Джеймс Миченер - The Source

To halt this blasphemy I said, as if he were a child to be got back into bed, “Only last week Shelomith told me she loved you. However, if you continue killing Jews even she will grow to hate you.”

He stared at me in horror, grasping at his throat. “Shelomith would hate me? Doesn’t she know that everything I’ve done has been intended to help her Jews? Myrmex, tell me honestly, when I die the Jews will mourn for me, won’t they?”

Why did I say it? Why could I not have supported this crazy old man as I had done so often in the years before? What did it matter to me whether the Jews mourned for him or not? But I told him, “Herod, if you continue to kill, no one will mourn you.”

He staggered back as if I had struck him. He choked on my words, and waves of putrescence flowed from his crumbling body, so that I looked at him with disgust. This infuriated him and he began shouting, “You are wrong, Myrmex, by the gods you are wrong. The Jews will mourn me as they have never mourned before.” He called for his mercenaries—Africans, Cilicians, Egyptians, Germans, Persians—the men who had coldly killed off the leaders of Judaism, and screamed at them in jumbled, frenzied sentences: “Go to every city in Judaea. Arrest the leading citizens. Put them in jail and guard them well. Feed them luxuriously. Let them have all comforts. And on the day I die, kill them.” The soldiers were stunned, but Herod continued: “Go now to every city. None is too small. Go even to Makor. And start by arresting this man!” He pointed at me with a trembling finger. “He and his wife shall die. Kill them as I have directed you in the past.” He strode about, hacking and thrusting with his right arm. Wrenching a short sword from one of his Germans he slashed it through the air not far from my face, “Hack him to death. Kill all the great men in the kingdom.” Exhausted, he fell back upon the fetid sheets and grinned at me, his broken teeth making his face grotesque.

“Myrmex, you shall die. Why should you be tall and slim while I am gross? Why should you have your teeth and your hair while your king has nothing but a rotting body? Why should you still have Shelomith while the only woman I ever loved has been taken from me? You shall die. All of you shall die.”

As the soldiers moved in to arrest me he wept on his couch, and I thought of the ancient poem of King David’s which Shelomith had often sung to me:Each night I make my bed swim.

I drench my couch with my tears.

My eye has wasted away from grief …

Herod was the legal successor to King David, so it was proper to compare them, but as I stood a prisoner before him I thought of how the earlier king of the Jews had wept for the great sins he had committed, finding consolation in the forgiveness of the Hebrew god whom he had tried to serve in his fumbling way; but Herod wept only for his personal misery, throwing himself upon the mercy of no god, and he found no consolation.

From his bed he shrieked the last words I would hear from this old friend: “When I die the Jews may not mourn for me. But by the gods they will mourn.” And I was led away.

Under guard I was brought to Makor. I marched, a prisoner, through Sebaste, which I had rebuilt into a city of magnificence, renaming it for the wife of Augustus. With fetters about my wrists I marched to Nazareth and Cana and Jotapata. With the guards behind me I penetrated the swamp and marched through my own olive grove and up to the gates which I had rebuilt in the Roman image. Desperately I wanted to cry out a warning to Shelomith, telling her to flee, but the soldiers had rushed into the town and taken her prisoner. We met in shackles, in the forum I had built, and she was beautiful as on the day Herod had brought her to me. She did not wail nor did she berate me for the errors which had led us to this conclusion. When the soldier-captain read the proclamation, that Timon Myrmex and his wife Shelomith were to be arrested and kept in a public prison where the citizens could see them, and that on word of the death of Herod armed soldiers were to be set loose upon them, she smiled.

“Tell King Herod,” she told the soldiers, “that I am sorry he murdered Mariamne.” In those few words she summarized the mad misery of the man.

That was three days ago. In the interval the citizens of our little town have reacted as Herod foresaw. Non-Jews come to the steps of the temple to bemoan my fate, and I advise them that as a Roman I am prepared to die. Jews come to visit Shelomith, for her father was a man of dignity and is well remembered in Galilee, and with equal resignation she assures them that she has lived a good life and a long one and that the ignominy of execution does not humiliate her. My people offer arguments and her people utter prayers, and it almost seems as if Shelomith and I must console the living rather than accept their weeping on our behalf.

But I must not create the impression that we are stoics. Yesterday I came upon my wife as she rubbed her tired face with a sweet oil which she keeps in a small phial: she had before her a tray of these bottles which Herod had given her years ago when we stayed with him at Caesarea, and she was so exquisite as she lifted first one little phial and then the other, creating beauty from them as if we were going to a dinner, that I sobbed, and she put down the tray and took my hand.

“We must not berate ourselves for having served Herod,” she whispered.

“You don’t accuse me … for having intertwined our lives with his?”

“Of course not! Apart from these last insane years he did far more good than evil. He gave us a harsh administration, but he gave us peace.”

“Why do you Jews always seek out kings like Herod?” I asked.

“We? Rome gave us Herod. We had no voice in choosing him.”

“I meant that if your people had rallied about the Maccabees there would have been no opening for Herod.”

She considered this and replied slowly, “We Jews always find it difficult to support our own people. We seem to prefer being governed by others.” Then she added, “It’s something you won’t understand. But we cannot believe in any kingdom, neither of our own making nor of Rome’s. We hold that the true kingdom is of God and will come only with the Messiah, so even if Herod had been Jewish we wouldn’t have accepted him. There will never again be a Jewish state in Israel, for we are destined to live under the yoke of others, offering our testimony not to principalities but to God.”

I was unwilling to follow her in these philosophical discussions, so I turned the talk to happier days. “I am nineteen again and you are a child living near the synagogue of Makor. A small ship sails into Ptolemais bearing a powerful young man named Herod who steps down to say, ‘I have come to pacify the Galilee.’ If we were to live those years again, would you advise me to stand with him? Defend him before Octavian?”

Again she paused to consider my question, for Shelomith has the Jewish characteristic of looking at life with absolute honesty of purpose, and quietly she said, “Would we not be craven to reject our history now?” She took my hands and said, “We followed Herod, and I suppose we’d do so again. But we should have given some thought, Timon, to the greater king whom we should have served with greater devotion.” Before I could respond, she laughed and asked, “Of all the years we spent together, which were the best? When we were building that beautiful arcaded street in Antioch?”

“No. Caesarea made anything else insignificant. As long as the earth endures, that city will be the capital of Asia, and to have helped launch it was no mean accomplishment.” We sat in our prison and recalled those majestic rows of columns, the palaces and the gemlike theater nestled beside the blue sea. It was a masterpiece that we built, Herod and I, and it will remain as long as men cherish works of beauty.