shytecmessa

1

When I awoke the morning after Yeshua was executed I had forgotten everything. Nor did events flood back; I only became aware gradually that I had done something of which I ought to be ashamed. As the sun stabbed at my covering I realized and wrapped it over my head more tightly. I was free, I had made myself free.

There was a brisk hammering on the door. Damn it, I had thought they would have been in hiding by now. Maybe it was not them and the priests had broken their promise. Arrest did not matter so much now that I had achieved the final freedom. Free from the pull of Yeshua’s eyes and the comfort of his voice…oh, it had been a prison, a prison you didn’t want to leave, but a prison nevertheless.

I heard Yakov’s snivelling voice: ‘He’s not here, Shimon. Why would he be stupid enough to return here?’

‘He can’t be gone, he can’t be gone,’ said Shimon, trying harder with the lock. He had no wish to call the landlady; when we had stayed here with Yeshua it was clear she was taking us on to garner a pinch of our notoriety for herself, now we were ended she did not want to know. I had crept through the back door since technically the two rooms were paid for. Time to lie low.

‘He’s probably long gone from Jerusalem. Hell, he said he had sisters here, they could be hiding him.’

‘He,’ a dejected whimper from Shimon, ‘he can’t be!’ An anguished roar.

‘I don’t like hanging about like this,’ said Yakov leaning on the very sill of the window under which I was lying. ‘Things are too restive. What’s the point of this, Shimon?’

Shimon’s voice came across as muffled. ‘I want to know why he did it. That’s all.’ Shimon was straightforward in all his essentials. Everything had a neat cause and effect with him. He exposed himself to the derision of the world and yet I could not help liking him. I almost stood up, leant my head over the window, and spoke to him. When you’ve been friends with someone for so long, a matter such as killing the man you both called ‘rabbi’ hardly matters. My instincts kept me huddled in my pallet.

‘He did it because he was jealous and greedy,’ said Yakov. ‘That look in his eyes always gave me the chills. Always daydreaming about something. He wasn’t right in the head, Shimon. Not right in the head at all.’

‘Just there must be a reason…’ began Shimon. He was cut off by a rhythmic sound, metallic and ominous.

‘A patrol,’ said Yakov quietly. ‘Come on, Shimon.’

Shimon saw the sense of it and I heard their footsteps hurry away. Then the Roman patrol drowned out their footprints with their nailed sandals, their armour passed through the very place where my friends had been standing. Yakov and Shimon and the patrol after them went on into the heat of the morning and I thought, Good, I’m finished with the whole rotten lot of them now. I had a feeling that I had done something irrevocable and that my old friends were nothing to do with me and that the Romans were nothing to do with me either.

I got up. Next step: escape. I was going to be rubbed out in some way. I remembered Yeshua when he had a good audience, when he was nearly mad on the power the audience handed him (for you had to admire Yeshua, there was nothing else for it) saying that what he preached would spread all over the world. But then they all said that, all these strange men. Anyway I wondered what they’d say about me. I knew that they would rub me out, like the way the Romans rubbed out histories they did not like.

I pulled my satchel together and left. Why, why did I do it? I looked back and reached back and twisted. Yehsua took everything from people; from Shimon, whose simplicity he had mocked, from Yakov and from me. If we admired anyone else, Yeshua would be angry. Yes, that was it.

Then the word ‘Ahmose’ came to me and I wondered if that was the beginning of the answer.

2

On the same night each week Ahmose came to our house to see my father. My father would not rise to greet him nor would they fall into each other’s arms. Instead they exchanged glances and nodded curtly, both able to do it at the same instant thanks to their long acquaintance. Ahmose’s visits had been invariable since before I was born. His long face was as much part of my early childhood as learning to walk.

Ahmose was an Egyptian; how he had wound up in Jerusalem I had no idea. Maybe he had wanted to see far distant lands as a young lad only to discover that he had exchanged one wilderness for another. He was a butcher, but not one of our butchers; he was long and thin with fingers like wet worms. His skin was covered in a perpetual sheen of sweat; I could smell his scent hours after he had left. It was a smell to which I tried to close my nostrils, for I knew that he dispatched animals impurely. His sweat had a sweet tinge to it but still I disliked it; sweat should not smell sweet.

At any rate, he was my father’s friend and not mine, despite the fact that he was a larger part of my world than he was of my father’s. They were true comrades; I was but a child. I had no face and no tongue.

So Ahmose would come and my father would sit there as if Ahmose had surprised him in the middle of a quiet night in. Ahmose was not to know that my mother and two sisters had been pushed behind the cloth which split our house in two an hour beforehand, although he could hear the even beat of their sleeping breath. Nor was he to know that my father would cast his eyes quickly and eagerly to the door all evening and that, when Ahmose failed to enter, he would drag them away slowly and sadly. All must appear natural and easy as soon as Ahmose arrived.

