WISDOM CARAVAN

Jean Bedard
jphbedard@globetrotter.net

WISDOM CARAVAN

Translation by Richard Clark

2023

My dear, dear granddaughter:

A few months ago, you asked me: “Why so grand a setting for so pathetic a play: be born, suffer, die? I’m eighteen. Tell me something.” This was after you attempted suicide. I said nothing at the time. A good treatment team had taken charge of you, so we weren’t worried anymore. Yet the question remains. To continue to be silent is cowardly; to draw you into a marvelous mirage would be horrible. So I am going to tell you a story that took place two thousand years ago on the Silk Road because it is neither depressing nor unrealistic but capable of changing everything.

IN THE LAND OF ISRAEL

BETROTHAL

Jaire, now a Pharisee and new leader of Capernaum’s synagogue, walks toward Jerusalem. Despite his status, there’s nothing impressive about him. His wide coat of unbleached linen, striped vertically with four blue bands, frays as it drags over the rocky ground. It is windy. On his shoulders, the fringed tallit, or prayer shawl, seems to be laughing like a child. A female donkey waddles behind him, for she doesn’t care for the camphor smell of the new vestment, he only has to wear to read the holy books. No halter links her to her master, except perhaps a very slight murmur caught by her enormous ears. The young Pharisee constantly mutters because he never stops thinking. The animal nods her head in approval from time to time but at other times shakes it violently to show her disagreement. Then the twenty-four-year-old man returns to his discourse and adds something more to it or, on the contrary, understands his error and corrects himself. The donkey then elevates her victorious muzzle. They are going to Jerusalem, not for the feast of Passover or any other feast, but because it is time for Asher Jaire, nicknamed Yair, to take control of his father’s business: the trade in manuscripts on the Great Silk Road.

But, for the moment, the sky is blue, the weather is mild, and the learned Pharisee is developing proofs likely to convince his listeners – his donkey and even some birds, perhaps. If there exists somewhere a principle of wisdom that hasn’t yet been found, that nobody has ever found, that was to be found. This would make the one who found it as happy as Adam and Eve in the earthly Paradise. This principle would obviously come from the east, like the dawn … “Or like the plague,” the donkey had silently added. It was a habit these two had; Yair saw the blue sky, the donkey, the thorny bushes. 

At that very moment, in the year 17 AD in Jerusalem, a girl with an unusual face fusses with a lock of hair she left floating in front of her, which constantly coils like a snake. Unable to smooth it to her liking, she crouches and places some stones in a line in front of her. Then, noticing a tiny flower trying to push a new leaf up from between two of the pavement’s flagstones, she decides to build a pyramid right on top of it. She grinds her teeth as if this would more effectively crush it under a stone.

Ari, her father, is a Sadducee, a priest of the Temple, just as was her grandfather and her great-grandfather as far back as Sadoq himself. The family owns a large villa very close to the gigantic religious edifice – like a city within the city, a fortress within the fortress. But Ari is not a member of the Sanhedrin, the great tribunal that interprets the Law and determines the fate of those who do not respect it. Ari occupies a modest place among the priests; his interest is elsewhere, beyond the borders of Judaea and even those of the Roman Empire. Nevertheless, the family holds the right to possess a caravan, with dromedaries, dromedary drivers, mercenaries, enslaved people, interpreters, scribe-accountants – everything needed to safely conduct a caravan to its destination. Starting from Jerusalem, one route goes to Alexandria via the Sinai; the other goes toward India by way of Syria, Persia, and Kashmir. On these two routes, Ari has at his disposal everything needed to finance and organize caravans.

Ari’s wife died while giving birth to Maâkha, the seventh girl of thirteen children; she has, in consequence, six brothers. She is the one who just now crushed a budding flower. In the Ari family, daughters are not excluded from education, for they are married whenever possible to caravan masters, administrators, and high-ranking officials, who serve as translators, accounts, and editors.

The former caravan routes were reopened by the armies of Alexander the Great, and it is the Greek language that keeps them alive. Maâkha is smitten with Greek philosophy because no one ever talked to her, and reading was the only thing that brought her friends, even if they were friends she didn’t see.

But now the time has come for her older brother to find her a husband. She is already fourteen; she mustn’t wait longer. Now, how to hunt down the man who would want her? Maâkha is a special case. She gives proof of a memory, an intelligence, and a culture that would shame any man, even an educated one. She questions everything, criticizes everything, and is generally morose, delighted in skepticism and pessimism, which she defends with impeccable reasoning. When she laughs, it is out of cynicism or as if she is grinding her teeth. She especially enjoys Epicurus. She is inclined to think that the gods are no more than natural forces, impersonal, savage, and cruel, that the soul is an aggregate of atoms, and that the greatest good is the absence of suffering.

As if that wasn’t enough, Maâkha lacks beauty and charm, which is not saying much! Her face is misshaped by an abnormality of the upper lip, pendulous on one side, and an excessively fleshy nose that gives her a nasal voice she makes use of to frighten birds and drive children away. Who would want her?

On this day, Adar – Maâkha’s older brother – hears his sister’s unbearable laugh; she seems to be in a state of euphoria she can no longer control.

Flocks of birds flee loudly. Adar leans on the parapet of the terrace to better observe his sister down in the courtyard. But he can’t manage to see what is making her laugh. The man is under a cornice.

“Wait, you don’t know everything,” that man is saying, “Besides that, there are little hairy creatures that slip into your clothes. You don’t feel them. Swish! Swish!”

“Stop, you’re tickling me.”

“I’m not even touching you.”

“It’s just like it.”

“No, really! I’m not touching you. I respect the Law. It is written: ‘Thou shalt avoid all contact with sweet, soft, sticky or smooth substances.’’”

“But where did you learn such foolish things? Am I a sticky substance?”

“No, I don’t know, but your blood, the moon; it’s a little dangerous, all that.”

“Oh, no! Not the Torah! But the quotation you just made is not in the Torah; ‘smooth substances’ is not the Hebrew vocabulary.”

“You’re right; I quoted the book of the Laws of Manu.”

“Manu?”

“There are not just the Greeks, dear Maâkha. There’s the Sage of the sages of India. His law has several points in common with ours. If you knew half of their demons, vampires, poisonous snakes, vultures, dung beetles, and hyenas, you would be so happy that you’d start to believe in their existence. You would stop being afraid and anxious at night because of the void – as you told me you have been since your childhood. But the little hairy creatures that tickle, that’s just funny.”

The girl squirms, shrieks, laughs, and grinds her teeth.

The man, who Adar still doesn’t see, is moving his hands and fingers in front of the sun. Shadows form on a wall, frightening and hilarious, shadows that touch Maâkha’s silhouette, making her laugh so hard it brings tears to her eyes.

Adar sees only the silhouettes, and his sister shakes with spasms. This indecent conversation has to stop. The visitor is acting through the teenage girl’s imagination, and it touches her! Under other circumstances, Adar would have beaten him up and thrown him out.

The man goes on:

“Do you know, dear Maâkha, that in the desert at night, you see silhouettes on the sand, dancing girls?”

He was going to start all over again. Maâkha regained her serious demeanor.

“Aren’t you telling me foolishness in order to take advantage of me?”

“No, you’ve shown yourself to be so cynical with all your depressing stories, as if there was no good in life. So, I avoid telling you that everything is good. You’re right; tragedies are allowed, even gratuitous ones. But if – all day long – all you gather is dogshit, what do you eat when evening comes? Wouldn’t the meal be better if you gathered good, ripe figs?”

“In that case, give me one of your figs!”

Adar can’t stand it anymore. He descends. The man is short but solid and well-built; his eyes shine with a mischievous and intelligent look. He stares at Maâkha with evident pleasure. Adar hesitates.

He introduces himself to the visitor and scolds him severely, but not more than that … Suddenly, he recognizes him. Asher Jairus, also known as Yair, only son of a family of merchants who do business with them fairly often and embark with the Alexandrian caravan – and sometimes even the Indian one. They are well known for buying, selling, and hiding rare parchments, engraved camel shoulder blades, clay tablets covered with undecipherable cuneiform symbols, and all kinds of strange texts from the deserts, from India, and even from China.

Nobody knows where their treasure was or even if it exists – the trunk might be empty since the father died – but the caravaners are still convinced that the Jairus fortune is not as modest as they make it appear.

For Adar, Jaire’s family has only one flaw: They are Pharisees. On the other hand, the young Jair is reasonably fluent in several languages which are in use on the Indian route; some say he is able to decode a part of Hittite writing. Despite a reputation for being crazy and naive, perhaps because of it, he bargains better than an Arab. He is even supposed to have said – during a discussion with the great Hillel:

“A reader more easily adheres to a truth when it offers itself to him without teeth, like a newborn.”

“Don’t you have time to have dinner with us?” Adar asked without any further ado. “I imagine you’ve come to speak to my father.”

“Yes, that’s right. I’d like to take over my family’s business, especially around Muree and Srinagar.”

“India!”

“It will take several years to get ready, but I have an ambitious plan in mind. It’s not for right away.”

The betrothal took place that very evening in the presence of Ari, Adar, and a witness from Sanhedrin. The only dowry Asher Jaire demanded was the right to travel to India, nothing else, but signed, and one that he could use at the time that he thought best. It was decided that the wedding would be held the following year at Capernaum. Ari didn’t want all of Jerusalem to invite itself to a wedding; he would have preferred to be as invisible as possible.

BALAAM

Let’s go back almost twenty years before the betrothal. Jaire, the father, holding a young female donkey by the bridle, is speaking to his son Asher.

“My son, you are seven years old today. I am giving you this yearling donkey; it’s up to you to make it an animal able to obey and also – sometimes – to disobey, for it is written in the book of Numbers: “The angel of the Lord says to Balaam: ‘Why have you struck your donkey? It is I, the angel of Yahweh, who has come to place myself as an obstacle because this journey has taken place against my will? Do you understand that, my son?”

“You want the donkey to listen to me, but not when I’m wrong, because if she blindly obeys me, I might get lost in a desert, fall into a hole, or oppose Yahweh.

“You are intelligent, son, perhaps too clever. Suppose you succeed in making yourself obeyed without diminishing your donkey’s ability to pay attention; you will be able to bring up your children and lead a group of dromedaries in the desert.

The father handed the son the donkey’s halter and disappeared down the road to the village.

It was the green season. The donkey was eating grass in a lush and luxuriant meadow that was gently sloping down to Lake Tiberias. The halter wasn’t long enough, so the donkey had to pull on it in order to bite into a clump that seemed succulent. The little boy was afraid she would escape, so he wrapped the rope around his wrist. The donkey noticed this but pretended not to see anything. A moment later, she was dying of thirst, the poor thing. She started to run toward the lake: the boy followed but fell. She dragged him.

Fortunately, the child managed to free himself before being hurt! Stretched out on the ground, he cried with rage and stamped his feet. The donkey played in the water with open lips, not really drinking but victoriously shaking his tail. So, the child sat down on a rock to think. In the distance, four fishermen – the only possible witnesses were casting nets. From where he was, the child could not recognize the fishermen even though he had sublime eyes. Neither would they have been able to distinguish him. For him, a great relief.

Asher approached the rope, but as soon as he wanted to seize it, the donkey went three steps back. He repeated this stratagem three or four more times. The boy suppressed a cry of rage. No one heard it. Sensing that anger was on the point of overcoming him, instead of yelling, he began to bray like a donkey – an astonishing realistic imitation. The donkey pricked up her ears. The child realized something.

“Never mind appearances and opinions,” he said to himself. Once spoken out loudly, this thought was transformed into a firm and definitive decision instead of remaining a thought. Therefore, it was a flash of lightning, not a flash that passes away, but a flash that crosses through all life.

He began to walk on all fours, went down to the lake, and siphoned the water as donkeys do. The donkey went back up into the field to glean here and there the grass it knew. On all fours, he took meticulous care to imitate it in detail. Hence, the curious donkey approached and stopped. Nevertheless, the boy left the rope in the grass as if he had suddenly grown indifferent to the animal. He was patient. The whole morning passed quickly because of this simple concept: “I imitate you, you imitate me.”

The noon trumpet sounded at the synagogue. The boy removed his flute from its leather case, played a few notes to practice, then chanted a verse from Genesis: “You have conquered. They will tie your young donkey to the vine. You will be the lion when you return with your victory. They will wash your garment in the wine.” Next, he got up, affecting a total indifference.

With a determined step, he left for the house. For a moment, the donkey hesitated yet decided to follow him. Arriving home, he stroked his conquest, tied her to a post, and gave her an apple to eat. With pride, he pushed open the door of the house.

“How is my son doing?” his mother asked. She had observed some of his maneuvers as she was cleaning the shutters.

“She has a strong head and a good heart,” the child replied.

“Your father warned you.”

“He told me the story about the donkey who listened to the angel of Yahweh.”

“Do you seriously believe she hears angels and will know how to guide you without making you a slave?”

“No one will be my slave, and I will be the slave of no one.”

“May you make that law of laws a reality in your life, my beloved child! Tell me, what will you call her?”

“Balaam.”

“Then your name suits you well, Yair – light and discernment.”

Her offspring learned plenty from Balaam, and Balaam learned to trust the boy. By the end of the year, they were partners, to the point where the donkey mourned when he left for the synagogue to study close to the hazzan.

HILLEL

Then the tragedy happened. While crossing Lake Tiberias to reach Gergesa, both parents were thrown overboard by a terrible squall; the mother died before being recovered. The father survived for a short while. However, unfortunately, he died of a pulmonary infection three weeks later.

At the time, there were already schools for boys only. The hazan of Capernaum adopted the young boy, who was now twelve. Two years later, he brought him to Jerusalem and presented him to Hillel, the famous Pharisee who ran his own school, in opposition to his implacable rival, Shammai. In principle, Shammai presented the more restrictive positions, Hillel the broader ones. From time to time, it was the opposite. For if one said black, the other had to say white; such was the tradition of debate in the schools of Jerusalem.

Hillel almost always taught in the Court of the Gentiles. He interrogated the child; stick in hand:

“What is the best law?”

“The one that is most just.”

“How can you recognize that a law is fair?”

“When you do not need a stick to make it respected.”

“What if the child deserves to be struck?”

“How could striking him make him love a law?”

“You have good comebacks; sadly, you are not answering the question.”

“Which is the better law: that of Israel or the Romans?”

“The one that needs the least soldiers and prisons.”

“Certainly, you have a one-track mind. Tell me, what do the texts say?”

“It is written: ‘Listen to me, you who know justice, and who bear my Law in your heart.’”

“You quote Isaiah, you still are not answering.”

“‘Though shalt not kill,’ the Torah says. So, to the degree that we do not kill in the name of the law, that law is the best.”

“I am hearing your father. He, too, affirmed the primacy of his commandment over all the others. It is not the first commandment; it is the fifth. Moreover, you misquoted Isaiah; you should have said: ‘Listen to me, you who know right from wrong, you who cherish my law in your hearts.’ He was speaking about the people and not about the individual; it is the people that the Law inscribed, not the individual. Otherwise, it would be chaos. The people take precedence; this can require the death of the guilty. You are here to learn the Law of Israel, to be subordinated to it.”

He gave the boy a hard blow on the hand with the stick and accepted him as his student, telling himself that he would bend in the end. Hadn’t his father been one of the best students in Jerusalem after being the stubbornest?

Balaam remained in the courtyard of the residence where the young man stayed. She could not, then, listen to his lessons. In the evening, she appeared to discuss them with her master, who learned much better by speaking out loud than by himself.

In Jerusalem, Yair was not content with his master and synagogues. He spent much of his time in the caravanserai, where he established friendships with his late father’s friends. He learned the most commonly used languages. Balaam, no doubt, studied the camel and the dromedary. All the two thought about were travels.

MAIMON

One day, Yair, wanting to break from Hillel and Jerusalem, harnessed Balaam and headed for Sepphoris – a thriving Roman town, less than two hours journey by foot from Nazareth – not very far from Capernaum. Sepphoris’ caravanserai opened an enormous market since wealthy Romans, Greek officials, Egyptian scribes, and prosperous Persian merchants had built their villas there. Yair liked nothing better than to return to that town he had so often visited with his father as a child.

He liked the cosmopolitan atmosphere, the Greek and the Latin language, and the exotic merchandise. Most discussions around the shops of the copyists, the parchment sellers, and the collectors of texts. There these were not nervous whisperings. At Sepphoris, no one believed that an idea could make a kingdom rise or fall – provided that it was not left to itself. With the bookseller, wisdom is not having one idea but having several. If possible, each one is contrary to the other. This way, conversations are more passionate, but actions are less violent. Of all the booksellers, Maimon was not the easiest to find. The old man, a friend of Yair’s father, did not have his own shop. He sought, copied, translated, and sold only the rare pearls. Without a doubt, he must be hiding deep in a shop, examining the most recent deliveries from Persia or India.

The merchants knew what Yair and Balaam wanted as soon as they arrived. In general, they were careful not to be too direct; on the contrary, they presented to the young man and to the donkey curiosities: apples, novelties, and grains; they began discussions, and they recounted the unforgettable moments of their latest trips. They stroked the donkey’s nuzzle.

This had occupied the remainder of the afternoon; Balaam had eaten, and Yair had rediscovered his old friend. As in the old days, Maimon went straight to the point:

“Stil the same question, my boy?”

“Are there any others these days?”

“You are going to talk to me about Rome again …”

“If it weren’t the Romans, it would be the Parthians, Persians, Carthages, Athens, or even us – the Hebrews; we are not better than others. For me, it is the greatest of mysteries: how can one man dominate thousands of men? And they call his heard ‘a people’?”

“He has the weapons,” Maimon responded without much conviction, for he knew the young man’s questions only too well.

“No, the soldiers do have the weapons.”

“He has the pay.”

“With the money, the soldiers harvest by pillaging …”

It was a game they had to recall the good times spent together.

“Yes, I always return to the same ideas,” Yair wanted to reply: “The basis of power is neither in weapons nor in money, but in the belief of all in one single…”

“When you were twelve or thirteen, you asked why it was that is possible to believe in a man who gives himself the right to whip people, to cut off their heads. ‘It’s a kind of bewitching,’ you said. Because deep down, everyone knows that – at any moment – he can become a victim. So, why does the soldier cut off heads without thinking that one day someone might cut off his? ‘Has he already lost his head?’ you asked me, laughing.”

“You remember all my arguments, master Maimon. But do not answer them. How is it that this bewitchment of brains has become so universal? It is even found in China or India.”

“This time, I am going to answer you. Questions like this and some others are like vultures. There are no more than ten or twelve in the whole sky. Here and there, they attack a child. They plant their claws into their shoulders, carry their prey above the trees, then let it fall. The child awakens, convinced that he has simply dreamed. However, his inner wounds prove the contrary.”

“I want to leave, Maimon. I want to leave Jerusalem and even Galilee. I want to take the route to Srinagar, the great crossroads; I want to find the book that will cure our slavery. If I don’t find it, at least I will be a long way from here. What I heard in Jerusalem, I can no longer stand. The priests crush the olives in a first pressing, the Romans in a second, soon the zealots and all the rebels will chew the final pulp, spitting out seeds.”

CAIPHAS

At the final examination, Yair impressed Sanhedrin: He quoted whole pages of the Torah by heart, he gave each side everything they wanted to hear. Whether Sadducee of Pharisee, the question received the exact morsel that completely filled his mouth. With mouth thus filled, he could not open it to object. After the vote of acceptance, the ritual of admission, and the high priest Caiaphas’ speech of honor, they gave the floor to Asher Jaire in the following manner:

“Now that you are accepted, you are free to question us as your equals; what question do you wish to pose to Sanhedrin?”

He took a deep breath and expressed himself: “When Moses freed his brother-slaves and let them out of Egypt – after a series of miracles intended to gain their trust – they had to wander the desert for forty years and learn to obey Moses. It required the commandment to be faithful to Moses to take precedence over the commandment not to kill. This is how tribes became one people. Thus, we are one of these people who have placed obedience to the law above the commandment not to kill. So, I ask myself: ‘In what way are we better?’”

The whole Sanhedrin remained silent. As not to look bad, Caiaphas himself answered:

“Your question is dangerous, Yair. You forget that after the sin of the First Women, it is God himself who imposed death as punishment.

Smiles lit up, one by one – all of the Sanhedrin’s faces.

Yair said nothing because he wanted to live long enough to find the answer to his question on the Silk Road.

When Asher Jaire received his official confirmation as a Pharisee, the council of Capernaum sent for him in order to announce that he had been named the leader of the synagogue. It was with the greatest discretion that the young man took what had been his father’s place. He was contented with presiding, giving the word to the most deserving, entrusting the education of the boys to a good hazzan. He knew that Caiaphas was keeping an attentive ear turned towards his direction.

THE WEDDING

Maâkha arrived in Capernaum at the end of the harvest season. Several months after the date stipulated in the betrothal contract, this was neither the fault of Adar nor Ari. To put it bluntly, the young fiancee feared the consummation of the marriage. A fear so great that her periods came every two weeks, with very severe pains and bleeding. There were no women to advise her; her two servants – slaves from Africa – had their tongues cut when they were captured years ago. All this loss of blood isolated her because of her impurity. Half the time, Maâkha couldn’t leave her room out of fear of contaminating a man. On the days when she did not bleed, she was obliged to practice ablutions and sacrifices of purification. Ari didn’t like to see her walking in the city; he always feared that someone would discover, under the veil he forced her to wear, a face judged unworthy of the family. To make matters worse, the young women hardly ate at all. She was unable to swallow the food brought to her room and was overwhelmed by intense solitude.

A nightmare never returning: She was falling into a completely black well that widened as the fall accelerated. There was no end to this well, thus no hope for death, the eternal fall of atoms in the void of Epicurus.

When she woke up soaked in sweat, she touched the stones at the head of her bed to stop the vertigo and to assure herself that she was not moving. Next, she tried to remember: Who had pushed her into the well? She couldn’t do it. But each time, she had the impression that the man had pulled a torch out of his clothes to brand her and burn her stomach.

She plunged her face into the basin filled with water and opened her eyes wide; the dream fled. The sensation of hunger was the only thing somewhat capable of dissolving her anxiety.

To give herself some courage, she recalled over and over the conversation she had with Yair before their betrothal. A betrothal was arranged to get rid of her. Maâkha remembered every word, and she tried hard to laugh at the funniest repartees, yet she could not succeed in doing it anymore. Evidently, she was no longer a child. Children don’t think about committing suicide.

The young bride’s cortege was approaching the village. Balaam sensed some smells she did not fancy and started braying from the top of her lungs as if a wolf was approaching. Yair suspected that the donkey would treat the young woman as a rival, so he gave Balaam a place of honor. The bride did not like animals. She almost got her hand bitten when she shook it to make the animal back off.

The courtyard in front of Jaire’s house was filling up. All Capernaum was there. The banquet had been prepared by the wives of the principal members of the city council. Among them was Salome, the mother of the Zebedees. Moreover, every member of the Zebedee family was present. For generations, the Jaires and the Zebedees had remained as close as fingers of one hand. Nothing explained this like friendship: The Zebedees were not interested in books, camels, or the desert. They built boats for the fishermen in the lake. In reality, their unconventional minds made the two families resemble each other.

Since the accident that had claimed the lives of Jaire’s parents, the Zebedee family had hired an artisan from Nazareth. Jaire appreciated him very much. Despite his young age – he was barely twenty – they called him “the Carpenter” with a capital “C” because there was not one like him in all of Galilee. His father had died when a beam gave way; his oldest son, he had taken over the business with his brothers. He had recently left the building trade because a Roman landowner had not honored a considerable debt owed to his family. Now that he worked with the Zebedees, he was at the point of revolutionizing the building of boats. They were said to be uncapsizable, and the gunnels, curved towards the inside, protected the fishermen and passengers from being knocked overboard.

The artisan took part in the feast, as did his mother. Everyone loved him, not because he won hearts with his beautiful work – he spoke very little – but because he knew how to interest children who always bothered their parents as soon as the latter got a little drunk. Upon his arrival, he organized a big table, especially for them. The food was not set out as on the other tables; he had divided the portions and hidden them under small clay bowls. All sorts of games gave children a means of discovering the mouthfuls, which acted as rewards.

Toward the end of the evening, the Carpenter returned to his place among the Zebedees; one by one, the children had fallen asleep. Yair came to thank him. The young worker cast a discreet glance towards the dainty bride, who still hadn’t shown the smallest of smiles. He was touched by her funeral sadness. This girl seemed to be waiting to be sacrificed like an animal at the Temple altar.

Just at that moment, a great silence set among the guests. They had suddenly grown aware of the urgent need to do something for the young bride. To leave Jerusalem for the Galilean countryside was, without doubt, for her, a step-down. From Ari’s palace to the Jaire’s house, the descent was rather steep. Above all, seeing her seated beside her husband, the gap that separated her sadness from his excellent humor seemed insurmountable. The more the bridegroom laughed, the deeper the young bride sank.

A mental austerity separated her from the country people there. This distance protected her. No one would dare to approach her, lift her veil, look at her face … what protected her, isolated her. What isolated her suffocated her. But this was all she knew. So, for her, Yair was just a little boy in Pharisee’s coat – defenseless – because he mixed up with the common people and material things. How could such a naive fool, staggering over his donkey’s droppings, be able to defend her against a village that assured already despised her?

And now the two of them, Yair and a young laborer, thought of her as a little, lost animal. That is what she imagined.

As usual, the Carpenter did not know what to say; he consistently needed to look around him. The silence grew painful. People said that he only spoke if he had something to say, in a very literal sense. Almost anything would do. He noticed a dense bouquet of lavender rooted in a big shapeless pot. There were flowers on all tables but just one pot of lavender because Jaire’s courtyard was surrounded by thickets of his somewhat invasive plant. The bouquet sat on the distant table assigned to widows and the poor. For an attentive observer, however, this lavender was not ordinary; it overflowed with health, shown by its exuberant colors.

“Who brought this bouquet?” the young artisan questioned.

“Me,” a woman seated at the table with that bouquet replied – without hesitation.

She had not been aware that her contribution to the wedding was not particularly original. Instead, she seemed very proud of her flower. The woman entered the young man’s conversation and continued:

“Come and show us your skill. Because what you have done is admirable.”

The widow had drunk three or four cups of wine; she got up rather cheerfully, took the pot, and went up to him:

“For a demonstration like this,” she began, “it is preferable to take a stem directly from a patch of wild plants; those around us are not of good quality; I am going to show you with this bouquet. You have to plant each cutting on an individual pot.”

She had very carefully chosen a stem, removed the lower leaves, and now she handed the delicate cutting to the Carpenter. He took it between his broad fingers. The artisan’s build did not bode well for the success of the operation: This man was a wide-wristed hauler of beams, a solid slammer of hammers, accustomed to hard work; he held the stems with a surprising gentleness. Between his massive fingers, it seemed somehow pitiful.

The widow couldn’t keep from giggling, which made the young artisan smile. Suddenly, he realized that his smallest actions were being observed, and people expected a miracle from him: that he would make the fiance laugh since he knew so well how to amuse children. They indeed did hope for it.

Mary, the Carpenter’s mother, showed some signs of impatience as if by her looks she was proposing: “Do something!”

The widow picked up a little gravel, which she carefully deposited at the bottom of the empty cup, then placed the cup under the stem the Carpenter was still holding. The stem barely touched the gravel. With her other hand, she poured some water into the receptacle and filled it with the soil borrowed from the mother bouquet – without disturbing the stem the artisan still held. She took the cup from the Carpenter’s hand. He remained motionless. The woman placed the pot on the table and tamped down the soil.

What was the young Carpenter getting at? Why didn’t he do something? Wasn’t the lesson coming?

Not one soul knew any longer why he went from a pot of lavender to an agonizing silence to lift the girl’s spirit. What was it with her, this rather unattractive bride? Wasn’t she blessed to have made such a good match? The leader of the synagogue! And a pretty rich one! The feast proved that. A little silly, it’s true. But why would he have married her if he weren’t?

“What do you want to tell us, my son?” Mary asked in order to bring the lesson to a conclusion.

The Carpenter stayed motionless and silent. He realized that his mother expected an ending that would lighten the atmosphere; first, he keeps silent, then just comes out with this:

“Let us take care of one another.”

These few words, mixed with this consuming silence, impressed nobody. They shrugged. The artisan surely was no orator. Everyone forgave him; you should stick with what you know.

Yair took out his flute. Others did the same. They played, they sang; even Balaam did her part, braying like a trumpet. Jacob Zebedee, still in his teens, went to get the bride and made her dance. How elegant the girl was in her silken clothes! She danced like a young deer: All the men took turns dancing with her; the grace and fluidity of her movements erased the imperfection of her face. She ended up falling into the arms of an old peasant twice as big as her husband. There, she fell asleep, drunk with fatigue.

The big man returned to her spouse. Everyone burst out laughing with relief, yet the girl did not wake up.

Yair didn’t have sex with his young wife on the first night, not even in the first week. Instead, he enjoyed imitating – as well as he could – the way she danced that night. This made her laugh. For the man had neither grace, nor rhythm, nor dexterity.

The lavender cutting took root in its cup, and soon, around it, several stems dared to venture out of the earth. A bee approached to pollinate the flowers, and Yair undertook to explain the ways of love to his new bride. He clearly saw her unease; despite having read almost all the Greek philosophers, she knew nothing of the kingdom of the living. In her rich villa, without a mother, with no advice from women, surrounded by walls, towers, and apprehensions, she had doubtlessly never observed the amorous courtship of birds.

“My dear friend,” her husband ventured without thinking, “there really is a sense of drama in the Creator of all things, and perhaps this is only a rockslide of atoms in the void; but in the details of life, you must admit, there is a sense of humor that surpasses the tragic sense. Plants proclaim their beauty, yet it is a bee that makes the seed fall into the parted corolla; with animals, the fertilizing actions often look grotesque – even pathetic sometimes – between you and me, we can laugh about them, for all of this isn’t really serious, don’t you think? It is like a wanton and burlesque dance in certain aspects, so astonishing in the results: the miracle of life.

Then, he launched into other, more explicit clarifications, which he camouflaged with increasingly farfetched examples. In the end, his face had become so scarlet, his explanations so preposterous, his movements so maladroit that she could not help but burst out in laughter.

At that instant, he asked her to dance. Wine and flute had their effect, and Maâkha’s dance concluded in an embrace that made her nearly faint with pleasure. For the first time in her life, a concrete sensation conquered the apprehension she had about it. However, behind her pleasure, beneath the piled-up stones of her memory, hid an unspeakable shameful experience. Yair realized that the girl, despite her brother’s almost constant surveillance, was not a virgin.

THE BIRTH

When Maâkha’s periods stopped, she was convinced she was carrying a child; she sank into a depression again. For her, it was certain death, the eternal fall into eternal nothingness of the eternal solitude, her nightmare. Her mother died giving birth to Maâkha. It was as if she was swallowed into a well of fear.

Yair could no longer bring her outdoors, on the ground, among living things. Yet his wife did not know what to do in the house. Her two servants did everything: even dressing her, handing her water to drink and meals to eat. She read old Greek philosophers who explained that everything was water, earth, and fire, tormented by shocks and that this was what determined her thoughts, her emotions, and her destiny. Puppet of obscure forces, she had no hold on her collapsing mind.

Yair disagreed. He opened the door, opened the shutters, and pointed to a leaf, a flower, an insect on Balaam’s muscle. Arguments that found no entry into his wife’s house.

“Why don’t you read Aristotele? Why don’t you go outside and verify his observations?”

“Buy me books; I will read them. Still, I will not set my feet in cow manure.”

Yair knew only too well that he wouldn’t get anywhere. Every argument he constructed with one side of his head, the other side could just as easily get deconstructed. We advance toward the future not with our heads but with our fingertips.

Salome, the mother of the Zebedee and a skillful midwife, agreed to lend the husband a hand. Making the most of the fact that she had no daughters, no sooner had the future mother got up than she began to hurriedly demand:

“I need you to trim the sheep’s hoof.”

The men passed the day at the boatyard. A dozen sheep kept Salome busy. She had to milk them, help them give birth, tend to the baby lambs, and, obviously, prepare everyone’s meals.

“I will send you my servants,” Maâkha answered.

“I won’t be bothered with servants,” Salome shot back. “You are the one I want to work with. I ought to fire your servants; they are keeping you from living. You should learn something; if not, you will stay just as ignorant as your philosophers all your life.”

Less than an hour later, Maâkha was in the sheep pan holding the instruments, obeying without the slightest initiative. It was simply impossible to say no to Salome.

Little by little, Maâkha grew accustomed to the fact that a difficulty is not always a tragedy; a birth is not necessarily a catastrophe; the death of a lamb is not inevitably the end of the world.

One day, the midwife turned up in the middle of the night, entered without knocking, took Maâkha’s hand, and brought her to Tirtsa, who had begun her labor a day before. She was going to bring her sixth child into the world. It soon became a celebration because the labor was well-advanced; after a few piercing shrieks and a flow of blood, the baby emerged triumphant. Salome sucked his mouth and nostrils to clear them and spat in a plate. He screamed. A tenor, this boy. She cleaned him a little, then gave him to his mother. He quieted down, then clung to her breast like a leech.

Maâkha felt vague jealousy; after her pains, the new mother had been caught up in something solid and powerful: Her baby prevented her from falling into emptiness.

Soon, it was Maâkha’s turn. Salome had filled a large basin with lukewarm water. She commanded with the authority of a leader, leaving no space for silence to attack her mother, and sent the servants back to her home to prepare the meals for the men, for dawn was beginning to yellow the horizon. Soon after, she opened the shutters and took command, regulating the breathing in and breathing out, insisting that Maâkha should assume the crouching position, then walk around the bed, rest, lying on her side in the crayfish position, then more inhaling and exhaling. She made her swallow calming infusions or stimulating infusions, according to the body’s needs. She had her bite a moistened sheet, then scream voluntarily, just because that helped. She led her out to the garden for a moment and brought her back to bed. No imaginary fear had time to interfere with her midwife’s liturgy.

Finally, the little girl was there, in her mother’s arms. The milk squirted from the nipple, and Yair wept like a child on the shoulder of his spouse.

For a long time, Maâkha was absorbed by her baby as if by an ocean, a time without the slightest break or interruption.

She couldn’t escape from the grip of the torturer who had split her in two and was now reassembling her around this new pleasure that filled her breast.

Yair was hoping. Had Maakho finally entered her appointed place? Could she come to Capernaum at last?

The new mother wanted to say something. She looked at Salome for a moment. No, not one word came out of her half-opened mouth. Afterward, she made this pronouncement:

“Emouna. No, she will be called Jemouna because it is even sweeter than Emouna.”

Yair’s and Salome’s cheeks were wet with tears because “Emouna” means “confidence.

MADNESS

Rabbi Asher Jaire made far too much of it. He could no longer contain his joy and started dancing with Balaam in the moonlight. With nearly every breath, he took a swig of wine. At night, rather than sleeping, he went to the village well and chanted Ecclesiastes.

« Praise Yahweh! What I have found to be good is to eat and drink, to enjoy the well-being due us for all the pains we take beneath the sun; this is the lot of men. Yahweh has filled me with

wealth and possessions. He has given me the power to enjoy it, to take my part of it, and make it my jubilation.”

Balaam went all out with thunderous braying while the goats pecked impatiently, hoping to receive some of the grain that fell from their master’s coat. The Pharisee danced grotesquely, a scarecrow in the wind. The young mother looked at her husband – through the frame of the door, which she always left wide open. His exuberance had the property of killing her own happiness. It was the same thing every time: Yair enjoyed himself, and Maâkha went into her shell. There was a wound that even the smoothest salve inflamed.

The woman asked herself if her husband was capable of bringing his euphoria under control. Did he really believe it? Did he think the whole world was transformed by Jemouna’s first cry? That the Messiah had just arrived? That now the only empire was this baby’s? That she would be his little princess? No! It was her baby, her pleasure, and this double of herself made her self-sufficient. In reality, the entire world was now superfluous! The mother did not want the baby to see her father; he had to keep his distance.

He did keep at a distance but didn’t leave. Yes, truly visibly, he believed in this new Kingdom. Asher Jaire’s joy about Jemouna did not run dry. The result was that on the following sabbath, he sang the passage from Ecclesiastes in the synagogue. The text was as expected, but the tune, the tone, and the expression puckered up the ears. The congregation looked askance but forgave.

Some months later, it was worse when Maâkha agreed to let Jem (the father’s nickname for the child) discover her father’s face. He made so many grimaces that the child, in despair, turned toward her mother and cried like pealing balls. It made no difference; Yair was utterly drunk, drunk with wine for sure, but above all, drunk with happiness. Which, by the power of an incurable wound, pushed Maâkha into the opposite corner, into doubt, cold, and hardness.

As she dug her hole, she thought things over. Was Yair able to recall, or at least able to imagine, that the sun has its most beautiful smile and shows its most beautiful colors before falling into the abyss of the horizon?

Summit of happiness, beginning of the fall. Wasn’t he just a naive and brainless child unable to see the danger? Was he going to jump into the hole of the moon, like a butterfly hurls itself into the flame of a lamp? What would do on the days of fever, the evil days, the days when Jem would be sick, carried off by a crazy turn of chance? What would he do when she becomes a beautiful prey for some hoodlum or her own brother?

The latter possibility took, in Maâkha’s mind, the consistency of granite and the sharpness of a sword. She didn’t take time to dismiss the image; she didn’t take time to decide anything at all. The vow was made: Jemouna would be her last child. There would be no others, that’s it. Don’t risk giving her daughter a brother. It wasn’t really a vow – nothing had passed through her will – it was a fact: Yair’s seed would never get to the promised land; the road was now cut off.

Sometime later, Yair realized that he was no longer welcome, not even for a caress, not even for a touch. The circle between mother and child was buckled shut.

And yet it didn’t matter, his little Jem existed, he saw her, he heard her, and someday she would come running to him. She would tear away the thickening veil her mother was weaving between them; she would jump on his neck and cry: “Papa!”

Time transformed the baby; Jem passed her first year; she walked, crawled, fell, cried, and laughed … Yair had the right to take her in his arms for a moment, and she didn’t resist; she was now accustomed to her papa’s exaggerated gestures. This so brief, so tender a hug was such an elixir that the desert of his married life was blown away for good. Without the slightest hope from that direction, his paternal love increased, in fact, got worse. It made him tremble. He loved his princess much more than he had loved his wife, much more than his own life, and this was obvious. 

The line of time went backward. Maâkha was now convinced that if she didn’t love her husband

anymore, it was because he, by loving her daughter too much, rejected her. He was literally crazy about his little one; a perfect child, a straight nose, lips cut out of silk, a high forehead, eyes like diamonds, all that she wasn’t.

And now that man who had abandoned her was, she thought, monopolizing her Jemouna’s attention. He captured her with his ridiculous, funny faces, his little boy behavior, his revolting joy, and his shameless happiness. The more Maâkha tried to keep her daughter close to her, the more she tore away from her – to go to her father. When he was working outside, or even when he went away and disappeared on the other side of the courtyard wall, Jem pushed open the shutter, laughed for a moment, then screamed at the door.

Maâkha didn’t tolerate for long the way Yair was acting with her daughter. His shameless joy, which delighted his Jem as much as a dollhouse, exasperated her. The mother knew only too well that her daughter would one day fall to earth and that it would surely be this very day, or if not, at the time when her blood would soil her, impure blood, an odor that attracts wolves. Volcanic jealousy arose in her a bottom – less anger, a rage that only a girl betrayed can feel. It grabbed her by the throat and became the bitter pedestal of her acerbic existence.

