BOOK THREE
Chapter Seventeen
Father
“i’m Afraid of ever having my courses again,” she said.
“If I could, I would plead to him that it never would happen again.”
“How old are you, sister?” Mary asked, and when she told her, Mary said, “Well then it is highly likely it never will happen again.”
Her name was Susanna, and Joanna and Magdalene noted that she looked so much better, full of life than she had only a few days before. How draining the last twelve years must have been. They heard now and again of women whose courses did not end, the ache of periods unpredictable, relieved now and again, but started back up, taking life and strength from the body and predictability from life. And, of course, what could a woman do? It was not only the Jews or the Jews of yesteryear who considered such a woman one of ill fortune.
“I had lost everything,” she said.
The doctors, the cure alls, the apothecaries, th witches and those who called themselves wizards ,the priests, the incantations, the spells ,the pilgrimages, all done by an increasingly tired body.
“You said nothing of a husband,” Joanna said.
“I lost him too. I have a daughter, and she and her husband have been a support to me. I almost lost everything. I went to bed every night, weeping, yet now I weep every night with joy because I am not in pain anymore, because my body is whole again.”
Susanna shook her head.
“I cannot even describe what it was like… Which means I can barely describe what it is like now.”
“Well,” Mary said, “you never have to worry about a roof over your head. You have lost much, but you are with us now.”
The women, including Rachel and Joses’s wife, Natal, nodded, but Susanna shook her head fiercely.
“I will remain with you. Because I wish to. But I will go back home, and my daughter and I will go back into the business again. What we lost we will get back, and when we get it back it will go here. To you, to Jesus, to all of this work.”
Rachel nodded and sighed.
She kept her thoughts to herself, thoughts like, would there be any more work? Where were they going? In the last weeks since news of the death of the Baptist had come, and there had been the fateful few days of miracles ending in Jesus’s speech at the synagogue, his followers seemed fewer and fewer. The group was becoming a family, firm and strong in purpose, but the wild crowds no longer followed, and what that purpose was, Rachel could not attest to.
Jesus, eternally strange and unreadable, did not seem to care about this. He was busy with Marta and John’s child, Benjamin, and the baby as well the young man who had brought the bread and fishes, Mark, could barely be parted from him. Things were, for once, at peace between him and the synagoguee. How could they not be? Flowers in her hair, always in a variation of the red gown he had brought her back to life in, Malthace, Jairus’s daughter, came from her house to join him. In fact, it was because of Jairus’s daughter that, as evening drew on and they could hear the sough of the waves breaking on the shore, they were making their way to Jairus’s house for a great feast.
There were Romans, or at least soldiers there, but they were in cloaks and tunics, the men who served Gamelius, the God Fearer who had supplied so much money to the synagogue and was a friend of Jairus. It was this man whom Sebastian was under now, and he sat beside John, his hand over the disciple’s shoulder, laughing and drinking. Surely, Magdalene thought, this place where old tax collectors, women, children, Romans, prostitutes and scribes were all together was its own miracle.
The house was different than it had been that sad morning, as bright in the night as it had been doleful that day, hands clapping, dancers twirling and Jairus, who had never been happy in his life, who had had marriage and children so late, laughing and clapping as his daughter fell into Jesus’s arms.
“You have brought joy into this house,” Asenath, the wife of Jairus said, “what greater miracle can there be?”
Magdalene sat back, delighted, and placed a bit of fine bread in her mouth. As it dissolved she thought, “We are not far from the kingdom of God.”
“Yes,” Rachel said, watching her son go to Jesus, as she planted her head on the breast of Cleophas, “What else was there? What else was worth worrying about?”
When the night had deepened, Sebastian said to John, “Get one of your boats, and we will go fishing. I wish to show you and the Master something I bet neither one of you had known.”
For a moment a flush went through John, remembering those days when Yochanon lived, and they were all on the river, the night when Sebastian had come to him and they had lain together, and that other night when Sebastian had come to him and Jesus at once.
John, red faced, nodded, and Sebastian caressed his back, rubbed his shoulders.
“That’s a good man, my Jonni,” he said.
Jonni, just as Jesus always called him.
In the night it was him and Jesus, and Nathanael came along as did Judas. But the rest of the fishing crew was Romans, and they were all naked and laughing as they pulled the boat out onto the waves.
“I didn’t know Romans fished,” Nathanael said, as he tipped the wine skin to his lips and shot a spurt of red liquid into his mouth before passing it to Judas.
“Romans do all sorts of things,” Sebastian’s friend, Rufus said. “It’s only here that you think we’re special.”
“Who says we think you’re special?” John said.
Rufus barked a laugh.
“You jest,” he said, “but you might understand what none of you Jews have understood before. We are not special. There are the old families in the ancient city who live on the high hills. But Rome is made of all the people of the world, and anyone who comes into it becomes a Roman.”
“Why,” said a brown soldier called Simon, “my whole fucking family is from North Africa.”
“This is what I want,” Jesus said, almost too earnestly for a naked man getting drunk in a fishing boat.
“Rome?” Sebastian burst out laugh. “She’s a harsh mistress. The suckling wolf is her sign for a reason. Lord, I don’t know that you want Rome!”
“I want the city that is the city of all men,” Jesus said, “where everyone comes into it and everyone becomes part of it.”
“Oh!” Rufus said. “Then they are wrong about you! You don’t want to be the king of the Jews, you want to be the emperor.”
Jesus smiled and shook his head. Squatting in the boat he stretched his hands out before him, splaying his fingers.
“My empire would be an empire such as has never been.”
Sebastian lifted his head and quoted:
“With a new breed of men sent down from heaven.
