The Liars' Gospel

Miryam

THERE IS A dead boy on the hillside, they say. Or maybe just almost dead. The herder Ephrayim found him when he was seeking a lost lamb, and does not know how long he has lain in the shallow cave between the pathways. Where has he come from? They don’t know. The clothes look like those made in Shomron, but the shoes are Galilean. Sturdy shoes, said Ephrayim, laying thereby his claim should the boy be lost. Sturdy, but still he should not have tried to cross the hills alone. It has been six cold nights one after another. Snow has fallen although it is nearly spring.

Still, if he is dead he must be buried, and if he is not dead they must attempt, at least, to care for him. They bring him to Natzaret thrown over the back of a mule. This is where Miryam first sees him. He is breathing, just a little, very shallow breaths, and they have wrapped him in furs. As they bring him in, a crowd comes to see — is he someone’s cousin? Someone’s nephew? Why did he come to Natzaret at such a time of rough travel? No one recognizes him. They push Miryam to the front in any case, to take a good look. A mother would know her own son, however changed he might be. Though they know there is no hope and he is at least a decade too young. But just in case.

Her youngest son, Iov, tugs on her skirt and says, “Who is it, Ima? Who is it? Why does he look like that, Ima?”

She picks Iov up and passes him to her friend Rahav to hold as she stares intently at the man on the back of the mule. The half-dead man is not her son. How could he be? She notices that two fingers on his right hand are black. He’ll lose them, painfully. If he’s lucky.

They place him in Amala the widow’s house and put him to bed with the dogs, for warmth. He sleeps the night, though they expect him to die, and in the morning begins to rouse, a little, enough to flutter his eyelids and take drips of water from a soaked rag. The pain from his blackened fingers keeps him moaning constantly, even in his sleep, a low keening wail like an abandoned newborn. He shivers and sweats and holds the injured hand like a claw. They fear a fever. They call for the blacksmith, who performs the necessary deed with kindness, that is to say: swiftly. He screams of course, a strangled, terrified howl, but that night he takes a little soup and sleeps deeply. He still has not spoken to say who he is, although he understands them when they say “soup” or “water.” They wonder if he is a Jew at all, and not a Syrian or a Greek.

It is four more days until he speaks. They take turns feeding him bone soup or bread soaked in milk. Among themselves, they murmur. He is not as young as the light bundle of him crumpled in the cave had suggested, but not so old as the lines on his face. His beard has not come in yet, except in mottled patches. He is perhaps fifteen or sixteen. And where are his people? There is one obvious answer. Every year, some village rebels against the Romans, refuses to pay the tax, claims they cannot pay — often it is true, they cannot pay. And the tax collectors report the rebellion, and soldiers are dispatched. Every year, some village is burned, its men put to the sword, its women and children to flight. It is not likely that a boy as young as this would have been a ringleader, would be remembered by a soldier. It is not likely that it is dangerous to have him here. Nonetheless, the old men mutter.

On the fourth day, when they come to give him his soup, they find he has woken and is patting the dog with his whole hand, keeping the injured one close to his chest. He is murmuring to the dog in good, intelligible Aramaic.

He looks up guiltily as Amala and Rahav enter the room with his soup. He knows they have heard him speaking. His good hand is twined in the dog’s fur and the animal stirs and whines as it feels him tense.

Rahav puts the tray on the floor, just out of the boy’s reach. Her arms are folded. She glares at him. Rahav’s children are the best behaved in the village, mostly out of fear.

“Well,” she says, “we’ve fed you. Now, who are you?”

The boy glances between Amala and Rahav. He looks hungrily at the soup.

“Is this Natzaret?” he says. “Did I reach Natzaret?”

They tell him it is. He did.

A change comes over his face. He sits up a little straighter, sets his jaw, as if facing a difficult job.

“Natzaret in the Galil?”

They tell him yes, again. And they cannot discern whether he is glad or afraid, such a shining-eyed sharpness comes over his face.

“The village of Yehoshuah the Teacher?”

And Amala and Rahav glance at each other with a sort of sad surrender. Of course, this. Out in the street, the little boy Iov is playing with some of the other children. Rahav sends him to fetch his mother, Miryam.

The rabbis say: when a loved one dies the sword is at your throat, and every way you turn your head it is there, in front of you.

So, this is how she is. When she grinds the wheat, she thinks of him. And when she soaks the cloths, she thinks of him. And when her youngest son, Iov, comes running to her, yes, it is her Iov, the foolish child who got his hand stuck in a jar because he would not unclench his fist to let go of the dried fig he’d found. But it is also that first little boy, her eldest son, the first child who ever skidded to a halt in the muddy place by the chicken enclosure shouting “Ima, Ima!”—“Mummy! Mummy!” She is distracted by the constant double image.

Iov is saying something. He kicks at a stone. The snow has turned to slush and the thin rain will soon wash it away entirely. He digs his toe into the hole left by the stone.

“Don’t do that,” she says, “you’ll wear out the leather.”

And he looks at her sadly, because she spoke more sharply than she’d intended.

“But Ima, Ima, did you hear me? They’re looking for you, at Amala’s house, they’re looking for you! They want you to go and see that man with half a hand!”

She asks him why, and his mouth twists and his eyes open very wide and she understands that he does not want to answer. So she has an idea, already, of what it is.

The women waiting outside Amala’s home aren’t waiting for her. They say nothing when she comes, most of them can’t meet her eyes. One or two touch her on the back or shoulder as she passes. The rest are simply afraid. They want to know if this boy is a curse she has brought on them.

Inside the smoky, dark room, he is sitting on a heaped mattress. Someone has given him a woolen jerkin, with a thick robe on top of it. They add bulk to his thin frame. When she enters he stands, a little shakily, to greet her.

She says, “Who are you?”

He looks into her eyes. He has an unsettling trick: that every word he says, he seems to mean with a profound depth of feeling.

“I am Gidon,” he says, “from Yaffo.”

“And why have you come here, Gidon of Yaffo?”

His eyes are so clear and innocent that she becomes afraid. Innocence can destroy three times as quickly as guile. At least the cunning can be reasoned with or bribed.

“I have come to seek the village of Yehoshuah the Teacher, to find his friends and family here, to meet them and to befriend them.”

She breathes in and breathes out.

“He was a traitor, a rabble-leader, a rebel, a liar and a pretender to the throne. We have tried to forget him here.”

“Did you know him?” Gidon says.

She remains silent.

“Did you know him?” he repeats.

The fire spits. Some wet log sending a shower of sparks past the circle of stones onto the moist earth floor.

“I was his mother,” she says.

A wetness is starting in his eyes, he is shaking.

“Oh, blessings are on you,” he says, “blessings are on you, and on your womb and breasts, because of the son you have given the world. A thousand thousand blessings from He Who is in All Places, for your son Yehoshuah.”

Her heart is a stone. Her mouth is a closed door.

“Go home.”

His eyes are shining. She thinks he might be about to embrace her or kiss her hand or fall to his knees before her.

“Go home,” she says again, before he can do any of these things. “We do not want you here.”

And she leaves the room before he can say any more to her.

She remembers the screaming trees that night.

She thinks of them many days, and of what happens to those who challenge and fight and argue. And how little this boy seems to understand of where his words will lead.

She remembers the screaming trees and she thinks: if I can bear not to speak to him, it will be better for him. But she knows she does not have that strength.

The boy will not leave, of course. They do not understand how one simple, addle-headed, half-handed boy can be so stubborn. They offer him food for the journey. They offer him the warm clothes as a gift. When Sha’ul the merchant passes by on his way to Jerusalem, they suggest he take the boy with him as a help against bandits, and Sha’ul, whom they have known for twenty summers, is not unwilling — but the boy refuses.

He will work, he says. He will repay the kindness they have shown him. He will sleep in the stone shelter made for the goats. The weather is becoming warmer, it will not be a hardship to sleep there if he builds a small fire. His hand is mending, look, the wound has healed clean. He can work. If they will give him a bowl of food each day for his trouble, he will tend their crops and mind their animals and mend their gap-toothed walls. They shrug their shoulders at last. If he wants to be the madman of their village, so be it.

All of them know which house he will choose to settle by. Which byre will be his dwelling place. Whose fields he will clear of stones. Miryam is unsurprised when, one morning, she awakes to find him sitting patiently on a rock by her door.

He watches her stumble, morning-stiffened, to the well. She lowers the bucket and twists the rope just so, to make it dip under the water and fill, but when she tries to pull it up he is by her elbow.

“Let me do it.”

And she is old and tired and her knuckles and wrists ache. It is easy to let him. If he wants to, why not let him? He hauls the full bucket up. He is a little clumsy with his half-hand, but he is adapting quickly, as children do. As she watches, he tests out different ways of gripping the rope, settling at last on using the arm with the injured hand to trap the rope close to his body and secure it, while the other hand works to bring up more. He reminds her of a blind man she saw once, reading his way along a wall with a light and interested touch, as though his fingers were eyes.

He carries the bucket for her, a little unsteadily, slopping out more than she would like. He brings it into the room where little Iov and his sister Michal are still sleeping, wrapped around each other. They do not stir. Gidon puts the bucket by the fire. Looks at her. Like a sheep, she thinks, looking for its flock.

“If you pour it into the pot,” she says, “and put the pot on the fire, we can make hyssop tea.” She nods at the bundle of dried leaves hanging from the ceiling beam. “There is bread from yesterday still.”

Favoring his good hand, he hoists the bucket again, pours the water into the pot. Lifts the pot onto the raised stones over the fire. She pokes at the logs with a stick of wood.

“You do not want to talk to me.”

His voice is not accusing. He is calm.

“No,” she says.

“But you let me help you.”

There is no trace of bitterness.

She shrugs. “Do we not read: ‘The Lord will recompense you for the work you have done’?—and so is it not good to work?”

He starts, and stares at her. It is true, a woman of learning is not a common thing, but neither is it entirely unknown. All the people of the village know their letters; one or two of the other women could best her in quoting Torah passages. She knows it is not this which interests him.

“Tell me again,” he says, “or again another thing.”

She shakes her head.

“If you want to learn, there are better teachers than me. Go and seek out a teacher.”

And he says, “I have already done so. My teacher cannot teach me anymore.”

The water begins to boil. She dips in a jug, breaks dry leaves into the water and pours some into a small clay bowl for him, and for her. The well water is good, thank God. It is clean and pure and tastes of old stones.

“If you are willing to work then you are from the Lord. If you work then I will feed you, until the spring, when you should go back to your people.”

There is such happiness in him when she says this that she knows what she has done.

There is a thing she often remembers. It was a little thing. When her first son was only a baby, and she was a new wife, and her husband was so young and strong that he lifted great boulders to make the walls of their sheep pen. In that part of their lives, she remembers, they passed evenings gazing at their little son sleeping. Every first baby seems like a miracle. The old women laugh and say: by number six she’ll forget what name she gave the new one.

