Great Lion of God (19 page)

“In Rome,” said Aulus, “there is a refreshing wind from the sea and a coolness from the Campagna and a green breath from the Alban hills.”

“Yes,” said Hillel, but he thought his country more vital than Rome and its suburbs for all it was a little land, and conquered. Strange it was that men and races came and went and there were clashes of arms and change and terror and slavery, but the land and those who worked and nurtured the land remained. There was a certain eternal serenity on the earth which none could disturb. It held the dead and the living and was equally indifferent to both. It had its own being. It was a gigantic tomb, for countless nations lay buried in the earth and their flesh and bones fed it, but it was also triumphant life.

The Romans had been here when Hillel was a youth, but he saw many more rich villas now near the road than he remembered, with high stone walls and glimpses of rainbowed gardens and fountains through iron gates. This depressed him. He wondered what his son and daughter were thinking of their country, which they had never seen before. He envied them. How glorious it was to view Israel for the first time, this ancient and holy land, this land of milk and honey, from which sprang the immortal moral laws of God and which still echoes with the Voice of Sinai, and from whose flesh the Messias would be born and cast the light of His eyes! The Greeks had elaborated and cherished the glory of the mind, and philosophy, and beauty beyond imagining and reason and civilized behavior and Demos and the graceful gods, and songs, and had built radiant cities and had invented poesy and dialogue and perfect art, and the Romans had struck grandeur on the earth and had brought law above all to chaotic civilizations and barbarians and were architects and engineers and scientists beyond anything the world had ever known before, and had introduced sanitation and clean water to the remotest places, and were tolerant and just and powerful and handsome and sane, and had produced Ciceros and Catos and Virgils as well as Catilinas and Caesares, and measured representative government and order, and commerce and trade.

But neither Greece nor Rome—nor even mystic Egypt nor India—had produced the Promise of the Ages, nor had they opened the portals of men’s souls to the Visage and the Law of God. Despite what the Pharisees declared, the Jews were not a people, not a race, in the full meaning of the terms. They were, at best, but the modern descendants of disparate nomadic tribes who came from no one knew where and whose destiny was still unknown but only conjectured by those who studied the Kabalah. Always they had been surrounded by the Semitic peoples: The Phoenicians, the Hittites, the Arabs, the Moabites, the Philistines, the Egyptians, Syrians, Babylonians, Persians, and a dozen others, and always they had been strangers among them, fought, cursed, reviled, enslaved, driven forth, killed, destroyed, beaten and scattered. But always they had returned to their little country, blood-stained but unconquered, to raise again the Temple to their God and to shout, as Moses had triumphantly shouted, “Proclaim liberty throughout the Land, unto all the inhabitants thereof!”

Then it seemed to Hillel that a mysterious voice sounded in his spirit:

“The Drama has just begun!” His soul lifted in a strange exultation and his eyes brightened, and he knew not why, but he was filled with both a powerful sorrow and a powerful joy. He wished to communicate these things, but his tongue felt heavy and he had no words. Alas, alas, he thought, the deepest voice of the soul cannot be uttered, except to God.

An unprepossessing youth, thought luxurious and plump Simon ben Shebua as he closely observed his nephew from the shadow of his silken hood. He is also too silent and stern of face and abrupt of manner, and his mother, my sister, was all grace and prattle and sweetness and courtesy. Hillel ben Borush is pleasing of countenance and affable of manner. How was it possible for these to produce such a son? Their daughter is charming. But this Saul resembles the less agreeable Romans. His father has written us of his intellect and the power of his mind. Yet he has the manners of a peasant. In comparison my brother David’s son, Ezekiel, is a paragon of beauty and graciousness and deportment, though I had heretofore felt him the least captivating of the sons of their father. But ah! these Pharisees! (Simon had been one of the brothers who had opposed the marriage of his sister to Hillel ben Borush. He thought of his own sons with complacency. But his daughters, he reflected, were not so beautiful as Sephorah bas Hillel. However, one was already espoused to a Greek merchant, very rich and possessed of breeding and wit. Simon had considered Saul, before encountering him, as a possible husband for his daughter, Yochabel, the youngest and prettiest and only thirteen, and his favorite. Were it not for the wealth Saul would inherit Simon would have laughed at himself.)

