She called me her Jewish hawk and nipped my beak between her slender fingers. I declared that she was my raven from Hellas. I bought her imported ear-rings, winter boots of soft leather from Jericho.
When I first saw Thalia, she was pouring wine for her father, a Greek wool merchant with a thriving business in the carpet export trade. He noted my interest and did not discourage me: although I was half Jewish, my learning and the possession of a private income evidently impressed him enough to allow me access to his table.
I dined there often but when I invited him to dinner at my own house, he knew what to expect. I did not prevaricate until we had reached the dessert of persimon and almonds in pastry. When I asked for Thalia’s hand in marriage, he buried his nose in his cup to hide his smile.
The wedding was a lavish affair with hired musicians and swags of flowers festooning the walls of the triclinium where we lay to eat the banquet my father-in-law provided. Thalia flushed with wine played the shy maiden but whispered to me that she longed for the evening procession, the door closed behind us.
There were the customary bawdy songs as we rode slowly in our chariot from her father’s mansion to my own at the edge of the Bethesda district to the north of Jerusalem. I had swallowed my earlier grief that neither of my parents had been there to raise their goblets and wish us joy. I was feeling Thalia’s warm body under my encircling arm and thinking of the times we had embraced when her parents were absent.
Boys raced to scatter the nuts of fertility under our feet as we descended at the gate; torches blazed and in the hand-clapping storm, we swept our way to seclusion.
I had only ever used a woman I had paid for. This one I possessed, as surely as I owned my small estate with its figs and vines.
“Behold, you are fair, my love” I recited from the back of my throat as I lay upon her and the feather mattress under us crackled softly in our contorting. “Your two breasts are like two young roes that are twins that feed among the lilies...” I began to slide up against her. “Until the day break and the shadows flee away, I will get me to the mountain of myrrh and to the hill of frankincense...”
She giggled in her gasping. “What is this ramble, my hawk?”
“A love song of my mother’s people. It used to be recited outside the synagogue when there was a marriage - one man, one woman, each recalling the rapture of Solomon who is supposed to have composed it though it’s actually a shepherd and his girl finding delight in one another’s bodies. As I find in yours.”
“Spare me the poetry then,” Thalia said, gripping me with her thighs and finding my rump under her palms. “Who needs words?”
She was as wild and wilful as any of the women I’d had in a Caesarean fornix but she played the virgin as convention demanded. Our coupling was fierce, joyful. She shrieked softly when I entered her but by morning when we had made love three times, her throat bubbled again with the laughter that had attracted me when first I saw her.
Thalia. Her name if whispered, is like the gentle wind at night, stirring the cypresses. I had only ever loved my parents: Thalia transported me to some place I did not know could possibly exist. I had thought to acquire a wife and had found the other half of my soul.
When she became pregnant I purchased her a well-spoken lady’s maid - a diligent child of twelve who had been brought up to the Jerusalem market by a trader from Ashkelon. Thalia told me I was a better husband than she’d ever hoped for - she had been sure her father would marry her to one of his aging business associates.
My son was born during the festival of Yom Kippur. Atoning in some small measure for the wrongs I felt I had done my father, I named the boy Lysis, after him and put around his soft neck the cornucopia of good fortune which my father had bestowed on me when I was born.
My mother’s lamp - the terra-cotta duck - I suspended near my son’s cradle where sometimes I whispered a brief prayer to the God of her fathers.
Either He or the goddess, Tyche, or both perhaps, had smiled on me.
My father’s entire estate had come to me as I had always known it would but I had never been able to escape the conviction that I had failed him and that he had died disappointed in me. It happened this way.
There had been a Passover once in which I visited Jerusalem on my own, hoping to find bar Abbas. I saw him from a distance but he was beyond speaking. He was dying.
An iron spike through each wrist attached him to the cross-bar of his gibbet against which he writhed, drooled, blew bubbles of phlegm and snarled like an animal caught in some hideous snare.
There were others who died with him. I had gone as close as I could but the circle of guards held us back and to be honest, the stench of the dying with their shit-streaked thighs and fly-infested wounds, made retreat from that place a blessing.
It was a Passover of such horror any rational man would have fled the place and never returned. I stayed. I was there for days, long after the tens of thousands had left and all the hillsides were pocked with the markings of their camp sites and all the trees stripped of every twig that would burn.
I stayed, haunted by bar Abbas’ rolling eyes, the hog-snorting sound of him as he twitched, sucked in air, tore against the nails that stretched him out in an appalling embrace of nothing but coming darkness.
I stayed. I fell among men who changed the entire course of my life but of the things I saw - the secrets to which I became privy - I said nothing when at last I rode back to the clean air of the coastal plain and the sanity of my city home.
