Great Lion of God (25 page)

“What are you, who are you, Saul, my son?” asked Hillel in bemusement, and passed his hand over his forehead.

Saul smiled at him grimly, as if he fully understood. “I am Saul ben Hillel, the son of my people, who are great in history and great in war and great in the love of God.”

“But you know nothing of Him,” said Hillel, and wondered, with fear, why these words had escaped him and from whence they had come.

Saul turned on his heel and left his father. I weep easily these days, thought Hillel ben Borush. But, do not all men weep for their children? If we feel such grief for those of our loins, how great must be the sorrow of the Lord of Hosts for His children, blessed be His Name! To pity God seemed a unique thought to Hillel. He pondered on it, as he rode in one of Shebua’s gilded litters to Aulus’ house. What presumption it was that man should have compassion on God, for had not David written, “Man lasts no longer than grass, no longer than a wild flower he lives, one gust of wind and he is gone, never to be seen there again?” It was as if a butterfly should feel sorrow for the sun! Yet, the thought remained of the sadness of God, and for some mystic reason Hillel felt again that powerful fire in his heart which is the love of God, and the immediate communion with the Lord of Hosts, and he was comforted and exalted. The Messias might tarry, but He, blessed be His Name, would surely come and console man.

Saul, bereft, darkly confused, lonely to his very heart, empty of spirit, went on foot to explore the city of his fathers, Jerusalem, avoiding all those whom he knew.

The day had turned chill and windy, and he pulled his hood far over his head. The feeling of desolation and oppression increased in him as he walked rapidly over the darkly glistening and rounded stones of the poorer quarters of the city. The sky had an ominous appearance, heavy with gray clouds and ridges of darkness. He saw the stony mountains, hard and barren, in the distance, growing more dismal under the somber sky. He reached one of the marketplaces, reeking with a thousand smells. Here was a walled street, arched over with stone, little booths sunken in the walls, the street itself nothing but a series, dropping down, of immensely steep broad steps of rough cobbles, on which the booths fronted. The little shops were so tiny and so crowded with goods, that only one man—or sometimes an old woman— could find space in them. But they were all noisy and clamorous and full of urgent shoutings and gestures. Here were sold meats, fizzling on braziers, rugs made of cheap goat’s hair or an imitation of costly Persian carpets poorly colored, spices, nuts, globed and partly rotting fruit, pottery, pots and pans, wine, silks of a poor quality, swaths of linen and wool in gaudy tints, cheap tunics and headcloths, weapons, hot breads, rough vases, amulets, cheeses that stank, appalling imitations of Greek and Roman statues, replicas of the Temple in plaster and cement, bronze lamps, candlesticks, sandals, ivory figurines of execrable taste, garlic, onions, various limp vegetables, olives in brine, oil, violent perfumes, incense, miserable jewelry set in base metals, cloaks of poor cloth, red, black, white, gray, purple, blue, yellow, dates, pomegranates and citrons, and, occasionally, a very active booth selling Syrian whiskey guaranteed approved and sealed by the Roman customs agents but in fact truly smuggled into Israel by enterprising mountain men and heavily diluted with water. Someone had been clever enough to forge the Roman seal in lead. The Romans were not deceived, but they did not care. Their own soldiers, poorly paid, and unable to afford good whiskey, needed to be served also. Let the Jews smuggle this wretched whiskey and do a massive trade in it. The legionnaires, poor country boys, did not complain. They had no comparisons.

Some booths sold furniture of miserable taste and quality, but bedizened and painted so that they dazzled the eye.

And everywhere was the market rabble, shrieking women and shouting men, children, thieves, beggars, the blind and the halt, the hungry abandoned, the cutthroats. Roman soldiers strolled among them, eating hot meat from grape leaves, bargaining loudly for amulets and whiskey and jewelry, cursing the furiously screaming merchants, laughing, eying the girls, kicking the endless donkeys and dogs and cats, strolling lightly up and down the broad steps, exchanging jests, sucking olive pits, chewing dates, straining pomegranate seeds through their big white teeth, swaggering, laughingly quarreling and pushing each other. In short, they were like young soldiers forever and a day in an alien land, enjoying themselves, inclined to be amiable, drunken, hungry, boisterous, proud of themselves, and anxious to be friendly even with robbers of merchants. Sometimes, with utter good nature, they Would reach across huge heaps of piled goods and tweak the beard of some merchant, who would pretend to wrath and shake his fist at them, cursing them in Aramaic and then swindling them a moment later. It was payday for the Roman soldiers. By nightfall they would not have a drachma left, though they would be happy and surfeited, having slept with a harlot under a bridge or among cypresses or beneath an aqueduct.

