Chapter Two

PAUL

“You’re lazy,” my father said, as he pruned an olive tree in our garden. “God hates lazy people.”

He was slightly stooped, his head sloping forward like a vulture, with his shoulder blades like folded wings; the back of his neck glowed like a stalk of cinnamon, the consequence of long days in the sun. His name was Adriel, and he had a pronounced dimple in his chin, deep and dark, that had carried over generations. I had the same mark in my chin.

I was twelve years old, with the first hint of a mustache dawning above my lip, and too old to treat like a child. The charge of laziness passed through me like a hot blade. Had I not been piling branches on a heap for him, stacking them all afternoon under a ferocious blast of sunlight?

“Goddamn you,” I said.

It was not the best choice of words.

He knocked my head to one side with a flat palm, drawing a welt along my jawline.

I tried not to cry, bending forward to conceal my pain. I never cried, though my neck would hurt for a week. And this wasn’t the first or only time he had slapped me, though it felt like an assault on my dignity.

For whatever reason, I remember that slap, even as a fully grown man who has been stripped, flogged, stoned, and beaten many times over. But none of that violence stands out more vividly than the day my father swatted me in the garden.

Though I loved my father, I never liked being home. It was more than comfortable, even among houses on the western fringe of Tarsus, where the wealthiest merchants had a wide view of the green sea below. We had four bedrooms with raised beds and two public rooms, including a peristyle with tapestries on the wall; there was an expansive garden and a spring-fed well. A dozen guests could dine comfortably in our tablinum, and my father often brought associates to meals there, where they would recline on soft cushions and discuss business matters. Our three slaves went to the market every morning and cooked and cleaned the house. They treated me, a motherless boy, like their own child, especially Gila, a white-haired woman with astonishingly wide hips, her hair pulled back and tied with a ribbon. She considered me her son, and laid out a fresh tunic for me every day and made sure that I ate and slept enough. “You must eat more fruit,” she would say.

My mother passed when I was eleven months old, so I have no memory of her. Not even the haziest image survives, however much I try to envision her. My sister, Esther, was ten years my senior, but I hardly knew her, as she went off to Jerusalem at seventeen, where she married a man twice her age, a rabbi who had been my father’s friend. Her letters were infrequent, and we saw her only on periodic visits to Jerusalem.

My grandfather came to Tarsus from a village near Jerusalem as a young man hoping to study philosophy as well as Torah. This had been a center of learning for centuries, the Athens of Asia, the birthplace of Antipater, the Stoic writer and exalted teacher.

Much as he liked the idea of it, my grandfather had no head for study, and he eventually turned to business, gathering from valley farmers the skins of goats. After buying a mill on the Cydnus River, he engaged dozens of slaves to work the fine goat hairs into a durable and coveted fabric, which he sold throughout the world. Large bundles of this cloth were shipped in wooden crates as far as Greece and Egypt, even to Rome. He also made tents that could easily be rolled and carried on the backs of mules by Roman legions on military expeditions. His assets accumulated, with profits in profusion, and he soon bought land on the outskirts of Tarsus. Before long, he had several villas, factories, warehouses, and a fleet of vessels in the harbor.

All of this wealth would eventually come to me, though my only interest was to spend everything I had in the name of Jesus. I would happily become a poor man for his sake.

My father would never understand this. He had no depth of spirit, even though he became a figure of weight in the local synagogue, where he would read from the scroll on the Sabbath: an honor in this city, where scholars often wandered into Sabbath gatherings, many of them gifted linguists. He would shift to the rostrum slowly, gazing through eyes like slits, furtively. His performance impressed the congregation, as he could utter the sacred words with some authority, though Greek was his first language, like mine. In truth, I could detect a stiffness and inexactitude in his Hebrew even before I myself knew the language well enough to be discerning. Then again, a boy is always skeptical of his father’s public face, and I felt his incompetence in every performance. I vowed that nobody would ever have cause to doubt the depth of my knowledge, the range of my learning, the ferocity of my devotion to God. I would become everything my father only seemed to be. I would inhabit fully the reality I dreamed about as a boy.

Each morning at home my father read the scriptures aloud, in the Greek translation. Because of its familiarity, this version felt to me more like God’s revelation than the Hebrew original. Its strong and beautiful if bracing words dug grooves in my heart, and my feelings flowed naturally in those grooves.

I was a Jew, and would always remain a Jew, even as my mission to the gentiles grew wider each year.

In my early years I sometimes traveled with my father, who had business in distant parts, with visits to Alexandria and throughout Asia. We would occasionally visit Esther and her husband, Ezra, during the week of Passover in Jerusalem, and attend the Temple worship. How could I forget that overwhelming vision of gold-and-white marble that Herod had built? As we approached its steps, the full-throated choirs of the tribe of Levi welcomed us with their angelic singing, and even then I had visions of God on his throne, the king of heaven, and I wanted only to bathe in this glory.

