To stop it looking quite so ragged, he had trimmed his beard just a little and now he had a swelling on his chin, which was sore and he could not stop touching it. And he had a pain under his ribs like he had swallowed an iron rock. That was just at the thought of eating the counsellor’s food.
- Say it again. More slowly. I know you don’t understand it, but say it as though you do.
The boy screwed up his face.
David stirred the rose petals that he kept in a clay bowl on his table. For the scent. Jacob, the boy, recognised the gesture as a quiet insistence that he must go on. He frowned harder, hunched a little more uncomfortably over his slate, mouthing once again at these harsh and exotic sounds, striving for the cadence and rhythm he had been instructed to imitate.
In truth, David was not really attending to the poetry. He watched a large black bee bumbling stubbornly in the fold of a curtain and when he heard the first incoherent bellows of the morning from his father they were so far expected that they were hardly an interruption. Jacob was relieved to hear him at last.
- He will wake the child, Jacob said.
He waited for David to make a sign and as soon as he had he was gone, carrying the slate with him, which he would surely contrive to lose among the old man’s many untidy belongings.
David’s father was quite deaf now. He was not losing his mind, as so many old men do, but he spoke only in the dialect that he had spoken as a child, in the North, by the Lake, and this was only just intelligible to his servants, and even to his son, though he shouted it at high volume. When he roared now, a pink lizard, its tail curled in the shape of a simple labyrinth, high on the wall, stepped briskly to one side as though evading a cart. David tolerated the lizards in his house, especially those of an unusual colour.
He stood in his house, to which he hoped very soon to say goodbye forever, and waited to see if Jacob would quieten his father before the old man roused the child. He noticed the flat blue rectangle by the rose petal bowl and saw that one of its pieces had been moved. It was a gambling game, very simple, of which Jacob was fond. Marcus had one. Jacob had moved the piece for sure. David put it back, which he knew was pedantic and unnecessary. He was very impatient with the boy, Jacob, who did much that was a man’s and a woman’s work around the house and patient with the man, Marcus, who behaved so like a child. Perhaps, when he went to Rome, if he went to Rome, he would give this little game to Jacob. But what if he should need it? Egyptian things were so popular now.
David did not like to gamble. He was an odds-on gambler. It was a pretty board. Cobalt blue. It looked lapis lazuli, but it was not. Marcus had one.
When he saw Marcus, they would, as always, begin by discussing the weather, that least Judaean of subjects. The weather in Jerusalem indicated the time of day, not the time of year. There was no weather. There was nothing to talk about. Marcus was always telling David how hot and dry it was. As it always was. He was the foreigner for whom the obvious had to be explained. His now familiar but foreign meteorological words and phrases helped to warm David up, to let him paddle in the gentle surf of another man’s language before he set off for the perilous swim across its depths. One fish does not say to another, ‘How wet it is today’. Why was Marcus so intent on the heat, the aridity?
David had prepared a pretty speech to compliment Marcus’ awful food. A quotation from Virgil. He had made Jacob recite it so that he could hear what it sounded like from the mouth of a Judaean. It sounded barbaric. Jacob sounded like David’s mad father. He might have found a passage in which Virgil discussed the weather. Might he? Marcus could have considered that satirical. David had not found the key to Marcus’ humour. He laughed at anything, like a child. David scratched at his beard and looked at his nails.
He gathered his father had fallen asleep in his chair again and had sat there all night instead of going to bed and then had woken up and had no idea where he was.
If David did not leave soon, the petitioners would begin to arrive. Those poor, extremely distant and all too proximate relations who knew he had the ear of a Roman. What would Marcus make of the way these people spoke? What would become of them when he, David, was in Rome, the capital of the world? Their murmuring, muttering, stammering and stuttering. David spoke clearly, even beautifully, a language no important man could understand. They were all so excited by Passover. David could remember being excited by that. He wondered whether his son would ever celebrate it.
