The Liars' Gospel (20 page)

There, in that screened-off place, his wife is sitting in Darfon’s lap. She is wriggling, pretending to try to escape. Another
bubble of laughter rises from her lips. Darfon plucks a ripe plum from the tree whose branches bend low over the garden and
puts it to her lips. She bites it. The juice dribbles down her chin. Darfon meets her eyes, questioningly. She becomes very
still. He puts his tongue to her neck and laps at the juice on her chin, her throat, lower. Her eyes are closed. She leans
back into his arms.

Caiaphas turns away from the window then. His heart is sick and his body is angry and the wolf inside him stalks and prowls
and says to him: go down now and strip her clothes from her body and parade her through the street like the harlot she is.
And the lamb inside him says: speak to her, be merciful, warn her, for you have seen nothing yet that damns her absolutely.
The little room full of the center of another person’s presence says: every person must have their secret place.

And the wolf says: look again. And he says: no. And the wolf says: look again. You know what you will see. It will make your
blood hot and then there will be none of this skulking in shadows. Look again, it says, and find all the courage you need.

But when he turns back to the window, his wife is smoothing off her dress and arranging her hair with the two gold pins. And
Darfon is in another part of the garden, lopping down the low branch with a saw.

A man may have more than one wife, but a wife may have only one husband. And this means that if a man should chance to desire
or know a woman other than his wife, he may simply take her as a new wife and all will be well. But a woman must cleave only
to her husband; this is the law of God. Therefore it is right for a man to keep watch over his wife, to ensure that she is
not allowed to stray. He has, after all, purchased her from her father by a deed of contract, and he must be free of all doubt
concerning the purity of his possession.

There is a thing a man can do, if he has a suspicion regarding his wife. It is scrupulously fair. It is written in the Torah
and so we know that it is good and just. A man who suspects that his wife has lain with another man must go to the priests—or
to another priest—and declare that the breath of jealousy has entered him. And then they bring the wife and make a little
offering to God: some barley flour. This is to begin, to ask God to enter into the thing they will do next.

They take holy water from the sacred well in the Temple and mix into it a tiny pinch of dust from the floor of the holiest
enclosure in the Temple. And finally they write the curse against adultery, containing the holy four-letter name of God on
a piece of paper. And they put the paper in the water until the ink dissolves. And this holiest of holy water, this water
which contains the unspeakable name of God, this they make her drink.

And then two things may happen. If she is guilty, if she has lain with another man, then the waters will be bitter waters.
They will cause her belly to swell, and her ripe thighs to wither, and in the fullness of many days she will die.

But if she is innocent she will conceive a child.

It can be observed how merciful and humane a law this is, for when the breath of jealousy enters a man he may be tempted to
beat his wife, or even kill her. But in this way it can be ensured that no sin taints him, even though his wife may be mired
in her sin.

Caiaphas could call his wife to be scrutinized by this ceremony. But it would not be a simple matter. If she died of it, he
would have killed Annas’s daughter, and Annas is a powerful man. And if she lived, he would have disgraced Annas’s daughter.
And Annas is a powerful man. And men love their daughters.

There is another interview with Pilate the following day. The wolf’s head amber ring glints and the man foams and expostulates
and makes it very clear that if he does not have his money for the aqueduct he will have to look for a new High Priest, one
who is more accommodating to his needs.

Annas has another son waiting to take the office. And would not that be in some ways easier? Caiaphas is willing to give up
over this. Temple money cannot be used to build a civic amenity. What next? Send the priests to work the land? Melt down the
golden cups and silver trumpets as Roman coins? They could give all the money for the sacred incense to the poor, but before
long there would be no Temple at all this way. Not to mention that he would not be able to remain Cohen Gadol anyway if he
allowed Pilate the money. He will have to enter the Holy of Holies again this year, as every year. God will see what he has
done.

Annas does not agree.

They drink wine in the evening while the house is sleeping and the wild creatures are calling on the hills of Jerusalem. Caiaphas
has not spoken to his wife this day, they have not lain together. He is trying to decide what to do. This conversation must
be had in any case: it is more serious than matters of the family.

