Great Lion of God (3 page)

“The nurse awaits the child, Master,” she said. Hillel had had the vision of Deborah suckling her son, but Deborah had decided otherwise. No Greek or Roman lady suckled children any longer, nor did enlightened Jewish ladies who had duties and responsibilities beyond the mere demands of the body. Hillel had been extremely disappointed. He thought the picture of a mother nursing her infant the most beautiful in the world. Certainly his own mother had suckled her children and he remembered the warmth and tenderness in the nursery and the crooning and the evening light caught in his mother’s hair, and the round morning freshness of her body. He had raised no complaint to Deborah, who at this hour was furbishing her mind in the library, for he was too kind and gentle a man. He knew this, and deplored it. The old patriarchs had been held in awe by their wives and their daughters in the past, but alas, Hillel was no patriarch.

So, without a word he watched little Gaia gather up the infant in her arms and he heard her remark about the condition of his napkin, which the other nursemaid had apparently neglected, and she rolled him deftly in the linen sheet and carried him out. As the girl reached the door the boy suddenly uttered a loud strange cry, not a childish wail or a whimper, but a humiliated and disgusted cry. He seemed almost to be saying, “I detest my present state and weakness, and I shall not long endure it!”

I am fanciful, like all new and proud fathers, thought Hillel, and he went out into the outdoor portico and then stepped down into the gardens. It was time for his evening prayers in the warm and scented silence. As a pious Jew, he knew that these prayers should be prayed in a synagogue, but he and Deborah lived in the house her father had bought for them in the far suburbs of Tarsus. (“My daughter is of a delicate constitution.”) There was no synagogue under less than an hour’s energetic walking, and Hillel was just recovering from malaria which left his strong legs somewhat weak, and his heart palpitated on effort. He was not a horseman, and he disliked effete litters, and though he owned a large car and a smaller chariot he disliked them little less than he did the litters. A man was made for walking. He would not have rejected a humble ass, but this Deborah would not endure, and Hillel was a man of peace. Men might talk of the unbending patriarchs but husbands were not so valorous.

Hillel looked about in the calm and luminous early evening. His house, in the suburbs of Tarsus, was held in constant quietude, a tranquil hush, even when the slaves and other servants were working busily or laughing or singing—for it was a happy household. Even the discordant cries of peacocks and swans and birds of prey sounded musically here, part of the murmurous background of palms and citrons and karobs and sycamores and fragrant shrubs, and a gentle benignity appeared to pervade during the hot spring storms, and the roaring summer thunder. The house and its extensive and beautiful grounds appeared protected, and this was remarked on by Greek and Roman friends who laughingly vowed that Hillel was under the loving guardianship of woodland deities and fawns and nymphs. Certainly the house was in a hollow section of land, verdant, fed by springs and little rills even during the driest seasons, and in the fertile and luxurious valley of Issus, that fruitful vast area in Cilicia Pedias, which had been joined to Syria and Phoenicia by Julius Caesar.

The country estate rolled in the softest green waves about the house, crowned by copses of thick dark emerald trees which made cool hollows of refuge during the hottest days, throwing their shadows on dense grass and formal beds of flowers and small red paths or graveled footways. Here fountains, bright amber in sunlight, hissed and gurgled, the illuminated waters pouring from gleeful marble hands or from horns of plenty or even from the mouths of exotic little beasts. (There had been a small statue of a little boy in one of the fountains from which the water arched, but Hillel had decided, in his Pharisee sense of what was obscene, to have it removed, to Deborah’s annoyance.) Hillel, in keeping with the Ten Commandments, would have had the “graven images” removed from the fountains and grounds—images erected by the former Roman owner—but here Deborah tearfully and vehemently prevailed, and became so agitated that Hillel, always the compromiser, yielded. He also compromised by not looking at the graceful statues in grottos and arbors and fountains, and avoiding direct confrontation with their classic and beautiful faces, but sometimes his naturally perceptive and appreciative eye wandered involuntarily. When sternly reproached by his more rigidly religious friends, he would laughingly change the subject. Unlike the gentle men, he could infuse a tone of quiet authority and character into his voice, which silenced even the most choleric or rebellious, and his brown eye would glow with a fixed and steady coldness. Once halted by this, the quarreler would never again contend for his own views or rebuke or criticize his host or master, but forever afterwards would hold Hillel not only in respect but in some fear.

