The Kingdom of the Wicked (22 page)

       So, pulled like a placid beast, he was led through the southern gateway of the city. He heard its noise — wheels, the cries of vendors, the snort of a horse and the roar of a camel, girls giggling at the blind man, a bird twittering in a cage close to his right side. 'What is the city like?'

       'Like any other city.'

       'We must go to the house of Judas. On the Street that is Straight. You will have to ask where that is.'

       'This one seems straight enough. He expects us?'

       'A Jerusalem man. With lodgings for Jerusalem men.'

       Saul stumbled. A cat, or other small beast, had darted between him and his leader. There was childish laughter as he stumbled. Seth seemed to shorten the cord, for Saul was aware of his bulk and warmth as much closer before him.

       'Let's walk side by side,' Saul said, and he himself in a confident voice called to the darkness: 'The house of Judas on the Street that is Straight.' Judas the cobbler? someone wanted to know. He might well be a cobbler. And so soon Saul felt heat and noise exchanged for coolness and quiet, except for the distant hammering of, it could be, an apprentice making a sandal and the quiet introduction Seth was making to, it had to be, Judas of himself and his blind companion, the quietness being appropriate to a sickroom. But Saul was not sick, merely blind and very tired. He was led gently to, he could tell from the bounce of the voices against its walls, a small cell of a room and lowered to a hard pallet. There, foreknowing that sleep was a part of the act of transformation, he had a few seconds of drowsiness before being lowered into sleep's deep pit.

       I can only guess at Saul's dreams, which must have been manifold and complex. Let us say that he saw the Temple, its main door blinding to his inner sight in the dawn, and that it dissolved gracefully, its angles softening to the arcs of the human form, and that the human form was that of a woman, naked and comely. The face was not clear, but the voluptuous contours of limbs and breasts aroused in him a lust which, though unsanctified by any legal contract of betrothal, seemed altogether wholesome, nay holy. He knew in his dream that his own body, formerly made tense by a zealous hatred, was relaxing to an acceptance of its functions, unbound by that fear of the body which had characterized his former comportment. The falling sickness, his dream told him, would not recur, and that disease had been the body's protest against rigidity of muscle and faith alike. What God had made was good. The human form was a miracle of workmanship and the whole of the human sensibility too precious an achievement to cast to the dust. God had accepted to be housed in it and return to the world of the pure spirit to will it to be modified by the nerves and blood. God had ascended to heaven as man, his human sensibility purified, true, but with that sensibility exalted to a new order that was not nameable under the terms of the ancient hierarchy. As man God had gone home, and man as man would follow him, not angelic, for angels were pure spirit, but in flesh transfigured to — a new word was needful. Sainthood?

       The word love — amor, agape, houb, ahavalt ai, upendo — filled the fierce blue over the dissolved Temple, which now ran as liquid gold and ivory through the gutters of a transformed Jerusalem. Some of the languages in which the word was rendered he did not know, but meaning transcended the accidents of the tongue and teeth. Love was the proclamation of the unity of the divine creation, in which man was altogether at home, if only he could will it so. But, seen anew as a figure of God's cosmos, home in its humblest sense was holy and demanded a love that was more than mere comfortable habituation. The ants on the stone floor marching off with a fragment of bread smeared with honey, the slant of light from the casement and the motes in the shaft of sun, the old streetsinger with the cracked voice who passed his sister's house daily, the grey mouse that peered out from its cranny — all were part of the unity. Hearing the word one — ena, wahid, echad — he saw the gold and ivory that sang in the gutters flow back and the Temple fill the space that it had deserted, reconstituted in all its former beauty and strength. Nothing was to be destroyed or desecrated, since all was part of the unity of the Godhead. He heard various voices trying to call him, but their owners did not seem to know his name. Saul, he replied, but he was no longer Saul.

       He woke and felt the raising of eyelids still heavy with sleep, but to his surprise and all too human disappointment he still could not see. He was aware of the groan of someone sitting by his bed, a man much disturbed. 'Seth?'

       'Can you tell me yet?'

       'You heard the voice?'

       'I heard nothing save your cry when you fell.'

       'It was his voice. He asked why I persecuted him. I will persecute no longer. You may go back to Jerusalem, Seth.'

       'You mean — our work's over?'

       'My work. You are your own man.'

       'I stay with you. No more — of what we did to the Nazarenes?’

       ‘I am to become a Nazarene. You may do what you wish.'

       He heard a deep groan of pain and bewilderment.

       'You're to join the Nazarenes — just like that?'