But this was their first child. Yosef, her husband, made the baby a cradle of woven branches. Yehoshuah was snug in there, on a bed of fur with a lamb’s-wool blanket.

The thing she remembers is that there was a scorpion. It happened between one moment of looking and the next. The baby was sleeping, she looked away, and then there was a small yellow scorpion in his cradle. Poised over his heart. Yellow scorpions are the most dangerous. When she was a child, a man in the village was stung by a yellow scorpion like that, its tail dripping venom. He died of it, shaking and sweating and crying out for his mother. He was a man of forty and strong in himself.

She looked at the scorpion, sitting on the chest of her sleeping child, and there was not a thought in her head. Every mother knows how it is. There is no thinking or weighing one thing against another. She reached her hand into the cradle, plucked out the scorpion, threw it to the ground and crushed it beneath her shoe to oozing yellow muck.

She had been fast, but scorpions are also fast. It had grazed the skin of her hand with its sting, leaving a faint red score on her flesh. As the day passed, her hand grew hot and heavy, her limbs ached. Her heart pounded, her knees buckled. She thought: I shall die like that man in the village, but it is better that I should die than my baby. When Yosef came home from the fields in the evening, expecting his supper, he found her lying on the straw-filled mattress with hot dry skin and glassy eyes and the baby crying in her arms.

It was three days like that. Yosef brought her well water and she drank a little, and vomited, and the baby would not cease from crying though Yosef fed him goat’s milk from a skin bag. But at the end of three days the fever broke. Yosef had to bring her a pot to piss in because she could not walk to the stone outhouse. Her right arm and right leg, the side the scorpion had stung, were numb like a fallen branch.

She recovered slowly. It was hard, with a small baby, but she was young and strong then and with God’s help she grew well. Her right hand never regained all its cunning. Still it is slower than its fellow, still it will not close into a tight fist only a loose one. She cannot use a needle with the right finger and thumb and had to teach herself to use the left. But she never regretted her action, not as she saw him grow tall and wise and strong. When he was a grown man of twenty she would thank her own hand sometimes for his life. Her hand, and the guidance of God.

But this past year, she thinks: what was it for? What had been the point of all those thousand thousand acts of work and love that go to raise a child? What was the point of any of it, seeing what has happened, and that he has not left even a grandchild from his body to comfort her?

The boy Gidon works hard, there is that at least. Her own grown sons will help her if she is ill, but they have their families now, and Iov, the littlest one, is too small to be much use lifting and carrying. He minds the sheep, but he can scarcely keep his thoughts even on that. Gidon has the single-mindedness that impressed and frightened her the first time they met. He has cleared the back field, which has lain untended since her husband, Yosef, was with them. They will be able to plant wheat in it, or barley, in a month’s time.

He has not asked her more questions. She has not mentioned Yehoshuah. Whenever she speaks of her sons, she says “my son Yirmiyahu, the second one” or “my son Iehuda, the fourth.” So that he will know, and not think she is inviting conversation. He asks her, sometimes, questions about the Torah. She has taught him, a little. It is hard not to, when his yearning is so open within him.

He sees her once giving food to one of the beggars who pass through even an out-of-the-way village like this. A blind woman, making her way with a stick and a bundle of little dolls whittled from wood in her backpack. Miryam slips a few extra apples into the woman’s pack before she walks on with some other travelers.

After she leaves, Gidon says, “My teacher said that the poor will always be with us.”

And she cannot help herself.

“If he wasn’t a fool, he meant that each of us can find someone who has less than us. Don’t you know that every Jew is obliged to give charity? Even the beggars must give.”

“Tell more,” he says.

And she teaches him what she had learned when her parents took her to hear the great Rabbi Hillel speak, that our duty to love each other is the highest of all the commandments of God. That our duty of charity extends even to our own bodies, and we must care for them because our souls are guests in them.

He wants a mother, this boy, she can read it in the lines of him as he sits in the dust by her feet listening to her teach, until it is time for supper and the children come in bustling and hungry. He wants a mother to notice that he is there, and to teach him.

Later, Iov and Michal are sleeping and she tends the fire, banking it high so that it will burn slowly through the night. Gidon is still in the house, leaning his long, thin frame against the wall, whittling a wooden stick to a sharp point with his knife.

She says, “Who are your people?”

He says, “My family are those who believe what I believe.”

She has heard of such groups. The Essenes are one — they live together and follow the same customs although they are not kin — and there are other small groups, those who follow the same principles or who gather around a teacher.

“And where are they?” she says, because she thinks he will say that it is a group who live in the caves, or in the desert, or in the wooded hills near Jerusalem.

“We are scattered,” he says. “Now we who followed your son Yehoshuah are wandering. Teaching. We are spreading his words.”

She looks at him. He is leaning forward on his haunches now, observing her. He moves towards her. Not to touch, but closer to her body.

“Become one of us,” he says to her, softly. “Mother Miryam, listen to the teachings of your blessed son and tell us what you know of him. There must be stories”—his voice is low, so as not to wake the children, but he is speaking more quickly, with a dreadful urgency—“you can tell the holy stories of his birth, his childhood. No one sent me to ask this, but I had a dream. It was as the winter came on. In my dream, the clouds parted and a voice spoke from heaven telling me to find you. It said that I must come and help you and work with you, to learn the stories you could teach me.”

She is tired now. Not angry anymore, barely afraid. He’s a good worker and a kind lad, but she is tired.

“There are no stories,” she says.

He reaches out towards her.

“There are no stories. He was a baby and then he was a child and then he was a man and then he was killed. That is the story.”

“But,” he says, “what kind of baby was he? How was his birth? What manner of child? How did his great wisdom first show itself? And where did he get his learning?”

She sighs.

“Gidon,” she says, “you are a good boy. And you have no mother. Let me be a mother to you.”

He toys with his pointed stick, saying nothing.

“If I were your mother, I would tell you this: take a wife. I know you have only eight of your fingers, but there are many girls who would have you willingly.”

The daughter of Nechemiah for one, her mother has mentioned this to Miryam casually more than once now, has happened to ask if she knows whether Gidon has a wife somewhere.

“Learn a trade. You are skillful with your hands even still. Then take a wife. Fill her belly with sons and with daughters.”

He blushes a little at this, his face becomes bashful.

“Then you will think of your wife and your craft and your sons and your daughters, and forget that you came here for any other reason. That is a good life.”

But she sees from his face that this business is not over.

He had been, she admits it to herself now, a distant child. Not always distant. Often helpful, often sweet. But a child given to entertaining himself for hours. Yehoshuah could sit staring at the waving barley and when Yosef said, “What are you doing there, boy, sitting idle?” he would reply strangely, with an odd question, “Why did God make the locusts?” or simply say, “I am thinking, father.” But for all that, he seemed happy. He made friends easily. He had a way with him that was charming.

She remembers a small boy, Ze’ev, the child of Batchamsa from the village. Yehoshuah and Ze’ev played together, some game of catching a ball and counting the throws. They were eight or nine. Yehoshuah threw the ball too far, Ze’ev made a lunge for it and fell in the mud. It was funny. Miryam, half watching while sifting the dried lentils for stones, laughed. The boy was covered in mud, brown streaks over his clothes and in his hair. Yehoshuah didn’t laugh, he simply looked.

Later, when he was settling down to sleep, he asked her, “What did it mean, Ima, that Ze’ev fell down?”

“It didn’t mean anything, sweet. He just fell.”

“But what did it mean?”

He returned to this thought again and again. What did it mean that the rain fell? What did it mean that the dog died? As if the world were a book and each person and event in it had been carefully chosen, and their meanings could be understood if one only read aright.

She and Yosef argued about him.

“He’s always hanging around your skirts,” said Yosef, when he came in from his workshop and found Yehoshuah reading, or thinking, or whittling some wood by the fire when the other children were out playing in the orchards.

“He’s different to other boys,” said Miryam. “He doesn’t like their rough-and-tumble games.”

“You’re making him weak,” said Yosef. “You give in too easily.”

“Give in what? I should throw him out of the house and force him to play?”

“Yes! Or give him work! He’s nine, he’s old enough to work! Give him some of your jobs, working your fingers to the bone. Set him to chop the wood, or carry the water. If he wants to be a woman, let him pluck the goose!”

“A woman? He should be like you?” said Miryam, and this was the start of their troubles.

“Like me? What do you mean like me?”

“Like you, never studying anymore as you did when you were young, never going to learn with the rabbi.”

And so it went on. And Yehoshuah sat by the fire, and although he must have heard every word he said nothing, did nothing.

As he grew to adulthood she feared, for a time, that she had done something wrong. Her fears were only calmed when she saw that her younger sons were normal. Yirmiyahu was married at seventeen. Iehuda went to the wedding canopy at twenty. Shimon, the quiet one, developed such an ardent passion for a girl from the next village that no one could hold him back and the wedding was arranged when he was barely fifteen. But although they suggested girls to Yehoshuah, he would not meet them, and though they tried to persuade him, he did not hear their words.

As a young man, when he and Yosef could no longer be in the same home together, he began to travel. He stayed for a time among the Essenes, those men who live without women and refuse to defecate upon the Sabbath day. He took, for a year, more difficult vows. She had grandsons and granddaughters from her younger boys and the oldest was still unwed.

He came back home for a time when he was twenty-seven. Still no woman with him, though she had hoped that after his wandering he might return with a sweet bride and surprise them all with…what? With normality at last. But no. He was odder than ever, more distant and strange. He would not meet anyone’s gaze, seemed always to be staring at something just out of view. He and Yosef argued. When would he found a family of his own? Build a house? There was that far field, if he wanted he could build himself a place there, but he could not live with them anymore, it wasn’t right, a fully grown man living like a child, waited on hand and foot by his mother.

Yehoshuah was different now, though. Not quiet but angry, suddenly, with a violent rage that swept over his body and made him go stiff and white-faced.

“You know nothing,” he said quietly, “old man.” And then, his voice rising to a shriek, “You know nothing, you know nothing. You. Know. Nothing!” and he picked up a pot from the table and smashed it on the ground.

The other children were not there. They did not see what happened. Yosef and Miryam looked at the broken shards. Yehoshuah stared, with flared nostrils and rolling eyes, at his father and then darted for the door. It was three days, that time, before he returned.

He spoke to himself. Or he heard voices. Or demons. Only sometimes — not all the time, she told her other children when they complained. He does not do it all the time. He is engaged in his studies, she said. He is reciting the words of the Torah, to keep them pure and complete in his heart. Is it not praiseworthy? Yosef looked at him like a stranger at their table. Not a son, an odd, full-grown man, whom they had taken in for no reason.

The arguments grew worse. There came a day, if she was honest she had known it was coming, when Yehoshuah hit Yosef in a rage. Yosef had provoked it, probably. With a critical tone, angry words. And Yehoshuah rose up from his place by the fire and with the heel of his hand whacked his father hard on the temple. Yosef was a man nearing fifty and Yehoshuah was young and strong. Yosef stumbled, almost fell. Yehoshuah looked at his hand in disbelief. And Miryam found that she was saying, “Yosef! Why did you speak to him like that?” Because what will a mother not do for her son?