Where Hillel had seen the eternal land—never withholding her gifts of water and fruit and grain and serenity—Saul had seen an afflicted country, forlorn and desolate. Where Hillel had observed the browned farmers faithfully plowing and seeding despite the Roman occupation (being wiser than the men of the cities) Saul had seen slaves and had wept in his heart for them, calling silently to them as brothers from his overwhelmed emotions. Hillel had heard birds and the wind, the laughter of children and women, the songs of the busy farmers, but Saul had heard only plaints and weeping and prayers for deliverance. Hillel had patience, and Saul’s spirit had never known that virtue. In short, where Hillel saw a certain tranquillity, a simple wisdom, and entrancing beauty, Saul saw only turbulence, bitterness and a lightless land, stretching forth skeleton hands to the tardy Messias, pleading for rescue, invoking curses on the blasphemous Roman and longing not only to be free but to be purified.

He saw the Roman soldiers. Near Caesarea as they had passed that white and licentious city he had seen the amphitheater on the outskirts where Roman brutality and unspeakable cruelty had their being in this ravished land. Here captured Zealots and Essenes had hung on crosses for their intransigence and patriotism and devotion to the Lord their God. Hillel had averted his eyes from the amphitheater and had softly murmured the prayers for the dead and the repose of their souls in the bosom of Abraham. Men, he had thought, were hard and unjust and malicious, for that was their animal nature. If they had no victims they invariably invented them. The reflection saddened Hillel though he had never enthusiastically hoped for nor truly believed in the alleged good that lay, like a pearl, in the slimy musculature of a bestial organism. Men were men, more alike than unlike no matter their religion or race, may God, blessed be His Name, have mercy on them!

But Saul did not follow his father’s thoughts. The people of Israel were unique in virtue to all other peoples and nations. Hence, their martyrdom. He forgot that they were a warrior people and that the Scriptures had lauded their less attractive disposals of captives, no matter how helpless. Or, if he thought about it at all it was with the attending thought that God had been with their ensigns and their armies and the might of their swords. (He had spoken of this to Aristo, who, after commenting that Israelites were remarkably like other conquerors, had expressed pity for the calumny against God, that He had allegedly blessed one army—as ferocious as the foe—and had shown no mercy for the helpless “enemy.”)

Once Hillel had told Saul, and only recently, that when the Red Sea had drowned Pharaoh’s soldiers and horsemen the angels had wished to voice their joy. But God had rebuked them, saying, “My children lie under the sea, and you would sing?” Hillel had admitted that the story was possibly only a parable, and had smiled at his son a little strangely, but Saul had been vexed. God had only one people, only one nation of sons, and all others were heathens and Gentiles. When Hillel had reminded him that it was prophesied that the Messias would be “a light unto the Gentiles” also, Saul had remained silent.

Saul could not have enough of seeing the land of his fathers, but he did not see what Hillel saw. Therefore, his agony of spirit. The blue passion of the sky was lost to him, and the green and golden earth, the orchards, the groves, the streams, the trees and the vivacity of the market crowds in the ancient towns through which they rumbled. The one fascination lay for him in their names, the birthplaces of heroes and prophets and patriarchs. He longed to see David’s tomb, and the great tomb of Rachel, and other holy places. He yearned not not only to be in Jerusalem, but in Bethlehem, where the Messias would be born.

His sister, Sephorah, who was fascinating her kinsmen in David’s car, looked with lively interest on Israel and pondered on her shy bridegroom in the car ahead and sometimes peered at him with mischief if his eye caught hers. She had decided that he appeared kind and timid and would not be a difficult husband. Hence, she would have small trouble with him. She was a girl of much cleverness and enjoyed life and had shrewdness and wit, and possessed a naturalness of being which demanded little of others and was humorous with all, and content with her fate. If she was not a young female of intense emotions she was also incapable of hatred and gloom. She had affection for her father and had loved her mother, but above all she loved Saul and considered him afflicted, a matter time and kindness would mend. In the meantime, her wedding was approaching and it would be a joyous occasion. Saul, too, would be caught in the singing web of festivities and perhaps even he would learn to smile again and to laugh as he once had laughed, boisterously and with all his heart.

