Saul gazed at him with the blank and unblinking eyes of a statue, and so Hillel thought he had not heard until he said in that same rough and stammering voice, “It was that they died for nothing that is frightful, and that no one cared that they died nor for what they died!”
Rabban Gamaliel’s face changed at once and became as stern iron.
“And who informed you of that, Saul ben Hillel? Who whispered things in your ears? Has God confided to you in secret the reason a babe dies in his mother’s arms or a child is torn in the jaws of a wild beast or a woman is bereft of her husband or a man of his wife? Has He also imparted to you the knowledge that they died for nothing, that no one cared that they died? Is the soul of man so valueless to God that He is unaware of its passing? He who created it? You have made of God a Being less worthy than the lowest man, a Being as mindless as a beast, and as uncaring!”
Hillel drew in his breath, for these were terrible words from the lips of Rabban Gamaliel and it seemed to the father that the echo of Sinai was in them, and the rebuke, and Hillel could hardly refrain from falling on his face before his friend in abject shame and contrition.
“No man,” said Gamaliel, “dies in vain for any just cause, though his name may be forgotten, and he is lowly and despised. God keeps accounts of a man’s intentions.”
He smiled ruefully. “Even if those intentions are not God’s. It is enough for Him that they were done in His Holy Name, and in love for Him, and so I say that those youths are happier than we.”
It was then, to Hillel’s crushing pity, that Saul burst into tears and covered his face with his hands and shook from head to foot. Saul cried aloud, as he had cried before, in the words of Job, “‘Oh, that I might know where to find Him!’”
He turned and fled, despite Hillel’s attempt to restrain him. Gamaliel rose, and came to his friend and embraced him tenderly.
“Weep not, Hillel ben Borush. Saul weeps for himself, and it is a sacred weeping, for I heard his words, and he is the first youth I have known who cried out in them in such anguish. My heart is exalted with a mysterious joy. I have taught thousands of youths. God has spoken to my soul. I will teach your son. Send him to me in two years, in Jerusalem. There is the sign of God on his forehead, given to few to see, but I have seen it, and though his destiny is obscure to me as yet I know it will be for the greater glory of God, blessed be His Name. His name is on the holy scrolls of Israel.” The Rabban’s voice was like a trumpet, raising echoes.
Hillel was comforted. He dropped his head to his friend’s shoulder and was not ashamed of his tears. He had been bereft and someone had filled his hands with gifts.
Chapter 13
SAUL went to his bedroom as to a refuge, a tomb. The sharp lines of the rain at the window reflected themselves on the pale gleaming walls and the air was alive with thunderous sound. It was cold in the cubiculum and drafty and Saul shivered and looked about him vaguely. He went to the window and stared out, and he saw the yellow stone of the courtyard below his window, wet and running with water and vaguely polished, and the turtle doves which were bustling upon it, and he could hear the dolorous dripping and slashing of the rain. Beyond the courtyard was a clump of dark cypresses, bending in the wind, and beyond them a wall of the same yellow stone of the courtyard on which fluttered the last tattered purple flowers of the dead summer. The dull gray sky boiled and rushed as pursued, or as if caught in a whirlpool.
Desolation overcame Saul. His mind remained empty of thoughts for his emotions were too dolorous and anguished. His shivering became stronger. He sat on the bed and pulled a fur rug about his shoulders and his red head bent until his chin touched his chest. A powerful longing for death shook him. It seemed to him that he did not possess organs within the flesh of his body any longer. He was one stony and churning pain, too deep for tears or sound, and he did not know the full reason for his suffering.
Then he was asleep on the bed and the evening came and the window turned black and the bedroom sank into deep shadow and it was night.
