The Liars' Gospel (30 page)

Bar-Avo says, “I am sorry,” and though the sound of his words is obscured by the noise of the crowd he thinks that perhaps
Yehoshuah sees the words form on his lips and understands, because the man’s head moves. It is something like a shake of the
head, something like a thin smile, something like a sob in the movement of his shoulders.

He is touched by the man’s ambiguous gesture. As his friends sweep him away, he thinks that perhaps they should attempt to
mount a rescue, as they might try to do for one of their own captains. But such maneuvers are risky at best—they would not
have tried one even for him. They are more likely to end in losing twenty men than saving one. It is odd, really, that the
idea has even crossed his mind, since this man is nothing to him. Except, of course, that this is the man who will die in
his place, whose death has bought his life.

He has lived his life in the exact opposite fashion to the way this Yehoshuah has lived and that is why he, Bar-Avo, lives
and Yehoshuah will die.

In the marble-floored plaza, as he is taken out in triumph, a few men and women are weeping. He turns his head again to see
Yehoshuah led through the iron gates towards the dungeon from which he will travel to the place of execution. The gate closes
fast behind him and Barabbas can no longer see his face.

He goes to sit beneath the men who are being crucified, later. He is the most free bandit and murderer in the whole of Judea
now, for the Prefect has liberated him in front of a great multitude and so he can go where he pleases and do what he likes.

Besides, two of the men crucified that day have fought alongside his men, stealing grain and arms from the Romans. He pays
the guards to cut their wrists as the nails go in so that death will come to them more quickly and he waits until he sees
them slump. He has their bodies taken down for burial before the evening, as is right. He has already told his loyal lieutenants
to bring pouches of silver to the men’s families. This is how a man makes friends and keeps them.

He would have told the guards to do the same trick with Yehoshuah, to ease his passing, but some of the man’s family and friends
are standing by. One of them, the man he’d seen weeping in the plaza, spits and shouts as he walks past, “Murderer! You should
be up on that cross, not my master!”

And he finds he no longer has a mind to help that death go swiftly.

It is not, in any case, the worst method of execution Rome has ever devised. There is a particular thing they do which begins
with hanging a man upside down by his ankles between two trees and slowly, across many hours or even days, sawing him vertically
in half from scrotum to neck. It is astonishing how long a man will live like this, upside down, when he would die right side
up. By contrast, crucifixion is merciful. There is another thing he has heard is done in Persia, where maggots of a particular
beetle are introduced under the flesh and the man is fed milk and honey to keep him alive while the maggots burrow through
his sinews and make their nest in his belly and sometimes crawl out alive through his eyes and ears and nose while he is still
himself just living. Sufficiently living to scream, anyway. Death, the only inevitable item on the list of life, is nonetheless
such a constant matter of human creativity. He finds he has an odd admiration for it. He would never have had the ingenuity
to devise such methods.

He wonders, as he lingers by the crosses, whether it is his destiny to end his days here too, pinioned and waiting to be food
for ravens. It is most likely, he thinks. That is how it will probably fall out. He will join all the thousands upon thousands
of men whom Rome has nailed up, but the important thing is to make sure he has scratched her face before that day.

Afterwards, he finds the man who betrayed him. His dear friend Ya’ir, the one who was his most loyal and trusted follower,
the one who fought alongside him, his most precious Ya’ir.

Bar-Avo is crying when he talks to Ya’ir.

“I trusted you,” he says, “I gave you everything, I looked after you and your family, you are my brother.”

Ya’ir, tied with rope at wrists and ankles, gagged across his mouth, says nothing.

“If you had a reason for me, any reason at all,” says Bar-Avo, “maybe it would be different.”

Ya’ir does not even attempt to speak. His eyes are dead already. What can the reason possibly have been? Only that he had
capitulated, taken the Roman money, agreed to betray them because he had accepted that Rome was the only power and had the
only favor worth gaining.

Bar-Avo leaps up from his chair and strikes him across the face, but still he says nothing.

They keep him for three days. They have to perform a certain number of unpleasant tasks to be sure they’ve found out everything
he knows. Bar-Avo watches, for the most part, but does not participate, and it becomes clear over time that Ya’ir does not
know much.

