The Weeping Chamber Read online

  After all, no place was far from another here in the wealthy upper quarters of Jerusalem. Pascal’s mansion lay roughly halfway between the palace of Caiaphas the high priest and Herod’s palace, where the Roman governor of Judea sequestered himself when he stayed in the city.

  And, as best as I can guess from what I later learned from a bowlegged Greek servant, at some time during my thoughts, Caiaphas himself must have passed nearby on the street—in secrecy, in darkness, without guards—on his way to see a man named Pontius Pilate.

  **

  Caiaphas waited with concealed impatience in the warm room of the bathhouse in Herod’s palace. He knew exactly why Pontius Pilate had chosen the location for this meeting—the heated, moist air made waiting uncomfortable for anyone dressed in full clothing. Furthermore, Pilate constantly wanted it clear that Rome ruled; his possession of the palace built by Herod the Great said it much more eloquently and pervasively than words. Finally, Pontius Pilate enjoyed lording his physical prowess over others.

  The floor and walls of the warm room were tiled with exquisite mosaics, and an elegant low table stood against the far wall. Other than that, the room was empty. Heavy grunts and groans from the hot room and the roar of the furnace below that heated water to steam was all that distracted Caiaphas from his thoughts.

  Caiaphas knew why the location was chosen but not why the meeting had been called, nor the hour for it. His spies, who informed him of every public move made by Pilate as well as most of his private ones, had told Caiaphas nothing unusual. What could be so important that Pilate did not wait until morning?

  Fifteen minutes passed. His clothing grew heavy from moisture. To torment him more, his palate began to click with dryness, and the insides of his thighs began to itch with the beginning of a rash.

  Still, he had enough discipline to hold himself tall and rigid as the grunts and groans continued just out of sight. The barbarians spent too much time in the hedonistic pleasure of muscle massage and skin scraping.

  The first indication that Pilate was ready came when his servant, a large bowlegged Greek, stepped out of the hot room and moved past Caiaphas. Pontius Pilate arrived moments later with a towel wrapped loosely around his lower belly and legs. He held the towel with his left hand, making no effort to hide the stubs of his first two fingers, each long ago sheared at the first knuckle and healed like blunt sausages.

  “So,” Pilate said. He looked Caiaphas up and down, making it obvious that his soldier’s judgment found Caiaphas utterly weak.

  Pontius Pilate was wide and thick, almost totally dark with chest and stomach hair beaded with water droplets. Long, narrow scars—sword and spear—covered his upper arms and shoulders. His gleaming red face held full lips beneath a nose crooked from a poorly healed break. The hair that crowned his head formed a bowl in classical Roman cut.

  Caiaphas hated Pilate for his smug reliance on the bearlike power of a middle-aged body not yet soft from age. Caiaphas hated as well the intimacy of standing in the presence of a nearly naked man. Most of all, Caiaphas hated the feeling of physical inferiority and weakness that Pilate inspired in him.

  “So, High Priest,” Pilate said, “Passover is upon us. Once again, the Jews celebrate a miracle that let them cast off the shackles of subjection to a world power.”

  Caiaphas felt the first wave of dizziness overcome him. Standing in the heat had taken its toll.

  “Yet here you are,” Pontius continued, “in shackles again. Roman shackles.”

  The servant returned carrying a heated pot of oil in a thick towel.

  Pontius Pilate dropped his own towel and smirked at Caiaphas’s stony, straight-ahead look. He walked to the table, settled on his belly, and allowed the servant to begin oiling the skin of his back.

  “Isn’t it wonderful to be enemies?” Pilate said. “We can trust that we distrust. We can love our hatreds. Each side knows where the other stands because each side watches the other as surely as if they were lovers.”

  In the dizzying heat, Caiaphas had to widen his stance to keep his balance.

  “And this is what I know,” Pilate said. “A few years ago, when a delegation of Jews came to Caesarea to protest the military insignias above the temple in Antonia, you were not among them. They were prepared to die before leaving, yet you, their religious leader, conveniently remained in Jerusalem.”