“Dead?” my father had demanded. “Executed? On what grounds?”
“Insurrection,” I told him. “No one seemed to know much, not even his wife. He had mixed with the Zealots…”
“Then he was a damned fool,” my father said. “I had credited him with more sense. That futile cause. Can a barking dog overturn a farm cart?” I was silent. “Well, can it?”
“It cannot.”
“No more can the Zealots ever change the way this country is ruled,” my father said, spilling his wine as he slurped at it. “Radical nonsense shouted in desert hide-outs might make a fine echo when the cave walls serve to magnify that wistful lunacy. It is a different thing when your fist-wavers meet Roman iron and are out-numbered, out-witted. Bar Abbas was meant to be... what? A man of reason!”
“A man of insight,” I said, finding tears welling. “A man of reason…”
“Do not snivel for him,” my father said. “He does not deserve your pity.” He looked at me carefully over the rim of his cup. “What kept you there? You said you’d be home in four days.”
I spoke of temple scholars I had met; of the fascination to be found in bouncing the doctrines of the Sadducees off the ponderings of the Pharisees. I told him of dinner parties and temple disputes and the outrageous inflation of festival prices for everything from a respectable sacrifice to a swig of warm water from some vendor’s greasy shoulder bag.
Of bar Abbas’ condemnation I told him nothing. Of those who died with him and of the things I found myself doing, half against my will, I said nothing. It did him no harm to remain ignorant of the turn my life was taking.
All men have secrets.
But his disappointment in me became plain when I informed him that I wanted to study in Jerusalem. Embracing the Judaism of my mother’s people in preference to his logical agnosticism, was almost more than he could bear.
I had expected his resistance yet also his capitulation. He could deny me nothing: I was too greatly loved.
He scoffed at the beard I had begun growing. When I pointed out that the Greek philosophers affected them, he said sharply that they did not bury their heads in books penned by devotees of some long-dead brigand out of the Egyptian desert.
I had my own doubts about the Law of Moses but I kept those to myself too. My father made money available at last: my keep, my academic fees. I insisted it was only for a year or two at the most. Naturally, I would come home and yes, if he wanted me to follow him in his profession of rhetor, grammaticus, I would do so.
I went back. Up into those hard, pine-scented hills with terraces of rock that seem to groan as the road encircles them, climbing up and up as though ascending to some place of eternal torment which is what Jerusalem had become. Yet it held me, drew me.
I returned to the temple courts and the Sadduceean colleges. The letters I wrote my father were full of the things I had begun pondering as I tried to weave a fabric of faith from the threads both parents had given me.
He wrote back, instructing me to correspond with the academies of Alexandria where Jews of good sense - that Philo, for example - could reconcile Plato with Moses and make his philosophy read well enough.
I did as he suggested but before any reply came my way, a letter arrived from one of my father’s colleagues to inform me that I should return home immediately. My father had been arrested by Pilatus to answer charges of treason.
It was absurd, unbelievable. Treasonable utterances had become an offence throughout the Empire as Tiberius became increasingly neurotic and Judaea was not exempt in this regard but the very idea of my father showing such indiscretion...
He had made some casual observation, it seemed - some passing criticism that one of his students had repeated at the wrong time and in the wrong place. Guards had hammered on the doors one night I was told. They hauled my father from his bed; walked him to the Praetorium with fetters on his wrists.
As a citizen, he was not flogged or tortured but they kept him in a cell for several weeks where they fed him on barley bread and sour garrison wine. There were frequent interrogations but nothing could be found to condemn him.
I rattled the bars that grilled the fortress archway, demanding an audience with Pilatus which was refused. I bribed soldiers to take my father clean linen and baskets of decent food. They told me nothing.
He was never formally charged so there was no trial which I suspect disappointed him as he would have thrived on the drama of the basilica where court sessions were heard.
He was denied the opportunity of calling on his wide circle of influential friends he could have asked to testify on his behalf.
Waiting alone in that fetid den, he grew despondent and fell desperately ill. When Pilatus eventually released him, he was a broken man. I did not know of his release until a thin, grey beggar was admitted one morning by speechless Otho and stood inside the street doorway with tears coursing down his unshaven cheeks.
I should have stayed with him then. I did not. Jerusalem called me - my studies at the small city college, dedicated to the most liberal interpretation of the Law, called me so insistently, I was compelled to go back, promising, of course, to return within the month.
My father’s letters became brief, morose. He was withdrawn and his teaching practice was declining. Even some of his oldest colleagues had found it expedient to ignore him, he wrote. Was there, he wondered, any true goodness in the world?
There was his love but I had never told him that.