They hang him in the end, from a tree near the village where they’ve been hiding, and put it about that it was a suicide.
If anyone questions this story or even wonders if it was true, they do not dare to say it out loud.

He sends later to root out what happened to that Yehoshuah’s followers and family. It is not only sentiment that makes him
do it; a rabble army looking for a new leader could be useful to him. He gets back a garbled tale that the dead man’s body
was stolen, probably by his family, but perhaps by some of the hangers-on who wanted to set up a shrine to the holy man. He
asks his own people to report back if they find out the truth of the story, but no one ever tells him a convincing tale about
it.

In those days, Av-Raham dies. It is not sudden or violent; he is an old man now, nearing eighty, and his spirit burns brightly
but his body is frail. He has time to gather his men to him, to tell them to keep fighting—they know that—and to name his
successors. Bar-Avo is named, of course, as the captain of the north.

They bury Av-Raham just before sunset and stand weeping over his grave for a long time. Bar-Avo lingers after the other men
have departed, wanting to wring some final wisdom out of the dry earth. It is for him now to decide how to prosecute the ongoing
war.

He says, “They captured me. They have spies among our ranks. If we push on we may perish and be defeated.”

And from the grave he hears Av-Raham’s voice and smells the man’s scent, the smoke and the mild smell of frying onions: “Better
perish than live under occupation. Better every man dead than that.”

Bar-Avo is pragmatic. He knows that the dead often appear in dreams and visions, that just because you think you have smelled
the scent of a man’s clothes after he has died does not mean that you should do what that voice tells you.

Pilate is mobilizing his forces, striking back at the “bandits” who have harried his supply lines for months. It might be
a time to retreat, to scatter the men to their homes and wait for the crackdown to end. It is not Bar-Avo’s decision alone,
but he is part of the decision. He says no, tell the men to come to the city even still. If there is no fight there will at
least be a mighty demonstration of anger. We are ready now, or we will soon be ready. The people want to overthrow the Romans.

And he is right that the city is ready to burn. That is the riot over the money for the aqueduct. Six hundred people die in
the public square.

Bar-Avo is not one of them, though he sees his friends cut down, and women, and children. His own son, still just a boy, might
have been one of them if he, Bar-Avo, had not gathered him into the folds of his cloak and broken through the Roman line using
his teeth to tear at the soldier holding him back, bringing up his mouth red and with a chunk of the man’s face warm and bleeding
in his mouth.

Men and women and children. It is the smell Bar-Avo remembers most as the years cloud up his memory of precisely how he escaped
and who he left behind to die when he ran.

Bar-Avo pricks himself with this memory when he grows weak, when his heart says for any moment “enough.” It will never be
enough until they have rid the land of every Roman on it. It will never be enough.

And perhaps on the same day that Bar-Avo decides this, Pilate begins to think to himself: so many dead, and still the thing
is not concluded? Perhaps he does think so, there is no way to be certain.

And then it is the last days of summer and the wheat is high, and then it is autumn when the fruit trees bring forth their
goodness, and then it is winter when the winds howl, and then it is spring again and the earth which has died is reborn. And
ten years can go past like this quickly and they continue the fight.

Pilate is finally ordered home to Rome after one massacre too many, and there is some brief rejoicing. It is true that he
has killed many thousands of Jews, that his men have left the city worse and more afraid and more angry than it has ever been,
but at last he is gone, and perhaps this is hopeful.

In Rome the old goat Emperor Tiberius dies and a new emperor ascends to rule. His name is Little Boots and he is full of the
promise of a new era of tolerant understanding, but it falls out that he is madder than his predecessor and the name Caligula
is soon a byword for cruelty and sickness. Caligula believes he is a god—though the people of Judea already know that no man
can ever be a god—and sees no reason, as a god, to keep to the old compacts between Rome and Jerusalem. He orders his statue
to be placed in the holy Temple. His generals attempt to explain to him that the Jews will rebel, that this has been tried
before, that they would have to kill every man in the city to make this happen.