There was no exit. Maâkha knew that no one in her family was going to remove has from Capernaum, from the filth of the animals, from the madness of a father at the mercy of his daughter. If Yair were to never recover from his euphoria, if he permanently lost his common

sense, he would be rejected by the synagogue, and their fall would then be fatal.

One night Maâkha left her little one with the servants and followed Yair, who couldn’t let a new moon pass without going to pray on the mountain. That’s what he said. Good Pharisee! But it wasn’t toward the mountain that he walked, but toward a valley south of the village. He descended a crevice and ventured into a mass of yellowish limestone boulders. Balaam, who followed, had surely noticed that Maâkha was threading her way in the shadows behind them. But she said nothing. Sooner or later, this farce indeed had to be put to an end. Yair,

leaving his donkey to keep watch over the surroundings, went to search for a big stick hidden behind an old linden tree. Using the stick, he rolled a heavy stone away and entered the cave. It was an unwhitened tomb, the family tomb. He lowered a heavy canvas from the inside. A barely visible light filtered through it.  No doubt, he had lit his lamp and didn’t want it to betray his presence.

He remained there, no sound, no whispering, a silence so long that the night and the cold got the better of the wife. She returned without fully satisfying her curiosity.

Nevertheless, it was enough. What a Pharisee!

A pervert, an adorer of corpses! A sicko, awaiting the bodily resurrection of his parents. No doubt he touches the burial cloths, uncovers a hand, gently grazes the skin like parchment, and kisses the brow. Corpses: The height of impurity. It was just as Ari had clearly explained to his daughter: ”For us, the corpse is the most impure thing there is; for the Pharisees, too, but they believe that Yahweh will put flesh back on the bones because, in the Book of Kings, it is written that Elisha brought a dead man back to life. Was the dead? If just anybody starts to believe in his own personal resurrection, what can we do to convince him that it is the people who are important? The people is the Law; if not, it is not a people, but a horde of wild animals. And for a daughter, the people are her family.”

Maâkha had learned all too well what a family is, and in particular, what a daughter is – in a family. So, how could she believe in the resurrection of bodies? You certainly wouldn’t want it. One life is enough, even too much.

In the morning, Maâkha didn’t have the courage to ask her husband the slightest question. From that day on, however, she made him pine after his daughter. She held her until she cried and screamed. Then she accused the father of making her cry and kicked him out of the house.

Yair, however, didn’t weaken in his resolution. He didn’t repudiate his wife. He let neither of the two female servants come near him, as Maakho hoped so that she could catch him in the act. He remained faithful, miserably faithful. But he was away a lot. He went to Sepphoris to talk with his friend Maimon, to read, to learn: the long preparation for the journey.

TERROR IN GALILEE

The little girl was not yet six when a Roman centurion arrived in Capernaum. The centurion was

searching for a group of Zealots who were hiding somewhere in Galilee. The rebels had killed two Roman soldiers and wounded another, besides having stolen public money that was being brought to Caesarea. Of course, no one in Capernaum or in any village or town had heard about these rebels!

This time, the centurion lost patience. He ordered that they bring him twenty girls still living

with their fathers. No one budged. The soldiers entered the houses by force. Before noon, they had assembled their booty in the center of the village: teenage girls fastened, two by two, to bundles of dry wood.

All those present understood what was going to happen. The fathers came forward one by one, affirming that they were Zealots and had taken part in the crime. The commanders understood that they would get nowhere this way. Nevertheless, he chose two fathers and their daughters. First, they flagellated them on the public square, then crucified them back to back on the road to Nain. A few days later, they all had died, and no one talked. The commander did not allow the bodies to be taken down and buried.

The centurion went toward Cana while the commander and two soldiers proceeded in The direction of Bethsaida. No one knew who followed them in the band of forest along the Jordan just before the land rose toward the village,  but two days later, the centurion doubled back, gathered his men, and headed toward mount Tabor. They found The Zealots and brought them back. Somewhere crucified at Cana, others at Magdala, six at Bethsaida, eight at Capernaum, beside the road, for everyone to see.

The weapons the Zealots used came from the Parthians: very powerful, two-edged swords, bronze helmets, and shields that were light. The commander gave a speech in Latin, which he asked Rabbi Jaire to translate. He claimed to have proof that the Parthians were infiltrating the Zealots, and if it wasn’t for love for the Jews, but because they wanted them to revolt, in order to weaken the procurator, then take his place and impose their law a hundred times less tolerant than Rome’s. He didn’t need to go into detail; everyone knew how the Parthians acted. Yet this did not change Capernaum’s mood.

The following sabbath, the corpses were still hanging on the crosses. The vultures had a feast. The citizens of Galilee choked back their rage. At the synagogue, the atmosphere was so thick that you could cut it with a knife. There was a traitor among the assembled men. In everyone’s presence, one of the men who had stepped forward to die in his daughter’s place shouted to the assembly one of the most famous maxims of Proverbs: “Like a broken tooth or a lame foot is reliance on the unfaithful in a time of trouble.”

Asher Jair, leader of the synagogue, said nothing. They saw his embarrassment, his fear, and his weakness. After a lengthy pause, he could do no more than stammer these words:

“Should we consider our neighbor as a traitor until there is proof of the contrary? Shouldn’t we do the opposite if we want to live in peace until justice is done?”

That was their rabbi, all right: blind trust. Time will sort things out! Let’s not be suspicious …

They saw in his indulgence only weakness and cowardice. Capernaum was split in two: the prudent, most notably the Zebedees; those bent on immediate action; the great majority gathered around the father who wanted to take vengeance on the Romans, even if it meant throwing all Galilee into a bloodbath. But, for the moment, they wanted – above all – to stone the traitor on the public square.

In the end, it was Jacob Zebedee who got the infamous traitor’s confession. The informer had feared that the Zealots of Galilee were giving the Romans a pretext to strengthen their occupation in the region and that the province would become a protectorate like Judaea, which would worsen everyone’s condition. “We will never be able to overthrow the Romans,” the man muttered. Let’s conform to their laws in our outward actions and follow our inner law; for in the end, what leads the world is never what is imposed from the outside, but what is lived from the inside.” Neither threats nor rewards had motivated the man’s informing. He had acted according to his conscience to save lives and encourage people.

Jacob consulted his father, and it was agreed that the informer would leave Galilee in secret and flee to Perea with his family, where he could work with an uncle he knew down there.

Obviously, people guessed that Zebedee’s clan had acted in secret without consulting the council of Capernaum; for now, there was an empty house in the little town, and a

family had disappeared. They burned the house down.

After these events, rabbi Jaire never managed to heal Capernaum’s wounds. The marriages in one clan were not celebrated in the other. They no longer even greeted each other. The leader of the synagogue was no more than a master of ceremonies who walked from one faction to the other. He passed days, and weeks at Sepphoris. He dreamed about his journey. There were so many things that needed finishing touches. The hazzan was taking care of everything; the town council no longer waited for Asher Jaire to make decisions.

THE LAKE OF TIBERIAS

At the house, Yair was nothing more than a shadow. Maâkha steered the boat; she was, it might

be said, like a fortress in a state of siege walled around her daughter. Despite everything, her father managed to fire some arrows that occasionally reached his little princess. He placed on them the final fragments of his paternal authority and didn’t want Jem to be entirely transformed into a Sadducee – versed in Geek fatalism, he didn’t want to see the worst of Greek philosophy, a kind of materialism, transform a soul into chaff and piles of atoms. He made it his duty to teach

her the prophets, Isaiah first of all: “Then the lame will leap like a heart, the tongue of the mute will sing; for waters will break forth in the desert, and rivers flood the arid plains. The mirage of living in the desert of your mind has become a real sheet of water, and the land of thirst is now full of fountains.”

Jem, from the height of her ten years, found her father’s euphoric quotations amusing:

“Is that why, papa, why you make up such big mirages? The bigger the mirage, the more immense the lake will be!”

“You don’t understand. Listen. Moses and his people were lost in the desert. The sun made mirages in the dunes in the distance. That gave them just enough hope to go to the lake of Tiberias.”

“After forty years, papa!”

“What do you believe? Do you think that your mother’s black and white mirages are less dangerous than my colored ones?”

Yair stood his ground. Maâkha didn’t intervene but didn’t let the father go out with the child. Nevertheless, and in spite of all these disputes – perhaps because of them – the child liked nothing better than to cross swords with her papa.

Beyond the words and the mirages, the child advanced in age and slowly transformed herself. One could begin to see the bit of woman peeping out of the child. This was when she headed

toward the Zebedees. There was a busy boatyard there, a brouhaha, an effervescence existing nowhere else. Above all, no mother and father. Peace. Maâkha gave her consent, for these people were well-off. In the workshops, they designed the boats, cut the lumber, steamed the planks, and bent them. The ships took shape and were sold for a very reasonable price. She couldn’t measure the transformation or realize that her daughter had her own lantern, illuminating here and there the things of life and beginning to love them. She saw nothing of that, for as soon as she set foot in the house again, the child reassumed her morose mood and melted into her mother’s darkness.

The Carpenter lived in the midst of this jumble of people, planks, and tools; he moved through it with ease and tranquility found only on placid lakes untroubled by any wind. The deep currents orient all things, yet we forget them. The young man spoke very little and made signs with his eyes, shoulders, head, and hands; everything seemed to advance of its own accord. The Carpenter often took breaks, escaping toward the olive groves, yet the work went on at the same pace. When he returned, the movement accelerated imperceptibly.

Occasionally, several people went out on the lake with him after the evening meal, supposedly to test the new boats. Fishing none too seriously here and there, they talked together: men and women, children and adolescents, workers and servants. This was Jem’s hour, and she pestered everyone with questions. What amused her the most was the diversity of answers, mainly the Carpenter’s skill at circulating the answers until an intimacy deepened among

them, and in the tranquility of the lake and the friendship of hearts, he told a story …

Among those who gathered in the boat was a teenage boy named Mark. He burst out laughing every time she asked one of her surprising questions; always so simple and yet unanswerable. For example: “Why do dead fish shine for a while in the sun but lose their colors when dried?” And the Carpenter spoke of the fisherman who never stopped watering his fish in order to keep them alive.

However, when Jem returned to the house, she fell back into the same sadness; she was crushed as soon as she closed the door behind her, and there was nothing but dead fish in her

boat after that.

One night, she was able to escape. Her mother had drunk too much wine and was sleeping like a stone. She slipped out of bed and fled toward the wharves.

The lake was as smooth as the sky it reflected. The night sparkled, and all the hills descended toward the lake, slowly, like big turtles. They were silhouettes with fuzzy, trembling contours.

There was no moon, and the starlight was filtered by masses of wool that little by little covered the sky.

The dome of Galilee was clouded over the basin of Tiberias darkened. The lake reflected the clouds; one by one, the candles of the night were extinguished. Jem had barely the time to absorb the last shimmering when suddenly she saw nothing except for a few small glistening surfaces undulating on the water.

The cold slid over her shoulders and formed an icy dew. She pulled up her shawl and slipped into a stout boat that was not used for fishing; it was rented to sail away, along the lakeshore, then up the entrance of the Jordan. Jem did not touch the moorings firmly attached to the rocks. The breeze was chilly, though it scarcely raised a ripple on the lake. She was protected from it, though, by the edges of the boat.

She gazed at a little halo dancing at the stern of the boat. Reflections swayed, stretched, contracted, wavered, disappeared, returned, opened an eye, closed it, vanished. It was her soul, supple as the dance of the phantoms.

There are stones: for them, the night makes no difference; tomorrow, they will still be there, intact. There are reflections; they waver and disappear: The world we hold, the world we lose. What is this thing that exists only in those moments when we are interested in it, these fish we have to water to make them shine?

She saw her moods in the water, in the spots coming from the sky, settling for a moment in a dark and shining place, vanishing afterward to never return in an identical form.

Her attention was something else: it was a miracle, it changed everything, it made everything exist. Even anxiety, when she experienced it attentively, produced a sort of pleasure in existing. Fear told her that she lived, and that made her happy!

Tears slid down her cheeks. The lake never lied. It disguised nothing; it arranged nothing.

Jem got up. The wind had also stood up and made noise in the leaves of the trees.

She thought of going back to the house, determined to remain in the state the lake had put her in. If she did lose the thread, all she needed to do was to go back to the lake; Tiberias was her friend, a friend who didn’t lie. With a friend like that, you can’t fall back into the narrow house of family torments just because the door has closed behind you.

She groped her way in the darkness. It wasn’t easy to find her way. She went northward along the shore, then retraced her steps. She was seeking the path to the village in holes of silence. Suddenly, she thought she saw a shadow between the trees rustling in the wind.

“This way, Jemouna.”

It was the Carpenter. She went toward him.

“The night is wonderful, isn’t it?”

“Yes, but the wind is rising, and the clouds have covered everything. I can’t see anything anymore.”

“So, follow me.”

She took his hand. With slow but sure steps, they returned. Jem felt as if the man understood what she had just experienced, that he had experienced a similar moment.

“Quite often at night, I sit in the boat you were sitting in. Sometimes, I even got to sleep there. I saw you; I did not want to disturb you.”

“Yes, it is beyond me. My mother is my mother. My father is my father. But the lake is me.”

“Keep this moment in your memory!”

“I do not need to. The lake won’t go away.”

“You are right. Go back to the lake every single time you feel lost.”

She could not imagine that happiness this true could disappear as easily as her father’s mirages. Yet, when the door of her house closed behind her, this moment at the lake evaporated as quickly as a dream.

The next day and the following days, even outdoors, even at the lake, even at the Zebedees, she could regain neither the image nor the knowledge nor the memory of this moment to the point where she asked herself if it had ever existed.

After many ups and downs, she was twelve. Salome’s brother took rabbi Jaire aside and declared his intentions. It was still too early – obviously – to think about betrothal, but the child was so beautiful and vivacious that he wanted her for his son, who, moreover, didn’t miss a single opportunity to sit next to her and cut Mark off whenever the latter wanted to put a word in.  “Think about it, rabbi Jaire,” he concluded, “the boatyard is where she’s growing up, and I already have 25 percent of the shares in the business.”

Yair thought it best to talk it over with Jem, adding That she had lots of time, a whole year to think about it, and maybe a little more. He regularly asked Jem: “Have You thought about it? One day, you will have to take a husband. Get a little closer to the young man. Talk to him! Maybe you’ll like him! If not, tell me, and we won’t speak about it anymore.” But the arguments he hammered her with brought the child almost to the breaking point. The boy stared at her with his mouth half open and froze as if paralyzed; all he did was repeat some pretty phrases. She did not dare to approach him anymore; it was Mark whom she preferred. Jem was inclined toward him because he laughed.

However, she began to see her own situation as it really was. She understood that she was starting to yield. Like a single pillar that knows too well that it alone holds up the entire roof, she didn’t want to give in. She gathered all her forces and hardened herself against happiness. Seated in the middle of the house, she supported a roof that wanted to collapse.

Jem shut herself up in this Holy of Holies, her morbid home. The father saw everything but remained paralyzed, not only incapable of acting but unable to discuss it with friends at the Zebedees or even Maimon. Imprisoned by the shame of his married life, he walled himself in. He sank, he, the man who had always felt as strong and joyful as his donkey. His mirages vanished.

He went to get the big ball of wool that had accumulated under Jem’s bed. He shoved it to her. She shrugged.

“Don’t you remember, every time I came to your room, I gave you a little ball? Today, you could make a shawl.”

“Who could weave such small ends, papa?”

“When we are children, we accumulate yarn; when we are adults, when we are old, we put it on. That is why we have life.”

“I have no life.”

Yair didn’t go to the lake; he went to the tomb of his parents, sat down, read something, or he dove into the cuneiform signs that absorbed all his intelligence and all his hope. Signs that he didn’t understand. He was convinced, nevertheless, that there was a path. Exhausted, he got

up, extinguished the lamp, rolled the stone behind him, and returned to the house; the real tomb was there. Some nights later, he returned to sit down next to his parents and his manuscripts, hoping for a sign and a departure.

On the road to the tomb, one moonless night, he looked at the stars, this time as if there was nothing else. They struggled, in the opaque clay, like the undecipherable cuneiform writing of the Hittites. He stopped, captivated by the mystery of this writing. This was the manuscript he was seeking, the great black book of heaven, the one revealing all the truth that had to be deciphered.

THE STARRY NIGHT

We must not lose sight of the fact that rabbi Asher Jaire lived in the time of the Roman emperor Tiberius. He doesn’t see people crucified on every street corner; he isn’t conscious of every moment of the cruelty of Rome. On the contrary, he strives to keep his imagination in an undeniable world of peace. All the same, he feels the fear, the weight, and the anxiety

of oppression. It is his the usual atmosphere; Maâkha is like a condensation of the mass of Rome made heavier by the Greek materialists’ philosophy of chance and emptiness. Yair struggles in that mass – like a donkey stuck in the mud. Since all the mud in the universe has been deposited on earth, the heavens are all the clearer, more limpid, and pure; the stars shine without the worry of vexation because here, on our planet, men bear the weight of the dust deposited on the depths of rock.

On the road leading to his parent’s tomb, discouraged by the latest events, he walked of night beneath a dome of ebony pierced by points of light. The sky is pure, perfectly readable. He tries to absorb its vastness, to make it erase his family drama.

Ah! If only he could understand the code of the stars!

He walks beneath that text, luminous but indecipherable.

The air is dry and perfectly transparent; the stars twinkle, some pulse and detach from the background, the others flicker in patches of white ash, and it is genuinely immense; it relieves

him.

Obviously, he doesn’t know that the number of the stars is not in the millions but in the hundreds of billions. He doesn’t know that this veil of stars diagonally crossing the heavens is only the Milky Way, our galaxy. He doesn’t know that the further off the galaxies themselves are numbered in thousands of billions. And yet, every star is an immense sun, a devouring inferno.

He doesn’t know it, but the greater part of these suns have skirts of planets that turn like dancers around the fire. At a certain distance, the flux of heat is sufficient in intensity and regularity to increase the complexity of molecules – to the point where plants and animals are formed. But what is written there? What is the meaning of this text? Will our torments serve

some purpose? Do our moments of happiness and unhappiness have any resonance at all in the global psyche of the world? Must all things dissolve forever in the void, as Epicurus thinks?

Or do all these stars form a word, as the Torah thinks?

The learned rabbi Jaire doesn’t know that in two. Thousand years, when libraries will overflow with knowledge about the details, the human being will be completely subjugated by the amplitude of sky and earth and yet still incapable of understanding why he or she exists! Why so grand a setting and so hard a teaching?

He does not know, but he feels it.

He breathes more freely, and now he looks ahead. He leaves his parents’ grotto, and he sees it in his mind; he sees his parents’ bones on one side and the family treasure on the other. He adores these cherished scrolls, covered with minuscule figures in ink, but especially this camel shoulder blade inscribed with the first verse of the commandments dictated to Moses. Two of its verbs are in the present tense, but the second has been truncated by tradition; it was written in the past tense –  like an accomplished fact, despite it being the ultimate commandment proposed to humans.

He lifts his eyes again and looks at the stars with an inexpressible thirst for knowledge. He doesn’t know how to read creation, so how could he read his daughter and save her from despair. He imagines abducting her and leaving for Srinagar. Why take her from her mother if he had nothing better to offer her? “Yahweh, my Creator, teach me to read that law that is like your body. What is this sea that I am the shore of? »

THE PLAN

Though his mind is unclear, Yair is determined.

“I am leaving to celebrate Passover in Jerusalem, he tells Maâkha. I am going there alone.

From the coldness in the tone of his voice and the lack of any explanation, Maâkha understands that he is seriously thinking of repudiating her. She knows that neither her father nor her brothers would accept her returning to the house. Jem would enter puberty in the coming months. Accordingly, she would remain with her father until he found her a husband to provide him with descendants. And yet Maâkha feels totally incapable of returning to married life, as if a belt had tightened around her, imprisoning her in her flesh and in her thoughts as well.

Terror reigns at the center of her mind, the terror of the eternal fall into the eternal nothingness. To this wall of fear, Yair had just added another, equally strong. Left to herself, without the protection of either her family of origin or the family fate brought her, a repudiated woman like her, lacking joy and lacking beauty, could do no more than wander, beg, and end her days slandered and stoned to death. Walled in by these two fears, she barely breathed. Her whole body began to sweat oil and blood like an olive in the press. Then her sweat turned icy and plunged her into a terrifying void. Vague, uncertain memories leap upon her. Anxiety, never easing, never resting, strangled her.

Jemouna was inexorably drawn into this press. She no longer went to the Zebedees; she stayed glued to her mother like a buoy attached to someone who has drowned, a buoy that is powerless and sinking. She stopped eating the way she should – not out of stubbornness, but simply because the pressure of fear on her stomach left her no respite. She vomited what her mother forced her to swallow.

Yair was already on the road and had loaded Balaam with packages and bags. He had his plan: He would go directly to Ari’s.

The negotiation lasted three long weeks.

He began by describing the facts. Maâkha was refusing to have intercourse with him (he didn’t speak about the virginity lost before the marriage); he had not only the right but the familial duty to repudiate her and seek male descendants elsewhere. As expected, Ari and all the brothers were cold as ice, letting it be understood that the woman had only herself to blame, and if she came to Jerusalem and loitered on the streets, she would be driven out so as not to cover the family with shame. This scandal displeased them, however. They were, in consequence, inclined to listen to rabbi Jaire’s proposition.

« I am ready; I am going to take up my family’s old profession, » Yair declared one evening opportune of nothing.

Ari, the father, was the first to understand that this might be a path worth following, a separation without repudiation; the family might wish time and distance, come to accept the idea of a second wife legitimized by the sterility of the first; that had been the case with Abraham himself. It had been twelve years, and Maâkha had not had another child! Adar, the brother, suppressing this fear, made a great show of acceptance. Yair threw him a glance so brief that it was invisible to everyone yet struck the target with a piercing point. Adar was ready to defend the rabbi’s proposition in exchange for his silence.

Asher Jaire explained his plan in greater detail; the more he explained, the more Ari seemed open to it. The rabbi showed extensive knowledge, great common sense, and thorough preparation. To increase the pressure, he let it be known that if he repudiated Maâkha, he knew of a synagogue in Jerusalem that would agree to take him in as an act of ostentatious public charity as the Pharisee knew so well how to do. Adar did not need anymore; he was in agreement.

MARY OF MAGDALA

On the trip home, Yair wanted time to step back and reflect on his future and the preparation details. Most importantly, the inevitable wrenching pain of the separation. He could not let Jem languish with her mother; how could he convince her? Could he induce her to forget this strong yet so lethal connection?

Balaam had her ideas about that; she wanted to distance herself from the somber atmosphere of her master’s reflection. The opportunity was given to her. She smelled an odor that indeed was very desirable. All of a sudden, she sought to approach a small, a rather cheerful group returning to Magdala. In reality, her only thought was to follow her instinct. She pulled her guide along with her by force. Drawing on the halter, with feet planted in the sand, he did his best to hold her back. He just could not resist his determined donkey!

Several women had assembled behind a brotherhood of Galilean fishermen who were also returning from Jerusalem. Balaam was especially attracted to the mule that one of these women had, and as a result, Yair, unwilling to let go of the halter, found himself surrounded by women seated on their mounts, beside one of them in particular. The flanks of the two animals were almost touching. Which was very unseemly. On foot, the Pharisee appeared especially small because the woman’s mule was a tall one. He timidly excused himself, blaming his donkey’s disobedience, in plain sight of the mounted women who had giggled into their veils so as not to hurt the rabbi’s pride. Jaire stationed himself behind his donkey, which in any case, would not go on her way without her new companion.

When the woman turned her face toward him, the wind lifted her veil, and Yair recognized her: it was the one they called Mary of Magdala (to mark a radical change of life). The young widow had had to beg for her bread by renting her body like so many women whose husbands had neither fathers nor brothers then; no one knew why she presented herself at the synagogue to ask for the punishment of pardon. After the prescribed beating, she was permitted to receive the bread and lodging of charity for several weeks. Then she found a respectable family to live with as a servant.

Balaam let the mule nibble her withers. She encouraged him, even. The silence brought laughter to a close. It was obvious that the rabbi had lost control of his donkey, which was not embarrassed about lifting her tail. This forced him to say something.

“Pardon my donkey. She is putting me in a position that is embarrassing.”

“It is unusual, but even so, you ought to try again. You need to keep your distance because you are a Pharisee, the leader of a synagogue. Everybody in Magdala knows you, just as they do in Capernaum. And they know me, too.”

She did not need to say a word more. A man was not allowed to speak to a woman in public, much less to a woman still considered impure. Using his cane, Yair hooked the donkey’s muzzle along with her halter. He pulled it sideways, but it did not do any good.

“Balaam’s donkey!” Yair exclaimed.

“It seems to me that this one here is not obeying a heavenly messenger!” Marry added, tapping her heel against her mule, who definitely did not want to leave his new girlfriend.

After a brief silence, resigned, she continued:

“You are the friend of the Zebedees, aren’t you?”

“They are a leading family in Capernaum and around the whole lake; it is a privilege for me to be their close friend.”

“Not well, I have to tell you, because he does not talk much and works a lot. He was at my wedding, though.”

“Maybe you are not informed! Last year, at about this time, he quit his job and asked Jacob and John, the two brothers, and a few others at the lake – fishermen mostly – to leave their work for a while to go and teach with him.”

“He is almost mute!”

“He was, and he did a lot of thinking. He prepared himself. Now he started. The little group retreated to the mountains for quite a while to discuss it. For several weeks now, crowds have been gathering. The master speaks, and he speaks with the authority of a prophet. He had also asked Salome to bring together several women he wanted to instruct so they could teach.

“He is going to make enemies of all the councils on the lake.”

“Surely, but not Capernaum! I imagine, rabbi.”

“I am not sure if I will be able to persuade all the members.”

Yair didn’t finish his thought, for another came to mind:

“From your smile, I see you are one of these women.”

“Yes, me, the one they call Mary of Magdala. I am with him, and so is the little group around us right now. We are returning from Jerusalem, but the master was not with us. We had a good time together, and more than anything else, we prepared for a new ministry. You can imagine the obstacles! Can we count on you?”

Salome was in front of him, even though he had not recognized her because of the veil. She turned toward him for a moment to show that she approved, nonetheless did not intervene. On the contrary, she hurried away with the other women to let Mary speak more freely.

“What does your master teach?” Yair asked. 

He repeats: “The captives are liberated, the blind see the light, the deaf hear a voice in their hearts, the paralyzed stand on their feet … A new age has just opened. Everyone can take a step and enter the peace of the new kingdom …”

“Isaiah said it!”

“Yes, but he does it. He gave sight to a blind man who had faith in him. He cured a man who had lived for years on a pallet …”

Yair was disappointed. More miracles like the dozens happen each time Israel feels lost or

abandoned. He hesitated a while before contradicting her and continued as if he suddenly remembered that he was the leader of a synagogue:

“In Jerusalem, and even in Galilee, the blind, the deaf, the captives are legion. Isaiah thought of something more significant than curing one and forgetting the others. Every time the people find themselves subjugated to a conqueror – which so often has been the case, it is even more dangerous. The blindest in spirit has sought to revolt, and terrible massacres have ensued; the paralyzed in thought have submitted to the details of the law, and tremendous inner oppression has resulted from this; the deaf, oh! The deaf in heart hallucinates to the point of hearing voices and appealing to the crowd with extravagant prophecies. It is the people who must be cured, not some individuals here and there.

“You’ve understood it well, rabbi Jaire. The liberation of the heart is what has to be achieved.”

“If each one follows his own personal way, how can we preserve harmony in the towns and villages?”

“Ah! Because there is harmony in our towns and our villages,” Mary replied even before Yair realized that he was simply repeating Hillel’s argument. And to whose detriment? Harmony is not the stippled silence of the oppressed. Not very long before your departure to Jerusalem near the lake of Tiberias, on the beaches, poor people, lepers, and rejected women. The disabled fisherman mending their nets were all crowded around the master to the point where he had to climb into a boat and go a little way out from shore in order to speak. He says to them:

“They call you impure, they look on you with disdain, they don’t want to be touched by you, they do not want to be seen in your company or eat with you. I know your hearts; I see no hypocrisy in you, while there is so much of it in those who ought to serve as an example for you. So, I tell you today: celebrate, rejoice. They have lied to you! You are pure; you are the light of the world!”

Very long silences now separated Yair’s questions from Mary’s responses. He had difficulty believing what the woman was saying. It was too beautiful to be true. Anyhow, as Mary spoke, her sincerity, her simplicity, and her frankness slowly persuaded the heart of the Pharisee who had always felt suffocated by the details of the Law. In fact, it was true: a sincere person inspires trust, and trust is the basis of real collective harmony. It was too beautiful to be false.

While he was beginning to believe it, fear was growing in him, for if the Carpenter began to awaken Isaiah’s old hopes, there would be insurrection and, after the insurrection, the massacre. This fear reinforced his desire to leave the Jewish world.

When they arrived at Magdala, Balaam still didn’t want to separate from the mule, so Mary decided to continue their journey to Capernaum with Salome.

Yair tapped Balaam’s croup with his cane and whispered in her ear:

“I am following you; you seem to know the road better than I do.”

DELIVERANCE

Approaching Capernaum, they encountered looks that resembled reproacher but with more

pity than condemnation. Although all the eyes turned toward her master, Balaam stayed glued to Mary’s mule as if her life depended on it. Yair suddenly felt oppressed. His worries returned one by one; he felt that it was no longer just a question of separation and decision, of flight and of hope.

As he approached his home, he realized that the courtyard was packed with agitated women. He passed from the premonition to the conviction that something serious had happened and rushed into his house.

Maâkha remained in the furthest corner of the room, veiled and motionless; she was so thin that she looked like an article of old clothing. The two servants and a woman healer rushed to and fro around the bed. Jemouna’s face was whiter than milk, her hair fell Tousled on the unbleached sheet, and her sealed eyelids didn’t budge a lash, despite her father’s high-pitched shriek as he came in. Her mouth, bluish and impassive, was half-open.

Flies were drinking in it what moisture remained.

“Your daughter is dying, the woman healer says; the pulse is barely perceptible.”

She shooed the flies away and slipped a few drops of an infusion between Jemouna’s lips.

Yair felt strangled. He went out and threw himself on Mary’s knees; she had been waiting outside on her mule. The reflex of a child. He burst out sobbing. He pulled his shawl up over

his head. A terrific silence muzzled all present. The rabbi’s pain had so gripped them that they

couldn’t move. It wasn’t often that a man lost face so noisily … and on the knees of a woman who had been a sinner. The leader of a synagogue to make it worse!

Mary, too, was paralyzed for a moment, then she placed her hand on the grief-stricken father’s head. Balaam let louse a terrible bray, to which the mule responded.

Around three o’clock, the sky smoothed out, immaculate, like a silver bowl.

They heard a distant clamor coming from the lake “The Carpenter, the Carpenter is back.” The birds, petrified at first, left their branches as if on cue. Everyone there took the road to the shore, together with others who came from their houses and yards.

Mary dismounted from her mule and, with these few words, persuaded Yair to follow them:

“All is not lost.”

The boat was approaching, and once again, time ceased to advance.

The was too bright, blindingly so. It was hard to distinguish the Carpenter. He was standing on the prow of his boat, calmly seeking a suitable spot to drop the hooked anchor as if there was no place to land. The first to arrive were already in the water up to their knees and couldn’t retreat because of the crowd. The one which many now called master remained standing, motionless, his attention focused on the water. He found a stone large enough, dropped

the hooked anchor, and jumped in the water. He checked the firmness of the anchorage. He was in the water up to his waist. He advanced at an easy pace, helped by his broad hands. It seemed as if he had not yet noticed the crowd.

Yet every gaze was riveted on him. No one moved. The silence gave the impression, for a moment, that the crowd did not exist. The man advanced with all the grace of a camel on the dunes.

He manifested neither timidity nor pride nor fear, nor an apprehension, nor waiting, nor hesitation, nor uncertainly of any kind, because he didn’t see the crowd, but just one friend, and then that one and then that other, like a shepherd who returned to the house after his day of work and takes his place among his brothers and sisters. He advanced as assuredly as if he were at home and looked at each one as if he knew her or him from childhood.

Yair was still far away. Leaving Balaam and the mule behind, he made use of his tears and lamentations to cut through the crowd. Nothing stopped him. Mary followed him. He arrived at the man’s feet; there, his legs failed him, and he fell on his knees. Those around the master retreated as much as they could, and a halo of silence formed immediately.

“What is happening?” The worker of Nazareth asked him in a kind way.

Mary, who had not left an inch between them, answered in his place.

“His daughter is dying.”

“Let’s go,” the artisan replied as he helped Yair get on his feet. “I was worried about you. Salome spoke to me, and she told me about Maâkha. Don’t be afraid; I know your child. A time comes when a daughter has to leave her mother; it is a little more difficult for her, that is all.”

The three made slow progress, for the crowd closed around them rather than opening up. Everyone wanted to see a close-up of what was happening and, more than anything else, what was going to happen.

In the crowd, there was a woman who had failed to stay confined in his room during her menstrual period. For twelve years, she had hidden there nearly all the time because she suffered from constant losses of blood to the point of falling from exhaustion. She had marshaled all her strength and banished her fears. If someone were to denounce her, she would – without a doubt – have been sentenced to being whipped with ropes, which, in her weakened condition, might have been fatal. Determined, she forced her way rather rudely through the crowd. She got close enough to clutch the master’s robe and wouldn’t let go until she felt her blood return to her flesh. This happened almost immediately. She then stood still, allowing her benefactor to leave with the crowd.

In a loud voice, the Carpenter demanded to know who had touched him. The people stopped for a moment. Spontaneously and together, the two Zabadee brothers replied:

“But the crowd is pressing against us from every side, and you’re asking who touched you!”

“Someone grabbed hold of my garment, and I felt a force go out of me.”

Then Andrew turned and looked twenty-one people around him, which led everyone to step back a little, leaving an empty circle around the master. With a loud voice, the apostle demanded:

“Who held on to the master’s coat?”

The woman declared that it was her, and a particular uproar ensued. Seeing her, the Carpenter called her. She appeared, then he took her hand and told her:

““Your pure heart has healed you. Continue to have faith; today, you have demanded your just place, and it has been granted you.”

A man recognized her and cried: “It’s the woman with the hemorrhage, Boaz’s wife. 

Then the Carpenter gazed at the man and then at several other men, looking directly at them.
“Don’t lay a hand on her, for not many of you are as pure as she is. What makes you impure is not the blood of women but your desire to shed their blood out of hate and out of fear!”

Some men had already taken up stones to chastise the woman; now they were brandishing them against the Nazarean who was putting the Law of Moses into doubt. But, seeing that the great majority disapproved, they dropped them.

Without looking at each man who had taken up a stone and without forgetting even one, he says:

“May no one among you act like the judge of his brother or his sister? Who knows enough

about himself to condemn anyone else, whoever it might be?”

A part of the crowd dispersed, some shrugging their shoulders, others clenching their fists.

All this had slowed down the walk and calmed Yair; who was regaining, little by little, his wits, his

Apprehension and his anxiety. What had he done beside the lake in front of everyone? He, the leader of the synagogue? His heart was beating with doubts and terrors. He wanted to hide his eyes, but the Carpenter said to him:

“What is this tumult, Yair? You are simply a father who is worried about his daughter. You recall, it was your firmest resolution: you were a child, you had just gotten Balaam under control, and you decided to never again be the pray of opinions. It was yourself who told me that.”

They heard the donkey braying, a distant cry, as if she had returned to the house and knew the end already. This made the master smile but demoralized Yair, for Balaam’s braying sounded desperate.

A moment later, the tumult of the crowd grew quiet, and the moaning of mourners could be heard. The woman healer had left the house. Her face haggard, she approached them. She saw Yair and nodded her head. Everyone understood that the girl had died.

The Carpenter seemed not to have seen or heard anything. He entered the house. The two Zebedee brothers, Andrew and Yair, followed him. The master didn’t see the child at first, but only Maâkha prostrate and utterly motionless at the end of the room. He touched her shoulder, then her back; she was only skin and bones. He suddenly understood the tragedy.

“Your daughter isn’t dead, he says to the mother; she has sunk into a deep sleep because she has eaten nothing for days. Will you help me?”

The mother didn’t even return his glance. He went toward the bed, sat down at the feet of the girl, and remained motionless for quite a while. After some time, he slowly slid his left hand to join his right hand. Aware that the master wanted to spare the child too great a shock, the three apostles retreated into The shadows. With his other hand, he uncovered the child’s neck, already wrapped in funerary bands. He blew gently on her face, the flies took flight, and he waited patiently. Still with his right hand, for the other didn’t abandon the child’s fingers, he placed his index and middle fingers in the cavity of her neck as if he wanted to follow the progression of the pulse. He brushed aside a lock of hair that was hiding her cheek. Slid his hand on her shoulder. Resumed his immobility.

Very slowly, the child’s paleness took on a pinkish tone. Her eyelids, though still motionless, seemed to relax and soften over her eyes. Her mouth also lost its crease without suggesting the slightest emotion. A fly landed on her exposed forearm but was driven off by an imperceptible quivering of the skin.

Without abandoning the girl’s hand, still using his right hand, he loosened her bands a little more. Drawing close to her face, he blew again, whispering:

“Wake up!”

She opened her eyes.

Those in the shadows approached. But the child seemed not to recognize anyone, not even her father. Her face had a questioning look.

“Don’t be worried,” her healer answered, “everyone here wishes you well.”

 “Bring me some fruit,” he demanded.

Jemouna looked at each one, a look without fear but still questioning. The Carpenter slipped some tiny morsels between her lips – fresh figs soaked in water – as one does with a very young baby learning to eat.

The child’s face remained perfectly peaceful. She looked at the men as if she were a stranger, but a stranger without the slightest apprehension and this moved her, in reality, a stranger to all who were there, even to her father, who found it hard to recognize his daughter – calm as she

was and yet at the same time go astonished. What is more important, her eyes had changed color: one might have said they were chestnuts, while previously, they had been much darker. Her mouth was no longer that of a little girl, it had lengthened and grown thinner, and her hair showed reddish highlights …

Maâkha emerged from her corpus and, holding on to the wall, managed to get up. Jemouna turned toward her. Suddenly her look was fearful.

“Jemouna!” the mother cried.

But the child didn’t understand. She pressed the Carpenter’s hand, then regained her unusual serenity.

“What have you done to her?” Maâkha cried, heartbroken.

“Our daughter lives,” Yair managed to say, despite the emotion shaking him.

“It’s not her. This is not my little girl. My dear one, my baby, where have you taken her?”

She took her head in both hands and tore her hair. She collapsed, seized with convulsions. Yair rushed toward her but taking hold of her, he realized that she was nothing more than skin and bones, on the point of dying.

“But what have you done?” he exclaimed.

“You’ve stolen my only possession,” she managed to stammer, already seized by other convulsions.

She vomited a little liquid, and her head fell on the paving stones. Yair cried:

“But look: our daughter is there, alive.”

It was too late.

The Carpenter went up to her, took her in his arms, and lifted her. He placed her on the table. Tears ran from his eyes; he let these words escape, words that Yair alone could hear:

“What tragedy, what despair!”