He became aware of the quiet and the still air. He understood that now was now, that this time was about to pass and that there would be no other moment like it. Even the bee was quiet, but the air had a timbre. He thought he had detected the accent of the day. His son awoke with his customary shout.
David would go to him through the woman-less rooms, while Jacob coaxed the old man. He stood at the head of the cradle of polished wood, the little walnut in the bed of polished wood, and behind it, so that the child could not see him. He was not crying and was engrossed in the bewildered contemplation of his own disobedient fingers. David could see the resentful face of his own father in the child’s slack mouth. And the same, unembarrassed stare, without shadow. He watched his son burble as he had watched his dreaming father mutter.
- I do not wish that you should grow up in Jerusalem, said David, in Latin.
He knew that it was a Roman world now. He would show his son the blue blaze of the Mediterranean and the rose-coloured marble of Rome.
David’s memories of her, of his own mother, were few and quite inarticulate, but not at all vague. He had stood at the trough in the old yard and looked at her reflection upside down in the water. And he knew of her prophecy, as he thought of it, concerning himself. Certainly, he did not recall her saying it, but he had been told that she had said it, many times. She had said that David would be a remarkable man. That was all. That he would be distinguished. Perhaps, that he would never be forgotten.
- I wake before the cock crows, had been his childish boast.
The other thing he remembered was his shell, an unspectacular and imperfect cockle or such hinged thing, but of a nacreous pink. A sunrise pink, glorious, yet modest, in that dingy ribbed space into which he could fit his boy’s thumb. This had been, this shell, some part of what his mother had hoped for him, in a way that he could not explain. And yet, it had been his father who had given him the shell, he was sure of that. The only thing he had ever given him, apart from advice.
His father, mocked even then by the other boys in the village and called The Crow, had told him that cleverness, wit, acuity were to be despised if unaccompanied by good conduct.
David was ashamed now that he could really recall so little of that time. His memories were dull, austere, impoverished. He remembered the apples that grew in his father’s orchard; the powdery pink flesh of that hard little fruit, the acrid bitter taste of childhood, its warm and sensuous throb. They tasted like the fruit in dreams. They tasted of nothing. They tasted of anything.
What David had left behind in the dusty yard he hardly expected to find again in Rome, but his son might. His son might find the merely beautiful there.
David had been diligent and industrious, but ungifted. His father had told him so. He had not been so bright. He had seen others preferred, young men who did not speak with the guttural burr of the farm, but with the bell-like sing-song of the cantor. They had been preferred because they were richer, but also because they were brighter. His father had told him so.
David had always been very proud of his handwriting. He might have been a scribe, his father had said, under other circumstances. Those lush reptilian figures he had drawn in the bold home-made ink.
The yard of his childhood could appear as a vivarium to David. A Latin word! As it would have appeared to Marcus. Their well was full of mountain water, his father had said. The pomegranates had grown there, but it was the apples he had loved, and stolen.
He remembered putting his boy’s finger in a gap in the worn stones of the well. The darkness of the gap was wet and it felt dangerous to put his finger there and he had to steel himself to do it. He had crumbled grains of damp soil between his silky fingers.
The last time he had spoken to Marcus, been invited to his house actually, he had met two Jews bickering in the corridor, clacking like children beating two sticks together. That had not been auspicious. They were allowing their voices to be heard inside. It reflected badly on the Jews and on him.
The young Greek had been there, the one who had stolen that wine, for which, he felt sure, he, David, had been blamed, or, at least, suspected, and which the Greek, who was never stained with any suspicion, so lovely he was, so well-spoken, fluent, glib and beautifully dressed with a quiet and cultivated manner, had confessed to David, that he the Greek had, indeed, stolen the wine, and in a spirit of roguery merely, which would be sure to provoke nothing but a wry amusement such as an over-indulgent father favours for the son who can do no wrong. The Greek had confessed to David because David did not count. David hated him.
