The Liars' Gospel (7 page)

He was sitting with three of his men, and when he saw her he frowned and she realized that for a moment he did not recognize
her. Oh, this was heavy and cold. But at last, within a heartbeat, his face broke into a smile.

“Mother,” he said.

They walked together, to soothe her sore legs, stiff from the ride. She told him at first all the news of the family, the
nieces and nephews and the doings of the village. He listened but he seemed distant. He replied, “That is good,” to news of
a good harvest or “Those are sad tidings,” to a death in childbed.

“And what of you?” she said at last. “Here you are, a mighty man with many followers.”

She took his arm in hers and hugged it. “Are you going to set up a great school and be a teacher? I would be so proud to tell
the people at home that you had founded a college, taken a wife…” She lets her voice trail off.

He paused his walking. She stopped too. He bent down so his face was level with hers.

“Mother,” he said, “God has called me. He has told me to go to Jerusalem at Passover, because it is time for a new heaven
and a new earth.”

His eyes were unblinking. His face shone like the moon. There was a smudge of dirt in the center of his forehead.

She felt suddenly impatient.

“Jerusalem, yes, very well. A good place to find new followers, but then what? Will you wander like this forever? Like a tent-dweller,
with no place to find rest?”

“God will show me. God Himself and no other.”

She frowned.

“You should come back to Galilee. We have fine pastures, the fishing is good. Bring your people there. Settle. Be a great
man in Galilee. Yes!”

“It is not mine to decide. I follow the will only of God.”

And this enraged her. Thinking of all she had done for him and how he was as stupid as a stone.

“Grow up,” she said. “The will of God is all very well, but we must also plan for ourselves. Be a man.”

“Like my father?”

“I will bring your father!” She could not control herself now, she took any weapon to throw at him. “He will come here with
your brothers and they will bring you back home and stop all this nonsense!”

Yehoshuah looked at her benignly. She felt afraid of him. What a foolishness, to be afraid of her own small boy.

“I love my father,” he said.

“That is not what you used to say,” she snapped back.

“I have learned a great many things,” he said.

“And you have not learned to send for your mother, or send her word that you are well, or write to her, or give her the honored
place at your table.”

He drew her to him and kissed her on the top of her head. “Ima,” he said, “you will see such things, you will be amazed.”

But he would not come home.

“Gidon is my grandson,” she says.

The tax collector knows her, and all her children and grand-children. He does not believe her. She can see his disbelief in
his face. She will have to try harder.

“He is my grandson, son of my son Yehoshuah, who died. He got him on a whore in Yaffo many years ago and I did not know it
till last year, when he came”—here she makes her voice waver like an old, grieving woman—“when he came and found me and told
me signs and I saw in his face that he must be that child.”

The tax collector laughs. He mutters something to the soldiers and they chuckle too. The mood has changed again. She does
not know what they are joking about. That she has taken in the son of a whore, who could be any man’s? That she boasts of
it? That she has been deceived by an obvious fraudster looking for an easy home and meals provided? Perhaps among all this
they will not notice another lie.

“He came last year, you say? About when?”

“In the summer,” she says quickly, “between the Feast of Seven Weeks and New Year.”

Around the square, there are looks from one to another, another to a third. It is a hard thing she is asking of them. If none
of them contradict her, they will all be accomplices. If Rome finds out they have lied, the whole village will burn.

The tax collector looks at them suspiciously, waiting to see if any will break. No one speaks.

“Well,” he chuckles, “if you have a whore’s son in your home, don’t let us detain you! Perhaps you find him as skillful as
his mother!” He chuckles to himself, then, evidently disappointed by the lack of laughter from the crowd, translates his joke
for the soldiers, who are as amused by it as he.

No one speaks to her after the soldiers leave. Rahav and Amala and Batchamsa are all there, but they do not embrace her or
comfort her. Their looks are wary.

At last, Rahav says, “You have put us in danger, Miryam.”

It’s true. She will have to set it right.