  Pilate hummed with pleasure for a few moments as the servant continued to knead oil onto his broad muscles.

  “I know, too, that you and I agreed to have the Romans build an aqueduct into Jerusalem with temple funds,” Pilate said, “and that once it was built, you then made it appear to the populace that we had robbed the temple.”

  Pilate closed his eyes. “And since then, I know that you sent word to Tiberius, going over my head, to protest the gold shields that honored him, even though they were here in the hall of this palace, not within the temple where I could understand any claims of sacrilege.”

  Pilate opened his eyes again. “As I see it, you do not fight openly as an honorable soldier, but hidden, as a snake in the reeds.”

  “I doubt you requested my presence at this hour to go over old history that reflects more your poor judgment than any failings of my own actions.” Caiaphas allowed a smirk to rest on his own face. There had been rumors of a letter from Tiberius, the unpredictable dictator from Rome. “I suspect, if anything, you are an honorable soldier about to lose your position as governor if news of any more Judean disturbances reaches your beloved Tiberius. And because of that, you need help to keep the peace.”

  By Pilate’s sudden, rigid silence Caiaphas realized his jibe had hit the mark.

  Pilate recovered, but too late. “Isn’t hatred refreshing? Who would have thought a dried-up old Jew could harbor the passion that you do. Let us keep this hatred out in the open, where it fools no one.”

  “Why did you call me here?” Caiaphas asked. “Surely not to establish that I need you. Or you me. We have known that for years. It seems to work rather well, as long as we each stay out of the other’s way.”

  “Then we shall speak plainly,” Pilate said. “I have brought in extra garrisons of soldiers for the Passover. See that I need not bring them into use.”

  “What could you possibly imagine as trouble?”

  “Anything that involves Jews,” Pilate snapped. “Let me repeat myself. I want no trouble. Do you understand?”

  Caiaphas understood. The letter from Tiberius was more than rumor. Pilate could afford no more trouble, or he would be recalled in shame to Rome. And as more than a rumor, it gave Caiaphas the leverage he needed in future dealings with Pilate.

  The smile that played at the corners of Caiaphas’s mouth was not directed at Pilate but against another. Yeshua.

  Caiaphas had his betrayer. Now he had the power to direct Pilate’s judgment.

  Thus armed, a man of hate could dream of triumph against the man of love.

  Chapter Thirty-four

  My dearest love,

  The stylus is now in my hand. However, just moments ago I was not thinking of words to send you but of holding yesterday’s letter near a candle flame. By burning it, I would have kept you from hearing how far I have fallen in the seemingly hopeless pursuit of reclaiming our lives.

  But I promised you my honesty. That commitment kept me from thrusting the scroll into the flame. So, by the time a servant reads you this letter, you will know that in the dark of the previous night, I had actually wondered if the Messiah was among us. I had actually hoped He might heal Vashti.

  Now I have lost that hope. He is only an ordinary man, betrayed in squalid circumstance, about to die an insignificant death.

  It probably matters little to our circumstances. If I am promising honesty, I must admit to you—and to myself—that I am not sure that I could have found my way back to you, even had He restored Vashti’s legs.

  I could probably rightly say that your unspoken blame has been a wall between us since the fire. It is a wall,
I believe now, I could have climbed if not for the burden I dared not share.

  I have never been unfaithful to you. But I imagine it is no different for a husband who has strayed. His wife may never know of the infidelity, but for the man it is a secret of shame that festers and drives him away in hundreds of small ways.

  As too is my burden. How could I allow you to love me when I hated myself? So I allowed the little love that remained between us to be slowly destroyed.

  I know I cannot find your love.

  I know I cannot hope in the Messiah.

  Finally, because I foolishly pursued that hope, I cannot expect to sell my estates to Pascal as I had planned.

  What do I have left?

  Nothing.

