The Liars' Gospel (9 page)

She believes him.

“You cannot stay here now.”

He nods.

“I’ll leave tomorrow.”

“No,” she says, “too soon will raise suspicion. Wait another week or two. Start traveling with the early pilgrims for the
next festival.”

He nods again.

She sits next to him, on the rock. The place is warm where the sun has been. A lizard is heating its blood an arm’s length
away from them on another flat stone. She can feel his body next to hers as if they were touching. She sighs. He places his
hand over hers. He clasps her hand. His thumb moves, feeling her fingers, absorbing them. She does not know whether he even
sees her any longer or simply the man he hopes to reach through her. But he is so soft with her that her heart cracks open,
she cannot help it.

She says, quietly, “You believe what you told me? You hold it in your heart?”

He says, “I do.”

She says, “Then my son Yehoshuah lives in your heart.”

He says, “And in the heart of all who believe it.”

She nods. That is where the dead live. In the heart.

He begins to hum a little melody. It is the melody the goat herders often sing when they are moving the brindled flock to
summer pastures. She joins in, letting her voice run alongside his, sometimes choosing the notes which harmonize, sometimes
singing the same tune. It feels as though they are one person, singing like this.

And she will not, she will not. Her son is dead, he is gone, but when she closes her eyes she can believe that he is here
now, that he has come back to her in the long notes and the tune and the piping warble at the back of the throat. He has not
let go of her hand. He is so young, younger than her son was when she saw him last. His skin is soft, his hands uncalloused.
She does not want to be moved but she cannot help herself. She is swept away.

The song ends. He looks at her, those eyes so full of longing. She knows what he wants from her, this young and beautiful
man.

She says, “Shall I tell you a story?”

He sits perfectly calm, with those shining eyes.

“It is a story from long ago,” she says, “when I first became pregnant with my child Yehoshuah.”

She sees him mutter something under his breath as she says her son’s name.

“Now I think of it,” she says, and her voice has taken on the singsong quality of a child’s storyteller, “now that I think
of it, there were signs that his birth would be special.” A chaffinch begins to sing in the thorn tree; a song of joy that
the winter has, at last, receded. “There were birds,” she says, “the birds seemed to follow me wherever I went, singing to
the child in my womb. And once, there was a stranger…”

She pauses. Anyone who has read the Torah knows what a stranger is. A stranger could be anyone. A stranger could be the angel
of the Lord come with a test of kindness or hospitality, and if you passed that test the angel might bless you. A stranger
could be the Lord walking among you.

“There was a stranger in the village who saw my belly swollen with the child and began suddenly to speak, saying, ‘Blessed
are you, and blessed is that child whom you carry within you!’”

She continues to tell this story. She thinks of how all the stories she has ever heard must have come to be. There are only
three ways: either they were true, or someone was mistaken, or someone lied. She knows that the story she is telling is a
lie, but she says it anyway. Not in fear, and not in anger, and not even in hope of anything that is to come, but because
it brings her comfort to see that he believes it. Even such a simple, foolish thing as this. It brings her son back here,
for a moment, back to her side and his small head under her hand and his life again unfolding. It is too good a gift to turn
down, this opportunity to return him to life. And she knows it is a sin, and that God holds special punishments in store for
such sins, but she cannot imagine worse than she has already seen.

She had been in Jerusalem that last spring. After he was gone, after the first day of Passover, which is sacred and on which
no work can be done, she heard that he had not hung long on that wooden frame. Her son, Yirmiyahu, brought her the news. One
of Yehoshuah’s friends, a wealthy man, had bribed the guards and taken him down and placed him in a tomb.

She thought on it for a day and a night. She remembered what he had said: they were not his family. They were not the ones
he had called for, they were not the ones he had spent his last days with. But was it possible that he had died without thinking
of her? He had no wife to mourn for him or children to carry on his name. If he had belonged to these friends in life, perhaps
he was his family’s again in death.

So she told her sons to go to the tomb and fetch his body to take it into the hills and bury him in the ground. She thought:
at least the crows will not have him. He will be buried in the same warm soil that will take my bones one day and until then
I will know where he lies, and this thought was a comfort to her.

Shimon, who was always the kindest, tried to lie to her.

“We found a shady spot for him, by an olive grove,” he said, when they returned.

But when she asked him exactly where, when she asked them to take her there now so she could mark the spot in her mind, their
story didn’t hold.

They had not found him. The body was gone. Taken, they supposed, by his friends to some special burial place.

Even in death they would not give him back to her. She did not want to tell her sons her worst fear—that the Romans had the
body, that she would see him again on the ramparts of the walls of Jerusalem, black and bloody and gouged by beaks and rotted
away.