Ahmose would sit on a stool and my father would snap his fingers. I would come forward with wine, as efficiently impersonal as any slave. I would serve Ahmose first, after him my father, and then I would be swallowed up by the dark shadow that covered the corners of the room. There was only a candle; it sputtered between the faces of my father and Ahmose, allowing them to see each other. They would drink, sing to each other, talk about the choicest parts of some women of the neighbourhood (never the whole woman), curse the Greeks, curse the Romans, curse their languages and their soldiers. They, a Jew and an Egyptian, remembered a time before the Romans and as for the Greeks, well, they were but children after all.

I admired their companionship; as a child I was alone, unable to befriend other boys. In time I began to hunger to become part of those nights. As I grew older I knew I could offer information that would have fit. Every night I would listen to them and watch them as I dreamt of saying something incomparably clever and winning their praise. I would tense, perspire, convince myself that I was waiting for the right moment, even as the moments sped by. The evening would end before my tongue had even stiffened for the first syllable of my brilliant remark. I would go to bed wondering what it would have been like if I had spoken. I was relieved that I had not and that the usual routine was unbroken.

Then I began to grow. When I had been a child, I could not conceive of being anything else. An adult was not a creature I believed I could grow into; I could no more turn into an adult than I could into a dog. I was used to being spoken at, not spoken to, to being shoved aside, not let through, to being silenced rather than being greeted. I was invisible, left to myself, able to hide inside the space of my mind. My body was lean and flexible, graceful from necessity. I was able to escape notice very easily.

At the age of fourteen my body began to betray me. It grew hard to use, clumsy, almost developing a will of its own apart from mine. It became susceptible to hungers I barely understood, hunger for food, hunger for women, hunger for recognition. What caused me agony was that these hungers had to go unfulfilled, especially the last one. I could no longer hide inside myself; my inner world was shrinking. My view of the outer world was becoming larger- at this stage it was unfocused, but definitely larger.

When Ahmose visited became a frustrating time. They were men, just as I was becoming, not gods and I felt I could understand them. Soon the ceremony would come and I would be made a man; that I was undeveloped for my age was no reason for them to ignore me. One evening, though, I tried to make a remark without having really wanted to. I was pouring wine for my father as Ahmose complained about a soldier who had cheated him earlier that day. I warmed to the topic for the day before some soldiers had shoved me aside and had not even looked at me as they had done so. I opened my mouth to agree. My father saw me do this and put his hand over my mouth. My lips moved uselessly against his damp flesh. I knew that I would never be welcome.

Without hope the nights became dull to observe. I would shift my weight from foot to foot, loathing the drone of their voices, trying to pick out the sounds of my mother and my sisters as they slept just behind the heavy cloth which broke our house in two. It must be so easy to be a woman, to have your weaknesses be seen as natural, to have them accepted, to be allowed - even encouraged!- to hide away. What bliss.

One night my father had downed a little too much wine and it had pulled him into sleep. Ahmose looked down at him, at a loss. Well, now there was no-one to talk to. He raised his eyes and looked into the shadows. He hesitated, put up his hand and beckoned me to him. He held his hand oddly; its shadow resembled the silhouette of a jackal on the wall behind him.

I came forward, squinting against the glow of the candle, half-wanting to go back to the shadows. Ahmose did not seem that drunk, nor did he seem unfriendly. He was giving me the first smile that he had ever given me; a tentative smile, unsure of reciprocation. I wanted to smile back but I could not move my face; habit froze it.

‘Come here, I won’t bite,’ he said irritably; the jackal jerked back its neck.

I neared him, well within the circle of light cast by the candle. My father’s head rested neatly on his hands.

Ahmose examined me; I bore up his gaze. Gazes were part of adult life. He ran his tongue over his cracked lips. It was like an invitation. I looked at his hand resting on the table. The fats of forbidden meats had worked their way under his nails, giving his pale fingers red and black crowns. I let my gaze play over the tensed fingers, followed the veins up the arm, the arm to the shoulder, the shoulder to the chin. Looking him in the eyes was another thing altogether.

Finally, he muttered a word: ‘Redhead.’ I had heard Ahmose expound, slur and sing all sorts of nonsense for most of my life, so I said nothing to this.

‘So red,’ he went on. The jackal opened its jaws and Ahmose took a clump of my hair in his hand. His smell was so near now and I could not resist it. His hand fell clumsily onto my head then, his sweat coursed along my scalp as he tested my hair for thickness and texture. It gave me the oddest feeling, as if a thousand tiny, sodden pincers were tearing the flesh from my skull.