Annas says, “Give him the money.”

Caiaphas sloshes the wine in his cup. Annas is playing some long and difficult game. Caiaphas cannot see to the end of it.
And he is afraid. Playing a game with Rome is like teasing a wolf, tickling its jowls and expecting not to lose a hand.

“Should I lie to the other priests? Have it done in the dead of night? There is that mute slave, Umman. I could send him to
do it.”

“No,” says Annas, “do it in broad daylight. Have ten priests take the money to him through the Temple at noon. Use that…what’s
his name, Egozi, the one who can never keep his mouth shut, to lead them.”

“But,” he says, “the honor of the Temple. Once it is known, the people will revile me for a traitor.”

“Not as much,” says Annas, “as they’ll revile Pilate.”

Annas looks to the left, out through the pillars of the courtyard, towards the Temple Mount and the star-filled sky above
it.

“His standing with the Governor of Syria grows daily worse and worse,” says Annas. “And we need to be rid of him. He’ll find
a way to get his money. But if we do it this way…”

“The people will be angry,” says Caiaphas.

“He will not be able to stand against them,” says Annas.

He drains his cup to the dregs. From the thin line of trees marking the start of the mountains comes a single howl, then another,
and another.

There is a matter of which Caiaphas never thinks. Not that he has decided not to think of it, but it simply does not cross
his mind, as a thousand thousand small matters connected to the business of the Temple never occur to him again once they
are concluded.

However, his memory is good. If one were to ask him, he would be able to recall how they sourced new bulls that year when
the fourteen sacred bulls destined for the altar all died of a cattle plague only hours before the festival. If Annas requested
the information, Caiaphas would be able to explain why, six years ago, the tribute from the tribe of Re’uven had been especially
high. And if anyone inquired—but why would anyone inquire?—he would remember a madman they handed to the Prefect for Roman
justice.

He saw him only three times, and each time the man seemed less impressive than the previous occasion.

The first time he saw the man, he was a genuine inconvenience. Caiaphas had been studying an ancient text on one of the papyri
he had bought from an Egyptian trader. It was a Greek text, a fascinating account of the workings of the human body. His eyes
became tired with the close work, and he looked up, through the window of his reading chamber, at the bustling outer courtyard,
alive with the people who make the holy necessities for the Temple and those who buy them. There was a madman in the courtyard,
with a gang of thugs.

The man was whirling his arms wildly, shouting without cease, and there was white spittle in his beard and his mouth was red
and sore like the mouth of a man who is lost in the desert and dried up with thirst.

Caiaphas could not make out the matter of his shouts, only certain phrases reached him: “my father’s house!,” “a holy house!,”
“evildoers!”

His rants were screams, his voice cracked as he bellowed. He was a pantomime of pain, an ill man surrounded by a phalanx of
serious, stone-faced men with broad shoulders and thick walking staffs.

The ranting was not unusual. The temple brought out such people, particularly now, close to a festival. Only the previous
week a woman had attempted to strip naked in the courtyard, declaring that she was the daughter of Caesar and that all the
men must fuck her in turn to make the new king of Rome and Jerusalem. Caiaphas had had to send for his wife’s maidservants
to subdue her.

There would be priests already in the courtyard to lead this man out as kindly as they could. If necessary he would send his
personal servants to help them. He stood up, leaned against the window, the soft grainy plaster damp under his fingertips.

The man was overturning tables. Raging like a child. He put both his arms under the planks-on-blocks of the man selling holy
oil and hurled them wildly. A hundred tiny ceramic jars shattered on the marble flags. Oil pressed from olives in the mountains
to the north and brought here by mule cart over five days’ perilous journeying dribbled into the cracks between the stones.
The owner of the stall, a straggle-haired fellow of fifty, was struggling to reach the man, fighting against the flint-eyed
followers who held him back. All around the courtyard they were holding men back while their leader went from stall to stall
pulling down carefully pinned curtains and throwing over piles of clay pots and soft flour cakes, like a Roman soldier bent
on destruction.