My father explained that the tribal elders, the Sanhedrin, met in the Hall of Hewn Stones. “They are great men,” he said. “You will sit among them one day.”

This seemed inevitable to him, at least during my childhood, when the evidence of my scholarly abilities grew abundant, and tutors praised my gifts. “Your son is a bright star,” they would say, pleasing him so well that he would lavish gifts on them.

This approbation only made my life difficult, as expectations rose. And I kicked against them, feeling reckless at times, wishing to revolt. I would steal fruit from the market or go abroad at night, often walking down to the harbor when my father assumed I slept safely on my pallet. I became a nocturnal creature for a period, a vagabond at heart, and thought of escaping to sea. I vowed to myself that I would wander in the world, no longer the pride of Adriel. No longer the perfect son whose life gave flesh to his father’s fantasies.

But my scholarly nature kept reasserting itself. I could not deny the appeal of learning, the lure of the Greek and Hebrew languages, and the shimmering light of truth reflected there.

When I was twelve, my father took me with him on a trip to Jerusalem and, much to my surprise, he introduced me to Gamaliel, a well-known Jewish scholar (who was the grandson of Hillel, the famous rabbi). Quite terrified, I held my father’s hand tightly as we walked into Gamaliel’s school, where young men chanted portions of the Psalms. They nodded as they prayed, some of them dipping to the floor in their avidity, even kissing the tile with their foreheads. I caught sight of Gamaliel himself at the end of a colonnade, a marvel with his bountiful and hoary beard and purple skullcap; the voluminous robes he wore failed to disguise a multitudinous belly that he pushed before him like a cart. At a glance, I worshipped him and wished only to serve his needs.

“You’ll attend this school one day,” my father said. “I have already written to Gamaliel about you.”

This startled and impressed me. My father had, on his own, taken my intellect seriously. He would put me on this path as best he could. Of course, he could send me to a school like this because he could afford such a luxury, which fed his own feelings of importance in the Jewish community. He would proudly tell his friends in Tarsus that young Paul sat at the feet of the grandson of Hillel. In his mind, I would take my place in this tradition, a scholar of the Hebrew scriptures, perhaps as a great rabbi. He nonetheless insisted that I learn to stitch and fold tents like any one of his workers. I had nimble fingers, taking to these tasks eagerly, and my affinity for this work pleased my father.

It was lucky for me that my father had so many projects in his business to oversee that I could escape his surveillance. Tarsus was a splendid playground, as pagan temples could be found in every quarter, all of them seething with the devotees of strange gods, and this spiritual frenzy appealed to me. The worshippers of the god Mithras, for example, caught my attention, as they met in underground vaults and sacrificed bulls, bathing in their blood, which became for them a redemptive gesture that helped them to purify their souls. I knew one boy, Fabian, the son of a Roman guard, who had contacts with this group, and once I stepped beside him into a cave at the outskirts of the city.

They huddled together in the dark, which only a handful of large candles illumined. Most of them wore long white robes, although one of them, a kind of high priest, had purple robes and a diadem of flowers. He held a scepter in the air, chanting in a language unfamiliar to my ears. They had lifted a living bull to a makeshift platform, and one of the votaries slit its throat. One by one the worshippers stepped beneath it, allowing the stream of blood to cover them. The women among them trilled their tongues, and the men sang together, accompanied by a hollow drum. I had never heard such peculiar music.

Fabian had said, “We must all be washed in the blood of the bull.”

I had no wish to do anything of the sort and stepped away with my back to the cave wall.

“These people, they are worse than mad,” my father said, when I asked what he knew about the Mithras cult. “Stay far away from them, son. Do you hear me?”

Often I felt like a thief in my own house, scarcely welcome, taking what was not mine; and yet some of my happiest days unfolded in Tarsus. I loved to see the mountains in the northern distance, the peaks with snowy scalps lifting through the tree line in early spring. I dreamed of climbing those peaks, rising in a snowfield, white as the sun, all radiance and dissolving into light. I longed to get out of this world, my life, my body: to rise and rise.

I was, in fact, a dreamy child, one who loved to sit by the harbor in the early morning, watching merchant ships depart for Cyprus or the farthest ends of the earth. Memories of that quayside lingered. I once, for instance, saw a lightly bearded young man kissing an older sailor, and the image unsettled me. It’s odd how certain recollections will stick, while others—more significant—just fall away. I would shelter under a tarpaulin, listening to the talk of sailors, absorbing tales of adventure, of foreign tribes and customs, exotic sea creatures, of unlikely and miraculous landscapes with vistas of snow or sand. These travelers had been to Spain and Arabia, to Athens and Macedonia, to Alexandria and countless seedy ports along the Black Sea.