       'I was fighting all along against what I had to be. I was trying to prove to myself that the old way was fixed, immutable. Soon I must go back to Jerusalem — to put things right. Meanwhile — you remember the name of the chief of the Nazarenes here?'

       'Ananias, the son of Ananias.'

       'Find him. Bring him to me. Tell him of a change of heart.’

       ‘He may not believe me.'

       'He has to believe. I must put myself into his hands.'

       'Very well. Will you take some food before you see him? You've fasted a long time.'

       'How long have I been asleep?'

       'Almost three days.'

       Saul, as we must still call him, pondered on that. It had seemed no more than an hour. 'I can't eat,' he said. 'I must take water first.'

       'I'll bring you water,' Seth's voice said eagerly.

       'No. No. I meant in another sense.'

       He was led, two hours later, to a stream called Mayim, which name, like the names of many streams and rivers, means no more than water. He could not see Ananias, the son of the Ananias dead of shame for his lying, but he could hear the gentle voice of a decent young man. He shuddered with the shock of his immersion. 'I baptize you, Saul, to the remission of your sins and in the plenitude of the grace of the Most High

       'Saul no longer. Saul is the name of another man. Now dead.' He was becoming slowly aware of the remission of darkness as well as sin. He saw a dim vista of trees he could not yet name, a sheet of what must be water. He turned to take in the face of his baptizer, but he saw only a vague form with a raised arm, a generality called man. That generality would soon sharpen to the particular: soon he would be dealing with men. 'I am Paul,' he said.

       So Paul, as we must now call him, sat later at the table of Ananias, eating with appetite. New bread, mutton somewhat overroasted, the tang of the wine of Damascus. A young woman, sister of one of the as yet nameless Nazarenes who sat at the table, poured him more of it. He felt the tingle of life in his groin as he saw the curve of her forearm, lightly flued. He said: 'I see now what should have been all too obvious but was not. What did Jesus say? "Because you are neither hot nor cold but are lukewarm I will vomit you out of my mouth." I was chosen for zeal, not for virtue.'

       'And so,' Ananias said, 'you take over the work here?'

       'Knowledge preceded hate. That same knowledge preceded love.

       But the knowledge is insufficient. May I learn more by teaching?' Seth sat at the table, but as far away from Paul as he could. His bewilderment still showed; he did not know at all what was best for him to do.

       'Very often,' young Ananias said, 'the words come out of my mouth unbidden. Only when I've spoken the words do I see what they mean. Yes, teach in our synagogue. We Nazarenes have to be cunning. Our cunning now lies in using you. Saul turned into Paul. Tell them your story.'

       'Will they believe it?'

       Some were all too willing to believe. Others would not have believed if that airless small synagogue had turned into the Damascus road, the roof into the vault filled with the thunder of divine Aramaic. Paul said to the crammed congregation, and this stench of sweat and garlic too had to be loved: 'I imprisoned, I whipped, I stoned, I put to death the followers of the Christ. Yet all the time, like yeast fermenting in the dark, the grace was working within me. Unwanted, unbidden. In a thunderflash the revelation came. The truth came not in a pale dawn when I was fuddled with sleep but in the effulgence of noonday The orthodox looked at each other, the pagan Godfearers listened. 'I was a horse disdainful of its rider, kicking against the spurs and the whip. Now I submit to the horseman —’

       A heavy man stood, a leatherseller named Rechab. He said: 'You, Saul of Tarsus, known to all here and revered as the scourge of blasphemy and falsehood, were to come to Damascus to the joy of the faithful that the heretic and infidel might be seized and bound and taken before the chief priests of Jerusalem. But you are revealed as worthy yourself to be seized and judged and punished —’

       'May not a man change?' Paul cried. 'Is it forbidden to the light to enter? What I was I was. What I am you see — a man reborn, refashioned, even renamed. In my flesh transfigured and in my soul irradiated I know that my redeemer lives and I know the name of my redeemer — Jesus the anointed, true Son of the Everlasting, slain and re-arisen. Believe as I believe —’

       'Get out of Damascus,' Rechab countercried. 'You shame the faith. You defile the House of the Lord.'

       'Oh, I will leave Damascus soon enough,' Paul said. 'The faith is strong enough here with no need of the buttress of words of mine. Do not fear, you faithless. My way lies where the word is still to come. I must tread strange roads and sail unknown seas.'

