THE MYRRH TREE
“We are a long way from Galilee, Yohanan,” Shan said.
Also, John noted, it had been a long time since his cousin had used his full name, and not the short Greek one.
Palmyra, a great city of golden stone, teeming with life, filled with pools, rivulets, palaces, temples, schools, ancient mysteries and even more ancient people, rose from an oasis surrounded by days of desert journeying, and was as far from their homeland as either man had ever been.
“Salome,” John always called his mother by her name when she wasn’t around, “said, you should not be a small person. You should see the world and have a real education, and I admit,” John shook his head, “she was right.”
“I believe she said, ‘I am tired of us being a small people.”
“Shan,” said John, “outside of the Galilee, we are not a small people at all. The Jews of Palmyra are cultured. They read Plato and Aristotle. Have you…. Have you heard of the Upanishads?”
Shan raised an eyebrow.
“They are from the holy men all the way in India!” John cried in delight.
He stood there before his cousin and lifted a finger.
“All this is full. All that is full. When fullness is taken from fullness, fullness remains.”
His cousin’s response was the knitted brow and inward expression that meant he was thinking.
He stood there like that a while, and John felt, in his presence, compelled to continue.
“The world is the wheel of God, turning around and around with all living creatures upon it’s rim. The world is the river of God, flowing from him and back to him.”
Amidst the noise of Palmyra, amidst the golden pillars of the great temple, Shan said, “Which God, I wonder?”
“Hear, O Israel—”John began, but Shan waved this off.
“But God is not one,” he said. “Our God never was. Our scriptures and stories speak of a petty God—”
“Shan!”
“Why would your mother have sent you here for learning, and not Jerusalem, if it were not so? Our books talk of a God who opens the earth to swallow those who irritate him, who sticks out his lower lip and his finger and and destroys Sodom, burns Gomorrah, hardens the hearts of Pharoahs, floods the whole earth, destroys the ancient kingdoms of our ancestors because of his jealousy, his, his and always his.”
“But also he is the great God of the universe,” John argued,
“For every beast of the forest is mine, the cattle on a thousand hills.”
“But even so,” Shan shook his head, “he is small. He is angry, and always we are at the center of him. Little Israel, whom he cares for more than anyone else.”
“Is that not right, though?” John wondered. “Are we not the smallest of people? Have we not suffered more than other people?”
“No, and no,” said his cousin. “Neither of those is true, and neither of those is a reason that the true God who made everything should care about us more than anyone else in the world. A real God would be father and mother—”
“Now you sound like your mother. You sound like Grandmother. You sound—”
“I sound like what it,” Shan said, “For I am convinced that is what is.”
Whatever things he was saying, however close he was to heresy, this was the brilliant cousin John was used to, who had faded in the last year, retreating into his work. This was the way John loved him best, Yehoshana, tall, sun darkened, his wide dark eyes now shut in thought, heedless of those around him, coarse robe stained grey and brown by the road, and his hair all in dark tangles like vines. Though Jews were quick to say the Galilee had been part of the ancient kingdom of Israel, that was long ago, and the Galilee was a Greek place which Jews had returned to only recently. Greeks were a people of speed, with names longer than Jews which they had lopped down to simple syllables and so it was, though his father had named in Yohanan, on the fishing boats back home he was John, and Yehoshana, such a beautiful named, was shortened to Jesus.
He opened his eyes and stretched out his arms, laughing, and called out:
“Shema Yisroel, Adonai Elohayno, Adonai ehad!”
And then, tipping his finger to his beak of a nose, John’s mad cousin grinned and said in a lower voice: “baruch shaym kovod malchuto, le olam va’ed.”
And then, still grinning, he said to John, “But not like you think. Not like you think.”
Aunt Salome had married well, a Greek Jew in the fishing trade, Zebedee, and he had connections who were not Jews at all, or just barely. This was how John could stay at the house of Flotillus who sent him to one of the school under the protective shadow of the Great Temple of the Sun.
“Greeks are not as perfect as they think they are,” he would say, “but one thing they taught even if they didn’t mean it was God was God. The Persians? They crushed everything they conquered and said, ‘Go on and worship your gods.’ But the Greeks, right or wrong, wished to bring the whole world together. They said, ‘Your Ba’al is my Zeus, your this is my that.’ The Gods can be seen in all places. They made the world less small.”