THE FIRST STEPS

Maâkha was buried in the Jaire family tomb. That day, Jemouna showed no emotion. She didn’t understand what death was, had no memories of her mother, and had no idea what a family tie was. Instead, she seemed to be somewhere else, focused on the details, the insects and small lizards that intrigued her.

The two slaves were freed. They decided to return to Jerusalem; Jem greeted them, imitating Yair, without understanding what was happening.

In the months that followed, Jem gradually discovered what was around her: The lavender plants, the donkey, the goats, and the children who were accustomed to playing with her … She relearned how to speak but spoke too rapidly, like the water of a river returning to its bed. Yair taught her reading and writing. She adored observing and memorizing and did not just study. Moreover, she always seemed to be discovering everything, even the people she had loved the most, even Yair.

She progressed rapidly, passing from the little girl who knew nothing to a girl of twelve. However, her body suffered significant losses; she could only laboriously take a few steps. She was still emaciated and puny; miraculously, she escaped the pulmonary diseases so common among malnourished children.

After seating her on Balaam, Yair took her to the Zebedees’ boatyard almost every afternoon. As the days went on, she familiarized herself with the customs of the house, the rules to follow, the chores assigned to children …

Salome’s brother no longer spoke of a betrothal for his son. He saw clearly that Jemouna was no lunges the same; in addition to her amnesia, her thinness, and her atrophied legs, she seemed to have regressed in age, reacted like a little girl, intelligent to for sure, but effectively neutral, playing as innocently with the boys as with the girls.

James and John weren’t working in the boatyard just then. Instead, they had gone to the other side of the Jordan, to an isolated plateau in Perea. The Carpenter had taken them there with other disciples to rest and escape for a while from the sick and disabled begging to be healed. Salome said that, before undertaking their mission, they wanted to come together to deepen their knowledge of the ways of peace and of communal life.

But no one knew what that mission was: some women said that it was about simply about learning to support each other to better endure the Roman yoke; others thought that they would find a school of healers like there were in Egypt; there were also rumors of the establishment of a new kingdom, a sort of community that would allow Jews to live their religion in spirit rather than according to the letter; a few feared an outbreak of madness, a mass hysteria, as happened so often in Jewish communities when they began to despair; and this was without considering the laughter and sarcasm of those who suspected that those who gathered there, far from prying eyes, were men and women who practiced the “love” of neighbor.

Like a lioness, Salome defended her sons and the Carpenter as well, but her answers were always evasive – because even she didn’t understand completely what would happen after the period of instruction. Jemouna, for her part, was having fun with the other children, sheltered from all these adult preoccupations. She drew from this the security needed for her blossoming.

Some mornings, even before Yair left for his business, children took her as they passed by, sat her down in a little goat cart, and took her to play at the fountain before going to the Zabedees, utterly carefree, she laughed as much as she’d suffered the year preceding her mother’s death.

Yair, seeing that he was less and less necessary, lamented: “I have lived alone, without family. Scarcely born, my only daughter has been taken from me, and now that she has turned to life, she doesn’t recognize me. A man in the middle of the Sahara is less alone than me …”

He had left at the crack of dawn that day, well before the hour when, normally, the children come looking for Jem to take her to the Zebedees and the care of Salome. He had left Balaam to her hay; she didn’t want to follow him so early anyway.

Heading northwest, he had passed Chorazin and climbed a hill – high enough for him to take the measure of his solitude by turning around in the patches of yellow space there. Finally, exhausted from too many sleepless nights, and by this crazy hike, he fell asleep on the sand, wrapping himself in the stinking blanket of his misery.

Something had broken in the motor of his life. He had to attempt the impossible to repair his heart and start all over again. In his dream, he was trying what couldn’t be achieved; he had to reattach the firmament’s great canvas to its lofty poles; if it had literally fallen on his head with all the stars. “How can I start over again?” he asked himself in the half-dream. “How can I find my way again?” To go anywhere or even to Srinigar, you have to know where you are and where you are going; I do not know either one. I am like a little boy under the collapsed tent of the stars.”

He was in this state, asleep but only half-asleep. Lost in his nightmare, but only halfway. So, imagine his surprise when, at the beginning of the day, a funny little voice he thought he had never heard woke him:

“Draw me!”

“What?”

“Yes, draw me!”

“Draw; what do you want me to draw?”

“Me. You told me that you knew me even before I opened my eyes for the first time in my big bed with the white bands. So, draw me the way I was before.”

Yair jumped to his feet as if he had been struck lighting.

He rubbed his eyes. He opened them wide and looked. He had never seen such a funny little girl, one he didn’t recognize just then, for the light blinded him, and the heat had forced her to cover his head with a thick woolen shawl.

And then the blood flowed back to his brain: he understood that only Jem alone could ask him such a question. She handed him a stick so that he could do it on the sand. He didn’t feel capable of making such a drawing –  Jews don’t draw – but he couldn’t refuse. So he made a circle, two points for the eyes, one point for the nose, a thick straight line like a cinnamon stick by way of a mouth.

“The mouth, that’s it, that’s how you were. The mouth is like you.”

“Your drawing doesn’t mean anything,” she retorted.

“I told you I didn’t know how to draw. But what did you do to find me?”

I sat down on Balaam. That wasn’t easy, but after that – no problem. Draw me again.”

“It’s no use. Even with the mouth, I was no good.”

“You used to smile a lot sometimes.”

He searched for what he ought to say, which wasn’t easy because in all the jumble of old fabrics that fell from his memory, very few had colors that suited the child. No part of the past could match the little girl who was there, so pure, so new. It was even stranger, seeing that she had wrapped herself up in his old coat from the stable, which she’d fastened none too neatly.

Finally, he was forced to conclude:

“My dear daughter, you’ve forgotten everything, and that’s just as well. Yes, you’re right, a story from zero … Even if I pay the price …

“What is the price?”

“You’re forcing me to start from zero as if I were just some stranger obligated to bring you out of yourself. That’s the price. And it’s rather expensive.”

All these words were now suspended in the air and repeated in silence.

“Are you going to leave me?” Jem asked solemnly.

“No, what do you mean by that?”

“Are you going to leave me in the middle of the night without taking me with you?”

Her eyes struck Yair like flying sparks, filling him with holes.

“Oh! Never, my little princess, never. I will never leave you again. You are my outside my flesh.”

Let us go back in time. The morning of that decisive day on the hill beyond Chorazin, Jem woke suddenly at dawn. She had felt as if someone had removed her covers, and a cold wind was coming in under her nightgown. On awakening, she saw, however, that she was still snugly wrapped in woolen. Yet the sensation of cold remained. She glanced at where Yair slept. The dawn light did not reach that far, but the covers seemed empty.

“Yair!” she called softly as not to awaken the menagerie in the stable.

No answer. Using both hands, she straightened up. Her tunic fell off her shoulders and slipped over her hips. She was so skinny that all her rips were visible, her clavicles, her thin too long neck. One might have said she was an insect.

With the help of two sticks, she stood up, painstakingly put one foot forward, then repositioned them and moved the other foot. She wanted to see if Yair was there in his bed. After taking two steps, she wavered on one of her sticks and fell. Dragging herself, she got hold of the

stick and got up. She fell again, and it was on her knees that she arrived at the foot of the bed: Yair wasn’t there.

“Yair!” she cried, splashing the silence with her desperate tears.

It was Balaam who answered, but not wish a braying that would have awakened all the village, simply by a soft groaning to reassure her. Then she undertook to get to the stable adjacent to the house. Discouraged by the distance, she abandoned one of her sticks, made a few steps, fell, and dragged herself as far as the door.

Afterward, it was a little easier, for the ground outside gave her more of a hold. She crawled, holding on to the weeds. When she had almost reached the stable door, however, she realized that her tunic was no longer on her; it must have slipped off. Luckily, Yair’s tough coat and an old shawl were hanging there. She was able to hoist herself on her stick. She found some pieces of rope to lighten the garment around her. She was unable to saddle Balaam, who was lying down, or even slip her halter on her. She simply untied her, firmly gripping her mane, slid on her, and straightened up. Jem was exhausted.

The route was long. Balaam began by going to drink at the village fountain, then wanted to eat here and there a little of the grass of the day, according to the colors and the odors. Sines Yair’s 

the scent permeated almost all the routes of Capernaum; it was only at the end of the village that she understood her master’s plan.

When she found Yair asleep on top of a hill, Jem suddenly felt anger.

“If you don’t love me, say it right away; I won’t bother you for long.”

He didn’t hear this first sentence, for he was sleeping. The sound woke him up, and the child didn’t repeat it.

THE AWAKENING

The day arrived when Jemouna understood that Yair would always be there for her, that he

would never forget her, and that he would return every day like Balaam returned to the stable. She

accepted him leaving the village the whole time she was with the Zebedees. Thanks to that distance, she found the strength to turn aside from the other children and pester Salome with questions. These generally had to do with the behaviors of her playmates – that was, to her, surprising. But then she started asking different questions.

“Did Yair choose me instead of some other child? When he began to take care of me, was I smaller than I am now? Why was he interested in me when he already had Balaam and the goats? Who found me first? Where did they discover me? How did it happen?”

Salome took her aside to explain to her how she had been conceived, how she was born, how she had suckled her mother’s breast. She wasn’t the slightest bit subtle about it, and it led her to the billy goat and the female goats so that she could see the reproductive organs and imagine the rest as clearly as possible. The girl found what the midwife told her, was very funny. It didn’t surprise her all: insects, animals, plants; everything was so bizarre, preposterous, and strange. Why not seed in a woman’s womb, which then got bigger and bigger, to the point where the mother expelled the baby to keep it from exploding?

She finally understood who Maâkha had been, the one whose image returned to her sporadically.

“Yair chose Maâkha, but not me,” she observed. “Me, he found hooked onto her nipple. He must have been surprised. He took care of me to help Maâkha and, little by little, found me funny, so he grew attached to me like Balaam had to him. Now he can’t leave me anymore.”

“Yes, he loved Maâkha as soon as he saw her; she was not much older than you are today. Except for the marks on her face, you look a lot like her, you know! And a father loves his daughter more than anything else in the world. Not because he has to, no, because he finds in the baby the reflection of the one he loves. Later on, he discovers another person that he learns to love. You too, a boy will choose you someday …

She hoped that Jem would realize that it could well happen that a man might ask her father for her hand as soon as she was fully recovered. The child didn’t grab the perch and unleashed another avalanche of questions.

“Who are Balaam’s mother and her father? Who began to wrap me in bands, the night when it was so light? Where is my brother? Why were the sheets so white when all the lamps were out?”

And she would have gone on if Salome hadn’t raised her hand:

“You don’t have a brother.”

“Yes, I do have a brother.”

“The Carpenter?”

“Yes, he told me so.”

“When?”

“I don’t know; I believe we were in a boat on the lake.”

Salome opened his eyes wide, stared at the girl for a moment, and, putting both arms around her, held her in a long embrace.

“Yes, you’re right. You do have a brother. An unbreakable connects the two of you, you seemed to be dead, and the cured you.”

She hesitated, took a deep breath, and came out with the following words:

“Would you want me to be your new mama a little?”

Jemouna instinctively tore loose and retreated. A copious sweat appeared on her forehead. Salome immediately understood that the word “mama” awoke fear in her, even a sort of terror.

“No! That’s silly; I’ll be your big sister instead, seeing that we have the same brother.”

“Yes, you’ll be my big sister,” Jem repeated as she returned to her friends.

THE CONFIRMATION

Jem had stayed at home that day. The latest events have exhausted her. Yair had left for the synagogue to discuss current happenings with the hazzan. Stretched out on her bed, she was observing some insects quarreling over a hole in a beam in the ceiling. Abruptly, her big brother was there in the doorway.

“I came to find out what’s new with you.”

She motioned him to sit on the edge of the bed, which he did.

“What happened?” she wanted to know. “Everything is mixed up in my head. I don’t feel at home here at all. It’s as if I came from another world.”

“Once a year, crabs abandon their old shells when they get too small, and they have to make other ones that fit them. You’re brand new now: you look, and every time is the first time.”

“I don’t get used to it; that’s my bad luck.”

“Your good luck, you mean!”

“The insects fighting over a hole in the beam on the ceiling, their shape, their eyes, their mandibles, their actions, their reactions are so strange! I can look at them for hours.”

With his left hand, he took her right, and they looked at each other for a moment. No uneasiness disturbed them. They simply had the pleasure of looking at each other. She understood then that this was their final meeting and that this was why he didn’t wrap things up and gone away.

She was the one who broke the silence.

“I remember every moment when you brought us, children, together to the boatyard and told us stories and helped us to think. Mark sat beside me, and we pestered you with questions. Why not continue?”

“You’re ready; it’s longer with the adults. I have more trouble with them. You, children, are

like brooks of fresh running water, each one going its own way. Those who are thirsty will drink.”

For a longer time, they looked at each other in silence. Then she hinted to him that he could leave, for sleep overcame her.

OURI THE FENNEC

One beautiful day, when the sky was clear, Yair took his daughter to the Sepphoris caravansery. She got enthroned on Balaam’s back with packages, drinking gourds, and all kinds of odds and ends. Physically, she hadn’t changed, a twelve-year-old girl; she acted like one, but she was in her fourteenth year, and her periods hadn’t come or any other sign of maturity. She still wasn’t accustomed to things; everything surprised her: The house, the courtyard, the Zebedees’ workshop, the synagogue. Today it was the souk of Sepphoris, the Roman capital of Galilee.

Arrivals had been announced, and the market was full of curious people. Jem no longer knew where to focus her attention. There were pens of sheep and goats packed so tightly that they couldn’t move, lines of dromedaries tied to each other, row of donkeys, platforms on which men in breechcloths were circling around, others showing nearly naked girls and women … People approached and examined them without even talking to them as if they were merchandise. There were kiosks full of dead fish spread out on planks, limbs of animals skinned and hanging, whole carcasses sometimes, hordes of flies, vegetables wilting in the sun, piles of withering fruit, rolls of brilliantly-colored fabric, pots and pans, an assortment of tools. In the crowd were several women in purple, blue, or saffron tunics, their heads uncovered save for a headband, their hair in tresses or pulled up like a fur hat. Soldiers stood to watch, their legs laced to the knees with the straps of their sandals, a knife on one side, a sword on the other. A man dressed in a very bright red stole, bareheaded, his nose in the air, walked surrounded by guards, holding the tail of his elegant robe with a folded arm.

These were strange men and women everywhere; Yair said that they were Egyptians, Greeks, and Persians, according to their costumes, their accent, or their language. Beggars dressed in rags rummaged in the refuse or manifested their presence by their entreaties. Groups of women in yellow robes were standing along particular walls. Their hair free, they gossiped and laughed, turned around, and looked from head to toe at one man and then at another. Donkeys rummaged in masses of vegetable tops. Dogs scratched themselves. Cats hightailed it. Crows glided down to seize unattended morsels…

Jem felt exhausted, as if each thing, each animal, each person, needed her attention in order to live; Sepphoris was too much.

A short time later, Balaam stopped. The girl on her back had stopped moving, her look weighed down with terror. The donkey was glancing at a shop with scrolls, most of them enclosed in magnificent tubes of engraved and decorated leather. Three shopkeepers were whispering among themselves. After a few minutes, they noticed rabbi Jaire standing silently in front of them. They rushed toward him and embraced him like a friend.

“Maimon will be back this afternoon; sit down, let’s talk, it’s been such a long time … Ah! It’s your daughter on Balaam’s back, the one who …”

“Yes!” Yair immediately cut in so that they wouldn’t go any further.

A certain uneasiness set in, for Jem was gazing at the men with questioning eyes, but not as if she were expecting introductions, rather as if she was trying to read on the lines of their faces what they seemed to know about her.

They heard a clamor, shouts coming closer. A relatively small dog with outsized ears came out from between the shops. Two men with nets were running after it to catch it.

“Watch out!” they shouted. “He bites! It is a wild animal, a desert fox, a fennec!”

People were moving out of the way as if a tiger were threatening them. The little animal, not much bigger than a cat, leaped into the shop. A man drove it out by hitting it with a broom. The fox dashed toward the scroll stalls, just in front of Balaam, stopped short, immobile to stump. Jem gave a start when she saw the little animal with bright eyes. This lasted just a second, for the shopkeepers united to protect their merchandise. The fennec furtively cast a glance in the donkey’s direction, then raised its eyes, adjusted, clearly saw her face, and jumped on her with a single bound.

For the briefest moment, Jem remained paralyzed but almost immediately sheltered the animal in her garment, where it became completely still. Just the end of its moist muzzle projected out of Jem’s coat. She caressed the animal through her cloth; it calmed down. Balaam raised her upper lip, then stamped her hoof.

The two men kept their distance. The net hung from the hands covered with leather bands. Rabbi Jaire approached them, raising his arms so that they clearly see his Pharisee coat, greeted them according to Jewish custom, and continued:

“That animal was no doubt going to be sold.”

“Yes, it should stay in the cage. It is dangerous”, one of them countered.

“A clever man might be able to tame it, make it a pet. Roman ladies adore this kind of wild animal when it is domesticated.”

“As I understand it, you are expecting a good price for it?”

“It’s a rare animal.”

“It escaped, and no one was able to catch it. If you want to take it right now, it will run away and start to upset the valuable merchandise in the stalls again. Then you’d have to compensate the merchants, wouldn’t you?”

Yair handed them a Roman denarius.

“Take it or leave it,” he concluded as he began to slowly close his hand.

They took the coin, had the foolish rabbi sign a paper, and departed, satisfied that there had not been too much damage and that the fennec was now someone else’s responsibility.

Jem named it Ouri because its hair was reddish. It was not hard for her to tame it. It was almost a baby. So, it took her for its mother. When it was threatened by a goat, male or female, it hid behind Balaam or jumped directly onto her back. Balaam liked it because it was cheerful, always active, and happy to play with children.

Two months later, Yair returned to Sepphoris, this time without Jem. He brought three dromedaries back from the market. Though still young, they had already crossed the Syrian desert three or four times. With Maimon, he had also meticulously chosen the scrolls, the copies, and the translation to be loaded on the animals. In no way did he dip into his treasure: no originals, except for the Torah and Mishnah.

In the grotto, he had wrapped in thick leather the treasure of treasures – the camel shoulder blade engraved by the hand of Moses – the first sentence spoken by Yahweh, written entirely in the present tense and expressing the ultimate challenge thrown at humans by God – and he let it fall into a crevice so marrow as to be accessible only to children’s little hands. One day, Israel would be ready to hear the Law of laws.

Returning to Capernaum, they securely tied together all that they would need the goatskin,

drinking gourds, the tent, the dried meat, the tea, the sacks of flour, the jar of oil, the salt, the herbs, the boxes of figs and dates, all the provisions. Maimon mounted one of the dromedaries, Jem and Ouri got down from Balaam, and Yair walked in front.

At Caesarea Philippi, Yair’s little troop joined the large caravan financed by Ari, and they departed for Damascus. Maimon was surprised that none of Jair’s in-laws were part of the expedition. However, the leader of the caravan had not been chosen by chance: Elon. « The best! » Maimon affirmed.

DAMASCUS

Here, the long journey began. Approaching Damascus, Balaam and Jaire’s three dromedaries passed the night on the north shore of the Barada. Old Maimon had agreed to accompany his friend up to this point, but no further. During the last days of the journey, his health had rapidly

deteriorated. With Elon’s permission, Yair obtained their passports of Sepphoris. For somewhat obscure reasons, Ari had preferred to purchase the general permit at Damascus rather than at

Jerusalem. At Damascus, they also had to gather a dozen slaves of very high value destined for the market of Hamedan.

On the bank of the Barada, the afternoon sun blazed like a torch; it took no interest in the shadows the palm trees made on Maimon’s face; it burned all it touched, its usual occupation in the desert. Yair brought cool water and moistened the motionless old man’s head. Jem and Balaam, their feet in the river up to their knees, watched the three dromedaries siphon all they could as if they were already feeling the dry air of the Syrian desert they would soon have to cross. Ouri chased the large dragonflies that emerged from the sand to feast on the dromedaries’ fresh droppings. He waited until they had filled their guts with manure; then, they would be juicer.

“My friend!” Maimon began in a firmer voice than the day before, when he had seemed at the end of his rope, it is that my earthly journey ends.

“You’re already doing better,” Yair retorted.

“Shut up, leave my old ears in peace!”

Yair sat down so near the old man that the latter only had to murmur to be heard. Jem and Balaam were playing, immersed in the water some distance from there, close enough to be seen but far from the words that were spoken. Ouri jumped back and forth on the shore, a

while worried, making tiny yelps from time to time.

“Yair, I have thought for a long time about your question, how to stop the cycle of violence, my

friend, why have you accepted such great violence in your house?”

Yair was dumbfounded by this unexpected slap and didn’t understand the allusion immediately. He had to stop and think about it for a moment … His wife devoured his daughter like a praying mantis while he was as silent as a fish. When he grasped what Maimon meant, he justified himself :

“I didn’t see anything …”

“You mean you didn’t want to see anything. This is what you need to fight now. You must learn

to see honestly, to hear honestly, to feel honest, to read honestly, for, in the end, that’s what it is in the Torah: not to run away, to stand up like a man in the footsteps of the truth …”

“But am I a man?” A long silence hammered home the question. “Maimon, my friend, tell me, am I even a man? You call me a seeker of truth. In reality, I’m just a coward. I would do anything

to avoid a fight. I loved Maâkha. God is my witness that I loved her, but I didn’t dare to fight her.”

“Listen! Love with all your body, love with all your heart, love with all your mind. You don’t

lack courage, Yair; like me, you lock audacity. You get ahead of yourself, too far ahead of yourself; start to look where you’re walking; that will be better. Celibacy must never be the closing of the senses; once we’ve closed the pores of our skin, we’re no more than dried-up fruit.”

Maimon’s face was turned towards the river, while all his friend saw was the old man himself. Raising his eyes, Maimon smiled.

“I believe you would do well to call your daughter: I would like to say farewell to her.”

Yair turned around. Jem had completely undressed and was washing clothes on a stone; frightened, the father stood up and looked around him; there was no one. He shouted at her:

“Put your clothes on! God in heaven, put your clothes on! You are fourteen years old.”

Seeing the fear in her father’s eyes, she put her soaking-wet dress back on, left her veil to dry on the gravel, and went to join the two men. Balaam and Ouri arrived shortly after as if they had seen a kind of invitation in the man’s panic.

“Yes, father, you want to speak with me?”

Balaam and Ouri also had questioning eyes. The three faces were so brimming with the same innocence that the two men couldn’t help laughing.

Maimon was seized with a cramp that passed through him, bending him double. After a short time that seemed interminable, he regained consciousness. Yair gave him a little water. The sun was unyielding; it darted its flames on every side.

“If you remember, tell me what death is like.”

Jem was astonished; neither her father nor anyone else had ever questioned her on this point.

She thought it over for a moment:

“You look at a man climbing a mountain in front of you; you don’t lose sight of him. Now he is at the top. You still see him very well. Then he continues, you don’t see his legs anymore; you don’t see his back anymore; you don’t see this hood anymore. He has disappeared behind the summit; why worry? You know he’s just going back down the other side. The man himself has never realized that, in his friend’s eyes, he has disappeared. If I stick a reed into the water to tickle a fish, the reed appears to break on the water line. This is because I am on the shore and looking from the outside. The little insect walking in the hollow of the reed doesn’t notice a thing. Me too, I didn’t notice a thing. All I can say is that all of a sudden, I was the little insect; now, it was only from the Inside that I saw my existence. So, I didn’t see any boundary, obstacle, hole, gulf; the road went on, that’s all.”

“And your return?”

“What return?”

“You’re there; you’re talking to me …”

“I haven’t returned, rabbi Maimon. I never retraced my steps. I went on, and a new world appeared to me, a world so strange: insects, plants, trees … And I constantly ask myself why the people around me look at the palm trees – without wanting to touch them, to scratch them, see what there is inside, see what they do to make leaves with the water they draw from the ends of their roots … Why does this not interest anyone? Do you know?”

Maimon couldn’t answer. He had just disappeared on the other side of the mountain.

THE CITIES OF ZARATHUSTRA

In this part, we are going to cross what today is Palestine, Syria, Iraq, and Iran.

DEQEL

Jem and Uri had relinquished the relative comfort of Balaam’s gently swaying back and were parched in a sack on the left side of a very large pure white dromedary guided by one of the ten slaves who were added at Damascus. On the right side, a young boy, even lighter and smaller

than Jem, was hanging. He was the son of a wealthy Roman woman and a high-ranking official in Damascus. He was a dwarf. They hadn’t left him to die as the Roman Law of Twelve Tablets stipulated, but because he had shown talent as an oracle before, he could even talk by simply pointing at stars. He was called Aulus. He was going to join his maternal uncle of Yasatis.

Yair walked beside Balaam and the slave, who was holding the big white dromedary’s load.

The other three dromedaries followed, loaded with magnificent scrolls of the Torah, the Mishnah, and many other texts. The rabbi’s little troop walked just about in the middle of the caravan.

What worried Yair was the extreme physical delicacy of the slave entrusted to him. The young

Sahara native appeared as if he had never done hard work; his smooth skin, the color of sand, seemed as soft as Jem’s. His voice hadn’t broken, and he was barely able to load or unload his big white dromedary, so Yair started to have doubts about the nature of the “work” for which he was destined. He had been given a strange name, Deqel, which means “palm tree; in mockery, no doubt, he was more like a reed. He spoke Latin, Greek, Persian, and Parthian. But did he speak? He only answered specific questions. He said nothing about his past or his future as if he didn’t exist or no longer existed.

To walk all day long beside a man without being able to connect with him in any way seemed impossible to the Pharisee, all the more go since the children on either side of the dromedary never stopped laughing, telling jokes, with no limits but their imagination.

“If you have a gnat in your eye, Jem said one time, everything around you is distorted

and monstrous. Remove the gnat, and it’s marvelous.”

“And my legs, my arms, they’re marvelous!”

“Would you be here with me if you were big and strong? You would be walking in the slave’s place, and he would be at my side …”

“And you’re convinced that it’s enormous good fortune …”

“It is for me, in any case.”

“I think I have a gnat in my eyes. I don’t hear you very well. Could you repeat?”

The heat of the sun is said to be filled the air with sand, and this accumulated on the men’s turbans and robes, sparing only Jem and Aulus, who were chattering like birds. All the others were suffering under the weight of the burning sand, which worked its way into their woolen clothing; muscles grew soft, minds even softer. Balaam, out of stubbornness, walked on, enclosed in his bubble, his ears on alert.

At one point, one of Degel’s knees gave way, and the young man took hold of the rabbi, caught him by the cord of his tunic, straightened up, and slipped his hand into Yair’s as though he were desperate. Yair did not let go. The sensation was so intense. He didn’t know why it was so pleasant; he had to admit it: This was the first time that he felt that he, and not the other, was a man.

The burning sweat was blinding; no one could see what was happening. Yair didn’t withdraw his hand; on the contrary, he closed it gently but firmly over the slave’s slim fingers. He reassured, he lent his strength, the pacified, and this produced in him a troubling sensation. Sweat had accumulated on his skin, but at that moment, it began to evaporate, cooling his body and creating a pleasure he had never known.

Like one titanic caterpillar, the entire column halted. A well in an escarpment of rocky peaks occasioned an hour of rest. They unloaded the dromedaries and let them drink, set up the tent roofs, stretched out in their shade and everyone, except for the watchmen, went to sleep. The watchmen and two other exceptions. Yair and Deqel were now inseparable.

They stretched out side by side, so close that their coats covered their joined hands. 

How could they have slept? They had never known a feeling so powerful, troubling for one but not for the other.

Yair repeated to himself Jem’s words: “If you have a gnat in your eye, everything around you is monstrous. Remove it, and it’s marvelous” did they apply to moral vision?

When the sun finally weakened, a whistle gave the signal to reload; the dromedaries stood up and again formed the great four hundred-footed caterpillars. The column started off again into the desert’s imperceptible bowels. Heat is like that; it closes men in on themselves. In time, the desert is nothing more than a coat covering the insides of a furnace.

Yair dreamed of the three Hebrew children thrown into the furnace because they would not betray their faith in Israel’s God. This is recounted in the Book of Daniel. Sure that they would experience the horror, here they were, walking in the middle of the flames. Yahweh had breathed a wind of dew upon them. The three children didn’t burn; no, they were bathing in cool water and singing: “Stars of heaven, bless your Creator.”

When the sky finally filled with stars and coolness flowed in the hollows of the dunes, Jem

and Aulus fell silent as if astounded by the majesty of the mountains of silence that inhabit the desert.

Early next morning, while everyone was busy, Balaam poked her muzzle between Deqel’s shoulder blades and pushed him a little. Yair, seeing this, understood that the man she wanted on her back was this very light one. For the rest of the desert journey, the rabbi would walk beside Balaam, who, for her part, would carry the long lead connecting the team of dromedaries. Walking where he did, Yair was close to the young slave’s swaying, a wave that began in the hips and rose up to the head as if he was a kind of flame. This flame made all of Yair’s senses flicker.

They still had seven nights and seven mornings to walk, sleeping six hours a day when the sun grew lethal. Hours of torture for Yair and Deqel: for the Pharisee because a gnat was manhandling moral vision, the slave because his fate seemed suddenly as horrific as the Roman plague. He had the habit, though, of denying the future, like a Stoic: Why be concerned with what is beyond our power? For a slave, everything is beyond his power! Perhaps…Perhaps he could gradually persuade the rabbi to purchase him? The problem was that he did not even know his price. He only knew that it was an enormous price because he had been judged physically perfect, purchased by a king rolling in gold, the satrap of Hamadan, Ardashir, the oldest brother of Artabanus III, the Parthian emperor. He was dreaming … His master would never accept the sale. They were no more than a day from Palmyra. The city was full of possibilities; perhaps the rabbi could do something; wasn’t he the friend of Ari, the banker, the supplier of the caravan?

For the first time in years, the Stoic slave was tortured by hope.

The desert burned, the desert brought light, and the desert brought together. Beneath the fire of the scorching star, the tremendous wheel of human existence was turned by the days and the nights.

Deqel decided he no longer had anything to lose. One afternoon, while everyone was sleeping under the cools, he untied the band around his chest, took the hand of his guardian on this journey, opened it, and slowly deposited it on his conical breast and its swollen nipple. Deqel was a woman.

This relieved Yair to some extent, but then it was like a cataract of mountains suddenly unloosed

by torrential rain. The deluge of his emotions carried him away; he was going to give in … Fear

returned him to his senses.

Fortunately, there was no time for privacy of promiscuity between her and him; the sharpened looks of others separated them as effectively as the walls of a fortress. Jem alone had sensed what was going on.

They saw Palmyra in the distance. She challenged her father:

“Where is it written that we must pray and practice justice in private, away from the sight of others, and not in public?”

“Almost all the religions say the opposite and make prayer and acts of charity public matters,” her father replied.

“I think it’s the opposite. Sincerity is found when others can’t see it; when we’re with people, we want to make a good impression. The purest acts are done privately and in secret.”

“Sin also.”

“No, I don’t think so, because sin is doing harm to someone or to everyone. It’s never secret; it’s public in its essence.”

“But who taught you that, my daughter?”

She didn’t answer.

They entered Palmyra, and it was agony. Discreetly, Yair gathered information from three

of Elon’s officers. From what they didn’t say, he understood bit by bit the ramifications of this trade in female and mole slaves: a nest of crabs. The men who did this traffic and the

men who bought this kind of merchandise were nothing you dared laugh about.

PALMYRA

How could he save Deqel from so cruel a fate, brutal for himself, but especially cruel for her? Yair had brought with him cleverly concealed Roman denarii and temple talents, a sum no doubt quite insufficient to redeem a royal slave. To obtain an additional sum, he would have to sell all his scrolls before arriving at Hamadan, and for a good price. Before arriving there, the caravan would stop at Palmyra and the twin cities of Seleucia and Ctesiphon, important markets … Let’s think … The money is there … How do you negotiate with a Parthian king? Yair imagined scenario after scenario; every solution that rose on the waves of his hope crashed on the shores of his despair.

The Pharisee had been pierced by a carnal arrow. Even in his youth, he had never felt such on

invasion of desire and pain, playing with him, in all this body, in all his heart, and in all his mind. He was sick from it, sometimes attacked by cramps in the stomach, sometimes stood bolt upright by a thrust of unbridled virility. He could no longer succeed in clearing the sky of his mind; his thoughts bumped up against his emotions, and nothing of any value took root. He had to save Deqel. Nothing else was of any importance. This single imperative, rather than making his thought more effective, pulverized it into a thousand pieces.

As a substitute for thinking, he prayed to Yahweh with all his strength … Yet remembering Israel’s history, he gave up before he finished. Negotiate with Elohim of Israel! You may as well negotiate with the king of Parthia, he was thinking. At least he can’t send us a deluge or strike us with lighting because of a single sin.

His thought evolved. Now he was asking himself how Yahweh, the jealous god par excellence, had been vanquished by … Jacob. Yes, Jacob, the famous text recited itself in both his ears: “That night Jacob got up took his two wives, his two servants, his eleven children, and passed the ford of Jabbok. Then he remained alone. It was then that an unknown man came to wrestle with him until the first light of dawn. The man, seeing that he could do nothing against him, struck him in the hollow of his hips, but Jacob didn’t give up. The unknown man pleaded with him: “Let me go because the sun has risen.” Jacob answered: “I won’t let you go until you have blessed me!” The other one asked: “What is your name?” He answered: “Jacob.” The other replied: Your name will no longer be Jacob, but Israel, that is to say, God wrestles because you have struggled against God, and you have prevailed. Then, filled with joy, Jacob cried out: “I prevailed against God, and I am still alive!”

These words, rearranged a little his way, acted like wine in rabbi Jaire’s mind. An exaltation and a great confusion took hold of him. On arriving at Palmyra, leaving Jem and Aulus with Deqel and Uri, he loaded the most beautiful scrolls on Balaam’s back and charged into the crowded soak.

A coolness had descended from the hills and brought people out of their houses. His father had spoken to him about a man in Palmyra, a frank and honest man, who took Jewish texts om exchange for scarce and sought-after texts of magic. “Do not laugh, you never know!” his father had concluded, giving his son an ambiguous glance, for he sold his incantations in Jerusalem for a good price, even to Sadducees. Yair prayed to Yahweh to support him, even as he struggled against him.

He was determined. He found the man, a Jew who wore the turban and robe of an Arab. He called himself Majoub and spoke Greek very well. They introduced themselves, gave each other news about their families, blessed each one of them, the living and the dead, then the

Pharisee plunged into the heart of the subject. He was visibly feverish, perturbed, even disoriented:

“My father spoke to me about Persian texts evocations, incantations, prayers addressed to angels that the idolatrous peoples took for gods …”

“As you like, my friend. Tell me more about what you’re looking for.”

“Father gave me to understand that you can change the course of things with formulas in which principles act …”

Beads of sweat appeared on his forehead, and his eyes seemed lost in the fog.

“Our lives are great rivers, my dear friend, the merchant responded; the current is powerful, but yes, you are right, we can escape a shoal sometimes.

Majoub’s measured tone and circumspect sentences settled down on the Pharisee like the silence of noon! In consequence, the argument he had raised in the morning’s effervescence shriveled like cut flowers spread out in the sun. For the Torah, the greatest of sins is idolatry, in other words, compromising with other gods. The Pharisee began to catch sight of the precipice. But the precipice had another side, and it was on this other side that his mind awoke from the solid side of the most material things. “If I give wealth away for a formula that doesn’t work, » Yair told himself, “I will have lost my only assets.”

Yair wanted to retreat, but he had gone too far, and, having struck a reef, his intelligence was breaking up. He put it all on the line:

“Do you want to see the scrolls I have?”

The Pharisee showed him several of great value because of their calligraphy and their decorations.

“That’s beautiful work!” Mojoub conceded.

“Do you have a text that’s worth as much as those?”

“What do you mean exactly?”

“I’ll leave you these scrolls if you find me a text that works.”

“I have here a text of Egyptian magic that is highly prized. A magnificent copy with the original text and a Greek translation … Careful, it’s a scroll of very great value. Multiple formulas are found in it, and a text on the soul’s road after death, but also a reputable incantation against a tragic fate … Here it is.”

He had quickly located the scroll, had unrolled it on the table, scorched for the formula, and put his finger on it. Yair was so shaken that he trembled and couldn’t read!

He went on regardless:

“Here is what we’re going to do,” he proposed. “You lend me the formula; I make a wish that can be verified right now, right here. If my wish is granted, I give you my scrolls. If not, you buy them from me at the agreed-upon price.

Majoub couldn’t keep himself from laughing out loud.

“You don’t really believe it! Cash for calling up spirits, good money for some temptation, and me, the butt of your joke!”

The rabbi tried to correct himself, crafting a different speech.

“Yes, that was laughable, but my scroll doesn’t deceive anyone. It’s not a pagan text: The Torah tells  the grand story of a god, the only God, the Creator of all things who saves humanity …”

“Oh, la, la, my friend, you aren’t like your father. Unless you’re in a really desperate situation. Your father didn’t tell you this, but I’m as much a Jew as you are and not born in the last sandstorm. The Torah always relates one thing and then its opposite. This is its strength and its value, for one truth by itself is a deadly poison; you must always serve a truth together with its antidote. The Torah tells how God saves humans, I grant you that, but above all, it tells how humans save God, who continually postpones his promises until later. How can you save the honor of a god who doesn’t deliver the goods, who postpones his rewards to who knows when? To save God, these people are ready for every sacrifice, making themselves the slave of a Law of a thousand unbearable details … I left the country with no regret, and I’ll never return. Nevertheless, you, my friend, what kind of mess are you in that you toss such naive traps at someone who might be able to help you?”

Majoub’s look was so frank and his words so straightforward that they pierced Yair’s heart. He was about to break down in tears. So, he ran away as fast as he could.

Shaded by a wool awning, Jem was surrounded by about fifteen children. Uri was seated between his mistress’s knees. Aulus, beside her, was having trouble manipulating straws that were too long for his small hands. Each child chose a straw, and chance determined who pulled

the shortest and, with it, the right to speak first. This caused a commotion for a moment, but once the children were seated, calmness returned. The child spoke. She or he had to relate to an important moment in their lives.

A boy immediately arose and told of how his mother had fled from the house in the middle of the night, dragging him by the sleeve of this garment. The father had gone into one of his terrible rages: he had broken some jars and jumped on his wife. The boy had grabbed the shepherd’s crook that served as a doorstop and waved it in his father’s direction. The latter, gripped with fury, charged but tripped on a jar and fell head over heels. It was then that the mother fled with the child. This wasn’t the first time, but from his mother’s determined steps, the boy understood that if she or he returned, they would be risking their lives. A few days later, and despite the enormous danger, the mother wanted to return. He refused and managed to tear himself

loose from his mother’s grip and escaped, hoping that she would chase him and not his father. Except she did leave him and he went back to the city, there joined a band of youths who know how to survive. “I’m not ashamed, he concluded, even if I stole food.”

“What a boy you are!” Jem exclaimed. It is a great decision. Between you and your mother, you chose the smaller, that is, you. Did you see your mother again?”

“She never returned to the house. On the way, she changed her mind, but she didn’t find me. We lost sight of each other, we did meet recently, but I can’t live with her any longer: I’m not a child anymore …”

The game continued, each one taking a turn. One could see in their eyes how each child admired the decisions of the others.

Yair kept a distance so as not to be seen.

