Just after Yirmi and I end work that afternoon, Lucius brings us a small sack of honey biscuits tied with a purple ribbon, since I have told him that today is my grandfather’s seventieth birthday. At his garden gate, he apologizes for what he calls his ‘shameful gabbling about the theatre’, but I assure him that his observations helped me understand my motives and fears more fully. This earns me a solemn embrace, since, like all those educated in the Greek manner, he holds self-knowledge to be our most important goal. After I thank him for all his help, I confess in a comic voice that I used to perform in shadow-plays for my nieces and nephews when they were tiny, but that Mia and Marta would only give me minor roles, since they regarded me as the world’s poorest actor.
‘Is your father really so incompetent a performer?’ Lucius asks Yirmi.
My son gives his laughing confirmation.
Lucius assures us that he has been forced to speak dialogue with actors no more expressive than Egyptian mummies, including – he notes with a horrified grimace – the incomparable Anaximander of Apollonia.
Did I fail to see that Lucius, too, is in need of an amusing conversation? Likely he has also envisaged Yeshua put in chains and Judaea turned to rubble by the Romans.
‘Was Anaximander very bad?’ I ask.
‘Very bad? Is a python coiled around your neck very bad? Was the earthquake that reduced Ephesus to rubble very bad? My dear Eli, the little hairy weasel was forbidden by imperial decree from ever appearing in a Roman theatre!’
‘What earned him a ban?’
‘He always forgot his most important lines and invented the silliest improvisations – a summary of the day’s weather, for example. But in truth, that wasn’t the main reason. It was because he reeked worse than week-old squid. None of the other actors could sit or stand downwind of him for fear of passing out from the fumes! I once lay dying on the ground by his feet, but I couldn’t play out my final demise because I was choking on his odour! I had to crawl to safety. The audience was in hysterics.’
Lucius paws at the air to show us how he saved himself.
Through my laughter I tell him he ought never to have given up the stage.
‘Alas, at a low point in my fortunes, I discovered that my brother-in-law’s garum was the goose that laid the golden egg.’
When I express my regrets for having fallen out of the habit of attending the theatre, his eyes brighten as though he has seen angels descending on Yaaqov’s Ladder. ‘Then you shall be my guest!’ he declares. ‘You and Yirmi both!’
‘I wish we could,’ I tell him.
‘But why can’t you, Eli?’ he asks and then remembers what we both know – that he would be ostracized by his friends for inviting his mosaic-maker to join him at a public event.
‘What an unjust world this is!’ he says. He gazes at me as though failing in spirit. ‘“Return, O Holy One, to our city,”’ he declaims. ‘“Abide not far from us, you who quench our wrath. Strife and bitterness shall depart if you are with us. Madness and the sword’s sharp edge shall flee from our doors.”’
His words fix me in place, because I am certain he is speaking of Yeshua. I had not previously considered the depth of Lucius’ devotion to him.
‘You have awaited him for many years,’ I say.
‘I have awaited the better world he shall help us make,’ he says. ‘And there’s something else – something I’ve just realized about us all … The despots of our world fear men who insist on telling their own stories. They want to control the words we speak and write. But we must not let them, Eli. Do you understand?’
‘Yes, I do. And we shall all of us help Yeshua tell his own story.’
After Lucius reaches out for the handle of his gate, his mood becomes playful. ‘Any guesses?’ he asks, squinting at me like a tutor who has posed a trick question.
‘Guesses about what?’
‘The lines I spoke about the return of the Holy One – whose they are.’
‘Euripides,’ I try, since Lucius is plainly a devotee of the great dramatist.
‘Yes, but which character speaks them?’
‘I don’t know … Andromeda?’
‘It’s Merope, from Kresphontes,’ he says. ‘It’s her prayer for peace, and it has long been mine as well.’
At our birthday celebration for Grandfather Shimon, the shaggy old ram wears a crown of jasmine blossoms and leads us in the blessings over the meal, his sword by his side, as is only fitting for a rebel who has never given up his hopes for a Zion freed of the Roman yoke.