Sometimes a laden camel would appear, lumbering and complaining at the steps, tugged viciously by his owner, who delivered fresh goods to the stalls and added to the clamor with his complaints that he had been robbed by a cursed townsman.

Colored awnings fluttered in the sharp wind. Men drew their cloaks closer; women held their headcloths against their mouths in protection against the swirling dust. Animal offal strewed the steps. No one strolled, except the soldiers. The avaricious faces of the merchants and market rabble were bent on gain before the sun fell, and as the day advanced the shrill screams and bellows became louder, the pace more frenetic. It was dim under the stone arch except for the fires of the braziers, yet the gray and luminous light heightened the color of garments, the strong reds and blues and yellows and whites, and glimmered on racing feet.

The stench and noise and the press of bodies stunned Saul. Not even in Tarsus had there been this vivacity, this fury, this determined rapine, this feverish rage of sale and bargaining, this smell of rotting vegetation and dust and vinegary wine and resin and garlic and crowding animals and roasting meat. He forgot that the markets close to his house in the suburbs were of superior quality and decorum, and nothing at all like this turmoil of buying and selling. As he had never bought anything in a bazaar in Tarsus he thought the goods displayed here were abominable, and he wondered who bought them and who desired them. Merchants stretched forth hands to grasp his cloak or his arm, imploring him to buy, and he pulled away from them in disgust, and looked at the Roman soldiers with umbrage and bitterness. And when one or two, not entirely drunk as yet, paused in their guzzling of their wine or whiskey bottles, caught his eye they stared in astonishment at the hard blue fire of it, and nudged each other and winked uneasily. They saw his hatred, and it puzzled them. One or two were annoyed. They pushed back their helmets, with the crests of horsehair, and wanted to challenge this silent but angry young man, but their companions held them back and whispered in their ears, and they laughed and forgot him. They had been warned over and over by their captains and centurions that they were not to antagonize Jews, who, on occasion, could be very formidable and very troublesome.

Saul, wishing to escape, ran down the last steps of the marketplace, dodging animals, men, women, children, beggars, soldiers. He emerged onto a large open place, paved with yellow gravel and surrounded on two sides by the yellow walls so prevalent in Jerusalem. It, too, seethed with people, but as it was big and broad the press was not too heavy, the animals not so ubiquitous. Here and there stone benches were scattered, for the benefit of the weary. Saul sank down on one of them and as he did so the clouds parted and the golden autumn sun emerged, warming and brilliant, bathing everything in a broad mass of brilliance, brightening robes and gravel and wall, turning the sky to the hard luminescence of blue and polished stone, making resonant with color every solitary thing it touched, shining on the dusty clumps of palms and cypresses, and outlining the city in shelves of light.

Saul slowly became aware that some short distance before him a woman was sitting wearily on a stone bench, a spare peasant woman dressed in dull brown garments and a blue headcloth and with bare dusty feet in thonged sandals. Her head was bent; she appeared to be meditating; her hands lay slackly on her knees, the palms turned upwards in an ancient pose of exhaustion and resignation, as if her hands had worked hard and long and could work no more for a pace, and she had come here to rest. The autumn sun was tawny on her tired thin shoulders; it glistened on her lashes which drooped; it illuminated one pale cheek and gave it a semblance of healthy color. But the lower part of her face and her hair were concealed by the headcloth which she had drawn over her mouth and nose and brow against the bright but nimble wind.

She was only a poor woman, probably from the hills of Samaria or Galilee or another of the farming provinces, but she caught Saul’s unwilling attention. He did not know why he stared at her bent head and why her depleted attitude attracted him. She had come a long way for the Holy Days. A basket stood near her knee and two doves were held there, for the sacrifice, all that such a woman could offer. She seemed a member of the Amaratzim, those who labored in meager vineyards or stony fields and milked goats or tended geese or picked fruit. Her feet were partly turned, as if to rest them. Saul guessed that she was a middle-aged woman about thirty-five years of age or somewhat younger, for her figure was not shapeless, even under that shapeless brown garment, and her ankles, he saw, were delicate and very thin. She appeared to be dozing in the warm brown-gold sunlight and her breath hardly raised the cloth on her breast.