She left Jerusalem that day and did not look to see if there were bodies on the walls, and did not ask, and told herself that
her sons must be right and his friends had surely buried him in honor.

It was as if he had never been now. As if that first son had been a curious dream, leaving behind no trace. Not a plowed field,
not a grieving wife, not a grandson or granddaughter. No one in the village spoke of him. Her own children had tried to forget
him. It had been as if she had never borne that first son, until Gidon came to Natzaret.

He leaves as they had planned, when it is coming close to the Feast of Seven Weeks and the farmers are making their way to
Jerusalem with carts filled with first fruits. He’ll be invisible among so many travelers.

She has filled him full of stories. Some have a measure of truth to them, with Yehoshuah’s childhood curiosity and his interest
in learning and the way he would sometimes say things that made the adults surprised. And some are things she hoped had happened,
she wished had happened. She gives him hard cheeses and bread and dried fruit so that his knapsack is bursting and she imagines
another bag on his back full of the tales he’ll tell, the stories he’ll take to his friends in Jerusalem and across the nation.

“I’ll come back,” he says, “when things are less dangerous for you.”

She does not say that she is an old woman now, and does not expect to live to see the day when things are less dangerous.

She embraces him like a son, and he turns and begins to walk.

She watches him until he is out of sight. If the soldiers come back, she will say: he deceived me. He lied. A broken-hearted
mother, he had no pity.

And perhaps they will listen, and perhaps they won’t. It is like the scorpion, she thinks, rubbing her right hand with her
left. Once a child is born, the mother’s previous life is gone, all that matters is how she cares for the child, protects
the child. Even that tiny part which is left when they are gone.

She turns. The children will be waking soon, little Iov demanding his breakfast. It is nearly the fourth hour since dawn and
she has still not made bread. She goes to begin her work.

IN THE MARKETPLACE,
during Passover, he hears two strangers saying that he is dead.

He is examining some clay oil lamps decorated with a blue inlay from Tarshish. At a stall nearby selling ripe melons, two
women, their hair modestly covered, are discussing the rising in Jerusalem last Passover. It is not much discussed any longer,
but the return of the season and the festival have brought it to mind. One woman, wearing a yellow scarf trimmed with fringes,
knows more than the other. When he looks at her closely he thinks he remembers that she is the sister of the wife of one of
the rabble who joined them in the last few weeks. Perhaps.

“It is sad,” she is saying, “so many of them fled. Or took on other names.” She lists several of his former friends whose
faces he never expects to see again in this world. Mattisyahu the former tax collector fled south to Africa, young Yirmiyahu
to Egypt, Taddai to Syria. Others she has not heard about, or has heard only vague rumors. He stops to listen. This is more
news than he has had of his former friends for months.

The woman seems well informed. At one point she implies that some of her friends here in Caesarea send and receive letters
from the dispersed disciples. He has heard that there are rebels here, still—Caesarea is a Roman town, the capital of the
region, a waypoint for trade, so a good place for all kinds of conspiracy. But it is a mark of how little they accomplished
that it is not dangerous for her to mention Yehoshuah in the market square. No one is now afraid of those who followed him.

The woman shakes her head: “There are still so many mothers who do not know what became of their sons. And Iehuda from Qeriot
died, of course. He threw himself from a rocky cliff onto a field of stones. Or I heard someone else say that some of the
others threw him off.” She shrugs.

“Where did you hear that?” he asks, before he has thought whether this is wise.

The women look at him curiously. He is dressed in a fine toga, his face is beardless, his hair neatly clipped. He is not a
man who should pay them attention. They look modestly to the floor.

“I…” he says, “I was rather interested in the fellow at the time. Such amusing teachings.”

He has learned the lines well. They come easily to him.

The woman who was just now so full of gossip opens and closes her mouth but no sound emerges.

At last she says, “Just rumors, sir. My brother is a sailor, he tells us tales. We have no common cause with traitors against
Caesar.”

Her tone is pleading.

He nods and smiles, allows his gaze to drift from them. He has no interest in scaring them.

The other woman has decided which melon she wants and buys it hurriedly. They move on, mumbling a good-bye, their eyes cast
down. He wonders how many of their other snippets of news were outright lies or strange misheard half tales.

He turns the clay lamp over in his hand. He imagines throwing it to the floor, how the oil would spill forth, staining the
hard earth with fragrance. It is a little time before he realizes that he is remembering the perfume bottle smashed on the
ground, the room choking with its scent.

