My Glorious Brothers (4 page)

“Put your hands on mine!” he said suddenly, laying his big, fleshless hands palms up on the table, and we laid our hands in his, leaning toward each other—and how will I forget that, my brothers' faces almost touching mine, their breath mingling with my breath? “Make a covenant with me,” he went on, almost pleadingly. “Since Cain slew Abel, there has been hatred and jealousy and bitterness among brothers. Make a covenant with me that your hands will be one—and you shall lay down your lives for each other!”

“Amen—so be it,” we whispered.

“So be it,” the Adon said.

***

My brother John married. I remember because it was the last day of grace, the day before Apelles came to take over the wardenship left empty by the death of Pericles. He married a sweet and simple girl, Sarah, the daughter of Melek ben Aaron, who performed circumcisions and who raised the sweetest, largest figs in Modin. “A fruit of her father's tree,” they said of Sarah—and the pride of Modin was such that eight of the twelve slaves in the village were given their freedom, well in advance of the sabbatical, when they could have claimed it. That day, Modin was packed with our kinfolk—from as far as Jericho, for when you come down to it, who is there in Judea who cannot claim kin with someone else? Forty lambs were slaughtered and set to cooking.
Zalah
filled the whole valley with its smell, and pots of that savory sauce,
merkahah,
bubbled on every hearth. A veritable flock of chickens were killed and plucked, stuffed with bread, meat, and three kinds of old wine, and set to roasting in the common oven. I call it to mind because it was the end of something, the end of a whole life. There was a horn of plenty, flowing with grapes and figs and apples, cucumbers, melons, cabbages, turnips. The fresh baked bread, round, golden loaves, like the discus the Greeks throw, was stacked in pillars, then broken all through the day, dipped in savory olive oil, and then eaten. Four times during the day, the Levites danced, and the girls still unmarried played the reeds, singing, “When will I have a fair young man? When will I have a suitor bold?” And then, in the common meadow at the end of the village, they joined hands and danced the marriage dance, a circle of laughing, swirling girls, while the men stamped their feet and clapped their hands to time.

I found Ruth after the dance. I was two years younger than John, and I knew what I would tell her. I found her in the courtyard of her house, in the arms of Judas.

***

It seems I hunger to search for and seek out fault in Judas—whom no man ever found fault with; but the fault and the uncertainty and the confusion, fear, and terror were in me, not in Judas. I, Simon, long of arm, broad and ugly of face, balding already at twenty, slow of movement and almost as slow of thought—I, Simon, accepted and considered only how we laid our hands one on the other. Neither of them knew. Yet for all that—may God forgive me—I was filled with such hatred that I went out of Modin, away from the dancing and drinking and singing, walking for hours, even after night set in. I had the thought, and for that surely I will not be forgiven, that I could have slain my own flesh and blood—and at last, when half the night had passed away, I came back. Before the house of Mattathias, the old man, the Adon, stood, and he said to me,

“Where were you, Simon?”

“Walking.”

“And when a Jew walks alone on a night like this, there's no peace in his heart.”

“There's none in mine, Mattathias,” I said bitterly, calling him by his name for the first time in my life. But he did not react. He stood there in the moonlight, the venerable and ancient bearded Jew, wrapped from head to foot in his white cloak, the black stripes making an awesome pattern as they fell first lengthwise from where his head was covered, and then girdling him round and round until finally the earth rooted him, beyond passion and beyond hatred.

“And so you're no longer a boy but a man to stand up to your father,” he said.

“I don't know if I'm a man. I have my doubts.”

“I have no doubts, Simon,” he said.

I started to go past him into the house, but he stopped me with an arm that was like iron. “Don't go in there with hatred,” he said quietly.

“What do you know about my hatred?”

“I know you, Simon. I saw you come into the world. I saw you suckled at your mother's breast. I know you—and I know the others.”

“The others be damned!”

There was a long moment of silence; and then, in a voice that almost shook with grief, the Adon said, “And ask me now if you are your brother's keeper.”

I couldn't speak. For a while I stood there helplessly, everything gone out of me and empty inside, and then the Adon clasped me in his arms. He held me for an instant, and then I went inside and left him standing there in the moonlight.