Gidon comes down from the mountain after two days. He has heard what she’s done before he sees her, she can read it in his
solemn face.

He looks different now from the way he was when he first came to Natzaret. Working outdoors has weathered and darkened his
skin. He is not so thin, that’s her good stews and bread. The place where they took off his fingers has healed to a fine silver
scar across the end of his right hand. The way he works now you’d think he’d been born like that. He will be all right, she
tells herself, when he has to leave.

She gives him lentil soup with flatbread and he eats it greedily. A thin dribble of the sunny liquid drips down the scraggly
beard on his chin. He finishes, and she tries to take the bowl from him to wash, but he holds on to it with his maimed right
hand, the three fingers stronger than both her arms.

He says, “Why didn’t you tell them where I was?”

She lets go of the bowl. She sits down opposite him.

He says, “I didn’t come here to bring danger to you all. That isn’t what I wanted, I didn’t…”

He slams his good hand down on the table. The earthenware pot jumps. He reminds her of her son at that moment. The memory
brings a sickness to her stomach, and the sickness makes her angry.

“Why did you come, then? What was it for? To stir up an old woman in her grief? To plague me with your love for a dead man?”

He looks as if he is about to say something, but stops.

She says, “There is no reason, except that you wanted a place to hide and knew that telling me your stories would make me
take you in.”

He stares down at his hand. At the place where his fingers were. He traces the line of the scar with his left thumbnail.

He says, “I came to bring you good news.”

She says, “There is no good news. My son is dead. That is all the news there can be.”

He says to her, so softly that she can barely hear the words, “He is risen.”

She does not know what to say, does not think she has understood, so she says nothing.

He looks at her, to see if she has grasped the heart of his words.

There is such a wild hope in her.

She has had dreams like this. Dreams in which the men come to her and say, “It was a mistake! He has not died, he was rescued.
He is still alive.” And dreams, more painful yet, in which she knows that she has one day, one hour to speak to him, that
he has returned so she could cradle his head against her body and smell the scent of him and hear the sound of his voice.
She has lost the sound of his voice.

Gidon says, “He died and rose again. A miracle made by God. He showed himself to Shimon from Even, and to Miryam from Migdala,
and to some others of his friends. He is alive, Mother Miryam.”

His voice cracks and his eyes burn and water and his face glows with a fervent intensity and she finds a feeling rising up
inside her so strong and so immediate that at first she cannot identify it until suddenly she finds that she is laughing.

She laughs as if she were vomiting, it is from the stomach not from a glad heart.

He is hurt by her laughter. He thinks she is mocking him, although this is not what is happening.

He says, affronted, “So laughed Sara our foremother, when God told her she would give birth to a child at ninety years old,
and yet it came to pass.”

And she stops laughing, although she cannot help a smile from creeping to her lips, as if she were merry.

She says, “You are too old, Gidon, to believe this.”

He feels a flush across his cheeks.

He says, “They came to the tomb, Mother Miryam, the tomb where he had been laid, and the body was gone. He had risen.”

And she laughs again. “Are you so foolish? Are you so unwise? Gidon, I sent my sons for his body as soon as the Sabbath was
over. So that he would not lie in a stranger’s cold chamber when he could be buried in the warm earth, like his forefathers.”

He looks at her, puzzled and aggrieved, and mumbles, “Yet he is risen. He has been seen.”

She says, “Did you come here for this? To convince an old woman that her dead son yet lives?”

He says nothing. She is angry now.

“If he lives, if they did not kill him, if he revived in the burial chamber, if God returned him to me, why is he not here,
Gidon? Whom should he see more than his mother? Why would he show himself to Shimon and to Miryam from Migdala and not to
me?”

And even as she says it she hears the voice in her head of Iehuda from Qeriot saying, “We are his family now, we who follow
his teachings.” She sees her son’s face, the last time she spoke to him, when she felt afraid and did not know why. She knows
he relinquished his family a long time before his death. If this child’s story were true, it would not be to her that he would
have come. And this is too much to bear. She stands up quickly, her knees cracking and her back aching at the strain, and
without knowing that she is going to do so she raises her right hand and hits Gidon across his left cheek.

