Damascus Read online

  But though he prays, keeping faith with the words of the ancients and the prophets, his ears are sharp and catch every word, in both Syrian and Greek. Smell, touch, all is alive in him. This must be a gift of the light. They live as a family but they are not blood: their roots spread out of this crowded city, stretching across to the mountains of Anatolia, to the Phoenician sea and even into the wild sand ocean of Arabia. Their faces, the differing shapes of their noses and eyes, the varied shades of hair and skin, the markings on their palms and wrists; they are every tribe of the world.

  Saul is startled to hear that part of their belief is that there will be no property and no one wealthier than another—that all that they earn is distributed in common, even to the slaves.

  ‘It is one of Yeshua’s commandments.’ Ananias speaks as though he can read Saul’s thoughts. He gestures around the tiny room. ‘This is all we have and all we need. And all we have we share with one another. The Saviour said that the rich must give all they have to the poor. The kingdom of the Lord is all the treasure we need.’

  Saul bites his lip, his head bursting with suspicion and spite. He finds he can’t remember the words to a prayer he has recited a thousand times over his life. For the first time he feels he cannot trust this fool Ananias, this blasphemous Jew. Saul knows all about the ardour of the young and righteous, the rhetoric of fanatics and desert dwellers, how the Zealots think themselves better than he is. He has worked hard. His hands are torn and callused from the skins he has washed and dyed and stretched, from the canvases he has sewn. He is equal to any Zealot.

  Having broken from his prayers he finally speaks. ‘I have no money or possessions to share with you, sir. They were all stolen from me.’

  The nine around him are momentarily silent, before giving in to laughter. He finds himself laughing with them.

  Pup grins. ‘Uncle,’ he says, ‘we will clothe you and feed you.’ His eyes are blazing. ‘Uncle, we are full of love for you.’

  The roar in his ears is as loud as the world splitting asunder in the inferno of an earthquake. These Strangers, these disciples to insanity, they are full of love for him? For him? This weak flesh, this noxious heart, this conceited mind and despairing spirit? He searches every single one of their faces, but can find no cruelty or mockery in their laughter.

  There is noise in the street. The day is ending and a mob of drunks is staggering home after squandering their day’s earnings at the inns and brothels.

  One of the young women gets up and finds her sandals by the door. She uncovers her hair and it springs forth long and thick, dyed scarlet with henna. ‘I am sorry, sisters and brothers, I must return to the temple.’

  The circle breaks up as they stand to hug the young woman and bid her farewell. Saul is still sitting. She offers a kiss to Bathsheba which the old woman returns. The girl hesitates, then crouches and places a tender kiss on Saul’s bearded cheek. ‘Welcome, brother.’

  He watches her rush into the indigo of the coming night. The night that will cover drunkenness and brutality, the darkness that will hide lewdness and sin. This can’t be the Lord’s promised kingdom, he thinks. This is more madness.

  The two slaves are also preparing to return to their owners. But Bathsheba urges them all back to the circle.

  ‘Sit, sit,’ she commands. ‘Before you depart, let us pray for our sister, Ariadne. Let us pray that the Lord God, the only God, will give her courage to withstand the evil she has to endure as one betrothed to the temple of the idol Aphrodite the Cypriot Maiden.’

  Comprehension does not come immediately; it is as if the words must find their way through the ruins of his mind left behind by his sickness. But when it does, he is stricken. He knows the temple and the debauched deity that is worshipped there. A shiver runs through him. Ananias’s eyes are shut in prayer. Saul does not care. He attempts to rise, falls and crashes amongst the bowls and plates, upsetting the jug of wine. The rich red liquid flows over the rug like blood. As it might be. Blood of demons. Saul crawls over to Ananias and grabs the man’s heavy coarse tunic. He will throttle the man, he will destroy him.

  ‘She’s a whore? You let me eat and drink with a whore?’

  He remembers the fleeting kiss and claws at his cheek.

  He will crawl to Jerusalem on hands and knees, he will neither sleep nor eat until he arrives at the Temple on bloodied limbs. He will wash himself in the baths for an eternity. But even then, would that be enough?