He began to dream. He was once again on the yellow rubble and sand and dust of the fearful spot beyond the Damascus Gate, and he was there to mourn and weep. But only one cross stood there, and it was taller and wider than the others he had seen and it loomed against a murky sky as red as blood and trembling with flame. There were men there, Roman soldiers, and the sound of lamenting, but Saul did not heed them. His whole attention was fixed on the man who hung on the cross, with the dull blood streaming from his hands and feet. The light, though crimson, was not strong enough to see all details, but it came to Saul that the man’s brow was bleeding also in many small places, yet Saul could not see what was causing this phenomenon.
Then Saul perceived that the man on this gigantic cross was the unknown poor workman or peasant from the provinces who had looked at him with such intense penetration in the marketplace, and who had walked among the dying victims in this very spot, comforting them, only a few hours before.
An awesome silence lay on this desolate place which was, and yet was not, the familiar place of execution. There was no sound of chanting, no voice lifted in consolation and hope and promise, no comforter. The Roman soldiers were like a graven mass of dark stone huddled together, and they did not move, and it was as if they were amorphous statues dwindled and attenuated against that doomful and bloody sky. But the cross and the crucified appeared to fill all the heavens, to rise from the four corners of the earth, human yet enormous, portentous and majestic, yet appalling. It came to Saul that something of direful portent had been done in this place, and yet something greatly holy and that the earth had moved from her place and had been lifted up.
Saul could not stir an arm or move a leg. He could not turn away his gaze from the man on the cross. It was as if he had been turned to iron. He was only sight and hearing, and not flesh.
The crucified had large limbs as white as moonlight, on which the red shadow of the sky shook and moved in ripples. His golden beard and hair were dappled with blood. He appeared to sweat blood. There was a wound in his side, and that, too, bled slowly and steadily. But his face was calm and most beautiful and reflective, as if he were alone and in some ineffable peace beyond the understanding of men. His ribs arched against his pale skin, and he sagged upon his cross, yet he uttered no word at all.
Saul thought that his heart, encased in the paralyzed metal that had replaced his flesh, would burst with grief and terror, and he did not know why, for this man was a stranger, no more important or valuable or tortured than those who had died before him in this place. Saul asked in himself, Why has he been executed? And there was no answer.
It was then that the man lifted his fallen head and looked fully at Saul, who seemed not to be standing on the earth but some little distance above it, so that his and the man’s face were level with each other’s, yet at a considerable space. The man’s face was illuminated, but the light seemed to come from within and not from that calamitous sky. Its radiance increased, and the blue eyes enlarged so that at last Saul saw nothing but those eyes and the immense depths of them, as if they had looked upon endless ages and would look on endless more, and had known eternity.
Then there was a great sound as if the sky had cracked, and the cross and the man were enfolded, as it were, in a shell, the carapace of a tremendous seed, and the ground opened and the cross and the crucified descended into the black tomb. To the very last, until the earth closed over them, the eyes looked upon Saul in recognition and in love. Then there was nothing but that place, and even the soldiers had vanished and the dim lamentation had ceased.
The bloody light of the sky had faded. A soft gray darkness lay over all things. Suddenly birds were singing, and in the east the sky turned aureate and streamers of scarlet raced toward the zenith, and there was a rustling like a mighty wind on the earth. Saul saw, with incredulity, that boundless sprouts of green grain were rising from the earth, rushing to fulfillment, to fruition as the world became light with a new dawn
. From moment to moment, the grain sprang exuberantly from the ground, whispering, murmuring, ripening, until a vast and horizonless plain spread before Saul covered with wheat, and it rippled like a glittering gilded sea under the sun and the scent of it was rich and swooning.
Saul, all at once, lost his grief and despair and he looked at the infinitude of grain with exultation and rejoicing, as if from death and sorrow life had been resurrected to feed all men—from the giant seed which had fallen into the earth and had been buried within it.
He heard a tumult of voices and young men appeared, bare of foot and humble of station, with their robes lifted about their sun-darkened legs and the hems pushed into their rope girdles. Their heads were covered with coarse cloth, which protected their necks, but their beards blew in the warm and shining wind. They carried scythes in their hands.
