Джеймс Миченер - The Source

Tarphon, aware of Jehubabel’s abhorrence of nakedness, deferred to the older man by grabbing a robe left behind by one of the wrestlers and throwing it over his shoulders; but as soon as he had done so he was sorry, for the robe was both long—which made him look awkward, which he tried never to be—and smelly, which made him seem unclean, which he never was. But he had taken it and could not easily discard it, so he wrapped himself in it and led the way to his room.

No sooner, however, had Jehubabel left the nakedness of the wrestling room than he found himself facing the absurd statue of Antiochus Epiphanes as a discus thrower, and the towering expanse of white marble with the godlike head and the huge genitals appalled the Jew. He could not forget that today’s execution and its savagery had been ordered by this fool who had decreed himself to be so represented, claiming to be both a god manifest and a naked discus thrower. The round-faced, pudgy Jew was disgusted, but he could not speak, for in the past he had picked up the suspicion that his friend Tarphon hoped some day to be represented in Makor by a similar statue, and he thought, turning his back on Antiochus and his glaring nudity: No one can understand a Greek.

Tarphon led him into the small room where on a table lay the report he had been writing, held in place by what Jehubabel considered a curious object: a life-size marble hand, broken off at the wrist and holding an instrument which the Jew had not seen before. “How was the statue broken?” he asked in the Koine.

Tarphon smiled indulgently. This was the kind of question one might expect from a Jew, for although he found the Jews of Makor industrious and well behaved, he also found them notoriously deficient in a sense of beauty. The Greeks had not been in Makor a dozen years before they began building the lovely temple to Zeus, but the Jews were still content with their squat and ugly synagogue. Greeks loved silk, the cool feel of marble, the smell of spices and the sound of lyric poetry being read at night, while the Jews remained a peasant people to whom beauty and luxury were equally abhorrent. With condescension Tarphon explained that no statue had been broken. “The artist carved the hand this way,” he said, also in the Koine.

“Why would he do that?” Jehubabel asked.

“From little, much,” Tarphon replied. When Jehubabel looked blank, he added, “By looking at the fragment you can imagine the whole statue.”

“But if he wanted you to see the whole statue, why didn’t he carve it?”

Tarphon was irritated but he was also amused. “In the spring haven’t you ever tasted just one bite of a Damascus plum? It was so good that you could sense all the plums for that year?”

“I don’t eat plums,” Jehubabel said.

“But this carving? Doesn’t it call to your mind the entire human body?”

The round-faced Jew drew back suspiciously to consider this preposterous theory, and he found that to him the broken wrist conveyed no such language. He saw a rather lifelike hand holding an object he had not seen before, and that was the end of the matter. “What’s he holding?” he inquired.

Tarphon was taken aback. It had never occurred to him that a grown man would not recognize a strigil and he summoned his slave to fetch the one he had left in the wrestling room. When it arrived he passed it along to the Jew. “Can’t you guess what it’s for?”

Jehubabel studied the metal scraper for some moments but could not fathom its mystery. “It has a dull point, so it might be used for digging,” he reasoned. “But it also has a sharp edge, so it might be intended for cutting. I don’t know.”

“It’s for scraping your skin,” Tarphon explained. Jehubabel looked at him in astonishment and made the governor feel self-conscious. “After athletic contests,” he added lamely. In an attempt to demonstrate he reached for some part of the Jew’s anatomy, only to find that all of Jehubabel’s skin except for the backs of his hands and a small part of his face was covered—either by his robe or beard. There was a moment of embarrassment, during which it became obvious that Jehubabel did not intend to uncover any part of his body, so Tarphon switched to his own, throwing aside one end of the smelly robe and drawing the strigil over his exposed thigh. “It’s most refreshing,” he said, but the round-faced Jew looked at him as if the governor were going out of his mind.

Having drawn aside the borrowed robe Tarphon was reminded of its offensive smell, and while Jehubabel studied the sculpture he took off the robe completely, stretched out upon a bench and called for his slave to bring a container of heated oil, which the latter began applying to Tarphon’s body. Spreading the warm oil liberally over the gymnasiarch’s back, he massaged the muscles and with his thumbs worked the lotion into the pores, and as he did so the aromatic spices permeated the room, providing a good ending to the day’s exercise. “This oil is the only luxury I allow myself,” he explained to his friend. “They make it in Macedonia and I used it when I wrestled in Athens.”

“The smell of the rose and the taste of the grape do not abide till the morrow,” Jehubabel observed, and Tarphon winced. The only unpleasant aspect he had found in working with the Jewish leader was this constant barrage of pithy statements in which Jehubabel took refuge whenever intellectual problems were to be faced. The Jew was known in Makor as a learned man, but he never referred to the great books of Judaism; against the works of Plato and Aristotle he never quoted Jews of equal gravity. It was always some cryptic proverb gleaned from the fields or culled from the shearing sheds that was supposed to summarize the Jewish position. Some years ago, when Tarphon promised to protect the Jews against the law of Antiochus, Jehubabel had stated his reaction clearly: “A friend is a friend at all times, and brothers are born for adversity.” Next year, commenting upon the worsened laws, he had said, “Whom the gods love they chasten, even as a father corrects the son in whom he delights.” In fact, for a man with the wide-ranging interests of Governor Tarphon, talking with Jehubabel for any length of time was apt to be a bore, and the Greek often wished that his colleague would forget his little gems of wisdom and for once face the reality at hand.

Why did he bother with Jehubabel? Because in the shifting Greek world of Ptolemais and Makor, the Jew was the one completely honest man with whom Tarphon had contact. He wanted nothing of the gymnasiarch, practiced no flattery, kept his word and worked hard for the betterment of the town. He paid his workers at the dye vats well, educated his children and assumed responsibility for the synagogue. Tarphon often told his wife Melissa, “If we had a dozen more like Jehubabel, governing this district would be a pleasure, but apparently only the Jews can produce such men.” Because Tarphon appreciated the rock-hard constancy of the man he was prepared to put up with his boring, almost niggardly, manner.

Now, from the rubbing bench, Tarphon said, “Tell me honestly, Jehubabel. The execution today. Was it the end of a difficult period or the beginning of real trouble?”

Jehubabel looked away from the naked body stretched out on the bench, belly up, for it offended him. Also, he could still see the accusing face of the martyred man staring at him as he shouted out the defiant prayer of the Jews, and he was driven to make a somewhat harsher reply than he would have otherwise done: “Once a river leaves its banks it does not return until the rains cease.”

“What do you mean by that?” Tarphon asked in some irritation.

“If these laws persist there could be serious results.”

“Could be, yes. But will there be?”