“But in our books it says they tried to kill our religion, they put their Zeus in our temple, an abomination of desolation where it ought not be. They fed us pork and forced us to give up circumcision.”
“All I know,” Flotillus said in a tone what mean it mattered no way to him, ‘is that in Jerusalem there is a gymnasium even now, though it is filled with Jews, and the Jews were all too happy for those Greek ways, even your precious Macabees who were supposed to put them away. For who is more Greek than a Hasmonean? Or what’s left of them?”
“The Herods is what’s left of them,” John had said.
But then Flotillus would say, “At any road, down south, down in Jerusalem, pretty as it is, how is it fit for a modern Jew, that place that stones living prophets even while it praises the dead ones, a place glinting with Herod’s gold and copper but, calling itself God’s temple, presided over by a high priest made by Rome?”
“Flotillus says Jerusalem is nothing but a toy, an imitation of itself put up by Rome to make some Jews happy,” John said. His voice was always tinged with wonder, and his sentences always lifted into a question.
“Jerusalem,” Jesus said, and John could not tell if he was serious or not, “is the Great City. It is the City of the Great King.”
And then he said, “It is not that all things begin in Jerusalem. Moses began in Egypt. Jacob in Beer Sheba. The fathers of Israel were born in Paddan Aram. Even David ruled at Hebron. Nothing begins in Jerusalem, but all things must end there.”
Jesus was always saying things like this,” John thought as he looked on his beautiful cousin, and now he said, “Do you know, part of me thinks I could have never come here. I could have sat at your feet and learned everything I need to know.”
Jesus yawned, a reminder that he had been traveling all day, that just this morning, in the midst of the dry desert, the wind changing the patterns of the sand, he had seen the walls of the city which marked the end of a long sojourn from Galilee.
“We’ll sleep after supper,” John promised.
“Sleep? In a place like this?” Jesus gesticulated about him on the broad street.
“Cousin it never sleeps,” John laid a calming hand on Jesus’s wrist. “We can’t wait for it to sleep before we do.”
So they find themselves in an open air tavern, noises all around, leaning against a wall, eating fried fish and flat bread, drinking good, sweet wine without the grit, and there are dancing girls with rounds stomachs like bronze bowls, and full breasts like wine cups, and there are dancing boys, golden limbed and copper torsoed, slender of waist and comely but, to Yehoshana, no comelier than John who sits beside him in a pure white gown, and they are with Jude now and James, and James is saying, “Did you hear how Magdalene went out into the desert…?” and Jude is saying, “Why can’t she just behave like a normal woman,” and John, who was barely paying attention to them, but to the dancers, and clapping his hands, breaks eye contact from them and says, “Because she was never a normal woman. She was never a normal anything.”
Yehoshana, clapping, head cocked to the side, a little drunk, quite exhausted, the coper bangles shining on his wrists, says, “There never was such a thing as a normal woman.”
John yawns in contentment as the bard begins singing his song, which is not his song which is the song of the exiled Roman poet who died only a few years ago, in the first days of Tiberius, the ruler of the whole world.
The song was of a princess called Myrrha, who had fallen in love with her father.
“The shame of it!” James said. “The thing those Greeks sing about.”
“Ovid was a Roman,” John said, his brow raised at his brother’s stupidity.
“Aye,” James allowed. “But the story is Greek.”
At any rate, there had come a festival where all the married women, including the queen, went off to dance, and then the king, one man called Cinryas, had sent for a virgin to lay with him during the days when he was absent his wife, and so Myrrha and her nurse had arranged to come to him in the cover of night.
Finding Cinyras drunk with wine,
the king’s bed empty of his lawful partner,
the nurse,
wrongly diligent, told him of one who
truly loved him,
giving him a fictitious name, and
praised her beauty.
He, asking the girl’s age, she said:
“Myrrha’s is the same.”
John lays his head on Jesus’s breast as he has done since they were children, feeling his heartbeat and smelling day sweat and the perfume he put on before dinner, and that curious scent which has always belong to Jesus, and while the poet sings, Jesus reaches down and takes John’s wrist.
She approached the sinful act.