They stood below Saul and contemplated the sea of grain, and then Saul saw that they were few in number, and their bodies and their arms and scythes were puny before that vastness awaiting them.
Saul was seized with a passion of impatience. He called out to the men, “Give me a scythe, also, that I may cut the grain with you before it is night and the winter is on the land!”
But the men did not turn their heads nor appear to hear him. They conferred together. They looked at the grain, swollen with life and promise, and they were only little men and this was a task for giants.
Then Saul heard that powerful and familiar voice he had heard before: “The harvest is great, but the laborers are few!”
Saul, in a frenzy and fever of impatience and desire cried out again, “Give me a scythe, also!”
The men had heard him and they turned and looked up at him with troubled expressions and he saw their dark and distressful eyes. Then one came to him and reached up and put a scythe in his hand, and they suddenly smiled upon him and said, “Come!”
But he could not move. He struggled in the iron which was his flesh and could not stir a single finger. He cried out, over and over, his spirit in torment, and the iron burned him as the sun rose higher and heated it and he felt his sweat like a torrent flowing internally, and his blood seemed to bubble and boil in his paralyzed veins.
Suddenly a darkness like death itself fell over him, and he dropped down into a lightless abyss where it was colder than snow and he saw the looming of spectral ice mountains about him as he sank deeper, and the glint of an unearthly moon on the frozen pinnacles that fled upwards from his descent. He heard the winds of eternity beating against his ears and the bitterness of frost against his lips.
“You ask the impossible, Hillel ben Borush,” said Shebua to his son-in-law, in a reasonable voice. “We cannot delay the wedding. The doctors have assured us that my grandson will survive and that he will recover consciousness soon, though he has lain in his fevered swoon for three days and three nights. He has no disease. He has an affliction of the brain, mysterious but not contagious. He has excellent nurses who leave him not for an instant, and though he does not open his eyes he drinks wine with water and spiced potions and medicines. He will live! It is an evil thing, say the superstitious,” and here Shebua smiled, “to delay a wedding. I am not superstitious, but my many guests—including the illustrious Rabban Gamaliel, who has been here with you and Saul daily—have been invited and it would be beyond forgiveness if I were to send messages to them that the wedding was not to take place.”
“Sephorah is his sister, and he loves her,” said Hillel. Shebua smiled again, superbly. “Hillel, he would not have the wedding delayed because of his illness. He would be mortified, embarrassed that he had caused inconvenience and disarray.”
Hillel, considering his son’s temperament, was forced to agree. He left Shebua and returned to Saul’s chamber, where a brazier burned against the autumn chill and the woolen curtains were drawn and where Saul lay under thick fur rugs in his baffling and unwakening swoon. Hillel had slept in a chair near him for three nights, since the night Saul had been discovered fainting on his bed. The doctors had come and gone, day and night, frowning, puzzling over the symptoms, discussing the intense fever, the fulminating sweats, the tremblings, the quiverings and shakings and strange discordant cries, of the stricken patient. The head of the Roman health department had appeared with his best physicians, for all sudden diseases had to be reported, for fear of the plague endemic among the accursed Parthians beyond the frontiers of Israel and Syria. The Parthians were many and turbulent, and an affliction to the Romans who knew that the Parthians had sworn to overthrow them and drive them from the east, and though the thought was absurd—to the Romans—the threat remained, also the diseases of the Parthians. (In truth, the discipline and occasional harshnesses the irritated Romans inflicted upon the Jews were due partly to the huge menace of the Parthians beyond the borders, who could not make up their minds whom they hated more: the Romans or the Jews, and were equally enthusiastic about killing both.)
The Roman official and his physicians had duly examined Saul, had questioned his doctors, had gravely examined the other members of the household, and had come to the correct conclusion that no plague existed or any of the other diseases of the unspeakable Parthians. So the seal of quarantine was not affixed to the doors of Shebua ben Abraham’s house, and the official and his physicians graciously accepted Shebua’s invitation to dine with him that evening—and, later, his lavish gifts given in mighty relief that nothing threatened his house.
