HIM, page 5
Yosef went still. “What?”
“It’s better that she dies than this evil be allowed loose in the world.” She didn’t say a new prophet sent by God had been undone by disobedience and the shadow of the world.
“She’s a child!” Yosef begged.
The child had rope-burn marks. Her ribs were showing. She had bruises. Something had gone wild in Maryam’s eyes.
So Yosef rose from his bed in the deepest night.
He climbed down the ladder with Yakob over his shoulder. He crept to Avigayil’s corner where she had been trussed like a lamb. Weeping for himself, for their life, for everything, he untied her wrists and ankles, and then he slipped out of the house, carrying nothing but the two children and began to walk in the dark towards Yerusalam.
“I’m a boy,” the child whimpered. “My name is Yehushua.”
“Yes,” whispered Yosef and kissed her. “Yes, you are Yehushua. You are a boy. Yes.”
In his wide cool bedroom, Yoazar barBoethus realized that he was being shaken.
Gently, but continually in the dark. “What the…” Yoazar threw off the hand and sat up. A small guttering lamp showed Mikael’s anxious face.
“Sir, oh Sir. It’s Yosef barLevi. Here, Sir, at the gate.”
“Oh for God’s sake!” Yoazar threw off the covers. Can’t a man rest? Presumably he couldn’t stand Maryam a moment longer. Coming here! Prison for sure if he’s caught.
Yoazar’s bad knee gave way as he stood up, and that made him angry again. He threw on his mantle, hobbled across the courtyard and flung open the gate. Before Yosef could say anything, Yoazar grabbed him by the wrist and swung him into the courtyard.
“Are you mad? You are in exile. They will throw you in prison.”
His eyes held wide open like his hands, Yosef said, “Maryam has turned on the children. She’s like a demon.” Exhaustion and despair shook him; his chin wobbled, his eyes shook out tears. His clothes and face were one even coating of dust, except where tears had streaked his cheeks.
Yoazar’s mind lumbered forward. “What?”
“I’ve come to hide the children. Maryam has gone mad. Look at them!”
The little girl’s face showed plain signs of a beating. Her wrists had scabs from what looked like rope burns.
Yosef tried to explain, gabbling. A childish thing was at the bottom of it. Avigayil’s friend Yehushua had died, and she says she’s to be called Yehushua, that she is now a boy. It’s not a good thing, but Maryam will kill her, has said she was rather she was dead.
Yoazar slumped. Yosef looked yellow and swollen. “I’m sorry, Yosef.” The poor fellow was a woe-begotten creature and part of this woe was Yoazar’s fault. Yoazar rubbed his face. “I always knew she was mad.” He grabbed hold of Yosef’s shoulder and guided him a few steps towards the house.
“How long have you been walking?”
“Two days.”
“I’ll get you food and water.”
There was a thump on the gate. Then another and another and woman’s voice bellowed “Yosef! Yosef!”
Yosef waved his hands for silence, pleading.
Yoazar’s heart shrivelled in something like terror. It was Maryam. Maryam here and as Yosef had said, she sounded like a madwoman.
“Yosef!”
Yoazar waved at Yosef. Get them away, hide them!
The older child put its hands over its brother Yakob’s mouth. Yosef pulled them both back, Yoazar waving towards the wine cellar door.
Yoazar waited for a while, as if he had to be awoken, then had thrown on a robe, and come out of his rooms. He called back. “Who is it shouts at this hour?”
“Don’t pretend. He’s there!”
Yoazar trudged in place as loudly as he could, sandals flapping, before pulling open the door.
Maryam’s hair was loose, wild in the moonlight. “Where are they? Where are my children?”
“Maryam? What are you doing here?”
“You have them.”
“I don’t know–”
“Don’t lie to me. Everybody saw him, a man carrying two babes right up to this gate!”
“Your feet! Have you been running all night and all day?”
“Where are they?”
God, to face Maryam in a rage – Yoazar had no idea she could be like this. “Now now now, don’t get violent. It just lends credence to the stories.”
“What stories? Whose?”