After that, Yehoshuah wandered farther from their village, into the desert, for days sometimes. He had not founded a family, he had no crops to tend or harvest to reap. When he returned from the wilderness he would not say who he had seen there or what he had done. And she remembered the charming child he had been, the one who would reach his little hand out for hers and show her a lizard he had seen, or a new fern, and she wondered when she had lost him.

Then one day, a week had passed, then two, and he did not return. For a month or two she thought he had died out there. In her dreams the scorpion returned, or its parent to exact vengeance on her son for her murder of its offspring. Her hand ached in its old wound and she thought perhaps it was a sign.

She and Yosef quarreled about it.

“Why were you always so hard with him?” she would say, and although she knew in her heart that there was no answer here, she could not stop. “Why could you never show him kindness?”

“He needed less kindness from you, woman! He needed to be taught to be a man, instead of you constantly keeping him near, mothering him!”

“I am his mother. What else should I have done?”

And Yosef made that disgusted noise he kept specially for arguments he knew he could not win with her.

She saw Yosef one day talking closely with the daughter of Ramatel, the blacksmith, a tall, well-built girl, but at that time she thought little of it. Her mind was occupied with chewing over Yehoshuah and what had become of him and whether she would ever hear from him or see him again, or if he had died somewhere out there in the desert and the wolves had had his bones.

And then she heard a tale from a merchant that he had been seen in Kfar Nachum, and he was preaching and working wonders like a holy man. And they said another thing. They said he was out of his mind.

And it is evening, and it is morning. And it is time to prepare for the Sabbath. She washes herself and the children. She bakes bread for today and for tomorrow. Just before sunset, she lights the oil lamps which will burn through the night and makes the blessing. And it is Friday morning, and it is Friday evening. The Sabbath day.

The boy Gidon goes to pray with the men in Ephrayim’s field. She and the small children go to sit in the long barn and sing the women’s songs welcoming the Sabbath. They share out bread and wine and make the blessings on it. They drink the sweet wine made in years when they were young, the jars sealed with wax by their fathers, keeping in those long-ago summers until this day.

Some of the women ask about Gidon. Not just, like Nechemiah’s wife, because they have a daughter who has taken an interest in him. They have heard something. The news has come that there was a small rising in Yaffo several months ago, in the autumn. A man appeared claiming to be the rightful king of Judea, the son of the king the Romans slew. He had followers, only two or three hundred, but they tried to break into the armory. The soldiers quashed the rebellion easily enough, but the man himself, along with several of his most important followers, had escaped.

Does she think…Gidon was from Yaffo, they knew, does she think that he might be one of those men?

She shakes her head.

“He is what he says he is: a fool, not a liar.”

Rahav puts a thin arm around her shoulder and hugs her.

“We still mourn with you.”

Rahav kisses the side of Miryam’s head. She’s a kind soul, especially with a glass of warm fragrant wine in her.

It’s Batchamsa who introduces a note of caution.

“They’re looking, though,” she says. “They’ve sent out armed men as far as S’de Raphael.”

“They won’t come this far north,” says Rahav, “not for a fugitive from Yaffo.”

“They might,” says Batchamsa. “They just keep looking.”

Rahav shakes her head. “One of his own people will betray him. They always do when they get scared or hungry and want to come home. In a month they’ll have found him in a cave near Yaffo and that’ll be the end of it.”

Rahav does not say the part in the middle, Miryam notes. She does not say, “They’ll find him and then they’ll kill him and that’ll be the end of it.” Miryam supposes that this is Rahav’s kindness.

She finds she feels a little protective of Gidon.

In the evening, they eat with her brother Shmuel’s family. His wife has made soup and roast goat leg with wild garlic. Gidon eats with them. The village’s decision to treat him as an imbecile has faded. He has done good work on Miryam’s land. Those who work deserve to eat.

Shmuel sets in on him again, saying,

“But you will return to Yaffo in the spring, yes? Before Passover?”

Gidon shifts his shoulders awkwardly. He is less comfortable here than he is with her alone. He does not talk so readily.

“I might stay here,” he says, and then seems about to say something more, but falls silent.

“He has been useful with the goats,” she says. “Iov can never bring them all in. We lost two over the winter. Gidon gathers them safely in.”

Shmuel nods and takes more bread and goat covered in the thick paste of herbs and olive oil. Her brother is the patriarch now, the one who makes the decisions since her husband has gone. But he’s not an unkind man. He dips his bread into the green oil and swallows it, leaving a few emerald flecks in his beard.

“But you’ll tell me when you get tired of him, yes?” he says, then grins widely, “so we can send him on his way with courtesy, of course.”

They said he was out of his mind. This, they came to tell her. The sympathetic women from the villages nearby came, when they passed through for market day. “Passing through” was what they said, though Natzaret was a mile or more out of their way. People who had not visited her for five years came to tell her that her son was mad. Just as a kindness.

He had desecrated the Temple, they said, and she could not believe it. He had loved going to the Temple as a boy, buying the cake for a meal offering in the outer courtyard and accompanying the sacrifice.

He had done work on the Sabbath, they said, and she laughed and said, “Yehoshuah? Who never did a stick of work the other six days of the week?” And they laughed too, because nothing is funnier than a mother mocking her own son, and agreed that perhaps on this point she was right.

Yosef, she noticed, did not laugh at this joke.

As they were getting ready for sleep, he said to her, “It’s not enough that he’s run away? Now he brings disgrace on the family?”

She did not bother to argue. He wanted to lie with her that night, but she refused him, and he made that special noise again, of unconquerable exasperation.

Those friends who loved her best told her simply that Yehoshuah was changed. That he seemed frightening sometimes, or frightened himself. Those who loved her best told her that it had been hard to recognize him, that something in him had begun to work differently, that even his face was changed. One said she heard he had been questioned by the Roman guard but they had not held him.

“You should go to talk to him,” she said to Yosef one night.

He looked at her.

“It’s your job,” she said, because this sometimes called him to his duty. “You are his father. You should go and see that all is well with him. I’m worried about him.”

“You’ve always worried about him over the wrong things.”

“Rahav said she’d heard that the guard questioned him. You should go there. Talk to him. Bring him home. Please.”

He stared at her levelly. His beard was all gray now, and his eyes wrinkled and his skin burnished, and where now was the young strong husband who had lifted her up with one hand? And had loved her? She had thought that he had loved her.

“No,” he said, “he will have no more from me.”

“Then I will go myself.”

He breathed in and out. She saw in his face the same lines as Yehoshuah’s face. The same angry stiff mouth, the same twitching brow. They had the same anger, that was the problem.

“I forbid it. Do you understand? You are not to bring disgrace upon us. I forbid it.”

She looked at him. Whatever he had been, he was not it anymore.

“I understand,” she said.

It was around two weeks after that when Yosef went north to take a look at some lumber and to trade. And she called her grown sons to tell them what she intended, and they agreed to it.

She will not go with her family to Jerusalem this Passover. Her brother Shmuel will make a sacrifice for her. She and her sister and Shmuel’s wife will stay behind, as they did when they were young women with many small children to care for. But still, although she will not eat the sacrificed lamb with them in Jerusalem, there are duties to be performed. The house must be cleaned, every jar that has held flour must be emptied and scoured.

Gidon helps her, carrying the wool blankets back from the stream when they are heavy and sodden and throwing them over the rope she has tied between two trees. He climbs into the back of the clay-and-reed flour store and washes the stone floor, bent double, inhaling the flour dust, so that when he comes out his eyes are red and his back cracks as he stands up. They do not speak of the anniversary that is fast approaching until the very eve of Passover.

The day before Passover is time to bake the matzot — the flat unrisen bread that they will eat for the next week. The flour cakes will last overnight, she will wrap them in cloth and put them in a stone jar to keep off insects and mold. She puts the flat stone into the fire to heat, takes three measures of flour from the jar and pulls up a bucket of cold clear water from the well. She begins to mix the water into the flour — swiftly, because her mother taught her that matzot should be made as quickly as possible — pulling it into a dough, forming round flat cakes, pummeling them out with the heel of her hand, stretching the dough to thinness. She makes dots in the surface of each cake with a wooden point, then quickly tosses them onto the heated stone, where they immediately begin to bubble and crisp, becoming fragrant with wood smoke and with flakes of burnt flour on the surface.

When she looks up, she sees that Gidon is watching her. She does not know how long he has been there. He watches her so tenderly. He must have seen his own mother perform this task.

“We ate them, the last meal with Yehoshuah,” he says at last.

Her blood is chilled and her bones are old ash. She does not want to know what they did. She wants to know everything. Her mouth tries to say, “Don’t tell me.” Her breath longs to beg him for every detail. She is thirsty for every moment she missed. She wants to ask if there was a crumb in his beard from the unrisen bread. Did he remember to change his clothes before the festival started? Would anyone but a mother notice? The desire, always coiled in her, always ready to pounce, springs now: the desire to wail and say why was I not there at his last meal, why did I not force him to come home?

All this rises up in her. She throws another flat round matzo cake onto the hot stone. She looks at Gidon.

“I miss him too,” the boy says.

And she cannot help herself. There are always tears in her now. Her voice cracks and she says, “You do not know what it means to miss him.”

She picks raw dough from her fingertips and lifts the flat matzo from the stone.

Gidon’s eyes, too, are filled with tears.

He says, “I have not your right.”

She finishes the baking, wraps the flatbreads in a cloth. Her sister will arrive soon with the lamb, so she banks the fire up high, with the hyssop grass and herbs she has dried for the occasion. Gidon gathers armfuls of green branches to make a smoky fire, separating out the dry logs which will burn long and evenly.

She says, “Did he ever speak of me?”

Gidon pauses and thinks. She can see that he wants to be kind to her.

“He spoke about his father,” he says, “or he told stories about a good father, and that father I think is God, who reigns above. There are many stories and sayings he told about fathers.”

“But not mothers?” she says.

He shakes his head slowly, and she can see the thought is only now occurring to him.

“He told a story of a widow,” he says. “Perhaps that widow called you to mind?”

“Perhaps,” she says.

She believes Gidon that her son didn’t talk of her, or ask for her, or even think of her. He had distanced himself from her deliberately a long time before.

People said he was out of his mind.

They agreed to journey to see him speak. Word came that he had circled round in a wide loop, through Hoshaya and Cana towards Emek. It was a long trek — a quarter of a day or a little more. Yosef would be away for several days longer and they need never tell him where they’d been. It was a bad business, to lie to him, but the brothers all agreed, and if the younger ones blurted something out, they could say that they had imagined it, dreamed it. Yehoshuah was their oldest brother and they wanted to see him.