Marcus and the Greek were playing the Egyptian game. Marcus’ set was lovely. A violet stone. And each piece the colour of a dove’s breast. They spoke Greek between themselves and were of the opinion, David thought, and he was right, that David’s knowledge of that language was meagre and non-functional. David had found it useful not to allow Marcus to discover that David’s knowledge of Greek, although most imperfect, was better than Marcus realised.
He tried not to be voluble, like a Jew. He affected to believe that Marcus would value his taciturnity as discretion. Actually, Marcus thought he was sullen. And then, there was Miriam. David was distracted. He would hear a remark and not know in which language it had been spoken. Should he respond? There were silences that were difficult to justify.
David was thinking that if he lived in Rome, his son might marry a Roman and so his own grandchildren would not be Jews. What would Miriam have thought about that? Egyptian gods were popular, but Marcus would not admire a turncoat. He noticed a dead black bee in the clay bowl full of rose petals.
David had dined with Varro, a refined, elderly man whose conversation he enjoyed after his own fashion, but a yesterday’s man, so Marcus said and who had employed David in his capacity as interpreter for a man of the King’s, recommended as such by Marcus, discreetly. Now Marcus wanted to know what Varro had said. The problem was that Varro had a loose tooth, a front tooth that had become twisted with age in his jaw so that his locution was now spoiled by a soft whistle. David had become fascinated by this sibilance and combined with his great interest in how distinguished Romans pronounced the rarest and richest words in their vocabulary, he now had only the vaguest idea of the burden of Varro’s speeches, couched as those speeches were in the luxurious upholstery of Varro’s diplomatic caution.
Everyone was rather exercised by Passover, Varro and Marcus both. David hardly knew what it was all about. He felt it was something he was leaving behind, although only his success here would allow him to do that. It was possible that David would have been better employed in cultivating the synagogue and not the senate.
He became aware, with a start, that Marcus’ decorum was disturbed. He was speaking harshly to David, which it must have pained him to do.
- I really cannot understand a word you are saying.
And then he turned to the handsome Greek and said to him something in Greek, perhaps about mumbling into his beard. Then they both smiled and an air of amity was restored, a brittle atmosphere. If only David could have repeated Marcus’ remark back to him. They might then have gotten somewhere. He lacked the courage.
- Truth is always a risk, he said and Marcus looked away from the Greek and thought about that.
- Varro, our friend, said that the administration creaks on despite the commotion in the city, said David.
Marcus thought again about what David had said. He did not seem to be able to think, David noted, and do anything else at all at the same time. David was struck with the awful idea that Marcus, that opportunist, was a fool. And David would do anything to be his friend.
- Take me to Rome when you go. Let me court you. I will be one of those who will protect you from your folly.
David did not say that. He told, instead, more lies about what Varro had said. And about what Herod’s man had said to him. David began to recover. The last time he had been here, Marcus had said,
- I do not care for Judaea with its snakes and scorpions.
To which David had replied,
- But there as many snakes and scorpions in Rome as in Jerusalem. It is just that you are used to them.
Marcus had laughed. David had made a Roman laugh. Marcus had thought he was being satirical and had approved his daring. David was now inclined to agree with him, but truly, at the time, he had not been sure what he meant.
Since that meeting, David knew, Marcus had somehow discovered that Miriam, David’s wife, had died and that was terrible, because it would embarrass the Roman, who would not know how to speak to David at all. He wondered whether Varro would have done better. There was that in the room that was vibrating at a pitch he could not hear.
David stared down at his son, the squat little chap, and he saw the one, two little lines appear in his peach bloom forehead, puckering its fulvous patina. How many times had he frowned now, still a countable number, and how many more would he? He was puzzled by the noises from the other room. It was his grandfather once more, talking too loud in the old way, getting on the other side of Jacob, which delighted him, delighted them both perhaps. Delighted the child. When he had been a baby himself, lying in his cradle, David had liked to lie like a scarab, each limb crook’d, not like the beetle, so much, but like a brooch his mother had worn, symmetrical.