His swollen and blurred eyes tried to join the scene, to pay attention to it as if nothing but an unexpected event could drive the morbid thoughts from his mind. His daughter seemed so happy with the children as if she had reached the shore and watched in peace the arrival

of each one.

Little by little, Yair was enchanted by these children’s stories. “But who is my daughter?” Yair, suddenly sober, asked himself. He caught sight of Deqel in the shadows. She was attentive, her eyes like flowers open at noon, her mouth indecisive as if suspended between a thousand

emotions. He approached her:

“How did these children come together?” Yair asked her.

“I have no idea; suddenly, they were there. Perhaps they were fascinated by Uri, who can walk on his two back paws, catch insects and return with them. They started to play; afterward, it changed.”

It was during the night that Jem’s intentions became clear to Deqel. She began to shed silent fears, saying to herself: “This child is cruel. I am a slave: They sell me, buy me, and groom me for perpetual prostitution. If I yield to my love for Yair, when they examine me, they will see that I’ve lost my attribute and my value. They will skin me alive before dismembering me and throwing my body to the dogs; with the Parthian kings, that’s the rule. I

don’t belong to myself. And Jem reveals to every child that he or she is priceless. That is what she has made clear among the children. How can I now accept my fate?”

SELEUCIA AND CTESIPHON

At the conclusion of her week in Palmyra, Jem said farewell to the children. She kissed each one of her little people. Deqel, however, appeared to be already struggling in the satrap of Hamadan’s hands. They were beating her until she bled for being frigid in the king’s embrace.

She tortured herself with these images.

Each person reacts in their own way; Yair was praying for a miracle, a divine intervention, or a saving stroke of good luck. He constantly searched for flaws in the multiple legal codes he knew: the Torah, the Laws of Manu, the Hittite Law, the Code of Hammurabi, the Roman Law of Twelve Tables, the largely Zoroastrian Persian Law, and the Law of the Parthians, which he only

knew a bit of. He shuffled the following precepts through his memory: “Do not deliver a stove to his master. If he comes to take refuge with you, do not return him to his place”, Deuteronomy says. But Exodus adds: “Do not covet your neighbor’s house: do not covet your neighbor’s

wife, nor his slove, nor his servant, nor his ox, nor his donkey, nor anything that he possesses; above all, he remembered Job: “People have a hard task on earth, and their days are like those of a laborer. They are like a slave wishing for the evening shadows […] So I will not stay quiet; I will speak out in the suffering of my spirit. I will complain because I am so unhappy.”

Must he resign himself to this? How could he hope to redeem Deqel? “Whoever borrows in order to buy a property,” says the Roman Law of Twelve Tablets, “and does not repay it, is to be put in chains for sixty days. After that time, the amount of his debt is announced to him out loud. On the third day of the market, if he has not been reimbursed, he is to be cut into pieces, and the

creditor can enslave his family.” This was what was trotting in the Pharisee’s head.

While Yair was sunk in his moaning and groaning, Deqel rode Balaam. The donkey was walking in the shade of the dromedary: high white hump, not very far from Jem’s keen ears. On the dromedary’s other side, Aulus was sleeping.

Thanks to the swaying of the animals and Jem’s ears, Deqel found fragments of her past perfectly preserved, unscathed, and alive, a little like a peasant who removes the mulch from his seed beds sown the previous season and sees the shoots appearing one by one.

Captured at the age of eight, in the Chott Melrhir, in the northern Sahara, where she was gathering salt with her family, she was taken to Carthage. They separated the man from the women and the parents from their children. Regularly exposed naked with other girls, they examined her from every angle. From selection to selection, she found herself in an unusual school, where she learned Greek, Latin, hygiene, skincare, makeup, the art of pleasing a man, music, dancing …

She laughed a lot, and all the children laughed. They encouraged gaiety; they had to be happy; those who weren’t were eliminated, just as those who didn’t learn the master’s languages quickly enough. Only the elite was rewarded with the right to live; the others were simply thrown into a big cistern.

In this school, her principal occupation was locking up her memories, her dreams – the desert’s immense spaces, her nomadic tribe, her language; all that she loved – to throw them together and bury them with the bones of her ancestors under the wet rocks of the school. “Forget your pitiful childhood; now you are living in the glory of Rome.”

She forgot. She even managed to be happy because nothing else existed; her current condition was all that gave her air, the fresh air of the inner courtyard’s marvelous garden, the succulent food, the perfumes, the lightness, the pleasure …

But there, besides Jem, the little girl from before returned, the little girl under the wool tent … She had a vision of it …

Her big sister is stirring the curds. The smell of goats stings her nose. The crisp morning air is coming in. Mama is crushing the grain, swaying up and down with her long pestle. Her breasts slop against her chest … the tent’s canvas undulates … Papa is removing the panels that close the sides … And It’s vast, very vast, in every direction. The yellow space. The family is united by the immensity. Then the light goes away to slide on the dunes, flatter the feet of the rocks, and roll in the pond in the middle of the Bou Omrane oasis: light is attached to nothing, neither to brush nor shrubs. It always returns, and the great isolation it produces around the tent compresses love into those inside it.

Papa watches, laughs and doesn’t worry. His salt, his skinny goats, his possessions, who would want them? He keeps his knife behind his back. He leads the little flock toward the bushes behind the rocky hill. The mother never disappears. She asks the child: ‘Point in any direction.’ The little one points at random. And the mother names the oasis, the rocks, and the route for a month of walking. ‘Do not ask me about anything further away! Because further than that, I do not know. It is night.”

At the last big feast, she was old enough to dance with the other girls. With hair unbound and as long as possible, they formed a circle and shook their heads, whipping the air. The men were returning from the annual dromedary race, burning with pride in their boubous and casting penetrating glances at the bare-breasted girls; they were looking for brides for their sons. They were so troubling, these looks.

Deqel was swaying on Balaam, and in her mind, the dromedaries’ feet were dancing like waves of rain. Jem’s attention had awakened Deqel’s childhood.

Deqel remembered the death that inhabited the desert. She hears her mother: “All you need to do is go that way, or this way, or this way, and in a few days, you are dead.” She recalled having liked the possibility of simply walking to evaporate in the light of the sun …

She recalled the day she was captured, the selection, the school, then the infamous sale. Apparently, on a day like the others, it had to happen. A Parthian king had come, an old man with scornful eyes. The silk of his robe undulated around him, and he seemed to advance in that same undulation, like a mirage between the dunes. He leaned on a gold-plated cane, yet he did not limp.

Deqel took Jem’s hand; she felt the need to speak louder – to be sure that the child understood:

“Standing one beside the other, naked under thin floating veils, we kept a pose the way they had shown us, as flexible as possible. We had learned how to depict on our faces the emotion expected of us, to point out our charms without pride or shame, to twist our mouths to show lascivious pleasure. Then he had me come forward; he slipped his cane up my right leg to lift my garment. He wanted to see me blush, but I did not because this body had nothing to do with me anymore. Do you understand, Jem? No, you are too pure. You do not know that the body is one thing and the soul is another. You so much don’t understand it that you have made my soul come back into my body, while your father has made my body come back into my soul, and now my life is terrible.”

“Explain it to me, Deqel!”

“If only I could!”

“In any case, I know that you love my father with all your soul and that you are afraid of the satrap with all your body.”

“Yes, I am afraid so! Too much, unfortunately! Love and fear. Both. It will kill me. The more love carries me away, the more fear grabs me. I dreamed of living in his tent and taking you in my arms also. I tried to suppress the dream, though it had already made its way. Now, I am living in hell because of this crazy and impossible dream which is torn away from me every moment.”

“Why impossible?”

“You know it.”

“Who knows the future?”

“You, Jem, you do know it?”

“I do not know the future, yet the past, yes. When I was twelve, I was very sick, crushed like an olive press. I was going to die. I even died. I felt myself being put back together into a single kernel. This kernel is me. I never could imagine a thing like that.”

“The Stoics speak of this place where the power of others can not penetrate, the summit of the soul, like the slave philosopher who had simply warned his master that if he kept on hitting his leg, he was going to break it, that he was going to damage his property. He spoke as if it were a thing. Can you keep your kingdom safe?”

“No, I can’t manage to do it. The thing that puzzles me most is why no one is interested in what is given to them, while everyone worries about what they do not have. You, do you know the answer?”

“I am afraid, Jem, I see nothing of what given me. Everything has been taken from me.”

The road between Palmyra and Selvecia on the Tigris is almost always rocky and brushy, with

scattered palms, fig trees, pomegranate trees, and acacias. It goes along cliffs and climbs on the edges of hills of mountains. At times, the caravan returned to its road of sand.

Though the routes may have tightened their grip, the light did not. The sun wasn’t looking; it plastered the sky to soften its points. The dry season was drawing to a close. Balaam found herself back in her mild element. She displayed her joy and shuddered, shaking up Neqel, who was reflecting on Jem’s words.

Yair was walking lost in thought, or rather in calculations, and when the daily news arrived, he went at teatime from one person to the other. Vague questions, ambiguous words, observations he concluded with exclamations, here and there got some information.

Perhaps it wasn’t impossible to get a loan out of Elon himself by evoking his connections and his contract with Ari.

How to evaluate the family treasure he could furnish as a guarantee? Quite on the abstract guarantee? For how long a time would the credit last? What could he give immediately? What price could he obtain for his scrolls of Seleucia and at Ctesiphon? And what were the risks of being betrayed by Elon himself?

He could not sleep anymore.

He was losing his strength; he was losing in confusion. He went to question Aulus. Didn’t he have talent as an oracle? Aulus listened. He was waiting to have a dream and would answer him the day after tomorrow:

“I saw a great moment of happiness. Don’t worry; one night, you will sleep with Neqel, and it will be perfectly legitimate. The next day, she will be completely free, but the price will have been raised.”

That night Yair slept soundly, for he had made his decision. It would require all of his treasure, including the camel shoulderblade – hidden for generations, and the first commandment of the Decalogue written in the present tense, but he would save Deqel: he would get her out of slavery, for it was the only way for him to get himself out of his own slavery.

UNAVOIDABLE LOVE

I ought to clarify an obscure point here, something puzzling to those who hear this story! How could two human beings as different as the rabbi of Galilee and the girl from the Sahara fall into the same whirlwind and so quickly fit together as if woven in the same cocoon by silk secreted by their hearts? Two hearts in the same cocoon: before, you would have seen two caterpillars, afterward, two butterflies, but between Palmyra and Seleucia, they are bound by an inextricable knot; as if the choice of one of them altered the other’s stars, as if the death of the one, was the death of the other: a reorganization of destinies.

A normal Pharisee would feel nothing for a black African except, perhaps, a certain repugnance; a slave sold for sex wouldn’t even imagine approaching a Hebrew priest, who would see her only as a dangerous temptation and denouncer. And yet forces a thousand

times greater than theirs had bound and delivered them one to the other.

Perhaps you don’t know it, but rabbi Jaire’s Hebrew blood, I mean his culture, literature, and worldview, is blood torn from the body by the whip of masters and returned to the body by an increasingly irrepressible desire for freedom. Under the Egyptians, the Babylonians, the Persians, and now the Romans, always whipped, always subjected. Thus, always in the act of hatching a dream of liberty called Torah, the Hebrews seek freedom won not only over the earthly dominator but also over the celestial Elohim. Recall that Israel means: “He who struggles against God.”

Elohim is the general name for the tribal gods who manipulate the celestial whip, in other words, the twisting trajectories of earthly life, hoping in this way to stimulate us to oppose them. The mission of the Hebrews: is to make the gods of domination and submission evolve to the point of making them a single god of love who wants us to be distinct from him and free. And then propose this unprecedented god to other peoples by telling them their tormented story of love and emancipation: the Torah. This is obviously a much too ambitious plan, so the blood of rabbi Jaire was left in suspense; still the blood of a slave, but a slave on the way to the conquest of his freedom, his own existence, in other words. The metamorphosis is not yet complete but firmly begun in his body’s fluids and the ongoing storm of his heart. He feels this metamorphosis in his most intimate part – his penis, which so much longs to enter a home and there produce an embryo that might, in time, make every wall of his jail explode. He feels it in his belly. It would like to be digested in a woman and come back out with neither fear nor weakness: to become in her a free man.

He feels this metamorphosis in his chest. He scorches for air but can’t get enough, for his lungs are the lungs of a former slave of Israel’s Elohim. He feels it in his shell that cracks, that splits in two, in order to expel the little reasons that justify submission. He wants to escape the feeling of being infinitesimal under Elohim’s gaze.

So, when she sees Deqel – with her skin brown like a ripe olive, smooth like the sand of the dunes – who, instead of walking, dances like the antelope, instead of speaking, sings like a nightingale, instead of closing her internal organs, opens them like a flower, saturating the atmosphere with their perfumes, he is transported to the point where he would much prefer to die rather than not to plunge into the act of love. Yet, he knows that if he does, he will be skinned alive and even disintegrated. But the death of his all-too-narrow body, the disintegration of his body, made to be the plaything of gods and tyrants, this is not the same thing as the disintegration of his body in the feminine power. The first constitutes a morbid conclusion, the end of freedom; the second forms a vital beginning, the access to freedom.

Yair wants to be disintegrated; he wants to dissolve all the limits that make him a slave. No more limits; the body transformed into sensations, sensations transformed into emotions, emotions transformed into feelings, and feelings transformed into a magnificent and elusive falcon; a free being. Nevermore the limits of delicate skin that can be whipped into submission.

In short, he feels that all the Pharisee in him wants to be converted into love, for all freedom is nothing but love in full flight, with all risks accepted. Suddenly this law is his Torah.

Deqel, for her part, arrives from the Sahara, the opposite route. In the Sahara, beings are dispersed in space, in the light and the fire of the sun. They are free. They tie all they have onto their dromedaries, straighten up and go off into infinity in every direction, without law or master. In this too-wide and ample world, women are the only vessels capable of confronting time. They have their children there, and their milk transforms spatial freedom into temporal freedom: a child. Obviously, this makes women something so essential that the men cannot tolerate their escaping on them.

Nevertheless, they do escape. The awareness of being time, time in a state of freedom, inhabits every woman of the desert and makes her the very mystery of human destiny. Deqel is not just a woman in a desert; she has, through her slavery, become potential freedom. A freedom withdrawn, packed down, and compressed to the point of exploding.

Yair and Deqel know nothing of all this preparation, but they feel something. If he loses himself in her, he will find himself. If she finds herself in him, she will lose herself. Without knowing it, they are the law that will finally abolish the kingdom of master and slave; they are fire, yes! Fire.

THE PRICE

Yair does not tell Deqel her plan; she guesses it from the lightness of the Pharisee’s step on the pavement that leads to Seleucia. She says nothing but does not want this plan: the rabbi bankrupted for her liberation! No! That would strip her of all her dignity. Besides, his plan was naive, foolhardy, and even suicidal. Yair had never closely examined the pride of the Parthian king, who would surely not hesitate to take both – his money and his life.

He, the seller of scrolls, really did believe in it, so now he used all his wits to execute his program. He would not make a fool of himself like he did at Palmyra.

So, Yair wasted no time in the souk of Seleucus. Balaam and him, loaded with all the scrolls, waded across the Tigris on a ford of float stones. Jaire’s father had established a solid business relationship with the queen of Ctesiphon, the fortress just across from Seleucia, on the other side of the river. This Jewish woman utilized the network of old Babylon’s small, unassuming markets to supply the needs, in mind and in body, of the country’s most isolated Jewish communities.

The Pharisee displayed all his charm, all his learning, and his art in the hope of obtaining a high price. He went to talk with the copyists, made recommendations, and instructed them on the best passages of the Mishnah. In addition, he was interested in specific details of Persian syntax he did not know and studied the basics of the Parthian language, an empire he would soon have to negotiate with. He met a disciple of Zoroaster named Mano; this old man chanted long Gathas by her heart, which he translated afterward. Yair responded with passages from the Torah. Both were amazed by the resemblance and the differences.

He spent the whole week at the palace. The queen was no longer bored; she followed him everywhere and participated in the discussions, often initiating them. In the end, Yair had sold nearly all of his Jewish texts; his purse was full. Before crossing back over the Tigris on his return, he unstitched one of the pads of Balaam’s packsaddle and filled it with Persian gold. He then firmly retied the stitches. Balaam took her job as guardian of the treasure very seriously. Woe to the one who would rummage through that side! 

At the caravansary of Seleucia, Jem, Aulus, and Uri had once more assembled a group of children. This time Deqel wasn’t just a spectator; everyone liked the friendly and helpful

“young man.” By trial and error, the children learned to trust each other. In the beginning, they irritated each other and violently quarreled. Nobody went too far with Uri. They knew that

if they were mean to him, the fox would never return and let himself be petted. And he was so soft! Starting from that, they understood the conduct they ought to adopt with each other.

One evening, while Aulus slept and the youngest children had returned to their parents. Deqel came over next to Jem. It had to do with a difficult question that kept a teenage boy and two girls awake at night.

“Don’t you think that in life, the gods sometimes strike us with blows of fate beyond all measure? Doesn’t the greatest violence come from them? Men just imitate the powers of Heaven.

Jemouna was at a loss for words. The two girls and the boy knew nothing about Deqel’s condition, but they guessed it: the trade in sex slaves was a thriving business on the Silk Road. Jem had known despair only too well – the idea of despair above all, and the culture of despair as well – to hide in silence … Blindly, she ventured to say this:

“Deqel, my friend, we’ve been working side by side for quite a while. Let’s look around us rather than at the gods; let’s not get stuck in our imagination … Even in a wine press, the life of the grapes is not annihilated but transformed: you have to find the way out.

“There is no way out.”

“Stay with me, don’t go too far away in the worst scenarios … We have only this world, not any others. It’s here that we have to search.”

“So show me a way out.”

Once again, Jem remained speechless. For no reason, she looked at one of the two girls.

“I can’t imagine your unhappiness,” she answered. “Me, I’m going to get married soon … Your situation seems truly terrible. I would never want to be captured and sold. My father has chosen a good match for me, as good as the dowry he was able to give. I don’t know him, but I’m sure. I’ll love him. I wouldn’t want to be in your position. I don’t know, but I imagine that a desperate situation requires a desperate action.”

Deqel’s eyes suddenly widened.

MATO THE ZOROASTRIAN

Elon was still waiting for the Parthian guide who was supposed to conduct them across the Zagros mountains. He had not returned from Hamadan, a delay still unexplained. He didn’t want to force everyone to stay confined in the caravansary until the guide arrived. He granted them another week to conduct business. Only the mercenaries would remain to guard the merchandise and the slaves.

The success of the sale had gone to Yair’s head; he no longer doubted that he could negotiate a sufficient loan from Elon. He had very firm control over Ari, his outstanding debts were protected, and his family treasure had an inestimable value on the Alexandrian market.

He crossed the Tigris again to pass a few days of the Ctesiphon palace. It was Mato who received him in his apartments. The queen joined them whenever she had free time. Rabbi Jaire truly really did want to understand Mato’s religion: Perhaps he would find in it some portions of the great Law of Peace and a way out. However, he had to begin at the beginning; he would simply inquire as to what made Zoroaster original.

Mato felt he had been vested with a mission and launched into his first monologue:

“Zoroaster simply had a lucid inner experience; not an experience that others have to believe, but an experience that others can experience. You know that the ancient Persian religion was supported mainly by wealthy, aristocratic warrior families who required animal sacrifice. This was profitable for them; Zoroaster instinctively went to the defense of animals, of justice, and of the personal conscience. So he came up against the old priestly families. He had to flee for his life, and, in the desert, he experienced the torment of love, the fire. In the fire of love, what isn’t given and received turns back on you, sinks into the middle of you, is compressed, and ends up exploding like a volcano?

“The love that begets,” Yais replied, with a touch of disdain.

“No other kind of love exists than the love that begets, except for the love that creates; to remember this is to stay ahead of misfortune.”

“What the Hindus call Karma, we call ‘Faravahar,’” the queen explained.

“Not exactly. I repeat it because everything is there: Love is a fire that must be given and must be received”, Mato continued. Satan is nothing other than love repressed.”

“What is love?” Yair asked.

“You’re in the book business, and you don’t know it? One who writes wants to be honored, and this poisons him. All the author knows of his drive to create is what returns to him in the form of admiration or rejection – and this risks corrupting him in either case – while the love that really fills us with joy is the love given and received by someone who never knows its results. The

Faravahar is a capsule of creative fire that inhabits us as it inhabits creation; a spark that can become a destructive fire or a fertilizing one …”

“You see in fire something that is not obvious for a Jew,” Yair responded.

“In front of a mirror,” Mato explained, “the human soul cried: ‘Who is this stranger?’ Because it is impossible for it to fall back on itself, love is thrown out of itself, for better or worse …”

“I do not follow you.”

“Jaire, my companion, knows that Satan does exist. He is the creative spark that becomes the will to power; he is love in reverse, control of the prey.”

“Couldn’t this lead men to compromise with evil rather than combatting it?”

“Jaire, are you on the way to compromise with evil?”

“Then are you on the way to combatting?”

“No.”

“In that case, where are you going, broken heart?”

A seed of wisdom takes as long to germinate as a coconut. It waits for the rain.

The Pharisee left Ctesiphon troubled and worried but also strangely joyful. He felt as if he had met his friend Maimon again: “Beware of celibacy; it is better to love badly than not to love.” He was uplifted from thinking with someone other than himself but disoriented like someone who awakens in a foreign land after sleeping for days on a camel.

Balaam, however, had a great deal of difficulty returning his master to Seleucia. The river was swollen from a sudden rain upstream. The stone that made up the ford had become nearly imperceptible under the tumult of the waves. The rabbi had to get down, advance from one rock to the other, fall, and get up again, laughing all the while to reassure his donkey.

On the shore at last!

The sun shoved a few clouds aside and dived down at them, intoxicating the Pharisee even more and sobering up the donkey slightly. They stretched out for a moment on the warm sand in order to get dry …

Like a clap of thunder, Deqel’s terrible situation struck Yair’s, feverish heart. He realized he was facing a dead-end; in a single lucid moment, his plan had spread out on the rocks in a thousand tiny pieces. Should he really negotiate with the Parthian king? “When he has devoured all my treasure,” Yair thought, “he will simply have me skinned alive on the public square! He wouldn’t even think about it; Satan is never a person; it’s a parasite in the brain, a substitute for consciousness.”

He no longer saw a way out. I’m a caravan; flight is impossible. Deqel was more closely watched than the Temple Gold Ari had entrusted to Elon. If the slave disfigured herself by burning her face, for example, she would lose not only lose her value but be accused of stealing the king’s possession and impaled in front of the Hamadan palace until she died.

The Pharisee suddenly understood what had led Elon to entrust him with Deqel’s care. He wanted to be freed of that responsibility. If the Parthian king’s possession was damaged or lost, the one who had charge of her would pay with his life and his gold, if he had any.

Discouraged, he entered the Seleucia caravansary. He would gladly exchange his life with Deqel’s, yet what Parthian king would prefer a Jewish priest to the most beautiful girl of the desert?

THE ZAGROS MOUNTAINS

The caravan stood up for the departure. Before it, at three or four days march, the Zagros mountains and the winding path. No high passes, no perilous crevasses, no snowdrifts, at least in the season; the passage from the northeast toward Hamadan is much easier than the one from the southeast, and this is why the city is part of the route to India; only afterward would you descend toward the south to reach Yasatis, passing along the edge of the great salt deserts. How can ambushes be avoided, those of hordes of pillagers or those of mercenaries sent by the Parthian king? We had a guide, or maybe a traitor; we were going to find out soon. The rabbi once again felt heavier than his gold. His coat gripped the ground with a thousand little paws that clawed. With each step, he had to tear himself from his unhappiness. Why go on? Ahead of him: death. He would never survive losing Deqel. When they tor his love away from him, his heart would be emptied of its blood, and it would be the end for him but the beginning of martyrdom for her.

He no longer dared to look at Deqel, who had suddenly grown light. When they told her Aulus’ prophecy, she hadn’t understood it immediately, except as a child’s dream. But she did understand it in detail at that level, and her spirit danced like the most beautiful dromedaries of her tribe. Her mother had often told her: “When the day of favorable circumstances arrives, don’t hesitate,” Jem had encouraged her to seize the poles that fate extends. Obviously, to wait for a favorable circumstance is to pray to be able to recognize it, for sometimes, what appears to be a dead-end, is a way out. Nevertheless, Neqel was now filled with hope. She would know how to recognize the moment and the circumstances. Since Ardashir would have better things to do with a scholar like rabbi Jaire, he wouldn’t kill him; they knew how to transform everything into gold, even scholars. This conviction relieved Daqet more than if she had been delivered from her own fate. Love is made up of two bodies; if one goes down, the other reaches shore.

The limpid nights sketched shapes and colored them black. The mountains resembled mouths of caves dug in the shining cliffs of the heavens. Progressively, in long waves, the orange flood

of morning breached the limestone rocks outlining the peaks; at first, a threat of gold on the summits, then the valleys filled with ochre light.

The mountains grew near, majestic like immense white patches cascading onto the earth. Their ascetic splendor, like prophets in prayer, their serene stature, like soldiers with no enemies, their timeless gaze, like that of aged tortoises, their outline against the implacable azure, all this was approaching: an immense meditation of stone. Mirages were projected on this stone; Deqel found her father there, her mother, her family, the tent of blue wool, the passionate silence of the wind, her desert. It wasn’t because the mountains resembled dunes; the effect they produced in her reminded her of her family. This soothed and brought new joy to the child within the woman.

The slave glanced at Jem from time to time; she saw that the girl was experiencing the same impression, for she only had eyes for these castles of rock seated on the incompressible soul of the earth. “Yes!” Deqel said to herself, “Mother is right: There is a soul in every dune, in every mountain, but also in the earth itself, and we are always invited. There are always hands to catch us.”

Balaam stopped short. They felt the barely perceptible throbbing. The dromedaries started to panic. Elon gave the order to make the animals lie down in a circle and to have everyone take coats and blankets to cover themselves. A wall of sand was arriving from the southeast; there was no natural shelter nearby. The caravan was going to be taken from behind, by the immense movement of the desert, about to crash into the base of the mountains. During the confusion of these comings and goings, while everyone else had taken shelter, Deqel and Yair found themselves alone under a large carpet.

The wind arrived, and it was furious. It would have torn everything away if the windblown sand hadn’t weighted the blankets and kept them on the ground. The wall of sand came from Arabia or maybe even the Sahara; Deqel recognized it by its alarming smell of salt and ashes. It had run for a long time, setting brush afire; it was tired now, and the mountains took its breath away.

After a while, it calmed down, yet even so, it could throw any who might dare to stand up to the ground. It was a lord; it liked men to grovel. All they could do was wait and pray the whole day, no doubt, for it was almost noon when the storm hit. The clapping canvas made no one eager to set up the tents, but it wasn’t violent enough to hinder sleeping; far from it – it bewitched them into torpor.

The sun disappeared, and with it, the flames of the furnace. A mildness filtered in and dried the sweat.

Under The carpet, two people didn’t act to sleep. Deqel was resolved to tear from her lover all his heart, all his soul, and all his vigor. She had to have that man. Gubble him up. One who is thirsty has the duty to drink; to drink all the wine in Carthage this night. One who is hungry has the duty to eat, and they won’t stop the she-wolf because this irrepressible vaginal absorption is like giving birth in reverse, taking vengeance on death. The man must be swallowed; only then can an offspring be thrown into his heart.

Yair no longer had any defense against how this woman acted. He gave up. For hours on end, they rolled and played the games of sexual pleasure. What Deqel had learned, her art, was longer an art; it was her entire body clinging to an octopus, suckers planted in the flesh of her man. For her, this amounted to bringing all back to herself as if to multiply herself was to give everything to him as well. How could you die after that? There is no longer anything that can die; all have been transported somewhere else.

It did not stop.

From exhaustion, their bodies sank into the beginnings of sleep, but it didn’t stop either. On the contrary, dreams bond them by senses they did not know; senses more subtle, deeper, more intense, and totally resistant to doubts. Everything was a mutual penetration, and everywhere in this world, there was just one single sexual delight, one that brought everything back to her, Deqel, no longer slave but a queen.

There was no morning, there was no day, there was no evening, nor any night. Everything was beginning again. There was no anxiety, there was no fear, there were no images of terror nor of an abrupt end. Everything was starting up again.

DREAM

During those events, Degel and Yair didn’t know that they were participating in a sort of cosmic new beginning. We know today that this story – and all our stories – ultimately began with an instant infinitely concentrated on itself. A beginning is obviously relative. Then, scientists affirm, this dilated more rapidly than the speed of light, at least in the orgasmic instant of the beginning. An instant absolutely obscure. The expansion slowed, and now it seemed to be accelerating again.

In this incandescent cooling, the stars, the planets, and the black holes condensed. What is most striking in this violent development, this slow cooling and this condensation of fire, is that everything was contained in the first nanosecond. Deqel and Yair know nothing of this, but their

bodies, yes: the body summarizes the history of the whole cosmos. Seen from our side of the world, this means “the call of the sexes.”

Above all, Deqel perceived she was the female. Her Mother had told her that the entire earth is female, while the sun is male. The sky is female also, and the stars are the seed of the gods, in a way still undefined. Deqel was asking herself, in this moment of love, in what female the cosmic seed was exploding. Then, aided by sexual delight, she was no longer able to distinguish her body from that cosmic woman.

A fertile confusion because everywhere, the dust of the primordial explosion agglutinates in billions of stars that are so many generations of life. They call it a star, but it is a seed in a woman. In her acts of love, Deqel discovers that everything begins again, always stronger than death.

Deqel enjoyed this supplement to life immensely because she had made her decision: she had found the knot of her freedom, the knot of all liberty; everything is taken in, and nothing is lost. She only had to untie this knot, and this is precisely what love did – untie the knot of death.

FLIGHT

Even as the stars of the Milky Way continued to turn in Deqel’s heaven, the caravan loaded up again, stood up, and undertook the first slope in a smooth and easy valley. A river indicated the route to follow. It was extremely beautiful, frighteningly luxuriant for a nomad from the Sahara.

The first valley was like a basin where veiled women had just bathed. Unseen, they splashed a refreshing drizzle. At the foot of the mountains, Jericho roses grow, and jasmine, spiny jujube trees, wild mustard, all sorts of colors. A greenish moss climbs the low rocks. Jem guides Deqel’s eyes, helping her share the pleasure. Deqel shows her the Barbary fig trees and the low grasses that goats devour first of all.

Yair was coming to his senses. What had he done? As soon as the slaves were delivered and they realized that Deqel was no longer a virgin, she would be. The image that came into his mind horrified him. He struggled not to see it. In vain – it made its home in his imagination. He sweated as if he was in a steam bath. The more the image burned, the more it erased all the other possibilities and imposed itself as the sole reality. He was tied to a stake; they were forcing him to view the slave’s unending agony …

They began to go next to a rocky cliff. The uphill road was securely paved with stones, wide

enough for two camels; the mercenaries Ari hired kept their eyes on the summits. There was nothing but quiet, surprising in these valleys with good grazing for sheep, goats, and even cattle. None of that, not even a single peasant; sometimes, on a rock, in the distance, an

ibex watching females that were never seen.

Uri slept, head on Jem’s arm. She was swaying on the left side of the big white dromedary while, on the other side, Aulus kept quiet. An inexplicable silence. With the complicity of the green and colorful landscape, Deqel was still enjoying her night. The river ran below them with a sleepy regularity. Why worry? At the slightest danger, Balaam would have brayed his trumpet cry. Yet the mercenaries were on the lookout, and most of the caravaners were holding their breath. We were in Parthian territory.

They camped in a comfortable wide place. The river made its crystal waters dance. Almost everyone bathed a rare pleasure. Robes stuck to bodies. People laughed.

The pressure of the day relaxed. The mercenaries alone stayed on their guard, with serious and searching looks.

Jemouna waited for the night and went to meet Deqel.

“I have never seen anything so serene as this starry night,” the slave said to her.

“Bats are so free, but only at night! Things exist that we only see when night has fallen.”

“Tonight I saw,” she continued.

“Then you know that the trail to Hamadan still has a thousand gates ….”

“Maybe not a thousand! One is enough for me, and assuredly it will appear; I have a strange conviction of this.”

“Deqel, my Deqel, have you guessed it?”

“What?”

“What I feel now when you’ve become the opposite of my mother.”

“Let me think … No, I don’t make it out … Give me a little more time … Maybe, wait! Since I married your father, I’m your … I don’t dare to imagine that dear a desire … But yes! I will take

you to my breast and protect you.”

“Yes, I want it. This time I do want it,” Jem affirmed. That way, I’ll have my big brother and my mother with me …”

“Your big brother, that’s just what I wanted to know; when did he adopt you?”

“It’s a long story, and it’s nothing unusual.”

“We have the whole night ahead of us.”

“I was eight, I believe. I don’t remember the beginning; it’s confusing; I only know that he was at the house before dawn; he had breakfast with us; then he obtained my father’s permission, and Mama had to give in. In the morning, I found myself alone in the boat with him. I was seated in the back, almost asleep on the sleeve of the oar. He was standing in front and casting the net with a sweeping motion. The lake grew choppy, the net sank, then the water smoothed its skin just as before, just as smooth as the sky. He waited and looked off in the distance for a long time,

nearly as motionless as the lake itself. His body adjusted itself imperceptibly to keep its balance. Then he slowly pulled on the net, which had probably closed and was no longer of any use. Since the net was empty, he tirelessly repeated the same motion, always just as slowly, with a movement just as supple, just as sweeping.

You could have said that the fish themselves had stopped moving to watch the net spread out, close, and come back up. He didn’t have to clean the net: even the algae stayed at the bottom of the lake. The sun stood up, however, letting its long blond hair fall behind it. We were comfortable. I fell back to sleep.”

“Then I was hungry. He understood this. The sun was now straight over our heads, but its heat remained gentle and pleasant. He was seated; the boat had moved a little; he untied the bundle he had brought, handed me a piece of bread, opened the flask of olive oil, dropped a small dried fish in it, and gave it to me. We ate without thinking to break the silence. Now and then, he hummed: I made him happy. We never really looked each other in the eye; when I was busy taking a mouthful, he did it, and when I was the one who dared to look at him, he was biting

into his bread. It was like a game. Our eyes met accidentally, and we burst out laughing at

the same moment. ‘Ah, I believe I’ve caught you in my net,’ he exclaimed. I felt myself blush. ‘Don’t worry, I did it to cheer you up and make you free because you’re not a fish; you’re a swallow.’ He must have seen that I didn’t understand. So he was more specific: ‘There are nets that imprison us and others that free us.’”

No doubt my wide eyes called for other explanations … He looked at me and searched for

something to say. Taking advantage of this silence, fear came back into me. I hadn’t realized that all that morning, this fear I wore like a coat every day and every night hadn’t come with me to the lake. Now it had leaped upon me and kept me from speaking and almost from breathing. He saw this and got up. The boat scarcely moved. ‘Get up; I’m going to teach you how to throw the net.’ When I stood up, the ship rocked rather violently. “Look!” he says to me. He sat down and repeated his action, but slower, emphasizing the movement of his arms, which he widened and adjusted to compensate for the minor imbalance of his legs. He had me resume my sitting position, and I paid more attention to getting up. The same thing several more times. Suddenly, I felt the immense pleasure of standing up without rocking the boot. An intoxicating sensation. Next, it was the net. It took me a lot more time, but the moment came when the net spread out perfectly, even over its surface. I trembled with pleasure and rushed into his

arms, laughing. The boat rocked. We paused for a moment, attentive to its movement. He gently pulled away from me and continued his lesson: ‘Now you are going to catch some fish because the sun is going down, and the coolness will descend from the hills.’

He rowed toward the shore, stopped, and asked me to cast the net. I failed with my first throws but succeeded with the fourth. We landed a few fish: four or five; this wasn’t much, but they were fairly big. I was so proud, so happy. He congratulated me with a wide smile. Returning to the shore, we made a fire and ate the catch. It was then that I ventured to ask my question: ‘Why did you fish starting in the morning if you knew that the fish would only be there once it

was cool?’ He burst out laughing, looked at me for a long time, and turned the question back on me: ‘Why what do you think?’

His pleasure said there was only one answer. It was a done deal. He was my brother. He would love me forever.’”

“And that’s all,” Deqel said, surprised.

“Not entirely, because later, he advised me much more clearly to beware of the nets that drag us to the bottom, into darkness, into despair. He never mentioned my mother. I know that he

was speaking about her. She was the water; I was the swallow that had suffocated in the water for such a long time that it thought it was a fish. I lacked faith, Deqel; I let myself be pulled down to the bottom. I was even afraid of heights. How about that, a swallow afraid of heights! You can always escape, Deqel. Sometime you will see, you can always escape.”

Three more days passed, just or quiet for Jem and Deqel, just as agonizing for Yair, while the others anxiously surveyed the tops of the cliffs. In the Pharisee’s head, imagination struggled with imagination: the mountains of solutions and miracles tumbling down the wall, to his right collapsed, on his left into a scattered pile; victims of a cold lucidity. The tragedy was inevitable; he understood nothing of Deqel’s nonchalance. How could she bathe and talk about plants, birds, and wild animals with Jem, while before her …

Within his imagination, something sought to emerge, something that his anxiety erased.

On the fifth day, the escarpment grew increasingly steep, the cliff climbed to the right, and the abyss fell to the left. Fortunately, the road was wide enough! At one point, the cliff made them fear landslides. To the left, the precipice formed a dizzying overhang. Beyond this, the broad plateaus of Hamadan opened up; all eyes scrutinized the city’s silhouette.

Deqel pressed against Jem’s thigh for a moment, then, without the slightest hesitation, threw herself like a bird into the void. It was silent, perfect, with no return.

The caravan didn’t stop. Balaam continued on her merry way; Jair still hadn’t turned around, though he just that moment understood the mental state of his beloved. That was what made him turn around. He saw Jem’s half-opened mouth and the absence of Deqel, who, like a shadow, had been glued to Jem’s thigh but slowly disappeared. Deqel had given her life to save her life. Hamadan’s dog would have nothing to eat. It was her absolute duty as a mother. 

“I won’t send my little one into prostitution because I have promised her to love,” she had said to Jemouna before jumping off.

Tears slid down Yair’s cheeks, yet his heart was like a falcon whose blinders had just been removed. It flew over the cliff for a moment but didn’t look down; he looked far off, toward Deqel’s native land, the desert, the smooth sliding of the sky on the sand. For a moment, he was liberated, too.

Aside from Jemouna, only two caravaners had noticed the slave’s fall. They didn’t cry out. Furthermore, it wasn’t a good idea to stop at so vertiginous a spot since the narrow road formed a meander – preventing those in front from seeing those who were behind.

When they left the high mountains, a river descended with them. They could not stop except on the vast plateau, facing the fortress of Hamadan.

A slave stealing her freedom, even through suicide – this in Parthian law was extortion, an unpardonable crime. The two witnesses viewed it as such and talked with Elon for quite a long time. Rabbi Jaire received a brief glance – nothing more. It disappeared immediately in his pain.

HAMADAN

The caravan passed through the fortress’ colossal gate, which closed behind them. Elon assembled five of his best mercenaries. The sun was baking the caravans and slaves, but it was out of the question to enter the caravansary’s shade before obtaining permission from the powerful Parthian king, the older brother of the elusive and untouchable Parthian potentate: Artabanus III.

The satrap let the caravan and its leader simmer on the city’s red-hot square. No one dared to bring water, food, or information. The halo surrounding the circle of squatting dromedaries was like a wall that no one crossed from one side or the other. Everyone was waiting.