‘May the Merciful One be as kind to you as He has been to me,’ he tells us after we take our first sip of wine.
Generous words from a man who is known as Shimon the Leper to many in Bethany, and who – except to attend funerals – has not left our house during the daytime for the last seventeen years.
Mia sits next to him and cuts his onion-and-leek patina into tiny pieces, gazing at him with amused adoration, as if he were the oldest and brightest star in the sky.
During our meal, Marta is uncommonly gracious and tender with everyone. She grins at me now and again as if we share a wondrous secret, but what it is I dare not guess or ask. So that I might feel what it would be like to live without the ponderous weight of her inside my chest, I permit myself to believe that – despite all my suspicions – she has finally closed the doors of vengeance and retribution behind her.
Shimon empties our flagon of palm wine long before I have a chance to serve the honey-cakes that Lucius gave me. He grows misty-eyed and maudlin and clumsy of body. As I reach past him to remove the empty platters inside our circle, he grabs my wrist and tugs me so hard that I nearly fall. ‘Eli, where’s that selfish and silly wife of mine?’ he asks with a moan.
‘I only wish I knew!’ I reply in a jesting tone, since I am aware that an honest reply will only give him an excuse to crawl deeper into drunken melancholy, but he shakes his head at me and frowns as if I am no help at all.
He asks my sisters the same question, and then poor Nahara, who huddles behind me and asks why Pappas is scaring her.
‘Pappas misses his wife,’ I explain to her.
‘Where did she go?’
How ought a father to explain to his daughter where the dead go, especially when he has lost his faith? Thankfully, I am not given any time to answer because Shimon stands up and throws his bulky arm over my shoulder, drawing me into a fermented embrace. ‘Why has that mean and odious woman abandoned me, son?’
‘I know that these past eleven years have been difficult,’ I tell him. ‘I’m sorry.’
He heaves a sigh and tells me that he cannot keep saying yes to each new sunrise much longer, which seems so apt and poetic an expression that I place it in the special room in my house of memory that I reserve for Shimon’s poetry.
He wishes to go to bed, so I help him to the ladder, but, even with me pushing and Yirmi pulling, he is unable to make it to the third rung. Irritated and dispirited, he tells me he wishes to be permitted to sit and cry by himself, and, since he will not take no for an answer, Yirmi and I help him to my mat. After he is safely seated, he reaches up to me with clumsy hands and implores me to bring Ayin to him, since he will not be able to sleep, he claims, without the owl guarding him. I bring Ayin down from the roof and stand him on the floor by my window, at a safe distance from Shimon, but straight away the old man crawls to the bird on all fours. ‘What would I do without you?’ he asks, and he presses his lips to the crown of Ayin’s head. ‘The featherless others never understand,’ he says, and he begins to tell the bird the story of his marriage, starting with his wedding. ‘Bityah wore a white dress with golden embroidery to receive me, and when I entered her father’s home …’ Yirmi grimaces and backs out of the room on tiptoe, but I am ever eager to learn more about Shimon’s youth. A few moments later, he lies back against the floor and decides to address the cracks in the ceiling. ‘I was shivering with fear that first night – I admit it. I’d already visited brothels, of course, and when I was sixteen my father and I fucked our way from the Galilee to Alexandria, but this was different.’ He licks his lips. ‘That sweet moist cleft between Bityah’s legs … Oh, dear Lord!’ He turns to me. ‘My goodness, son, how happy a woman can make a man if she just agrees to bend over and stop talking for a little while!’
Shimon’s delight in my grandmother makes me tingle, as if he has discovered what makes us holy. The body that opens in jubilation is the Lord’s greatest gift to us, I think.
Soon, however, his voice fades and his eyes flutter closed.
I go off to fetch him a cup of water, and by the time I return he is snoring with his mouth open. An hour later, after I have put my children to bed, I sit again by him and study the wrinkles by his eyes and whiskered cheeks, and my thoughts return to when he was the benevolent emperor of my childhood.