A mistake. Who was there to tell Yoazar any stories except Yosef? Yoazar heard a creaking door, and saw to his horror, one of the children walking towards them.
It was the little girl, her face like a fist. Her hands were in fists. And she was marching. She said in a gravelly voice, not at all childlike: “I am the one who was born. Not you!”
Yosef slunk out of the cellar carrying the youngest. Maryam’s lip curled at him.
The little girl shouted at her. “I am the one who knows what I am. Not you. You will call me Yehushua, and I am a boy.”
That calmed Maryam. She slumped back, looked satisfied. “You see the demon that afflicts her.” She knelt and took the child’s shoulders. “Your name is Avigayil, after my own mother.”
“Call me Yehushua or you will never see me again.”
“I am your mother. Your mother and your father.” Maryam’s voice was as even as paving. Dust coated her as if she’d been salted for preserving; her sandals were pink; her face looked fat and starved.
The child said, “You are nothing more to me than anyone else. I am here for everyone.”
The child is crazy too, Yoazar realized. They both think they are God. Just a small part of Yoazar’s coiled heart liked that. Maryam was up against Maryam, and she could lose.
Maryam held out a demanding hand. “You will come with me now. Yosef. Where is my son? I want my son.”
The older child said, “I am your son.”
“Yakob! Now.”
Yoazar coughed gently. “Go home with your husband, Maryam. Call the child what it wants to be called, and get going before the sun rises. Otherwise Yosef will be sent to prison.”
“Good!” she snarled.
Yoazar felt a growing calm. “If that happens, Maryam, I will make sure you never see these children again. I will not leave them to your mercy. You will have no husband, no children. And I will cease to send the cart. You can run wild in the desert like the madwoman you are.”
He gave her a push and she stumbled backwards. He seized the child’s hand and pulled. “Yosef. Bring the other child.” He moved all of them outside his gate, and then stood across it, barring it. “I am the head of this family. If Yosef is sent to prison, I cannot allow these children to remain in your care. I will take them from you and have you declared insane and sent to that place where the insane go. It will not be a house in Nazareth.”
“You heard the abomination that child has become.”
“What did you expect with the nonsense you’ve been telling her about a virgin birth and not needing a father? And you, Yosef, with your wild thinking. You are both to blame. I am close to removing both these children from you now, in any case. Go, before I do so. And if I hear that Yehushua has come to harm or died, then I will have you stoned in public for killing your own child. Get out. You disgrace my doorway. Mikael! See they get home swiftly in one piece!”
The child had a strange small tight smile. “For the child is father to the man.”
Maryam slumped into the cart and was still.
She looked pallid, staring ahead, and said in a tiny, bereft voice. “It’s all undone.”
“Call me Yehushua,” the child demanded.
“I can’t.”
“That is my name. Call me Yehushua.”
Maryam’s feet were bruised and bloody, and she looked chastened. She had come close to losing the child.
“Call me Yehushua.” The child said in a singsong, voice. Then sharp, succinct. “Call me Yehushua.” Then demanding. “Call me Yehushua.”
Over and over, lurching over the broken roadway, all the way from Yerusalam, hour on hour, even after Maryam had fallen asleep, bent forward, her head hanging. Even when she woke again at Gappiah. “I am a boy. Call me by my name.”
The day grew long and hot. They had some bread, which they broke. Their jug of water emptied but there were wells on the road. All through the day, the child did not let up. He sounded so pleased with himself, so insolent. Even Yosef wanted to clout him.
“Leave your poor mother alone,” Yosef said.
The child said, “I can walk back and live with Yoazar.” The child’s face was still and the obsidian eyes bore down on Yosef. This child would do that, no doubt about it.
Maryam was right; it was indeed as if the child was possessed by something. Yosef had not been close to the child but he had felt pity for it being trapped with Maryam’s all-conquering love and being seen as part of her.
Now the babe was getting older and children could be cruel, as Yosef so well remembered. This little one had hard eyes. Both of them were mad, both of them could be dangerous. The fondness Yosef had felt for this little creature began to shrivel.
You are not quite human.
