Читать книгу Jesus and Menachem - Siegfried E. van Praag - Страница 9

It was night over Nazareth. Where the highway curved into the Great Sea, the men that escaped the Roman marauders had called a rendezvous.

“Judgment has been cast,” said a man who expected a stark descent into Sheol. “God has sent His tempest. We must bow to its waves and billows. We find ourselves on board the shipwreck of the Lord.” Others gnashed their teeth with rage and despair as the prophets had foretold.

A full moon shone peacefully and solemnly over the men. The night wind moaned through the mountains. At the head of the large assembly stood the fully grown Yeshua, his eyes filled with compassion. His squarely trimmed beard was chestnut brown and black like his hair. The great smith Shammai towered over them like a giant, his hand gripping the handle of his hammer with its head on the ground. Among them were the young shepherd Pinchas with his curly black hair around a bronzed scalp and the itinerant merchant Andreas Philippos. Shirach the potter who had succumbed to despair strolled about aimlessly, hoping that others would give them clear instructions on what to do.

“We cannot stay and look on,” shouted the smith. “We are here because we have hidden ourselves like fugitive slaves. Slaves we were in Egypt but free men in our own land. Must we also become slaves in our own country? We are going away, men, we choose the mountains. There can be no more rest for the men of Israel. In Judea they are fighting already. Yehuda the Galilean has assembled thousands of men. They lie in wait for the idolators. Every act of resistance is a spade of earth for the place where God digs Rome’s grave. It is written: blood for blood. I have seen enough blood since the time my father showed me the first idolator.”

“Tonight I bade my wife goodbye and made her understand that from now on she must consider herself a widow. My children are orphans. Will any among you go with me? Early tomorrow morning parents will look in vain for their children and women will grope for a shadow. Otherwise are we all guilty!”

“And what say you, Yeshua?” asked Pinchas the shepherd.

Yeshua looked at him long and piercingly. Then he answered:

“The time is not yet come.”

Shammai the smith raised the hammer block gently from the ground and let it fall again.

“The time has come.”

“For you but not for me,” replied Yeshua tautly.

“And what is your counsel, Menachem? You are young but you share what stirs in us,” said Andreas Philippos.

They did not know whether Menachem had just joined the group from the darkness or whether he had been standing there a long time already. He was slimmer than ever, the young Judean, but tenacious and wiry.

“I know that Yeshua speaks with God. But each one is free and may switch his path at any moment. Woe be to man and woe be to people that each hour of their life is marked upon the crossroads. Where there is choice, there is darkness.”

“Where there is choice, there is darkness,” repeated Yeshua, adopting Menachem’s words for the first time.

“For us there is no choice!” cried Shammai the smith. “Today we saw our children dragged away as slaves. I have seen my son for the last time. There is no choice.”

“If there is no choice for you, then go,” said Menachem. “Then has your hour come.”

Yeshua stood motionless at the edge of the group. Looking at him, the others did not know whether he was sunk in thought or whether his mind was, in truth, somewhere else.

A night wind rustled softly behind the group of hopeless men.

“We give everything up, we are going,” called the shepherd, the merchant, the young wood chopper, the pottery bakers, the sons of the donkey driver. “We follow the smith.”

Menachem looked at them with compassion. But Yeshua continued to stand there as before with impassive eyes—as though this event was not of this world.

Led by the smith, the men moved off to the south towards the wild hills of Judea.

“Where to, Yeshua?” asked Menachem.

“Where my Father wills there will I go,” replied Menachem, abruptly taking over the words of his friend. For he understood that Yeshua meant God.

“Does a Father wish then that one son should go here and another one yonder?” asked Yeshua.

“Aye, Yeshua, for the sake of their Mother’s house.”

Yeshua gazed at Menachem under the still moon which hung over the mountain like a glass bell and although their eyes were compassionate and earnest too, they could not subdue one another.

Silently Yeshua turned around to take the road to Nazareth while Menachem cautiously descended the mountain slope towards a forest which rose up from the stony ground like the plume of some subterranean creature. There he lay down in order to reflect on what to do the following day.

Menachem fell into a heavy sleep in which he did not dream but when dawn approached it seemed that he saw sunlight and wished to get up but could not as he lay under a lump of rock. He tried to roll over in order to dislodge the stone. He bent his arm to the elbow, exerting all his strength to heave the boulder; it was no use.

Then he opened his eyes, sighed deeply and realized that the dream was part of this world. For a man pressed his knee on Menachem’s chest and his hands pushed Menachem’s shoulders to the ground.

“Who are you?” asked the man.

“A witness of my people!”

“Are you also a witness of your people?”

“Aye!”

“Who are your people?”

“I am a Hebrew!”

“So—you know the prophets! Do you serve God or the idolators?”

“I know not whom I serve. I wish to serve my own people but not against God.”

“Your name?”

“Oppressed people have no name!”

“You are right.” With a spring the man leaped up and Menachem recovered the freedom of his chest and arms.

“Now—your name?”

“Menachem, son of Gedalia who calls himself Marcus Mercator. Now what is your name?”

“They call me Ben Nesher.”

“What, the son of the eagle? I have heard of you. You belong to the partisans of Yehuda the Galilean.”

“That is so. The idolators follow closely on my heel. I seek shelter for a day or two. Hide me. But you are free. If you will not hide me I will not slay you. If you betray me, however, then it is all over with the house of Marcus Mercator.”

“Let us go,” said Menachem.

So the two young men walked together in the direction of Nazareth, not along the main road but through a path formed by nature which crossed the slope irregularly, at intervals broken or hidden by palm groves. Now and then their steps flushed out some mountain badgers that despite their plumpness scattered swiftly before their feet. Perhaps they had prepared the path that Menachem and Ben Nesher followed.