  The daughter who once sang loving lullabies to me, the daughter who once whispered silly things in my ear—she now screams with agony and will not even meet my eyes when I attempt to comfort her.

  The son who once climbed my back and shouted with glee, the son who once followed me into the shops, imitating my every move—he is now cold and still and alone in a tomb.

  And you? All I have are my memories. Once sweet, and now more bitter because of the sweetness I shall never taste again.

  I have no peace.

  Today I begin the final steps to reclaim peace. Not in pursuit of a charlatan messiah. But through my own efforts.

  You are my love. I have asked before and I ask again: Pray for me. Against the chance that there is no God, I must hold the chance that there is. It cannot hurt for you to place your heart before Him on my behalf. If there is no one to listen, neither of us has lost anything. Because we cannot lose any more than what we already have lost.

  And for what we have lost, I will pay the price to set us both free.

  Your Simeon

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Shortly after the dawn’s trumpets called the city to prayer, I began to walk the streets, paying little attention to where my feet took me. Because I had long since chosen to deny myself wine as escape, and because I could not sleep and thus find refuge from myself, it seemed my only relief came in movement.

  It was poor relief.

  I took no pleasure in the beauty of the soft blue sky above, scrubbed clear by the rain that had passed through the mountains. Lungfuls of the morning’s cool air did not invigorate my blood.

  As for my other senses, food was tasteless paste. The thought of fleshly pleasures left me cold; no woman’s embrace but my wife’s mattered, and even if I returned to her, she would never offer me open arms.

  Despair congealed around my heart.

  So I walked.

  I descended from my cousin’s mansion in the upper quarters. I crossed over the aqueduct that marked the lower boundary of the wealthy and restlessly wandered into the crowded filth of the lower city, barely aware of the pain of those hunched in doorways or limping through tiny alleys with staggering loads on their backs.

  My feet kept me in motion. I reached the main street of the lower quarter. Had I turned left, I would have passed the temple, then the Roman fortress on its northwest corner. Farther on stood the blacksmith shops, the wool shops, the clothes market near the underground quarries at the north end of the city.

  I did not make a conscious decision to turn right, but I moved slowly in the direction of the Siloam Pool. Fifteen or twenty minutes later, I reached the end of a street where the outer city wall abruptly blocked my progress. Built for defense, it was easily higher than the flat-roofed houses it contained in this corner of Jerusalem, wide enough that a horse could pull a cart along its top edge.

  I stared at the heavy stones for several minutes.

  With a grim smile, I realized I had indeed found my destination. A set of narrow, rough steps jutted out from the wall, leading to the top. I climbed, and since the outer edge had no support rails, I leaned for balance against the wall to guard against a painful fall. That, considering my intentions, struck me as ironic.

  From the top of the wall I surveyed the breathtaking drop down the sheer cliff of the Kidron Valley. A half mile to my left was the temple, towering over the poverty within its shadows. Ahead and across the valley stood the Mount of Olives, dark against the rising sun behind it.

  But it was the drop that held my attention.

  Idly, I kicked a small rock into the vast emptiness. It fell with the swiftness I expected, but as it gained distance, it seemed to float until finally, a dozen heartbeats later, it clattered off the boulders below.

  That could be me, I thought. In that short a time, I could have total escape from my miserable life. With a slight flex of my legs and the small price of the brief flash of a smashed skull, I could leave behind all that weighed my soul.

  How badly did I want to live? Less than a day before, my fury against the thieves had shown me the spark was bright.

  Yet . . .

  I saw again the oil spilled across my daughter’s legs and the snakelike flame licking the path of the oil. I saw again my son’s body, the fragment of cloth clutched in his small hand.

  I swayed on the edge of the wall with my arms lifted against the breeze.

  Yes, I thought. I could do it. I could step out into the emptiness and welcome my death as the air tore at my robe and the boulders rushed toward me.

  I might find peace.

  Soon.

