My Glorious Brothers (2 page)

Even the old man, my father, the Adon, I cannot tell you without speaking first of Judas. I was three years older than Judas, but in all my memories of my childhood, there is no memory without Judas. My older brother, John, was gentle and sweet and good, but not somebody to lead the four hellions that we were; so out of the five of us, the old man held me, Simon, responsible and always to the accounting. It was never a case with me of “Am I my brother's keeper?” For I was that; and to me, always, the bill was presented. Yet it was Judas who did the leading, and like the others, I turned to him.

How shall I describe Judas, who was the first of us they called the Maccabee, there coming to him what was his by right, and to us only what fell from his shoulders? Yet the curious part of it is that other things are more clear, it is so long now: Eleazar, built like a great bull, with his big grinning face; Jonathan, small, wiry, girl-like in his grace, yet as brilliant and as calculating as Eleazar was honest and simple—even Ruth as she was then, so tall and lissom, with her high cheekbones and her great shock of red hair, yet not red as I put it here, but lit through with sunlight. Judas is not like that; there is no memory without Judas and no memory completely of him, and about that I once talked to an old, old man, a Rabbi who knew many things, but not his own age, which was lost somewhere in the past; and he said that people, the human flesh and blood, are compounded out of evil, so that when the good shines through it is like a blinding flash of God Himself; about that, I don't know and would have something to say before I agreed with him, but certainly it would be easier to paint Judas for you if Judas were like other men.

Judas was not like other men. Tall and straight, taller than any of us except myself, he had that tawny hair and beard that crops up so often in our line, which is the Kohanim—though more of us are red, as I am and as Ruth was; yet there were other Kohanim who were tall and blue-eyed and as straight and as handsome as Judas was; but other men are compounded out of weakness, even as the Rabbi said, and it is the weakness that makes a man knowable, as you will see.

***

Then we lived at Modin, a little village on the road from the city to the sea, not on the main road, which runs from south to north and is older than the memory of man, but on one of those little cart tracks that twists down through the hills, out of the wind-bent cedar and hemlock, across the valley, and back into the broad belt of forest that grows along the seashore. The village was a day's walk from the city, and all told some four hundred souls lived there—in the low 'dobe houses. Nothing unusual about Modin; there are a thousand villages like it, up and down the land, some larger, some smaller, but all of them pretty much the same.

We are a village people, except for this city where I sit and write; and in that, as in a hundred things more, we are different from all other folk. For among other people in other lands, there are two stages and two stages only, master and slave. The masters, with those slaves they need to serve them, live in walled cities; the slaves, in mud and wattled huts, scarcely more noticeable than anthills. When the masters make war, they hire great armies of mercenaries, and then it may or may not be that the slaves in the mud huts in the countryside will have new masters; it makes little difference, for outside of the cities men are like beasts and less than beasts, half naked, scratching at the earth so that the masters may be fed, neither reading nor writing, not dreaming and not hoping, dying and giving birth… I say this not with pride because we are different, because we alone of all people do not live in walled cities; not with pride—how could I have pride and say the benediction, “We were slaves in Egypt”? Not with pride, but to make you who read and are not Jews understand how it is with us who are Jews—and even then there is so much I cannot explain!

I can only tell the tale of my glorious brothers and hope that something will come out of the telling. I can tell you that in Modin, then, there were two lines of 'dobe houses, and the street ran between them, from the house at one end of Ruben, the smith—though precious little iron to work came his way—to the house of Melek, the Mohel, the father of nine children which was at the other end. And in between were twenty-odd houses on either side of the street, all sunny and old and venerable in the wintertime, but in spring and summer covered over with a wonder of honeysuckle and roses, with hot bread steaming on the sills and fresh-made cheeses hanging by the doors, and then, in the fall, the houses were festooned with garlands of dried fruits, like maidens in necklaces going to dance. The streets were full of chickens and goats and children, too—but that changed, as you will see—and the nursing mothers would sit on the doorsteps, gossiping, while their bread cooled and while their men were out in the fields.

