Secret Magdalene (51 page)

We wait, Jude and I, for Yeshu to answer us. Am I alone in my secret prayer that even now we might leave this place? That all that Yeshu has planned might be set aside as an unfinished play that no longer pleases its author? It is the work of a moment to know my answer. On Yeshu’s face it is writ clear: we will never leave this place, not as we have entered it.

On the couch beside mine, Jude stirs. It seems he would stand, perhaps walk away. Is there some other he has thought of, someone else who might do this thing?

“Yeshu?”

How is it that at the sound of his brother, Yeshu becomes rigid where he sits? Why do his eyes widen as they would at some terrible danger, one he cannot escape? His hands, which have lain unmoving in his lap, slowly clench into fists. “Brother?”

“Let it be me.”

I turn to Jude and am struck by clarity. How could I not have known this moment would come? It has been there all along, as stark as a cut throat before the body falls.

The sound of Yeshu as he answers is as a mortal wound. “No, Jude. Not you.”

“There is no other. And my betrayal would be the most convincing of all.”

“No. I have said it. Not you, Jude.”

Jude has stood up. There is nothing about him of the supplicant. He stands before Yeshu, as Yehoshua the Nazorean and coming king stood before Gamaliel and all the elders and all the priests. “It will be me, Yeshu. It must be me. You have a thing to do. How can you think you are alone in it? I too have a thing to do. I am your brother. As I am your double, I am more than your brother. If you have struggled to know who you are, I too have struggled. Yet who have I ever been but the shadow of my brother? If you are the Messiah, I am the shadow of the Messiah. And if you must do as the Father would have you do, so too must I. Therefore, I shall betray you. And when I have done this thing, then I will know who I am. And I will know my own name.”

Jude does not wait for further protest, nor does he wait for answer. He walks from this place as Yeshu would walk from it, with Glory at his heels. And I stare at the air he has passed through as if somehow it is changed by his use of it.

Yeshu has closed his eyes as if he would never see a thing again.

I do not sleep this night. Yeshu is gone. Not even I know where. And I walk alone in my Father’s house.

I am in torment. How can Yeshu do what he does? For pity of others, men and women he does not know and will never know, he allows his twin Jude, the most loyal of brothers to act the betrayer? He could have risen from his place, could have shouted Jude’s name, and forbade him! The Sanhedrin will believe the brother of Yehoshua. Nor will the priests doubt him. Even Pilate will accept his word. For though few can conceive of any man’s goodness, many are convinced of his failings.

I have reached the roof. From here I can see all of Jerusalem. Are any asleep? In the Valleys of the Kidron and of Hinnom, by the quarry beyond the Gates of Mariamne and of Phasael, the whole of the Mount of Olives, and near to the pools of Bethesda and Struthion and Israel, there are fires around which the pilgrims have gathered to await tomorrow’s feast. There are lamps in niches on the walls of houses from the Upper to the Lower City. Before me, the Temple gleams by the light of the Ogdoad, the starry realm. Behind me, is the palace of the greatest Herod where this very moment Pontius Pilate lies. Or is he as well sleepless, and does he pace as I do, biting his nails? Has he had word of Jude Thomas the Sicarii, who is the betrayer of Yehoshua the Nazorean? Like the Sanhedrin, like the priests, like all those Yeshu would place on a game board and push here and push there, does Pilate all unwittingly prepare even now for what my friend would have him do?

There has never been a moment that Yeshu has angered me, but as I love him, he maddens me now. I am sick with what becomes of us. John of the River is murdered. Salome, the friend of my youth, is lost to me, and I think I shall never, not in this life, perhaps not even in another, see her again or hear her voice. My beloved Addai is crippled. Seth is not here. Dositheus is driven off. Now Jude is gone to play the part of that vilest of things, a man of false heart.

And once this great heart is seen to have done this thing, he too will be lost to me. Lost to all of us. He will be lost to himself. Does no one else rage at this? Will no one speak up?

I must find Yeshu.

I found him where Tata once tended her roses. I did not speak to him, nor in any other way betray my presence, but stood in the shadows as he sat alone on a low wall. What was there to say to a man so anguished it was as if his blood would escape his skin or his bones burst from his back?