Everyone talked of Rome, of course: the center of the world. And I dreamed of going there one day.

The odor of spices—cloves and coriander, nutmeg and cinnamon—lifted from dockside stalls, and the quayside itself churned with prostitutes, girls and young men as well, who seemed inoffensive to me. I didn’t know for certain, not yet, what they offered for a fee. Yet I understood only too well that my father wouldn’t approve of their behavior, and heard him talking to one of his assistants about the “vile creatures” who approached sailors and visitors, taking money for “the use of their filthy bodies.”

I often thought about that phrase: the use of their filthy bodies.

“Your body is God’s temple,” my father told me, quoting the Tohorot.

He was always quoting something, usually getting it wrong. But I never forgot many of these sayings. And he would remind me of our status.

“We’re Roman citizens,” he said, as if I might forget. “Your grandfather purchased our citizenship at a very dear price. So we may appeal to the emperor when it’s necessary, and they know this, the authorities. Never be afraid of them. Ask to speak to the emperor yourself if you should find yourself in trouble. You have every right.”

This sounded improbable, as the Son of God in Rome (as Tiberius fashioned himself) probably had better ways to occupy himself than listening to the complaints of minor subjects from the provinces; but my father never let go of this. He was himself an emperor in his world: an iron-fisted man, a man of commercial influence, a godlike figure who didn’t allow fools room for their foolishness.

He was a lonely man as well, especially after the death of my mother, and I rarely saw him with friends. We never met for meals with neighbors, as others did. It would be difficult even to call our little household a family, in fact. It was just my father and me, with a sister who lived far away and rarely saw us, and three slaves.

I did, however, have my friend Simon, whose father worked closely with mine as a shipping agent and might have been considered a friend since they very occasionally dined together, though nobody thought of them as equals. I know my father didn’t. But that didn’t matter, and I grew fond of Simon, an orange-haired boy with gray-green eyes. He caught everyone’s attention, as nobody looked quite like him in Tarsus.

My father whispered that Simon must have slave blood in him, “possibly Egyptian,” though I had never seen a slave with orange hair or green eyes. He was taller than me by a good measure: I doubt that the top of my head ever reached his chin. Strong and lean, from the age of ten or eleven he spoke with the authority of a man, in resolute tones, with a knowledge of the world around him. I had never observed such confidence in a boy.

We both liked swimming and knew the good places along the banks of the Cydnus, some miles above the city. My father had taken me to a rock pool in this river when I was five or six, teaching me to feel comfortable in the water as we played in the shallows. I never felt closer to him, not before or after. In the course of my instruction, I discovered that after a while I didn’t need his big hand under my back. I could float by myself and would seek out places to swim on my own. The gift of swimming was perhaps his most precious offering.

One swimming hole beneath a waterfall near Tarsus became a favorite place of escape for Simon and me. The waterfall crashed into an icy pool below the river, fanning out in ripples, obscuring the sharp blades of rock that sometimes flashed below the surface. My father would never approve of my swimming in this place, nor would Simon’s father. But we didn’t care what they said. It was enough that they couldn’t see us, and that both had better things to do than worry about where their sons went to swim.

Indifference to children is also a grant of freedom.

On hot summer mornings Simon and I walked there together. Unlike me, Simon was a fine diver, an arrow shot into the stream between its rocky blades. I would follow in his path, but nervously, jumping feetfirst, as I sensed the danger. But danger was part of the thrill of this activity, part of us now.

I was beginning to learn to live with peril, even to crave it.

By the edge of the pool were gray rocks, warmer than the water below or beside them. We crawled onto them like lizards after paddling in the swift gurgle of the stream, and would lie in the sun, letting pearly beads of water evaporate from our skin, saying nothing, needing to say nothing, just listening to the water tumble below us, fizzing and churning.

I loved its hoarse voice, its throaty rumble.

Simon himself had none of my scholarly or religious instincts, and he wondered politely about my devotion to reading the scriptures or my interest in Greek poets. Once in a while I allowed myself to think aloud in his company about philosophical matters, as if testing the waters. But he would bat away these ruminations.

“Do you care nothing for this earth?” he asked.

“What do you mean?”

“This world, the earth, a running stream. Not the clouds!”

It was an odd thing for him to ask me, and I quoted from David: The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof.