This Ben Nesher was a great and fearful name in Israel. He was an avenger of God who had sworn never to rest until the Romans were driven from the holy soil. Woe to the Israelite who was unwilling to place his goods, chattel and livestock in the service of God and Israel. Ben Nesher was tall of stature, broad and gaunt, flat like an iron slab on which houses might be built. People who were as broad-shouldered as Ben Nesher were seldom so lean. His hair was black, unruly and bent in curls like claws upon his skull. His face was regular, his nose hooked and his chin protruding and hard like a buffer block. Justly was a man with such outward appearance called Son of the Eagle.

“Life in Judea is hard, is it not?” said Menachem.

“One rests softer on the hills there than in the beds of Jerusalem,” answered Ben Nesher, measuring Menachem with his eye.

“You belong to the runners. You have long strong fingers! Do you still sleep in your bed, do you wait at home each morning for the arrival of the tax collector? Do you wish to pay the great idolator in Rome so that you may live, and give him what you owe to God? Are you a Galilean?”

“Nay, I live in Nazareth but I am from Judea.”

“The men of Judea live best in the hills of Judea.”

“Do you believe it will last long, Ben Nesher?”

“What? The rule of the idolators? I know not. I am no prophet and no Essene. I have no future to predict. Today I must fight the idolators. The book of Daniel says that the end of the fourth kingdom of the fourth enemy of God will surely come. We shall not live so far. He who does not shun death, serves God. To him nothing can happen and he does his duty.”

“Is there a future for Israel, Ben Nesher?”

“That is for God to decide but we must change the present.”

“Should we not husband our strength then for the age to come?”

“He who spares himself commits treason. People who should have died and who perish not in battle are false coins; they have been usurers in their duty!”

Menachem remained silent a long time and Ben Nesher did not feel compelled to speak. Life among the stones had made him taciturn.

Does this man see nothing but his own vision? wondered Menachem. The field in which it grew was once tilled and irrigated. He does not yet know from which feeling his idea was born? In his head he has a nut with a hard shell but he cannot find the soil, the roots and the tree again. He turns the nut around and around. Perhaps it must be so. Perhaps one should be cut off from one’s feelings as soon as the feeling has given birth. Ben Nesher walked another way than Yeshua. Surely, the people stood at a crossroads.

And God Himself? Did he like to stand at a crossroads too? Or had God intended this for His chosen people? It hurts to stand at a crossroads forever but if that is Israel’s destiny, may a child of Israel desire a better fate than the people?

Then Menachem said: “I have thought this over, Ben Nesher. I shall conceal you and accompany you for a while afterwards.”

The dawn began to glow, caressing the distant valley and mountains of Hermon that dominated the northern horizon. A flock of cranes flew over the plain of Esdrelon. Other large birds, the pelicans from the Sea of Kinnereth, also crossed the sky.

“I know a place where you will be safe, Ben Nesher! The Romans will not seek you there!”

They reached a spot on the slope where a stair had been carved. Ascending the crude steps, they arrived at a steeply rising path protected by rocky walls on both sides. The path led to a narrow alley, a miserable little street where dogs sniffed the heaps of garbage outside the houses. The white of the walls was sulfur-yellow, stained with dingy black spots. Garbage water trickled over the stones that served as a natural pavement. At the corner of this street in a gulley called the Alley of the Jackals—these animals sometimes penetrated there at night—they reached the house of Joseph the carpenter. A wooden fence enclosing a workshop extended from the dwelling. A door had been built in the fence.

Work was already beginning in the house of the carpenter. In front of the door stood Joseph behind his bench. He did not notice the two young men approaching. In the middle of the alley they saw Yeshua standing with his arms folded across his chest. It was as though he had been awaiting them.

“Yeshua,” said Menachem, “here is Ben Nesher, the friend of Yehuda the Galilean. He seeks shelter for a day or two. Inside this enclosure is a dry hole, I know. May Ben Nesher stay here?”

Yeshua stood there as ever in his own immobility which made others, even old people, uneasy because that quiescence seemed to contain all movement. It was the immobility of momentarily folded wings. He looked at Menachem and then at Ben Nesher. The latter did not lower his eyes but was stirred by Yeshua and, turning to Menachem, said:

“Now there’s a man! Is he coming over to us?”

“I think not,” said Menachem. “We all have different paths. There are too many roads for our people.”

“There is only one way for man,” interrupted Yeshua.

“There is also only one way for our people,” said Ben Nesher. “God and our freedom!”

Menachem wished to bring this conversation to an end so he asked again:

“Yeshua, may Ben Nesher stay here?”

And now a singular thing happened. Menachem had followed Yeshua from his fourteenth to his nineteenth year but had never seen him laugh.

Now the young man smiled. His smile had a strange effect on Menachem; it was as though he had just witnessed an unusual phenomenon of nature.

“In my Father’s house there is place for all,” said Yeshua.

Menachem nodded; Yeshua had spoken of his Father’s house for the second time.

“Yeshua knows what his Father wills, Ben Nesher! Go in!” Menachem opened the door in the fence.

Ben Nesher looked at both young men. “You have helped me. That is still not one tenth of the work. You may depend upon it that I will not leave here alone. He who is not with us is unclean.”

“So also says Yochanan the Baptist who washes away sins in the Jordan,” observed Menachem. “There is too much talking in Israel. Each one has his own surety. But where is the real certainty when there are so many?”

“In faith,” replied Yeshua.

“There are too many beliefs, people must be careful. Each heart has its own niche,” remarked Menachem.

Yeshua turned away from them and Menachem shrugged his shoulders in a melancholy way. Yet Yeshua turned back, walked over to Ben Nesher—who had made himself a nest between the boards of a low shed—to tell him that he would bring him some blankets.