***

Much can be explained, and then nothing; for the more I tell in this tale of my glorious brothers, the less it seems I understand; and the only thing that remains unchanged, unmarred, unblurred, is the picture of the old man, the Adon, my father, standing in the moonlight in our ancient, ancient land. I see him as I saw him then, this old man, this Jew, in his great shawl that covered him from head to foot, the singular among peoples and nations, only able to say in affirmation, “We were slaves in Egypt—and we will never forget that we were slaves in Egypt.” So it must have been then, in the long ago, when our people, twelve tribes of them, sick with wandering and longing for rest, came out of the desert and saw the wooded hills and the fertile valleys of Palestine.

***

Pericles was dead, and they sent us Apelles. Pericles was a wolf; Apelles was a wolf and a pig in one. Pericles had a little Greek in him, and Apelles had none at all.

You must understand about Greeks—you who read this when I am dead, and my children, and their children too. This is not a people, this thing we call Greek, not a culture, not Athens—not a golden dream, lingering somewhere in our memory, of the glory that was once made by Greeks. In the old tales, they tell of a beautiful folk, far to the west, who found many things that were not known before. Who can grow up in Judea without handling this or that, a vase, a cloth, a tool—a way of speech too—and not know it was born out of Greeks? Such Greeks we never knew, only the bastard power-drunk lords of the Syrian Empire in the north, who made their own definition of what was Hellene and taught it to us through suffering. Thus they “Hellenized” us, not with beauty and wisdom, but with fear and terror and hate.

Apelles was the final result, the height and pride of Hellenization. He was part Syrian, part Phoenician, part Egyptian, and a few other things too. He came into Modin the day after my brother John's wedding, riding in a litter borne by twenty slaves. Forty mercenaries marched in front of the litter, and forty mercenaries marched behind it—you could see right there that he was taking no chances in sharing the fate of Pericles.

In the very center of the village, where our market booths are, the litter was set on the ground, and in so doing, one of the slaves twisted his foot and fell. Apelles hopped out of the litter and looked around him. He carried a little whip of woven silver wire and when he saw the slave crouched on the ground, nursing his twisted foot, he leaped at him and opened his back in two places; a small man, but active, Apelles was, fat the way a pig is fat, rolls of pink flesh from head to foot, not pretty, but exhibiting his nakedness for the world, wearing a dainty little skirt and a dainty little tunic, and pleading with the world to examine the little he had under the skirt.

By the time the litter was put down, almost all of Modin, men and women and children, had crowded out to see the new warden. There had been a blessed two weeks without Pericles, an absence unexplained but well regarded; yet the people knew it had to end sometime, as all good things do. We stood there and watched silently as he opened the slave's back.

In our tongue, the word for “slave” and “servant” is the same. No slave can be held for longer than seven years among us, and because that has been written into our law from time immemorial, the sabbatical of freedom to remind us everlastingly that we, ourselves, were slaves in Egypt, we have become almost a people without slaves—in a world where there are many slaves for every free man; where all society, where every city, rests on the backs of slaves, we alone have no slave markets—and it is forbidden to have a block for the sale of men or women. In our law, if a master strikes a slave, the slave can claim his freedom; among civilized people, it is different—and therefore we watched with interest this first manifestation of the character of the new warden.

His mercenaries pushed us back with their spears, and in the circle of space they made, Apelles strutted a bit and then struck an attitude. He drew in his chin, pushed out his stomach, and placed his feet wide, his hands clasped behind him. He licked his lips and then spoke—in lisping Aramaic with the high-pitched tones of a capon.

“What village is this?” he asked. “This is a foul place—what village is it?”

No one answered him, and he took out a lace handkerchief and passed it delicately under his nostrils. “Jews,” he lisped. “I detest the smell of Jews, the look of them, the air of them—and the pride of them, filthy, bearded beasts. To make it plain, I repeat, I do not like Jews. And you—” pointing a fat forefinger at David, the twelve-year-old son of Moses ben Simon. “What is this place called?”