We were farmers in Modin, as we are farmers in a thousand other villages up and down the land, and our village lay like a nugget in the center of our vineyards, our wheat fields, our fig trees, and our barley patches.

In all the world there is no other land as rich as ours, but in all the world there are no other people who till their fields as free men. Whereupon, it is not strange that, talking of many things in Modin, we talked mostly of freedom.

***

My father was Mattathias ben John ben Simon, the Adon; always he had been the Adon. In some villages, one man is the Adon one year, and the next year another. But as long as people cared to recall, my father had been Adon. Even when he spent much of the year at the city, serving the Temple—for as I said we are Kohanim, out of the tribe of Levi and the blood of Aaron—he was still Adon at Modin.

We knew that. He was our father, but he was the Adon; and when our mother died, when I was twelve years old, he became less our father and more and more the Adon. It was not long after that, I remember, that he made one of his journeys to the Temple, taking the five of us with him for the first time. I have no memory of the Temple or of the city or of the city people before that; yet somehow I remember every detail of that trip—yes, and of the last trip the six of us made to the Temple some years later.

He woke us while it was yet dark, before the dawn, rooting us out of our pallets while we whimpered and protested and begged for more sleep—a tall, unsmiling, somber-eyed man, his red beard shot through with gray and here and there a streak of pure white, his arms frightening in their massive strength. He was fully dressed, in his long white trousers, his white waistcoat and his beautiful pale blue jacket, belted in with a silk girdle, his wide sleeves folded back. His great shock of hair fell behind almost to his waist, and his beard, uncropped, swept across his bosom like a splendid fan. Never in my life have I known or seen a man like my father, Mattathias; my earliest pictures of God substituted him. Mattathias was Adon, God was Adonai; I grouped them together; and sometimes, may He forgive me, I still do.

Sleepy, excited, and terrified with the prospect of our trip, we crawled into our clothes, went out into the cold to wash, came back and gulped the hot gruel John had prepared, combed our hair, wrapped ourselves in our long, striped woolen cloaks even as the Adon did with his, five stunted figures striped in black and one giant, and followed him out. The village was just waking when the Adon marched majestically by, and one by one we followed him, John first, then I, Simon; then Judas, then Eleazar, and finally the small, already gasping figure of Jonathan—only eight years old.

And that way, for thirteen long, cruel, bitter miles, up hill and down dale, I and my brothers kept pace with the Adon to the gates of the holy city, the one city we call our own—Jerusalem.

***

To a Jew, there is a time when he first sees Jerusalem—and how shall I explain that? Other peoples live in cities and look down on the countryside, but from the countryside we look at our city. Then, even then, you understand, we were a conquered people—not conquered the way we were later, not on the basis that Jew and all that Jew means must be wiped from the face of the earth forever, but under the heel of the Macedonian, subject and abject, allowed to live in peace as long as we did not mar the peace. They didn't want us for slaves; there is a saying among the Gentiles, “Take a Jew for a slave and he'll be your master yet,” but they wanted our wealth, the glass we make in our furnaces on the shores of the Dead Sea, our Lebanon suede, soft as butter yet enduring, our cedarwood, so fragrant and red, our great cisterns of olive oil, our dyes, our paper and our parchment, our finely woven linen, and the endless crops, so fruitful that, even on the seventh year when all the land lies fallow, no one hungers. So they taxed us and milked us and robbed us, but left us, at least for the time being, an illusion of tranquillity and liberty.

That in the villages. In the city it was something else, and that time, still a boy, walking with my brothers behind the Adon, I saw the first evidence of what men call Hellenization. The city was like a white jewel—or so it seems now, so long after—proud and high and lovely, its streets flushed by water from the great aqueducts that had brought water to our Temple from a time before any Roman dreamed of such a thing, its towers high and proud, its Temple the grand crown of the rest. But its people were a new thing, clean-shaven, bare-legged, as the Greeks go, many of them naked to the waist, watching us, sneering at us.

“Are they Jews?” I asked my father.