I had no precognition of his death. He had gone quietly in his sleep, a letter informed me. I hacked my hair short and rode down to Caesarea in a blizzard of tears.
When the funeral observances were over, I gave Otho his freedom and sold the other two house slaves, not on the open market but privately, to good homes where I could be certain they would suffer no abuse.
On an impulse, I sold the house and bought a small property with figs and vines at the edge of the Bethesda district to the north of Jerusalem. There was something odd in that, I agree, since the city had stamped me with both misery and awe but I felt impelled to do it and fell to having repairs done. Hired craftsmen knelt to lay mosaic floors; to re-plaster the atrium and paint it in sunset colours. There was a stucco freize of vine leaves around the formal triclinium. Still enjoying my affluence, I purchased a house-boy and a cook with casual labourers hired on a daily basis to work the land under the supervision of a reliable steward.
It occurred to me then that a man such as myself, should marry.
When Thalia rocked our son while she suckled him, I would find myself considering that all faith, all philosophy, were as nothing in the face of such simple, domestic pleasures. These private joys - trivial in themselves - are what sustain us, long years after glazed glass has cracked, mosaics crumbled, the vine leaves flaked away in fragments of green and gold. Hold a cheap cup and know that kiln-fired clay must also crumble into dust like the bones of the hand that holds it.
My son was a smiling cherub like an infant Eros in a wall plaque. I saw my mother in his eyes and shame-faced at not having him circumcised - a small gesture to my father - I offered a lavish sacrifice of thanksgiving for him: a fine white ram. My tallith over my head like the synagogue son I had once been, I stood in the Court of Israel and watched the rich smoke rolling up from the Place of Burnt Offerings.
It was to my mother I silently spoke, not the God of her fathers. With upraised hands and my eyes closed, I asked her forgiveness.
“You’re not happy,” Thalia said to me one night. “Why is that? Do I displease my hawk now there is a small bird to tend?”
“Foolish raven,” I said, stroking the scent of rose oil from her black hair. “It’s nothing to do with you. It’s nothing really.”
“Tell me about this nothing so that I can make you smile, even in the dark.” She wrapped her arms around me, fingered the fuzz of hair on my chest. “Sometimes you still grieve for your father, I think.”
“For both my parents, I should have liked them to see their grandson - to know you too. But I was thinking about others who have gone - men like my tutor, who died here in Jerusalem some time before we met. I loved him like a brother.”
“Who was he?” she asked.
“Yeshu’a bar Abbas,” I replied and felt his name tighten my throat. “He was the Essenic teacher I’ve told you of. Joined the para-military wing of the Pharisees then became a Zealot and then was caught up in some failed attempt at rebellion and was crucified for it.”
“Why did he do that? It has been said that the Sons of Lights are pacifists.”
“Some of them certainly are.” I did not want to speak of him but she had brought me to the memory. “It seems bar Abbas was greatly excited by the appearance of that Galileean holy man whose followers have been causing such problems in the synagogues lately.”
“Oh, you mean Jesus the magician?” Thalia sighed. “They say he was extraordinary.”
I lay silent for a time. Jesus the magician. Yeshu’a bar Yosef from Gennesareth, the lake district in the north. Yesu to his friends. Instrument of Lucifer to his enemies of whom there were some among the priesthood. Jesus to the Greeks - the wandering healer, thaumaturge, exorcising daemonic entities with incantation and ritual passes.
“He was crucified the same day as Yeshu’a bar Abbas,” I said. “Pilatus condemned several men that morning, all of them implicated, one way or another, with a failed rebellion, triggered by a riot that Yeshu’a bar Yosef started in the Court of the Gentiles a few days earlier. He started throwing things round and attacking the money changers. His Galileean followers got excited as Galileeans do and naturally took it as a signal to follow suit. Pilatus came down hard on the lot of them.”
Thalia stroked my nose. “It is time to forget, Kleitos. What’s done is done.”
But it’s not - some things are never done with.
What Pilatus unleashed that morning has grown beyond all recognition and I, Kleitos, good son of a skeptical Epicurean, have had a hand in it but cannot speak of it. Not yet.
I’ve often wondered what might have happened - how different my life might have been - if Pilatus had been afflicted with a headache when he wakened after a night spent over too much falernian. If he’d given orders for the arrested men to be flogged and released instead of having them nailed up on posts near the cross-roads, screaming their hearts out on that warm spring day and the festival mob averting their faces for fear of being defiled at that holy season.
Thalia fell asleep against me. I lay on my back and recalled how it was that bar Abbas came to an untimely death.