“Then kill every man in the city,” Caligula says. Or something similar to that. Or something as unconcerned as that, at least.

Caligula’s madness has encircled him so that although he rules an empire as wide as any ever known, he is entrapped within
the labyrinth of his own mind. He cannot see beyond the horizons of his own loves and hatreds, his own family, his own cock.
He fucks his sister, they say, and makes his horse a consul, and when his sister falls pregnant he cuts the unborn child out
of her belly.

In Jerusalem the new prefect, Marullus, attempts to place the statue. And the anticipated consequences come to pass.

Bar-Avo has three thousand men under his orders now in Jerusalem alone, and more importantly the people are with them, the
households give them shelter, the young men come to fight with them. This statue of the Emperor Caligula, his nose upturned
to the heaven, a laurel wreath on his mad brow, is too much for the people of Judea to tolerate and the High Priest cannot
convince them, does not even try to do so. Caiaphas is gone now, and it is another of Annas’s sons who meets with Prefect
Marullus to say, “Not this, not this, there will be no way to stop the killing.” But the Prefect, even if he were the best
man in the Empire, would have to obey the commands of his God-Emperor.

Caligula has set himself against the God of Israel. Upon Him particularly and necessarily, for both are jealous gods. All
the people who will have to die to wage that war of god on God are insignificant.

Massacres and riots and rebellions and battles are nothing new now. Mothers sharpen weapons for their sons. Grandparents shelter
fleeing rebels, saying, “He was never here, we have seen no one.” Men are slaughtered in the noonday square and their bellies
sliced open so that their entrails slide out glistening as they yet scream. There is death upon death, and though it never
starts to feel easy, it begins to feel expected. The land is becoming accustomed to living this way.

For every Roman excess there is a rebellion. Every rebellion is put down with increasing brutality. Every act of brutality
hardens the people a little further, making the next uprising more violent. Every act of violence justifies a more extreme
show of force in suppressing it. There are fewer and fewer people among the Jews who trust Rome at all. Even to speak of trusting
Rome now, of wanting peace with Rome, is to forget the murdered sons, the repulsive statues in the Temple, the men with daggers
concealed in their cloaks. The thing has no end. Or no end but one.

Bar-Avo sidles up to a man in the marketplace. Who is he? A baker, by the scent of him and the flour dusting his drawstring
trousers and his leather shoes. Bar-Avo has never seen him before. He probably does not deserve to die. There is a crumb of
dandruff above his ear. The back of his neck is red from too much sun. He has a hot boil starting just above the place where
his tunic rubs his neck. Some woman probably loves this breathing body, or is used to it at least. Some woman would have a
hot compress with fragrant herbs to draw the poison out of that boil this evening after his work is done. He should not have
come here to stand in the marketplace.

To do good, sometimes, one must do evil. He reminds himself that this honest baker has paid his taxes like a good citizen
of Rome. That perhaps he sends loaves to the Roman garrison or to the Prefect. That he collaborates, over and over again,
just by living in the city and not rising up against them.

Bar-Avo’s cloak flows around him in loose, deep folds. Within the cloak is the dagger. The crowd surges and bounces. There
are sizzling scents of freshly cooked meat from the stalls. People are loud, shouting for attention from stallholders, watching
out for the thieving hands of small children, demanding from one another where they need to go next and have they tried yet
the bread with dill, the cheese, the wine, the garlic, the oil? He waits until a surge pushes him forward into the baker.

They learned the lesson Pilate taught them extremely well. Pilate understood the methods of terror. Pilate is no longer the
prefect, but his methods are still effective.

Bar-Avo’s dagger slides out so smoothly. No one sees it within the folds of the cloak. He finds the baker’s ribs with a steadying
hand and sends the dagger through just here, behind the heart, with that horizontal slicing motion that cuts the heart in
two. The baker says “ump.” That is all. It was an easy death, insofar as men are ever afforded an easy death. His body slides
against the wall but the crowd does not let him fall completely to the ground quite yet, they are pressed so tightly. No one
has even noticed. Bar-Avo moves a little away. It does not have to be far. It is not wise to try to run. He has learned that
before.