Iscariot: A Novel of Judas (9 page)

She was still warm.

"Help me get her to the midwife!" I cried. "Help me!"

Simon stared at me, face as ashen as the stones beneath his feet.

"The midwife! Now!"

Simon ran up the street ahead of me, back toward the New City. Weeping, I hefted my wife's lifeless body into my arms and staggered after him.

Nightmare slow, those moments. Morbid and intimate, the form of my wife in my arms, the precious bulge of our son between us.

Simon and the midwife came rushing out to help me. The midwife felt for Susanna's pulse, shook her head, told us to hurry.

We laid her on the floor of the courtyard. I groaned and tore at my beard as the midwife cut open her belly, the blood pooling on the earth.

"A son," she said, as she put the boy in my arms.

I fell to my knees, cradling the tiny form.

He was too small, the tiny eyes already fringed with Susanna's lashes so delicately closed, having never had a chance to open.

The first time I died I was a boy staring up at his father on a tree. The second was that day, as a man, kneeling beside the gaping body of my wife, cradling my dead son.

69

I DID NOT BATHE. I hardly ate though my mother brought me dates and olives, and Nathan's wife poured me honeyed wine. I could stomach none of them, dreaming at night of Susanna in Sheol with our lost children. It haunted me, thinking of her there, four starving babies gnawing at her shrunken breasts.

I combed the scrolls tirelessly. I tortured myself with thoughts of the Sadducees, who do not believe in the resurrection of the soul. I writhed with the need to know that I would see my family again. I thought of going to the porticoes, to the great teacher Shammai himself, to beg to know for certain. I wanted assurances. I wanted promises.

What else should there be for Susanna, a woman of honor? For my brother, who was perfect, my father, who deserved better than the shame of a cross?

Isaac, earnest to the end.

They had all loved the law and kept it all the days of their lives.

It eluded me, the thing that had kept Mother's head lifted in the middle of her disgrace. That had sustained Father through the tortured hours on the cross.

That had overcome Joshua's doubts.

How then are we to be saved?

I read and reread the story of Job. My mother could not pry the scroll from my hands. I cried out at night when the rest of my household slept and stood for hours in the cold water of the mikva. But I heard only silence. Not even a still quiet voice to answer me.

I had pursued the law with all my heart and it had gained me nothing. It had not sped the kingdom or called out to God, or struck the false, Roman-appointed priests dead within the sanctuary of the Temple.

70

By the time my month of mourning was over I knew only one thing: I was tired of being holy. The great warrior hero Judas Maccabee had not been so holy, after all, waging his wars on the Sabbath.

Neither could we afford to be.

That evening, I went to the house of Levi.

"Come inside, Judas," he said.

That night, I stepped into the dark waters of the mikva, galvanized by new

promise: the revolt to come at the hands of these secret Sons of Abba, which was the name for "father" but also given to teachers . . .

These Bar-Abbas.

And then, that fall, the voice of Zion came.

71

8

People had been talking about the Baptizer for weeks.

Pilgrims who'd come to the Holy City for the Feast of Tabernacles brought stories about his fanatical preaching and obsession with immersion in the living water of the Jordan.

They brought stories, too, about his open condemnation of Herod Antipas, who had married his brother's wife in violation of Torah. For these things alone I would have wanted to see him myself.

But it was the whispers of those who had come from the river that raised the hair on my arms.

Elijah.

He is Elijah!

Elijah. Who was to return before the coming One.

"I wonder if he really could be a prophet?" Simon said the day I persuaded him to travel from Jerusalem to find this Baptizer. We had gone out with a group of students, Amos and Levi among them.

"No prophet has been seen in four hundred years," Levi said. "No, my friend.

He's an Essene for his love of washing or a madman. But an interesting madman."

72

"Who says he's a madman?" Amos said.

"Who else would speak out publicly against the king? But for that we love him. And so we brave scorpion and jackal to look upon this madman before Herod's men come to kill him. Come to think of it, any mouth Herod would silence must be the mouth of a prophet indeed. We should hear what he has to say before he dies."

I chuckled, but the sound was hollow. He couldn't know the disquiet his words evoked in me, or that I felt the serrated edge of them all the way to the river. Something had returned to life in me, larger and more ravenous than before. And though I feared disappointment in this madman, this Baptizer, I feared hope even more.

By mid-afternoon we came to a small scarp overlooking the Jordan--and gaped at the sight before us.

Lean-tos and tents covered the scrub in a colorful swath all up and down both sides of the river. There must have been three hundred people sitting on the banks or going into and coming up out of the water. Laborers, their skin like dried brick, rich men in fine linen, and children in rags. Women spread garments to dry on the grass and nursed babies beneath the shade of acacia trees.

And then I saw him--out in the middle of the river, like the eye of a gathering storm.

He was as sun-dark, nearly, as a Nubian. His hair fell in ropes past his waist, over sinewy shoulders the skin of which looked as though it had baked to the wiry muscles beneath. His beard fell in a black stream to the middle of his chest. But it was his voice, carrying up from the river to our vantage on the scarp, that made him seem feral as a thing uncaged. It was not the voice of the elder who read the scrolls in synagogue, or the scholar debating in the porticoes. But of the man who runs to the village warning of coming disaster.

73

"The time is coming! Hear what I say: Repent now! The kingdom is near!"

A part of me instantly recoiled. Recoiled because they were the words I had hoped all my life to hear. And from outrage. How dare he arouse false hope!

How many times had I heard such promises only to find death?

