Naomi Alderman - The Liars' Gospel

Yehoshuah was different now, though. Not quiet but angry, suddenly, with a violent rage that swept over his body and made him go stiff and white-faced.

“You know nothing,” he said quietly, “old man.” And then, his voice rising to a shriek, “You know nothing, you know nothing. You. Know. Nothing!” and he picked up a pot from the table and smashed it on the ground.

The other children were not there. They did not see what happened. Yosef and Miryam looked at the broken shards. Yehoshuah stared, with flared nostrils and rolling eyes, at his father and then darted for the door. It was three days, that time, before he returned.

He spoke to himself. Or he heard voices. Or demons. Only sometimes — not all the time, she told her other children when they complained. He does not do it all the time. He is engaged in his studies, she said. He is reciting the words of the Torah, to keep them pure and complete in his heart. Is it not praiseworthy? Yosef looked at him like a stranger at their table. Not a son, an odd, full-grown man, whom they had taken in for no reason.

The arguments grew worse. There came a day, if she was honest she had known it was coming, when Yehoshuah hit Yosef in a rage. Yosef had provoked it, probably. With a critical tone, angry words. And Yehoshuah rose up from his place by the fire and with the heel of his hand whacked his father hard on the temple. Yosef was a man nearing fifty and Yehoshuah was young and strong. Yosef stumbled, almost fell. Yehoshuah looked at his hand in disbelief. And Miryam found that she was saying, “Yosef! Why did you speak to him like that?” Because what will a mother not do for her son?

After that, Yehoshuah wandered farther from their village, into the desert, for days sometimes. He had not founded a family, he had no crops to tend or harvest to reap. When he returned from the wilderness he would not say who he had seen there or what he had done. And she remembered the charming child he had been, the one who would reach his little hand out for hers and show her a lizard he had seen, or a new fern, and she wondered when she had lost him.

Then one day, a week had passed, then two, and he did not return. For a month or two she thought he had died out there. In her dreams the scorpion returned, or its parent to exact vengeance on her son for her murder of its offspring. Her hand ached in its old wound and she thought perhaps it was a sign.

She and Yosef quarreled about it.

“Why were you always so hard with him?” she would say, and although she knew in her heart that there was no answer here, she could not stop. “Why could you never show him kindness?”

“He needed less kindness from you, woman! He needed to be taught to be a man, instead of you constantly keeping him near, mothering him!”

“I am his mother. What else should I have done?”

And Yosef made that disgusted noise he kept specially for arguments he knew he could not win with her.

She saw Yosef one day talking closely with the daughter of Ramatel, the blacksmith, a tall, well-built girl, but at that time she thought little of it. Her mind was occupied with chewing over Yehoshuah and what had become of him and whether she would ever hear from him or see him again, or if he had died somewhere out there in the desert and the wolves had had his bones.

And then she heard a tale from a merchant that he had been seen in Kfar Nachum, and he was preaching and working wonders like a holy man. And they said another thing. They said he was out of his mind.

And it is evening, and it is morning. And it is time to prepare for the Sabbath. She washes herself and the children. She bakes bread for today and for tomorrow. Just before sunset, she lights the oil lamps which will burn through the night and makes the blessing. And it is Friday morning, and it is Friday evening. The Sabbath day.

The boy Gidon goes to pray with the men in Ephrayim’s field. She and the small children go to sit in the long barn and sing the women’s songs welcoming the Sabbath. They share out bread and wine and make the blessings on it. They drink the sweet wine made in years when they were young, the jars sealed with wax by their fathers, keeping in those long-ago summers until this day.

Some of the women ask about Gidon. Not just, like Nechemiah’s wife, because they have a daughter who has taken an interest in him. They have heard something. The news has come that there was a small rising in Yaffo several months ago, in the autumn. A man appeared claiming to be the rightful king of Judea, the son of the king the Romans slew. He had followers, only two or three hundred, but they tried to break into the armory. The soldiers quashed the rebellion easily enough, but the man himself, along with several of his most important followers, had escaped.

Does she think…Gidon was from Yaffo, they knew, does she think that he might be one of those men?

She shakes her head.

“He is what he says he is: a fool, not a liar.”

Rahav puts a thin arm around her shoulder and hugs her.

“We still mourn with you.”

Rahav kisses the side of Miryam’s head. She’s a kind soul, especially with a glass of warm fragrant wine in her.

It’s Batchamsa who introduces a note of caution.

“They’re looking, though,” she says. “They’ve sent out armed men as far as S’de Raphael.”

“They won’t come this far north,” says Rahav, “not for a fugitive from Yaffo.”

“They might,” says Batchamsa. “They just keep looking.”

Rahav shakes her head. “One of his own people will betray him. They always do when they get scared or hungry and want to come home. In a month they’ll have found him in a cave near Yaffo and that’ll be the end of it.”

Rahav does not say the part in the middle, Miryam notes. She does not say, “They’ll find him and then they’ll kill him and that’ll be the end of it.” Miryam supposes that this is Rahav’s kindness.

She finds she feels a little protective of Gidon.

In the evening, they eat with her brother Shmuel’s family. His wife has made soup and roast goat leg with wild garlic. Gidon eats with them. The village’s decision to treat him as an imbecile has faded. He has done good work on Miryam’s land. Those who work deserve to eat.

Shmuel sets in on him again, saying,

“But you will return to Yaffo in the spring, yes? Before Passover?”

Gidon shifts his shoulders awkwardly. He is less comfortable here than he is with her alone. He does not talk so readily.

“I might stay here,” he says, and then seems about to say something more, but falls silent.

“He has been useful with the goats,” she says. “Iov can never bring them all in. We lost two over the winter. Gidon gathers them safely in.”

Shmuel nods and takes more bread and goat covered in the thick paste of herbs and olive oil. Her brother is the patriarch now, the one who makes the decisions since her husband has gone. But he’s not an unkind man. He dips his bread into the green oil and swallows it, leaving a few emerald flecks in his beard.

“But you’ll tell me when you get tired of him, yes?” he says, then grins widely, “so we can send him on his way with courtesy, of course.”

They said he was out of his mind. This, they came to tell her. The sympathetic women from the villages nearby came, when they passed through for market day. “Passing through” was what they said, though Natzaret was a mile or more out of their way. People who had not visited her for five years came to tell her that her son was mad. Just as a kindness.

He had desecrated the Temple, they said, and she could not believe it. He had loved going to the Temple as a boy, buying the cake for a meal offering in the outer courtyard and accompanying the sacrifice.