  First, I needed to ensure that Jaala and Vashti would not become paupers in the wake of my departure. If Pascal would not purchase my estates while I was alive, he would find it easily possible after my death. Before taking my life, I needed to make arrangements to protect my wife and daughter.

  I moved away from the wall, having found a peace of sorts.

  My figure had been outlined against the sky, but it is fanciful to think that it would have drawn the attention of thirteen men in their place of refuge across the valley.

  Up there, I was as unaware of them as they were of me. Events would follow later that compelled me to learn what I could about Yeshua and His movements that day.

  **

  They rested in a garden at the base of the Mount of Olives.

  The walls of the garden contained a hundred gnarled, ancient olive trees—ten rows of ten in a rough square spaced several paces apart, each with a gray, weathered trunk double the thickness of a man’s body and hardly taller than double a man’s reach. From the massive trunks, webs of low, wide-spreading branches reached out, shading the garden with the delicate patterns of their tendrils of new shoots and curls of new green leaves.

  Gethsemane. Nearby residents called it the “garden of the oil press.” It was a garden in the traditional sense as well, for while its owner made profit from the olive oil he sold for cooking and lamp fuel, he saw no reason to leave the open ground surrounding the trees barren and had planted small fruit trees and flowering shrubs. Later in the heat of the year, with everything in bloom, it would be a medicine of peace to sit there in the honeysuckled sweetness of an early morning.

  As it was still early, however, the peace of the garden came not from blossoms but from the timeless dignity of the scarred solidness of the olive trees, the new grass, the still air, and the distant burbling of the Kidron.

  Here, Yeshua rested with His disciples. Nearby, tied by a halter to a low-hanging branch of an olive tree, the white lamb that Judas had purchased the day before tugged at the grass, unmindful of the men nearby.

  All reclined against the tree trunks—but one.

  Judas. He had been walking the garden ever since the disciples had arrived following their early meal of leavened bread.

  He was thirty pieces of silver richer, but there remained the problem of earning that silver. He had to arrange a time and location where the authorities could arrest Yeshua.

  This was no easy matter. Worried about riots, the chief priests had instructed Judas that it must be a private place.

  This garden and this morning, of course, would have been perfect. But if Judas left now, there was no certainty that Yeshua and the
others would still be in the garden when the religious authorities arrived.

  No, Judas needed to know a time and place in advance. Especially since that would allow Judas to be among the disciples when the authorities appeared, leaving him unsuspected as the betrayer.

  But, Judas asked himself again and again, how can I know where Yeshua will be?

  When the solution struck Judas, it was so obvious that he smiled. He hid his urgency as he walked toward Yeshua, who leaned comfortably against a tree, smiling, eyes closed, face tilted to the sun.

  As Judas’s shadow fell upon Yeshua, the teacher opened His eyes.

  “We must begin to prepare for the Passover supper,” Judas said. “As You know, room is scarce in the city. Let me tend to our arrangements.”

  This was the solution. If Judas knew where they were going to share the Passover meal, he could tell the priests when and where to expect to find Yeshua.

  At the question, nothing about Yeshua’s expression changed, but slowly, tears filled His eyes as He looked wordlessly at Judas.

  Judas felt an unspoken reproach. Had the impossible happened? Had someone seen him enter the palace of the high priest? Had someone drawn the easy conclusion and informed Yeshua? Or was his own conscience so plain upon his face?

  A black shivering void swept through Judas. A void brought on by his urgency to betray and by the fear of the magnitude of that betrayal. A void brought on by his possible failure. And by his possible success. Judas tried to cover his cold dizziness by pushing the conversation.

  “I am the keeper of the common purse,” Judas said. He had planned his arguments. He hoped his voice didn’t tremble. “And I know how important this Passover supper is to—”

  “No.” Yeshua shook His head at Judas. His voice was quiet. The other disciples would not overhear. “Yesterday, you went into the city and purchased the lamb. You have already done enough.”

  “You have already done enough.” Should he look for a double meaning in the teacher’s words?