Iscariot: A Novel of Judas (14 page)

the second Pharisee said.

I cringed at the way he said "son of Mary." It was the address of a bastard, to be called the son of his mother rather than father.

"Did I?"

"A charming tale, about some weeds." He chuckled and gestured vaguely.

"What is this story about? A farmer? A husband whose neighbor 'sows seeds in his field' when he isn't looking?"

Chuckles, all around.

Before Jesus could answer, a chunk of straw and earthen ceiling fell abruptly onto the table. And then we were up and leaping back over the cushions, the Pharisees tripping over their robes, Simon falling against the wall with a look of such utter shock that I would have laughed at him were the ceiling not now falling down in great clumps and dusty nuggets.

"Who's up there? Stop! Make them stop!" Nahum was saying, clapping his hands to his head. He was a proud man, but not a

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wealthy one. He had not counted on ruin to his house in hosting this prestigious dinner.

A group of faces appeared above us, brown and dirty-faced, and there was John yelling up at them that they were killing us. They pulled more of the dirt and straw away and the branch support beams with it leaving a clear expanse of starry sky.

"What is the meaning of this?" James shouted.

And then the sky was blocked out by what looked like a pallet.

"Steady!" someone yelled. I had never seen anything like this Galilean chaos, this commotion of the country folk.

"Teacher! Please!" Someone shouted from above. One of the wall stones came loose and tumbled into the room. The ropes creaked. A groan issued from the pallet.

A young man was lowered right onto the table. His face was drawn tight and a line of drool escaped the corner of his mouth. I had thought him a man but he was barely thirteen, if that. I had seen paralytics before near the Temple steps, and been afraid of them. He was not the kind of beggar that a man could even pity well, because he seemed half out of his mind, eyes looking out from the prison of his own bone-thin limbs. A smell filled the room--urine, perhaps, overpowered only by the stench of one who is wasting away inside his own body. Across the table, one of the Pharisees covered his nose with the edge of his sleeve.

The boy lifted his arms, just a little. They didn't work right. His legs were askew, no better than sticks. I shuddered and looked away in time to see Simon avert his eyes. But Andrew was looking at the pallet with strange interest.

As was Jesus.

He leaned over the pallet and sighed, smoothed back the young 116

man's hair. The paralytic made a sound that was not a word. Bubbles came out of the spittle at the edge of his mouth.

I would never forget the look on Jesus' face. I had seen it before on the face of my mother once when Joshua and I, roughhousing, had knocked a bowl of rare painted pottery to the floor, shattering it. It was the most precious thing she owned and her eyes had filled with tears even as she had gathered up the pieces on her knees.

How was it possible that I should see that look in this man now? What man was this, who could look at a paralytic that way?

He held the young man's wrist gently. I saw Simon glance toward the door.

It was an impossible situation. How could we gracefully leave this place, this house--the presence of this broken man--with so many nearby?

"Son," Jesus said, loud enough for all of those to hear, and yet in a way that seemed as intimate as though he had whispered it. The young man's gaze was fixed on his, rapt. "Your sins are forgiven."

I must have heard him wrong.

Across the table, Simon had gone white.

What was he doing? Every man of Israel knew that only God could forgive sins!

Over in the corner, where the Pharisees had drawn back against the wall, the one stared, eyes bulging, no longer indulgent.

Jesus' gaze snapped up as though the man had screamed at him.

"Why do you entertain evil thoughts?" he said.

The Pharisee started to open his mouth.

"What is easier?" Jesus said, his voice rising in the direction of the teachers in the corner. "To say to this man 'Your sins are forgiven'?"

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He returned his attention to the young man on the table. "Or 'Get up. Take up your mat . . . and walk'?"

The young man closed his mouth, still slick with the line of saliva running down past his jaw to his throat. Slowly, he turned his head straight, as though he were gazing not up at the faces of his family, but past them, to the heavens themselves. And then he lowered his chin toward his chest . . . and began to roll upward.

Gasps from overhead. From the windows. From my own mouth.

The man came up as one emerging from the surface of the mikva or the waters of the Jordan, into the air. He sat straight up as Jesus took him by the wrist. One of the thin legs twitched on the pallet. Overhead, a woman cried out.

The leg slid over the edge of the pallet and table both, dangled toward the floor. The other slid toward it until his feet had come to the ground. He bowed his head, his free hand grasping the edge of the table . . .

. . . and pushed up from the edge.

His breath came out in a slow, unsteady exhale, ragged like a pant.

No--like an incredulous laugh, where his jaw and his tongue had not seemed to work before.

Shouts from the roof. But those within the room stared in utter silence as he stood before the teacher, hand now clasped in his. And then he slowly let go, reached up and brushed the line of saliva away from his cheek, moved forward a step, and then another, and clasped the teacher in shaking arms.

At that, an explosion of pent breath, of cries and laughter came in through

the windows and down through the ceiling. Across from 118

me, John was hollering as though with the might of the heavens, and his brother had rushed to the window, crying, "Did you see that? Did you see it?"

The house erupted. It shook like Jericho itself at the clamor outside and on top of it, as though it would all come down upon us.