Caiaphas was shouting for his manservant even as he watched the unholy ruin the man was making of all the sacred appurtenances.
The slave came swiftly, watched for only a moment before muttering, “I will tell the priests,” and hurrying away.

A wave of tremendous irritation broke over Caiaphas like a fine sweat as he watched the man. It was this that he struggled
against day after day—wanton demolition. As if they had built the holy Temple of the Lord out of mud and straw and every day
the rains came and he had to renew its walls. So many hands were trying to pull it down, so few holding it up. It was against
this that he made his daily visits and spoke to his spies and counselors, to hold the place solid against the rain. And this?

The man was overturning the tables full of coins which the poor people had brought to pay for their sacrifices. Hard enough
to come by coin outside the cities. Any piece with the head of any king would be taken, that was the pride of the Temple.
No one would be turned away for lack of a particular currency. And because the marketplace was here, the priests could oversee
the prices to ensure that the peasants were charged fairly, that everyone, rich and poor, men and women, could offer a sacrifice.
One might have to wait, but everyone would be seen. It was organized and sensible, and these are the highest and best forms
of kindness.

The metal showered like hail and rang like hooves on the flagstones as the stallholders wailed and the children ran eagerly,
stuffing their fists with coins. And Caiaphas thought: this? Is it possible that any sane man would prefer this to peace and
quiet conversation and each man conducting his business with good humor? Only a man who had never feared for his own life
or the lives of his children.

They chased him out of the courtyard in the end, and the young priests set the tables to rights. Caiaphas heard a few complaints
that afternoon, and announced at nightfall that the Temple would make good the stallholders’ losses out of its own coffers,
for it was not right that men should go hungry because of one madman’s actions. And this meant of course that several men
who had lost nothing claimed to be ruined, and he set a trusted Levite treasurer to sorting the true claims from the false.

And then many days passed. There was a rising in the east and a spate of murders of soldiers and Roman citizens by bandits
in the west. From the north came murmurs of a bad harvest, and from the south they heard there was another plague in Egypt.
The eldest son of the house of Avtinas, the incense-makers, came to tell him that the wine they had received from Cyprus was
of inferior quality—it had been delayed coming from the coast by the bandits and had spoiled in the casks. This lawlessness
must cease. The young man was wealthy, his whole family one of the richest in Jerusalem; he spoke disdainfully, and the silk
robe slung casually over his shoulders, its hem trailing in the dust, could have bought a dozen barrels of good wine, or a
dozen men to guard the wagons. But he was right.

He discussed the matter with Annas, who had spoken to the Prefect. Rome was unhappy. It was time, again, to round up the troublemakers
and rabble leaders and make an example of them. The Romans had captured a man called only Bar-Avo—a typically insolent pseudonym
meaning “the son of his father”—who, with his band of men, had been torching Roman houses and disrupting their convoys for
months.

It would look well if they could also produce a dissenter or two. They would find some of those twitching, raving men who
proclaimed themselves the scourge of Rome, flog them in the public square, and be able to tell Pilate that they, too, were
defending the honor of the Emperor. As if the Emperor were a fearful woman. The conversation was uncomfortable, as these conversations
always were.

Annas placed a hand on his shoulder and said, “To keep the peace.”

And Caiaphas grunted in assent.

It was a lucky thing that, among the crazed preachers and the careless plotters, a man Iehuda came to them saying that he
knew where they could find Yehoshuah, who he said was the one who had tipped over the stalls in the courtyard that day.

When they brought him, Caiaphas assembled an informal court in one of the rooms of his Temple house. It was only days before
Passover. He managed to gather eight men: enough to try a simple case like this. There were a few witnesses willing to speak
against the man. This was normal. Any trial would bring a group of people eager to gain favor with the Temple. Everyone in
Jerusalem knew about the waste of money and goods and the disruption to the sacred services on the day that this Yehoshuah
had thrown over the tables.