The sun was going down when Elon was finally authorized by the trumpet blast to present himself in front of the palace – with his men. The last rays continued to ravage the men and animals in the circle of the caravaners. The leader entered the palace but not the escort; the guards would not budge.

Elon finally reappeared. From his looks, the caravaners understood that he had paid rather dearly for the rights to the mountain route he had just passed so freely and for those to reward the satrap of Hamadan for his great hospitality and another for the protection of his brother Artabanus.

Elon had clearly perceived that Ardashir, the king of Hamadan, suspected him of doing business not just for himself but for the Romans, the Parthians’ number-one enemy. If the satrap ordered the systematic search of the caravan with the aim of seizing its supply of gold without any proof of a collaboration with Rome, the news would spread among the caravaners. The Silk Road could change course and stop passing through the north. Even if it was more difficult, it was possible all the same to cross the mountains directly from Seleucia to Yasatis. Every caravan brought its weight of gold. So he mustn’t make himself more of a threat than the high mountain passes around Yasuj and the Khirsan river, for then they would choose the worst route rather than the worst city.

At nightfall, the slaves were delivered.

Yair didn’t sleep at all that night. He had reason to be afraid. He was led to the palace in the morning but wasn’t summoned until the end of the day.

He went in with Jemouna; this was on Ardashir’s order. The king had already heard the witnesses of Deqel’s suicide, a despicable theft. With her wide, apparently wondering eyes, Jem looked at the splendid mosaics, the multicolored carpets, the Greek statues of naked women, the fruit trees, the firebirds, the gushing fountains.

The old man sat enthroned on an ivory chair like those at Caesarea. He was surrounded by a half-circle of bas-reliefs recounting the glory of the Parthians; in front of the bas-relief and behind the king stood vases adorned with gold, bronze statuettes on marble colonnades, a Greek treasure, on all-too-common looting. Facing the king, at each side and at a good distance, stood his counselors, heads bowed. Along the lateral walls, the satrap’s guards stood absolutely still. Next to Ardashir, a barechested colossus with a wide belt and an enormous saber held a whip and searched the rabbi’s eyes with a broken-toothed smile. At the king’s feet, a gorgeous young slave dressed like an oriental dancer – nearly naked, in other words – was fanning the monarch.

The old man drank a little tea. Yair was crouching with his face to the floor as he had been ordered to do before entering; he had done this and pulled Jem into the same position, but she, on her knees with her mouth half-open, continued to look at the king and his splendor, apparently dumbfounded by the riches of the palace. He didn’t take offense at her insolence.

“Asher Jairus, Pharisee, and rabbi of Galilee tell me that you have lacked vigilance; tell me that in tears.”

And that is what he did.

“You owe me your life, but you aren’t worth the one you have taken from me by your negligence, neither you nor your child, who seems as stupid as she is repulsive.”

Ardashir stoked the Pharisee’s fear a little more, shrugged, and went on:

Galilean, you impressed the queen of Ctesiphon with your erudition. I will take only seven years of your life so that you may establish here, in my palace, a library worthy of Alexandria. If not, your stay might be of short duration.

The colossus moved a little. An additional silence for the king to savor his pleasure of seeing the rabbi squirm between hope for life and disgust of living.

“Alexandria!” the Pharisee repeated in a desperate exclamation.

“Perhaps there wouldn’t be as many books in it, but on the other hand, all the laws of all the kingdoms would be there. Can you do it, or do you prefer to leave us sooner?”

“I will devote all my energy to this … But I would work better in silence. My daughter is handicapped …”

“You will keep her with you. I don’t mind.”

He raised a finger. A young woman approached, nearly a child. She wiped the sweat that had gathered on the old man’s forehead. He nonchalantly stroked her back.

Ardashir liked the scandalized Pharisee face. Again, he raised a finger.

The giant advanced toward the Jew, who was crushed with fear and vexation. He smashed the whip down on his left shoulder, a single blow so that no illusion would survive in that man’s heart. Jem stared wide-eyed, took her father’s hand, and put her forehead on the floor.

The satrap was going to burst out laughing but stopped himself and raised a finger again.

An old man came out of the shadows. No doubt, he was the master librarian of the palace. He brought the rabbi to his feet, which took some time. Ardashir had already left the room.

Jem had permission to say goodbye to Aulus.

“I will keep you in my heart! Watch what you say, Aulus; your life may depend on it.”

“Have no fear; I know how to fag up minds so that they find what they’re looking for in my enigmas. Yasalis is a very beautiful city. We’ll resume our discussions.”

They embraced. Uri jumped into Jem’s arms, and Balaam followed them. The rabbi’s three dromedaries were conducted to the caravansary stables. Then Balaam was given a home in a reserve next to the palace stud farm.

Even if the Parthians aren’t Persians, they imitate them. The rabbi’s apartment wasn’t bad at all. Two servant women lived there, and they would answer all his needs. From the start, Jem was interested in the two young women. She greeted them in the way she had observed the master librarian did it, but with Greek words. The young slaves returned her greetings in Parthian. Jem repeated it. Next, they took a few steps in the garden. The young women pointed at objects, plants, and everything they saw, pronounced the names, and Jem didn’t forget them. After a couple of hours, all three were laughing together, eating fruit, and preparing the meal for the new master librarian.

Yair, who already knew the rudiments of the language, followed the old master to the library to

evaluate the amplitude of the challenge that awaited him. He attentively examined the inventory listed on the parchments. He verified the quality of certain documents; it was better than he thought.

ARDASHIR

The sharp shadow of mount Alvand formed a sort of sundial that rang the hours in Yair’s apartment.

Four years had passed, with absolutely no rest.

Today, when the rabbi considers them, extending like a long fresco in his memory, he smiles because it is now in the past, a sort of mosaic that can be reread, that offers its colors but keeps its pains. The feelings return but are now no more than old rounded mountains; the peaks that hurt him long ago now lapse into nostalgia.

From the first year of his reign, Artabanus III showed up at Hamadan to enroll all the able-bodied men. His brother Ardashir stood silently beside the city crier. The Parthian emperor was firmly attached to his divine title and his territories; he wanted to take back Armenia from the Romans. All the cities had to contribute men and money. Ardashir felt dispossessed but displayed the dry resignation of an army general.

Thanks to his elite archers, able to kill while riding at top speed in their chariots, and his new crossbows of unprecedented power, Artabanus, sacrificing an impressive number of peasant soldiers, managed to push the Romans back to the west as far as Armenia, where he installed a king from their nobility, adding a Roman “adviser,” in reality a procurator.

Artabanus withdrew to the north to restore his forces: Hamadan and the other Parthian cities had to donate even more peasants. The emperor retook Armenia. The blood of the countryside didn’t cost him much. That’s what he believed.

At Hamadan, the war weakened Ardashir, for now, all he had to prevent revolts were his own personal guards, and since the debt had increased astronomically, the levies increased imposed on artisans and peasants provoked rebellion. The king wove a tight network of spies, promised informers rewards and protection, and devised horrible public tortures to dissuade the troublemakers. As in the Roman circuses, he made a show of it, one he attended religiously, like a high priest, excited by blood. The pleasure he derived from it was so evident as to arouse even more agitation and revolt.

Rabbi Jaire rarely left his library. He had learned the king’s language and wore himself out translating. Moreover, he wasn’t interested in anything else. He no longer lived in his paper scrolls but in the world of ideas. Not exactly the world of ideas, but rather a dream of the future, an insane hope for peace. It wasn’t that he really believed in it, but he couldn’t imagine anything else: “A river of blood is not a river of water, a sun that burns is not a sun that warms, a field of thorns is not a field of wheat; one day women will refuse to give birth, one day we will have to

do something other than killing each other; one day, we will have learned how to live.”

One fine morning, a Jewish caravaner he was acquainted with showed up at the door of the library; he was coming back from Yasatis and would return to Jerusalem. He had to pass through Hamadan to pay off a debt to a merchant in Yasatis. Yair had asked him to bring back copies of scrolls his friends had in Sepphoris and had given him a quarter of a large sum for this service.

The next year, hoping to receive the remainder of the payment, the man had returned with the copies and fresh news from Galilee. The Zealots had gained ground in Judea. The Sanhedrin in Jerusalem feared a revolt. It delivered to the Roman procurator all those it categorized as Zealots, adding a few personal enemies. The Carpenter, lacking prudence, had gone to Jerusalem to teach in the Temple. He had been executed along with two others, the Zebedee family, the ex-prostitute from Magdala, and some of his former disciples were expecting him to come back to life to install peace in the world. The state of despair was such that a dream this insane was for them like bread and wine. At any moment, a single spark could set all Judea

on fire.

When Yair wanted to tell this story to Jem, she was playing with some children. He didn’t want to disturb her. However, when evening arrived, she suddenly told him:

“Papa, I don’t believe all they say, and stop being afraid of me; I am strong enough to defend myself.”

He had shrugged. His daughter obviously remained a world apart and didn’t want to know anything about men and their horrors. So much the better.

He buried himself in work – in reality, a work begun by his father; he finished the translation of the principal rules of Hittite law. He translated the Laws of Manu into Parthian, at least the part he possessed. It was a text in verse, supposed to be the oldest and most important of the Hindu tradition, which dictates in detail the duties of Brahmans and the order of castes. A strange Law which opens with a fantastic cosmogony:

The first world was plunged in darkness, imperceptible, lacking any distinctive. Attributes were not able to be discovered by reasoning nor to be revealed by images; they seemed entirely given over to sleep.

When the duration of the dissolution arrived at its term, then the Lord-existing-by-itself, and who is out of reach of the external senses, making the world perceptible with the five elements and the other principles resplendent with the purest brightness, appeared and dissipated the darkness, that is to say, it impregnated all of nature with its presence, like a sun.

The one whom the mind alone can conceive, of who escapes the organs of the senses, who is without visible parts, eternal, unfurled its own splendor. Being resolved, in its thought, to make the diverse creatures emanate from its substance. If first of all produced the waters, in which it deposited a seed. This seed became an egg shining like gold – as brilliant as the star of a thousand rays – in which the supreme Being itself was born in the form of Brahma, the ancestor of all beings.

Following this preamble worthy of the Jewish Genesis is the description of a social organization of castes: from the lowest, the untouchables, to the highest, the brahmin priests and the kings. A way of superimposing the inequality of wealth, inequality of sins: the quilty, to be sure, is at the bottom, punished by their poverty for sins they have no doubt committed in a past life. The cycles of reincarnation are caused and determined by Karma, a kind of impersonal judgment. Heaven and hell are contiguous on earth. Heaven is the splendor of kings, and it justifies them. They have not sinned since they are at the summit of their glory. The hell of reincarnation in an inferior cast allows sinners to purify themselves through suffering and destitution. Their misery, in this way, justifies the cruelty of the priests and lords.

Yair knew perfectly well the kind of laws the Parthian king was looking for. He had learned this at his own expense, Ardashir would have liked the Laws of Manu, but they were inapplicable outside of Indian culture.

The first year had been exceedingly terrible for him.

One day, Ardashir had asked him:

“Jew, you know the Torah better than anyone, so tell me its principle in a single sentence.”

“You will love your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength, and your neighbor as yourself”, Yair spontaneously answered as if he had been in front of his old master Hillel.

“You’re crazy! You don’t want to live, Jew! How could an empire stand more than a month with such a law? Your Law has made you a people of slaves. You forget the essential thing: it is, however, found in the texts. It is said in the Mishnah that if a Gentile, a non-Jew, or a Roma,n falls in the water, a Jew should not pull him out. You take me for an ignoramus or an imbecile! I’m telling you, here’s the essence of your Law: your neighbor is your ally, the one who thinks like you and breathes your religion; the others, all the others, are infidels, and you for them you must prepare a cruel punishment. You weigh love and assign it a considerable

weight, but you omit its counterweight. It is said: ‘You shall love the bearers of light, and you shall hate the fomenters of darkness.’ So, take me seriously, son of a yid; you owe me your fidelity and your respect, for I am your life, I am your air, don’t forget it!”

“What you gain that way, take it; I don’t want it,” Yair retorted.

“You call yourself a wise man; haven’t you good Zarathustra? ‘Everywhere I have found something living, I have found the will to power, and even in the will of the one who

obeys, I have found the will to be master. That the stronger dominate, the weaker; that is what his will wants. It is the only joy he doesn’t want to be deprived of. Therefore the greatest risk of their lives is for power. A superman like that bets his life to gain it.”

“Bet your life, Ardashir. But you haven’t quoted Zarathustra; your quotation comes from one of his disciples, an adviser to the emperor Darius, a man of your kind. What you take for a will to power, Zarathrustra makes a will to love; the free man doesn’t seek to dominate anyone whatsoever; only the weak, not the superman, but the subhuman man, wants to dominate because he is afraid of collapsing into his own emptiness.”

He got out of it with twenty blows of the lash, which he thought would kill him. Fortunately, Jem’s attentive care, with that of two slaves, had put him back on his feet. The little man was only a twig in the hands of the colossus. He made two other errors later, but after that became as unctuous as a Chinese diplomat.

DOLMA

Yair disappeared like a shadow on the surface of the walls; he hugged them so closely that he could not be seen; went from his room to the library at the strategic hours when he was convinced he would meet no one. In order to survive, he had joined Socrates and Plato; he was trying to wade through the river separating his enormous questions from his equally enormous hopes. This way, he managed to forget that he was the hostage of the king of hell, but Ardashir himself did not forget it.

Later one evening, a servant came to usher him to the king’s chamber. The satrap was there, lying down in the Roman style as if he was dining, but on a monstrous bed inhabited by multicolored cushions and surrounded by bright red veils. Torches planted in bronze pedestals surrounded the bed and made it difficult to see the rest of the room, which Yair sensed was as large as a courtyard. Invisible in the shadows was the unmistakable aroma of young slaves coming out of a perfumed bath. Were there several or perhaps just one? Impossible to tell, but the aroma seemed to cover the entire circumference of the chamber.

“I’m making you suffer, my dear sourpuss.”

“Not at all, my good king.”

“I learned that you despise the female servant I have placed at your disposal. I agree that it is good to fast sometimes,  to increase the appetite and get the stomach’s passion back. What is this? You have been here for three years …”

“Four, lord.”

“Four years already; it’s much too long to be celibate! How do you manage it? It’s not good for your health to be deprived in that way; you should have let me know.”

“Master, I assure you, I’m perfectly healthy. I have other worries. The library is being enriched year after year, with rare works of great value …”

“Yes, that’s right, but you still haven’t told me anything about the great Law, the one that serves to conquer time as well as space, the one that serves to endure as well as take. You won’t arrive at it unless you free your mind from time to time. Do you see what I mean? Your health is important to me because you are mine, my property. I have horses, dromedaries, all sorts of animals of high quality, and I want their needs to be met, so they serve me according to my needs.”

“I will see to it, my lord; don’t worry about me.”

“I do worry; that is just it. You are enriching my library, but you talk like a public entertainer. My servant is going to conduct you to my slaves’ apartments. You will choose one of them.”

“It is too late.”

“But …”

“That is not important. Life, in general, is short. You know that. Moreover, they don’t please you. I quite dislike selling my slaves unless I cut off their tongues, though that is cruel. No! You need some young and vigorous blood.”

“God in Heaven!”

“No, Jair, you are overestimating me. I am only your master, your doctor, your king. You see it very well. You have a brain completely congested by, I don’t know, disdain for the pleasures of the flesh. It is a sign of resistance that I do not like. Tomorrow, you will come to thank me on your knees. I want to see in your eyes the night you will cross, a night that will cleanse your mind of all the stupid things that come from the naïvete of your virginity. Tonight, you are going to lose your dreams and your ramblings by making a man of yourself.”

He dismissed him with a weary hand.

Yair was floored. He didn’t see anything any longer, not the corridor, not the servant who

accompanied him, not even his own soul. How could he escape this trap? Could he simply pretend and thus save both his soul and the life of the poor slave he would have to choose? It would be challenging. Ardashir had his spies everywhere; he would check. If the pretense were discovered, the slave would be tortured to death. No, it was impossible! Yair had no choice.

The further he went, the more he accepted this lack of choice and found fewer and lower disadvantages in obeying the satrap to save the slave and himself. It wasn’t just about her life and his: if he was whipped to death, what would happen to Jemouna? He couldn’t even think about it and had no choice. This fact, slowly but surely, made its way into his body, for all he could do now was imagine the act … It wouldn’t be so bad, after all, he wouldn’t have to rush things, and he could take all his time; he wouldn’t have to inflict any pain on this woman … May as well make the best of a bad thing …

And then it was true. He had to acknowledge it: he needed a woman. Perhaps the slave would please him; maybe he would please her, too. If they satisfied each other, Yahweh would understand.

He began to feel within himself the rising waters.

He could admit to himself, couldn’t help but admit, that this call of nature was a sting. Another exquisite pleasure rose as well, much subtle, sweet, and bitter, a too-perfect blend that becomes uncontrollable, one to which you suddenly surrender; an infinitely secret and intimate

delight that is absolute concupiscence, the sap of Satan. The delight in having no choice, the exquisite pleasure of belonging to another and no longer having to do anything more than following the current, to surrender himself to the act required without resisting it in any way, the exquisite delight of losing his will, the captivating charm of the fall into the world of things, for things have no willpower and, because of this, exist entirely. All the great prophets have felt that delight: To be nothing more than an instrument of God or of Satan. If I become a rock that falls, what does it matter? Yair couldn’t acknowledge that ultimate delight, but it was swarming inside him; it was gaining ground in him. The universal pleasure of blind obedience.

To say I belong to you and be justified for every crime, this is man’s greatest intoxication; it is universal, it is the food of Satan. All he has to do is disguise himself as the Almighty, the greatest, the most beautiful, and everyone comes to him. If there wasn’t this ultimate pleasure, Satan would not exist.

At last, they arrived at the slaves’ appartement. Yair had totally surrendered to the pleasure of no longer having any choice.

They were all prepared, shamelessly revealed in the light of the torches, as they stood side by side in a circle of transparent robes. Yair retreated; they were children, truly children, most of them younger than Jem. Were they already at the king’s service? Could it be that the king raped children? His heart beat fast.

He could not force himself to look at the exhibition of girls. A wall separated him from their bodies. He focussed on their faces, the composed faces. The children imitated a king of learning grimace that poorly concealed a strange passivity that was, in fact, a terrible resignation charged with fear.

Two men entered, one of middle age and the other an adolescent, neither of them responsible for the surveillance of the harem of spouses and the pavilion of concubines. Yair concluded that they were the matron of the slaves and his assistant.

The matron inspected the girls with great disdain while his assistant stood back, eyes turned toward the ground. The matron shrugged and withdrew, taking his assistant with him. Probably he had just observed that they weren’t ready, too fearful; if they were brought to the king like this, they would act up and would be lost.

The servant who accompanied Jair told him:

“Choose one of them. If you don’t, two of them will be thrown in the ditch.”

Yair was totally broken. He no longer understood. What were the king’s intentions? He looked at them one by one; their faces didn’t know how to camouflage anything, not even their efforts to hide their emotions. He couldn’t look anywhere else, for anywhere else was their bodies.

To break a human being in the act of being born … He couldn’t. Condemn two to death by refusing them all; he couldn’t do that either. Pity tore his heart; the dilemma tore his mind. He was overwhelmed, incapable of thinking …

His blurred eyes no longer let him so much as see the children. But he was as much assailed by their helplessness as by his own. One was reflected in the other; he could never either take one or have two killed … He had trouble staying on this fact; cramps passed through him.

His mind flew off for a moment. He imagined himself with a sword in his hand; he imagined himself bigger than a giant, running in the corridor, entering the king’s chamber, driving the

sword into the king … But he wasn’t a giant; a cockroach, perhaps, a larvae, it’s possible, but not a giant, not even a man. He was sick with disgust.

The servant pushed him on the shoulder a little to make him move from one girl to the other and make a choice at last! His eyes cleared. He stopped in front of a girl who seemed older than the others and whose chest seemed well enough developed. A very young woman, an adolescent, but not a child. She certainly was the oldest of the group.

He gazed at her for a moment and hoped to find a kind of complicity. She understood that she was betting her life. Maybe she was even accustomed to betting her life. He saw only fear in her look. He looked at her for a long time. He tried to make her understand that he had to play a game, that was all. He wouldn’t hurt her, but he would have to. For life. To live. To continue to live.

He didn’t get a thing. The young woman was simply afraid.

So he moved away, went among the others as if to calm them: ‘Not tonight, it won’t be my fault.’ He returned to the oldest one. Her look was no longer the same. She suddenly seemed free of all fear and looked at him in a determined manner as if she said: ‘Choose me, save the others. I am impregnable.’ Her look had the brilliance of unshakable dignity.

Yair tried to understand but could not. The venom of Satan had entered him, and his acceptance of it hugged and suffocated him. He was intoxicated by the submission he thought was necessary as if Ardashir were the arm, and he, the saber. She, on the contrary, had cut her ropes and broken her chains. She had chosen to have the choice, but Yair couldn’t understand because he had chosen not to have a choice; he had chosen to be a thing in someone else’s hands. He did not see any other possibility that exonerated him.

“What is your name?” Yair asked her.

“Dolma.”

Her tone was not decodable. But her look was like Deqel’s after the wedding night. Yes, this look that he hadn’t understood, that he couldn’t understand; a look totally at peace, as when the heart is welded to the soul and no power can shake it any longer.

The three returned by the wide corridor with a determined pace because the servant knew that they were late. Arriving at the spot where they would have had to turn toward the rabbi’s apartment, the servant motioned them to continue. All three of them had to return to the king’s

chamber, no doubt so that he could certify the rabbi’s choice so that he could savor the pleasure of eliminating all freedom and all intimacy from those surrounding him, and above all, to see if the venom had entered if he could detect in his master librarian the delight of his fall, the strange and muted pleasure of abdicating all that is human in oneself in order to serve a master, as well as a cane, serves a walker.

When they arrived at the king’s chamber, the king got up and walked over to Yair.

I was certain that you would choose her; she’s pretty but a little rebellious. I don’t dislike that. You can leave. She will stay with me. Thank you for having taken it upon yourself to choose my candy for tonight. The matron never stops telling me that they aren’t ready, that they won’t please me … That’s not your problem, rabbi! You chose her, so she is ready, isn’t she? I have your benediction.

And he burst out laughing.

Yair said nothing, absolutely nothing; he held back what he had to say, he held it back like a soldier holds back his sword, and by the very fact, consented.

Returning to his apartment, he realized that the two servants were there safe and sound. Obviously, they knew nothing of what had happened. The night resumed its course.

Jemouna was already sound asleep. If the servants learned something, they would say nothing. Every evening, as usual, they remained scaled on the edge of Yair’s bed until they wished them good night and dismissed them with a gesture of his hand.

That night, and several nights afterward, Yair could not sleep, not even for a moment. He saw himself as a dog licking his master’s boot because he was afraid of the stick. He had let Dolma be thrown to this wild animal. He was so disgusted with himself that Jemouna was the only thing that kept him from hanging himself on one of the hooks that held the torches in the library. And yet he returned to work, got back into harness, fleeing with all his mind the venom Ardashir had injected in him. Did he flee into his books, into his research, into the greatest of mysteries: How to escape Babylon, how to escape servitude’s universal delight? For, if no sidestepping was possible, the god of love and wisdom would, in reality, not exist, and the Almighty would rule over all humanity like Ardashir over Hamadan

One evening he began a new habit; he accepted the intimacy of one or the other servant. For their lives, for his life, for Jem’s life.

LESSON AT HAMADAN

Luckily for her, Jemouna remained a twelve-year-old child. She acted so naively that no one would ever think of treating her otherwise. All the more, since she ate little and lacked strength. To spare her steps, Uri had required the habit of carrying messages with the aid of a hollow stick into which a piece of parchment could be slid. Sometimes the apprentice had to carry her in his arms from one spot to the other. They called her “the Invalid.” Despite her handicap, which she polished like a copper shield, she had arranged to start a class with the slaves’ young daughters. They let her do it. She taught them the Greek, which was still commonly in use in the territories previously conquered by Alexander the Great, maxims and proverbs they could repeat to make a good impression.

The king liked girls who were happy and educated but innocent; the eunuch-in-chief and the children’s matron accepted Jem’s work but monitored it. The apprentice stationed himself discreetly behind a low wall, where he heard everything.

Around a nearby fountain, about fifteen fruit trees of various species grew together with flowers of every color, spices, thickets, a whole marvelous world that birds loved.

In the beginning, the birds were afraid of Uri and nervously flew in circles, but they realized rather quickly that the fox was harmless. That was where she taught. All those faces of different colors, who had no right to their personal feelings, not to the slightest privacy –  this upset her. Jem had to navigate on a thin line, open windows, but never a door.

Amrita asked one day, standing up in a very determined way: “Miss Invalid, I’m now the oldest one in the group. You spoke in Greek to us about a species of bird; I don’t recall just one; that doesn’t farm and doesn’t work, and yet is as well dressed as a princess. I didn’t understand everything, were you talking about us? Because if we are dressed like queens, this doesn’t mean that we are as carefree as a finch. Our life isn’t so golden …”

Another cut in: “So what? My mother is very happy right now, one of the most influential concubines.”

“That’s just it; she’s attracting the attention of the older women; that’s dangerous,” a third put in.

“Let me finish,” Amrita resumed, suddenly aware of the danger of her question, “I just wanted to say that I’d rather live in the palace where I eat well than run over the fields to catch flies and earthworms, like your bird yesterday.”

She thought she had extinguished the wick, but she had lit in her closest friend, who, in a low voice, brought it up again:

“You’re forgetting Dolma …”

“Shush! You have no right to talk about her,” one of the youngest of the group interposed.

“No one has liked her. She was ugly and crazy to refuse the king,” another insisted.

“Wait!” Amrita continued. “I’m not asking you anything; I’m addressing Miss Invalid.”

In the silence that followed, steps were heard; the matron approached, had they been alerted by the guard! The girls were suddenly all ears, silent and petrified. The Matron went away, but the apprentice, a young Greeks eunuch, remained motionless behind his wall.

Jem responded:  “Miss Amrita in Greek means ‘swallows’.  I was speaking of the swallow that perched on the orange tree yesterday; wasn’t it beautiful?”

On hearing the matron depart, the girls breathed more freely and looked at each other to keep the dispute from resuming. Jem continued in somewhat literary Greek; the matron did not know much of the language that the girls were well on their way to mastering. The apprentice was Greek, but the girls did not know it.

“Let me continue. A giant caught the swallow and put it in a cage, not just any cage, but a very mesmerizing one. Everything was going rather well until one night when she dreamed of the lake of Tiberias.”

“What is it, this lake, Miss Invalid?” the youngest of the group asked.

“It’s the most beautiful lake in the world. All around it, there are big hills covered with vineyards,

olive trees, orchards, and pastures where goats, sheep, and donkeys graze. When you’re on a boat in the middle of the lake, you feel that this world is infinite, that It has a heart, and that in this heart reigns an immense peace.”

“And why would it be more beautiful than our fountain?” Amrita objected.

“It isn’t; this is what the swallow remembers.”

Suddenly understanding the story, Amrita concluded:

“So, Miss Invalid, this swallow must have had an enormous shock when it woke up here after its dream!”

“But what if it were the opposite? If the cage was the dream, and the lake the reality?”

“We aren’t dreaming now!” Amrita replied.

“That’s not so certain. Let’s imagine that we are dreaming … In this dream, we are all small, small fish. And like small fish, we are contained in bodies that are terribly edible. And it’s rather dangerous to be so small and so edible. Maybe, it’s just a dream we’ve accustomed to, a nightmare. In reality, we are perhaps swallows created to fly over the lake.”

Without a sound, the young apprentice got up and met the matron. Laughing, he told him the foolishness the Invalid had taught. However, after a few days, they understood the lesson as well as Amrita.

When Yair learned what had happened to Dolma, once again, he couldn’t sleep or find any way to escape; all the books, all the laws, all his mind’s constructions crumbled. And in the immense void that followed, he felt Satan’s venom in his veins, his sap, and the subtle delight of a man who thinks he is at the mercy of another while he is only at the mercy of himself. As for Jem, she would only know much later what had really happened to Dolma.

THE POWER OF FORCE

About one year later, rabbi Jaire was summoned to the king’s apartments; the monarch was not on his ivory chair but on an upholstered armchair beside his bed. He seemed exhausted and overwhelmed. He ordered his guards and servants to leave. 

“I have accorded you plenty of time and ample means. It’s time that you answer my questions!”

Already, the sweat stood out on Yair’s forehead.

“Stop being afraid! You’ll suffer, and you’ll die; that’s life. Don’t be afraid of me today; I won’t be the cause. Speak to me honestly. Just take care not to insult my intelligence; tell me at last what law would permit an emperor to enlarge his sway in a way that transcends time.”

“Imitate Rome. You’re well advanced in that way.”

“Rome has already reached its limits: what it gains in the cast, it loses in the west, what it takes in the north, it loses in the south; through its enlargement, it destroys its longevity. At the same time, the queen city cannot make do with its limits because its gluttonous heart demands too many resources. Rome always needs new blood, an overflowing abundance of meat, and fabulous treasures just to survive. It will collapse from within, by voracity, like all the empires. No! I feel old. I don’t seek an answer for the Persians, the  Parthians, or for the Chinese; I don’t seek an answer for myself or for my brother; I seek an answer for humanity: ‘How can we make order among humans and maintain it without creating a disorder worse in the end than the one we are combatting?’ Such is the question a law must answer.”

“By what miracle are you asking such a question?”

“Let’s say that I’m tired.”

“As long as humans see nature as a kind of disorder, there will be no order. Romulus made a wide circle with a plow and declared that what was outside the circle was disorder and barbarism, and what was inside the circle was civilization. Starting from there, Rome was only violence and disorder. Its law does not order but the labyrinth is produced by anxiety and thus disorder. Creation is not disorder; it is order; order made for the living and not for the dead …”

“Through violence …”

“It’s up to us to better understand nature so as to make it something more comfortable. And it is difficult.”

“You’re thinking of Socrates and above all, of Aristotle, so tell me what such a natural harmony is.”

“Justice, equity, and the participation of all.”

“Words, more words that you have been repeating to me for months, but in practice, what is justice?”

“What naturally sets in among human beings once the fear of murder, torture, and pillage has gone away.”

“You’re speaking about what you don’t know because you’re still afraid. And because you’re afraid you’ll repeat to me that if the great majority of peasants, of artisans, of priests, of instructors, of doctors – who make up the country – feel that the decisions are just, they

won’t seek to contest them. You will say that justice is economical because there Is no need for weapons to impose it … And so on. There’s your idea. It is not an idea; it’s a dream. You will add that if everyone had enough to drink, eat, wear, and had lodging and education, peace would gradually be established in the country. You will say this because, in reality, you are afraid.”

“You’ve got me pretty well figured out. Isn’t it fear that makes you a master while it makes me a slave? You’re afraid of rebellion; the people are afraid of repression. We’re the same species, victims of violence …”

“Don’t insult me, Jew. My fear is a sword; yours is a rag. Don’t compare me to you. Your principles, you can write them on rags; they will walk all over them. All goes well in imagination as naive and stupid as yours. Absolutely nothing of what you say is applicable. If I tried to experiment with your justice here in Hamadan, the nobles would negotiate in secret

with the Romans to keep their privileges, and the soldiers would go on their side. Rome would crush us before the end of a single year, for those who have obtained privileges by force will never abandon them for the love of justice. As you see, force is the elephant; justice the grass

that it tramples.”

“Perhaps I am dreaming; however, I do know that on the road of injustice, everyone loses; the nobles as much as the army generals, the kings as much as the peasants. Because this grass we trample feeds the animals we eat. As long as men prefer to gain advantages to the detriment of justice, empires will replace each other until the end of time. You are proud of your forces of order, but everywhere they go, you see appearing only disorder, anguish, and desolation …”

“You talk like a stoic who wants to ennoble mature by ennobling himself and freeing himself from fear; you talk like them, but you aren’t like them. What you resemble instead are the disciples of the philosophers of Galilee. I don’t know his name, and they give him all sorts of names; they tell me that he condemned, all at the same time, the revolt of the Zealots, the power of the priests, and the violence of Rome. And he proposes love and forgiveness as the only cure! What would you do with a life like his? A fool like you. They say that Rome nailed him on a cross. Can you find more flagrant proof that force always wins? The cross will be the symbol of force. Understand this, Jaire: Once you have taken hold of the sword and of religion, you cannot give them up, for at the slightest weakness, it is your own brother who will cut your throat, and if it isn’t him, it will be the populace. Violence is not a choice; it is a law, the Law of laws. If one day your people take up the sword in the conviction that they have been assigned to apply the Law of God to the world, it will be the cruelest of people because it will have accumulated all the sufferings and humiliations of the world.”

“You are well informed …. And I no longer have a defense …”

“Before the procurator, the master of Galilee backed down like you, saying: ‘My kingdom is not of this world,’ He wanted to save his skin. ‘Force eliminates those who try to sneak away. Don’t forget that lesson, my dear slave. You live because you benefit me, even if you don’t benefit me enough. However, you are making progress: you no longer snub the servants I gave you. You, too, have no choice; you submit to force. Such is the law, we have nothing to choose, and force always wins. We all lie down beneath the Almighty, the One and Only, Most Merciful, who lets us live in spite of our pity. All bowed down, face against the ground, praying for our lives!’”

FREEDOM

On a night without the moon or clouds, black as the pupil of an eye, Amrita awoke from the nightmare that had imprisoned her since her early childhood. She had just understood what the Invalid had said. To remain sequestered in Hamadan, you must, in the first place, have already fallen into the net of a collective nightmare and become a sleepwalker.  You have to dream that your ears can’t cross a wall, that your nose can’t fly to the meadow flowers, that your eyes can’t climb to the stars; you have to imprison yourself in an imaginary construction in which you are only a little fish, and which certainly comes in handy for all the Ardashirs of this world.

Emerging from this nightmare, Amrita understood vaguely at first, then much more clearly what was going on in her heart. Free, she could see from above this palace, so unbelievably miserable, so low, so distant, where the women, the children, and the men are trapped like rats by fear.

Perched up there, she looked down. So there is where Dolma was, Amrita realized: in the land of the swallow, this was why she was no longer afraid. She was so swollen with joy … Amrita remained at that height for quite some time. The mist was dispelled.

She could see all the years she’d just lived: the timeline where hundreds of little stories were attacked and overcome, stories that might have begun, that might have flown away, or even come to a conclusion, but prisoners of the nightmare, these thousand possibilities were nipped in the bud. Among these aborted stories, she could observe one, study it in peace, and in total freedom, with many details. The young guard, the apprentice eunuch, is not indifferent to her. He doesn’t, to be sure, look at her as an infant man would; he is not overrun by sexual desire; even so, he obviously loves her as much as a lake can love a bird. There is, even here, on earth, a kind of love that can escape the chains of fear in such a way that no one can notice or even imagine it, a free love so far from the nightmare of power and slavery that no sleepwalker could suspect it.

The apprentice eunuch really was smitten with a love that freed him; he could see, on the length and breadth of the castle walls, fissures through which a free being could escape.

The more Amrita examined the very real details, the looks, the actions, the words, the more certain she was that he loved her; he would do everything for her to escape. If he couldn’t do anything to free her physically, at least he would know how to love her for her happiness and his own.

In the days which followed, Amrita subtly and shrewdly let their her heart’s truth run to the young

apprentice, who wrapped himself in the love’s fabric, finding in it happiness that, dissipating all his stupid fears, rendered him intelligent and shrewd.

He began to see small cracks in the palace trap, in the fabric of its relationship, where everyone spies on everyone else and where no one is able to simply imagine reality. The reality that is not of this world: love with no intent possesses or holds power.

Understanding all the little cracks, he was able to place them end to end so that one night Amrita really could flee, go off with a caravan, cross the Zagros mountains and meet the queen of Ctesiphon. All that at no cost to the apprentice, except for an impeccable silence. Not that

anyone suspected him – no one could imagine that a young man, even an emasculated one, could act so gratuitously, to the point of putting himself in chains to set another free – no one suspected him, but to that collective indifference he added his indifference to death. The eunuch didn’t want to run the risk of attempting an escape, for then he might involuntarily provide clues for finding Amrita. So, he had sworn to renounce her forever, but not in dreams, not in the reality of this grand dream where, little by little, the fraternity of gratuitous love is formed. He had, on the contrary, entered this truer than true world, truer because swollen, with truth, like a sprouting grain of wheat, this world just above the world of rat traps.

He became the most obedient eunuch in the world; yet, in the secret of his scaled heart, he lived the greatest love that can be known with one of the most beautiful girls in the world.

THE END OF ARDASHIR

Two months later, Ardashir again summoned the rabbi to his apartments. This time, he was on his bed; his doctor remained close to support him.

“It’s all over for me. I simply want to tell you that I regret nothing. I did what I had to in this kingdom of wolves where ‘the strongest wins.’ The kingdom that will survive until it attains the height of its internal contradictions is what you said. Force will destroy the force; you and your

daughter, who is not as dumb as she looks, you are working in the kingdom that will follow, the kingdom of the broken and the dreamers, patience, and good luck!”

His smile would doubtlessly have opened up into his usual loud guffaw, but he was too weak.

“You’re being ironic, but do you have the strength to do it? What do you expect of me? You seem to need your doctor more than a philosopher.”

“I don’t expect anything anymore. Nothing, yes, I believe … Nothing, that’s the right word, that’s what I would want. I wouldn’t want to be reincarnated like a Hindu to see myself be the slave of a king of my kind, nor would I want to find myself in the hands of a brother, on Artaban, as I have been here, in Hamadan, living in fear of a family coup. The law of fear. It’s the only law I know, a law good on earth because we die there but unbearable in eternity. I don’t want anything anymore, or rather: I want nothing – the void, the blessed void of Epicurus.”

“Good luck to you, too! You remind me of my late wife: nothingness, the dream of the despairing! You’re asking for the impossible. Right now, when I’m talking to you, you

aren’t even able to eliminate from your imagination a girl you tortured to death. On the contrary, she has been immortalized in your mind, an image of love. And you think you are able to disappear! An omnipotence that you don’t have. We are not condemned to nothingness; that

would be too easy; God is not stupid; we are condemned to love. I wish you a good eternity under Dolma’s gaze!”

“What? I hold the end in my hands, and you’re talking is away? Know this: I don’t like to die alone.”

“If you kill me, you’ll take me with you. Do you really want that? Do you really want to bring another mirror?”

“You’re right. I don’t insist on it. Look on the table; you’ll see a parchment: It is the certificate of your emancipation and the one for your daughter; there is also a money order for a considerable sum that will allow you to continue your route because you still don’t know about Buddhism and

China. You haven’t brought me anything from that direction! I have engaged an excellent guide who will conduct you as far as Yasatis in complete security. I know that you’re acquainted with  Atar, a learned man there in Yasatis, who advises me sometimes. You are no longer my slave, and I no longer consider you my subject, so speak freely.”

Yair paused to get hold of himself. He only half believed in the piece of parchment there. Yet he couldn’t resist the volcano rising up in him.