“Modin,” the boy answered.

“Who is the Adon?” he snapped.

My father stepped forward and stood silently, wrapped in his striped cloak and his enormous dignity, his arms folded, his hawklike face utterly expressionless. “Are you the Adon?” Apelles demanded querulously. “Hundreds of stinking villages and hundreds of head men—Adons, the lord of this and the lord of that!” His sarcasm almost whined. “What is your name? You do have a name, don't you?”

“My name is Mattathias ben John ben Simon,” the Adon replied in his deep, ringing voice, deepening it even further to contrast the squeak of the capon.

“Three generations.” Apelles nodded. “Was there ever a Jew, whether he be the dirtiest, meanest beggar or slave, who couldn't reel off three or six or twenty generations of his ancestry?”

“Unlike some folk,” my father said softly, “we know who our fathers are.” And Apelles stepped forward and slapped him full in the face.

The Adon didn't move, but a cry, almost of anguish, came out of our people, and Judas, standing beside me, lurched forward. I caught him and stopped him, and the leveled spears stopped the others. It was only the beginning of my acquaintance with Apelles, but already I was recognizing that sick and perverted lust for blood that made so many wardens turn so many Jewish villages into shambles.

“I don't like insolence and I don't like disobedience,” Apelles said. “I am warden and my duty is to spread through and among your benighted people some understanding and some appreciation of that noble and free culture that has made the name of Greece synonymous with civilization. It is hardly likely that the West will ever understand the East, or the East the West, but for the sake of mankind in general, certain attempts must be made. Naturally, this costs money, and the money will be forthcoming. I don't want to be a hard master. I am a just man, and justice will be the rule. However, the representatives of the King must walk in safety; we cannot have it otherwise. Pericles did not walk into a cloud and vanish. Pericles was murdered, and that murder cannot go unavenged. Each village will have to share a degree of the responsibility. Thus will law and order be established throughout the land, and thus will peace and security prevail.”

He paused, passed the handkerchief under his nose, and suddenly called out:

“Jason!”

The captain of the mercenaries, dirty and sweating under his brass armor, strutted up.

“Any one of them,” Apelles lisped.

The captain of the mercenaries walked along the line of villagers. He stopped opposite Deborah, daughter of Lebel the schoolmaster. She was eight years old, a bright, lovely slip of a thing, alert and white-faced now, her dark hair plaited in two long braids down her back. In one quick, calculated motion, the captain of mercenaries drew his sword and thrust it into the child's throat, and with never a sound she fell in the spurting pool of her blood.

No one moved; only the anguished wail of the mother, the cry of the father—but no one moved. What Apelles wanted was only too apparent. Then a noise came from the people. Then Apelles climbed back into his litter, and the mercenaries, swords and spears ready, gathered around it. Then the slaves picked up the litter, and Apelles left Modin.

The screaming of Deborah's mother followed him, pitching itself higher and higher and higher.

***

It was strange to see Lebel in his house of mourning, rocking and lamenting where the body of his daughter was laid out, this little pinch-faced man who for so long had taught me the
aleph,
the
bes,
and the
gimel,
driving in his lessons with a rod—a rod that fell so often on Eleazar that he grinned with embarrassment if a morning went by without it—this little man bereft of all his dignity and power, twisted and mutilated with grief. In another room, his wife wept and the women wept with her, but Lebel sat among his sons, his clothes rent and torn, ashes streaking his face and beard, rocking and whimpering…

“The Adon will be here for
min'cha
,” I said.

“The Lord has abandoned me and abandoned Israel.”

“We will hold services then.”

“Will it bring back my daughter? Will he breathe life into her?”

“With the sundown, Lebel.” What else could I say?

“My God has abandoned me…”

I went to the house of Mattathias, and he sat there at the big table of cedarwood which had been the center of our family's life for as long as I remembered, where the morning bread was eaten and the hot milk sipped at night, where the Passover was celebrated and the fast of Atonement broken; there he sat, his head in his hands, still mantled in his long striped cloak. Eleazar and Jonathan crouched by the hearth, but Judas paced back and forth, tearing bitter music out of himself.