Only do thou, at the boy's birth in whom
The iron shall cease, the golden race arise,
Befriend him, chaste Lucina; 'tis thine own
Apollo reigns.” And in thy consulate,
This glorious age, O Pollio, shall begin,
And the months enter on their mighty march.
Under thy guidance, whatso tracks remain
Of our old wickedness, once done away,
Shall free the earth from never-ceasing fear.”
“What prophecy is that?” Nathanael said.
“What prophet indeed?” Judas wondered.
“Not one of yours!” Rufus said, laughing.
“It is Virgil,” said John, who had studied him in Palmyra, “The favorite poet of Augustus.”
“Aye,” Sebastian said. “Augustus called him the greatest of the poets, and maybe he was. But he was certainly the one most like a prophet.”
Sebastian quoted:
“He shall receive the life of gods, and see
Heroes with gods commingling, and himself
Be seen of them, and with his father's worth
Reign o'er a world at peace. For thee, O boy,
First shall the earth, untilled, pour freely forth
Her childish gifts, the gadding ivy-spray.”
“Then it is not he dream of a few sad Jews on the shore of the Great Sea,” Thaddeus said.
Jesus shook his head, folding his legs under him, and then he turned around, looking into the water and as he knelt, and he let his fingers trail the moonlit water.
Turning around he said, “It is the dream of all men in all places. I will bring that dream out of the dark and put it in the light, something far more difficult than forging an empire.”
“Jesus of Nazareth,” the soldier called Simon said, “I do believe you are a mad man. But… I also believe your madness is the only thing worth following.”
On the beach, every Jew grimaced with the exception of Judas, and Jesus whose mind seemed to be elsewhere.
“We absolutely cannot eat that,” John said.
“You can, and you will,” Sebastian laughed. “And you certainly sell it.”
“To the goyim!” John exclaimed.
“Oh, but John, love,” Sebastia laughed amd threw his arm about him, “We are the goyim.”
“Do not grimace until you taste,” Rufus said, and Paulinus was assembling sticks for a fire while, on the beach, the others sorted through shrimp, and Nathanael stared balefully at the crabs and lobsters climbing over each other in their cages, and mussels that lay in the nets like mossy stones.
“I cannot believe you Romans eat these sea bugs and lake scorpions,” he declared, “these creatures who make their homes on the asses of boats.”
“Anything good enough for a boat’s ass or a Roman’s stomach is good enough for yours,” Simon dismissed him as he rinsed the strange creatures and Nathanael wondered, “but how do you kill that sea bug?”
“By sea bug do you mean the lobster or the crab?”
“Yes.”
Simon laughed.
“You boil them. You put them in the pot, and the water rises higher and higher. Just a little higher and higher. They don’t know it’s too hot until it is.”
“There’s a metaphor hidden somewhere in that,” Jude noted.
“Thaddeus, my friend,” Simon clapped him on the back, “there’s a metaphor hidden in everything.”
“What we need now is some butter and some onions and herbs,” Sebastian said.
“I can dress and go back and get some.”
“No need, Jonni. A soldier is always prepared.”
They sat bare assed on the sand, rocking back and forth on their heels, and now and again John watched Jesus rise and go into the water, down to his knees, to his waist, submerging his head as if in baptism, and he remembered that unearthly day, seeing him like a ghost on the surface of the sea
“What on God’s earth is this flavor!” Nathanael demanded, eyes wide as bits of lobster hung from his mouth.
“And this?”
He dipped it in the fresh butter and the garlic.
“What in God’s earth is this flesh?”
“Now you have learned what the unclean eat,” Sebastian laughed.
Jesus was grinning as he split open a mussel and consumed the meat.
“This is not your first time with shellfish?” Simon said to him, marveling.
“This is not my first time with many things,” Jesus grinned back.
He split open the crab and pulled out the meat.
“Blessed art thou, eternal one, who has given us the life of the sea for food.”
“Blessing even on the forbidden food?” Thaddeus said.
“Blessings on all food, for all food is from God. It was never what went into the body, but what comes out of it that was the thing,” Jesus said.
“I heard,” Sebastian knelt, crouching over the fire, his heavy sex hanging between his legs as he wiped the slime of a crab on his thigh, and pulled out a hunk of sweet meat, “that you said you had not come to destroy the Law of your teacher Moses, but to fulfill it.”
“I have heard that I’ve said many things,” Jesus said.
“The old law was written on stones. The prophets said that God would write in on hearts. But after this, there is no writing at all, only living, for the end of the law is love.”
In the tent, under the tarp, Jesus woke, and for some time he lay there, blinking, before he slowly disentangled himself from the arms of Judas and John, who slept with his hand thrown behind his head, lifted Sebastian’s thigh from over him. He craw;ed out of the tent of sleepers, and stood and stretched on the sand before Capernaum. In the predawn, when the sky was just touched by grey blue, he looked over the lake where the boats still were, taking in a last haul before coming to land. He went behind the tent and pissed into the sand, and John came out and pissed beside him.
They turned to silent contemplation of the water. In the charcoaled sky, the fingernail of the moon still looked down, and when they lowered their eyes, both were amazed.
In the distance, so small they were nearly missed, in white, in blue, and in red, were Magdalene, Susanna and Joanna. To the sound of the waves on the sand, and the swoosh of the wind, in the presence of circling seabirds, one by one they went into the water, wading , but…. John squinted his eyes… not sinking, only sinking a little. And then, like one on a ledge, Magdalene held out her hand, and Susanna caught it and was lifted up, and then Susanna took Joanna’s, and lifted her up, and tittering, laughing, they walked upon the waves.
John’s mouth hung open while the three women walked on the water as if it were a road, but Jesus, standing there naked, legs planted apart, arms crossed over his chest said, “They understand. Even if no one else does, they do.”