They took the donkey, loaded it with water skins, bread and cheese and walked. At S’de Nachal, they met a woman on the way, her hair uncovered, carrying a baby at her breast wrapped in a woolen blanket.

She said, “Are you going to see the teacher?”

Iov opened his mouth to answer but Miryam interrupted him.

“What teacher is that?” she said.

The woman checked on the baby, fussing and pawing, its little hand waving as it struggled to latch on to the nipple. Though her breast was covered, the older boys looked away, disgusted or embarrassed.

She shrugged. “Some teacher. I saw one last winter who cast a live snake out of Rakhel who had the pain in her gut. She vomited, and it came up and crawled into the grass covered in her blood and slime. Rakhel was better for a while after that, and after that she was worse and then she died.”

“Is that the same teacher as this one?”

The woman shook her head. “We wouldn’t have him again in Emek. No, but this one will do cures, I expect, the same as the rest. Are you sick, any of you?”

She ran her eye appraisingly over the children. They had all come, leaving their families some of them. Yirmiyahu, tall and broad-shouldered, had a wife, Chana, with two months to go in her fourth pregnancy. Iehuda had two little boys with him. Shimon’s wife had not yet borne a child and there were fears…well, it was too early to fear that yet. Dina was becoming a woman — time to think of finding a husband for her — while Michal and Iov were still children, she older, he younger, tracing patterns in the dirt while they waited for the grown-ups to finish their conversation. They were a healthy family, may the Evil Eye stay far off. Miryam did not like the look the woman gave them — a jealous look, as a poor man might give a rich man’s flock.

“Thank God,” Miryam said, “we’re well. We’re bored, that’s all. The harvest is in and the sun is shining and we thought to entertain ourselves — perhaps we’ll see this teacher.”

The woman nodded. She knew Miryam was lying but could not quite tell why, or about what. She sniffed, moved her shoulders uneasily and the baby began to wail.

“He’ll be working his wonders at the synagogue on the hill.” She jerked her head towards the structure at the opposite side of the valley.

“May you be blessed in your going,” said Miryam.

“And you in yours,” said the woman, without a great deal of sincerity.

As soon as she passed out of sight, Iov tugged on her skirt and began:

“Why didn’t you tell her, Ima? Why didn’t you tell her we were going to see Yehoshuah? Why didn’t you tell her he’s our brother? He’s my brother—” this last addressed to Michal, as if Yehoshuah weren’t her brother too.

Yirmiyahu hoisted Iov onto his shoulders and said, “Not everything needs to be told, pipsqueak. Maybe Ima didn’t want to make the woman jealous.”

And this answer appeared to satisfy Iov for the time being.

They would not have needed directions. As they approached Emek, a great swarm of people became obvious, walking from every direction to the synagogue on the hill. Perhaps three or four hundred were here! A greater number than Miryam had seen anywhere outside Jerusalem. They pressed forward, towards the synagogue. Were all these come to see her son? His name must be larger than she thought. He had no such name in Natzaret, where the people remembered him as a stumbling infant, a complaining child, a petulant boy-man. The synagogue was full, the people had spilled out onto the street. At one side, a man was selling hot flour cakes to those waiting for the wonders.

Miryam did not see him at first, through the crowd — she, a woman with children, was kept to the back with the other women. But Iov wormed his way forward, tugging on her hand, until they were almost at the door of the synagogue. And two heads parted suddenly and there he was, speaking. Her body turned cold and then very warm. As if she were in love. Ridiculous! For her own son? The little boy she had washed and clothed and fed from her breast? She ought to have gone to him and washed his face off, where his forehead was always dirty because he would sit on the ground and sift the dirt and then rub his brow. She could see that little dirty smear even from where she stood. She ought to have strode over to him and said, “I am this child’s mother — give me the seat of honor.”

And she knew now why she had not done so, but she hadn’t known it then. Only in the seat of her soul, she had faltered. She thought it was the way the other men looked at him. He was the kind of man her own father would have uncovered his head for, stood up in the house of learning for, told her to call “teacher.” Yehoshuah looked so comfortable there.

He was debating with an older wise man — she heard others in the crowd call him Ezra the Teacher, his beard was as white as a lamb’s fleece. There was a jar of wine on the floor and a table before them. Ezra dipped a cup in the jar and placed it with a sharp slam in front of Yehoshuah. He dipped a cup for himself, took a mouthful, swirled it around. He pulled on his beard. The crowd became silent. This was the debate they’d come to hear.

Ezra said, “I’ve heard it said that you work wonders and make cures in the name of God.”

Yehoshuah nodded. Ezra smiled.

“Well, this is no crime. God gives great power to those who trust in him. When I was a child I saw Khoni the Circle Drawer bring down rain by his prayers from a cloudless sky. Those who are as old as me remember it.”

Ezra looked around the room, indicating a few gray-bearded men with his finger who murmur, “Yes” and “I saw it.”

“And many a man has come to this village to perform cures. And many of them found some success. Now tell me, is it true that you make your cures on the holy Sabbath day?”

Yehoshuah said, “It is true.”

Ezra banged the table so violently that the cups of wine jumped and spattered.

“Then you make yourself greater than God!”

There was a low rumble from the crowd, a murmur of agreement from the people of the village, a mutter of discontent from Yehoshuah’s friends.

Ezra turned to the crowd, bringing them with him as he spoke:

“Wasn’t it enough for the Lord Almighty, God of Hosts, to have six days to create the world? And didn’t he make man with one gesture of his finger”—Ezra flicked the little finger of his right hand—“on the very last hour before the Sabbath, along with all the diseases that plague us and, it must follow because God knows the end of all things, all the cures for those diseases?”

Yehoshuah stared directly ahead of him, neither agreeing nor disagreeing. Miryam had seen that look on his face many times before, a way of staring that made her think he wasn’t listening. Ezra evidently thought that Yehoshuah’s lack of response meant that he was winning the debate.

Ezra raised his voice so that even those standing outside could hear him with perfect clarity: “And if He Who is in All Places could create the cures for all diseases in six days and rest on the seventh, who are you to challenge him? Who are you to do away with the commandment to rest on the Sabbath?”

He lowered his voice again and brought a chuckle to it — he was a skilled orator, taking the crowd with him as he spoke: “Now, I don’t say it’s wrong to heal the sick, of course not. But you couldn’t do it on the other six days? Why make these unfortunate people wait till the Sabbath? Can’t you heal them on a Friday, so they can be home to enjoy their soup with the family like everyone else?”

The crowd laughed. Miryam heard people whispering, “That’s a good point,” and “If even God could make the world in six days…” to each other.

“But of course”—Ezra was coming to a conclusion—“there is an explanation, isn’t there?” His voice became hard again, low and firm and solid. “We know that our God rests on the Sabbath like all his creatures. And so if you heal the sick on that day, where does your power come from? Not from God.” He banged the table again and shouted, “Not from God! We’ve seen you jerking and crying out as you heal, and we know what it means. If not from our God, the God of our forefathers Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, your power comes from a foreign god like Ba’al Zvuv!”

His voice was loud and strong, and as he finished speaking the crowd erupted into foot-stamping and shouts of agreement.

And then Miryam’s son rose to speak. He spoke softly, rocking all the time on the spot and looking not at the crowd, as Ezra had done, but above their heads, as though reading from letters written in the air like a prophet.

He said, “Tell me, is it permitted to save a life on the Sabbath day?”

And one of his followers shouted out, “It is permitted!”

He said, “And is it permitted to do anything which might save a life? Even if the outcome is uncertain, is it permitted?”

One of the other men in the crowd, not one of Yehoshuah’s friends, called out, “It is permitted!”

“Well then”—he turned his whole body round to Ezra in a jerking unsteady motion—“who are you to say that I should not perform a cure! For if I left them one more day, perhaps there would be no cure at all? And tell me”—now he spread his arms wide to the crowd, but still spoke quietly—“is it permitted to circumcise on the Sabbath, revered Ezra?”

Ezra, a little puzzled, but gracious, nodded to acknowledge the truth.

“It is permitted, of course. If the eighth day after the boy is born is a Sabbath, we circumcise on the Sabbath.”

“Well then!” Yehoshuah turned to the crowd. “If we can put right one part of the body — and not even a part that is broken or hurting — all the more so we should be able to make right other parts!”

Emek was a pious village. But this argument made sense. There were some unwilling nods in the crowd.

Ezra stood up and, with all the appearance of good humor, said, “But God has told us to circumcise on the Sabbath! He has not told you to heal. Where is it written or handed down in the law? The Lord Himself rests on the Sabbath — this is how we know your power does not come from Him!”

Yehoshuah became angry now. It was swift and frightening to see him flash to sudden wrath.

“You say my power comes from Ba’al Zvuv, whom the Philistines call the prince of demons,” he said, “but I drive out demons from sick men and women! You’ve seen me!”

He appealed to the section of the room containing his friends, but Miryam saw several others nodding.

“And can a demon drive out demons? Can the prince of devils drive out devils? A house divided against itself cannot stand!”

He thumped the table now and looked down for a moment breathing deeply. When he looked up, his face was dark.

“Listen,” he said, “Rabbi Ezra, you’re committing a grave sin. Because you’re slandering God. Now, we all know”—he stared around the room—“that if you tell a lie about your friend and you ask forgiveness, if he forgives you God will also forgive it. But if you tell a lie about God,” he was shouting now, “if you tell a lie about God there is no forgiveness for you! God will not forgive you, Rabbi Ezra, for lying that my power is not from Him!”

The arguments continued. At times Ezra seemed to hold the crowd’s approval and at times they favored Yehoshuah. At one moment, when the crowd were shouting to Yehoshuah, “Praise God!” and “You speak the truth!” one woman called out, louder than the rest: “Blessed is the mother who gave birth to you, Yehoshuah, and blessed are the breasts that nursed you!”

Miryam saw which woman it was who said this. She was young, neatly dressed, no children with her. She thought: this woman does not even know me and yet she loves me. And she almost spoke up and said: it is me. I am here.

But Yehoshuah replied angrily, “No. Blessed are those who hear the word of God and obey it.”

And she said nothing. And the debate went on.

There was a raving quality to Yehoshuah. As he spoke, spittle flew from his mouth, his face became red, his eyes looked wildly, angrily around the room. He quoted from the Torah and from words he’d heard listening to the sages. And she thought: is this my son? How did this man come from me? Every parent will think this about their child someday — all children become strangers to those who gave them birth. This was what she told herself.

When they finished speaking it was dark. Their arguments had twisted and turned, each of them had become angry and dissatisfied with the reasoning of the other. At last when it was evening Ezra called a halt and they embraced as friends, as was right. Ezra said: come, eat meat with us and bread and drink wine. And most of the crowd began to disperse. They had meals to eat in their own homes, or long walks to make. Only Yehoshuah’s little band of friends, thirty or forty of them, and Ezra and the elders of the village remained while Ezra’s wife and daughters brought roast lamb and bread and olives and fresh figs.