       Transfigured within and yet the same, Saul or Paul showed no sign of transfiguration without. His hearers saw a young man growing untimely bald, his height below the ordinary, swarthy and with a sparse beard, the closeset dark brown eyes moist and luminous, though the luminosity might be as much from madness or disease as from inspiration. He dreamed of unity, but sometimes the body mocks the spirit. The frame was of one who seemed in prospect already chained and whipped, somewhat bowed, the movements of the body in speech as it were wincing from blows. It should not be so easy, the transformation from persecutor to evangelist; it should not be possible to snap away, with the hard thumb and fingers of a tentstitcher, so many martyrdoms. He had done much wrong, and the punishment had partly to be in the disguise of his own persecution for the teaching of the good. God is not mocked. Wrong is not negation of right but a positive quantum of great weight. Paul carried Saul on his back.

The Castra Praetoria lay to the northeast of the city, between the Via Nomentana and the Via Tiburtina, a structure of grim right angles with a great parade ground in its exact middle. Here one day the men and officers of the Guard, Marcus Julius Tranquillus with them, were forced to watch a display of gladiatorial skill. The taller and stronger of the two combatants was all too evidently holding back with the painted wooden sword he wielded. The other, shorter, fatter, clumsier, squealing with little breath as he thrust his own blunt toy at the guts of his opponent, did not observe the grace of permission with which this latter fell to the dust, clutching a makebelieve deathblow. When he fell the victor snapped his fingers at the uneasy referee, who at once handed over a real dagger that caught the noon sun. The squealer shoved the point in, tittering as the vanquished in surprise tried to get up, his two hands filling with the gush of red from his intestines. 'Plaudite, plaudite,' Gaius Caligula cried. Those at the front did so with no enthusiasm; some at the back retched.

       Gaius Caligula strutted in his little boots towards the gateway leading to the Via Tiburtina (Vetus), followed by staff, cushionbearers, sweetmeatcarriers. There was a shrine being erected not far from the guardroom by the gate, and the bust of the Emperor was already in its place, the cement affixing it not yet dry. The effigy, laurelled, held its modest eyes averted from the legend GAIUS CALIGULA DIVUS, but the mouth smirked. Gaius Caligula said:

       'One god, one god. Well, the Jews have their one god and now so do we. Not an unwashed tribal deity but a lord of lands and oceans. Our holy mission is to bring this new belief in the single godhead to the barbarous places of the earth. Britain. Germany. Thrace. Other places.'

       The tribune Cornelius Sabinus said: 'Palestine?' He had heard a loud contention between the Emperor and Herod Agrippa about this, the Emperor graciously yielding to the more serious view of monotheism, but the mad changed quickly. Gaius Caligula said:

       'They already have their — You heard what I said. But still — logic, logic, there's a certain logic in it. All right, parade dismissed.' And he saluted his own bust before treading the purple carpet as far as his coach, a tasteless crusty gold affair. Some of the officers went off to bathe before the noon meal in the mess. The body of the dead Opsius was already being prepared for its obsequies. Nobody's appetite was much impaired; death was, after all, their playfellow. Marcus Julius Tranquillus stripped off his armour as though it were defiled and left it strewn for his servant to scour and polish. Then he hurried to the stables to the north of the barracks, there to saddle and mount the piebald mare Euphemia, who chewed the last of her meal and gave no whinny of greeting.

       He rode west to the Viminal, turned on to the Vicus Patricius and with some difficulty trotted through the central streets of the city, which were thronged with noontime crowds. The Via Sacra. The Forum. The Palatine. He had right of entry into its grounds. Its slave quarters were thrust back to the northern limits of the estate, hidden by a grove of mixed planting — pine, poplar, cypress, chestnut. Marcus Julius found Sara waiting for him some yards away from the slave compound, in the territory of the masters where flowers grew. She was twisting a rose in nervous hands. Marcus Julius took her hands. The flower fell, depetalled. This situation was absurd, and both knew it. They spoke Greek; they were much on a level in Greek. Ruth? Ruth had died two days before, untended save by her sister, a nuisance, slave flesh no longer useful, give her to the compound incinerator alive. Sara had shown fire briefly respected, there is nothing like fire, and claimed burial in earth and the services of one of the rabbis of the city, the intoning of the qaddish. But slaves had no rights, much less in death. So Ruth had been buried like a dead dog. Sara was calm about it, with the calm of one who cannot bring with profit the rage of a known country to an unknown: rage here would be a useless language. But rage is liquid and calm is stone, and stone can break heads. Sara guarded her stone against a day, some day. 'I should not be here,' she said, meaning this zone a few footsteps beyond slave territory.