Джеймс Миченер - The Source

Yesterday Shelomith smiled when I spoke in this manner of Caesarea, and when I asked why, she said, “You are so stubbornly Roman! I should have thought that the temple of Jerusalem would be your permanent satisfaction. Even we Jews are forced to admit that there Herod performed a miracle.”

I had never spoken to my wife of this matter, but death was upon us and there was no sensible reason to withhold our thoughts, so I said, “The temple I have erased from my mind. For me it does not count.”

“Why?” Shelomith cried, for like all Jews she kept a deep affection for this ancient building.

“For a long time I’ve suspected that sooner or later Rome will have to destroy the temple.”

“But why?”

“Because imperial Rome and the temple cannot exist together within the same empire.”

“Timon! You are talking insanely, like the king. Rome is one thing. It lies across the ocean and is very powerful, but the temple exists in a separate world. Its continuation is permanent.”

“I used to think so,” I said.

“What changed your mind?”

“You weren’t in Jerusalem when priests caused the young men to chop down the wooden eagle.”

“You told me about it,” my wife answered, and her eyes glowed with satisfaction as she recalled the daring escapade.

“You remember the tearing down,” I said, “but I remember the men who were burned alive. We set up five pillars before the temple and huge piles of brush were placed upon the stones, forming platforms on which the condemned men stood. Herod’s soldiers … they’re always ready to do anything … lit the fires and we expected cries of anguish to come from the pillars.”

“What happened?”

“The fires burned unevenly, but as the flames licked about each face, one after the other, the man who was being burned alive cried with his last breath, ‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.’”

“At such a moment what else would a man say?”

I looked at Shelomith and realized, after a lifetime of the most intimate existence with her, that I barely understood her, and she must have recognized this, for she said quietly, “Tomorrow or the next day, when the messenger comes, and the soldiers are sent in to kill us, you will think of Rome and Augustus and the distant buildings you have built. You may even look upon the Augusteana across the way and a marvelous light will go out. Timon, I have loved you so. You have been so brave, so enduring.” She began to weep, not silently but with unstifled sobs that sent tears gushing from her eyes, and as they fell upon her lap she took one of the perfume bottles and with its lip brushed aside the offending tears, so that some fell into the bottle, and she laughed nervously, saying, “Together we have made the perfume of life, tears and roses and the smell of olive trees in the spring. That perfume has been in my nostrils since the first day I met you.”

She placed the phial on the tray and resumed the line of thinking that the tears had interrupted. “As we die you will look upon the buildings of this world, but I will whisper, ‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.’ Herod with all his soldiers, with all his flames, will never be able to silence that cry.”

“That’s why I say the temple will have to be destroyed. Rome has offered you membership in the world at large. But in your stiff-necked pride you’ve rejected the world and clung to your temple.”

“Must it perish?” she cried, and we were dealing with such impassioned thoughts that I left her improvised dressing table, so that she might complete her toilet, and went to the entrance of the temple where the guards were waiting for the word to slay us.

Two were Egyptian and two were German, and I asked them how they had entered the service of Herod. The Egyptians had been given him by Caesar Augustus when he dissipated Cleopatra’s power, and the Germans had been brought to Judaea as slaves, progressing by one chance or another to responsible positions in the army. “How many Jews have you slain?” I asked the men. They shrugged their shoulders. “We do what we’re told,” they replied.

“Well, how many?” I insisted. “We haven’t had any foreign wars, so all your activity has been against the Jews. How many would you guess?” And they began recalling their various expeditions against Jerusalem, when there was trouble there, and Samaria before the name was changed to Sebaste, and the trouble in Gaza. Slowly the figures mounted until these four chance soldiers, operating in different areas, found that they had slain more than a thousand leading Jews.

“When the orders come to kill my wife and me … won’t you wonder what it’s about?”

“Orders come and we obey them,” one of the Germans replied. His sharp, dreadful sword hung easily from his left hip.

“But you’ve known that Herod was insane.”

“Don’t speak against the king,” the soldier warned me.

“But he’s dead. We’re merely awaiting confirmation.”

“I should think you’d want him to live,” the German argued, speaking a colloquial Greek.

“You haven’t answered my question. Why would you obey the orders of a dead man?”

“Because if you don’t have one king, you have another,” the German explained. “If Herod is dead, as you say, there’s another king in Antioch to give orders and above him there’s the emperor in Rome, and it doesn’t matter very much who tells us to do what. There’s always a king somewhere.”

Jews came to pray with Shelomith, and in their bearded faces, obdurate as iron, I found my solution to the behavior of the Herodian soldiers. On earth there was always a king giving orders, and frequently they were contradictory or even inhuman, as in the case of a putrefying Herod, but above them there had to be a true king who judged things honestly and who, when the time came, corrected the mistakes of the earthly sovereigns. If there were not such a system, the behavior of a mortal like Herod would be incomprehensible.

I looked at the Jews, whom I had never understood, for they were always a withdrawn race who showed neither love nor toleration for the Romans, and I realized that it was not through the friends of Herod but through these bearded, intransigent men that Judaea and perhaps the whole empire would find its moral stability. Between the Jews and the Romans there would be war—of that I was increasingly convinced—and doubtless the temple as a symbol of Judaism would have to vanish; but the principles these men stood for, the rectitude I saw in their faces, must ultimately triumph. For the first time I was sorry to be dying, for I wanted to witness this great confrontation. For me, Herod had terminated any belief in Rome as a permanent master. There would have to be something else, some force that could control insane men. Why, he had even intimated that if the rumors were true, if an honest king of the Jews had been born in Bethlehem, all Jewish babies in that district must be slaughtered, but from this hideous act he had drawn back. It was essential that some superior power be called into existence to force such men to draw back from their other insanities, and I wished that I could be on hand to greet the messengers of that power when they arrived.

Shelomith and I talked of these things for many hours yesterday and I went to bed with increased respect for her religion, which I had not deeply investigated before. I say, “I went to bed,” as if this day had merely been another in a long sequence of routine days, but it was not. We shall probably never go to bed again. I shall never again see her rise like a flower coming to bloom in the spring, and in the nothingness of death, if I am permitted memory, I shall miss her more than I can say. My three sons, one in Antioch, one in Athens and one in Rhodes, will look like her until they die, some years from now, and then her lovely image will be forgotten. Being a Jewess, she never allowed me to have her portrait made, for like the brave men who chopped down the Roman eagle and who were burned alive for their audacity, she considered portraits blasphemy. Something Moses had told his Jews prevented them from having any likeness made; but I smile, for as long as Makor stands, the eight perfect columns will serve as her memorial. They are closer to her reality than a painting of her face could ever be, for they reproduce her essence: tall, flawlessly proportioned, austere, yet molded to the requirements of her position. Like her columns she stands with her head unadorned, and bearing nothing, for she is a free woman. Only the Jews know how to produce such women, and I have known two of them—Shelomith and Mariamne. Had the queen lived she would have kept Herod sane, but she died prematurely and he died with her.