Oh, the Zealots pleaded for him and for his lieutenants to be released but Pilatus would have none of it. He made a little game out of the situation, offering the crowd in the agora below the Herodian palace where he was lodged, a choice: did they want Yeshu’a the prophet or Yeshu’a the killer, the freedom-fighter?
The Zealots and their supporters out-shouted the Galileean riff-raff who’d followed the prophet, the would-be Messiah, all the way to Jerusalem for this Passover.
Pilatus enjoyed that. He let them rage at one another for a while then called for water in a large silver bowl and washed his manicured hands as he sent nine men to their deaths. When he had done, he tipped the water down the terrace steps in a neat little gesture of contempt for the citizens of Jerusalem. It was a theatrical touch and the irony was not wasted on the howling mob who watched him go back through the arch. Pilatus was still smarting over a riot he had provoked when he robbed the temple treasury to pay for his new aqueduct, designed to improve the city’s water supply.
My father had often spoken of that affair. Heads were cracked in dispersing the trouble-makers, he had told me - men and women were beaten down and trampled as the mob scattered in panic.
Water for Jerusalem had remained a sore point with Pilatus: there had been complaints to the Emperor with even the Herodians making deputations to Rome where they lodged their reports criticising Judaea’s Praefect.
He slew my tutor. That was all I knew. He destroyed the finest of men.
Bar Abbas died more slowly than the rest, set out in three groups of three with the tall Galileean prophet between two of his followers. I had watched bar Abbas contorting on his pole, his thin arms attached to the patibulum by those iron spikes firmly pounded into each wrist and a bolt head protruding from under each shattered ankle so that his feet looked like a camel’s, monstrously swollen and his blood jetting onto the stones below.
He groaned my name - at least I thought I had heard it - just before he died. And poor deluded Yeshu’a bar Yosef of Galilee had jabbered a few words now and then, like Socrates giving a final discourse on the threshold of death.
Before sunset, the execution squad started methodically smashing the shins of the victims so that they could no longer push themselves up to take a proper breath. For reasons I must not comment on here, they stuck a javelin into Yeshu’a bar Yosef but did not break his legs whereas bar Abbas - blessed be his memory - slumped like a broken puppet, his splintered bones protruding through the skin.
I had slunk away, weeping like a child. I had failed to please my father; I had been no use to my beloved mentor. I could not speak easily of these things - not even to Thalia.
Of the aftermath I could say nothing to anyone. Of the deception in which I participated; not a word.
If Thalia or any of my many friends knew how I had behaved, implicating myself in what amounted to a crime, I should have lost my good name and been considered more than eccentric, a fool; a dangerous fanatic.
I had reluctantly but most certainly involved myself in a controversy of the most extraordinary nature.
“Sleep, Kleitos.” Thalia stirs, sighing as she half wakens. “Your foot is twitching.”
It does that when I lie in the dark and ponder that unforgettable Passover. Thalia’s hand rests on my shoulder, patting me as she would soothe our son.
The goodness of women: they offer consolation like honey on a spoon.
Even in death, bar Abbas had no dignity. There was no place where I could go to mourn him. He was tossed into the common pit in the Hinnom valley along with the rest, except for Yeshu’a bar Yosef who had powerful and wealthy friends among his entourage. Bar Yosef went into a new tomb, shaped to receive the family of a rich Synhedrion member.
Bar Abbas rotted among the mounds of refuse dumped each night when the scourings of the city’s avenues and latrines and crowded courts had been heaped into a line of stinking carts and gone out through the Dung Gate, dripping their filth into the dust.
Perhaps the lepers of Hinnom picked over bar Abbas’ corpse. As for bar Yosef, he was laid to rest with ceremony and that I know for a fact. Yeshu’a bar Yosef - the latest in a long line of failed claimants of that title, Messiah, went into the earth a man and emerged as Christ Jesus, conqueror of death.
What came out of that aristocratic tomb was a dream from which no believer has wakened. You know that, of course. Like me, you probably acknowledge the value of a good dream which is often preferable to the harsh light of morning in a world grown cold.
I had copies of books that bar Abbas made me study; I had commentaries of his own too, given me by his widow whom I eventually traced, living with her children in a room above a saddlery near the centre of the Essenic quarter.
I read them again; mused on the theme of the Messiah. At the synagogue I attended, men argued about the Messiah: about the long, long hope of a national Deliverer who would be an heroic priest-king in the mould of David and would lead the people in a general uprising then inaugurate a new kingdom with himself - the Anointed One - ruling over all with perfect righteousness.
The liberal disciples of Sadduceean teachers argued that the concept could not be taken seriously: it was an image to give hope to the poor and the simple, they said.