Now he was to step out once more into the streets of Jerusalem. It lay before him like a frowning face, the ochreous face of a silly old man, pitted and blotched by poverty and war, and he set out to trace the lines of it.
He thought he would walk through the Temple quarter, but avoid Benjamin’s grand home which he had not entered for some time. The city was crowded. There were many visitors. David listened to the voices of strangers and noted the unhappiness, violence and stupidity in them. The drone of the city could be made out here. He recognised voices from all over Judaea. He ran his fingers through his beard as he stood before the stall of a man selling cooked lamb. He knew he would come home hungry from Marcus’ house. The man was grilling the meat over coals, turning it with tongs. The coals were grey like the pebbles on the shore of the Lake and every so often the man would reach under the grill and turn the coals with his hand which was a remarkable thing to see and then they would come back to life, glowing like a waking child with a fierce heat before winking back to sleep in a sheen of pearl. The man was clearly blind, but he had beautiful useless eyes in his upturned face; grey and blue like smoke, grey and blue like Roman glass.
- I shall tell Marcus the wind is from the south. It will be hot.
The soldiers before Marcus’ house knew him. They seemed nervous, more so than usual, but they let him pass with a nod. The porter of course would need a gift. As he approached, he saw two Jews coming away, almost certainly, from an audience. He could not hear exactly what they were saying, but the tone was of mutual reproach. People here are so often displeased.
The porter was not a man for whom David could care. It was a problem typical of those caused by the Roman presence in the city. The man, also, was close to David in age and that made it worse. He was Judaean and he performed the role of a servant, but of a servant to a Roman and he wore a ring with a stone of watery blue. David and the porter did not know how to treat one another and the embarrassment this caused both of them introduced an uneasy rancour into their relation that no rudeness or arrogance could have done. David was confused and he confused this fellow. He asked him politely to send in his name, but then he made him repeat it and then repeat it again. Then he didn’t look convinced so David gave him a coin which was sure not to be the right coin and so was worse than nothing and a waste.
- I will wait in the court, David said. Come and find me there,
which was not the correct place for a plausible person to wait, but David could not bear it to stand on the steps.
He walked away from the porter so that he would not have to see him hesitate, to evidently think about it. There were some fellows by the well, some soldiers and some others. He took a drink of water, scooping it into his mouth with his hand and not minding the drops in his beard. He listened. A rough grey man was speaking softly to a maid. Again, David could not hear what he was speaking about but he caught something familiar. It was a sound, a way of speaking, not a word, but it was as though he were overhearing a conversation and understood nothing of it but his own name. He was pleased to hear this after the unpleasantness with the porter and he spoke to the man,
- Friend, your voice, you sound like my father. You are from the North, are you not? From the great Lake? Gennesaret?
The man turned to him with an expression like one who has tasted something unexpectedly vile.
- Not at all. No. That is not true. I have nothing to do with those people.
And he pushed past David and stalked from the court with the soldiers staring after him, not sure what to do.
David was upset. He did not like to speak to the soldiers so he would not meet an eye and he walked back to the steps shaking water from his hands.
He needed to steady himself. He must become compatible with the world, to close the gap between himself and it. Take me to Rome. Take us to Rome. He felt he was close to praying to Marcus and almost blushed. It seemed so unlikely, but who knows what lies past the bend in the road? You must find the courage to walk it, regardless. David knew how to make God laugh.
He also knew, he felt, that the porter would not come back. It had already been too long. This insult was Marcus’. His eye caught on a bowl of fruit on the porter’s table. A neat pyramid of oranges, pomegranates and lemons and near the base of it one of those hard little apples often put in these bowls for show. David wanted that apple and he took it and the pyramid fell in a waterfall of childish colours. He walked out the way the rough man had gone. He bit into his apple which tasted of the desert, so he threw it down. Then he had to stop to dash the tears from his eyes.
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