He wants to think about what he’s heard. None of what the woman said might be true, or a portion of it, but if this is the
tale being told among those who knew his friends, perhaps it is time to leave his hiding place. Perhaps he should find them,
tell them he is still alive, try to explain what he did.

He walks home slowly, taking the long route around, west towards the harbor. Here the boats are constantly working. Even on
the Sabbath, even on the festivals, men from fifty nations load and unload cargo. There are baskets of fresh fish, figs from
the orchards in the north, oil and perfume from across the ocean, bolts of expensively dyed cloth, pretty stones and jewels
for women, even silver mirrors and ivory combs for those who can afford such things. Caesarea is rich.

The harbor too is one of the wonders of the world. Herod’s men slung it across the bay in seven years. They worked on the
Sabbath, and in the seventh year, the year of rest. If he were still in Jerusalem, some preacher would even now be shouting
to a crowd of followers that the harbor was cursed, that all who traded in it had earned God’s eternal anger. But this is
not Jerusalem and the work goes on.

He wonders if this is the freedom he had sought all along. To be in a place where one could decide to care or not to care
about the laws for oneself. The Romans had brought that freedom, together with their statues of their little arguing gods,
and he had never noticed.

It is a kind of freedom, he thinks, to be dead. If he is dead, he smiles at the thought, perhaps even God has ceased to care
what he does.

And as he thinks this, he finds that his feet have taken him wandering past the small Syrian temple to one of their goddesses.
From inside the squat marble building comes the sound of laryngeal chanting, the soft cries of the worshippers in response.

He has never visited before, but he is suddenly curious to see what the nations do with their many gods. And he is not ready
to go home quite yet—not to face the crowd of Calidorus’s perfumed friends with the smiling ironic face of a dead man. He
picks up the hem of his cloak, ascends the dusty steps and, ducking under the curtain, enters the temple.

It is dark inside, and the smell of fragrant wood and oil is thick. Well-trimmed oil lamps are positioned in alcoves, but
there are not enough of them to cast more than a glow. The people are tightly packed, crowding towards the altar, and for
a while all he can see is an indistinguishable mass of humanity. But his eyes become accustomed to the gloom. At the front
of the temple, on a raised marble platform, lit by the brightest lamps to draw the eye, the service is taking place.

It is not so different. They slaughter a pigeon and pour its blood onto the stone. Libations of wine are poured on the altar,
prayers are uttered in Greek. The priests are women, of course, that is different. They are clad in white—he thinks he has
heard that this symbolizes the fact that no man has had them. It’s been a long time since Iehuda last had a woman—nearly a
year now—and his body often aches to hold soft, yielding flesh again. He is sure that the other men must feel the same rushing
in their loins when the soft virgins bend to pour the oil—does it make the moment more sacred for them? He has heard that
they believe their gods are pleased with sexual congress.

And there is the idol, of course, that is different to Temple services in Jerusalem. She is the best lit of all: a dozen lamps
carefully placed on hand-shaped ledges jutting out from the wall surround her. She is a naked woman, large breasts, broad
hips, round belly, beads around her neck—is this worship nothing but sex? They pour the oil on the feet of the statue as if
it could feel, they waft the incense around its head as if it could smell.

At a certain point, some of the worshippers surge forward and ecstatically plant kisses on the feet of the statue, grabbing
her ankles, mumbling prayers, placing pieces of clay with messages scratched on them and small coins into the sacred pool
in front of her. As if, he thinks scornfully, this object they had made themselves could grant their wishes. He is unimpressed.
All these years he had thought something terrible, even monstrous, went on in these temples. Like most Jews, he had never
set foot inside a place of wicked idolatry and had imagined something much worse than children playing with a doll, pretending
it could grant favors.

And then there is something else. There is a screaming ululation from the front of the crowd, where the people are pushing
close to the statue. Something changes in the mood, he can feel it around him, the way that one can feel the change in the
dry air of the desert when a sudden rainstorm approaches. People around him are breathing more rapidly, pressing closer and
closer. He feels a hand at his back and a woman’s arm around his waist. He cannot see her properly—it is dark and her head
is turned away—but he guesses she is about thirty, with pale skin and hair oiled and scented with pine resin. She is dressed
like a respectable married woman and yet her fingers are clutching at his robe. He begins to wonder whether this will end
with an orgy—he had heard rumors of something like this in Jerusalem. He finds he is both horrified and excited, half hard
already at the thought.

But when the crowd parts momentarily, allowing him a clear view of the brightly lit area in front of the statue, he sees that
it is something else. A woman with unbound hair, with eyes rolling back in her head, is dancing in front of the statue. Her
skirts are hiked up past her thighs. She goes down into a crouch repeatedly and thrusts herself up. She is making guttural
cries. She has pulled her robe off her shoulders and arms, it is slipping from her breasts, but what is happening is no love-dance.