One Sabbath, someone mentioned the crucified Galileean and the preposterous claims being made by his followers. He had walked from his tomb; he had manifested so tangibly on occasions that he had been seen to eat food. Barred doors and thick walls were no barrier to him - he moved with ease between two worlds.
In the ensuing uproar I went back to my lodgings, imagining how my father would scoff. The stories should have faded away in time. They did not.
Even the temple priesthood began to take notice. There was a series of arrests in which a few of Yeshu’a’s immediate followers were taken before the Synhedrion for questioning. There was a disgraceful lynching in which a Greek-Jew like myself - one, Stephanos - was pelted to death with rocks by an outraged crowd of fundamentalist bigots who took exception to a public address he gave in which he claimed that Jesus, as he called him, was indeed the long-awaited Messiah but that Israel’s religious leaders had been blind to his glory.
Stephanos was evidently a fanatic and a fool himself - no man speaks like that in Jerusalem and expects to get away with it.
The issue might have withered in time except for the actions of a brilliant scholar, Saulus, a citizen of Tarsus in Cilicia, who had been sent by his father to study in Jerusalem.
Although a Pharisee, he somehow became a favoured member of the High Priest’s inner circle and earned himself an odd commission. He was sent to Damascus in Syria to root out the deluded members of the synagogues there, who were openly proclaiming Jesus as the expected Christ.
The rest as they say, is history. We speak of Paulus now and he is revered as chief among the apostles.
Saulus-Paulus, the architect of a cult. He took a minor off-shoot from the numerous apocalyptic branches of the flourishing tree of Judaism and has made it a universal sect of personal salvation.
Paulus: who never set eyes on Yeshu’a but presumed to speak about him as if he alone understood who that man was. In time, he came to denounce the Galileean followers and insisted that the Judaean adherents of the new Faith were quite misguided when they claimed that Yeshu’a, their friend and teacher, had been the Messiah - no more or less.
Monstrous arrogance, Paulus! Oh yes - you will say that I am simply suffering from professional jealousy because he was a superb orator whose words have been recorded a hundred times over by devoted audiences. I acknowledge his gift while rejecting his message. I could well have made a career out of rhetoric as my father hoped. Instead, I chose to live in Jerusalem and enter the world of commerce.
I think now of Paulus, at the huge following he had, and I marvel that a man of such talents could so completely misunderstand what he claimed to perceive as no others could do. His was specialised knowledge received in visions alone. Absurd conviction!
I pray that my mother will forgive me if I state that in the end, visions are no more to be trusted than the words that spring from rational thought.
Paulus has triumphed, of course. Although the actual followers of Yeshu’a detested Paulus so much and sent out their own envoys - teachers of their Messianic cult - it was that tent-maker from Tarsus who carried the image of the crucified God-man to the great cities of the eastern empire where the Faith now flourishes. The bizarre and outrageous doctrines that Paulus was propagating in liberal synagogues throughout Syria and Magna-Graecia, have swept aside as false, the recollections of those who knew Yeshu’a.
They say Paulus imbibed the cults of the Soters in Tarsus: those mythical god-men who save. Certainly, it was a remarkable fabric of mystical longing that he wove throughout his years of journeying and teaching - a vast tapestry of loose stitches and tangled threads, the image blurred in many places; the fringes so richly coloured, they have become tasselled truths.
The eye of the unwary is easily distracted. Where Yeshu’a bar Yosef once stood, there is now a glowing representation of one like Helios with the great disc of the sun set behind his shining head. Yeshu’a is forever obscured.
Yet my eye is firmly set upon his distorted likeness and if you ask me to comment on the curiously over-wrought borders of that tapestry Paulus has woven with consummate skill, I must decline.
Where the tent-maker had mere belief, I have knowledge
I never intended to enter trade but through my horticultural ventures as the estate flourished, I met a Galilean supplier of excellent walnut oil. I thrived on the business of despatching it in pottery flasks to the kitchens of the rich and importing luxury goods for the mansions of Jerusalem’s aristocracy followed so naturally I rapidly became too much the business man to devote any time to study.
Bar Abbas’ books went into lidded drums of leather that lined one side of my tablinum. Pilatus who had condemned him, was recalled to Rome for a massacre of Samaritans and we had a new governor, one, Marcellus who made a point of avoiding any measures that might give offence to his subjects.
My commissions increased. Ships arrived safely at Caesarea with consignments of fine linen, rainbow-hued glass, crates of cut ivory and precious stones. Exports were heavy: woollen goods and salted Galilean fish, dried fruit, fresh persimmons, date wine from Jericho, pickled walnuts and jute for sails and canopies.