‘What is it the world wants from us?’ I’d once asked him. I must have been eleven or twelve years old at the time.
‘The world? It wants nothing from us, son,’ he’d replied. ‘After all, what could the mountains and seas possibly want from us that they don’t already have?’
At the time, that reply made me shiver, since it seemed to signify that he and I and everyone else were of little worth, but it comforts me now to believe that the universe is not dependent on the ruthless and frivolous beings we are often proven to be.
I would like to lie beside Shimon, to feel the rise of his warrior’s chest against mine, but I hold myself back and imagine his light going out – and his soul fleeing our realm – since the sharp pain of losing him for ever is the closest I shall ever come to isolating what it means to be the grandson of so beautiful a man.
I awaken in my children’s room with Gephen lying across my shoulders, nibbling at my ear. I take him in my arms and remind him that I have no wish to be edible, but he is in one of his sullen moods and wriggles free from me with a serpent-like hiss.
My children’s mats are empty. Dazzling light frames their window shutters.
A foul and bitter taste in my mouth prompts me to spit into my daughter’s chamber pot, and it’s then that I discover – dishearteningly – that my tunic is again stuck to the wound on my back, which must have bled during the night. As I stand, Gephen leaps on to one of Nahara’s cushions and tests his claws, pricking at the fabric. I ask him to stop, since he will create a rip, but he continues his mischief. After I chase him from the room, the frigid edges of a dream fold around me: I am again at the night-time beach in Alexandria, and my father is with me. Blood covers his hands – from the blade wound in his chest. He pleads for my help, though I know in my heart that nothing I do will be able to prevent his death.
Now I close my eyes and still my breathing, as I have been taught, and I concentrate on my father – on his agonized countenance – and I extend my hand to him. I sense that he will reveal to me what I can do to ease his suffering in the Underworld if he takes it, but he does not.
In the courtyard, I discover that my family has already eaten breakfast. Shimon greets me with a hearty embrace, showing no ill effect from his overdrinking except for his stale breath.
‘You’re frozen,’ he tells me, rubbing my hands in his.
‘I had a bad dream,’ I explain.
‘About what?’
‘I was on my way home at night, racing across Samaria, and I got lost,’ I lie, though it seems as if what I tell him is also – in some sense – true.
I take my barley broth to my room because I can still feel my father dying inside me. I notice that my beach stones from Alexandria are gone from my shelf. I question Mia about them on returning my breakfast bowl to her, but she has no idea where they might be and has not yet had a chance to search for my mother’s amber beads. And don’t rush me! her expression warns.
Nahara reaches up to me and pleads to be lifted while Mia and I are conversing about the baby girl she rescued and who is now at the orphanage. My daughter buries her head in the curve of my neck as she does when she is upset. I suspect that she has finally grasped that she will be leaving for Egypt in just four days – on the morning after our Passover supper.
Mia notices the bloodstain on the back of my tunic as I am distracting my daughter with talk about Gephen. She tells me that she needs to clean the wound. ‘Now!’ she orders when I tell her that I am not yet fully awake.
A long and delicate operation ensues, involving warm water, ointments, a plentiful amount of blood and – when vinegar is applied – some healthy swearing on my part.
As Mia is coating me with her fragrant oils, Marta’s daughter Yehudit escorts Onesimos the jeweller into my room. He carries Grandfather Shimon’s tallit, folded into a perfect square. His walk is stooped and his eyes are sunken, which sets fear jumping through me, but I soon learn that I have misread his mood
‘Eli, you did it – you saved Ninah,’ he tells me in a hoarse whisper, and the tears in his lashes glisten, and he places Shimon’s prayer shawl before me as though it were an offering to the Lord.
It is an astonishing thing to hold in your arms a father whose daughter has not died, to feel the ocean of gratitude in which he is drifting – and to be reminded again of the prodigious depth of feeling that is our heritage but that we hide from one another, as if it were shameful to admit that our spirit is made of compassion – racham – and love.