  It is not Ananias who answers, it is Bathsheba. ‘And you, sir, have you never sinned?’

  Their insane vanity. The outrage of their insolence to the Lord. Everyone commits sins but not all do so wilfully, not all sit in judgement of others. He is right to hunt them, he is right to bring them to justice.

  Blasphemers, whores, procurers and law-breakers. Stone the whole fucking lot of them.

  He will not stay. This is not light, this is the emanations of Satan. He must escape. Pup tries to embrace him, his eyes an outpouring of grief. Saul musters his strength and shoves the boy away.

  On the street, twilight and freedom. He stumbles, he lurches, and at one point bumps into a man who angrily pushes him against a wall. But his weakened limbs and unsteady feet do not betray him. As his rage quietens and night gathers, he becomes aware that this part of the city is unknown to him. However, being lost is preferable to being at the mercy of the profaners. Saul decides he will walk till he finds a landmark or a site he recognises. He will walk till daylight if he has to. He will collapse and die in a dingy alleyway if he must.

  A young slave is making offerings to a stone idol. She hears his heavy tread and glances around. On seeing his face she screams and rushes back into a courtyard, banging shut the gate behind her, scattering the food offerings onto the ground. He must look like an ogre to have frightened her so. A mangy cat hisses from a wall, then leaps to the spilled food and feeds ravenously.

  Saul becomes aware of steps echoing behind his. He turns to faces the potential threat.

  A man emerges from the shadows.

  Weariness floods through Saul. ‘Leave me.’

  ‘I will guide you to wherever you need to go,’ Ananias replies. ‘Just let me see that you are safe. I won’t bother you.’

  Ananias walks in step behind him. The silence of night is only broken by the barking of dogs, the whispers and curses of the wretched as they prepare to sleep on the streets, and the quiet directions offered to Saul by the man who saved his life.

  When Saul reaches the meeting house gate, he turns back. There is only darkness and shadow.

  The courtyard of the meeting house is strewn with sleeping bodies, travelling Jewish labourers from the mountains and from the endless desert plains of Syria. He knocks on the door to the house and the young man who answers grimaces at the sight of Saul’s battered face.

  Saul offers a greeting and a blessing.

  The boy returns the greeting and repeats the blessing. Then he frowns. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘A room.’

  ‘Have you coin?’

  ‘I am Saul, son of Judah, born in Tarsus and now a resident of David’s city.’

  The young man sniffs, unmoved. ‘I asked, have you coin? If not, you’re welcome to find a bed in the yard.’

  He thinks I’m a beggar or a madman, Saul thinks. He peers over the youth’s shoulder into the long hall where men sit eating at long tables. Above the din and laughter he can hear the intonations of prayer.

  ‘I’m a leatherworker and a tentmaker,’ he says quickly. ‘Is Joseph, son of Samuel, here, a brother from Antioch? He will vouch for me.’

  The youth doesn’t reply and slams shut the door.

  Saul is grateful that the evening air is warm. He only has what he wears: the tunic given to him by the profaners. Of course the youth won’t return—he thinks Saul is a lunatic, a beggar or a sick wretch. Saul determines to ask for mercy and a blanket. He can find a bed on the stone.

  But the door opens and Joseph is standing there
, his face flushed and his beard stained from wine. He recoils in shock, then grabs Saul in a rough hug. ‘Brother,’ he roars, ‘what the devil happened to you?’

  There is food, sanctified food, there are cheeses and yogurt, roasted turnips and salted meats, there is bread and date paste. With his mouth full and spitting crumbs, Saul tells his friend about the beating he’d been given, and how Silas stole everything and left him to die and rot on the desert road. Joseph listens intently, cutting slices of cheese and fruit for his friend and filling Saul’s cup with wine as he speaks. Finally Saul finishes both story and meal, wiping the oil from his mouth and pushing his plate to one side.

  Joseph raises his cup. ‘The Lord is great, friend, the Lord has saved you.’