Miryam waited longer than she should, she supposed. She could have rushed through while the crowd was dispersing and touched Yehoshuah’s arm, and perhaps he would have turned around and smiled and said, “Mother!” She sometimes occupies herself for hours imagining that that is what happened, imagining the smile on his face and her own swelling heart.

But by the time she had gathered the family and given the little children the last of the bread and cheese and straightened her robes and her head-covering the men were already in the smaller back room of the synagogue, eating. She walked around to the back of the building, holding Iov and Michal by the hand, the other brothers walking behind her. There was a sound of loud debate, noisy laughter from behind the old wooden door. She wormed her hand out of Iov’s sticky grip and knocked.

A man opened the door a crack. She recognized him. It was a friend of Yehoshuah’s. She had heard someone in the crowd point him out, Iehuda from Qeriot, a man with a curling beard and an anxious look. He frowned, as if she had said something entirely inappropriate before she even spoke.

“You are…Iehuda?” she said, trying to smile. “I’m…we are the family of Yehoshuah, your teacher. We are here to see him.”

His frown deepened. “I’ll ask if he wants to see you.”

“If he…”

But he had closed the door already. They waited there. Her older sons met her glance and then looked away. The anger rose from their shoulders like the steam-wreathed breath off cattle in the early mornings.

He came back. He had the grace, at least, to look embarrassed now.

He shook his head.

“He doesn’t want to see you,” said Iehuda from Qeriot.

He stood there for a moment in silence.

“What did he say?” said Yirmiyahu, the anger hard in his voice.

Iehuda from Qeriot moved his shoulders uneasily.

“It doesn’t…” He paused, breathed out through his nose, like a bull. “We are a family now,” he said, “we who follow his teachings, we are like his family.”

Through the open door she could hear her son’s voice. The other guests had become quiet and he was teaching. It was his voice, the consonants of that little boy she had taught to feed himself with a spoon, and if she shouted out now he would hear her. She wondered for a moment if Iehuda from Qeriot was lying. But she knew he wasn’t. She’d known as soon as she left for Emek. She’d known as soon as she’d heard that he was nearby, and in that same moment had realized that he hadn’t sent word.

She turned around to look at her children. Yirmiyahu would have been willing to start a fight with Iehuda from Qeriot, she thought. She hoisted Iov up onto her shoulders.

“Come on,” she said, “come on.”

When she came back to the village, she could not be bothered to hide that she had seen him. The people in the village asked where they’d gone, the whole family all together, and she said: we went to see my son, Yehoshuah, preaching. We ate meat and drank wine with him but we were tired and preferred not to travel further. She knew this would find its way to her husband. She did not care any longer. Neither could she care what was true and what a lie. She found that she was waiting for Yosef’s return not with fear but with a dull emptiness. She had sons and daughters but not one can fill the place of another, and she would never have another firstborn. She wanted to mingle truth with lies, and to have Yosef be angry with her for speaking to Yehoshuah, because that was better than remembering that he had not spoken to her at all.

She should have done it then, turned her heart into a stone. She should have said to herself, “My son is dead,” and begun to mourn him. As if it were possible. As if we can begin to mourn for a death a moment before it comes, as if we can grieve for any destruction before it arises. Even if we have known for a hundred years that it must be so. Nothing can be anticipated in grief — for if we could bring our sorrow forward, would we not mourn for a baby on the day of its nativity? She should have mourned for him then, on the day he was born.

It is the first day of Passover. This is the day, of course. She knows it down to her fingers’ ends. She has wondered how she would feel, but like the impact of an anticipated blow, contemplating it in advance cannot reduce the pain. Pinchas, her younger brother, knows it too. He has walked from S’de Raphael for the Passover feast. When he sees her, he makes a grimace at her and rises from blowing the embers of the fire. He puts his arm around her shoulders. His wool jerkin is damp, moss-scented. He pulls her close and says, “May your other sons live, Miryam! May they make you proud and bring you more grandchildren and great-grandchildren.” He kisses the top of her head and she nestles against his shoulder, pressing her nose into that mushroomy fabric. It feels safe here. Safe like family.

She sniffs and pulls away.

“Better get that fire going.”

He lets his hands fall to his sides.

“I still think about the ones Chava and I lost,” he says at last.

And she does too, and she understands. She still thinks often of her two that died, the little ones — lost at the pinnacle of their sweetness and grace to a cough and a chill and the simple fact that she could not keep them here. And those that never quickened, or that quickened but did not hold. She thinks of them and it is an ordinary sadness, the kind most parents share. But this particular thing is different. Perhaps it is only different because there is anger in it too.

“It’ll be like this all day,” she says. “The cousins and the aunts and the nephews and their wives.”

Pinchas shakes his head.

“Never. Some of them will forget.”

“The others will tell them.” Then, “Iov will remind them.”

“Has he still got that gossiping tongue? Like a woman at the market.”

She smiles. “Still.”

“So he’ll tell them, and they’ll wish you that your other sons live.”

This is how life continues. Learning to bear the unbearable.

Through the family feast Gidon watches and is mindful and says nothing. The family ask about him. She says, “He was lost in the mountains when the snow fell. He is staying here until he is well enough to make the journey home.” And they glance at him, looking his rangy form up and down, seeing that he appears quite well, and they say nothing. It is Passover, when it is especially meritorious to take in the stranger and the wanderer. Some of them remind her of what happened this time last year, and some say nothing. She finds they cannot make it harder for her either way. At least they do not ask about her husband. They are mostly concerned with tales of the soldiers still scouring the country for the last of the rebels from Yaffo. They are coming nearer to Galilee because their search has not been fruitful farther south. The family shake their heads and worry. They eat the unleavened bread and drink wine.

When she wakes the next morning, Gidon has completed his chores and has a soup bubbling on the fire. He is cutting some vegetables for it — onions and leeks.

He smiles. “One who helps a widow,” he quotes, “isn’t his portion doubled or tripled under heaven? And she who gives succor to an orphan will find herself blessed, and God will turn His face to her.”

She frowns. She thinks — I could tell him, and then he will know all my sorrow.

“I am not a widow,” she says. “As far as I know.”

Gidon’s hands stop working.

“He was angry with me. I disobeyed him too often. I was a stubborn wife, and people told him that I had disobeyed his wishes in…a certain matter. He put me away,” she speaks quickly and quietly, “he took another wife and moved her to another village. He gave me the keritut, the contract of divorce, and told me I was permitted to other men.”

She is not sorry he’s gone. Apart from the strength in his shoulders, she barely misses him. She wants her children close to her and she wants her son back, and Yosef and his new young wife seem the least of her concerns.

Gidon says nothing. He knows she has told him a sad and lonely thing. Most women in her position would lie and say that the husband was dead.

She heard that Yehoshuah preached a teaching which had never been heard before. Many of his teachings were not new. He told them well, and with a force and skill that impressed the listeners, but the teachings themselves were as familiar to her as her own skin.

She herself had taught him the famous story of Rabbi Hillel. A man came to the two great rabbis, Rabbi Hillel and Rabbi Shammai, and made of each of them the same request: “Teach me the whole of the Torah while I stand on one leg.” Rabbi Shammai chased him off with a broom. But Rabbi Hillel said: “Stand on one leg and I will teach you.” And the man stood on one leg. And Rabbi Hillel said: “That which is hateful to you, do not do to other people. That is the whole of the law: all the rest is commentary. Go and learn.”

When Yehoshuah said, “Treat others as you hope they’d treat you,” it was not a new teaching. Rabbi Hillel was an old man when Yehoshuah was born.

But he taught a new thing, one of the women from Kfar Nachum told her. He said that if a man divorces his wife and takes another, it is the same as adultery. This saying was popular among women. They passed it one to another. Every village had some woman whose husband had put her away, scraping a living in her old age on the goats and land their marriage contract made him give her, with no rest for her aching bones even though she had borne him sons and daughters.

She wondered if this was a secret message for her, a sign that he thought of her still. But he did not send word to her. He did not speak about Yosef. He talked of having another father, spoke of God as his father. And she thought: he wants me to go to him again. Surely this means he wants to see me.

It is a curious thing, the growth of trust between two people. When two strangers meet, there is no trust. They may fear one another. They do not know if one is a spy, or a traitor, or a thief. There is no dramatic moment which marks the transition from mistrust to trust. Like the approach of summer, it walks a little farther on every day, so that when we come to notice it, it has already occurred. Suddenly one notices that, yes, this is a person whom I would have watch over my flocks, my children, my secrets.

She is moved by the softness of Gidon’s features. His beard has hardly begun to come in, just a few patches of fuzz like a mountain dog in molt. His eyelashes are long, and his smell is the sweet thick scent of a young man in whom the sap is just rising. His elbows and knees are sharp, his shoulders are stiff. There is a wanting in him, and not yet an understanding of what he wants. Her son was just so when he was twenty. His tender eyes were just so. The way he holds the cup of warm liquid, cradling it close to him, rubbing his knuckles in the cold, he was just like this boy.

Her heart comes close to him. She says nothing more of her husband. For a long time, he says nothing more of her son. He works. They bank the fire down after the evening meal and talk of what could be done with the western field next year.

She went to Yehoshuah the winter before Gidon arrived in Natzaret. It was not such a harsh winter, there was no snow. She had heard that he had a mighty crowd of followers with him, perhaps five hundred people traveling in a great convoy. They were circling near to Natzaret, not half a day’s journey, and she left the littlest children with Shimon’s wife and wrapped woolen robes around her and borrowed a mule from Rahav and went to see her son.

It had been many a year, she thought, since she had last made such a journey alone. A young woman would never travel so unprotected. But there was a fierce freedom to it. Who could rob her now? What would they take from her? She had water, and hard bread, and a bag of apples. She kept to the main roads. She told her sons where she had gone and when to expect her return.

She ruminated as she rode. There was such an anger in her heart, she hadn’t known it was there until she was alone on her mule, riding the iron-hard miles. She had never been a bad mother, never truly a bad wife. She’d cared for her children — she flexed her stiff fingers, reminding herself how much it had cost her to care — had made loaves of bread and meal cakes and soups and roasted meat and dried fruits, had washed the children and kept them free from disease, had lain with her husband even when she was tired or unwilling because these are the duties of a wife and a mother. She had vanished into it and not accounted it a loss. This is who she was: a mother.

And this child could not pay her the duties of a son? Not to visit her in glory with his mighty crowd of men? Not to give her a place at his table? Not to write to her or send word to her after all she had done? From the first red scored line that had popped open across her belly when she grew big with him to the last bowl of soup she had made for him before he vanished, was all of this nothing?

Her soul grew bitter as the miles passed and when she arrived at the encampment — there was no mistaking it, five hundred travelers make smell and noise and smoke — she felt as tough and unyielding as the frozen earth.

“Where is the tent of Yehoshuah of Natzaret?” she said to a Roman hanger-on with fine clothes.