“They
were
Jews,” he said, his voice ringing loud enough for anyone within a score of paces to hear. “They are scum today!”

And then we strode on, the Adon with the same, steady measured pace he had kept from Modin, but we children, ready to drop with weariness, climbing higher and higher, past the lovely white buildings of the city—past the Greek stadium where naked Jews threw the discus and ran races; past the cafés, the restaurants, the hasheesh houses; through the exciting, bewildering turmoil of painted women with one breast hanging bare, Bedouin merchants, pimps and prostitutes, desert Arabs, Greeks, Syrians, Egyptians, Phoenicians; and everywhere, of course, the arrogant, swaggering mercenaries, the Macedonian troops—all colors, all races, these mercenaries, united only by the one and simple fact that their business was murder, for which they were paid and armored and fed.

To us children, it was one gorgeous tapestry; only later the parts sorted out. To us, there was only one recognizable factor, the mercenaries. Those we knew and understood. The rest was the bewildering complex of what had happened, over a generation, to Jews who wanted to be Greeks and who turned their sacred city into a whorehouse.

And finally, climbing on and on, we came to the Temple, and there we paused while the Adon said the blessings. Levites in white robes, bearded as the Adon was bearded, bowed to him and drew back the mighty wooden doors.

“And thou shalt love the Lord thy God,” the Adon said, in his deep, ringing voice; “for we were slaves in Egypt, and He brought us out of slavery to build a Temple to His everlasting glory.”

***

It is not of childhood that I desire to tell you, dipping back as I do into the past, here and there, almost aimlessly, so that I may have enough eventually for me to understand—and perhaps you too—why a Jew is a Jew, blessed or cursed, as you look at it, but a Jew; not of childhood, which is forever without a sense of time or the passing of time, but of the brief manhood of my glorious brothers, so terribly brief. But the one fathers the other, as we say. I went to the Temple as a child, and I went again and again—and finally, the last time, as a man.

If there's a mark of manhood, it's the end of illusion. Then the city was a whore, and no magic pile of white stone. Then the Temple was a building and no more, and none too well built at that. Then the Levites, in their white robes, were dirty, cowardly scum and not the anointed messengers of God. You pay a price for manhood; you give up a world and get another, and then you have to weigh what it's worth—article by article, measure by measure.

It was only Ruth that remained untouched. What I felt for her and about her when I was twelve I felt when I was eighteen and when I was twenty-eight. I said we went to the Temple again and again, and finally a last time, but there were things that happened in between. We grew; we changed; the juice ran in us; we killed a man, we boys; and there was Ruth. She was the daughter of Moses ben Aaron ben Simon, a small, plain hard-working Jew who lived next door to us and who was a vintner, with nineteen rows of vines on the hillside. But he was a philosopher of sorts, as all vintners are; and in a way we are a nation of vintners, the people of the
sorek,
as the Egyptians call us out of their own, slave-infested ignorance, envying what they have not. The
sorek
is a black grape as big as a plum, fleshy and bursting with juice. In the spring, it gives us
tirosh,
in the summer the heady
yayin,
and through the winter
shikar,
the deep red brew that makes an old man young and a foolish man wise. A Roman or a Greek will say “wine,” but what do they know of the precious Keruhim, liquid gold, or Phrygia, as red as blood, or rose-colored Sharon, or
yayin
Kushi, clear and sweet as water, or
aluntit
or
inomilin
or
roglit?
There were thirty-two brews that Moses ben Aaron made in our little village of Modin, in his two deep stone cisterns, and when it was especially good, he would send Ruth with a beaker for the Adon. She would stand there by the table, her mouth open, her blue eyes anxious and troubled as the Adon poured himself the first cupful.

We shared her anxiety, the five of us; we would stand still and quiet, watching her and watching the Adon. Wine is the second blood of Israel, as we say often enough, a sacred drink whether you taste it at the
seder
or bathe in it, as Lebel the weaver was wont to do. The Adon never spared ceremony if ceremony was indicated.