The Roman road, as the entourage clattered thunderously in the sunset some hours later, climbed many steep hills and then dashed down into valleys strewn with little brown houses and gardens and narrow pastures and brooks and rills. Then Aulus pointed to the empurpling distance and said, “Jerusalem.” Hillel, who had bravely remained with him in the leaping chariot, turned his eyes in the direction of the far city and murmured, “If I forget thee, Jerusalem, may my hand lose its cunning, my eye its lustre and its sight, and my heart die in dust.” Aulus, who guessed his emotion, pretended to be giving all his attention to his horses. The Roman was a pious man who believed deeply in his old gods, and he revered piety in others. Nevertheless, he could not help but remember that the Jews had twenty-four distinct sects, all of which were vociferously proffered and declared the one true faith and all the rest heresy. Still, he thought kindly, we Romans have adopted the Egyptian gods and have temples in Rome to Isis and Osiris and Serapis, among others, and give them honors and support them with taxes. We are tolerant of all, and therefore we do not understand the insistence of Jews, and it bewilders us. We prefer law and order, and universal peace. He was grateful for his Hannah, modest and sweet for all her indomitable will, who, while living implicitly as an “old” Jewess had tolerance for her husband’s belief. A remarkable matron, thought Aulus, longing for her comforting arms. He even permitted her to bore him with her repeated and patient explanations that there were, in truth, two main Jewish religions, one of prayer and synagogue, and one of the Temple, embracing sacrifice and ceremony and learning, one simple and without ostentation and the other of great ritual and incense and priesthood. To Aulus, men were men and God was God, and this seemed sufficient. But the Jews were contentious and there was always alertness among the Romans for any incipient rebellion or riot or violence, for this was an abrasive people who never really submitted, and for that he secretly admired them. There was always at least one uproar in the surrounding provinces, alas, with resultant and ruthless carnage and executions on the cross, and flayings alive.

There upon the highest hill stood Jerusalem, yellow-gray winding and slitted walls and battlemented guard-towers seemingly not built by man but only an outcropping of regimented stones on high bulwarks yellow-gold with autumn.

Against the walls, and on the crumbling earthy bulwarks, stood lone groups of stiff black-green pointed cypresses and an occasional stand of tall and dusty palms. Torches were already aflare on the battlements and against the walls, and thus their grim and stony yellowness was imprinted upon the dark purple sky, and scarlet shadows fluttered over the stone and even fingered down on the bulwarks. In the spring and summer, thought Hillel, it is not so desolate, so forbidding, for the bulwarks are struck with ardent green and wild flowers. But he felt a deeper melancholy. As the Holy Days were approaching the goat’s-hair tents of some pilgrims were already being cast on the bulwarks of the city, and the little red fires could be seen burning here and there, and the movement of lanterns. The city was always crowded later at this time of the year, every inn filled to bursting, and as the people from the provinces had neither the money for inns nor could find room, they were forced to bring their tents, their goats, even their geese and fowl and asses, and an occasional milch cow. This made for liveliness and noise a little later, as the people increased in numbers, but now their only occasional presence on the rising bulwarks enhanced the lonely and abandoned scene. Hillel thought of their long hot and dusty journeys here, with their domestic beasts and their wives and children, and tears came to his eyes. Devotion to God still burned in the provinces, if not in Jerusalem and Joppa and Caesarea.

The entourage entered through the Joppa Gate but were not challenged by the Roman soldiers on guard because all recognized Aulus Platonius, and all saluted the standard of Rome in the vanguard. “Greetings, lads!” called Aulus, as the gates were opened and he Pulled up his chariot in the shadow of the arch. He spoke as if he had been absent for months and not for days. The officer in charge, a young man with a sun-darkened and wary face, saluted him and came to the chariot and said, “Greetings, noble Aulus Platonius. All is peaceful.”

“That is remarkable,” said Aulus, and the officer grinned and looked curiously at the entourage. “My kinsmen,” said Aulus. “I have conducted them from Joppa.”

If the officer felt some surprise that a Roman had so many Jewish kinsmen, who were apparently so very rich also, he did not reveal it. He looked with respect at the elaborate and handsome cars and the fine horses. Then he lifted his arm in salute again and the entourage swept into the city. The iron gates clanged after them.