“Who are you to ask?”

“I am his mother,” she said.

The first they know of it is that the long barn is on fire. The barn at the edge of the village, the first one you come to if you’re walking from the south. There are cries in the street of “fire, fire” and Miryam runs out like everyone else, carrying her bucket, ready to be part of a chain down to the river. It has been dry these past few weeks — a stray cinder from a careless fire could have set the barn ablaze.

They begin to run down the hill to the barn, barefooted mostly on the chalk-dry baked earth. Calling to one another that they should make for the river to bring water. And they see the crested plumes and the glittering spears and they hear the sound of the phalanx. And they are afraid.

It is only a scouting party, ten men with a guide who speaks the native language. Rome does not send its finest and best to seek out a small village sixty-five miles from Jerusalem. But even a scouting party brings with it the authority of those who sent it, the invisible chain stretching back from these ten to the centurions garrisoned at the capital, and from there to the Prefect, and from there to the Emperor himself. If these men are not satisfied, others will come. If those are not satisfied, more men will come. Eventually Rome will have its answer, or the place will be reduced to a bloody smear upon smoldering earth.

This is why they have burned the barn. It is not your barn, they are saying. It is ours. Rome owns you.

They come to a halt in the town square. The people gather there too. There is nothing to do now about the barn or the stores that will be lost.

The leader of the soldiers makes a brief statement. The people of the village do not understand the language. Some of them, those who go to the larger cities to trade, have learned a few words, but this speech is fast and complex.

They know the translator. He is a man who works for the tax overseer in Galilee. They have seen him often. He never brings good news. It is no surprise to see him now with the Roman soldiers; he has come before with mercenaries to exact his payments.

This time, he attempts to pretend that he is their friend. The Romans do not understand what he is saying, the people do not understand what the Romans have said. There is no way to be sure that he is even communicating the true message.

“They’ve brought me here,” he says, “because they’re looking for people who fled Yaffo. In the uprising a few months ago, I know you heard about it. Now, I’ve tried to reason with them, tried to persuade them. You’re good people, you pay your taxes on time, you don’t make trouble. But they’ve heard the rumor that a boy from Yaffo is living in the village now. A new boy. And I’m sure you don’t want to harbor known criminals, not in a quiet place like Natzaret! So my best advice is, hand him over. They’ll take him away and ask him questions and leave you alone. You might even have time to save some of the”—he inclines his head faintly towards the barn—“some of it, perhaps.”

They look around at one another. Gidon is not there, he is in the hills with the new lambs, he will be there for a day or two probably. Miryam wonders if any of them will speak.

“He is living with me,” she says, loudly and suddenly, surprising even herself a little. “But he is not the man you’re seeking.”

The tax collector smiles. The gold ring glitters on his thumb.

“Mother Miryam, I would never have thought it of you! Well, hand him over and we’ll be on our way.”

Miryam sees her brother Shmuel shift in the crowd. He would go and get the boy now, she realizes. He would mount a pony and gallop into the hills to find him and give him to the Romans.

“No,” she says, “he is not the man you want.”

Shmuel’s body stiffens. He tries to catch her eye, to mouth something to her.

“We’ll have to judge that ourselves, Mother Miryam.”

“No,” she says.

And something in the atmosphere turns. Perhaps it is that one of the soldiers fingers his spear, not understanding the conversation but hearing something in her tone.

The lead soldier bends to whisper a word or two in the tax collector’s ear. The man nods.

“If you can’t produce him, Mother Miryam,” he says, and his voice is hard now, “we will take you instead. For questioning.”

She tightens the muscles in her stomach. She will need to lie.

When she came in to see him, she found she was singing a song under her breath. It was a psalm, set to a tune the goat herders sing. She used to sing it to Yehoshuah when he was a tiny baby and perhaps some part of her thought that it would turn him back to the child he was, and he would remember how he used to need her.

He was sitting with three of his men, and when he saw her he frowned and she realized that for a moment he did not recognize her. Oh, this was heavy and cold. But at last, within a heartbeat, his face broke into a smile.

“Mother,” he said.

They walked together, to soothe her sore legs, stiff from the ride. She told him at first all the news of the family, the nieces and nephews and the doings of the village. He listened but he seemed distant. He replied, “That is good,” to news of a good harvest or “Those are sad tidings,” to a death in childbed.

“And what of you?” she said at last. “Here you are, a mighty man with many followers.”

She took his arm in hers and hugged it. “Are you going to set up a great school and be a teacher? I would be so proud to tell the people at home that you had founded a college, taken a wife…” She lets her voice trail off.

He paused his walking. She stopped too. He bent down so his face was level with hers.

“Mother,” he said, “God has called me. He has told me to go to Jerusalem at Passover, because it is time for a new heaven and a new earth.”

His eyes were unblinking. His face shone like the moon. There was a smudge of dirt in the center of his forehead.

She felt suddenly impatient.

“Jerusalem, yes, very well. A good place to find new followers, but then what? Will you wander like this forever? Like a tent-dweller, with no place to find rest?”

“God will show me. God Himself and no other.”

She frowned.

“You should come back to Galilee. We have fine pastures, the fishing is good. Bring your people there. Settle. Be a great man in Galilee. Yes!”

“It is not mine to decide. I follow the will only of God.”

And this enraged her. Thinking of all she had done for him and how he was as stupid as a stone.

“Grow up,” she said. “The will of God is all very well, but we must also plan for ourselves. Be a man.”

“Like my father?”

“I will bring your father!” She could not control herself now, she took any weapon to throw at him. “He will come here with your brothers and they will bring you back home and stop all this nonsense!”

Yehoshuah looked at her benignly. She felt afraid of him. What a foolishness, to be afraid of her own small boy.

“I love my father,” he said.

“That is not what you used to say,” she snapped back.

“I have learned a great many things,” he said.

“And you have not learned to send for your mother, or send her word that you are well, or write to her, or give her the honored place at your table.”

He drew her to him and kissed her on the top of her head. “Ima,” he said, “you will see such things, you will be amazed.”

But he would not come home.

“Gidon is my grandson,” she says.

The tax collector knows her, and all her children and grand-children. He does not believe her. She can see his disbelief in his face. She will have to try harder.

“He is my grandson, son of my son Yehoshuah, who died. He got him on a whore in Yaffo many years ago and I did not know it till last year, when he came”—here she makes her voice waver like an old, grieving woman—“when he came and found me and told me signs and I saw in his face that he must be that child.”

The tax collector laughs. He mutters something to the soldiers and they chuckle too. The mood has changed again. She does not know what they are joking about. That she has taken in the son of a whore, who could be any man’s? That she boasts of it? That she has been deceived by an obvious fraudster looking for an easy home and meals provided? Perhaps among all this they will not notice another lie.

“He came last year, you say? About when?”

“In the summer,” she says quickly, “between the Feast of Seven Weeks and New Year.”

Around the square, there are looks from one to another, another to a third. It is a hard thing she is asking of them. If none of them contradict her, they will all be accomplices. If Rome finds out they have lied, the whole village will burn.

The tax collector looks at them suspiciously, waiting to see if any will break. No one speaks.

“Well,” he chuckles, “if you have a whore’s son in your home, don’t let us detain you! Perhaps you find him as skillful as his mother!” He chuckles to himself, then, evidently disappointed by the lack of laughter from the crowd, translates his joke for the soldiers, who are as amused by it as he.

No one speaks to her after the soldiers leave. Rahav and Amala and Batchamsa are all there, but they do not embrace her or comfort her. Their looks are wary.

At last, Rahav says, “You have put us in danger, Miryam.”

It’s true. She will have to set it right.

Gidon comes down from the mountain after two days. He has heard what she’s done before he sees her, she can read it in his solemn face.

He looks different now from the way he was when he first came to Natzaret. Working outdoors has weathered and darkened his skin. He is not so thin, that’s her good stews and bread. The place where they took off his fingers has healed to a fine silver scar across the end of his right hand. The way he works now you’d think he’d been born like that. He will be all right, she tells herself, when he has to leave.

She gives him lentil soup with flatbread and he eats it greedily. A thin dribble of the sunny liquid drips down the scraggly beard on his chin. He finishes, and she tries to take the bowl from him to wash, but he holds on to it with his maimed right hand, the three fingers stronger than both her arms.

He says, “Why didn’t you tell them where I was?”

She lets go of the bowl. She sits down opposite him.

He says, “I didn’t come here to bring danger to you all. That isn’t what I wanted, I didn’t…”

He slams his good hand down on the table. The earthenware pot jumps. He reminds her of her son at that moment. The memory brings a sickness to her stomach, and the sickness makes her angry.

“Why did you come, then? What was it for? To stir up an old woman in her grief? To plague me with your love for a dead man?”

He looks as if he is about to say something, but stops.

She says, “There is no reason, except that you wanted a place to hide and knew that telling me your stories would make me take you in.”

He stares down at his hand. At the place where his fingers were. He traces the line of the scar with his left thumbnail.

He says, “I came to bring you good news.”

She says, “There is no good news. My son is dead. That is all the news there can be.”

He says to her, so softly that she can barely hear the words, “He is risen.”

She does not know what to say, does not think she has understood, so she says nothing.

He looks at her, to see if she has grasped the heart of his words.

There is such a wild hope in her.

She has had dreams like this. Dreams in which the men come to her and say, “It was a mistake! He has not died, he was rescued. He is still alive.” And dreams, more painful yet, in which she knows that she has one day, one hour to speak to him, that he has returned so she could cradle his head against her body and smell the scent of him and hear the sound of his voice. She has lost the sound of his voice.

Gidon says, “He died and rose again. A miracle made by God. He showed himself to Shimon from Even, and to Miryam from Migdala, and to some others of his friends. He is alive, Mother Miryam.”

His voice cracks and his eyes burn and water and his face glows with a fervent intensity and she finds a feeling rising up inside her so strong and so immediate that at first she cannot identify it until suddenly she finds that she is laughing.

She laughs as if she were vomiting, it is from the stomach not from a glad heart.

He is hurt by her laughter. He thinks she is mocking him, although this is not what is happening.

He says, affronted, “So laughed Sara our foremother, when God told her she would give birth to a child at ninety years old, and yet it came to pass.”

And she stops laughing, although she cannot help a smile from creeping to her lips, as if she were merry.

She says, “You are too old, Gidon, to believe this.”

He feels a flush across his cheeks.

He says, “They came to the tomb, Mother Miryam, the tomb where he had been laid, and the body was gone. He had risen.”

And she laughs again. “Are you so foolish? Are you so unwise? Gidon, I sent my sons for his body as soon as the Sabbath was over. So that he would not lie in a stranger’s cold chamber when he could be buried in the warm earth, like his forefathers.”

He looks at her, puzzled and aggrieved, and mumbles, “Yet he is risen. He has been seen.”

She says, “Did you come here for this? To convince an old woman that her dead son yet lives?”

He says nothing. She is angry now.