A great natural pond lay in the very center of the grounds, flashing blue and purple under the sun, and becoming a shield of silver under the moon. Here floated the arrogant black and white swans, and the curious and highly colored ducks from China, seemingly made of angular painted wood, who occasionally disputed lordship with the swans over the water. During the migration periods of red-legged white storks flying to Africa or returning, these fowls would often halt at the pond to devour the fish with which it was sedulously stocked, and the singing frogs, and the clouds of insects. The regal peacocks drank here, and jeered at the swans, and so did the small denizens of the land. Fed by clear springs, and released into tiny brooks and rivulets—which freshened the earth—the pool was always clear and pure, with its rocky little walls in which blue and gold and crimson flowers, and even ferns, grew with colorful abandon. Sometimes the slaves waded here on hot evenings, to the combined indignation of the usually quarreling inhabitants, catching iridescent fish in their young hands and then releasing them with laughter. The former owner, who had visited the Orient, had erected a very complex and ornate little arched bridge over the narrowest part of the pond—which had the shape of a pear and it gave an exotic touch to an otherwise too formal setting. Dragon shapes and serpents and vines twined together in the teak of the bridge, and the animal shapes had eyes of silver or lapis lazuli, and the minute fruit of the vines were delicately fashioned of jade or yellow stone. The younger slaves would often lie on the arch of the bridge to examine with wonder and delight, freshly discovering new intricacies of the artist’s work, and marveling over inlays of carved ivory.

There were small awninged retreats under the thick trees for refreshment, striped in blue or red or green, and Hillel came here to meditate after a twinge of conscience following his admiration of beauty. Deborah could also retire here with her friends from the city and from nearby estates, decorously to sip spiced or perfumed wine and partake of fine little cakes and fruit. When Hillel would hear their high and tripping voices he would flee, though Deborah would later speak of discourtesy and the duties of a host. Hillel had a wise way of avoiding women.

The estate had cost Deborah’s father a considerable fortune, which he was not averse to discussing with Hillel, and he had furnished it with slaves and other servants and had sent one of his best cooks to serve his daughter. “One must remember that my child, my sweetest only daughter, is accustomed to refinement and comfort, and could not tolerate privation.” This was accompanied by a meaning hard glance over the affectionate smile, and the father-in-law would consider that he had instilled meek acceptance in Hillel. But Hillel, the tolerant compromiser, would smile inwardly.

So Hillel, this early evening, stood in his flowering, green and pleasant gardens, folded his hands and murmured aloud, “Hear, O Israel! the Lord our God, the Lord is One! O, King of the Universe, Lord of lords, we praise You, we bow before You, we glorify You, for there is none else.”

He pondered on that with his usual awe. “There is none else.” The endless universes were pervaded with God’s grandeur. The uttermost star was charged with His glory. The worlds—endless like the sands of the sea—sang His praises. The smallest golden wild flower, clinging to the rocky side of the pool, dumbly, through its color and life and vitality announced His power over the smallest and the humblest, as well as the most majestic, and His invincible life, His omnipresence, His circumambient pervasion. Each blade of grass reflected His occupancy. His altars were not only in the Temple and the synagogue, but in every morsel of earth, in the silver bark of trees, in the clattering fronds of palms, and in the rainbowed darting light of the wings of birds and insects. His voice was in the thunder, the spark of His wrathful eye in the lightning, the movement of His garments in the winds. His breath stirred trees and bent grasses. His footsteps revealed stone and mountains. His was the cool shade, the clusterings of shadows, the cry of innocent beings, the rising evening mist, the sudden exhalations of cooling flowers, the scent of freshness of ground and water. “There is none else.” Nothing existed but God.