He reaches into his pouch and hands his daughter’s blood-encrusted molar to me, and, while I turn the tiny four-horned bulb in my hand, he speaks my thoughts for me. ‘It seems wrong that so small a thing could cause so much pain.’ Gazing up at Mia, he says in a reverent voice, ‘Your brother is a man of miracles.’
‘It would seem so,’ she agrees, which makes me gaze up at her, and we share a look that acknowledges that we would both like to return to how we lived before my death and revival but never shall.
Onesimos holds out a slender golden ring to me. ‘For you,’ he says.
‘I already accepted one present from you. That was enough.’
‘I swore to Elohim that I’d give this band to you if my daughter survived. It was my mother’s. Ninah was named after her.’
With his ring in my palm, I calculate how many months of Yirmi’s studies its gold would guarantee and arrive at nine. I make a fist around it, and it feels right in my hand, but I shall not steal from a friend. And, for once, I find the right words to express my thoughts. ‘Give your mother’s ring to Ninah,’ I say, ‘so that she may know that her life is special to her grandmother, even though she is not here to tell her so.’
After Onesimos departs, Yirmi and I make ready for work. Thankfully, Lucius has again sent us Abibaal and his donkey. As we make our way to the Upper Town, I offer benedictions to all those who beseech me, including a deaf Roman dwarf from Antioch who comes to have a prominent place in my heart because he teaches me the meaning of a verse from the Book of Names I’d never previously understood.
The dwarf’s name is Maximus. A joke at his expense? Yes, he admits, his father intended the name as a humiliation. On leaving home at the age of twelve, he stopped concealing it from those he met for the first time, since he discovered that the name had become a sacred lantern that always revealed to him those he could trust and those – giggling at him and pointing – he could not.
Unfortunately, he has been deaf nearly from birth. His intelligent eyes gaze up at me out of a pale and shrivelled face, and he converses with me with graceful and intricate hand gestures that his son, who is of normal stature, translates into Latin. The young man’s wife, a Judaean, translates his Latin into Aramaic.
While watching this time-consuming but captivating process, I understand the verse from the Book of Names where Mosheh tells us, ‘The people saw the sounds’, for I come to recognize – and hear inside my head – several of the words Maximus speaks with his hands!
The little man tells me that he lost his hearing as a five-year-old boy after a period of aching in both his ears. Watching him speak, I recall a visual prayer that Rabbi Elad taught me, and I sense that my recollection of it is no coincidence, so, after he finishes his explanation, I draw a circle in the air above him – representing creation – and picture the two of us at its centre. I compel the circle to expand inside my mind, and, when it surrounds Yerushalayim and Bethany and finally all of Zion, I ask Abibaal to take a drop of blood from my back on to his fingertip and trace it around each of the little man’s ears. I then recite a prayer from Samuel that I heard Yeshua use to restore the hearing of a Galilean cobbler. ‘“In my distress, I called upon the Lord. And from his temple, He heard my voice. And my cry for help came into His ears.”’
Although Maximus’ hearing is not immediately restored, he thanks me with graceful, kind-hearted gestures. Abibaal watches me suspiciously while I am saying my farewells to him, as though he has just realized that I am not the simple artisan he has always taken me to be.
The elderly slave wears a handsome white turban today, and, as we enter Yerushalayim, he tells me it is because Lucius’ right elbow has been aching, as it does whenever we are about to have rain. It’s then that I notice that thick grey clouds have indeed rolled in from the east.
As I turn away from the sky, I sense the intimate connections between myself and the world as trembling in my chest. Had I never been born, I think, I wouldn’t have been able to learn from Maximus or help save Ninah’s life. Everything would have been different, which means that the life or death of a single person may have consequences we cannot predict.
Can you grasp what I am tell you, Yaphiel? You and I are connected to the men and women who lived a thousand years before us, as well as those who will be born a thousand years into our future.
How to express this truth?
At the time, I am unable to do so. Indeed, only many years later, after another flash of insight, would I hear Yeshua tell me again what he had said after I lost my faith: the sea whispers that the separateness of islands is an illusion.