“If he lives, if they did not kill him, if he revived in the burial chamber, if God returned him to me, why is he not here, Gidon? Whom should he see more than his mother? Why would he show himself to Shimon and to Miryam from Migdala and not to me?”

And even as she says it she hears the voice in her head of Iehuda from Qeriot saying, “We are his family now, we who follow his teachings.” She sees her son’s face, the last time she spoke to him, when she felt afraid and did not know why. She knows he relinquished his family a long time before his death. If this child’s story were true, it would not be to her that he would have come. And this is too much to bear. She stands up quickly, her knees cracking and her back aching at the strain, and without knowing that she is going to do so she raises her right hand and hits Gidon across his left cheek.

The sound is loud. Her hand stings. She stares at him because she is an old woman and he a young man and if he responded in kind he could easily kill her.

He does not respond with a blow. He does not move or try to flee. He looks at her levelly and turns his face so that the opposite side is towards her. He waits. It is a kind of invitation.

Her hand falls to her side.

“I would have known from across the world if he were still in it.”

The first year she was a woman, her father had taken her to Jerusalem for Shavuot, the festival at the end of the seven weeks from Passover. It is a joyous festival, a simple one, a celebration of the harvest that is just beginning. Farmers bring the first fruits of their fields to the altar, to thank God for blessing their trees and their ripening vines and the swaying golden seas of their wheat. They stayed with her father’s younger brother, Elihu, who lived so close to the Temple that they could see its walls from the roof of his house. The early summer light was golden, but the days blew with a sweet breeze so that the heat did not thicken or the air become still. She sat at the window on the first day, watching the never-ending procession of oxen-pulled carts filled with ripe pink pomegranates and furry yellow dates heading for the Temple, and her heart was glad.

It was a good time to come to Jerusalem — especially for a girl who had become a woman, her mother said. The people had come from all corners of the land. A young man might notice her, or she might notice a young man. There were many nervous, eager, excited girls like her, walking to the Temple with their fathers, and many young men too. In the courtyard, her father gave her the coins to buy the lamb for the offering. She examined the creatures closely, chose one tied to the back of the stall, not the largest but with the purest white wool.

There were soldiers outside the Temple, of course, auxiliaries employed by Rome. She heard another man tell her father there had been a skirmish, swiftly quashed, earlier in the day when three farmers had attacked a soldier. Miryam’s father said nothing, though in the past she had heard him rail against the Romans, wishing that the people would rise up and drive them from the land. He put his arm around her shoulders as they entered the Temple and whispered, “If you see something like that while we are here, Miryam, run. The Romans cannot tell the guilty from the innocent. If there is a squabble, run to your uncle’s house, you will be safe there.”

They made their offering in peace. Seven baskets of the fruits of the land they brought to the priests: figs and barley, wheat and pomegranates, olives and dates and grapes dropping heavy on the vine. The pure white lamb was slaughtered, its blood scattered, its forbidden fats burned on the altar for the Lord. And they heard murmurings again as they left the Temple. The men gave one another secret signs, making a hand shape like a dagger and whispering low and confusing words.

Miryam’s father kept a tight arm around her and brought his lips close to her ear. “You see nothing,” he said. “You hear nothing. We feast with your uncle tonight and tomorrow we go home.”

When it happened, it was swift. They were walking past the spice market, homebound, and as they came in sight of the Hippodrome, with its tall colonnades and its fluttering flags, she knew something was wrong. Her father’s grip tightened on her shoulder. He stood still. Behind them, back the way they’d come, there was a tight knot of men, walking slowly but at a steady pace. The shutters on the buildings nearest the Hippodrome were shut and closed tight with wooden pegs. To the right, up the narrow alleyway, another small group of men. Burly farmers with corded muscular arms, each with a long bag on his back.

The soldiers on the steps of the Hippodrome were laughing. Two of them were throwing dice. The others had wagered money on the outcome. Some were on lookout, most were watching the game. Miryam’s father’s grip was like iron tongs on her shoulder. They were in a thin crowd — some other parents with children, or whole families, each looking as frightened as they. They walked into the Hippodrome square, moving as quickly as they could without breaking into a run. Passing an open doorway, she saw that the dark room beyond was full. She had the impression of watchful black eyes, of shifting flesh, of the dull sheen of metal. Men had come to Jerusalem from all over the country for this festival. The thing had been planned.

The day had grown overwarm and clouded, the sky off-white. The breeze faded away, the air was soft and moist as damp cloth. A splash of rain fell onto the cream marble plaza. A heavy, ripe droplet which burst on the dusty stone. And then another drop, and another. And as if the rain had been a signal they had agreed on long before, the men came.

Screaming, they ran. Dark-skinned and red-mouthed, letting every rasping breath go from their lungs with a cutting edge like their metal blades. Wild shouting, anger howling, swinging their iron arms like free men whose home was overrun by vermin, they pelted up the steps of the Hippodrome and began the slaughter. The first guards, shocked by the sudden inrush, legs trembling, died before they had unsheathed their swords. Miryam saw one split from stomach to throat — a quiet smiling man who had unloosened his breastplate with the hotness of the day. Another soldier went down screaming, calling to the garrison.

There were arms around her, suddenly. Strong arms around her waist and under her shoulders, lifting her up off the ground though she kicked and wrestled, pulling her back, gripping her close, and in her confusion it was several moments before she realized that the voice shouting in her ear, “Be still! Be still!” was her own father’s.

He ran with her, as the rain fell more strongly and the men screamed, ran back through the crowd. Charged at them with his shoulder, held her pressed close into his chest so that she could only inch her face to the side to breathe and, with one eye open, see glimpses of those who pushed forward. They were smiling hot, blood-grins. It was those soldiers who had taken their land, it was this man, and this, who had stolen their harvest, their women, their God. Miryam did not see where her father was running to, only that he was striving against the sea, pushing away from the place of blood.

When at last they came to rest and the noise was more distant, she saw at once that her father had taken two gashes, one across his shoulder, through the fabric of his robe, and one to his ear, which was half gone, the top sliced off, and oozing dark blood. He had collapsed, with her still grasped firmly by one of his arms, on a pile of sacks. They were in a dark room across the courtyard from the Hippodrome. She tried to stand up, but her father pulled her back.

“Be still,” he whispered, and fell back onto the sacks.

Clasped against his chest, Miryam could feel his breathing, rapid and shallow. His grip loosened, and she crawled out from under his arm, staying low. The shouting and the dreadful cries from the square were increasing. She saw a long trickle of blood run down her father’s neck and, feeling with her fingers in the gloom, found a wet patch on his skull. He was still breathing though. She put a palm in the center of his chest to reassure herself of that. Still, yes.

She looked about. They must be in a stable, probably for a priest’s family so close to the Temple. It had that clean smell of horseflesh and dry straw. They were just beneath the window, which was shuttered, but she pressed her eye up against a chink in the wood. Arrows were flying in the square — one thudded into the thick shutter, and she thought: what if one were to hit my eye? — but she could not look away.

The slaughter was endless. The soldiers at the Hippodrome had lowered the metal gate to keep the attackers out. They had the upper ground now, looking down the steps on the mass of Jews running up towards them. They fired arrows through the grille and she saw twenty men brought down as she watched, pierced through the stomach, the chest, the groin. Near to her hiding place a man slumped with an arrow sticking out of his thigh. He tried to pull it out and screamed. He was young, she thought, maybe eighteen or nineteen. There was a sheen of sweat on his brow. He looked around for a safe place to shelter. What if he came here? What if he opened the door and they were discovered? And if the soldiers came, what then? Another arrow found his neck with a crunching snapping sound and he fell back, dead. God forgive her, she was grateful.

As she watched, the Jews, unable to sustain the heavy losses from the archers, fell back into the surrounding streets. The square in front of the Hippodrome was dark with bodies, and running red — Roman blood and Jewish blood, she thought. One of the soldiers was still moving, moaning. She wondered how long his comrades would leave him there. Her father was still breathing. She moistened his lips from her water skin. He licked them. It was a good sign. It would be dark in two or three hours — perhaps he would be able to move then.

She heard cheering from the street outside. Were the Romans celebrating their victory? But the noise intensified. Not a cheering. A rising again of the raging voices. The clash of arms. She put her eye to the shutter a second time. From the roofs of nearby houses, the Jews had raised ladders and ropes, and had hoisted themselves to the upper levels of the colonnade. From there, they had the upper ground and were throwing down rocks, bricks pulled from the structure itself. There were boys with their slingshots, hurling down missiles — the more the Roman soldiers looked up, the greater the danger to them. She saw one man smashed in the mouth with a brick, his upper lip gone, his teeth out and the whole center of his face pouring blood and gouts of flesh. The Romans tried to fight back at first — they sent their arrows upwards and even pulled some of the men down bodily, and set on them with swords, cleaving their limbs and heads from their torsos.

But the advantage of holding the higher ground was too great. The Romans withdrew, sheltering in the back of the colonnade. The center of the Hippodrome, Miryam could see, was piled with the bodies of the fallen. There was a great cheering from the Jews on top of the Hippodrome, a victory cry. Miryam could not see what the Romans were doing. The Jews atop the colonnade could not see either.

She turned back to her father. His lips were moving. She wet the sleeve of her dress in her water skin and dripped a few drops into his mouth. He swallowed. The stable was dark and cool. She leaned close to his lips.

He was whispering, “Run, Miryam, run to your uncle Elihu’s house. Run now.”

She looked outside again. The square was quiet. She saw a weeping woman walking at the edge find a particular corpse and kneel, cradling a head in her arms. If she were to run, this would be the time for it. But if she ran, and soldiers retreating from the Hippodrome found her father here, they would kill him. At least if she were here, a young girl, she could plead for him. She could not leave.

“The danger has passed, father,” she said, “the square is quiet. Rest, and when you are able to walk we will go together.”

“Run,” he kept saying, “run now.”

His fingers and his legs were cold. He was shivering. Crawling on the floor, she brought more sacks and covered him. The shivering diminished. He moved onto his side and began to breathe more slowly and evenly. He was sleeping — a true sleep, not a faint.

There was a sound from the square like the sound of trees being felled. A great cracking sound. She wondered if the Romans had brought battering rams. There was a low, rumbling roar, like the sea heard from far off. She put her eye to the shutter again.

The Romans had set the Hippodrome on fire. The bottom part of the structure was stone, but the upper floors and galleries, the parts where the Jews had climbed, were wood. And the wood was crackling flame, like the altar of the Temple, like the smell of the burning sacrifices, the wood was on fire.

She saw that a great host of men had retreated to the very roof of the Hippodrome, where the clay tiles were not yet aflame. But there was no way down. The ladders had burned and no building was near enough the Hippodrome to jump. They were going to burn to death there, on the flat roof of the building. Some of the men were clinging to each other and some were on their knees praying and some were shaking and tearing their clothes and hair. She saw one man take five paces back from the edge of the roof and run forward, as if trying to jump to the next, but it was too far and he fell to the stone floor and did not move again.

