Naomi Alderman - The Liars' Gospel

Two older women pass him as they leave.

“She was Assyrian,” mutters one to the other, “the one who cut herself. I’ve heard about their rites.”

The other woman, dressed neatly and with the hairstyle of a respectable matron, sniffs and frowns. “A lot of fuss,” she says. “What’s wrong with a pigeon?”

He smells the banquet before he sees it: the sweet sticky smell of spilled wine. The smell of pomades, too, of the fragrant oils with which Calidorus and his friends anoint themselves before a feast. It is the smell of money, copiously spent.

He is late for the party. This is a mistake. He had not realized how long the temple service had gone on, he had stumbled back home dazed and would be grateful for a bath and a sleep. But although no one chides him, the anxiety of the slaves shows that he has made a bad error. One of the men hurriedly washes him with a wet cloth, another dresses him in a fresh robe and tries to touch his hair with the perfume. He grabs the man’s wrist as he approaches with the stone vial.

“No,” he says.

The slave, who has tended to him a hundred times, looks puzzled but places the perfume vial back on the table. “My master is waiting,” he says.

“Waiting” is something of an exaggeration. The feast had begun without Iehuda. In the dining room, six men are reclining on upholstered couches arranged around a low table. The table is well furnished. The men have silver cups of wine mixed with honey. There are dates, olives, bread, white cheese with herbs, dishes of lentils with fruit and in the center a huge ocean-fish with sliced citrons, dill and parsley. The men are drunk already and the meal is not even halfway over.

“Ah, Judas”—Calidorus pronounces his name in the Greek fashion—“we were beginning to think you had forgotten about us entirely.”

There is acid in his tone.

“Never,” says Iehuda. “I was detained by some business in the market, that is all. My apologies, gentlemen.”

Calidorus eyes him suspiciously.

“Business? I thought”—he puts on a laugh—“that all the business you would ever have is been and gone.”

“My apologies,” says Iehuda.

It is time for him to perform.

He is not exactly a guest at the banquet, just as he has not exactly been a guest in Calidorus’s house these past months. Not a slave, no certainly not that, but neither precisely a friend. He has been treated well, allowed to roam as he please, fed and supplied generously with wine, given clothes and two rooms of his own and even writing instruments and certain books. But there have been these parties. His presence has been requested in a way which is slightly firmer than an invitation. He has begun to wonder what might happen if he refused one of these generous offers of “an evening with some friends.”

He takes a stance in the center of the room. The other men hush each other loudly, one spitting into the fish with an excessively enthusiastic “shhhhh.” In a dark corner of the room, Iehuda notices, two slaves are standing almost motionless.

Calidorus introduces him with the usual flourish.

“Behold the man before you,” he says, “once a follower and close confidant of a man some called the King of the Jews, but now a guest in my house. Since the subject of debate tonight is the gods, whether they are wise or foolish, to be loved or to be feared”—Calidorus had produced a series of such topics for debate at his symposia since Iehuda came to stay—“his assistance will be invaluable!” He beckons a slave to fill his wineglass again. “Come, tell us, Judas of Cariot, tell us about the God of the Jews and how your master was very nearly mistaken for him!”

“We have heard,” says one of the men, his face flushed with drunkenness, “that you Jews believe that your God lives in only one house in Jerusalem! Is he not as wealthy as our gods, then, who can afford to keep up many homes?”

The others find this hilarious. One laughs so long and loudly that he begins to choke, and the slave to his right has to help him to some wine.

Iehuda sighs inwardly. It is one of the things that every gentile has heard about the Jews. Like the lie that Jews worship the pig and that is why they do not eat it. Like the lie that at the center of the Temple in Jerusalem, in the most sacred place, there is a donkey and its shit is piled up around it. Like the lie that Jews hate their bodies and their wives so much that they only make love through a hole in a sheet. How do these things begin? Which debased mind invented them? Who chose to pass them on, unthinking?

He has learned to play along with such tales rather than challenge them. Or to circumnavigate them, like a boatswain foreseeing choppy waters. He tries to tell the truth jokingly.

“Ah,” he replies to the drunken fool, “perhaps it is that our God is more loyal to us. Like a loving husband, he stays close to home. While we all know how Jupiter spreads his…favors.” He mimes the thrusting motion of the body, the bunching of his thighs reminding him suddenly, overwhelmingly, of the musk scent of the red-haired woman in the temple.

But the trick works. The other men laugh. One punches the drunken questioner gently on the arm.

“You’d do well to learn from them, hey, Pomponius? Stay a little closer to home and maybe your wife wouldn’t stray so much!”

The others laugh and Pomponius, a jowly man in his fifties, though still with a fine head of thick black hair, reddens and scowls and drinks more wine.

Calidorus, Iehuda notes, looks nervous. Rein it in, Iehuda says to himself, don’t embarrass important guests.

“Ah”—he fakes a little laugh—“perhaps it is just that our God, like a wise husband, knows he cannot trust us, as no man can trust a woman! If he left us for a moment, we would start rutting with some other god.”

He does a comical little mime of a woman peering through the curtain of her house, seeing her husband leave, and immediately grabbing the nearest slave and mounting him. The men laugh uproariously, toasting each other with wine, spilling more than they manage to get in their mouths. He has them now.

“Yes,” rumbles Pomponius, relaxing a little, “you can’t trust women.”

Calidorus gives Iehuda a small smile.

“But now,” says Iehuda, “to my own small role in the downfall of a god. It is hard now even to recall how different I was back then. If you can believe it, I had a full beard.” He cups his two hands upwards at his waist, to indicate a beard so long that these clean-shaven Romans grimace.

“Not only that, I was a virtuous and honorable man. I prayed every day, I observed the festivals and the Sabbath, I kept to the old ways of cleanliness in foods and in washing my body and in making sure I fucked only my own wife, and not anyone else’s.”

He winks broadly, as if to say that he is exaggerating slightly here. The men chuckle. Iehuda has read Ovid, with the stories of gods fucking women, women fucking animals, animals turned into human beings so that they can rut and grunt and screw. He understands what these people are like. They would not really believe that any healthy young man could have been a virgin at twenty-eight when he took a wife, that it would never have occurred to him to be unfaithful to her. Perhaps they would not even believe that he had never eaten the flesh of a pig.

So he tells them the story they want to hear. It is a jesting version of tale, he has rehearsed it many times at many such dinners. He knows exactly where to pause, where to emphasize a joke, where to undercut a tragic moment, turning it to ridicule. In the version he tells, he is the impudent puck, the fool who dares to challenge the king. In this story, Yehoshuah — his friend, the man he loved best in all the world — becomes a puffed-up little prince who waved his needlelike sword at Roman rule. Iehuda becomes the naïve innocent who says, “If you irritate their skin, they will swat at us all.” He paints himself as foolish, giving his friend up and believing that Pilate would do no more than scold him. The men laugh. They drink more wine. Calidorus is pleased.