Читать книгу The Robber - Bertram Brooker - Страница 9

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It was one of those cloudless oriental nights, when the stars lose their remoteness and become like bright pulsing beings, near enough to the earth to hear its faintest sounds. Barabbas sank noiselessly on to the mat of woven palm leaves near the parapet of the roof. He unwound his head-cloth and dropped it beside him. Little gusts of wind from the valley stirred his thick black hair.

In a low voice, Judas said: "As soon as I saw you at the door, I thought, 'Here is Jeshua ... the one man I can tell. He will believe me.' Now, I am not sure you will believe me."

"Believe what?" said Barabbas.

"In a miracle. I am perchance the only one who believes in it, who has conceived it. Every other man I know accepts death. I reject it. The dominion of death is to be ended. God has answered me. I have waited for this all my life. Before I ever saw you, on the night when I saw my father die, that is when I began to believe. I believed then that in my lifetime a man would be born who would never see death, a man who would wrestle with God for everlasting life for all mankind. This man is alive, now, perhaps, waiting for some sign, gathering the power of his spirit. He must be alive now, for this will happen within the year, before the next Passover."

Judas had grown breathless. Barabbas had to listen intently to catch his whispering voice.

"I am not a soothsayer. I have told only one other, only one. Not a man. A woman. If I told others, they would call me a soothsayer. But this is not perceived by divination, or by reading the stars."

"How, then?"

"I have seen it written."

"Falling Satan!" exclaimed Barabbas, under his breath. He did not move his head, but his eyes veered into a quick sidelong glance.

Judas seemed to feel the other's eyes on him. He rolled still nearer and leaned close to Barabbas's face. "I have seen it written. He will come. He will destroy death. And when he has conquered, the whole earth will know his name, Im-ma-nu-el! God with us! for then God will be with us, every day, every minute for ever. Not against us or hidden from us, but with us and in us!"

Barabbas drew in a deep noisy breath. He sat up and grasped his knees. Looking straight ahead, he controlled his voice with difficulty, for Judas's words always started a ferment in his mind. It needed all the force of his will to ask calmly the question that had come into his mind.

"The one you look for, is he not the Messiah?"

"Jeshua! Our people have waited, generation after generation for an 'anointed one', a king anointed of God. I know you never believed before. You were the bitter one then, but now ..."

"I have not changed. I said, then, that our people, every people, had their fill of kings long ago."

"The man who will come will not be a king or a ruler of men. He will be a new perfect man and the pattern of all men to come. His life will be like living water, an everlasting spring, and out of him will grow the new vine of mankind."

Barabbas thrust out his feet and leaned back on his hands.

"Whether or not it is a vision," he said, "it possesses you."

"You think I am possessed?"

"Not by a demon, unless death is a demon. It all comes from that, Judas, from too much thinking on death."

"You never think of death, perhaps," said Judas. He sounded discomfited, and yet there was something like insolence in his tone. "You are like everyone else. You accept death."

"A man cannot live without death," said Barabbas. "Does it sound foolish? Folly, or not, Judas, it is true. Life and death are entwined. They grow on the same bush. Just now, on my way here, I stepped across a bramble and the thorns scratched me. I looked down, and on the same shoot with the thorns were delicate blossoms, lovelier than stars."

"And you accept cruelty. You accept death."

"I accept life! I have lived in the wild. And the moments when I seemed to be most alive were those when death was closest. I have fought with men. I have killed lions and leopards. And those moments when your blood is up, when you call on all your strength and strain your last fibre, when your eye must judge a hair's-breadth and your arm must be swifter than the darting of a snake, swifter than the pounce of talons, then life is at its height! A man feels, then, the power and glory and beauty of life. Yes, beauty! The striped coat of a mountain cat bristling, what is more terrible? What is more beautiful? And when it leaps, with the ferocity of fire, what flame can match it? What jewel is brighter than the fierce yellow of its eyes? Where will you find on earth such burning gold?"

Judas stifled in his throat a shuddering laugh.

"You have become a psalmist," he said bitingly. "A singer of death."

"Since I left Jerusalem," replied Barabbas, "I have embraced the earth and her quietness. For you, death is the curse of the world. For me, the curse is misery ... hunger, poverty, sickness, wretchedness! If I could find a death that would somehow lift that curse, then I would sing of death."

He sprang up and flung around him a furious glance at the abject leaning houses and the streets as narrow as gutters, ending abruptly in the tumble of rocks at the bottom of the valley, where the reek of goat's dung and rubbish fouled the air.

"Why did you come?" asked Judas, searchingly, as he stood up beside him.

"To see! To kindle fire in my heart. To challenge misery. To discover ... yes, Judas, I have come to discover a death that will shame the world!"