She was very insignificant in appearance and Saul was irritated by the fact that he was caught by something in her attitude. Jerusalem was filled with thousands of such women; the streets were restless with endless clusters of them. They carried baskets on their heads or their shoulders, or they came from afar to the Temple on such days. They were not extraordinary. Yet, Saul could not look away. Where were her children, her husband, that she sat in such mute abandonment and heavy drowsiness? Was she a widow, childless? The woman dozed, or brooded.

He wished he could see her face so that he could guess if she were widow or maid, young or old. The wind lifted her headcloth and she raised her hand suddenly to catch it and restore it over her nose and mouth. And so Saul saw her face, full and turned toward him, and he was incredulous at her beauty. He thought of a waterlily, waxen and pale and smooth and fresh, open to the brilliant light of the day. Her mouth was softly rose and sad, yet full in contour, the lower lip indented like the lip of a very young girl. There was something Grecian in the long shape of her white nose with the delicate nostrils, and the still and unwrinkled calm of her broad brow. Her chin was rounded and dimpled, her cheeks fragile and without tint. He saw her eyes, very large and blue, with gilt lashes, and as her headcloth fluttered he saw that her hair was a clear soft gold, straight and shining. It was a regal face, serene yet touched with sorrow, thoughtful yet living, not placid but restrained and gentle, a face from Galilee.

She is but a girl, he thought, and then it seemed to him that the light changed a little and she was old, as old as his mother would have been if she had lived, and that would be thirty-five. She was regarding him with a mild but steady interest, as if he had spoken to her and she was trying to remember him. Then her lips parted and she smiled gently and her blue eyes radiated a mournful but sympathetic recognition. He felt an almost irresistible urge to rise and go to her and tell her his name, and inquire of hers. Instantly, he was vexed. She was only a peasant woman, and she believed she knew him while he knew her not. He began to stir, readying himself for leaving before she spoke and embarrassed him by some simple boldness or impertinence.

But her beauty, as beautiful as a statue’s, held him, and a kind of reluctant and angry awe touched him, for rude hills did not breed such women for all her dress. She had the aspect of a queen garbed as a peasant for her amusement. Her hands, he saw now, for all their work-worn appearance, were as delicate as her face, narrow and exquisitely formed. And her radiant eyes studied him, not in crude boldness, but with maternal interest and affection. Now the light about her changed once more and she appeared as young as his sister, Sephorah, and as untouched and fresh, and even younger.

A young man approached her, as rudely clad in sand-colored garments, his feet shod as hers. He was, in appearance, some years older than Saul, a man in his first adult years, and Saul thought he must be the woman’s brother for he resembled her closely. His hair was the same color as hers, and his young beard also, and he seemed as worn with work and as weary. His feet and garments were dusty; the dust in the folds of the cloth had turned golden in the sunlight, and the leather purse that hung at his rope girdle was very lean. He was moving slowly, as if he, too, had come a long distance, and his cheeks were haggard with weariness. But he smiled down at the woman and now she raised her eyes to him and suddenly her face was shimmering with love and pleasure at the sight of him. He carried a large grape leaf in his cupped hands and it was filled with smoking spiced meat, aromatic and appetizing. He laid it in the woman’s hands.

“Thank you, Yeshua, my son,” she said. She spoke in Aramaic and her voice was soft and ineffably sweet.

Saul was astonished. It was incredible that this girl, this very young woman, was the mother of this man of at least twenty-one years or perhaps more. The man squatted on his heels and reached into the basket which contained the doves and he brought out a leather pouch and produced a spoon for his mother. Then he sat beside her and he looked down at her with benign dignity and answering love. “You are very tired, Mother,” he said. “Eat and be refreshed.”

“Tinoki,” she murmured, the endearing word of a mother to her beloved child. He touched one of her hands and said, “Emi.” He took the spoon from her and, like a father, he dipped it into the grape tear and lifted food in it and solicitously raised it to his mother’s lips. She ate obediently, smiling, her eyes fixed on his benevolent face as if she could not have enough of the seeing.