Quarantine

14

Jesus had not expected anyone to come. There would be god at hand, of course. Invisible, unprovable, perhaps, and shy to intervene. But ready to provide. If needs be, god would show Jesus how to tum the stones to bread and take his water from the clouds. Al things are possible to him that believes. And at the end ofquarantine he’d give him faith enough, ifhe so chose, to jump off the precipice instead of climbing to the top. He’d have no fear of death. The angels there would fly out of their eyries in the sky and take him by the arms back home to the Galilee. In their good care he’d not so much as strike his foot against a stone.

Jesus knew exactly what he believed where angels were concerned. He put his faith in them. They were as real to him as birds. He was no rigid sadducee. But he was not so clear on any of the other, weightier and wingless issues of the day. He’d sat cross-legged and done his best to follow the arguments held in the temple court by older men, but he could find no pleasure in debate. It was too easy to agree with every idea put to him with any feeling.

Of course a Jew should take the laws of Moses literaly. He saw the sense in that. He nodded, rapped his knuckles on the ground, a young man wise beyond his years. But should a righteous Jew reject everything not found within his laws — the immortality of souls, for instance, or the cheering prospect of messiahs — for fear of being reckoned false and being cast aside by god? He could not nod or rap at that with much sincerity because, like every fresh-faced follower of god, he harboured hopes of immortality himself, and prayed to see messiahs too. He prayed they’d come to earth to make god tangible, to mediate for god in all the conflicts of the world. But would messiahs drive the Romans out or let them stay, unharmed? Again, Jesus would not claim to have a single view. He did not like the taxes, tithes and tributes that the Romans levied in the Galilee to pay for their great marble works, their aqueducts and unremitting roads, but still he could not bring himself to hate the frightened, pink-skinned boys from far away who were the local legionnaires. He pitied them. They were not circumcized. They were not Jews. They had no covenant with god. They had no place in paradise.

Jesus had a simple view, a village view of god, that was not scholarly. He believed he was the nephew ofhis god, a god who many years before had chosen from all of the families of the world the family ofJews — not Romans, note — to be his kin. He’d rescued them from captivity and led them to a promised land, the Galilee. If god required the Romans to depart and retreat with their taxes down their roads back to the city of their birth, then he would do it al himself. He had the strength, for he was hard and muscular. His nature was not womanly. An engineer like god who kept the great machine ofstars and planets voyaging through air could have no trouble with the Romans if he chose to drive them out. The fact he did not choose to drive them out was evidence that god was not concerned with matters ofthe body. His empire was the mind and soul, the spirit not the flesh, the age to come and not the world of days. There’d be a battle, then, bitter and divine, not with the Romans but against the legions of evil. Al the demons would be killed and every sin defeated. Then God would call his family to his clearing in the fields. God would separate them, one from another, as a shepherd divides his sheep from the goats. Then waters would break forth in the wilderness and streams in the desert; the burning sand would become a pool and the thirsty grounds a spring of water; the haunts ofjackal would become a swamp and the scrub would flourish with its reeds and rushes. That’s what the scriptures promised.

Jesus had sat inside his cave and looked out on to the poisonous mists rising from the sea and expected to witness in his loneliness a vision of god’s mossy paradise. He’d not expected to be disturbed by visitors. But first — with hardly one day of his quarantine endured — there’d been the tumbling donkey, then the faces on the ridge, and now this gathering of five. He sat entirely still, too scared to hide himself in prayers, and watched the timid delegation taking risks to reach a crumbling promontory a little way along the precipice. He watched the blond man — not an angel now — pointing out to his four strange companions the stony perch and the entrance to his cave. He sank back further into the darkness and looked out like a cat. They must have seen a shadow move or heard the rattle of a displaced stone, because they stayed, standing or sitting on the sloping earth and looking across at the key-shaped darkness where he hid as if they had no business in the world except to wait for him. He could not hear the words, but he could hear their voices. They were thin and querulous, like lambs. That was a slightly cheering thought. He was a cat. And they were lambs.

If they had been five shepherd boys, five camel drivers, five legionnaires, five matching anything, he might not have found their presence quite so sinister — but these five were like animals in Noah’s ark, unlikely and disturbing friends.

There was a second face already briefly familiar to Jesus from the falling of the donkey, an impish, restless figure, as brownskinned as a honeycomb, with red-black hair. There was an old man, bent and hesitant, his legs like twigs. And a woman, sitting at a distance from the men.

There was another man he recognized as well. The large man from the tent, the one whose dates and water he had taken, the almost dead man he’d abandoned only yesterday. He’d offered no more care and charity than to rub a little, borrowed water on his lips. The merest drop. He’d left the man to die without companions. But Jesus was not troubled by any guilt. He was afraid. He could remember the man’s blackened tongue, and the heat of fever. And he could still recall the eggy odours of the devil on his breath. Yet here he was, recovered, big, beyond the grave, against al probabilities. He was holding a stick or walking staff in one hand, and that — to a timid man like Jesus, lonely, inexperienced, far from home — seemed ominous. It was the twisted wood that should be thrown out or burned. It was so fractured by the distance and the heat that it seemed to curve in spirals like the demon’s baton he’d heard about from stories older than the scriptures. The sort ofstick that could strike flames into a bush, split rocks, become a snake, turn wine to water with a single touch, tum holy bread back into stone again, make brothers fight and mothers chase their sons from home. It could fly through the air into a cave and beat its cowering occupant. It was the sort of playful stick the devil used to drive good Jews away from god.

The man put down his curling stick and cupped his hands around his mouth. ‘Come out. And talk to us,’ he caled in breathless bursts. His voice was like the echo of a voice, an almost-dead man’s voice, reduced and watery and pale. ‘Come out, Gaily. Let’s see. Your face.’ Gaily? The big man knew him, knew the nickname that his Galilean neighbours used. He knew where he was from. ‘Gaily. Gaily. I’m the one. From yesterday.’ A chilling phrase. ‘You drove the fever out. A miracle. Come out and. Show yourself. .’

Jesus knew that angels and devils could not be told apart just by their looks. Handsome was not virtuous. It was not sinful to be fat. But he could tell the difference. Angels left you calm of spirit when they stepped into your life. Devils left you troubled. Here was a devil then, sent to the wilderness, with death and fever as his friends, attended by four mad, unbelonging souls, to be adversaries to god. Jesus would not come out of the cave, no matter what they said, no matter what their slander was, no matter what they offered him. They’d come to tempt him from the precipice with their thin cries.