Clodia Flavius assisted the nurses and ministered to Saul also, and told the father, “There is a fever in his soul, and that is worse than a fever of the body, but not fatal. He will recover, Hillel ben Borush, though it is possible that he does not, deep in the depths of his afflicted spirit, wish to do so.” She regarded him kindly as she would a child.
She was like tireless strength in that chamber. She permitted Sephorah to enter her brother’s chamber, and Sephorah wept over him and put cool wet cloths on his burning cheeks and brow and called to him in her soft and fluting voice. But beyond his sudden wild cries and threshings, his sudden struggles as if he were trying to escape from his flesh, he did not answer nor open his eyes, and his face became smaller and grayer as the hours passed, and sunken.
Aulus Platonius and his son, the captain of the Praetorians, visited the anxious father and consoled and cheered him, and so did Joseph of Arimathaea who stood for a long time in silence beside the bed, gazing down on the unconscious youth and listening to his incoherent groans and exclamations.
On the day before Sephorah married Ezekiel ben David, Saul regained consciousness. His fever had subsided. The sweat following it had been washed away and he had been clothed in fresh white linen. He opened his eyes to see the face of his father bent over him. But one of the eyes did not fully open, though Hillel was not aware of that in his joy that his son had regained his senses.
“It is well, my son,” said Hillel, with tenderness, and he kissed his son’s cheek and rejoiced that once again it was cool. “You have been ill, but God, blessed be His Name, has spared you to me. You will soon recover your strength.”
Saul whispered, and tears appeared on his eyelids, “I would that I had died.”
Rabban Gamaliel was in the chamber also, and he came to the bedside and said gravely, “It is God’s will that you live, and you must not dispute Him. You must rest and become strong, for He has wonders for you to accomplish.” His face was suddenly exalted, and Hillel gazed at him mutely and with a far fear.
“I fell into the darkness, and it was death,” said Saul, still in that faint whisper, and it was as if he had not heard the Rabban. “I was not afraid, though it was only nothingness.”
He suddenly fell asleep, but his left eye remained partly open and they could see the white of it and the lower edge of the blue iris as it was upturned.
It was not for some days that the physicians regretfully informed Hillel that the fever had partially paralyzed that eye and while it was not blind it would never be as the other again. And it was still l
ater before they knew that the fever had permanently affected a part of the brain, which would leave Saul a victim of occasional seizures. “The epilepsy is not serious,” they told the grieving father. “It is possible that it was latent before his illness and has only been somewhat intensified. Is he a youth of passions and strong urges and vehement emotions?”
“Yes,” said Hillel, sadly. “But he has had no seizures.”
He lifted his hands and said, “Why has God afflicted my child? Why did He not afflict me in his place? If He had stricken Job’s children, then God and Job would not have triumphed over Satan! For what man can witness the suffering of his children and not turn from God?”
Rabban Gamaliel said, “It is written that we must not question God, for His ways are not our ways, and we trust in Him, that in His wisdom He has a reason for all.”
But Hillel could not be comforted. He sat for hours beside Saul’s bed and looked upon him and his heart was as bleeding fragments. There were times when he knew that Saul was not sleeping and was aware of his presence. But Saul did not speak.
Chapter 14
SPRING was on the land and the almond blossoms were like pink butterflies and the sycamores took on a liquid green and even the dark cypresses had a bloom. Captain Titus Milo Platonius was recalled to Rome, for his leave had expired. He was departing, with his men, for the Joppa Gate, in the radiance of the early morning, and his father, Aulus, accompanied him in a last farewell.
I am a soldier, thought Aulus, but I am also a father, and my years are increasing and it may be long before I am permitted to return to my beloved country, and in the meantime I shall not see my beloved son. I must remember that I am a soldier and am born of soldiers and I would have nothing else for my son, but still I have a human heart and it is sad.