  Saul too raises his cup. ‘The Lord is great.’ He looks across the crowded hall at the faces illuminated by the flickering lanterns.

  Joseph shakes his head. ‘No one has seen Silas—he hasn’t been at the markets. We thought that bandits had got you both.’

  He grabs Saul’s hand, brings it to his own chest. ‘I was going to send word to Jerusalem, friend, I swear. I was certain that you had been murdered.’

  Saul can feel the heart beating within his friend’s broad chest.

  Joseph drops his hand and winks, leering. ‘You were never pretty, Saul, not even as a boy. But now they have really made you a monster.’ He guffaws and burps, gesturing for more wine.

  Saul, his head already spinning, his stomach full, cautions his friend.

  ‘I’m paying, Saul. Eat! Drink! You have come back from the dead, friend.’

  Joseph slings his arm around Saul’s shoulders, eyes narrowing. ‘You were supposed to get here on Sabbath eve fourteen days ago and it’s Sabbath again tomorrow.’ He raises his chin, clicks his tongue, pulling at Saul’s robe. ‘Where were you all those days? Who nursed your wounds?’

  Should he lie? Above their heads a torch illuminates the rough-hewn stones of the meeting hall. He reads on them in their ancient tongue the commandments received by Moses the Lawgiver, blessed into eternity.

  ‘I was found by a fellow Jew. His name is Ananias, son of Nathaniel.’

  ‘The stonemason?’

  Saul feels ashamed. In all the time he spent in Ananias’s care he had not once asked of his work, or of what his life was outside those small rooms filled with a family who were not blood.

  Tables and benches are being moved in preparation for the last of the prayers. Already some are washing their faces and necks out of the water troughs that runs along the far wall of the hall.

  Joseph takes a large swig and empties his cup. ‘He is a good man. You are not the first he’s rescued.’

  Saul gets up. He needs to be cleansed, to kneel and pray.

  Joseph is tracing a circle on the surface of the table, following the recess of the grain. ‘Don’t witness against him.’

  Saul flinches. ‘I don’t bear false witness against anyone.’

  Joseph nods, his finger still circling the groove. ‘I dare say you don’t, friend, but it is no secret you receive money for the information you give to the priests.’

  Joseph raps loudly on the wood. His lips are against Saul’s ear. ‘Ananias is deluded. He believes in the atrocious lie that our Saviour was some poor bastard the Roman swine nailed to their crosses.’ Even in here his friend has to whisper the last of those words. Then, more loudly and firmly: ‘But he saved your life.’

  Fatigue is sewn into his bones, into every part of him. But he cannot sleep. In the low-ceilinged room where he lies next to Joseph, amidst a large mob of sleeping men, he can’t summon forgetfulness. He recalls the hands that tended the wounds and cleaned his filthy body. And as he remembers that tenderness, he stirs, his body rubbing against another man. Lust bursts within him, a flame that destroys sleep. The moon shines its beams through the window, the open shutters allowing the faintest hint of a breeze. But that light is not the light he is longing for. It neither warms nor comforts; it offers neither peace nor bliss.

  Saul starts working for Joseph, slowly recovering to his previous proficiency and vigour in working and stitching the hides. He stinks of it, the labour and the fluids. His mind also becomes clear of the fog brought on by his beating and his illness, healing from the urgency and exhaustion of work but also through what it takes to barter in the marketplace. He works for Joseph and Gilead and for a Stranger named Anaxis who fears the Lord and allows his Judean workers to observe the Sabbath. Saul feels that he is a man again and that he has fully returned to himself. Until that morning when he stepped over a puddle and looked down to behold his reflection: the burst of purple and the crisscross of lesions over what was once an eye.

  He sends a message to his family that he is alive and well and working to soon buy a new mule, to resume his trade and again be able to buy offerings for sacrifice to the Temple. In the same message he asks Ebron to send word to the Roman prefect in the Greek city of the crimes of Silas and the two men they hired. Tell them, he instructs, that a servant of Rome was violated near Damascus; remind them that my father’s father was granted freedom and made a Roman by dispensation of the great Caesar Pompey. Urge them, beseech them, to see that justice is done and that Silas is never again to set foot in Jerusalem. And there is one thing that he does not dare say to the scribe he has hired, but he knows that Ebron will read his message and will understand: if Silas dares return, any one of our house has the right to draw a blade across his treacherous neck.