“I have hated you like you wanted me to hate you, Ardashir. My hate was one of your numerous

pleasures as if I had been one of your prostitutes. I was one. Before I knew you, I had never met Satan and even doubted his existence. All that is twisted, cruel, and sick, all that is needed to coldly crush, to calmly make suffer, to cruelly subjugate. This you have cultivated; you have

trained yourself to tear out your heart, and you have succeeded by walking against your own conscience. You have succeeded in becoming evil, as others have succeeded in becoming charitable by following the voice of their hearts. An exploit that demands a lot of training, for you have to struggle against yourself, against your innermost conscience, and above all, you have to struggle against your own happiness. I have hated you with all my strength. I have been horrified by the tortures on the public square you so much enjoyed and, even more, by the knots you tied in your reasoning to justify your acts, even the touching of little girls. And you have made me complicit with your most despicable acts. I asked myself why almost all the men of power end up with soiling children. It’s just because a child is pure and innocent, and this mirror of purity tortures twisted consciousnesses like yours …”

The king stared at him in an absolutely icy silence.

“You’re being very cruel there, Jaire, my fellow creature! But remember, it was you who delivered Dolma to me. I took away your pleasure, and you continued to lick my feet,

good dog …”

This was too much for Yair: his eardrums hardened, and he didn’t hear himself scream with rage against his own cowardice.

For the space of a moment, he was gifted with a perfect vision. He clearly saw Dolma’s impeccable gaze. She was there before the king. He had turned down her clothing, but she

was dressed in such a dignity that the satrap had stepped back as if he was confronting a valiant warrior armed with a shield of gold and a massive sword. He had her taken away. At sunrise, he was in front of her. While the executioner was killing her, she stared at the king – without the slightest hate, nor the slightest fear, nor the slightest doubt; she simply suffered. She seemed to see a magnificent sky, an extraordinary lake, her homeland, her kingdom.

In his vision, Yair watched her without turning away and without breaking down; he faced up to the truth, faced up to this wretchedness, and his heart survived, barely, but it did survive. He attempted to stake his all against the king and against himself.

“Ardashir, I liked you, first of all, because I wanted to take vengeance on you, but also because I have seen you struggle, prisoner of the smallness of your thoughts and the coldness of

your heart. Most importantly, prisoner of your cowardice. You won’t be able to flee more; now, you will be submerged in the lake of your own soul. Wave by wave, the stone of your heart will be eroded, and you will attain your heart. Wave by wave, your sensitivity will return to you, and all the suffering that you have inflicted will come back to you like a bird returning to its nest …”

Yair could no longer restrain himself. In reality, he was talking to himself; he was attacking himself with love and truth; he was approaching forgiveness and hoping to reach it …

But the king was dead. His face was fixed on an enigmatic smile.

The doctor closed his eyes and signed the death certificate. When the rabbi left the room with the emancipation certificates and the generous money order, he was disoriented and even helpless; he had his freedom in his hands but was almost afraid of it. A nostalgia swept through him, and he asked himself if another period like Hamadan might not arrive in his life, where time and space would be so concentrated on trying to make a man of him.

Slowly, the joy of Jem – who didn’t seem to understand that a new life was beginning for them – but who jumped up and down at the idea that she was going to have Balaam, the dromedaries, and the desert again. That joy in its always multiple forms infected him, and Yair felt light.

The next day, even before the burial, when the king would take with him several dozen slaves, mostly children, the rabbi and his daughter went on their way. The guide had already made all the preparations as if he had known his mission for quite some time. That same evening, after cashing in the money order Ardashair had given him, Yair went to see his donkey. He explained to her what had happened, why he had neglected her, that now they were free and were going to Yasatis to find Aulus. He checked to see if the animal’s saddlebag was still firmly knit, cut the thread, added the new gold coins, and put everything back together, just as firmly as before.

In the morning, the guide, the three dromedaries, Balaam, Uri, and Jem, left the city. They did not have any merchandise but could buy plenty at any market.

Artabanus III reappeared in the north with a new army. He bypassed Armenia and retook Seleucia, a great defeat near Tigris, forcing himself to sign a peace treaty with the Romans. The peace conference of a Roman legate, Herod Antipas, Lucius Vitellius, and the king of Armenia. This peace was going to allow caravans from the Roman Empire to spend less on merchandise and rights of passage. This would facilitate the free circulation of ideas and the fertility of intertwining thoughts.

DASHT-E-KAVIR

They started east toward Qom. A detour. Bashar, the guide, explained that bands of robbers were no doubt going to take advantage of the king’s death to attack travelers and that it would be better to avoid the official route. For one who knew the country perfectly, it was easy to pass through isolated villages and little-known oases all the way to Yasatis. The dromedaries had very little to carry, aside from water and food supplies. The detour would only take them two days more, possibly three; for greater security, the added expense was worth it.

They passed along the south side of two big red rock hills. It wasn’t really a road, but rocks, sand, and a few thorny bushes that didn’t really slow down the animals. They met absolutely no one. To the south, the horizon went to infinity on a sea of pebbles – ochre and sometimes black – and a little sand, with here and their dense groves of small press. It was something like a desert. Dasht-e-Kavir could be distinguished in the distance by the whitish pocket it lifted into the sky. This was the true desert, but they would pass just south of it.

At noon, the heat was crushing; they had to set up the tent, drink, eat, and lie down. Bashar knew these places perfectly; he led the little troop into a grove with sufficient shade where the canvas could be attached. There was no hurry; Yasatis was not going to disappear.

The calm was total; slowly, the rabbi’s nerves relaxed. He began to feel fatigued, the accumulation of all those years of work under pressure. He was free. He was safe. He was even rich from two small fortunes: Ardashir’s gold and the gold he had collected to save Deqel. He

patted Balaam’s rump and took a deep breath. He felt as if this could throw his exhaustion on the ground and stretch out on it for a hundred years. The nightmare was over.

He and Jemouna slept a long time. Bashar kept watch; they woke up for a moment and went back to sleep again. They woke up, the sun once more at its height, and slept a little longer. Thereafter, they ate and fell asleep again. Finally, they departed, feeling as if they had new bodies, a lightened mind, and a space to discover.

The stars shone in the moonless night. The air massaged them with a pleasant spray of cool moisture; they were comfortable in the thick wool of their coats. Jem was sitting on one of the three dromedaries, petting Uri, her constant companion, very happy with the magnificent sky

that offered itself to her. Unable to walk for long, she remained perched on one of the animals, where the rhythm of rolling motion, the rhythm of its bobbing to and fro, and the salty air brought her a giddiness she hadn’t known since she sat in the Zebedees’ boat by the lake of Tiberias.

They heard in the distance the Dasht-e-Kavir’s silent whistling. One might have said this desert was a noble lady, pirouetting in her great amber veil. Her rippling robes appeared to cover all the desert; her arms were of ebony; they floated, dispersed, then recovered their form.

At certain groves, they stopped. Jem’s dromedaries layed down, and she got off to restore the circulation in her legs. Uri bounded around Balaam and ventured off a little further, and the troop started off again. The fox, despite his age, needed to run. He would treat himself to insects, take his time, sniff the odors underneath the bushes, scent new territories, discover new plants, start off again, and catch up with the caravan in just a few minutes. He was free. He never ran in a straight line, even to return, because curiosity made him turn off to one side or the other. It was wonderful to live in a world that was fascinating. Jem followed him with her eyes: she felt as if she had four legs and time to explore his paradise of puzzles and mysteries.

The yellow dances of Dasht-e-Kavir disappeared at times but couldn’t wholly keep from approaching; it seemed to want to take a child in its arms and was truly sad not to have any arms.

Yet one in the party – Balaam – had a kind of fear and sadness engraved in her mind, and her new freedom was no help. She walked pensively, her head low. No doubt she’d been shut up too long, immobile in her stable; now she carried her prison in all her joints, like a pain, like an incomprehensible apprehension. Fortunately, night’s cold hands fingered his back and legs and planted small needles of relief in the sagging muscles, giving Balaam back her vigor. Jem told her about the conversations she had had with the children, what had made her laugh, and what they had learned. The happy times.

The one, for instance, was about a rather fat and heavy man that brigands had left for dead on the side of the road. Then a king and his noble arrived; they made a big detour so as not to see the unlucky man. Next, a steward passed by, then a valet, then a house slave; all made a detour so as not to smell the odor of the poor man who was disgusted with himself after two days of lying in his blood and urine. By chance, a shepherd arrived with his donkey and his dog. It was the dog who found this man first. He licked his worst wounds, barked, and howled until his master arrived. After washing and dressing his injuries, the shepherd delicately lifted him and managed to scat him on the donkey. The donkey carried the man a very long distance, and he was saved. Balaam liked that story.

Qom was like a green island with a blue eye in the middle. Bashar went to talk with the head of the clan. He seemed to know him perfectly well and spoke his dialect. The tent was set up.

Balaam, Jem, and Uri bathed in the blue eye. Children came and joined them. They sat around a circle of stones to play. Jem didn’t know their language, and they knew nothing of Persian or Parthian. It didn’t matter! Uri showed them his skill, and that encouraged them to do the same. One performed a mime, another sang, the biggest drew signs on the sand, and the smallest made a circle by running, and Jam started to make her arms dance as if she thought she was a bird. She fell on her back in the middle of the children. Uri in her arms. Nobody ever knew why or what kind of tears ran down her cheek, of joy or nostalgia; her smile, it too, had lost the common language of humans and could no longer serve to express anything other than a reflection, one that brings calm, though understood by none.

They camped one day more in this paradise of peace.

When they wanted to start out again, the mothers had to tear away the little hands gripping Jem’s robe.

QOM

The sun was setting behind them and Qom, which concerned Yair, who expected to head south. They had to make a second detour to avoid Kashan. “A village of robbers,” Bashar asserted.

When the desert of Dasht-e-Kavir was before them, they turned toward the south to go along its edge. The night was magnified, and the desert on their left seemed to sing to cover a languorous silence. Once again, the dancer with the ebony arms and yellow robe took form, whistling in the wind.

“Papa! I would like to camp here! I am tired. I have a heavy heart, and I think of Deqel, and she has arms too big to take me, her breast is too vague to press me against hers, she no longer has a voice to speak to me, and even her scent of wildflowers is gone.”

She hadn’t completed her sentence when Yair’s eyes filled with tears. For quite some time, the white and salty desert had been tickling his ears with the whistling of the one he had loved so much. They were attracted by the desert, like Ulysses by the sirens. Deqel was, for him, the spirit of the desert. What Yair didn’t know yet was that Deqel’s voice aroused a growing shame in him, mounting in his heart and overcoming it.

In Hamadan, fear had built a wall of stone around him; Deqel had not been able to penetrate it. He forgot her. Yes, he forgot her. Now that this fear had loosened its grip, Deqel slowly returned, but she returned only in spirit, like a memory, like a mirror also. The memory, rather than caressing, tore Yair’s skin like claws. At first, it was her physical absence that tore at him. By what miracle could a memory, rather than being softer than the softest of silk vails, lighter than the wind, since it is spirit, no longer be anything more than a heap of claws and fangs?

Why did this carry a mirror of truth? Was it becoming impossible to avoid?

Yair felt his beloved in spirit, perhaps two inches away from him, perhaps even in him, but this wasn’t worth one kiss, one caress, one embrace, one crash of body to body. He didn’t want to live beside her like a brother. In her, through her, in the sensation of a pleasure that makes the entire universe and all its misery disappear. There comes a time when you no longer want to live by yourself under a blue sky dome; you want the red matter of eternal love and to be ground up in it in the end.
He heard Mato’s voice:

What are the manifestations of truth?

Wine, fire, and beauty

Wine clouds the light, fire kindles it, and beauty

moistens it.

Thus the heart is only a halo

that lights up the road

by just the width of a hand.

Jemouna saw her father suffer but was powerless; she, too, suffered, but not in the same way. As if she had been seized by an impression or stung by a bumblebee, she exclaimed:

“Papa, do you know what led Dolma to resist the king? I was so helpless and faced with these slave girls. I wanted to give them a little hope, but maybe I opened a door and put them in danger. I was convinced that the girls’ matron would never have taken one of them before she was ready.”

The shock of that last sentence choked Yair’s voice and his spirit. These are moments when we bitterly regret not dying earlier, at a time when we were still innocent, die before the betrayal. We realize that such a death would have been an inestimable blessing. Yair felt that he should have jumped off the cliff with Deqel, heart burning with love and still not tangled up. That way, he wouldn’t have known Ardashir, he wouldn’t have licked the feet of Satan, he wouldn’t have delivered Dolma to the executioner, he wouldn’t have slept with servants…

“It’s me, it’s me,” he confessed.

On hearing his own words, he broke down in tears and let this slip out of his mouth:

“I delivered Dolma.”

He couldn’t go on, his heart had contracted in his chest as if he had been struck by lightning.

“She did more for Ardashir’s soul and men’s salvation than the two of us together and all the

mountains surrounding Hamadan …” Jem added.

“Yes, I bear the responsibility for each of the acts I didn’t do.”

Jemouna leaped into her father’s arms. And they sobbed as if they were out of their minds. Bashar looked at them and wasn’t a bit surprised; he shrugged and said to himself: “You don’t get out of Hamadan without some damages.” Then he examined the spot, looking all around the horizon: He had all the time in the world; Dasht-e-Kavir wasn’t going to disappear.

Slowly, the daughter in her father’s arms and the father in his daughter’s arms finally forgave themselves. They had not looked Satan straight in the face with a pure eye. They were alive, and this was a risk, but a risk they could transform into an advantage; for now, they were free.

Deqel was there. They felt that she was observing them. They separated from each other and carefully looked all around. No one, just Bashar setting up the tent, Uri prancing, and Balaam looking at them, weighed down by an incomprehensible sadness.

Deqel’s scent became glaringly obvious, but the rest didn’t follow, still no clear demarcations, no definite forms, just a vague yellow robe, ebony arms that stretched in every direction, and a gaze like the ocean. An immense and heartrending absence. Strangely, the same had disappeared; Yair felt as if it had been washed.

And then his heart and Jem’s stopped awaiting what wasn’t going to happen. There would be no resurrection of Deqel’s body. The sand wasn’t going to reorganize itself to form arms, eyes, and a mouth. She wasn’t going to return on her two legs with tears of joy.

“Daughter, tell me something!” Yair finally cried in his pain, slowly coiling in the night.

Papa, we’re going to live our human life right to the end; we’re going to live it without losing a bit of the bitter or the sweet. After that, we’ll see.

“Live our human life, not a life less than human, not a life more than human, but a life simply and resolutely human. Suddenly, this seems to say it all – all the commandments, all the Torah, all hope.”

Silence did the rest. The father and his child grew calm.

Everything was ready for the night. Bashar was waiting, looking at them with questioning eyes.

“I think we are just happy to have left Hamadan safe and sound,” Yair told him.

Bashar shrugged again. They ate and layed down for the night.

In the morning, the guide said that they go a little way into the salt deserts; he knew a tree and a well not far away. From there, they could savor the salt air and the desert spaces, so mysterious and so free. He spoke as if he had understood their desire.

They walked toward the west for quite some time. The stars made the salt dance and sparkle in the sand, like a beach of tiny diamonds. They didn’t find either the tree or the well. They had plenty of water and food, so they settled down to sleep for a while.

Bashar made them an excellent tea, and he even gave some to the donkey. They fell asleep in their woolen clothes like a little child on their mother’s belly.

It was Balaam’s braying that woke them up. The dromedaries had run away, and Bashar was not to be found. Yair understood the fate that awaited them when he realized that Balaam’s packsaddle had disappeared along with the food and water. All that remained was the motionless tent in the desert’s windless dryness.

THE SPIRIT OF THE DESERT

The tranquility of the crystalline sky night has calmed their panic. The facts were still there: the infinity of the desert is a sort of fortress, a wall of emptiness, a wall all the same time. In the fortification of absence, no catapult can pierce a hole. There is no water, no food, no orientation; all is the same, and all lead equally to death.

“Papa, we have Uri and Balaam; it won’t be so hard.”

Rather than reassuring her father, Jem had demoralized him; all four of them were lost. They would die of thirst long before reaching Badroud and the Yasatis route. Besides, Yair did not see any path or even a single sign of a route.

Nevertheless, they started out toward the southwest. The morning shade was vanishing very fast. Soon, the sun would kill them. Jaire didn’t want to be the first to die; he did not want Jem to be alone. Already his feet were dragging on the hot white coals of salt. The girl on the donkey sang to encourage her father.

“Look, Papa, a big lake ahead of us!”

Yair knew perfectly well that there were no lakes or rivers for hundreds of leagues in any direction; a well perhaps, what were the odds that it would be just on the southwest line he was following? Then he recalled that same time ago, he had taught his daughter the art of the mirage as a way to hold out to the end; now, it was she who was practicing it.

They had brought a portion of the woolen canvas; his burned feet didn’t permit him to walk any longer. He placed the canvas on the white sand and wrapped Jem and himself in it, sheltering themselves in this way from the killer crouched in his white sky, aiming his silver arrows and never missing his mark.

A great silence set in on them like a shield of powerlessness. Neither father nor daughter managed to gather their wits. Their thoughts escaped, forming small hallucinating spots. Yair struggled hard against death’s pleasures. Jem surrendered to them.

“Go there ahead of me, hold my hand, don’t let me go.”

“Don’t be afraid, papa, the rain will fall soon.”

She sank with these last words. The father pressed her wrist, then her neck – the pulse stayed imperceptible. He smiled, and it was his turn to let go.

A woman approached in a cloud of salt. She was wearing a yellow tunic. He recognized her from her unique way of walking; the desert is for her what water is for the fish. He didn’t make out her face; she was still too far away. The cloud of salt passed through her for a moment. She reappeared, resplendent:

“My great friend, it isn’t time. Keep on.”

“We don’t have either water or food.”

“Have faith. You can’t carry a mountain on your back, only a few rocks. Every hour has its rock, and that is enough. The mountains of time have been split into portions that can be carried. You will move the whole mountain, but one rock at a time. This is the fate of humans: to be small in the immensity of space, immense on the point of an instant.”

The cloud of salt enveloped Deqel again, and she disappeared.

The silence was deafening. Yair comes out of his torpor. The sun had gotten lower and was lightly veiled. Uri growled and danced for joy; he had gathered a small mass of insects: big beetles, mostly, and some juicy grasshoppers. Thinking of his dream, Yair resolved to eat this

manna the little fox had brought him. To his great surprise, Jem had sat down behind him and was stretching out her hand. He gave has what was left.

He succeeded in lifting Jem onto Balaam. He felt that he could take only a few steps before collapsing. So he layed face down on the donkey, which got underway. Now it was she alone who carried the weight of hope, for both of them had lost consciousness.

Balaam walked until sunset, until the moon set, and until the sun rose again. Slow steps, shaky and sometimes desperate steps, she shook her head to clear her nose and breathe the scent that guided her. Uri had found some insects, but Balaam couldn’t eat them. They didn’t

come across even the smallest bush. The donkey had the misfortune to lick a block of salt, and this provoked a deadly thirst. She was going to collapse …

The first ray of dawn appeared in the east. To her left, she saw shadows appear: Badroud, she gathered her strength, Iet loose a terrible braying, and collapsed.

A dog was the first to arrive, then a young boy and his sister, and finally a shepherd and his donkey. They brought back the father and the daughter, both of them unconscious.

Balaam had given up. Uri followed in the distance so as not to attract attention.

What wind of pity had blown on the people of Badroud that day, people who weren’t in the habit of doing much for strangers who could pay neither for services nor the saving of their lives! The shepherd had searched the unlucky man’s coat and hadn’t found even the smallest piece of money, or jewelry, or anything. He had concluded that the travelers had been rubbed or betrayed by his guide; no one ventured on the Yasatis route without a guide. And that stranger certainly had no family either in Hamadan or in Yasatis. Nobody could hope for any future reward. And yet they gave them shade and water, to him and to his daughter. They let them sleep. They fed them and took their time to return to life; they were granted that time.

When Yair finally was able to relate that he had been robbed and abandoned by Bashar, no doubt on Ardashir’s orders before he died, the whole clan grew fearful, so much so that they went to look for an old camel that knew the Yasatis road by heart. They tied the man and his daughter on the camel. A good snap of the whip, and they were rid of him.

Thanks to a second miracle, they weren’t dead when they arrived at the oasis of Meybod, where by pure chance, they found Aulus and his uncle Atar, who had come to bargain for two Bactrian camels. Uri, who had followed the macabre crew, recognized Aulus the first.

THE EPHEMERAL MOMENT

Compared to the duration of a mountain, human life scarcely occupies the space of a mustard seed, but through this seed, it ends up covering all the mountains. Without human life, eternity would have no feet to walk with.

At the time of his odyssey in Persia, rabbi Jaire knows absolutely nothing of its importance; he cannot evaluate its historical value; he is caught up in the ephemeral interval of his life like the trunk of a tree, still unaware of its roots and its twigs. He goes from place to place in the desert spaces but remains a prisoner of the moment. He doesn’t know, for example, that one day his little personal story will be summarized in a few concise sentences that will circulate by hundreds of mouths, by thousands of copies, and then by billions of electronic messages: verses 41 to 56, of chapter 8 – of the Gospel of Luke, corroborated by Mark and Matthew, and commented on by an incredible mass of exegetes, scholars, and internauts.

Yair is progressing on his road, but it is very hard. He came out of the desert alive, but will his daughter? They still don’t know. They were both transported to Yasatis, the present-day Yazd, under the supervision of Aulus and his uncle, who were at Maybod for business reasons the very same day that the dromedary driven off by the people of Badroud finished their course. Without the sharp-eyed fox, would Aulus have recognized the two dying people?

He and his daughter could have died at any moment. In his mind, Yair felt himself disappear in the desert sand; he was sure he would die, and he was in the process of occupying an enormous place in history because, at the very moment he was walking, at least five or six of the Carpenter’s apostles were recounting the resurrection of Jaire’s daughter everywhere they went: to Damascus, to Edessa, to Rome, and even in the south of India.

Yair obviously knew nothing about it. As a tree’s tiny seed is unaware of all the space it leaves will someday cover, rabbi Jaire didn’t know that he was already beginning to shine over all the earth. He walks as if it was the end, but it is the beginning.

RESURRECTED FROM THE DESERT

The desert had acted on Yair. It had surpassed the bounds of his physical resistance and the limits of pain. Beyond pain, there is no longer any pain. The state of peace he had experienced in the white light had been complete, prolonged, and perfect.

He implied that he had lost consciousness, but that expression doesn’t fit; he was submerged in consciousness, drowned in it. The Torah relates that sensing his end was approaching, Elijah said to Elisha: “Tell me what you want me to do for you before I am taken away far from you.

Elisha responded: “That I receive a double portion of the spirit that you have received! Elijah continued: “You are asking something hard: you will obtain it if you see me when I am taken away from you; if not, you won’t obtain it.” Elijah was carried off on a chariot of fire. Elisha had taken hold of his garment to prevent him from leaving. The garment was emptied of his friend and the west in the empty garment. This was how Yair had caught hold of Degel’s

robe, and he, too, wept in the empty garment. After that, he received a double portion of wisdom which he found difficult to digest.

We might also say this in a different way; for example: through his adventure in the desert, Yair was prepared for the next stage. For a relatively long time in the drunkenness of death, in the absence of weight, desire, guilt, sensation, fatigue, irritability, anger, as a sea lets the rocks appear at low tide, Jaire perceived a presence that is almost never noticed, except when it is absent, a presence too stable to attract attention, too complete to be added to, too whole to diminish. This is our being in its will to leap out of itself. We have no idea of what that could change if we kept a piece of it in our hands to carry with us in our travels. Elisha kept Elijah’s garment in his hand and so had something to oppose death with.

Yair and Jem had been practically killed by the sun. When Aulus and his uncle discovered them, their vital signs were no more than the nearly imperceptible pulsation of a definitive end, the terminal wave of a finally finished world. Both of them were floating in a space as vast as

the Dasht-e-Kavir, as wide as Deqel’s Sahara: absences of the ocean, absences of water, and absences of food. The desert. Elisha’s garment. That lasted just a moment, the time of a wasp’s sting, then the poison acted, and we entered fear and death again.

Inexplicable, the sand opened beneath their feet, and they felt they were being somehow compressed. The compression brought weight, and the weight made them fall. As they fell, they began to feel the wind, and the sensation of wind revealed bones, tendons, and internal organs here and there. In the beginning, these floating organs looked strange and out of order. Yair and Jem recognized, one by one, the cut-up pieces of these two bodies and reorganized them into their individual bodies. Finally, the bodies recognized their allotted places and put on their souls.

This resurrection was slow. Returning to life is a painful experience. The bodies they slowly

entered were like dead, dry branches. Inside, the tissues burned with thirst. As water entered their lips, their senses awoke, and the pain increased, always more intense, always more aggressive.

When he was being whipped, Yair had experienced the opposite: The more the suffering exhausted him, the more it weakened; when the last lashes arrived, he was no longer there to receive them, and death appeared before him like a ripe fruit, a deliverance. At Yasatis, in Aulus’s unce’s big white bed, resurrection produced the opposite effect: he woke up to pain, and he gained strength only to better suffer the blows – ever more intense – of life. With every heartbeat, the bones of his skull cracked.

Jemouna had already known death’s deliverance. When the Carpenter called her back, she had endured the passage from peace to pain. Reliving it at Yasatis was worse: like a woman who dreads the pain of second childbirth all the more, from having known the first, she saw every

crack coming on the excruciating road to health.

It was with slow steps that the father and daughter advanced on this road, for they often retreated to take courage in death and return to the charge of living. They struggled not to sink into this cage of pain, but they couldn’t resist the gravity of the body, the compression, and t they were penetrated by an unbearable thirst.

Despite the weakness of her body, which was no longer anything more than bones, nerves, and veins, the steps Jemouna took were sometimes like a gazelle, jumping out of joy because her big brother was holding her hand, as if he was saying: “Just a minute, Jem, just a minute. I choose you. I am keeping you. Feed my sheep.”

This feeling expressed in inner words returned to her like a kind of music so that multitudes of skylarks stretched her body, swirling with exuberance. The sinking in the desert’s fire, once again her brother’s words.

Then she took her father’s hand: “Papa, stay with me; I still have some small things to do; I have the rest of my life to live. Do you understand me?”

He did understand but didn’t have the strength to speak a single word. He clutched her hand, and she pulled him a little lower, down to where the world goes, and the odyssey of Humanity, into the valley, into the groove, into the silt of time where the mustard seed joins heaven and earth.

They were side by side in the same big white bed. Sometimes in the fire, sometimes enjoying relief. When you already have lived in a body’s confinement, you grow accustomed to it quicker than a newborn does. You resign yourself and are reborn without crying too loud.

She opened her eyes for a moment. The pink silks of the bed curtains waved their hands like dancers light-drenched the flowers, and it was good. When the wind parted the curtains, green breezes entered, and with them, the smell of camel dung. The flow of pain and muscles

abated. This flow of pleasure increased, the veins and muscles supple, and the body entered life neither hot nor cold.

“Papa, look at how beautiful it is once you’re in it. It’s so good to live. Someone came, and I ate some mashed dates. Uri wiggled around my ankles. I think he’s the one who woke me up. His fur is so soft.”

“Did someone speak to you? Where are we? Who has taken care of us and why? Do you know?”

“I saw the Carpenter in my dream; we’ll stay here a while and then leave for Herot with a good camel.”

“Are we prisoners like in Hamadan?”

“Were we prisoners in Hamadan?”

“Ah, daughter! I see very well that you’ll never wake up completely. You’re still so naive. I’ll have to live in order to take care of you.”

“Papa, Balaam is dead.”

Yair realized she was telling the truth.

A colossus entered the room. He was carrying a dwarf. He placed him on the ground. Excited, he limped toward them; Aulus! But his face was that of a man of thirty, wrinkled between the eyes and under the lower lips.

“You’re finally waking up! You’ve taken your time; they have given you water and some date pudding”, he said.

“Where are we?” Yair asked.

“In Yasatis, at my uncle’s. But it’s the cool season. A mist comes down from the mountains every morning. I will show you. There is green grass. It is heaven. My uncle is a traffic man. You will get along with him very well; he has one of the libraries in Persia, nothing but originals.”

ATAR

Yasatis stands resplendent on a plateau between the mountains south of the Dasht-e-Kavir and north of the Dasht-e-Lut, two terrible deserts. In the city’s vicinity, salt lakes slowly evaporate. Typically, Yasatis is the most bakingly hot city in Persia, but it was a mild season.

In this caravan stop, Atar flourished like a king; it was impossible, however, to know the source of his wealth: the bought and sold camels, he collected the profits from the caravansary, but none of this sufficed to explain such a grand villa, so many servants, gardens and fountains, a personal temple, where the fire was renewed, as if by some miracle, and a library that only scholars were allowed to consult, and then only rarely, because it contained nothing but originals that must not be damaged, in languages that must not be translated.

Except on rare occasions, Atar never goes to the caravansary, not to the court of the city governor, and never acts directly. He plays host to many people, almost always nobles or wealthy merchants, even kings coming from Syria or Kashmir, accompanied by their scholars. He stays at home and never can be found; he is at the temple or his library but has just left. They say that he is in such and such an apartment, in some other, with one of his wives, in one of his gardens, but he doesn’t answer calls. He emerges from his paradise only to purchase the best Bactrian camels, those that can cross the Himalayas. It was rumored that he would be present at one of the weekday meals since his two guests were finally able to get up and eat by themselves.

They had to wait until the following week. After a few polite words on either side and exchanges on the Persian and Parthian situation, on Rome and Jerusalem, harvests and drought, the ups and downs of the caravan route, especially the northern route which passes through the foothills of the Himalayas, following the Indur valley. Since everything was going neither better nor worse, Atar and the rabbi plunged into their shared passion: great literature.

The only thing the two of them loved was this realm between two worlds, so much more real for them than the one of sand and salt, a realm that reflects the Creator as much as the creature that reflects the amorous and often stormy passion, of the Creator for its creature and of the creature for its Creator: “For that’s what it is,” Atar insisted, “all the Torah is just the chronicle of the unfaithful woman (the people) and jealous God, isn’t it?”

“And of the Law proposed to reestablish their Covenant,” the rabbi clarified.

“But what interests us is their passion, not their Covenant. In reality, who would be terribly disappointed if the woman-people were ever totally and durably reconciled with the jealous God. All her infidelities are there to underline a passion she cannot break, a spell she cannot shatter, a connection she cannot cut, and her sin always reminds her of her love; sin hurts her, and this hurt is her love, and this love is all she has – all she is. And he, God, carried away by anger, strikes, whips, leaps, crushing towns and mountains because he loves her. So, no one wants this law of fidelity, for the world would then be as boring as an old couple who looks into each other’s eyes because their bodies are nothing more than wet ashes. Love is violence, and violence is love.”

Atar had gone too far. This made Yair want to know where the limit was, for if there were none, love would justify jealousy and murder.

“But what is the Creator jealous of?” he asked.

“He made a creation of oceans of sand, mountains, rivers, valleys, forests, plants, insects, and

of animals, but he also made a woman his rival.”

“His rival?”

“She gives birth. What might be difficult for you to understand, dear Pharisee, is that no law, not even the Torah, can separate good and evil, and as a result, what the woman creates is a mixture. So the woman should remain in the private universe, between the four walls of her husband’s house.”

“And, by the sword, the man goes along every road, trying to separate good and evil. Thus spreading unhappiness.”

“This is why we must keep all laws securely shelved in inaccessible libraries …”

“Like a woman in his husband’s house …”

“Then transform everything into poetry.”

“Tear all the truth out of writing …”

“That’s exactly it. It nearly seduces us and thus frees us from all truth. That is what enthusiasm is. The world of the superman.”

Hearing that argument, Yair realized he was getting into quicksand. He said no more.

Jem and Aulus had heard just the beginning of the conversation. They gestured to each other and speaking in asides, they told each other all that had happened to them and laughed a lot. Jem hadn’t aged, but Aulus had.

HOD

Uri had felt at home in the desert. He even thought he’d gotten younger, but he didn’t much enjoy Atar’s palace. There weren’t many beetles there. One evening, instead of going to sleep on his mistress’s bed, he went hunting. All the found were dry cockroaches in spiderwebs. Something wasn’t healthy in the holy palace of the Zoroastrian priest. The spiders had too many things to clean.

He was attracted by voices so low that the breeze in the leaves erased them. His ears were truly very large. He approached out of pure curiosity.

“Don’t kill me; I didn’t have any choice, and I’ve come to bring you back your gold!”

“You should have brought them to me here, in good health. It’s a miracle that I didn’t lose them.”

“It was them of me.”

“You should have chosen them. You, you’re nothing. Why? Tell me at least why you did that.”

“Something must have happened. The doctor brought me an order signed and sealed with the seal of Ardashir himself, ordering me to lose them forever.”

“The old fool, he wanted them with him. Are the boxes with all the originals ready?”

“Yes, the Caravan is underway in the greatest secrecy.”

“And the rest of the library?”

“Some leather, some old parchments … A fire happens so quickly.”

“And now, may I see you no more?”

Uri took flight. He sat down at his mistress’s feet. He had recognized the voices. The priest and

the betrayer. What a misfortune! What rotten luck! If instead of such big ears and such a small mouth, he had been given the opposite, he would have been able to do something. But now, even if he got excited, yapped, growled, and gesticulated until morning. That wouldn’t change his friends’ fate in the slightest.

Two weeks later, when he was convinced that his guests were fully restored to health, Aulus reappeared, gesturing in the arms of the colossus. Still on his servant’s chest, he conducted Jem to the women’s pavilion, where he was busy with a dozen or more children playing in the

apartments of Atar’s seven wives and in their garden, near the fountain that lavished its coolness.

One by one, the children quietly arrived.

Aulus wanted to continue the conversation they had had at the meal with his uncle. He discussed this in aside with Jem:

“Atar isn’t altogether wrong. Enthusiasm makes us alive.”

“Aulus, there is only one serious moral difficulty in this world, and that is how to discriminate between the enthusiasm of wise man and the enthusiasm of fools. Are you certain that Atar isn’t confusing them?”

“You really are like a wasp; you never give up …”

“I’m the little killjoy with the pointed questions.”

“That I adore …”

He let silence change the tone of the conversation. Then he continued :

“I haven’t stopped thinking about you. I was very worried. Without my dreams and my visions, I would have despaired …”

He hesitated but couldn’t keep from adding: “I’m getting old so fast, and you so slowly.”

He looked at her, even stared at her. She was twelve. A little girl. So beautiful, but how old was she? For a moment, he hoped, he imagined; he even embraced her, but only in his imagination. This lasted for a sweet, almost eternal instant: like a flame that dazzles, the flame passes, but the dazzling remains, and he was the one, as painfully sensitive as someone skinned alive.

As for her, she didn’t understand. Friendship, like love, isn’t woven with cotton thread: there aren’t any scissors capable of cutting either one’s connection.

Now the children had all come in and were waiting for this strange couple to stop their dialogue without words. Uri unexpectedly arrived and caused excitement. He ran everywhere, walked on two legs, stamped his feet, got excited, and peed on the marble … Jem called him, and he jumped into her arms. The children were filled with wonder; it took time for them to become serious again.

After the introductions, Aulus began his lessons.

He had an assistant, a young man about fifteen, named Hod. He was a big boy who was very gentle with the children and inspired respect because of his stature. He already knew Greek, the mathematics of Pythagoras, and Zoroaster’s fundamental texts. He wasn’t the legitimate son of Atar, but that of a servant, who claimed she didn’t know the father and who, in spite of everything, had been expelled, sent back to his clan, stockmen who possessed a small plantation of fig trees. Hod’s face resembled his fathers all too well. He might have been able to claim a part of the heritage, a minimum of recognition. That made no difference to Hod! He never thought about it.

Jemouna proposed that the three of them teach as a team. The children were divided into three small groups of about the same age, changing teachers every hour: one time with Hod, another with Aulus, and finally with her. This scenario continued for several more days. After that, Jem preferred to attend Hod’s lessons because he had a way of explaining mathematics that made her climb Jacob’s ladder and touch the stars.

Every evening, back in their room, Jem layed down next to her father in an increasingly pensive silence. She answered all his questions, and it was, as usual, the most marvelous of days. The children were wonderful; they had discovered this or that … An undertone of sadness grew perceptible and penetrated her silence and even her voice.

Yair insisted a little more. All he got for answers was an avalanche of happy little things, no matter what; she told of the children’s wonders, at all they were learning, a plethora of trivia that covered obscure sadness.

The next day, Jem was not to be found. Yair had arisen very early. He found out about it immediately. The kitchen servants got up well before dawn and hadn’t seen her either. No one had.

Battle stations all day long. The servants combed the apartments. Aulus, on his colossus, searched all the distant sectors of the villa: the stables, the gardeners’ quarters, the groves, the camel park. In the afternoon, the searchers concluded that she wasn’t on the estate.

How could that child, who couldn’t walk more than a few cubits without becoming exhausted, how could she get to the gate and go out without being seen by the guards? They began to fear a kidnapping. But who would have any interest in taking hostage an invalid girl whose father was bankrupt?

The sun was going down when they saw a man approaching, who seemed to be carrying a bag in his hands, and they recognized him: Hod and the bag was not a bag, but a girl. They cried out with astonishment, Yair, who had rushed to the gate, almost fainted. His daughter, dead …

But Jem woke up and waved her hand in a perfectly normal greeting. She seemed completely at ease, as if she had just come back from the garden, carried, as happened so often, by a man of goodwill. Uri barked with triumph on her stomach.

She didn’t understand why everyone was so upset. Hod did understand, and overcame his fears, fears not imaginary, but totally realistic. Yet, he didn’t lower his eyes, let no guilt appear, no shame, and all that without the slightest sign of arrogance.

Aulus couldn’t restrain a horrible emotion. One moment, he was Hod, standing, sturdy, handsome as a god, strong as an Olympic champion. That was another, not him. As for her, she loved him because he was neither ugly, deformed, small, nor old. He left the scene in the giant’s arms so as not to be carried away by the explosion of the volcano mounting in him …

Yair wanted to know the facts immediately and in public. His anguished look wasn’t sufficient to

loosen Jem’s tongue because she still didn’t understand his worry. He had to proceed to the interrogation.

“Explain yourself, daughter, because I was getting worried.”

Angry words piled up in his mind, but he kept them to himself.

“Papa, you said to me one day: ‘All that you would want others to do to you, do to others.’ And you even added: ‘This is all the Law and the prophets.’ So I went to work with Hod’s family. Do you know that they’re overwhelmed? The season was excellent, and the work was too much for them. During the three previous years, the harvests were terrible, and now that they might be able to improve their condition, they’re wearing themselves out and risk of losing a part of their harvest.”

“You feel able to do this work and do it well?”

“Yes, I have quite a gift for sorting and cleaning the figs and spreading them out in the sun. More than anything else, I convinced Hod that Aulus could do very well by himself and that it would be better for him to help his family.”

“Couldn’t he have asked permission before making that decision?”

“Who would have given it to him? Would you have allowed me to do it?”

“Never.”

“So …”

“What am I going to do to protect Hod from Atar’s anger?”

“Never mind the whip,” Hod immediately answered. “I’ve decided to go back to my family; I’m leaving the place. I prefer their difficulties to the castle life; I have never been purchased, I consider myself free.”

“And your father?” Yair asked.

“My father! What father? He’ll never let that out. He’ll have me whipped, like a disobedient servant; it won’t be the first time.”

“This time, the acts are serious.”

“Papa, what acts are you thinking about?” Jem asked, astonished by such words.

“I’m not thinking about anything. I know you, look around you: everyone saw you arrive in Hod’s arms.”

“But everyone sees me all the time in the arms of some man.”