They stopped beside the springs at Yenin so that the mule could rest, and they could take water, cheese and bread.
Cold water welled up in an ancient stone basin carved with flowers. The water ran off into a trough for asses or cattle. Local women were chatting beside it; other travellers led their animals to drink. One toothless man flung up an arm and cried “Ho!” to Maryam and Yosef, but he faltered when he got a good look at their faces. Yosef supposed the misery and exhaustion showed.
The child ate bread with merry smiles, smacking its lips as if making fun of them. Yosef cradled Yakob who was thankfully fast asleep. Maryam chewed her bread in heavy-lidded misery.
There was only a hint of orange in the sky, but Mikael announced “We’ll drop here for the night.”
Normally the child would have run up the rocks or tried to sneak round the back of villages to see what the people were doing. Instead he sat across from Maryam saying over and over in a chant. “I am Yehushua.”
“You will stop now,” said Yosef. “We need to rest.”
Maryam lay down on a cloth over the scrub and dust, and the child leaned forward and began to whisper in her ear.
Yosef did not know what to do. He covered his eyes and wept. He felt that he was not a real man to be so out of control of his family. He’d always been weak. All the reading and arguing, it had all been a cover for his timidity. He had hoped that marrying would at least give him a home, a place of safety, but he couldn’t even keep that secure. He envied Maryam her strength.
He knelt beside the child and pleaded. “Please. Please leave your mother alone.”
“I think not,” said the child. “Her mind is at its softest while she sleeps. If I whisper over and over, the words will enter her mind with her dreams and soak in.”
“Please stop. The rest of us need to sleep too.”
The child eyed him coldly, and then smiled. “You want your family to be at peace, don’t you, Yosef? This the way to do it.”
Little Yakob woke up and started to wail. Yosef knelt to calm the littlest while glancing with misgiving at the child. Yehushua lay down next to Maryam’s ear and kept on whispering. Maryam whimpered and kicked her bloodied feet, and turned on her other side.
The child reared up over the exposed ear and kept whispering. Maryam covered that ear and tried to slap him away.
The time had come. Yosef had to act, to get him to behave. Biting the inside of his lip Yosef finally laid hands on the child’s shoulders.
Then Mikael loomed suddenly behind them both. He wrapped the child in his arms, stood up, and carried him away from Maryam, and kept on walking until the child fell silent. The child didn’t struggle, but stared ahead, letting itself be carried out of sight.
They started out again before the sun rose.
The child did not look tired. Mikael still gripped him, hauling him up into the front of the cart. As Maryam rolled into the back, the child started up again. “Call me Yehushua.”
“I told you to stop that,” said Yosef.
“I can walk and live with Yoazar.”
Mikael rumbled from the front bench. “Maybe he wouldn’t have you.”
“Then I would find somewhere else.” This child would do that, no doubt.
Five years old.
“Call me Yehushua,” he said as a playful joke as if pulling petals off a flower, then in an unsettling whisper. “Say it, Ami. Say it.” The voice never rose, or raged. Sometimes it chuckled, or wheedled or spoke quite calmly. “Who does God protect? Say it Ami.” The child did not even sound anxious. “We’ll be friends, as soon as you say it.”
He had a strength to crush armies.
“Do want to be a king?” Yosef whispered.
The child pondered for a moment. “I already am one.”
Over and over and over as the sun swelled in purple-orange haze. The light was pallid on Maryam’s hollowed face. She asked in a small voice, “Why do you want to be a boy?”
“I don’t want to be a boy. I am a boy,” said Yehushua.
Maryam’s lips moved, Yosef could see, she was about to say girls can do things. But she didn’t – she was too exhausted.
Girls can’t preach thought Yosef. They can only go so far into the Temple. They can’t become lawyers or priests. They can bear children, labour in the fields or, if they are very lucky, manage the servants, count sheets and have their hair dressed in the knowledge that their husbands are chasing fresher sheets somewhere else.
Maybe the child doesn’t want that? Yosef looked at the rock-hard face of the child and saw something simpler. The body says girl but the spirit says different.
“So what does God tell you?” Yosef asked the child. The God you know inside you?