Hillel’s heart swelled with passionate exaltation. All exulted in God and acknowledged Him—except man. All obeyed His slightest command implicitly—except man. All lived in beauty—except man. All bowed before Him, existing only in Him—except man. Man was the outlaw, the rebel, the distorted shape that scarred the earth, the voice that silenced the music of Eden, the hand that raised up obscenities and blasphemies. Man was the pariah dog, the moral leper in this translucent mirror of Heaven. He was the muddier of crystal waters, the despoiler of forests, the murderer of the innocent, the challenger against God. He was the assassin of the saints and the prophets, for they spoke of what he would not hear, in the darkness of his spirit.

Hillel preferred to think well of his fellow man, being compassionate and often reflecting on the sorrows and the murky predicament of humanity, but he could not always delude himself that man was worthy to be alive. When he found himself in this crepuscular misery—as he did this evening—a misery mysterious in its source—he would remind himself of the prophecies concerning the Messias, and quote the words of Isaias regarding Him: “He will deliver His people from their sins.”

The few Sadducees whom Hillel knew and whom he welcomed in his house, smilingly laughed at him when he confessed—after an extra cup of wine—that he “felt” something divine had “moved” upon the world, that a powerful event had already taken place which would change the face of history and revitalize man with the Voice of God. “It is your voluntary seclusion,” they would tell him, with fondness. “This world is of rock and substance and the power of Rome, and it is reality, fixed in space, and only madmen deny reality. Abandon the stars, my friend, and the Kabalah, and prophecies made by ancient prophets smelling of dung and goat’s-hair garments and sweat. They lived in a simpler day. Today the world is complex and civilized and filled with great cities and commerce and the arts and the sciences. Man has come of age. He is a sophisticated being, a citizen of the Roman world, at least by existence if not by fiat. He knows all that there is to be known. He is no longer the prey of jejune fantasies and hopes and delusions. He knows what the stars are. He knows what matter is. He knows his place in the universe. He is no longer superstitious, except in a mild manner, like the Romans. He feels no terror for natural phenomena—he understands it. He has his universities, his schools, his wise teachers. Few Jewish maidens there are, these days, who dream of giving birth to the Messias, for they know there will be no Messias, and that that delusion was only the wistfulness of innocent, ancient men. We still honor those men’s childish wisdom, and find it remarkable, considering that they had no access to our libraries and our schools. But it was the wisdom of most ingenuous men, who knew nothing of the cities and the roaring world of today.”

“A virgin shall give birth—” But no one spoke of that these days, except a few old Pharisees among Hillel’s friends, and even they spoke of it as an event still shrouded in time and possibly only a mystical hope. Hillel felt alone. At midnight, he found himself pondering on his peculiar surety that something had, indeed, moved on the face of the world and that all creation was holding its breath.

Once Hillel said to an old man whom he honored in Tarsus, an old Jew bent with years but with the mind of a leaping youth, “I have heard from my female cousin in Jerusalem, who is—I do not regret to say—married to a burly Roman centurion. A good man; I have dined in his house; he adores my cousin and defers to her, which, in some minds makes him less a man, but I have never believed that it was a proof of manhood to despise women. In many ways he possesses a rough wit and much shrewdness, and contrary to popular belief that all Romans are monsters, he is very kindly and has much humor.” Hillel spoke diffidently, while his guest frowned at this doubtless exaggerated view of the Roman conquerors of God’s Holy Land.

“He is also superstitious,” Hillel continued. “He had been married to Hannah for six years, but God had not seen fit to bless them with a son though they have four rosy little daughters and I long for such, myself. This was a sore sorrow to Hannah, though Aulus seemed singularly and happily resigned. However, four years ago, after the winter solstice when the Romans were celebrating their boisterous Saturnalia even in Jerusalem—they are restrained, however, on command of Caesar Augustus who is a sensible man—Hannah gave birth to a son. Aulus was consoling some of his men in a watchtower high over Jerusalem, for they, that night, were on duty and could not join the final night of the festivities, which he assured me are the most—pleasant—of all. It was a fine cold night, and Aulus was gazing in the direction of Bethlehem, the birthplace of King David, and all the stars were sharply visible.”

Hillel had glanced apologetically at his old visitor who was accepting more wine from a slave and who revealed traces of ennui. Candidly, he was yawning.