I ventured into bigger markets, despatching hand-picked slaves. I specialised in youths and girls who were educated, many of them coming from the markets of the Decapolis or from cosmopolitan centres such as Berytus, Tiberius, Autocratorius.
It was their minds I advertised as much as their bodies and I became a trusted supplier.
My reputation for fair dealing became firmly established and my circle of suppliers expanded until I had to employ agents in places as distant as Petra and Damascus. My father-in-law was greatly enthused: we established a partnership with the aim of breaking into the Alexandrian markets. I knew that if I could establish outlets along the great emporium of the inner harbour in that glorious city, there would be no limit to my success. Alexandrian merchants have such sound contacts in Rome it would be tantamount to calling the imperial city a second home and opening new channels in any corner of the ever-expanding empire.
Yet as I sat over my abacus at night or dictated letters to my secretary, it would come to me that I had lost the quiet content I had known as a boy student under bar Abbas or as a youth immersed in the liberal Judaism of the holy city.
There had been scholarly sons of aristocratic families as colleagues then; young Sadduceeans as admirers, following me into the temple courts to hear what I might say in disputing some point of law with the academics who held court in the great stoas.
I had long-since shaved off the short beard I wore as a nod in the direction of the old conventions. My clean jaw was slick with rose oil and in the chill of winter my feet were warm in boots of deer skin from Gaul.
But the stuff of my soul grew threadbare and I felt beggarly within.
It was a golden age at my estate in Bethesda. Only Thalia knew that I divined to discover the most propitious day or week in which to place my orders. I cast tokens and noted my dreams: the visionary gift of my childhood had weakened but never dissipated.
That quiet craving for some consolation that belief systems could not offer gnawed at me. I swallowed my dissatisfaction in the rich, dark wine that came to my table.
And then, quite suddenly, the Moerae spun their wheel of fate and dealt me a succession of blows which tore my secure world apart.
A storm wrecked several cargo ships off the coast of Cyprus and ruined a major trade deal with an affluent Jewish family in Corinth. At enormous cost, I had purchased several tons of fine bronze works - vases, door fittings, commemorative shields, water-heaters - for merchant customers whom I had promised to supply.
I was compelled to pay for goods I never received. My customers assumed I was losing my grip and went elsewhere.
Indebted, I sold several servants for quick cash and applied myself to the work of the estate. That summer there was a drought that brought famine. The simple people said it was an omen of the way our nation would fare under Rome’s new Emperor, Gaius whose soldiers referred to him as, Caligula. Leaves wilted on the vine, locusts descended out of the relentlessly blue sky. My crops shrivelled in the cracked soil but Gaius Caligula seemed too distant to concern me.
I took to reading those passages of Scripture which describe the punishments inflicted by the Most High upon our ancestors when they had become back-sliders in their observance of the Law. The words were harsh, the concepts simplistic. I read and I heard my small son’s laughter as he drove his goat-cart like a miniature chariot, across the clean-scythed grass of the peristyle gardens.
When he went down with a fever, I took myself to the temple and offered a fine calf. The animal bellowed and twisted as it was led towards the whetted knife. Its throat slashed, it still kicked and voided its bowels on the sacred flagstones. The officiating priest in his butcher’s robe, glared at me as though I had appeared with shoes on or in a short tunic.
The omens did not improve. I broke an ivory amulet I had purchased in Gadara. I found a dead crow, studded with thorns, in the bottom of the grain pit. It had been deliberately placed there. When I lifted it out, maggots tumbled from its stinking head and flies darted at my ears and mouth.
I sat that night by my son’s bed, gazing at my mother’s duck-lamp with its gentle flame. The boy beneath its glow, breathed like a runner at the end of his course. He was the colour of ripe berries.
The physician had instructed us to keep him cool but the cold tub we sat him in, made him wail so hard, he nearly choked. My wife plucked him out and cradled him, moaning while the servants wrung their hands.
“There must be something we can do!” Thalia groaned. “What good is your money if we can’t save our son? What if he should....” She shook as she wept. “I couldn’t bear it.” She was pressing her lips to his wet head. “Lysis, little bird, be well... be well.”
The lamp had gone out though there was still oil in the duck’s terra-cotta belly. Shuddering, I got to my feet and left her to her crooning and her tears.
When I walked in the orchard and called on my parents in a cry that only I could hear, two owls responded from the cypress trees near the Sebaste road.
I tore open the neck of my tunic and went indoors.
Lysis died before dawn, clutching at his mother’s sleeves like one who in drowning, grasps a passing plank. The household fell into mourning and stayed that way until days after we had committed his small body to the new vault I had ordered for the property, believing I should enter its darkness first.