‘You know what sort of colour red is, lad?’

‘A bad one?’ I hazarded.

He held his cup loosely with his other hand, white fingers lounging over it, as he took another sip but his eyes remained fixed on me. ‘Good boy. A bad one.’ I felt ridiculously pleased to have a bad attribute; I had always wanted to be feared but did not have the strength to make myself feared.

‘Why is it bad, sir?’ I ask, wanting more of his attention.

‘To do with the desert.’

‘I like the desert.’ I did; I loved it at sunset when the blue of the sky and the red of the earth made each other deeper and brighter; I loved it when I had been smothered by the crowds of the town and ran to the outskirts to find peace and air from the desert; I loved it when I saw grown-ups and Greeks and Romans look at it and shrink from it and turn back to other people, shaken, seeking comfort.

‘Nothing to like in the desert, boy,’ Ahmose said quellingly. ‘There are animals that would eat you, the sun would boil your meat from your bones, your throat would gasp for water.’

‘There are no people there.’

Ahmose gave me a sideways glance. ‘There’s worse than people.’

I felt a shiver of excitement, as if Ahmose had stroked a finger down my spine. My father let out a breath, too fluty to be called a snore.

‘What things?’ I asked.

‘Things that have no shape, things that can take any shape, things that keep away from men, things that rush to them. Things that put terrible images before your eyes, things that whisper in your ear. Things that crawl up from the land of the dead, things that will take you to the land of the dead with them. Things that have no rules and no gods, being nearly gods themselves.’

The light of the candle was dwindling; the pull of my father’s breath was enough to bend the flame into a dance.

‘Have you seen those things, Ahmose?’

‘Not me, no! I would sooner die. But back home, let me tell you, there are priests who have seen them - once there were kings who worshipped them. Remember, if you see them, that creatures from the desert can slay gods. They’d make short work of you.’

‘I’d fight them!’

‘They only fight among themselves. They are not for men to fight.’ (Men - that magic word and the first time it was applied to me.)

‘Maybe no man ever tried.’

‘The mad have tried. That’s why they are mad.’

‘How do you know this?’

‘Everyone knows it,’ he replied nonchalantly.

‘But they are harmless if you leave them alone?’

‘No. They are not. Even naming them is dangerous.’ There was something wrong with the rhythm of the room; what was it?

‘What names do they have?’ I breathed.

‘Well of course I can’t say!’

I was annoyed by Ahmose’s vagueness; he seemed to be promising more than he could deliver. ‘There are good, nameless spirits in the desert. Moshe found the Nameless One there-’

‘How does he know it was good? Eh? Because it said it was a god? Gods dwell in the desert. Set came from the desert…he had red hair, just like you…how did he know it was good?’ Ahmose leant back, the stool creaking under his sagging muscles. He put his hands over his expansive belly.

I realized what was wrong. My father was awake.

He raised his head, looked at Ahmose and spoke; his voice was dull and blood stained the whites of his eyes. ‘Shut up.’ Ahmose did not react; he never would have expected what he was about to get from my father. For men, words are no weapon. For the religious, they constitute the first of increasingly painful strikes.

My father’s head drooped unsteadily on his drink-weakened neck. ‘Shut the fuck up, Egyptian.’ That startled Ahmose. My father had been the one person who never used his birth as an insult.

‘S-Shimon?’ he asked, unsure. I stood beside Ahmose, my gaze united with his, as my father sat opposite us.

‘How dare you come into my house and say things like that?’

‘But-’

‘Your spirits are nothing and as for your gods, they’re just bad spirits.’

‘They’re not here,’ explained Ahmose, ‘they’re back home-’

‘They’re nothing!’ My father slammed his open palms on the table so hard that everything on it shook. Distantly, I could hear my sister ask my mother what was going on. My mother replied, ‘Nothing much,’ sounding quite at peace.

Ahmose put his hands over his head. ‘Damn, why do you all have to be like this?’

‘We all?’ my father spluttered. He was standing by now. He tried to walk to Ahmose but I was in the way. Impatiently he pushed me aside and I stumbled into the shadowed part of the room. ‘What do you mean by that?’

‘Whenever any of us’ (What was us? Could I be a part of us?) ‘do, it’s never good enough, you always throw a fit, you always get offended -’

‘It’s our homeland! If we want to get offended, we will. Really, it’s your own fault for not adopting our ways -’

‘I have! I truly have!’

‘You still hanker for you own gods!’

‘Well of course - they live in my home! It’s natural to miss my home!’

‘I don’t want to hear this! And that’s not all you said! I heard what you said about Moshe!’