The sound is loud. Her hand stings. She stares at him because she is an old woman and he a young man and if he responded in
kind he could easily kill her.

He does not respond with a blow. He does not move or try to flee. He looks at her levelly and turns his face so that the opposite
side is towards her. He waits. It is a kind of invitation.

Her hand falls to her side.

“I would have known from across the world if he were still in it.”

The first year she was a woman, her father had taken her to Jerusalem for Shavuot, the festival at the end of the seven weeks
from Passover. It is a joyous festival, a simple one, a celebration of the harvest that is just beginning. Farmers bring the
first fruits of their fields to the altar, to thank God for blessing their trees and their ripening vines and the swaying
golden seas of their wheat. They stayed with her father’s younger brother, Elihu, who lived so close to the Temple that they
could see its walls from the roof of his house. The early summer light was golden, but the days blew with a sweet breeze so
that the heat did not thicken or the air become still. She sat at the window on the first day, watching the never-ending procession
of oxen-pulled carts filled with ripe pink pomegranates and furry yellow dates heading for the Temple, and her heart was glad.

It was a good time to come to Jerusalem—especially for a girl who had become a woman, her mother said. The people had come
from all corners of the land. A young man might notice her, or she might notice a young man. There were many nervous, eager,
excited girls like her, walking to the Temple with their fathers, and many young men too. In the courtyard, her father gave
her the coins to buy the lamb for the offering. She examined the creatures closely, chose one tied to the back of the stall,
not the largest but with the purest white wool.

There were soldiers outside the Temple, of course, auxiliaries employed by Rome. She heard another man tell her father there
had been a skirmish, swiftly quashed, earlier in the day when three farmers had attacked a soldier. Miryam’s father said nothing,
though in the past she had heard him rail against the Romans, wishing that the people would rise up and drive them from the
land. He put his arm around her shoulders as they entered the Temple and whispered, “If you see something like that while
we are here, Miryam, run. The Romans cannot tell the guilty from the innocent. If there is a squabble, run to your uncle’s
house, you will be safe there.”

They made their offering in peace. Seven baskets of the fruits of the land they brought to the priests: figs and barley, wheat
and pomegranates, olives and dates and grapes dropping heavy on the vine. The pure white lamb was slaughtered, its blood scattered,
its forbidden fats burned on the altar for the Lord. And they heard murmurings again as they left the Temple. The men gave
one another secret signs, making a hand shape like a dagger and whispering low and confusing words.

Miryam’s father kept a tight arm around her and brought his lips close to her ear. “You see nothing,” he said. “You hear nothing.
We feast with your uncle tonight and tomorrow we go home.”

When it happened, it was swift. They were walking past the spice market, homebound, and as they came in sight of the Hippodrome,
with its tall colonnades and its fluttering flags, she knew something was wrong. Her father’s grip tightened on her shoulder.
He stood still. Behind them, back the way they’d come, there was a tight knot of men, walking slowly but at a steady pace.
The shutters on the buildings nearest the Hippodrome were shut and closed tight with wooden pegs. To the right, up the narrow
alleyway, another small group of men. Burly farmers with corded muscular arms, each with a long bag on his back.

The soldiers on the steps of the Hippodrome were laughing. Two of them were throwing dice. The others had wagered money on
the outcome. Some were on lookout, most were watching the game. Miryam’s father’s grip was like iron tongs on her shoulder.
They were in a thin crowd—some other parents with children, or whole families, each looking as frightened as they. They walked
into the Hippodrome square, moving as quickly as they could without breaking into a run. Passing an open doorway, she saw
that the dark room beyond was full. She had the impression of watchful black eyes, of shifting flesh, of the dull sheen of
metal. Men had come to Jerusalem from all over the country for this festival. The thing had been planned.