There were others who joined him soon enough, jumping from the roof to escape a death by flames. She saw some as the fire crept up the wooden structure draw their swords and fall on them. And some did not jump and did not take a blade to end their lives but waited or tried to climb down through the flames and their cries were the loudest and most anguished of all. She had heard it said that a man who died as a martyr to Rome would be rewarded by heaven. The growling, unquenchable fire sent bright sparks up to the skies and she remembered how the life of a lamb goes back to its maker while the flesh remains here on earth, but the cries were so loud that after a time she could not think of anything else.

The square between the stables and the Hippodrome was stone and marble. The flames did not extend across them. She watched through the night, ready to drag her father behind her if he could not move himself and the flames jumped to the buildings nearby. But they did not. The soldiers had made a neat job of it. And the rain, coming and going, helped a little. The fire burned out while it was still night, leaving just blackened stumps of wood poking up into the sky from the stone base. Before dawn the next morning, Miryam shook her father until he woke and, stumbling, dizzy, crawling sometimes, he came with her to the house of his brother Elihu.

They stayed in her uncle’s house then seventeen days, not daring to leave even to find food or to hear the news of what had passed in Jerusalem. They had the well, and wheat flour and dried fruit enough to live on, and her father grew stronger every day. He and her uncle agreed they must not go into the country — the Romans would be looking for anyone who fled Jerusalem, guilty or innocent. Anyone trying to leave the city would be branded a criminal and a traitor. Especially a man with fresh wounds showing.

When at last her father was well enough to attempt the long journey, and Elihu had made inquiries about the best time to attempt the gates and the best lies to tell there, they left. They went in the early morning. The soldiers at the Double Gate asked them what business they had and Miryam replied, as her father and uncle had schooled her, that they were citizens of Jerusalem, and she was betrothed to a boy from the north and they must attend the wedding or the dowry would be lost. The soldiers joshed among themselves and made bawdy jokes to her about her wedding night. She cast her eyes down and, tiring of the game at last, they let them go. It was only then that she saw what was to be seen.

Along the roads to Jerusalem, the Romans had erected wooden frames — two planks crossed, one over the other, a long upright and short crosspiece — making a shape like the letter zayin. There were thousands. They lined the road on either side as far as she could see, down the hill and curving around. And to each frame, they had nailed a man.

The day was warm. The sun was bright as if it knew not what it shone on. As if the Lord God Almighty, the Infinite One, He Who is Everywhere had forgotten this place.

There was the smell of blood. And the buzzing sound of flies. They gathered at the soft places — the ears, the nose, the eyes. And the beating wings and low tearing rip of the vultures and the crows. The blood had trickled down the frames, had pooled at the bases, had dried in brown drips. And there was the stench of rotting flesh, like a taste in her mouth. And there was the sound.

They walked along the rocky path. The men nearest the city had been nailed up first. They were already dead, their bodies contorted, their faces and flesh already eaten away by the carrion birds. As they went farther from the city, though, they came to the more recently captured rebels. These men had been there three days, four, five at most. It was they who were making the sound.

The soldiers, she knew, were still watching from the parapets of the walls of Jerusalem. No man could be cut down until the Prefect gave leave, and these men would rot here and the flesh would be eaten from their bones by the birds and the swarming things of the air. For all that, those who still had tongues in their heads pleaded for mercy, for a sponge to their brows or a swift sword to their throats. They cried for their mothers, she remembers. This was where she learned that all dying men call out for a mother. No matter what they said or thought before.

“Do not look up,” her father whispered to her, “do not stop, do not hesitate. Look down. Walk on.”

So she walked through the valley beshaded by the screaming trees.

This was the message of Rome to the people of Israel.

There are things which are too painful to think of. And she tries, she struggles constantly not to think of it. But she cannot make a day pass without remembering those men calling for their mothers. She knows what a man calls out when he is nailed to a crossbeam. She should have forced him to come home.

He sits on a rock a little way from her house. The wind brings news that summer will come soon.

She watches his sitting. This boy who is so very alive.

“Were you there,” she says, “in the uprising in Yaffo? Were you one of the rebels with the pretender king? Was your hand injured before you ever came here, injured in the fighting?”

He says, “I was there.”

“Following another master, Gidon? Another king of the Jews?”

He shrugs. Says what she has known to be true for a long time.

“They killed my family. My mother, my brothers, my father, my cousins and uncles. For a long time I followed anyone who promised to destroy them.”

She nods. They are silent for a long while.

“I am different now,” he says. “I did not lie that God told me to seek you out. It was after the rising in Yaffo, after we had been defeated, I was sleeping in the mountains waiting for spring and in a dream a voice as clear as a sword told me to come and find you.”

She believes him.

“You cannot stay here now.”

He nods.

“I’ll leave tomorrow.”

“No,” she says, “too soon will raise suspicion. Wait another week or two. Start traveling with the early pilgrims for the next festival.”

He nods again.

She sits next to him, on the rock. The place is warm where the sun has been. A lizard is heating its blood an arm’s length away from them on another flat stone. She can feel his body next to hers as if they were touching. She sighs. He places his hand over hers. He clasps her hand. His thumb moves, feeling her fingers, absorbing them. She does not know whether he even sees her any longer or simply the man he hopes to reach through her. But he is so soft with her that her heart cracks open, she cannot help it.

She says, quietly, “You believe what you told me? You hold it in your heart?”

He says, “I do.”

She says, “Then my son Yehoshuah lives in your heart.”

He says, “And in the heart of all who believe it.”

She nods. That is where the dead live. In the heart.

He begins to hum a little melody. It is the melody the goat herders often sing when they are moving the brindled flock to summer pastures. She joins in, letting her voice run alongside his, sometimes choosing the notes which harmonize, sometimes singing the same tune. It feels as though they are one person, singing like this.

And she will not, she will not. Her son is dead, he is gone, but when she closes her eyes she can believe that he is here now, that he has come back to her in the long notes and the tune and the piping warble at the back of the throat. He has not let go of her hand. He is so young, younger than her son was when she saw him last. His skin is soft, his hands uncalloused. She does not want to be moved but she cannot help herself. She is swept away.

The song ends. He looks at her, those eyes so full of longing. She knows what he wants from her, this young and beautiful man.

She says, “Shall I tell you a story?”

He sits perfectly calm, with those shining eyes.

“It is a story from long ago,” she says, “when I first became pregnant with my child Yehoshuah.”

She sees him mutter something under his breath as she says her son’s name.

“Now I think of it,” she says, and her voice has taken on the singsong quality of a child’s storyteller, “now that I think of it, there were signs that his birth would be special.” A chaffinch begins to sing in the thorn tree; a song of joy that the winter has, at last, receded. “There were birds,” she says, “the birds seemed to follow me wherever I went, singing to the child in my womb. And once, there was a stranger…”

She pauses. Anyone who has read the Torah knows what a stranger is. A stranger could be anyone. A stranger could be the angel of the Lord come with a test of kindness or hospitality, and if you passed that test the angel might bless you. A stranger could be the Lord walking among you.

“There was a stranger in the village who saw my belly swollen with the child and began suddenly to speak, saying, ‘Blessed are you, and blessed is that child whom you carry within you!’”

She continues to tell this story. She thinks of how all the stories she has ever heard must have come to be. There are only three ways: either they were true, or someone was mistaken, or someone lied. She knows that the story she is telling is a lie, but she says it anyway. Not in fear, and not in anger, and not even in hope of anything that is to come, but because it brings her comfort to see that he believes it. Even such a simple, foolish thing as this. It brings her son back here, for a moment, back to her side and his small head under her hand and his life again unfolding. It is too good a gift to turn down, this opportunity to return him to life. And she knows it is a sin, and that God holds special punishments in store for such sins, but she cannot imagine worse than she has already seen.

She had been in Jerusalem that last spring. After he was gone, after the first day of Passover, which is sacred and on which no work can be done, she heard that he had not hung long on that wooden frame. Her son, Yirmiyahu, brought her the news. One of Yehoshuah’s friends, a wealthy man, had bribed the guards and taken him down and placed him in a tomb.

She thought on it for a day and a night. She remembered what he had said: they were not his family. They were not the ones he had called for, they were not the ones he had spent his last days with. But was it possible that he had died without thinking of her? He had no wife to mourn for him or children to carry on his name. If he had belonged to these friends in life, perhaps he was his family’s again in death.

So she told her sons to go to the tomb and fetch his body to take it into the hills and bury him in the ground. She thought: at least the crows will not have him. He will be buried in the same warm soil that will take my bones one day and until then I will know where he lies, and this thought was a comfort to her.

Shimon, who was always the kindest, tried to lie to her.

“We found a shady spot for him, by an olive grove,” he said, when they returned.

But when she asked him exactly where, when she asked them to take her there now so she could mark the spot in her mind, their story didn’t hold.

They had not found him. The body was gone. Taken, they supposed, by his friends to some special burial place.

Even in death they would not give him back to her. She did not want to tell her sons her worst fear — that the Romans had the body, that she would see him again on the ramparts of the walls of Jerusalem, black and bloody and gouged by beaks and rotted away.

She left Jerusalem that day and did not look to see if there were bodies on the walls, and did not ask, and told herself that her sons must be right and his friends had surely buried him in honor.

It was as if he had never been now. As if that first son had been a curious dream, leaving behind no trace. Not a plowed field, not a grieving wife, not a grandson or granddaughter. No one in the village spoke of him. Her own children had tried to forget him. It had been as if she had never borne that first son, until Gidon came to Natzaret.

He leaves as they had planned, when it is coming close to the Feast of Seven Weeks and the farmers are making their way to Jerusalem with carts filled with first fruits. He’ll be invisible among so many travelers.

She has filled him full of stories. Some have a measure of truth to them, with Yehoshuah’s childhood curiosity and his interest in learning and the way he would sometimes say things that made the adults surprised. And some are things she hoped had happened, she wished had happened. She gives him hard cheeses and bread and dried fruit so that his knapsack is bursting and she imagines another bag on his back full of the tales he’ll tell, the stories he’ll take to his friends in Jerusalem and across the nation.

“I’ll come back,” he says, “when things are less dangerous for you.”

She does not say that she is an old woman now, and does not expect to live to see the day when things are less dangerous.

She embraces him like a son, and he turns and begins to walk.

She watches him until he is out of sight. If the soldiers come back, she will say: he deceived me. He lied. A broken-hearted mother, he had no pity.

And perhaps they will listen, and perhaps they won’t. It is like the scorpion, she thinks, rubbing her right hand with her left. Once a child is born, the mother’s previous life is gone, all that matters is how she cares for the child, protects the child. Even that tiny part which is left when they are gone.

She turns. The children will be waking soon, little Iov demanding his breakfast. It is nearly the fourth hour since dawn and she has still not made bread. She goes to begin her work.