I remained near all the rest of that night. Did I think I could stop him if he should rip out his tongue for the words it had spoken, or his eyes for all they had seen?

Later, brief sleep found me, for I dreamed a dream. Yeshu stood under the stars as three fell from the sky, one to land in each of his outstretched hands and one to land on the crown of his head. If this were all, I should have sung in my heart. But it was not all. Around his ankles coiled a man and a woman, both weeping and both blind.

If, as is said, those dreams we dream after midnight are true dreams, what then will I make of this?

T
hey have crucified the bandit Timaeus. He and all the others Pilate puts to death this day are nailed to their crosses, not roped. I could see them if I would climb again to Father’s roof; and though I would not go back for my life, still I see them.

Like men of straw, they are black and broken against the bitter northern sky.

I am sure many think Pilate means the nails as a kindness done on Passover, for by them, the death of all these will come faster. If a man is hung by ropes, it takes him days to die of slow suffocation, sometimes four, sometimes even five or six or more. But if he is nailed, though the torment is so much more, and his agonized body hangs so much lower, often the time can be no more than the passing of two days. By nailing these now, it must also be thought that Pilate means them to die quicker so that they can be taken down before our Passover Sabbath. I would say that this Roman, whom the Poor call the Young Lion of Wrath, has learned a few things about the Jews: there can be no leaving a body on a cross into the Sabbath.

I do not know how I can think of such things. I do not know how I can continue to breathe. And though I read quietly as Miryam mends something of Yeshu’s and Mary weaves wool from her small flock of sheep, and I throw down my scroll and I run whenever I hear a sound near the main doors of the largest courtyard, Jude has not yet returned. And if ever I have known disquiet, I know it now. All the comfort I have ever known, all the idle thoughts, all the dreaming of Egypt, are scoured from my skin. I am nothing but drowning, and salt.

Comes the third hour of this terrible day, and the scribes Levi and Matthew arrive with great clamor, what can be seen of their faces around their beards flushed with innocent pleasure. Like discovering Eio and her colt tied in a certain place in Bethphage, Yeshu had told them they would find a man in a certain alley near the rose garden by the Pool of Siloam, and that man would be carrying a water jug. And how could they miss a man with a water jug? To carry such a thing is woman’s work. And once they had clearly seen him, they were to follow him and mark the house wherein he entered, for there we would eat our supper this evening. They rejoice, think it another miracle. They do not know it was, and is still, the House of Megas, and that even before they saw her manservant sent to fetch water, it was being readied for the feast of unleavened bread.

I turn away, for to me, the miracle is Jude. If there is any I now revere, and any I now pity, it is this brother of Yeshu. Where is he? When shall he return? Does he already suffer?

We are at supper before I know any of this.

As Yeshu would have it, we are twelve at table. He has listened to Seth and he has listened to John the Less and he has listened to Simon Magus, he knows the meaning of the stars in their twelves. This night, we are as the signs of the zodiac and he is as the sun.

Those who dine in the house of Megas the Whore were chosen long before ever we came up to Jerusalem, and they were chosen very carefully, for these shall go forth to tell of the Last Days. Aside from Yeshu himself, only one here knows what it is that is planned, and that one is I, seen tonight as John the Less. But a full ten are blessed with a luminous innocence. For the first time in my life, I know envy at this; not once before have I understood how comforting is ignorance. I can scarcely speak for worry. As for eating? Not a mouthful. Now and again, I manage a small sip of wine, but that is the sum of it. Yet the Sons of Thunder and Simeon the Zealot, Simon Peter and Joses and Matthew and Levi, these can scarce contain themselves for excitement, and eat and drink as befits a feast. Eleazar, whom they all pronounce as “Lazarus,” chatters. Ananias the merchant swells with talk. Zaccheus of Jericho counts not tax money but his blessings. They know so little, understand so little, and what they know least of all is that the Yehoshua who sits among them will never sit among them again.

But in Yeshu there seems neither fear nor excitement. If he has been ill in the night at what he would do, his will has cured him. I know he has not slept. I know this is the first he eats since my mother’s garden. I know that he has somehow gathered within himself such a pure and implacable strength that nothing short of the last hour in the last day will now stop him. If, without complaint and without hesitation, Jude can do what is needed of him, Yeshu would not do less. If Jude can find the courage to sacrifice himself, even unto his good name, Yeshu will move the world to ensure it has not been in vain.

