Night was setting in and Jesus had sent Nikodemos and Lazaros off with Mary and his kin. Aunt Salome and her folk were all on their way to Jerusalem. Magdalene remained. With her, stripped to a cream colored gown, hair down her back like a virgin, was Marta. In those days she and her husband were reunited again. Jesus was with his men, and none knew when they would finally go into Jerusalem.
Jesus went off in the dark to be alone with God under the stars, and Marta came to Yochanon’s hut and undressed before his feverish eyes. When she stood naked before him, he trembled, his large eyes were full of lamp fire. She undressed him and sorrowed over how the desert and his endless penitence had wounded his flesh. Penitence for what? For the sins of the world, had hollowed his eyes and his stomach and ravaged his body. She knelt at his wounded hands and feet, lamenting over the beatings he had received from Herod’s men. She wept into his lap and he stroked her hair with his long hands until he was startled, whimpered almost in pain at being taken in her mouth, at the return of pleasure and the vulnerability it imposed. All night he strived between her thighs and murmured as he sucked gently on her breasts. He had walked away from all gentleness and now trembled under the softness of her touch. The night, humming with crickets and touched by the songs of the wild dog and the hoopoe, was pierced by Yochanon’s scream as he clutched Marta’s shoulders, bunched his thighs about her, and experienced orgasm for the first time in years.
“She will stay with me,” Yochanon said.
He looked strange, and now John understood why. Because he had never seen his cousin happy. Always Yochanon had been a burning fire, searching for more kindling Now he looked content and quiet, Marta at his side, clinging to his arm.
“She cannot,” Lazaros began.
“This is no place for you,” he said to his sister. “And this man has made himself a danger.”
“We must all make ourselves a danger,” Yochanon said. “There is no safety in safety.”
“Fuck this!” Lazaros exclaimed, but Jesus placed a hand on his shoulder.
“He is right,” Jesus said.
“Oh, not you too!”
“Me above all,” Jesus said.
“The time for seeking safety has passed. There will be no safety now. Jerusalem is a day away, the Festival has begun, and I have brought no sacrifice, for what do they need of sacrifice? I will preach here all the day, and before Hoshanah Rabbah, I will enter that great city and see it for myself, what it has for me.”
“And what do you think the city has for you, Master?” Marta asked while she stroked Yochanon’s hairy arm.
Yochanon was in a white tunic now, the camel’s hair cloak cast away.
He spoke the same time Jesus did and said the same thing.
“Probably nothing.”
“Maybe,” Lazaros said, “now that Marta is at his side he will be quiet. Not draw the ire of Herod as he has, not draw the anger of the royal family and their connections in the Sanhedrin.”
“He’s already spoken,” Peter said.
“He spoke and it cannot be unspoken, and at any rate, the Sanhedrin should be ashamed of any connection to the Herods.”
“The Herods who remain are the descendants of the Hasmoneans, and of the Onians,” Lazaros said.
“I don’t give a red fuck what high up priestly families they’re related to, they’re foul and incestuous, and the only reason Herod and Herodias are angered with Yochanon is because he has told the truth of them. A niece fucking her uncle, having a child by him, and then moving that child into the palace of her other uncle so they can both fuck him!”
“We don’t know if that last part is true,” Alphaeus said.
“I’ve heard it said,” Peter said.
“But what you’ve heard and what you know are two different things,” Matthew said. “And, at any road, I’d thank you to watch your words even here. It’s no need for us all to be in Herod’s bad graces.”
“Herod has no good graces, and if everyone who spoke the truth about him around their dinner table was to be clapped off to jail, there would be empty houses all over Galilee.”
“But there are empty houses all over Galilee,” James pointed out, and Jude said, “And crosses on hills like a forest of fuckery.”
But when they were not sitting around discussing the kingdom of heaven and the kingdom of the Herods, they were baptizing, for when Jesus spoke, many wished for the same sign or renewal they had known with Yochanon. They did it a mile up from Yochanon, whose followers were shrinking, and John and Philip noticed this with a touch of guilt.
The day before they were to head for Jerusalem, Yochanon’s disciples came and asked Jesus, “How is it that we and the holy ones fast often, but your disciples do not fast?”
“How can the guests of the bridegroom mourn while he is with them?” Jesus demanded.
Even when he turned to Yochanon, he was rejoicing, happy with Marta. Whatever would happen, this was what was happening.
Terrible vision assaulted him, almost like a blast of lightning. He could see all the future and he pushed it away.
“The time will come when the bridegroom will be taken from them;” Jesus said. “Then they will fast.”
They were looking at him, and he thought he had finished, said all he had to say. But now he added, “No one sews a patch of unshrunk cloth on an old garment, for the patch will pull away from the garment, making the tear worse. Neither do people pour new wine into old wineskins. If they do, the skins will burst; the wine will run out and the wineskins will be ruined. No, they pour new wine into new wineskins, and both are preserved.”
And as evening came, they were heading for Jerusalem. Even as he could see the city spread before him. Jesus was seized with a desire to enter, but Magdalene said, “Why? What could you do now but turn around and leave?”
From the hill top he looked down on the expanse of city and thought, “But it has taken so long, so much longer than it should have to come to her.”
“It has not taken that long,” Magdalene disagreed, “and it was not time.”
She wondered if it was time even now.
“Let us stay in Bethany,” Magdalene urged. “Lazaros will be glad of your company, for he is still not right thinking of Marta.
Jesus agreed. His mind was still on those last moments with his cousin, when he had announced the wedding feast, but there was, on all of them, the feeling of a funeral.
The disciples had said to Yochanon, “Rabbi, the one who was with you beyond the Jordan, to whom you bore witness, is baptizing, and everyone is flocking to him.”
Yochanon, drunk with love, Marta at his side, replied, “No one can receive anything except what has been given to him from heaven. You yourselves can testify that I said,‘I am not the Christ. I have been sent before him.’
“It is the bridegroom who has the bride, but the friend of the bridegroom who stands by and listens for him rejoices greatly when he hears the bridegroom’s voice.
“This joy of mine is complete. He must increase; I must decrease.”
But I don’t want you to decrease,” Jesus murmured as he sat on the rooftop that night, and saw, beyond Bethany, the lights of Jerusalem.
The bright sun and clear sky put Jesus on edge and anxiety filled the space between the green trees. It was the perfect time to enter Jerusalem, yet, Jesus was full of dis ease. He wished to shake himself of the worry thrumming in the air. He wanted to go into the garden on the Mount of Olives where he had once slept beside John. While they dressed, over and over he adjusted his mantle, and he walked about the house feeling waspish, short tempered.
When Sara came down the steps into the great room, reporting that she had seen people approaching, Jesus was almost relieved, and when the gates to the courtyard opened, there was Marta, and with her a woman he could barely remember, yes the woman called Joanna, the wife of Chuza. There were some others, a clump of Yochanon’s old disciples. But where was Yochanon?
All of them looked exhausted, and Marta fell to her knees, but there were no tears on her face. She was breathing heavily, and Sara went back to get water, and when Magdalene came down the stairs, Sara took her mistress with her.
Lazaros had restrained himself from asked what was wrong. Wordless, Jesus knelt on the floor before Marta, and took her hands in his.
She looked at him blank eyed and said, “Herod. He took Yochanon.”