Those were the days when I prayed as I had never done before. My head draped with the tallith I had been given at my bar mitzvah, I stood at the window of my tablinum and appealed to the Ruler of the kosmos to receive my son; to let his little shade not linger in Hades or Sheol if such realms existed but thrive and grow in some place where we might one day join him and hear his laughter, delight in the beauty of him.
I was David rebuked by Nathan - I was Job afflicted with boils. Tears streamed from me and I added my voice to the wailing of my wife and servants, the sound creeping like the wind in Tevet when it laments at the eaves for vanished days of light and warmth.
Mourning over, I held a green glass pendulum above the grain pit and called on bar Abbas then named my household, one by one. When I spoke the name of Eteocles whom I had purchased from Philadelphia of the Decapolis, the pendant swung from left to right instead of in a gentle circle.
Summoned, I led him to the grain pit and pretended I had been informed by one who had observed him. He paled, stammered lies until I shook him. Suddenly he blurted his confession. He had been bribed by one of my chief rivals in Jerusalem. The malignant crow had been placed there on the orders of my opponent with silver to seal the arrangement. My observance of omens was known: that carrion corpse was to unsettle me.
I took Eteocles to the stables and gave him to the grooms to thrash but not so as to scar his shapely arse: I intended selling him to a dealer who provided the brothels of Caesarea with suitable stock. Eteocles wailed for mercy when the trader took up his neck-rope harness. There was no mercy in me.
How my father would have mocked me!
Before the month was out, a consignment of balsalm oil in glass vials was stolen on its way to Ptolemais - bandits came out of the hills near Dora, slaughtered the escort and stole the entire mule train, taking twenty beasts and their panniers crammed with precious stock.
There were no more magical birds to blame now; no ill-favoured omens of any kind.
I appealed for time to pay my supplier in Jericho but the attempt was futile. Grasping pious prig - he had often enough referred to the synagogues of Satan, knowing full well I was of the liberal persuasion. He demanded payment in full - I had sent him the deposit only - and I was suddenly forced to liquidise several assets to realise the debt.
They said in the city I had over-reached myself - greed, ambition and over-confidence are the enemies of successful business, they said. With my status as a trader plummeting, I was no longer asked to dinners in the country villas that dotted the hills around Jerusalem. Acquaintances managed not to notice me in the forum of the city and the bankers would lend me nothing more.’
Thalia rocked in a chair, Lysis’ wax death mask pressed under her lips like a posy of spring flowers. In bed at night, she wept softly with her back turned to me.
I sold all the servants except Thalia’s maid, the steward and the cook. My three horses went to the market leaving me with two mules to draw a cart. I found myself demanding of my father, why such misery should be heaped upon our heads if there was no malevolent force behind it.
When tiles slid from the roof of the west wing in a storm, I could not afford to hire a man to repair the damage so took myself up the ladder.
Crouched on the gable with sail cloth, intended to cover the exposed rafters, I saw my father gazing up at me from the gloom of the shallow roof space. The cord I was holding between my teeth, dropped. The canopy floated to the ground.
My father’s face was stern. His mouth opened and shut in the over-precise way it had always moved when he was called upon to declaim in the open air.
I said, “What are you telling me?”
He mouthed a single word in reply.
“Go?” Thalia demanded when I suggested it? “Go where?”
“Away from Jerusalem,” I said. “I should never have come here to live - not after the misery it brought me when bar Abbas died. We can start again while we have the opportunity. If we stay, we shall be completely ruined, that’s certain. I can make good money on the sale of the house and property if I move now, before everything deteriorates.”
“And do what?” Thalia demanded, her face dark with contempt. “Become a teacher like your father of hallowed memory?”
I suppressed the urge to slap her. “If necessary,” I said. “And where? Well, I’ve always liked Tiberius on the lake, Gennesareth. It’s new, clean, a pretty place with good water and the company of spirited people.”
Thalia complained bitterly, of course: the prospect of leaving Judaea and her family who had dwelt there for six generations, was unthinkable.
I swept aside her protests and her father’s loud complaints with them. The house was sold to a property developer who planned to have the vines and orchard ripped out to make way for new houses: the Bethesda district was fast becoming a suburb of Jerusalem itself.
Thalia wept like a child when her maid was taken away for sale. We loaded our belongings onto three hired ox-carts and went with a party of traders, out onto the Sebaste road, in preference to the heat of the Jordan valley. Jerusalem, with its perpetual odour of burning flesh and of incense, fell behind us.
To the traveller, Galilee’s lush vegetation and its radiant light are like a tonic after five days of slow travel. Thalia actually smiled. The lake shimmered, as blue and smooth as a lacquered dish. Galleys and fishing boats glided with coloured sails billowing and in the shade of the date plantations that ran down to the water’s edge, children splashed in the shallows.