“Not in that way, not in secret.”

“What secret are you talking about? We were in a family that couldn’t have been more respectable.”

Yair didn’t want to go any further, or rather he was only thinking about going very far away. He went to find Atar, and he tried to convince him that Hod and his daughter were innocent. Atar never believed in that “innocence.” Hod and Jemouna, a boy and a girl –  to go that far and to return that late.

To return that late … Notwithstanding that, all he imposed on Hod were twenty lashes for disobedience.

Aulus no longer left his room. He wanted to kill, yet didn’t want to be the killer. He scratched himself, he twisted, and he tied his arms in knots.

The following day, while Yair was brushing Uri’s fur and Jem had left to look for Aulus, Atar made rabbi Jaire a proposition:

“Dear friend, I’ve thought about it a lot. I would like you to go to Srinagar and bring me back the original texts of Buddha’s sermon at Benares.”

“That doesn’t exist.”

“You know very well what I mean: The oldest copies possible which copyists use. I would also like their Greek translations, which I will obviously keep in a separate location.”

“Texts like that are worth a fortune!”

“Don’t worry about it. Just find it. I will do what is necessary afterward; most importantly, I’m looking for a certain very old Chinese poem whose author and title I don’t know but whose value you will immediately recognize, for it is addressed to an emperor and indicates to him the way to bring peace in the kingdom. I have learned that Chinese merchants are seeking to exchange this text for Buddha’s first sermon at Benares. Obviously, they aren’t bringing the originals. Perhaps you will find a decent copy. You alone can find these texts, and I think that these manuscripts are in Srinigar, in a monastery. I will loan you one of my best camels. Your salary will be amply sufficient for that rental and for the cost of your journey. When you return, I will procure you a place in a Caravan en route to Damascus, and we’ll be even.”

“Have you been thinking about that for quite some time?”

“In reality, I hoped to have resources to your services as soon as I learned from a messenger from Jerusalem that you were in Ari’s caravan. I was informed of your imprisonment at Hamadan. Since it seemed impossible for you to come out of that adventure alive, I had given up.”

Hearing these words, Uri wiggled his ears, hopped, skipped, and backed. Yair ordered him to go away to Jem.

“You won’t turn against Hod?” Yair demanded.

“He has already left. I won’t lower myself to make a scandal over on escapade.”

“I trust you. Do you trust me?”

Yair had asked that question without expecting an answer, simply to show that he wasn’t a dupe. He knew very well that the man would have spies and that he had people dependent on him in every oasis caravan, serai, or even in every stopping place next to a well.

He wouldn’t invest his funds imprudently. Even so, Yair accepted the proposition. He couldn’t

do anything more because he didn’t know anything more. He himself was on the trail of these manuscripts Maimon had spoken about to him. As for finding, why not deliver the “originals” and make copies? Writing is like a fire; it can be reproduced without the source being extinguished. Who can take hold of a breath and shut it up in a library? All the Atars in the world couldn’t do it.

Several days later, a caravan of twenty camels left for Srinigar to buy the spices of India, the silk of China, and many other renowned products from Kashmir, which knows how to hammer metal like nowhere else and has wool that will grow on the backs of goats and sheep only in the intense cold of the Himalayas.

It is said that every good goat there gives good wool. May it is the same for men: by going up to the mountains, they get a better soul!

Aulus remained in his rooms and didn’t respond to any of Jem’s appeals. She didn’t understand why he no longer wanted to see her. On the day of their departure, he didn’t even show up at the window. Jem didn’t stop looking at this opening until distance had reduced the dark square to white dust. Hod didn’t come either. He remained with his family; he didn’t want her to see him bent beneath his wounds, still oozing blood.

ADRIFT

What had really happened during the fugue?

Uri had awoken Jem by pulling on the sleeve of her skirt. Once up, she followed him. She found herself in Hod’s room. Uri burrowed under some woolens next to the bed. No one understood why he had acted like this because no one knows what it means to “leap just like that and eat beetles.”

It was around midnight. She slipped into his bed. He didn’t wake up and couldn’t get to sleep. She looked at him. He was so handsome. She let herself be cradled by that beauty. The waves were not too big, and the lake was not too large. She didn’t lower her gaze. 

A wind came down from the mountains. The lake stirred, and her heart began to shake. She wanted to caress his cheeks, but she couldn’t budge, for if he woke up, she would no longer be free to look at him. Since they would be looking at her, and then the two gazes would mingle, and nothing they saw would really be true.

Hod kept on sleeping, but she felt that his sleep was light. His respiration was no longer entirely that of a sleeper; he floated on the surface of his sleep; perhaps he even was breathing the same air she was. Maybe he didn’t want to wake her because he, too, wanted a presence whose contours he would be free to probe without any false pretenses.

Hod was still almost beardless; a down covered his jaws, and his thin lips let a narrow line of air go in and out through the middle. There wasn’t a shadow of fear or worry on his smooth skin. His face was that of someone not to be diverted from his long-sought goal, the nose like a ship’s prow cleaving the sea, the oriental cheekbones heightened by a light tan. The goal was simple: Leave Atar’s palace and return to his own people. He definitely didn’t like the atmosphere his father imposed in the little fortress. And he was peacefully sleeping there.

What was this sea that simple touch had transformed into a tsunami? The lake of Tiberias … and she went back to sleep.

It was at that moment that the boat drifted onto on island in the middle, and both of them landed on the island. Uri barked, growled, and gesticulated as if he were perfectly happy with this fugue he had orchestrated so well. They knew nothing and had arrived in front of the house on the island. They entered it. In a cradle, a baby wriggled. Theirs. She took him and gave him her breast. Her breast was plump, heavy and full of life. Then she placed the baby in the cradle, and he almost immediately went to sleep. Without closing her garment, she went toward Hod, who was standing in the light of the open door. She embraced him with a kiss that shook her whole body with a pleasure she had never known.

The dream was torn away, and she woke up.

Hod was looking at her and didn’t change his expression as he saw her waking up. He was looking at her as if she was the most beautiful fruit tree in the garden. He couldn’t even turn his eyes away, for glimmers of light were swirling around Jem’s face, a face like a peach. She seemed to be fifteen. It was too difficult; his eyes ran away in spite of himself.

She brought his gaze back toward her. The faces grew dangerously near each other; their two noses touched, which made them burst out laughing. Their lips brushed against each other, which pulled the two bodies into another knot, which would indeed have sent them both to

the bottom if they hadn’t been afraid. Both of them knew nothing about this knot that forms on a lake when a sky too hot falls on too limpid a water.

“Let’s go, Hod. Dawn is coming. I hear the animals moving in their shed. Take me with you.”

“Where?”

“To your place, with your family. You told me that they need more hands for the harvests.”

“We’ll write a word to Aulus, to let him know.”

“No, no! It’s our day. He would have people search for us …”

They left without being able to keep Uri from following them.

Hod’s mother was a sturdy and serene woman. It was said that she had crossed the Himalayas ten times and that nothing could upset her anymore. There was no lack of work. The mother led a team of five pickers, which gained new energy when Hod joined in, for he had a drive and good measure, picking as much as two people combined. The mother, Hod’s sister, two other women, and Jem took the figs and prepared them for drying, inspected them, spread them out, and turned them over.

Jem manipulated each fruit and probed it as the mother had taught her: It’s like a little belly that shouldn’t be either too soft or too firm. Sometimes a fruit opened and let its insides run out. Jem’s hands became sticky, she licked her fingers. The women laughed because they were

doing the same thing, that sensation unified them, and when the men returned with their full boxes, there were embarrassing looks and hesitant actions.

The weight of the work numbed minds; the fog lifted when the deliveries arrived. The boys sat down for a moment and watched the women who licked their fingers and couldn’t keep from laughing. The sun streamed over the man’s bare torsos. They went back out, whispering words the women didn’t hear. That tickled them until the next delivery.

This clockwork motion of hands and chests arriving and departing made the women very open with each other. Forgetting Jem’s apparent age, they talked about intimate things. Moreover,

you would never imagine that she was twelve. She listened and responded as well as Hod’s sister, who would soon be married. The women were feeling and examining each fig, so they didn’t have time to look attentively at Jem.

In the afternoon, without paying much attention to her words, the mother treated Jem more and more like her daughter, or rather her daughter-in-law. You couldn’t tell anymore if she was speaking of her daughter’s wedding or her son’s. Everything was mixed up as in a dream. Jem let this dream take her. The following year, she would have passed through puberty, she would have breasts that Hod would caress, she would have a down that he would tickle, she would be his, she would see her pleasure rise, and they would cross the lake of Tiberias to the island in the middle …

Jem tore a fig. She had applied too much pressure on it. The mother noticed it :

“Do you think Hod will leave the palace? He’s so used to it,” the mother asked. 

“I think he will. As for me, I prefer your village; I don’t know why it’s as if there were ghosts

in the palace.”

“But here, nothing is sure … This year, there is abundance, but more often, you know, we are hungry, and Hod sends us what we need, the leftovers from the palace …”

“The palace isn’t sure either. Atar’s moods are no more predictable than the seasons.”

“You, could you leave your palace?”

This last question brought Jem down to earth. Her palace was obviously her father. And that wouldn’t happen. She would never leave him because her body was not going to suddenly mature because of love. She would never be a woman. There, that very moment, time tore her to pieces!

Evening arrived. Hod came in with the last delivery. It was time to eat. The wine was good, and the feast was joyful, but he had to go back.

On the way back, as Hod was carrying Jem like a baby goat no heavier than a cloud – and that in spite of the added weight of Uri lying on her stomach – she slipped her arm around his neck in a tender motion and kissed him on the cheek.

Hod realized that this rapprochement signified the end. He let the truth be revealed in silence.

He had dreamed. He walked ahead as slowly as possible.

“It’s not serious, Jem, the words come out it is not serious. This day was good, even very good. I will carry you forever because you have brought me back home.”

Jem could not hold back the tears, and he couldn’t dry them, for both his arms were busy carrying her.

“I would like to be a woman like the others. Right now, I would like that.”

Hod said nothing at all the rest of the way. The sun was going down, reddening, weakening.

Jem was thinking. There are all sorts of possible lives during one human life, buds of life. There are buds that will stop growing and others that will continue to grow. There are so many branches turn off or cut off so that the trunk can climb and be strengthened …

She grabbed Hod as hard as she could. The night was covered with stars.

“I wish that time would stop here.”

Once again, he said nothing. Now it was fate that was walking in his place.

In front of them, the palace gates were wide open, and human forms were waiting. They had cut one day out of their existence and raised it higher than all the others. Something would not perish.

She saw Aulus turn around and leave. She barely understood what he could be feeling. Maybe he thought that she could own herself and give herself. Perhaps he believed that she could choose and that she had chosen. How could he have understood?

THE MOUNTAIN OF BUDDHA

In this part of the book, we are going to cross what is not Afghanistan and Kashmir in order to reach the west of Tibet.

HERAT

The route to Herat stretches over seventeen days between the Dasht-e Kavir and the Dasht-e Lut, ancient seas of salt that have since evaporated. The motion of Bactrian camel forms a kind of wave between its two humps as if you were in a big rowboat. For the first few days, Yair and Jem were seasick, neither of them was strong enough to walk; their feet wouldn’t have resisted the burning stone, and the camel could easily carry both of them, their water, and their food. They didn’t need much. The caravan master knew the wells, the oases, the settlements, and the numerous villages. The route was highly protected; there was nothing to fear.

This sense of safety led rabbi Yair to reflect on what lies behind things. The barrenness of the rocks and sand, and the almost total absence of vegetation, made it seem as if he was at the beginning of a new life. Once at the bottom of a valley, they necessarily had to climb back out of it again; once you had reached the end of the furrow, the seeds would have no choice but to sprout. Every life begins at the bottom. Yair possesses nothing, he depends totally on Atar; he is poor, but the Silk Road is rich in opportunities.

Jem, comfortably settled in a bag hanging on the camel’s side, never stopped talking to Uri, convinced that everything she could understand, he could too. There was the camel also, but his intelligence seemed a little more obtuse. Yet, you never knew!

She talked about it with Uri. They observed that mountain of hair and muscle for quite a while. His ears were short, mobile, made to scrutinize the distance in every direction but without leaving any room for the burning of the sun or the biting cold of the night. His hair protected him as well from the heat of the day as from nocturnal frosts. His eyes protruded so as to see the entire immensity of the circle whose center he was sure he occupied. He rarely looked at the ground, yet placed each foot precisely between two rocks or on a flat stone, as if he were studying the terrain four different times – in order to maximize the comfort for each of his four feet. He accumulated an enormous volume of water, and his humps contain phenomenal oils that regulate his body temperature – a great vessel of the desert.

Jem explained all that to Uri. He nodded his head in agreement and scratched Jem’s thigh with a bit of jealousy. 

No doubt that’s what the Carpenter meant with his saying we often recall: “There is nothing hidden that will not be revealed, nothing secret that will not be made known.” So the camel reveals the desert because the desert made the camel.

Uri began to scratch harder, for he too understood the desert. Today, obviously, he shouldn’t insist on it too much because if they dropped him off right then and there, with no preparation, would he know how to take care of himself? He would have to relearn it like a forgotten language because of long disuse. He was old now; he had stored enough of the desert in his memory not to feel the need to tire himself out explaining it.

“You are right, Uri, you are not only the desert but also Damascus, Hamadan, Qom. You are the fox with clear eyes, my guide.”

While Yair was thinking Jem was talking with her friend, the whole caravan was advancing until the burning hour when they were forced to take shelter and sleep. Sometimes, as around Gonabad, they had to climb south-facing slopers and follow the sides of mountains. Nights there were very cold, and it was pleasant to press against the camel’s thick walls.

“Papa, what’s the camel’s name?”

“Well, I don’t know!”

“He is so tame he obeys without hearing his name!”

“So it seems! But go to sleep, daughter, or be quiet. I am awfully sleepy.”

But she didn’t shut up. She went up to one of the camel’s ears and tried all kinds of names. None worked, she dared to go and bother the caravan master to ask him that. He wasn’t sleepy yet, but almost.

“Leave me alone!”

“That is not an appropriate name”, the girl retorted.

“Ad, he’s called Ad,” he said in order to get rid of her.

She returned to the camel.

“Thank you, Ad. Without you, the desert would be a tomb, but with you, it’s like the Lake of Tiberias.”

She wants to sleep alone with the camel, hugging the clear-eyed fox in her arms.

Finally, Herat.

The Greeks called it Alexandria of Ari, in memory of the great conquests of Alexander the Great. An essential stop on the route to Kashmir, one of the great cities of Khorasan. They arrived there just before the noon break. The souk was crowded in spite of this because it was covered by a roof of intertwined branches, and its configuration was designed to create a continuous current of cool air. The poor who had no shelter took advantage of the general siesta to find shady spots and perhaps some poorly guarded food.

Yair hoped to discover texts there on the practices of Buddhism, for two centuries earlier the emperor Ashoka – who had unified India and Khorasan by violence – was converted to Buddhism and introduced Buddhist philosophy into his empire. In addition, he experimented with a non-violent political philosophy expressed in his edicts which aren’t so many ordinances as teachings by example. These edicts were engraved on monoliths or public columns. In all probability, copies must exist on leather or on parchment. The rabbi hoped to find one that he could have translated at Srinagar along with some Buddhist sermons.

Unfortunately, after Ashoka’s peace, a Yucchi conqueror seized the country with extreme violence and after several massacres, pillaged it: towns, villages, and countryside. In order to receive tribute, he added the biggest cities to his Kushan empire. He invaded the north of India and the country north of it – as far as the barbarian savannahs around the Aral Sea. Nevertheless, he favored Buddhism. By trade and the caravans, Buddhism was introduced into the great steppes of the north, all of Khorasan, the southern Himalayas, and, passing to the north and south of the Taklamakan Desert; entered China.

Yair knew Buddhism’s charm: like water flowing into a dried-out swamp, Buddhism swells the soul thirsty for peace. Buddhism resembles a monsoon; it submerged the whole country, calming down the thirst and roughing of the pendants. The forms assemble to peacefully resist violence; the latter join the strongest to augment their power and their violence. So the question remains: Is Buddhism easily propagated because it is encouraged by emperors who adore this inner peace because it discourages revolt better than torture and thus facilitates docility, or does Buddhism spread because it proposes a genuine practice for the elimination of violence, including political and economic violence?

Ashoka is a unique and exceptional case: he not only encouraged the individual practice of Buddhism, but he also instituted a policy of non-violence in all of his empires. As Ardashir would have predicted, his empire was invaded by extremely violent emperors who encouraged individual non-violence so as to better exercise their political, military, social, and economic violence. This was one of the rabbi’s questions in regard to violence. He was searching for a philosophy of peace as effective for the individual soul as for the collective soul one able to counter all the despots of the world.  This is why he wanted to buy a copy of Ashokar’s edicts for without it he would have to reproduce in detail the Sanskrit symbols engraved on the columns without understanding them and then look in Srinagar for a good translator.

To allow himself more freedom, Yair asked a caravaner to look after Jemouna and ordered him to remain in the caravanserai. The caravaner was perfectly willing to take care of Jem, who in any case, lived in a world apart and talked to her fox or the camels more than to men. However, he didn’t want to be prevented from fooling around in the souk; there were exotic wines, intoxicating herbs, perfumes, women …

In any case, the girl couldn’t go very far; after a few minutes, she would have to be carried. Her fox didn’t have much energy either; he was always snuggled up on his mistress’s chest. The caravaner found a pleasant shopkeeper who spoke a few words of Greek and entrusted him with the child and the fox. The man sold small knotted rugs made from the wool of his goats. The whole family participated in this work. In the back, the wife and her four children were making the knots, preparing the weft, or measuring the length, which didn’t prevent them from gossiping. Only the man spoke Greek correctly.

Uri was definitely not well when Jem set him down on the pavement, he slipped into a dark corner that might have seemed to him like a den. He didn’t want to play, nor did he want to leave his alcove made of carpet scraps. He seemed to be saying: “Forget me.”

Jem suddenly recalled a childhood memory. The Carpenter had told the children: “Foxes have their holes, and the birds of the air their nests, but I have nowhere to lay my head.”

The merchant’s wife gave Jem a place in the middle of the children, who were seated cross-legged in front of a weft already half-woven. She showed her how to make the knots. The boy beside her gave her yarn of the color corresponding to the pattern written in code on a strip

of leather, because she couldn’t learn to read such a pattern in so short a time, the girl seated on his right adjusted the knots or corrected them. Their backs began to swing back and forth to the rhymes the mother recited as she supervised and prepared the yarn and set the wefts for another carpet.

Tears ran down Jem’s cheeks. The noise of the souk was glued to her ears and formed a shell; she heard nothing but the silence imprisoned in the rhyme she didn’t understand. The mother, the children, and the father standing in front of the display – it truly was a good den.

The time for tea arrived. The children laughed and chattered. The mother listened with the pleasure of a then surrounded by her chicks. And, in reality, it pleased Jem not to understand the dialect spoken by the family, for this way, she understood better what was being said under the clothing of the words: “We’re good together. Jem understood that they too could catch a little of what she said in Greek, so she told them how she had lost her two mothers in the same way: both had, out of necessity, thrown themselves into the death of deliverance; the first in abandoning herself to despair and the second in casting herself into the arms of hope. This is why she was so happy today to be in the shade of a simply delighted mama. The children laughed, hearing the sounds she didn’t understand.

They want back to work. Jem quickly learned how to tie the knots correctly. This impressed the boy beside her who, like her,  was about twelve. He began to teach her to decode the holes in the leather band. It was as much fun for him to teach as for her to learn.

Yair arrived at the end of the day; he had met an apothecary who, in exchange for a little translating work, had given him herbs and foods which would enable him to quickly regain his strength. He arrived, however, in a rather foul mood, very dissatisfied. While he was excusing himself in Greek to the father for imposing his daughter on him, as well as her fox, Jem went looking for Uri, who hadn’t come out of his hiding place the whole day. 

He was inert, already rigid.

She fell down on her knees as she put down the little corpse, which she had pulled out of his hole without thinking of the tragedy. Her knees had given way, and his arms as well when she realized that he wasn’t going to come back to life and start to run. Even dead, Uri attracted everyone’s notice, but this time the looks were sad and ravaged. This lasted for a time which was hard to endure.

These words slipped out of Jem’s mouth:

“He died alone.”

And she burst out in tears.

The whole family was caught up in her sadness. No one could say a single word. The lifeless body made an impression. The silence opened their eyes to the truth contained in this pouch of reddish fur – a truth hard to see but impossible to flee: we are all going to die by separation,

alone in the mystery.

After the body had delivered its truth and that truth had vitrified each one, the mother said in comprehensible Greek that surprised herself:

“My girl, you will stay with us as long as your father wants.”

With the caravaner’s consent, they stayed in Herat for two weeks. Every day, Yair grew stronger; he felt a strange energy enter him, and he now found it pleasant to carry his child on his shoulder. She seemed even lighter than before. He returned to the apothecary, who loaned him a place in the shade, a small table, and all he needed for writing, without understanding any of it, the rabbi had to copy in detail, on light parchment, the Sanskrit characters used by the emperor Ashoka, which covered the four sides of a tall column. Jemouna said goodbye to the family and climbed on Ad while her father walked in front, one more wrenching departure.

THE LOR KOH

Two routes lead to Ghazni: one, more direct, passes through the mountains; the other goes south and along the great deserts. The caravan master thought that the season favored a passage through the mountains, this would save them two or three days of the journey. More importantly, the mountain was sprinkled with route rivers and lakes, which minimized the quantity of water that had to be carried between stops. They had to dress warmly, however, the caravan master bought Yair thick woolens in the fashion of the country. They would be necessary for Srinagar and were more in conformity with the region’s practices.

Ad pricked up his ears: He recognized the Herat River on his right and on his left the snowless mountains of Lor Koh, jagged out still not very high. The camel had made the trip to Kashmir several times, sometimes even further. With the height of his legs and his powerful muscles, the simplicity of his mind, and the strength of his memory, he could envision the journey almost without interruption – like a painting rather than a route. For Jem it was different, the immensity spread out ahead of her as they entered the Herat valley, the nakedness of the yellowish mountains, the sky blue as a lake made her oscillate between a state of wonder and a state of terror. Ad went on in so sure a way that Jem calmed down. She was rooted once more in the elements of the world.

Every three to four days there was a hamlet of tents, sheep of every kind, children hiding in order to better observe, and sometimes a village of cabins. Nothing seemed separate in this country – everything went at the same speed.

Jem mumbled in Ad’s ear.

“Don’t you find it pathetic and majestic to see human beings in the middle of these titans of rock, to see them move, live, and work in such a world? We lose sight of them, Ad; we constantly lose sight of them. What comes makes room for what goes. A river carries the whole world behind it, is this what the Buddhist samsara is? Tell me, you traveler!”

The camel agreed. We cross cities and deserts, we lose everything, and yet everything remains.

“Ad, explain to me finally why, when we stop next to a well nothing seems to separate the shepherd from his flock, the child from her family, the brush from the stones. We might even say that the ear is not separate from the sound, the nose from the smell, the thought from the atmosphere; the separation of travel makes me anxious. Nevertheless, the isolation calms me down. I don’t understand it all! Are we already deep in the Orient?”

Ad remained silent.

THE KOH-I-BABA

The Haret river seemed to lose itself in its sources at the foot of the Koh-i-baba with its high, jagged, and snowy summits. This time, the mountain was better than the valley. Slate-roofed cottages of dried mud rested on the rocks, together with a large flock of woolly goals, the caravan master knew the clan chief and asked his permission to camp at the foot of the rocks. Before entering the tent to go to bed, Jem noticed that a white male goat had stationed himself on a pinnacle of stone as if he were proudly keeping watch over the village.

In the middle of the night, they heard a woman’s loud scream, it came from the houses. There were no other screams. Those who had been woken up went back to sleep, which Yair was tempted to do, but Jemouna got up and went out of the tent. Yair let her do it because he was going out to go to the bathroom, when she didn’t return, he woke up for good and went out looking for her. The moon illuminated the blocks of limestone and the path going up to the village. 

In spite of her handicaps, using her hands more than her feet, Jem had succeeded in climbing up to the houses. She heard a stifled moaning and stopped, searched, came nearer, and stopped to hear better. The moaning came from the interior of a home; she opened the door, the moonlight entered, and she saw a woman crouched with her face on the ground, blood in her hair, and clothes half torn off.

A man grumbled something in the darkness. Jem didn’t understand his language, she dragged herself toward the woman. The woman waved her off, then fell on her side, her face seriously swollen, her jaw broken. Blood flowed profusely from her mouth and her nose. It was evident that her husband had violently beaten her.

Jem had left the door open, and Yair had no difficulty finding his daughter. He stayed in the doorway, dumbfounded. The moon, with no shame, cast its light on the bloody woman and Jem on all fours. Helplessly looking at her, he immediately guessed what the drama had been about.

“Come back right now, daughter, this is none of our business,” he whispered in her ear, taking her firmly by the hand.

“Papa”, Jem replied in a loud voice, as if she meant to wake everyone up. “That woman was losing blood, she moaned, she was suffering. You can’t leave her like that. Her husband …”

“That is his right,” Yair murmured, gritting his teeth. “He’ll take care of it.”

The man got up and came out of the shadows, red-faced with anger to leave faster, Yair took his daughter’s hand, but she began to scream and struggle with all her might to help the woman and reprimand the man. At that moment, the caravan master arrived in the doorway out of breath.

“But what are you doing here, Yair?”

“I’m bringing back my daughter. She got lost.”

“Get out right now,” he loudly commanded.

Addressing the man in his dialect, he begged his pardon, even falling on his knees to beg him not to avenge his wounded honor. He explained that the girl was crippled and retarded from birth …

Jem understood by the tone that he was excusing him, so she used all her strength to break loose from her father; she succeeded. She collapsed on top of the woman bathing in her blood and cried:

“Do something!” 

The caravan master looked at the rabbi as if he had committed a horrible crime. Yair seized his daughter and took her down the rocky slope to the caravan’s tents. He had no choice but to use

force on her because she didn’t calm down. 

Convinced there was a danger of reprisals, the master caravan blew his horn to signal an emergency departure. 

It was then that an irreversible event almost happened. For just a moment, fortunately, short and scaled at both ends, Jem found herself in the past, eight years ago, at the moment when the Carpenter was holding her hand and telling her “Tabitha cumi!” which means: “Wake up!”. He did too much, she woke up too much, she woke up from a life mixed with death, she woke up in a life untangled from death, and that is why she didn’t age. Now It was clear. But confronted with

the bloodied woman and the extreme injustice of the situation, it was as if Jem were snatched up again and thrown into life mixed with death. In terror, she became aware of the human condition and the world’s unhappiness.

Yair had put her in her sack. Ad had stood up, and during that time she saw the crystalline water of the brooks descend inexorably from the mountains, carrying the fertilizing silt into the bottom of the valley’s depths. It was one of Nature’s laws: The carrying of sediments cleaned the skull of the mountains, vegetation came to life further down, and later still the people of the trees tried to come back up without ever succeeding completely. In the skulls of the world, constantly washed by the fall of time, everything is always forgotten – so almost nothing is learned: we charge straight ahead into the same pitfalls; even so, in the valley, a new world is being prepared, but it isn’t there, and we miss it desperately.

A rage welled up in the bottom of Jem’s heart. Though silent on the camel’s back, she floated with the caravan at the foot of the enormous snow-covered Koh-i-Baba, she was swelling with rage. 

Yair was still trembling, Jem had never seen her father so shaken by fear. He had his fear, and that of the caravan master, the two of them entangled … Had there been anyone to care for the

woman? Had there been enough men to reprimand the one who had so seriously injured her?

Ad didn’t speak, he too was holding his breath.

“You, Ad, do you understand?” Jem fired back at him.

“Are you going crazy, my daughter?” was Yair’s reaction on hearing this.

“It’s more the opposite: I’m trying to get out of this madness around me, why this fear, papa? Why were you sick with fear, the caravan master, everyone?”

“Do I have to explain it to you?”

“Yes, you do have to.”

“There weren’t many men in that little hamlet, only a part of the clan. The clan has no doubt split up and spread out in the valley. In this world of mountains a man’s honor just imagines, unifies a clan like the smell of blood gathers the wolves.”

The man really had lost his honor by striking his wife. He could only get it back by helping her and asking her to forgive him.

Confess his fault? For him, that’s the absolute abyss. With all his strength, he will go in the opposite direction. All the men, too, will unify to go in the opposite direction.

“Papa, honor can’t be saved by adding shame to meanness!”

“You don’t understand anything about men. For a man, cowardice is always just one thing, giving up, nothing else.”

“But you were afraid, and you’re still afraid.”

“Yes, I grant you that! I didn’t have any choice, clearly.”

“I sorely saw that in Hamadan, papa. I surely saw clearly that cowardice consists of choosing not to have any choice. The husband too had the choice but to beat his wife because she refused him, perhaps. Otherwise, he would not have been a man, isn’t that right?”

The Koh-i-baba, from the height of its white summits, imposed a long silence.

The rabbi no longer knew what to say. Ad, too, kept silent; he knew that in this place the mountain produces terrible earthquakes sometimes if you don’t show it respect.

Jemouna, though, had been pondering new arguments and kept on stronger

than before:

“Father, you go all over the world on foot, on donkeys, on dromedaries, on camels, to find the law of peace, and you fall, scared to death, at the moment when you need to put it into practice.”

“I’d be dead, no doubt, struck down by the humiliated husband. What would have become of you? You can’t cross a big mountain by changing into it, that’s for certain.”

“Is that what It is, your law: make a detour? Well, that doesn’t work because if you cast out a demon, it wanders over all the desert in search of rest and finds none. So it says to itself: ‘I’m going to return to my house,’ he arrives and finds it empty, so he enters and makes it his home.”

“Now you have understood. Man is the enlargement of violence in the emptiness of his heart. You must stay alive if you want to cure the beast.”

“Now, I’m going to take up arms against you. We didn’t do a thing to oppose Ardashir, while Dolma conquered him with a single look. You can’t make peace grow by throwing mountains of fear on it.”

“Don’t condemn me, let’s wait for the judgment of God.”

“I am the judgment of God,” Jem concluded with a fiery look.

Ad walked, walked, walked, swinging heads and hearts. But the route put no one to sleep because the mountains grew immeasurably. At the base of such mountains, even a satrap mounted on his chariot and surrounded by all his army is as small as an earthworm.

Yair sank into bitter reflection. He said to himself: “A mountain’s peak receives the thunder in order to spare the valley. One summit alone can save a vast number of people. I haven’t saved the world.”

He prayed in silence: « My God! My God! I give you back my soul. I haven’t known how to do anything with it.”

During this time the moon had set, and the stars were as dear as pearls on black silk. He noticed some vibration in the Pleiades. He couldn’t turn his eyes away from that spot, yet nothing happened except for a trembling he attributed to his pique.

THE PLEIADES

What rabbi Yair doesn’t know is that the Pleiades are a mass covered with stars in the constellation of Taurus about 444 light-years from Earth. In Asher Yair’s time, the Hebrews called then ‘the hatchery’ a correct intuition; it is an excellent brood of rather scattered stars. Now, we can count around three thousand stars in this mass, only a dozen visible to the naked eye. The age of the mass is estimated at one hundred million years, it is too scattered for the unifying power of gravity to stabilize it. The mass should dissipate in barely two hundred fifty million years.

Of the brightest mine stars in the mass, seven of which especially fascinated Yair, sparkled like silver crosses, particularly Asterope, though it is slightly blurred since it is in reality a double star.

Without science, we would have no idea of the violence of these little luminous « chicks ». If Yair had known, fear of the heavens would doubtless have submerged his fear of men. Faced with a dragon-like that,  who would fear the aphids of the earth?

The sound, the heat, and the light of the Pleiades’ stars would evaporate the entire earth if energy didn’t diminish with distance squared. Beneath the celestial vault, violence is continually counteracted by the void. A quantity of the void – which we call distance – transforms destructive

violence into creative violence.

This is why Yair doesn’t fear the heavens, and because he doesn’t fear them, he is terrified of his fellow humans.

Obviously, the Pharisee knows nothing about all this, but he feels it. He recalls what Yahweh said to Job: “Where were you when I founded the earth? Who established its measurements? On what are its foundations set? Do you know? Where were you when the stars of the morning

sang together, and all the sons of God shouted with joy?”

Yair didn’t know it, he didn’t even feel it, but his whole body, his mind, and his soul held together because the energy of the entire cosmos passes through them. If he saw himself as he is, who could make him afraid? When Dolma looked at Ardashir, it was the heavens in all their immensity that pierced with a single blade of light.

JALALABAD

Aware of the potential violence of the mountain tribe, the caravan master didn’t go down to Ghazni, to the south, as planned; he continued east along the valley as far as the Kabul river to reach the fortress of Kapisa, the Ancient Alexandria of the Caucasus where trade is done in Greek under the protection of a Bactrian king. They had to make the distance, but also create confusion. After that, they were going to follow the valley as far as Jalalabad.

No one in the caravan spoke a word to the Jew anymore, and they were almost at the point of spitting on his daughter; insane and a menace to the public. The caravan master wouldn’t abandon a merchant on a mission for Atar and would provide him with protection to the end.

Nevertheless, without admitting is too much to himself, he was looking for a way to continue without him while ensuring that spies kept track of him. In the same way, the rabbi was making plans to continue his route at his own expense while freeing himself of the chains that bound him to Atar. From these tribesmen accustomed to punishing the slightest sign of resistance from a woman or even a child, an act of private revenge against Jemouna could occur at any moment.

At Jalalabad, the rabbi had found a quiet place in the souk to master the script of Ashoka’s edicts, the writer he was still unable to understand. He bent over two parchments when someone coughed in front of him. He raised his eyes. The Asian, Chinese, or Mongol, Yair didn’t know which – had completely shaved his head and wore a full robe of ochre wool with no outer belt. This man read the first lines of the rabbi’s copy …

“Do you read this old Sanskrit?” Yair exclaimed in Greek.

With his strongly slanted eyes much more than with his lips, the man smiled and continued to recite without even looking at the parchment.

“Are you a Buddhist monk?”

“You said it.”

“What extraordinary luck! I wanted to understand this text. Could we continue this meeting somewhere else, where there is less noise?”

They went into a garden known to the monk – next to the river. Jemouna followed them for a moment but asked for two arms to help her keep on. Yair took her on his shoulders, and the monk stepped back as if to take the measure of what he was seeing. He seemed to perceive something that the Pharisee, so accustomed to that action, didn’t see.

They continued all the way to the garden, they got down to some big rocks.

Without too many preliminaries, Yair asked him to translate the text. He would be well paid. The monk gestured that he would do nothing of the kind. The Pharisee understood that the monk would not give pearls to a man he did not know, who seemed to understand nothing about Buddhism and thought he could buy everything. He did, however, look the rabbi in the eye and asked him what he was looking for.

“The way of peace,” Yair spontaneously replied.

The caravan had been installed in the caravanserai for at least two weeks, time enough to rest the camels and the people from a route crossed in haste and nervousness. They also had to prepare for the mountains; there were formidable high passes to cross.

Yair met the monk every day of those two weeks, the man’s name was Gautah. He lived with a few other monks in a small monastery high in the mountains. He didn’t want to disclose its name or location, but it wasn’t very far from Srinagar. No camel could get there; a donkey trained for the mountains could carry loads there, but nothing very heavy. But why so far away? Why so inaccessible? Gautah replied that it was for reasons of solitude, detachment from the world, and elevation of the soul.

However, as the conversations continued, the monk displayed so uncommon an erudition that by the end of a week, Yair was convinced that the monks in this monastery had collected some very rare sacred texts that had to be studied, copied, and preserved. He undertook to persuade Gautah to invite him there. The monk deflected all the conversations that were going in that direction. Yet the more the rabbi debated with the monk, the more he felt personally concerned with his philosophy. He now hoped to be initiated into the life of a monk. Unable to find the political key to peace, he sincerely hoped to establish it in himself.

He had experienced too many events, too many pains, too many fears, and disappointments, he had lost the thread. He had understood that fear was leading him, and he no longer wanted anything to do with that tyrant. The monk radiated such peace on unshakable inner serenity Jair was ready to surrender.

After that, Gautah seemed more open to the Pharisee’s approaches. One day he stared at him and said :

“Jaire, my friend, you seem sincere. You should know that it is impossible to return on your own from our monastery lost in the mountains, you will have to follow all our rules for five years, learn Sanskrit, study our sacred texts and our tradition, and, above all, put them into practice.

He further specified:

“You will not possess any money or keep control of any wealth whatsoever. You will give to the monastery all that you have, and this will be given back to you when you return to lay life if that is what you want, after your five years of monastic life. During that time, you cannot get married, and you must abstain from all sexual relations. You will owe me obedience …

“You know that I have a duty to protect my invalid daughter who will never in all likelihood be self-supporting.”

“That is part of your duties, and you will see for yourself how to detach yourself from her without neglecting your responsibilities. For greater safety on the road, she should dress like a bhikshu and, of the monastery follow the routine of the community as much as her health and abilities permit.”

“And for me, are there other rules I ought to know!”

“Four rules are irrevocable, one mistake on those things would lead to your immediate rejection: fornication, murder, theft, and pride yourself on a spiritual accomplishment. You will wear the same clothing as I do, of yak wool, because it gets very cold in the mountains: a Sanghati like the one you are looking at; beneath it, an uttarasanga which is lighter and on your body a breechcloth

and a belt. You will have a bowl for your food. But at the monastery where we will be we don’t go into the villages to exchange good words for offerings; the people are too poor, and we are too far away, we only go to Srinagar out of necessity, but you won’t go. We provide for our needs by raising yaks and goats and picking herbs and berries. You will have a razor to cut your hair and your beard in order to lose any outward distinctiveness, a needle to mend your clothing, and a filter to prevent you from needlessly crushing the insects that might be in the water. You must never do harm to an animal.”

“You know what I am looking for!” … Yair wanted to be specific – for he too had expectations. 

“This will be one of your most important duties: You must force yourself to acquire a vast knowledge and a profound understanding of all that the Buddha taught, practice his teaching,

observe the virtues, strengthen your vigilance, and develop your wisdom. Afterward, you can track, copy, translate in the Buddha’s interest and propagate the sacred texts.”

Yair felt a sudden dizziness. His heart failed him for a moment – what was he getting into? 

He returned to the caravanserai as he did every evening. This time he felt the was a stranger there; not only a stranger but rejected, rather, incompatible with the people there. He no longer grasped the meaning of the trade in silk, in precious stones, spices, or even in fair texts, has the study of laws which, in any case, always consisted of were always about a large number of people to a privileged minority.

He approached the caravan master who was drinking tea with a few caravaners. They were talking about the public women at the souk, laughing as they described their intimate physical characteristics. They were having such a good time that they didn’t see Yair hidden behind a camel. The caravan master spoke about the high-value prostitutes who were the object of trade on the Silk Route, the Asians sold in the West, the white women sold in the East, and they let it be known that this was the source of Atar’s fortune …

The future monk could no longer even imagine continuing with them on a route that sordid, selling women to buy texts and buying texts to shut them up in an inaccessible library. Fabricating ignorance to create slavery. Satan’s foundations, this might be called, and Ardashir’s

lowest basements.

He discreetly went away.

In the morning, they went to see the caravan master.