She has a small silver knife and she is cutting herself, across her arms, across her chest. Other women are singing with her,
clicking with their tongues, slapping their arms against their bodies in rhythm, and as he watches she presses the tip of
the knife into her own breast by the nipple, cutting a bright blue vein. She leans forward and allows the blood to gush over
the feet of the statue, like milk from the breast of a woman giving suck. She squats and thrusts her pudenda towards the statue.
She slices at her own thigh, completing the impression that she is bleeding from her places of sex.

The woman next to Iehuda is still holding on to him, her fingers convulsively scrabbling at the fabric and the flesh of his
side. He can smell her sweat. He is certain that some sexual rite is about to begin, or something more than that, something
even more appalling than what he has already seen. He is afraid now of what may happen. But no one is moving. Only the bleeding
woman at the front of the room continues to dance, to smear her blood onto the statue, to dip and sway until, suddenly, with
a wild cry, she drops and falls across the idol’s feet, quivering, spent.

The woman standing next to Iehuda lets her arm fall away from his body. He catches her eye. She looks dazed, her lips half
parted. She reaches for him again, fumbling at his robes. Her hand finds the warm flesh of his back, under his clothing. It
moves lower, grasping his buttock, squeezing. At the back of the room, through the curtains, a few people are stumbling out
into the light, but he sees that two or three couples are already pushed up against the walls of the temple. The woman’s skin
is covered in a sheen of sweat. He can smell her; through the incense and the odor of two hundred bodies pressed tight against
each other, he can smell the thick willing scent of her. He puts his arm around her waist and half lifts her from her feet,
pushing men and women aside to gain the temple wall. She is already gasping as, between a pillar and rough stone, he lifts
her up, presses her against the wall where her feet can find the pillar, swings her skirts aside and enters her. She is wet
and hot and ready and she cries out and bares her teeth and her hands scrabble at his back as he thrusts. It does not take
long. He has not even uncovered her breast before he is done and, shuddering, lowers her to the floor.

He wants to take her again. He feels already that it will not be long before he is ready to do so. He grabs at her waist.
But she squeezes his hand, lets it go, and is now drifting towards the doorway. He follows as they exit, blinking, into the
early-evening sun. He sees, with surprise, that her hair is red: it had looked dark, brown, in the dim light of the temple.
He realizes in the same moment that she may be surprised to see his features, his own red-brown curls. He tries to speak to
her.

“What is your name?” he says.

But she looks away, apparently faintly embarrassed, and says nothing.

He thinks: woman, I have felt the grip of your cunt.

But before he can find something else to say—something more uncomprehending, perhaps, or the thing he wants to say that she
would not understand: did you know that you have just fucked a dead man?—she pulls her scarf over her head and hurries away.

At the top of the marble steps leading back into the street, a maiden is holding a wide flat dish. Her arms soon struggle
with the heavy heaping of coins that worshippers place there as they leave. Iehuda finds a small coin for her and steps back
down into the street.

Two older women pass him as they leave.

“She was Assyrian,” mutters one to the other, “the one who cut herself. I’ve heard about their rites.”

The other woman, dressed neatly and with the hairstyle of a respectable matron, sniffs and frowns. “A lot of fuss,” she says.
“What’s wrong with a pigeon?”

He smells the banquet before he sees it: the sweet sticky smell of spilled wine. The smell of pomades, too, of the fragrant
oils with which Calidorus and his friends anoint themselves before a feast. It is the smell of money, copiously spent.

He is late for the party. This is a mistake. He had not realized how long the temple service had gone on, he had stumbled
back home dazed and would be grateful for a bath and a sleep. But although no one chides him, the anxiety of the slaves shows
that he has made a bad error. One of the men hurriedly washes him with a wet cloth, another dresses him in a fresh robe and
tries to touch his hair with the perfume. He grabs the man’s wrist as he approaches with the stone vial.

“No,” he says.

The slave, who has tended to him a hundred times, looks puzzled but places the perfume vial back on the table. “My master
is waiting,” he says.

“Waiting” is something of an exaggeration. The feast had begun without Iehuda. In the dining room, six men are reclining on
upholstered couches arranged around a low table. The table is well furnished. The men have silver cups of wine mixed with
honey. There are dates, olives, bread, white cheese with herbs, dishes of lentils with fruit and in the center a huge ocean-fish
with sliced citrons, dill and parsley. The men are drunk already and the meal is not even halfway over.