We entered Tiberius on the lake road and went to the apartment I had leased through an agent. Hired sons of fishermen unloaded our chairs of lemon-wood, our cedar chests and bronze lamp-stands. From a street hawker, we bought figs and fresh bread; fish drawn that morning from the lake. Thalia was heard humming as she unpacked our boxes.
It took me less than a week to find us a modest villa near the south gate. Its walls were freshly plastered and there were stuccoed medallions on the ceilings of the principal rooms. The peristyle was sweet with lavender and daphne. I found myself whistling. Though smaller by several rooms than our Jerusalem mansion, it was pleasingly proportioned and the exhedra was open at the rear with a superb view through rustling palms, of the whole eastern side of the lake with the burnt ranges of Gaulanitis rearing to the north.
Some impulse sent me that first morning, to the acropolis. I climbed its paved street until I reached the precincts of the palace, all pillared porticoes and gilded akroteria, ostentatious enough to please the Tetrarch, Herod Antipas.
I presented myself at the gate as formally as some visiting diplomat and to my astonishment, was admitted to the outer court, hopefully clutching the bundle of credentials that stated my worth and background. I had heard enough of Antipas to feel that I knew him a little. With a reputation for ruthless self-interest and the most aggressive nature - like most of his family - he was also said to be a lover of learning and still anxious to fill his new capital with as many Hellenoi as he could persuade to enter its walls.
There were perhaps twenty men in the ante-chamber and it was nearly noon before I was admitted to the audience hall.
Antipas, lounging in a curule, received me courteously, ran his eyes over my documents and demanded to know what I felt I could offer him since I was clearly in need of employment.
“I had intended to follow my father’s profession, sire,” I began. “A teacher of rhetoric - a grammaticus...”
“I remember him,” Antipas said briskly, glancing at my father’s name. “A Gadarene who often came to us at Sepphoris-Autocritorius, did he not?” I nodded. “Well, if you are anything like him, then I can use you. But why abandon Jerusalem and a prosperous business?”
I explained as briefly as possible, not attempting to conceal the collapse of my financial affairs. It would be an honour, I insisted, to be employed in the service of the Tetrarch.
He seemed to like me. Wine was called for and we chatted of politics and the recent stories from Rome where the Emperor, Caligula, had begun displaying some curious eccentricities which even Antipas - an ardent friend of Rome like his father before him - could not resist chuckling over.
“I can use a man of your talents,” he said. “After all these years, I’m still trying to persuade my subjects that just because my new city was unfortunately built over some ancient grave-yard, that doesn’t make me a desecrator of the Law, nor one who wishes to violate the things that are deemed holy.” His full lips twitched. “Always a problem, you’ll agree, these matters. I take it you accommodate the faith of your mother’s people within the more pragmatic view of the modern world?”
I assured him he was correct, I was as servile as a man should be in my position.
“I’ll start you in my library,” Antipas said. “The custodian is dying and his chief assistant too young for the post. You can catalogue, do translations, that sort of thing. And I’ll send outraged Pharisees to argue with you rather than give me more headaches. How will that suit you?”
I was delighted: thanked him effusively. He stated the beginning salary which was a little more than I had once paid my steward but I had meagre savings and was content.
“Come tomorrow,” the Tetrarch said, thrusting my documents back across the table. “I’ll have you attend my staff dinner next week, bring your wife if you like, we’re moderns here.” He scratched at his greying curls, clipped close but thinning. “You’ll like everything about Tiberius.”
Thalia was ecstatic when I told her the news. She cooked a stew of goat meat flavoured with garlic and cummin and we went to our bed happy, for the first time in more weeks than I could remember.
When at last we rolled apart and she had slumped into sleep with her head nestled against my shoulder, I found myself giving thanks to the darkness of our room. The night breeze rattled the palms in the garden. I began to recite in my mind the synagogue psalm of praise for deliverance that I had chanted as a child but the words wilted in my head.
I turned then to the nebulous force which my father contended might lie behind all things. When I tried to address that being, that power, I discovered I was looking into the eyes of the dying Yeshu’a bar Yosef.
The shock of it made me jerk. Thalia stirred and shifted away from me.
I was back in that appalling place of suffering where he had died but now he was nowhere to be seen. Instead my beloved bar Abbas dangled from his ripped and streaming wrists, his eyes beseeching me to save him. Half dreaming, I could do nothing but demand that he tell me why he had been foolish enough to support yet another failed liberator
If his answer came, I never heard it: sleep descended and in the morning, I put on my white tunic and best sandals and went off to be employed by the Herod who ruled Galilee.