This drew an approving grin, and I can still see the happy opening in Simon’s face, his brilliant white teeth with uneven spaces between them. With his smile, he blessed and welcomed me, even when I went overboard in conversation. He didn’t mind if I was silly with philosophical affectations and quotations, as long as (like him) I took pleasure in the cool stream and the hot stones where we lay. I think friendship itself was everything to Simon.

One day at the far end of summer, when it was too hot to breathe and one could not sit anywhere comfortably, Simon and I hiked out to this waterfall, our secret place. I had turned fifteen that summer and felt like a man, with a silky beard darkening my cheeks. I let my hair grow to a fashionable length, and wore only the finest linen tunics and leather sandals with glass-studded straps, an affectation that annoyed my father, who once said, “I’ve seen girls in those slippers.”

The remark stung, and it hurts to recall it. How could he humiliate me like that? But my father clung to every convention and had no tolerance for youthful attempts to separate oneself, to express uniqueness.

As Simon and I approached the waterfall, I began to speak about the existence of the soul, its name and nature, or the possibility that our bodies might one day inhabit a different form, something quite unlike what we understood as human. The soul itself, I said, was possibly like a bird, high in the heavens, and in its soaring left these passing shadows on the ground, these bodily traces of its existence.

These ideas had come to me in a dream and troubled me. My friend Fabian had mentioned that the votaries of Mithras believed in the divine re-creation of life in some cosmic realm, and this had excited me. I wished that the Hebrew scriptures had talked more explicitly about such things, the shape of the life that lay beyond us, whatever glistened at the horizon, beyond the edge of every visible thing.

Simon let me ramble. But then he sighed loudly.

“I think I’m boring you,” I said.

“It’s a little sad for me to see you troubled,” he replied, as we approached the cliff above the rock pool. “You should know, I don’t really mind what you say. You’re interested in these notions.”

“But I’m dull,” I said.

“Or mad,” he said. Then he laughed, and it pleased me that he would laugh and not simply shrug or turn away from me.

We stood for a while in silence on the bluff above the pool, taking in the beauty of the place, the churned-up freshness of the air, the crackling water, a wistful breeze. I watched a large and colorful bird hover, then drop into the river, rise with a fish in its mouth. I wiped my face with the back of my hand, and the salt of perspiration ran into my mouth as I tilted my head upward. Quite literally, I seemed to be melting away and drinking myself.

I watched as Simon slipped from his clothes and plunged headfirst into the water below. Many times I had watched him arrowing through the air like this, always so agile, unafraid of diving from a height.

Now I leaned over the cliff, slightly dizzy. The sun blinded me, and I had to shade my eyes, expecting a shout. He would usually draw me into the water within minutes, forcing me to abandon my fears.

I called out, “Simon!”

When his head didn’t break the water within moments, and no voice called from below, I was only confused, not frightened. He had probably come up in a different place, farther downstream than usual.

I shouted again, but his name hung in the air, unanswered, as the sun tucked itself behind a cloud as if ashamed of something.

And then the day darkened.

Sick with fear, I jumped, and was sucked through the air in the downward draft, breaking the hard glass of the water with a slap that stung the soles of my feet. My heels dug into the sandy bottom, stirred to a muddy cloud. When I opened my eyes, it was impossible to see: the water opaque, a hail of bubbles and swirling sand. Lifting my head above the surface, I scanned the river and its banks without seeing him.

“Simon!”

I must have called his name a dozen times but recall only a blur, the watery fizz, an upturned sky, and sharp black ledges covered with moss. I saw a mass of scudding clouds, an innocent bird that had strayed into this terrible scene without knowing what it had happened upon by chance.

I climbed onto nearby rocks to scan the pool, hoping that Simon had come up in some unexpected place or, perhaps, lay quietly under a ledge. It was like him to play games with me, although this was a step too far.

The waterfall thundered in my ears, and my whole body shook. Could it be suddenly so cold?

I called again and again for Simon, but with a faint voice now.

After a timeless time of searching the shoreline, I saw him at last, in the distance, the unmistakable orange hair, in a pale wad of reeds. I didn’t understand at first, or dare to understand, what this could mean, even as I approached. I waded slowly into the shallows, talking to myself, praying. I could hear my voice, oddly removed from my body, calling out, “No, no, no…”

I lifted Simon to a bank of dry grass nearby. A wide gash in his forehead explained what had happened only too well. He had caught the left side of his head on a buried rock blade, and it had sliced away a part of his skull. I could see into the cavity itself, its tangle of blood and gristle and soft sponge.

I knelt over Simon’s limp body, putting my face against his chest. And held him for a long time, my maimed dear friend.

I whispered his name to myself, letting it hang in the air above us as his bloody head lay against my chest.

I wanted him back again. Back, back, back.

But he was not coming back, not in the same way.

Ever.