‘Well, people at home used to believe in Set and he was bad! Things have gone wrong before!’

‘Things have not gone wrong now!’

Ahmose remained silent for a minute, his fingers imprisoning his eyes. Finally he spoke. ‘I didn’t do anything wrong.’

My father became incoherent at that point. Amid much interjection on his own part, he accused Ahmose of trying to corrupt me, of leading me astray, of stripping me of my nationhood. I was in a corner of the room, shivering in a state of wonder. I was important enough to have an argument about at long last. I must not be corrupted either as an individual or as part of a whole that was solid and important and to which even I was integral.

I brushed against the cloth that split our house in two; in fact the material was sliding along my arm. Maybe the breath of the women stirred it that way, but it annoyed me and broke my concentration. I shoved it aside impatiently.

By this time Ahmose had stumbled to his feet to face my father. ‘I won’t stay here to be insulted like that,’ he said shakily.

‘Good! Go home! Go all the way home!’ The jackal, made larger by the dying candle, had sagged into a miserable mass. I could hear the hiss of the tallow as the life of the candle ended.

Ahmose walked to the door, wrenched it open, stepped out and banged it shut behind him. He did not look back once, but I remained looking at the space where he had been.

My father stood panting. He poured himself some wine and then swallowed it with an animal eagerness. He did not need me; a man in a temper prefers to shrift for himself. I remained in my corner.

He came and stood over me. His eyes were unreadable. ‘What did Ahmose say to you?’ I was too afraid to lie and because he was my father lying did not even come to mind in the first place. I just told him. The candle died.

The sudden fall of darkness changed my father. He squatted down to my level. ‘Did you encourage him?’

‘I was - I was respectful.’

‘That was not what I asked. I asked did you encourage him and you will answer as I wish.’

‘No, Father, I didn’t mean to!’

‘So you did.’

‘But you said to be polite-’

‘How dare you!’ The words were delivered with such force that I thought he wanted to kill me. There was no longer any closeness between this man and me. Only a tie of kinship remained. A tie - or a chain?

I knew that he would beat me and worse, beat me in this cramped lightless cave of a room within the hearing of the women. There was no light in the room and I would be unable to focus on anything to draw me out of myself. And, although I had been beaten before, I knew that this would be the worst beating I had ever experienced.

He got a leather strip. I could not see his face; he was as much an instrument of punishment as the strip he wielded. I closed my eyes and as the first blows fell I responded with a surge of heat in my blood. I was no child - I was a man! But then maybe I deserved this. I was a man and I had acted as a cringing child to Ahmose all because he was older and clever and foreign. I had acted as a child and so I would be punished as a child.

The rhythmic whistle of the strip humiliated me. I could have wielded it as well as my father - I could have beaten him, made him bleed! But the laws with which I had been brought up gripped me and the words of the laws fell with each lash. Honour -your - your father and -your mother- and- and - death to th-those who - disobey, to men who -lie with - to children who dis-obey their - parents - death - death - he’s killing me, killing me. I don’t want to - not die - live, see Ahm- see the desert and be alone and be silent and be free and be all right…

My father had stopped and the strip was relaxed in his hands. They were co-conspirators but their job was done now and they could relax together. I turned my head with a great effort. My father was a lighter shadow against the darker shadows of the room. I could not see his face; it was too dark to see even the gleam of his eyes. He went behind the cloth then, to the women. I dared not join them. The cloth was a necessary protection.

I regarded my half of the house and was content. It was all mine for now and I was alone in it. It was special now. No one here except for me. I could let my memories play.

I got up stiffly. I limped over to the table. There lay upturned cups, the burnt-down candle, the stains of wine dregs. Ahmose’s stool was upended; he must have kicked it aside. I righted it with tingling hands. There was the wall on which I had seen the jackal but it was a slab of darkness now. Or maybe the jackal’s head had grown so large that it had swallowed the wall entirely.

I got my cloak and arranged it carefully on the floor. There it lay and then there I lay, one flap of the cloak hiding my bruised body. I was nearly asleep but just conscious enough to think. I was pulled between anger and gratitude to Ahmose. He had been the first man to treat me as an equal but because he had done so I had suffered. Ahmose, the silly foreigner with the funny smelling sweat. What was he anyway? An up-ender, a man who upset things. A foreigner, unchosen. There was us and there was them. And they had the power to make us unlike ourselves. And once we ceased to be ourselves, we ceased to be. Our stories would be removed and replaced with foreign stories. And we, people like us, would not even be a memory to our descendants, or if we were, we would be an embarrassment, something to be forgotten, if not consciously erased…

Tags: fiction
Current Location: My room
Current Mood: energetic
Current Music: Moby - Lift Me Up

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