Compulsion swallowed me and I knew I had to see him closer, if only to tell him to stop his wild and empty talk.

"Judas!"

I hardly heard Simon's call behind me; I was hurrying down the stony slope, skidding most of the way, tearing toward the bank, the crowd thick before me. Rather than fight my way through them, I surged into the river's shallows.

The water was cold in contrast to the hot fall sun that had sent sweat dripping down my back on our day-long journey.

My robes tangled around my legs as I pushed upriver toward the source of that voice, past an outcrop of reeds.

I emerged from the reeds panting, up to my knees in the muddy river. And then only one man stood before me, not twenty paces away.

The Baptizer.

He turned to look at me and I caught myself. His were not the eyes of a madman.

"Welcome," he said, holding out his hand to me, seeming not at all surprised by my appearance.

I did not take his hand. I dared not. Because his eyes were not only not mad, but filled with a clarity I had never seen. They were too lucid--the eyes of someone who had seen more than eyes should see. And now they were looking at me.

74

For an instant, I felt laid utterly bare.

I fell back, suddenly desperate for the cover of others, for the very crowd I had fought to break free from just a moment ago.

"The time is coming. I tell you today, one more powerful than I will come," he said, and I realized he was no longer shouting, but speaking directly to me.

His voice dropped. "One whose sandal I am not fit to carry."

There was a moment, strange and uncanny, in which I thought he took my measure as much as I took his. But then he turned to the shore and cried,

"Come! Today I baptize you with water, but he will baptize you with fire!"

They came, surging into the water, and I allowed their number to swallow me, grateful to escape the brunt of that gaze.

All around me I heard the whispers of those praying like a swarm of locusts, confessing wrongdoing. Beside me a man murmured that he had stolen from his neighbor, and another that he had broken the Sabbath.

And then they began to immerse, lowering themselves into the chilly water, more people on the banks shedding outer garments and some of them stripping down even to their loincloths, some of the women going farther off to a bend in the river.

Feeling foolish, I turned and sloshed through the water, desperate to escape, staggering up onto the bank. I was looking around for Simon and Levi when a young man came alongside me and shed his tunic.

"Will you immerse? Come, we'll go together."

I shook my head.

"It's living water--it's the living water of the Lord, for the forgiveness of sins!"

he said.

75

"Forgiveness of sins?" Simon had found me and stepped forward.

"Nonsense. This Baptizer is no priest and this is not the Temple."

"The Temple is impure and in need of cleansing!" the man replied. "You as well, my friend. Immerse and tell everyone that Elijah has returned."

"Leave us," Simon said. "And be careful you don't blaspheme. The Temple is the dwelling place of the Lord!" The man gave Simon a parting look, and then moved on, undaunted.

Simon took my arm and tried to draw me away. "They are overzealous.

These radical teachers!"

But I stood rooted, watching the young man as he waded into the shallows toward one of the Baptizer's disciples. They seemed to speak, and then to pray. And then he was sinking beneath the surface at the hands of the other man.

I watched until he burst from the water, his hair and beard like a shroud about his head. The look on his face was sublime.

Next to me Simon muttered, "Mark me: This will become a dangerous place."

Were it not too late, Simon would have insisted we go back to Jerusalem that same day. But it had been nearly seven hours' walk coming here, and we couldn't leave now until daybreak. I was secretly glad, wanting to unravel the mystery of this man, of the strange clarity of his eyes.

That night, Levi and I gathered as close as we could to the fire where the Baptizer, whose name we learned was John, was sitting with some others.

Even at this hour, the crowd was so thick around him that we couldn't hear what he was saying, and I felt a strange surge of envy for his disciples sitting within that innermost circle.

76

"Did you notice," Levi murmured, "that he is wearing a camel shirt?"

"Yes," I said, understanding his meaning: so had Elijah.

"What is he saying?" I said to the group in front of us.

One of the men said, "There's a tax collector up there, asking what he should do. John is telling him not to collect more than required."

Next to us, someone snorted. It was common knowledge that those who owned the collection franchises collected as much as they possibly could, keeping anything above the amount owed Rome for themselves.

"There's a tax collector up there?" Levi said with a frown. "Why would he allow a tax collector to immerse?"

"Someone asked if he is the Messiah," another man said.

Messiah. The Anointed One. Gooseflesh sped up my arms.

"And what does he say?" But even as I asked it, I berated myself. I had renounced would-be messiahs and thrown my lot in with the Sons of the Teacher. If there was to be a Messiah, we would be it--though we would not shun the help of a man able to raise an army when needed.

That was the true reason Levi and I had come.

"He says he's not the One," the man said.

I did not know what was stronger, my disappointment or my relief.

I woke before dawn with a stiff neck and growing frustration--a sense of stymie that sat like something sour in my gut. By morning light, the Baptizer was stalking along the bank nearest us, already teaching. The crowd was smaller than yesterday and I found myself unnervingly near him.

77

His words knew no end! Again and again, he called for repentance and announced the coming kingdom until my frustration grew so great that I leapt to my feet.

"Where? Where is the Lord?" I cried.

The Baptizer's eyes turned and caught mine, his gaze a snare. This time I did not melt backward.

"He's coming! I tell you, he is coming, and the kingdom with him." He walked up to me. "Come. I will baptize you."

I did not need a messiah. I did not want to see the death of yet another anointed one come to march Israel deeper into the clutches of Rome.

But how I craved cleansing! How I longed for it, mourned every time that the waters of the mikva fell away from my skin, knowing my peace, too fleeting, would soon follow.