The golden moon fled the sky;
black clouds covered the hidden stars;
night lacked its fires. You, Icarius, and you,
Erigone,
his daughter, immortalized for your pious
love of your father,
hid your faces first.
Jesus slipped one copper bangle from his wrist and fit it over John’s. He took another and fitted it on John so the two jingled gently.
“We saw them in Damascus,” he whispered. “These,” he raised his left arm, “for me. These,” he touched John’s paler arm, “for you.”
‘Now she reaches the threshold of the room,
now she opens the door, now is led inside.
But her trembling knees give way,
her color flees with her blood,
and thought vanishes as she goes forward.
The closer she is to her sin, the more she
shudders at it,
repents of her audacity, and wants to be able
to turn back,
unrecognized.
When she hesitated, the old woman took
her by the hand,
and, leading her to the high bed,
delivered her up, saying:
“Take her Cinyras, she is yours”,
uniting their accursed flesh.
The father admitted his own child into
the incestuous bed,
calmed her virgin fears, and encouraged
her timidity.
Perhaps he also said the name, “daughter”,
in accordance
with her age,
and she said, “father”, so that their names
were not absent
from their sin.
‘She left the room impregnated by her father,
bearing impious seed in her fatal womb,
carrying the guilt she had conceived.
The next night the crime was repeated:
nor did it finish there.
Eventually, Cinyras, eager to discover
his lover after so many
couplings,
fetching a light, saw his daughter
and his guilt,
and speechless from grief, he snatched
his bright sword
out of the sheath it hung in.
Myrrha ran, escaping death,
by the gift of darkness and
secret night.
Wandering the wide fields,
she left the land of Panchaea,
and palm-bearing Arabia, behind,
and after roaming
through nine returns of the crescent moon,
weary,
she rested at last in the land of the Sabaeans.
“What a vile story!” James whispered. “Leave it to the pagans to come up with something like this.
“Is it any viler than Lot and his daughters,” Jesus said. “Or Absalom taking his own sister?”
“I like the story,” John said, languorously yawning and stretching his arms. “I like the passion of it.”
…Tired of living, and scared of dying,
not knowing what to pray for,
she composed these words of entreaty:
“O, if there are any gods who hear my prayer,
I do not plead against my well deserved punishment,
but lest, by living, I offend the living, or, by dying,
offend the dead, banish me from both realms,
and change me, and deny me life and death!”
Some god listened to her prayer:
certainly the last request found its path to the heavens.
While she was still speaking, the soil
covered her shins;
roots, breaking from her toes, spread sideways,
supporting a tall trunk; her bones strengthened,
and in the midst of the remaining marrow,
the blood became sap; her arms became
long branches;
her fingers, twigs; her skin, solid bark.
And now the growing tree had drawn
together over
her ponderous belly, buried her breasts,
and was beginning to encase her neck:
she could not bear the wait, and she sank down
against the wood,
to meet it,
and plunged her face into the bark.
“You were always a strange one,” James said, at last. “And that was a strange story.”
“Shush,” Jesus put a finger to his lips. “The tale is not over.”
“And I would have thought you would be the last to listen to something like this,” James added.
“Shush, before I hit you,” Jesus said, not even looking at his cousin.
In the corner, Jude, who had said nothing, chortled, and Jesus, reaching for an old sandal, negligently hit him with it.
‘Though she has lost her former senses with her body,
she still weeps, and the warm drops trickle down from
the tree.
There is merit, also, in the tears:
and the myrrh that drips from the bark
keeps its mistress’s
name, and, about it, no age will be silent.
“A tree!” John said, in marvel. “A myrrh tree.”
As the singer continued tell the story of the pregnant tree, and how it gave birth to the child Adonis. This child was raised by the Goddess of love and the living, and by the Goddess of the Underworld. Wounded and killed, his blood made red poppies on the green earth. He descended every year to live with Death, and rose every spring, and all life rose with him. As the song ended, the crowds were wild, but the group of Jews sat there, silent. In the midst of the clapping, Yehoshana sat straighter, which forced John to sit up straighter.
“Shan. Shan, what is it?”
“I do not know,” he shook his head. “It’s…. it’s a thing that comes over me now and again. I needed to hear that,” he said, joining his hands to the applause, but only half paying attention. “I needed to hear it, though I scarcely know why.”