But the Pharisees in the corner were as pale as the dead.

That was how the trouble started.

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13

It was three weeks until the Feast of Tabernacles and I had never experienced a more astonishing two months of my life.

Now everywhere we went, people said, "Are you not one of the ones with him? Are you not his disciple?"

I was gratified at first by the look in their eyes. It surpassed what I had imagined as a child when I wanted to be a teacher of the law, going beyond respect to strange awe.

Then again, it was an easy thing to awe peasants and fishermen. It was an altogether different matter to move the learned. And though there were more peasants than teachers, it was the Pharisees and teachers whose opinions mattered . . . and who found themselves the most offended by my new master.

And then there was Simon.

When people asked him these same questions, he did not answer, but kept his eyes straight ahead. They grabbed his sleeve and his tunic anyway, as though having been in the company of the healer he might have some vicarious power. But of course none of that was true.

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He was often in prayer, his shawl over his head, and I knew that he wrestled with something that he would not share with me. In those days and hours, he reminded me of Joshua as he had been in Sepphoris. The way my brother had struggled so valiantly and beautifully. Perhaps because of that, I was gentle with him in the only way I knew how to be: I left him alone.

A few days later Simon and I accompanied Jesus down near the lake.

James and John had gone ahead of us.

I welcomed the breeze, the smell of the water--if not the fish themselves in the shallow pools where the fishermen brought in their catches. The father of John and James--the "Sons of Thunder," as Jesus called them--had invited us to his house for dinner that evening. I was curious to meet the father who had spawned the brash brothers, but when I asked the teacher about it he said, "We will go, but not tonight. Tonight we eat at a wealthy man's house."

I was secretly relieved for that news, hopeful that a rich man might serve something other than fish.

Near the catch pools of the southernmost dock stood a stone hut. It was attended by soldiers and a line of peasants, their pack animals laden with baskets of barley, jars of pickled fish, oil, wine. Behind the hut a large wagon stood half-filled with similar goods under guard by two more soldiers.

The tax booth.

Had the teacher come to pay taxes? I followed him to the hut where James and John were already arguing loudly with the collector behind the table.

The man was a Jew--nearly all of them were, having bid and bribed for the privilege of extorting their countrymen. My father

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had never failed to spit in the direction of a tax booth when he could for the simple fact that such men used their learning for love of money over the law.

It was the reason Shammai had permitted lying to a tax collector as long as it didn't involve an oath . . . and the teacher Hillel permitted it even if it did.

"I tell you, that was a freak catch," John was saying. "You can't base our lease on one catch alone! So here it is, the usual payment and we're done

with it!"

The tax collector, who could afford to be far fewer volatile with soldiers at his side, spoke so quietly that I couldn't hear him. John's brother, James, however, was another matter.

"Fool! We've only got the two boats and there's fewer of us fishing now than before! We've paid you enough to fill your table for days with only a pittance left over for our own children. Don't think we don't know who you are, son of Alphaeus. You're a Levite. Your calling is the Temple! But here you sit stealing our food and livelihoods and giving them to Herod and Rome." He spat on the table, right onto the man's books.

The soldiers watched the exchange with a lazy eye, apparently accustomed to these conversations.

Simon stepped in front of me and tried to draw Jesus away.

"Please, Teacher, you dirty yourself here," he said.

The tax collector, who had lowered his gaze at the onslaught of the brothers'

anger, suddenly looked up. His cheeks were full and anyone looking at him could see that he was well fed, that his skin was not dark from the sun, and that his clothing was made of the highest quality linen. But now I also saw the lines around his eyes, the ring of his mouth drawn tight over his teeth as though he sat there by an act of will--no, as though he sat there chained by the

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very wealth of the fine linen on his back, fixed to his position by the hatred and scorn of others.

"Are you the teacher they're all talking about?"

"I am," my master said. "Come with me."

I stumbled back. I told myself it was not possible that I had just heard the same words my master had spoken to me offered to a tax collector. That I did not hear the scrape of a chair, or the audacity of the man rasping as he fell to his knees: "Have mercy on me, a sinner!"

THAT NIGHT, MY HEART pounded as I entered the Roman-style villa in the upper hills of the city where the wealthy had their houses. We had come to eat at a rich man's house indeed--the house of Matthew, the Levite tax collector.

Simon had refused to come.

We sat down stiffly on the sofas, as though scorpions might come out of its cushions. Peter and his brother reclined rigidly, holding themselves high on their elbows rather than sinking into their shoulders.

Another wealthy man arrived not long after us, gold rings heavy on his fingers, his fat cheeks flushed in the early evening heat. Matthew greeted him with a kiss. And then to my shock, the teacher himself rose from among our company and kissed him as well, as one kisses a friend.

I saw the surprise on the faces of the others, the ire smoldering up from the fishermen. But none of this surpassed the sheer stupefaction of the man himself, whose bravado slipped the moment Jesus released him and brought him to the table to sit among us.

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Two more rich men arrived soon after and they, too, came to the table with darting glances, as apparently uncomfortable as we were.