“God has no idea what is going on or why. God is confused.” The child’s lower lip was pulled back in; the face suddenly looked fearful and alone, bereft. No one understood, certainly not God, who had never been imprisoned in flesh before. “Only I know,” said the child.
God, thought Yosef, has just been split in two.
Maryam stared, perhaps at the rising sun. Then she glanced down and whispered, “Yehushua.”
And Yehushua slid over next to her, and hugged her, and kissed her arm. “We’ll be home by sunrise, Ami,” he said.
CHAPTER 7
TIMELESS STARLIGHT
By the time the child was six, Avigayil had been forgotten.
Who could remember Avigayil, when Yehushua would race with any caravan that came into the village, or run out to meet lone travellers?
“Welcome to Nazareth. Welcome to Nazareth!” he would shout, waving his pudgy arms. He would offer them water from a sloshing wineskin. The other boys would try to join, but the child could always outrace them.
“It is so beautiful in Nazareth.”
A bad-tempered tinker spat. “Ptah. Nazareth is all stones.” And it was not the kind of place to have much metal to repair. He was on his way to Sepphoris.
“I will bet you the hole that needs repairing in my mother’s bronze cauldron that I can get you to say Nazareth is beautiful.”
“Ha, ha. You have seen nothing of the world. What do I get if I win?”
“I will walk all the way to Sepphoris with you and keep you amused.” The little boy hopped in place.
“How would your mother have a bronze cauldron?”
The little demon squared up to him. “She’s the niece of the Kohen Gadol.”
The tinker’s eyes widened. He didn’t believe this little scrap, but he was charmed. “You are on. We have a bet.”
“Our stones are beautiful in sunlight. They glow like pieces of stars. And we have two oxen and many goats and grow fruit.”
“So do most places, kid.”
“So? I did not say that Nazareth was more beautiful than anywhere else. It is part of the world. And do not the scriptures tell us to rejoice and be grateful for the world that God has made?”
The tinker stammered. “That, that.”
“Do you deny that God’s world, these olive trees, these stones, the broken eggshell of the raven that got eaten. Do you deny that they are beautiful?”
The tinker blurted out a laugh through brown or missing teeth. “No. No little teacher, I don’t.”
He repaired their cauldron. Maryam silently flicked her hand towards it and said nothing. She sat and stared, a haggard line down each cheek.
Yakob had not started to talk.
Yosef saw children who had been born after their son already taking unsteady steps and saying, “Daddy big” or “Baby hungry.”
Was there something wrong with Yakob? Yosef didn’t feel able to say anything to Maryam, who he could see was still in mourning for Avigayil.
Whenever the first-born came home, there seemed to be a burst of noise and light that made Maryam turn slowly away, but it transfixed little Yakob, benumbed him.
An instance: Yosef had told Yehushua that there was soup on the stove – a mix of herbs, olives and well water heated up with a single egg. The child scraped a dining couch to the stove and hopped onto it. The loud noise made Yakob jump. Yehushua served the soup while talking. “We have a new game. We found some rope and strung it between trees and then we try to send things down it.”
Little Yakob was staring round-eyed at Yehushua. Yosef hunched forward and said, “Ya-Ya. Don’t worry about your brother. Look at Ami. That’s your Ami, there.” Yosef’s hand capped Yakob’s skull and turned it.
Maryam was staring through their missing wall, looking at the afternoon clouds, apricot-coloured against a purple sky. Far over the horizon there was a storm above the lake. As soon as Yosef let go, Yakob’s head turned back to look at the eldest.
“Say Ami. Hmm? Say Ami.” Yosef kissed the infant’s disordered head, already covered in hair but the infant was not yet walking or talking.
Yehushua came closer and leaned on his knees. He beamed, his face polished with sweat, his baby teeth a limestone white. “Yakob! Ya-ya? We’ll play wheels soon. You and me. It’ll be fun. I promise. Ya-ya? Say Ami.” Suddenly the child was not performing baby talk. Serious and not at all childlike, Yehushua gave Yakob an order. “Say Ami.”
