,
bent double, inhaling the flour dust, so that when he comes out his eyes are red and his back cracks as he stands up. They
do not speak of the anniversary that is fast approaching until the very eve of Passover.

The day before Passover is time to bake the matzot—the flat unrisen bread that they will eat for the next week. The flour
cakes will last overnight, she will wrap them in cloth and put them in a stone jar to keep off insects and mold. She puts
the flat stone into the fire to heat, takes three measures of flour from the jar and pulls up a bucket of cold clear water
from the well. She begins to mix the water into the flour—swiftly, because her mother taught her that matzot should be made
as quickly as possible—pulling it into a dough, forming round flat cakes, pummeling them out with the heel of her hand, stretching
the dough to thinness. She makes dots in the surface of each cake with a wooden point, then quickly tosses them onto the heated
stone, where they immediately begin to bubble and crisp, becoming fragrant with wood smoke and with flakes of burnt flour
on the surface.

When she looks up, she sees that Gidon is watching her. She does not know how long he has been there. He watches her so tenderly.
He must have seen his own mother perform this task.

“We ate them, the last meal with Yehoshuah,” he says at last.

Her blood is chilled and her bones are old ash. She does not want to know what they did. She wants to know everything. Her
mouth tries to say, “Don’t tell me.” Her breath longs to beg him for every detail. She is thirsty for every moment she missed.
She wants to ask if there was a crumb in his beard from the unrisen bread. Did he remember to change his clothes before the
festival started? Would anyone but a mother notice? The desire, always coiled in her, always ready to pounce, springs now:
the desire to wail and say why was I not there at his last meal, why did I not force him to come home?

All this rises up in her. She throws another flat round matzo cake onto the hot stone. She looks at Gidon.

“I miss him too,” the boy says.

And she cannot help herself. There are always tears in her now. Her voice cracks and she says, “You do not know what it means
to miss him.”

She picks raw dough from her fingertips and lifts the flat matzo from the stone.

Gidon’s eyes, too, are filled with tears.

He says, “I have not your right.”

She finishes the baking, wraps the flatbreads in a cloth. Her sister will arrive soon with the lamb, so she banks the fire
up high, with the hyssop grass and herbs she has dried for the occasion. Gidon gathers armfuls of green branches to make a
smoky fire, separating out the dry logs which will burn long and evenly.

She says, “Did he ever speak of me?”

Gidon pauses and thinks. She can see that he wants to be kind to her.

“He spoke about his father,” he says, “or he told stories about a good father, and that father I think is God, who reigns
above. There are many stories and sayings he told about fathers.”

“But not mothers?” she says.

He shakes his head slowly, and she can see the thought is only now occurring to him.

“He told a story of a widow,” he says. “Perhaps that widow called you to mind?”

“Perhaps,” she says.

She believes Gidon that her son didn’t talk of her, or ask for her, or even think of her. He had distanced himself from her
deliberately a long time before.

People said he was out of his mind.

They agreed to journey to see him speak. Word came that he had circled round in a wide loop, through Hoshaya and Cana towards
Emek. It was a long trek—a quarter of a day or a little more. Yosef would be away for several days longer and they need never
tell him where they’d been. It was a bad business, to lie to him, but the brothers all agreed, and if the younger ones blurted
something out, they could say that they had imagined it, dreamed it. Yehoshuah was their oldest brother and they wanted to
see him.

They took the donkey, loaded it with water skins, bread and cheese and walked. At S’de Nachal, they met a woman on the way,
her hair uncovered, carrying a baby at her breast wrapped in a woolen blanket.

She said, “Are you going to see the teacher?”

Iov opened his mouth to answer but Miryam interrupted him.

“What teacher is that?” she said.

The woman checked on the baby, fussing and pawing, its little hand waving as it struggled to latch on to the nipple. Though
her breast was covered, the older boys looked away, disgusted or embarrassed.

She shrugged. “Some teacher. I saw one last winter who cast a live snake out of Rakhel who had the pain in her gut. She vomited,
and it came up and crawled into the grass covered in her blood and slime. Rakhel was better for a while after that, and after
that she was worse and then she died.”

“Is that the same teacher as this one?”

The woman shook her head. “We wouldn’t have him again in Emek. No, but this one will do cures, I expect, the same as the rest.
Are you sick, any of you?”

She ran her eye appraisingly over the children. They had all come, leaving their families some of them. Yirmiyahu, tall and
broad-shouldered, had a wife, Chana, with two months to go in her fourth pregnancy. Iehuda had two little boys with him. Shimon’s
wife had not yet borne a child and there were fears…well, it was too early to fear that yet. Dina was becoming a woman—time
to think of finding a husband for her—while Michal and Iov were still children, she older, he younger, tracing patterns in
the dirt while they waited for the grown-ups to finish their conversation. They were a healthy family, may the Evil Eye stay
far off. Miryam did not like the look the woman gave them—a jealous look, as a poor man might give a rich man’s flock.

“Thank God,” Miryam said, “we’re well. We’re bored, that’s all. The harvest is in and the sun is shining and we thought to
entertain ourselves—perhaps we’ll see this teacher.”

The woman nodded. She knew Miryam was lying but could not quite tell why, or about what. She sniffed, moved her shoulders
uneasily and the baby began to wail.

“He’ll be working his wonders at the synagogue on the hill.” She jerked her head towards the structure at the opposite side
of the valley.

“May you be blessed in your going,” said Miryam.

“And you in yours,” said the woman, without a great deal of sincerity.

As soon as she passed out of sight, Iov tugged on her skirt and began:

“Why didn’t you tell her, Ima? Why didn’t you tell her we were going to see Yehoshuah? Why didn’t you tell her he’s our brother?
He’s my brother—” this last addressed to Michal, as if Yehoshuah weren’t her brother too.