I am placed to the right of Yeshu, Jacob bar Judas sits to the right of me. Standing behind us, Simeon tells me some new thing his well loved Bernice has done. On Yeshu’s left stands Simon Peter who has yet to seat himself, while my cousin Eleazar stands near him lending an ear to whatever it is Simon Peter is saying to Yeshu. But no one sits on the left hand of Yeshu, and this because there is one of us who is yet to arrive.

Yeshu means this place for Jude.

We are served by Megas herself, and by Maacah and by Miryam, the daughters of Mary and Joseph. Mary has prepared the food, as has Martha, her goitered sister, for Megas has long since freed her slaves, and of her servants, there remain only a very few to maintain her great house.

Wearing the white robe of the Few, I lean my head on Yeshu’s breast, who is also robed in white, and I listen for the sound of his heart. There it is, as slow as mine is fast. And I think that there could never have been a stranger feast, made all the stranger by the final coming of Jude. As Yeshu’s twin moves among us, as he is greeted by one and by all, my beloved’s heart beats now as fast as mine. Jude the Sicarii, so like his brother that even now it astonishes, does not look at us. Yeshu does not look at him. If the ten who are ignorant wonder at this, they make no remark. And Jude takes his place on the left hand of Yeshu, and still there is made no remark.

I feel Yeshu gather himself, and I know he means to speak, but I do not know how he finds it in himself to say this, “In truth, I say to you that one of you shall betray me.”

Yea Balaam!
I sit up and away from my love. The audacity of it! He will play this thing through! I would touch Jude, but I cannot. I would kiss his mouth, but I cannot. I would throw myself at Jude’s feet and wash them as Megas washed the feet of Yeshu, but I cannot. Jude, who knows all this, and more besides, remains as still as the tower in the wilderness, his eyes cast down on the hand he has put forth to take food from a dish. But the others, who know nothing, break out into babble, looking from each to each, uneasy and unhappy, saying, “Is it me, Yehoshua? Is it me?”

“It is one of the twelve who dips into the bowl this day.”

All other hands are snatched back from the serving bowls, but not Jude’s: his hand is steady. He takes parsley from the bowl Miryam has set before him. He dips the bitter parsley twice in salt water as Yeshu reaches out his own hand for the unleavened bread his sister Maacah has provided us. Slowly and with great deliberation, Yeshu, who must note what Jude has done, breaks the bread he has taken, saying to all, “Take. Eat. This is my body which is broken for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” He signals to Megas to fill his cup with wine, and when she has done so, he lifts it, saying, “Take. Drink. This is the blood I shall shed for you. He who will not eat of my body and drink of my blood, so that he will be made as one with me and I with him, the same shall not know salvation. And I tell you now of these things before they come, so that when they come to pass, you will remember, and you will believe in me.”

Just as he has chosen his twelve with great care, so too has he chosen his words. Some are words that tell them clearly what it is he does, if they could but hear him. And some are the words of the godman Mithras, and some are of Seth, and they are meant as symbol, as a way of saying that if they could hear, or “take him in,” they would be as he is. But the ten innocents who hear him are as ignorant of this as of all else. Not understanding, these words are sure to ring long in their ears. For if they are not Jews, they are Galileans, and to Jews and to Galileans, blood is a fearsome thing. They are taught it is unclean. They drain it from the beasts they eat. They shut away their women when that time is upon them. They spill it daily on their altars. Yet here is Yeshu talking of betrayal, and here is Yeshu talking of drinking blood. And I feel them shudder where they sit. Yeshu knows full well they will not soon forget these blooded words. Or his deeds. And though each drinks from the cup that Megas fills for them, still their eyes dart from face to face, even to mine as once again I lean on the breast of my beloved, taking what comfort I can there. Yeshu claims one of them will betray him. They wonder, Which one could it be? They have all taken bread this night; they have all dipped their hands in the bowl. But if they are innocent of knowledge, they are also innocent of betrayal. Each knows he has not gone against this son of man who will be their king, and in this sure knowing, they begin bickering. They do not bicker about betrayal but about which among them could be accounted the greatest disciple.