  He has done what needs to be done. Soon he will have enough coin to rent a bed for himself and not rely on the cold planks and crowded rooms of the meeting house of the Damascan Jews. He is gaining strength and all is well. Thanks be to the Lord.

  But he is not at peace. The merchants who employ him never stop complaining about their devious clients, all of whom are out to swindle and to thieve. They mistreat and hit the boys they pay to fetch and carry the skins and rugs. They resent every coin they have to pay and they demand subservience and unceasing loyalty in return for the meagre diet and stone floor they give to them. Have they always been like that? Had he been blind to their venality in the past? Saul has seen where the poor lads sleep: a stone slab at the back of the market stalls, a narrow trench overflowing with their shit and piss, the whole tiny cell beset by flies in the daylight and the pricking of mosquitoes by night.

  The jokes and camaraderie of his fellow labourers also weary him. Endless boring stories, their pathetic fantasies about a slave girl’s buttocks or a whore’s mouth. He knows he comes across as surly, loathsomely pious in his constant prayer and his abstention from drunkenness and rutting. What they don’t see is his blind terror that if he gives in to the slightest pleasure, he will not be able to stop—there is no abomination he will not surrender to. Such is the darkness to which he feels bound.

  One night as he lies sleepless, in constant silent prayer to banish the demons that claw at him, he hears a cry of shattering distress. He rises, trips over the sleeping bodies, and makes his way out to the courtyard. The yard is strewn with bodies, as if after a calamitous battle. Saul peers into the tepid moonlight. A young lad, a travelling beggar boy, is crying in his sleep. Saul picks his way carefully across the sleeping bodies till he reaches the crying boy, his frame dreadfully thin, his limbs covered with the sores of a growing sickness. Saul takes the boy into his arms, softly kisses his damp forehead, whispers to him a song of David. The boy, lulled, grateful, begins nodding towards sleep, his small fingers unfurling, his sobs weakening. Saul keeps up his hushed singing until a man lurches upright and peers over the sleeping forms. He sees Saul embracing the boy. He scowls in disgust and laughs coarsely. ‘If you want to pound that beggar boy’s arse, do it outside.’ He spits, then rolls over back into sleep.

  Saul cannot control his fury. It is as if his anger has taken whatever good remained in him, whatever he’d retained of the light. He feels he will never be in light again. He lies next to the boy, stricken by his own shame, mortified by his animal
hatred. He lies awake till dawn.

  A third Sabbath passes and then another. With nightfall, the men feast. They only look up when they hear the rich tone of a kithara being strummed; the reverberating pounding of a drum; voices in beautiful harmony. Musicians have gathered in the courtyard.

  The men stream out into the yard, amongst the beggars and amongst the poor, drawn by the sweetness of the singer’s melodious voice and by the intoxicating savagery of the music. The men dance and Saul too is dancing, his arms aloft and his body swaying, his feet leaping within the circle, a circle within a circle that gathers speed and movement as their bodies twirl and shake and the men open their throats, a song of the sea and of nets and fish and of nights alone on a craft on still and calm waters. And even though Saul doesn’t know the song, the song knows him and he too raises his head to the night and to the stars and he too is singing a song of the sea and of fishing and of nights on calm waters and within the circle of gathering strength and movement the light from the moon broadens and deepens and it is no longer the beam of that tender sphere but a light beyond, a light that has slashed the vault of the sky and spilled out of the heavens and Saul is in joy. Saul is dancing and singing and in joy. Next to him a giant, a tall man with an amber beard, raises his hands and claps. ‘Keep singing, lads,’ he urges. ‘Keep singing your Galilean song.’ And there, still part of the circle within the circle, mesmerised by the strength and movement of the dance, his hands still high in the air and his feet still stamping, Saul is filled by light and knowledge and understands what he has to do.