“I have an agreement with Atar, and I’m going to respect it. I’m leaving Ad with you. He won’t be useful to me any longer. I’ve found a trustworthy guide, I’ve written a dispensation for you and

signed it. You no longer have any responsibilities in regard to me. You will tell Atar that the work I have to accomplish will no doubt take more time than anticipated, and the result will surprise him.”

“Where can Atar’s men find you?”

“They won’t find me. I’ll bring back a priceless treasure.”

“Jew, you don’t know Atar. Run into your mountains, evening leaves a saber next to your mat.”

“We will settle our accounts in due course, and they will be satisfied. Tell him that.”

The caravan master turned around in order to continue another urgent discussion because he soon had to break camp.

That afternoon, in the garden, while Yair was waiting for his teacher, Jemouna called out to him.

“You are certainly right, I agree with you. I will go to the mountain. I’ll accompany you right to the end. I will sustain you and protect you to the end. You no longer need to be afraid.”

Yair was speechless. “What a strange little girl!” he said to himself. “I still have her on my shoulders, and she thinks she is my shield.”

KARMA

Gautah was finally ready to carry what he had purchased for the monastery, he had obtained three strong donkeys trained for the high mountains. Yair gave all he had left to obtain an old donkey able to carry his daughter, some food, and water. He had taken great care in choosing it – the donkey was born in the mountains and was sure-footed and prudent.

In the middle of the night, they disappeared into a cave only Gautah knew. By the light of a lamp; the monk shaved the Pharisee’s head and beard and dressed him as a monk, even though he was just a novice. He was allowed to keep his old clothing to wrap his child in when the cold became too biting and bitter. He then shaved the little girl’s head and dressed her as a bhikshu. He

gave the new monk a bowl. On the road, he would have the right to receive whatever they gave him and do odd jobs in exchange, for he wasn’t yet pure enough to pronounce the words that had passed through Buddha’s mouth.

They left Jalalabad incognito not by the caravan route, along a chain of mountains that connects the from lets north of the valley and passes through Mingora. They mustn’t take too much time; the middle of the summer was approaching, and it was impossible to reach the monastery in winter because it was perched at much too great a height.

They went in silence by interminable and solitary roads. What can one say in the presence of such mountains, they hammer in the insignificance of the human world if not the insignificance of human existence?

Peaks pierced the blue sky, the wind whistled in the valley of Kalam. Hurling themselves from the heights, cascades rolled in their white manes. Huge vultures kept watch as they whirled in the

azure. Iboxes looped from ledge to ledge on the dizzying cliffs. In this landscape, the four donkeys and the two monks moved their little feet, advancing toward some invisible who knows what. How can you explain to the mountains where you’re going and why it’s somewhere else, isn’t it remarkable that the meal is entirely served and that there is plenty for everyone? Isn’t it majestic, this banquet, and even much too big and so total that you cannot cut just one piece but have to swallow everything all at once?

With a deafening noise, cataracts fell into the valley, and there was always more. “This noise in your ears when the silence is absolute, that is Buddha who cries out in his dizzying descent as he flies to your aid. Listen to it!” Gautah suggested.

The disciple asked his master:

“How can the block of the world, the indivisible head of Buddha, which cannot be cracked or divided, how can it love any place for movement?”

The monk responded:

“In a lake, the bar never cuts the substance, only displaces it entirely.  Such is the place of man, when the advances, he displaces everything at the same time as himself. When liquids swirl, so do the fish that are in them. All movement begins with what is infinitely light, all movement goes from thought toward action. But the flash goes directly from Buddha to the summits of minds. In every case, it is the lake that moves in the whirlwinds of Karma. Nothing is commonplace, scratching your nose can make a child laugh or decide who wins the war. Good consists of acting prudently; evil consists of imagining that we can cough without having to sweep up dust that we are displacing. Bend your back, hold back from acting, and tremble.

Thus spoke Gautah.

It was night, and the dust had fallen back to earth, the moon and the stars were shining, and the two monks’ minds could open out like a tremendous valley.

“To know how to fool is the first knowledge”, Gautah specified, “for if the leaf on the tree doesn’t feel movement, it flies off all the same, but it Is only the sign of movement; you, you are a man, you are the moral movement of the earth, one of the motors of Karma, so you must feel it and understand its direction.”

The first villagers arrived, some people smiled and gave a little of their wool, their vegetables, or their cheese, Gautah sat down on a stone and offered them some simple advice for avoiding suffering and cultivating peace. Further down the road, other villagers threw rocks at them and violently chased them away as soon as they saw the color of their clothing, the people said to each other: “Look at these men, they’re against the Gods, they don’t expect anything from Heaven, neither help nor punishment – they here they are, hoping to make the world a peaceful place by reasonably cultivating their thoughts.”

If we become as feminine as they are, this savage, hostile world would fall down on top of us. Let’s learn to defend ourselves. Drive them away.”

Yair became aware of the terrible reversal Buddishm imposed: instead of praying to one or more Gods, the monk sits down, unfolds peace in his inner space, and waits long enough for the rain, the sun, and his body’s ardors to calm down, and for nothing to act but the Buddha’s light alone.

The Gods might be far from taking this lightly and see it as disloyal independence, an intolerable rivalry, or even an open rebellion. To become complete in oneself as all reality is complete and inseparable, rather than seek miracles, resembles a peasant revolt. The peasants are afraid that the Gods will become more threatening and punish them to prevent an uprising.

No matter! Whether welcomed with rocks or good hot rice, the monk and his disciple smile just as much, for once accepted, the blows as well as the rice strengthened the body’s muscles, even more, the spirits.

THE DHARMA

When Gautah realized that his disciple had drunk enough of the mountains’ silence and that he understood the principle of the universal substance, Karma, the universal fluid which reacts to the all by its all, he began to teach him the Dharma, the principle of the universal law as much valid for matter as for the mind.

“Truth is what it is: a source. In the heavens, it forms the stars: in the rock, it forms the mountains, in the plains, it forms the grass and the caters of grass. In the oceans, it forms the algae and caters to algae; in the mind, it forms just thoughts; in the feelings, it forms just emotions, in the muscles, it forms just actions. One must also blend with the customs of the places we pass through, provided that they are compatible with the Dharma.”

“In a monastery”, Yair responded, “there are monastery rules; with hermits, hermits’ rules, in families, family rules. Monks’ rules are not general.

“You’re right. Family life is more universal. The monk assumes a specific role. He is like the end that must always inhabit the beginning so that all is not lost. He is like the stake that points upwards to indicate the vertical road. Without this stake, men might forget that they should climb mountains to widen their horizons and not climb down them to satisfy their lowest attachments.”

Gautah stopped speaking and raised his little finger because he realized that time and the mountains would act more effectively on his disciple than would his words. ‘To digest is more important than to swallow,’ the Dharma says.”

By the time they arrived at Murea, Yair had understood the Dharma so well that he no longer paid any attention to buildings, shops, commerce, and appearances and saw only the work of truth in human thought. Thus he was no longer able to distinguish the city from the mountain: “I was like a mass of stone dens in which families lived, and thoughts and actions in the process of adoring the grand harmony of the world like so many lambs at peace in a field of grass.

Truth works for peace in a different material: man.

A city, Gautah said, is a mass of dens like those one sees in the mountains.

It’s just that, in the city, the Dharma has not completed its work, and instead of simply turning the harmony of the world, it confronts so much ignorance that, in spite of itself its rays are distorted and clash with the beauty of the mountains. And it is this that the Buddhist monk wants to correct by a singular example. Chastity to compensate for the violence of the passions: meditation to counterbalance the feverishness of work: Contemplation to provide a counterweight to egocentricity: poverty to struggle against greed; reflection to reduce the inevitable suffering; joy to diminish unhappiness. It is not because the city is worse than the countryside, it is simply more concentrated: like a concave mirror, it amplifies so that we may better see what is lacking and has to be changed. The Dharma uncovers the worst in order to transform it for the better. 

THE LOST CHILD

The four donkeys and the three pilgrims were not supposed to test more than two days of Murea, long enough for the monk to teach at the souk next to a small fountain that’s what he had planned.

Jemouna went up to a boy her age who was selling roots and mushrooms harvested in the mountains. They couldn’t find a common language, but they had such a need to exchange that they become literally intoxicated with the sonority of the other’s language without understanding anything of it, the melody, the resonance, the intonation let something pass that made them laugh. As the hours passed, an observer might even realize that the fact of not being literally understood removed all the filters and that they were telling each other things they would never have dared to say if they had really understood each other.

After a few minutes, it was an extraordinary spectacle to hear them: as if they had been the best friends in the world as if they had been raised by the same father and the same mother. They warmed each other’s hearts, rounded the consonants, amplified the syllables, accentuated the

verbs, pointed out times a thing that corresponded to a name, laughed or cried, and felt the whole range of emotions. If an adult had stopped to look at them, he would doubtlessly have said to himself: “Someday, I must return to the purity of heart.” But what adult would be interested in two kids?

Yet somehow their strange dialogue detached them from the tumult of the souk and they saw a little girl who was silently weeping, hiding her head in a square of wool. The boy approached her. The little girl told him that she couldn’t find her mama, who had let go of his hand in order to buy something. A flock of sheep had passed, and her mama had disappeared. 

A meticulous investigation followed. First, they observed the young women. Was one of them nervously scorching, was she casting watchful or desperate looks? The boy put the little girl on his shoulders and climbed up on a table so that she could observe the crowd from a height. Nothing, all who were there had no faces; they remained immersed in their business indifferent to the little one.

They presented the child to reliable merchants and asked them if they know her. They went at it prudently because a child lost in a souk could easily become an item of merchandise.

Jemouna didn’t understand why the boy didn’t start by looking for the girl’s father who was probably not far away. Jem didn’t think of her father or the monk. Instead, they went to families the boy knew in Murea. He himself came from a village in the mountains to the north, about three days’ walk away. No one knew the child, and she couldn’t explain where she came from; she probably didn’t come from the city. However, because they had gone up and down it almost completely, she didn’t identify a familiar spot.

They returned to the souk, the father had taken the son’s place in front of the display; he yelled as soon as he saw him and then brutally struck him. Jemouna pretended that the lost little girl

was her sister. She didn’t know why, but that seemed prudent. As the evening arrived and the father was totally concentrating on dismantling the display, the three slipped away in their search for the parents. In the end; the boy had to go back with his father, who struck him even harder so he wouldn’t do it again, the boy didn’t cry. He gazed at Jemouna and smiled.

She gestured to him not to worry, that she would take care of the little one, that she would never abandon her. She took her to Yair, who explained the situation to his teacher, Gautah said nothing. He took the child to a family he knew.

“Is that the right decision?” The disciple humbly asked.

“It’s the best we can do, in one case, she will find her mother; in the other, she will be a servant in that decent family. No one will ever be able to say which of these possibilities is the more favorable.”

“We have only looked for just one day!”, Jemouna exclaimed.

“We can’t delay,” Gautah answered coldly.

Jem held the little girl’s hand and did not want to let go of it.

“That is the way life is”, Gautah added. If you do not want to suffer, you have to be detached. Her new family will do as well as the first, and perhaps better.

Hearing these words, Jem’s heart jumped in her chest; she couldn’t keep quiet:

“You are not a good shepherd. The good shepherd leaves the flock to go in search of a single lost sheep.”

“If he loses his whole flock without finding his sheep?”

Yair was very satisfied with Gautah’s answer. He tore Jem away from the child’s tiny gripping hands and promptly left the house.

They left Murea immediately because the monk didn’t want to spend one more night in the noise of the city. 

They took the road up a valley that rose toward the north and slept under the stars while the donkeys, grazing, made circles in the grass the width of their ropes. You just had to look: it was pathetic all the same to always graze within the length of a rope. If the essential was just a little bit further, there where a serious man can’t go, in the kingdom of children, in the kingdom of primordial knowledge?

Jem couldn’t get to sleep; anger opened her eyes much wider than her thought could comprehend. She got up, wanting to return to Murea, and walked until she was exhausted. She fell, weeping because of her powerlessness.

Yair awoke and saw that his daughter was no longer at his side. He called for her louder and louder. Gautah woke up. They searched, making wider and wider circles around them, and found her deeply asleep at the foot of a tree.

Under his teacher’s approving gaze, Yair shook his daughter and severely scolded her.

“You can beat me up, that won’t wake you up,” she answered.

They didn’t hear her words, angry but moistened with tears.

The day after that, they arrived at the entrance of a spectacular valley oriented toward the cast in such a way that the setting sun cast an oblique and purple ray, reflected on the snow of the summits before it was lost in the darkness. There was no end to that valley’s horizon; it was the corridor of infinity, one might have said. They were more than a week from the first village.

Looking into that abyss, Jemouna was seized with terror.

“If we were in a caravan of a thousand camels down there, at the end of that route we’d be as alone as a lost little girl.”

“Perhaps you are right, ruminating bhikshu, the monk said, and through that poverty, we will possess the whole world.”

Hearing that word, his disciple was filled with admiration.

SRINAGAR

The interminable valley gently entered them. The sky lowered, the valley invited, the melting snows ran down, and the valley gathered them; austerity descended, and humans rose. The little troop advances on the twisting path between the summits and the rockslides. Their bodies are like stone, their hearts like grass; sheep approach, in the distance, the shepherds awaken, and they tirelessly continue their crossing, filling themselves with all things and emptying themselves of fear.

They arrived in Srinagar full of immensity and as serene as the high mountain sky. This city, paved with squares of flowers, at the junction of three great valleys in the middle of a lake with three lobes, this city made no noise, as if it wanted to hear the wind. Even the soak murmured like an attentive animal. They were worn out. They slept on the fountain square, heads on the belly of the old donkey lying down from exhaustion, while the three other donkeys stuck their muzzles into a pile of straw to glean the grains. It was night.

The sun rose without them getting up and set without them lying down because they didn’t wake up; their dreams blended with the wisdom of the giant mountains they had crossed.

The old donkey woke up first. She was hungry. Then the monk, then Yair, then finally Jem. Leaves of bread, vegetables, and rice had been set down around them. Here, they knew Gautah.

In a few days, they regained their energy.

It wasn’t appropriate for the monk to continue to do nothing, nor for the population ti let him do nothing. When the midday sun had finished erasing the shadows, the mountain teacher began. The air was still, fresh, and burning.

“Monks have been repeating for six hundred years the same sermon pronounced by Buddha of Benares after his enlightenment. We are not speaking of ourselves; our authority comes from him. I always repeat the same speech because I still haven’t found anything better. In any

case, you haven’t yet put into practice this first step toward peace.”

“Certain pleasures create unhappiness around you, unhappiness is never a good thing neither for yourself nor for others. There are two extremes to avoid: attachment to offensive pleasures and attachment to offensive pains. A path exists that avoids these shoals and that – though it is quiet – creates an inoffensive eye. Without this inoffensive eye, you remain blind, you only see the ends and means. Violence happens because no one is an end and no one finds the means. I propose the middle road. This road seems narrow since it is in the middle, but it opens every step.

“The thought of the middle contains eight truths: right thought, right intention, the right word, right action, right work, right effort, right attention, and right concentration. These truths create the minimum of suffering and the maximum of peace. Following some of these truths doesn’t lead anywhere. They must be followed all together. 

“By seeking the right thought, we learn to think for ourselves. The right questions create the right answers, and the right answers create other right questions so that thought advances, widens, deepens, and, thus finally, illumines. A right thought favors a right intention. The intention is right when the end favors the maximum of happiness and the minimum of unhappiness in yourself and, more broadly, around yourself.

Right intention favors the right words. The words are just when they create the maximum of truth and the minimum of falseness. Every word is false if It doesn’t lead to action. Right action can be recognized by the sufferings it avoids and the peace that it brings. Among the actions, some allow us to support ourselves. This work is right and honorable if it doesn’t create unhappiness but on the contrary, favors happiness.

The road that appears the easiest is the most difficult. Without effort, we arrive at nothing because samsara, the river in which man is plunged, descends without effort toward the maximum of suffering, such is its law. However, in yourself, there is a golden fish, a Buddha, which climbs back toward its source. Let’s follow it.

“To discover the Buddha, it is necessary to apply a maximum of attention. But maximum attention demands maximum relaxation, and the right concentration is a maximum orientation in a minimum dispersion. Concentration favors right thought, and the circle is closed.”

“We have to admit it; as long as our thoughts, our intentions, our words, our actions, our work, our attention, and our concentration are not right, there is an excess of suffering in this life. To let the Buddha accomplish his work – without getting caught on the thorns – is to arrive at the finest accomplishment.”

« A person who sees sightly awards an equal value to every being. Thus their vision improves, and they see clearly, to free themselves from suffering, all that is needed is to think without prejudice, with a straightforward intention, in such a way as to utter true words and accomplish the right actions. The greatest difficulty rests in the words ‘all that is needed’. Because, most often, you do too much, or you don’t do enough through a lack of confidence.”

“The one who suffers constantly ad since the beginning of his life does not know that he suffers. Buddha sees him suffer. Let him open his eyes.”

The crowd kept silent for quite a while, and he remained meditative and motionless even longer.

When he got up, all had left except for Yair, Jem, and their donkeys. Provisions for the monastery had been deposited. Three guides arrived with additional donkeys. They had sworn to reveal Akhal’s secret.

THE ASCENT

It is possible to get to Akhal in one day, but you must start very early. No stop, no encounter with a storm, and you need to demonstrate exceptional resistance. Did this matter? No. It had been decided. They left before daybreak, headed due north so as to circumvent the mountains and take the Kangan Valley. The monastery is on the south flank a dizzying slope fit for goats and yaki; one must, however, approach the mountain from the north side, climb in zigzags, cross a narrow high pass, and descend again – but not much because it was built almost at the summit, in a stony hollow more or less sheltered from the wind.

As they approached Wayul, a tiny village where the valleys crossed, an icy stinging north wind blocked the route almost completely. They would have to desperately keep on, snatching each step from the gusts. The men wanted to stop there, in a cave, and wait.

“Wait for what?” Gautah exclaimed. “It will snow before nightfall, and then the route will be impassable.”

The rest of the day was a terrible combat against the cold and this standing wind that wanted to throw them over the cliffs. They also had to struggle against hunger, for stopping was no longer an option: they would pass ahead of the storm, or they would be snowed in up to the waist.

The sun set early, behind the summits, tinting blue, its last crown of light over the peaks, revealing the blackness of the storm racing toward them. The men and their donkeys were only just beginning to climb; fortunately, the wind now came at them from the side and sometimes pushed them in the back. They often had to grab hold, for the path was becoming as slippery as the roof of a house. The guides untied the donkeys so that if one fell, the others wouldn’t follow it into the abyss.

Yair was at the end of his rope, he couldn’t give up: the old donkey wouldn’t have taken one step more without him, and Jem was on her, wrapped like a precious cheese. The pass wasn’t even visibly lost in the impenetrable darkness and the infinite verticality of this black world.

Gautah decided to make a brief stop of a slightly safer surface to deposit the provisions on a slightly safer surface where they could come and look for them on foot some fine winter day. They had to rest the animals; otherwise, they would never get there.

The wind subsided; a calm, no doubt, before the final attack. They took advantage of this to accelerate their pace. Yair was no longer able to follow.  They mounted him on a strong mule. This was how he arrived at the monastery. They unloaded him along with the merchandise and deposited him along with his daughter on an enormous pile of raw wool. They didn’t wake up until one day later. The storm had deposited an alarming quantity of snow.

AKHAL

The former rabbi and his child found themselves in another world through a square left open for ventilation, they viewed the sky as well as falcons. They were suspended on the face of the mountain nearly as sleepy as what they had climbed. A little lower, toward the cast, a stone hut buried in the snow smoked in the silence. What did those who lived in that hut see when they looked toward the monastery?

First of all, was this a monastery? Just a hut of rocks and wood covered with earth and grass buried now in the snow. A floor of tamped-down earth, but clean and shiny as marble. There were three carpets, one over the other. Near the air vent, a small fire in a stone hearth. On one of the carpets, five monks were meditating in a circle. In the center, a statue of Buddha surprised Yair: the Buddha was dressed in a Greek pallium, his proportions corresponded to the golden section, and his face could have been that of any Greek. Only a perfect serenity distinguished him from the gods of Olympus. Jair had noticed similar statues, but in the cities of Khorasan conquered by Alexander the Great. Here in the mountains of Kashmir, it was surprising. The similarity of the statue to what could be seen at Caesarca or even Sepphoris woke up his stomach, but he had to wait for the hour of the one meal of the day.

He wanted them to show him the library. Again he was surprised, but for the opposite reason: it was an old wooden chest filled with supple leather bags containing bundles of thin wooden plaques treated with oils and engraved in classical Sanskrit.

“And that’s everything?” Yair asked.

“Wait!” Gautah exclaimed, “there are priceless treasures in this chest, some texts were written by Buddha’s first disciples. You won’t have more than five years to read them, earn them, and understand them.”

Because the mountain was only snow and ice because the five monks were only calm and austerity because the silence flattened time because the food was insipid because the recitations were endless and the actions were always as irreproachable as the snow because there was nothing to do since a present farmer lodged in the nearby hut did all that was necessary, the former rabbi learned Sanskrit without too much difficulty. By the beginning of spring, he was reading the bundles of daily prayers rather easily. A few months later, he ventured into the sutras Gautah had entrusted him with.

As Yair faced the red rising sun in front of his closed eyelids, the monk’s ship slipped obediently onto the windless seas of the Buddha’s mind …

As the third winter had gone on to the moment when there was nothing to move any longer in Yair’s heart: its tranquillity had blended with the mountain.

This was the first earth: the earth of tranquillity.

Gautah was surprised that his disciple had passed the first stage in so short a time. But Yair had really lost everything: he no longer had anything, no parchment to sell, no money, no beast of burden, not even his old love of the Torah. Nothing chattered in his brain, he had even lost the memory of having possessed anything, even a question. In reality, he had lost the supreme illusion: to imagine oneself free of fear. After that, the mountains had taken their turn, and death had done the rest, death, which always washed the prey it has taken. All that remained was the death of all the deaths, the death of death itself, the ultimate fusion with being.

On days without haze or clouds, you could see as far as Srinagar, the lakes, and the plateau. Spring arrived from there, you could see the snow melt, setting free the greenery, the green patches spread, then climbed into the mountains like shadows. Then the goats and yaks were liberated; they went down on their own toward the fresh grass.

The seasons turned one after the other like the millstone in a mill, the grain of time no longer had the texture of a route but that of a home; the past was no longer distinct from the future nor inhaling from exhaling.

THE GRANDFATHER

Jemouna had learned the language of the peasants who kept the monastery alive, a family with Mongol features who came from Tibet: five children, the parents, and a grandfather still able to handle the mountains. She spent most of her time with them. “The daughter should help her

father detach himself from her,” Gautah had said. But, more important than the monk’s rules, the family kept the old donkey with the other animals. Jem felt she owed a lot to this animal which had almost given her life to bring her and her father so high up there.

The old donkey had seen too much, worked too much, and given too much. She wanted now to give her soul to the one who had loved her and given her recognition. This was what she was beginning to do, slowly, gently, spread out on a good bed of soft straw. She hesitated because Jem’s solitude filled her with compassion.

It was then that the grandfather grew attached to the child as if she were his third granddaughter. He saw her leaning over the abyss of the donkey’s soul, a soul free of the obscurities of seasoning and the obstructions of apprehension.

The grandfather was seated beside the girl and the old donkey who wished to die. He couldn’t hold back any longer:

“You see her silence, you see her resignation, she has carried you all the way here, and now you are sitting in the straw beside her, tell me, has she told you her life?”

“No .”

“Has she spoken to you of the days when, without a doubt, she was beaten, whipped, pushed to the limit by impatient and intransigent masters?”

“No.”

“Has she ever spoken badly to you about a single one of the men who did her harm?”

“No.”

“Has she ever described the burdens she carried, their weight, their hardness on her sides, the pressure on her hoofs that had to be dealt with, the perils of the mountain?”

“No.”

“Has she ever spoken to you about the lack of food, the rotten or dusty winter hay, the dirty water, and all the apples she never put her teeth in because they didn’t give her any?”

“No, grandfather, she didn’t say anything about that.”

“And you, have you thought about it?”

“Yes, I have thought about it all the time.”

“So you’re much more of a present than a bhikshu.”

She understood that he had just baptized her with the greatest of compliments. She clearly saw that her nun’s clothes made him smile. The old man discerned her heart of flesh capable of attachment and said to himself: “All is not lost for her; anyone attached to a donkey is capable of a happy life.”

The dying donkey had heard everything. Without hurrying, she entrusted her soul to the two of them.

Not the monks were always polite to the family that served them and were even full of understanding and compassion for these poor, uneducated people. They knew very well that without them, they wouldn’t be able to meditate, study, contemplate, and fortify themselves with so many hours of immobility; they couldn’t make do with a single meal either because work requires more. They were very grateful. Since they were men who could neither be caught nor held, their gratitude was universal and detached. Each one had to leave the flock of distinctions, take common wings and dissolve in a single mind as smooth as the snow.

As the winter come to an end, the work of the peasants grew harder and harder. It wasn’t easy to take care of goats and yaks and cultivate herbs and vegetables on a slope that steep. Jem didn’t have the strength of that small band of short, rugged people who had always lived in the mountains; even the youngest, who was only seven, had much more stamina than she did. She was good at milking, however, and helped the mother to make yogurt and cheese. She prepared the food for the monks. While riding a donkey, she went to harvest herbs, berries, and mushrooms … In short, all the work that required precision and patience, she did as well as the others.

In her kingdom, the being who lives the closest to the earth, the one who lives from the earth itself, occupies the highest place; the last is the first since that one feeds everything above her, of him, or it. So we need to call earthworms and fungi kings since they permit roots to give life.

THE JEWISH MONK

At Gautah’s request, Jaire translated the Lotus Sutra into Greek, eight thousand verses. An exhausting work that Gaulath couldn’t truly appreciate because he didn’t know the subtleties of Greek. This collection of bundles occupied by itself almost a third of the chest because it had been specially entrusted to the Akhal monastery. Hindu Brahmins were searching for these Buddhist writings in order to burn them and make them disappear forever.

Fortunately, no one knows of Akhil’s existence, except for a few monks in Indu’s volley, and of this number, only four or five scholars were correctly informed of its vocation as guardian of the greatest sutras of Mahayana Buddhism. Thanks to a good Greek translation, Buddhism might be able to take the western road and come to all the Hellenized cities of Persia and the Roman Empire. This was Gautah’s hope. Moreover, besides the Jewish novice worked two Tibetan monks who had been educated in China. They knew Manchu Chinese perfectly and were translating the same sutras with the idea of returning to the empire of the Han.

As the work of the Jewish scholar advanced, he gave the parchments to his daughter so that she could translate them into Hebrew and ultimately bring them to Palestine if they ever returned there. He might also send them to his friends in Sepphoris if they remained in the mountains. They might send Atar counterfeits to make him wait. The Greek version would go to Damascus.

He had no monetary ambitions for his work at Akhal; he simply wanted to make the Buddha’s wisdom available. Jemouna worked in the midst of a peasant family; she felt at home there. 

Yair possessed a power of concentration that astonished the monks. He had a table made, small but of the proper height, leaned against the stone wall beside the fire, and didn’t seem to be exhausted by this work; instead, it made him blossom. He adored understanding each of the stages, called « earth » leading to the final state of Buddha united to the All. It was so reassuring; to pass through identifiable « earth » – in reality, states of existence and consciousness – perceive that you are advancing, that this depends on us, and that you cannot help but succeed, even if this takes ten lives. It was so different from the torch, where humans depend on God, on God’s unpredictable love and anger. In comparison with Buddha, Yahweh seemed emotionally unstable.

In addition to power over oneself, the state of Buddhahood brings with it eternity, while for Jews, uncertainty reigns over the destiny of humans: the Sadducees think that after death there is nothing; the Pharisees believe in an indefinite heaven, but also in a hell of pain. In Buddhism, the divine essence inhabits us; we respond to it, we rise through stages, and we arrive at fusion with the true self. Then we wrap all existence in the single moment of the present. How can you resist an appeal like that? We lose in it all the unique traits of our miserable individuality and gain the universality of harmony and peace of mind.

At times the novice tasted complete and perfect silences; his body disappeared in the total weightlessness of the big striped-headed geese that cross the Himalayas. Like them, the rose above the mountains, in those moments, the perceived neither limit, nor form, nor color; nothing drow him either higher or lower, peace revealed everything, hid nothing, and he was impregnated with all that revelation like a sponge reabsorbing the ocean.

However, a time always arrived when the pain in a foot, arm, or shoulder returned; with the pain, the sensation of heaviness, and the back, the head, hunger, and the whole body threw itself on him … Even this wasn’t all that much, you could laugh about it, they were just sensations. Sensations pass like ripples on a river; they indicate the direction of the current, samsara’s

quiet gradient running to the sea to dissolve there forever. The material world is only a shadow; if we don’t get caught in it like a bird in a net, it prevents us from rising gradually and naturally to our original house, just like the striped head goose returning to its place of origin. One day, the Monk Yair would no longer have a name, he would be living on the eighth earth, and his stale of equanimity would be perfect and unshakable. His body would no longer call him back into matter, it is he alone who would decide to descend into samsara to help others get out of it, for in this absolute peace the effusions of compassion are irrepressible – in the end, one descends and teaches.

Yair was now out of Atar’s reach. He was now too far away, perched too high in the mountains, and too protected by secrets. His spies were questioning everyone in Srinagar’s soak. They returned to Yasatis and tried to reassure him: “Yair is no doubt in the mountains translating Buddhist treasures; at the right time, we will go and collect them, him and all his work.

THE PEASANT GIRL

The young invalid found a little more vigor and above all a new form of happiness with the grandfather who taught her all he knew, and that truly was a lot. He observed the yaks and explained what their life was like, not in general, but the life of each female and male. Each

of the lactating females had her preference for grasses and chose them very carefully, one type of gross to diminish her stomachaches, another for its odor, another for its flavor its salt, or its hidden seeds. From sensation to sensation, life flowed with no boredom, one rapture led to another, for the whole field was diversified in an infinity of variations on the theme of smells, tastes, texture, and color. Nothing was more important than the differences that prevented each animal, each plant, to return to the Indifference of the great All.

“Look at that yok: her name is Jade, she’s thirsty, but she’s still eating a link because the water is a lot further down, and she would have to climb back up again to return to that patch of grass that she’s barely begun to discover. The surprising thing is that the water, the grass, the wind, and the baby she’s carrying, that this is enough for her because each thing tears itself out of the landscape for its details: the grass pulls itself out of the rocks to catch the light in order to make its beautiful green body studded with flowers. By seduction and attraction, it succeeds in filtering into the yaks, the sheep, the goats, and then into us. So we walk with our backs bent to take care of it. Tell me, who could hope for better, who could not be content with a field like this on a mountain like this where not a single blade of grass or like its neighbor? Who wouldn’t like to turn and be returned in this great mill?”

They spoke of another mama yok and of still another. He also spoke about each goat. Each of them has a particular quality of milk because not one milk animal has the same milk as another, since the milk depends as much on the grass as on the happiness of the animal, and also

on its worries.

“You noticed that Jade’s milk was a little more acidic than viral this morning. She’s asking us not to milk her so that she’ll have time to recover. Her next baby is showing her it’s haste to see the day. I think it will be a male. It’s already moving around a lot, I’m not sure. Tomorrow, you’ll begin to wean her.”

For Jem, there was no book more fascinating, no ground fother more wonderful, for all that he saw, he saw it; all that he touched, he touched it; all that he breathed, the smelled; and all that he observed, he respected. In his garden of Eden, he lost nothing of the apple that had been given him, he lost nothing, neither the color nor the odor, neither the seeds nor the skin, for he ate this one so well that he didn’t hope for any other, his tree of knowledge.

“Was your father like you?” Jem asked him one day.

“What do you mean?”

“Was he a peasant?”

“He would have liked to have become one, he had been torn away from the country; he begged in the streets of the city of Lhasa. He found work on a farm. It was a servant who gave birth to me. She had been driven away from the farm and even from the city. She wandered for a long time. She finally found refuge with the monks of Lamayuru. That is where I grew up, in a rather wealthy monastery that was like a palace. I never know my father, there were numerous revolts at that time, and l was taught how to handle weapons. I was a swordsman of the monastery, then master swordsman for the city. I had to flee because one day I refused to cut off a brigand’s head. I walked here. I settled on this field because no one would think of it like it: it’s steep as a donkey’s croup. The grass here’s wonderful, but who’s interested in the qualities of grass? I have animals now, and I sell my cheese twice a year of Srinagar. I agreed to take charge of the monks because they didn’t have any place to take refuge and no one to take care of them.

“And your wife?”

“She fell.”

He showed the spot. “The slope was so steep; with just the slightest carelessness you could slip. If you fall, it is impossible to take hold of anything, and farther down, the cliff was abrupt and fatal. He said that this was life.”

“You don’t imitate the monks in any way,” Jem observed. You don’t fast like them, and yet you love them and serve them … “ 

“Why would I fast? Do you fast on your wedding day with both hands on the food for the banquet? I didn’t want to scatter my wife’s ashes, so I spread them under the straw of my bed  Every night, I sleep with her. During the day, I have my yaks, my goats, and my mountains. Who can match my happiness? Twice a year, I go down to Srinagar; there are people there who have nothing, and I give them my surplus. If one day the grass and my flocks diminish, I will fast. I say

that without any irony. I like the monks, you might say that they live in another country, a country I don’t see. Who knows, maybe the morning dew that makes my grass grow depends on that country!”

“And if you were separated from those you love, your daughter and your son-in-law, your grandchildren?”

“Who can cut the sky in two and keep the light of the stars from reaching me? Isn’t my wife with me? Shouldn’t I be afraid instead of not loving enough, for then I’d be isolated and alone? I wave my strings like the spider weaves its web and everything that sticks in it, I take away. We don’t die from separation, it’s a separation that ends up dying from the force of love.”

Three more winters passed. Yair had translated everything except for Buddha’s sermon at Benares, which he had learned by heart from Gautah’s mouth. That word was too pure, it shouldn’t enter into matter. It should remain in the most respectful memories and the softest whisperings of experienced monks.

The Jewish monk had passed through the first three piles of earth and received permission to teach, but he felt no desire to do it; he judged that Gautah couldn’t be replaced by Srinagar. He decided instead to pass the seventh winter higher up in the mountains, toward the East. The grandfather had told him that he had built a very solid stone hut there because in some seasons the new grass was excellent. He left before the heavy snow, bringing three goats with him.

He had said goodbye to Jem, who was so happy in his new family that she no longer needed her father.

That winter was especially mild. the animals preferred to stay in the snow rather than return to their stables. Jem took advantage to become even closer friends with the oldest animals. The sun sparkled on the snow, nothing was more beautiful. The yaks scratched the ground and succeeded in reaching the grass, and this was ecstasy. The goats would then eat what they hadn’t gotten.

Jem had a lot of fun with the children in the family, too. The youngest was now a lot stronger than her; his name was Boshay, and he found it normal to pass almost all his time with his friend Jemouna. He didn’t ask any questions. He thought that he would marry her one day; besides he didn’t know any other girls, and this one, though more delicate than gentian, was much prettier than his sisters.

Jem didn’t know what he was plotting in his heart. She liked him a lot. He was a great help, doing everything for her that required too much physical effort. He enjoyed carrying her through the flock. He also took her into clearings that he alone knew.

THE ATTACK

One evening, after the sun had set, armed men arrived without warning, hired no doubt by Hindu Brahmins. They blocked the exit of the monks’ hut. They hadn’t noticed that there was another hut a short distance away. They threw bunches of dried branches into the ventilation outlet and then a torch. There were terrible screams.

The grandfather woke up, took his old saber out of the family’s chest, and ran to defend the monks and their treasure. He yelled so loudly that in the darkness the assailants thought it was a pack of wolves or demons. They fled, one of them, turning around, saw the old man and his saber, burst out laughing, placed an arrow on his bow, and ran it through the old man’s neck.

The fire sparkled in the ventilation hole, the crackling masked the final cries, and the hand disappeared into the darkness.

The mother went up to the dying: he was breathing with great difficulty and was trying to entrust her with one last word. The son-in-law appeared, the children and Jem, too. They brought the grandfather back to his home next to the hearth and spread him out on the carpet. Blood was filling his throat, he couldn’t say a single word and looked at each one with a smile that struggled

against his eyes already fixed on death. You could feel that he was giving the fruit of his life, they were all too filled with pain to receive it. Jem, however, stood a little to one side and received the treasure.

The father asked the family to stay near the dying man, lit a torch, and cautiously handed it toward the monks’ house. The silence was frightening. Thick smoke was coming out of the ventilation hole. He forced the door open, stuck his torch into the darkness, and, in the smoke, perceived charred bodies. The smell was unbearable. The chest and the treasure were no longer anything but ashes. The marble Buddha’s white head looked out over the black remains.

The next day, the father wanted to be alone to bury the bones and ashes of the already incinerated bodies. According to his tradition, he kept some of the monks’ photonics: for him, relies on. The mother and the daughters prepared the grandfather for cremation so that he too, would find the appropriate road on the perilous route connecting incarnations.

After the cremation, the mother pulled out the bones of both her father’s thumbs, carefully cleaned them, and didn’t want to ever be separated from them. It wasn’t in the peasant’s nature to trouble the departed in their progress along death’s road. I WeNound Alone cried, and

could not stop crying, they remained without eating until the third day, then they piled rocks on the ashes to make a kind of burial mound.

When all was finished, one of the monks arrived from Srinagar, one of these two Tibetans who were translating Sanskrit into Chinese; he had left with the Manchu translations to obtain the advice of a caravan proficient in that language. He looked at the garret smashed open like a block hole. He pressed the Fulls of parchment against his chest. The father told him about the terrible events, entrusting the family with the precious documents, and the monk went looking for Yair.

The father had a long discussion with his wife. They were making a decision, they would leave in the spring for Lamayuru with their flocks. It wasn’t their thing to remain in such solitude and live on a slope so steep that It had taken the grandmother without, however, protecting the monks of the grandfather. They didn’t like Srinagar, they didn’t know the language well enough to sell their products as the grandfather had. They had family in the great monastery of Yungdrung Tharpaling at Lamayuru. They might be able to settle there.

It was without a doubt a dangerous journey on a perilous route often washed out by the spring floods, but the yaks were very surefooted and could carry a lot of baggage, and the goals would easily follow. In several places, there would be grass, and even if the valley as a whole was somewhat of a desert, it was altogether possible to reach Lamayuru before winter.

They announced their decision to the part of the family. All liked the idea of such an adventure and of an easier future. Jemouna and Boshay alone remained silent as if stunned by a triple blow: the death of the monks, the grandfather’s death, and now the separation. For her, it was the rupture of another great friendship; for him, it was the collapse of his engagement with a dream.

The monk Yair and the Tibetan had to wait for a local storm to end. The three goals Yair had brought went ahead of them; they wanted to join the flock; the two monks approached when they saw the father arrive in front of them with the three goats. He wanted to announce his decision to them in private so that the family, with all their emotions, wouldn’t think of interfering with their plan.

As if he had guessed everything, the Tibetan immediately declared that he would follow them and, turning toward Yair, explained that it would now be very dangerous to return to the West via Srinagar and Yasatis. There were only two possible routes for fleeing the Brahmin persecutions: go north toward Kashgar, in other words, the Karakoram that passes through the col of Khunjerab, or follow the Indus valley toward the East to reach Lamayuru in a month’s walking.

With the flock and allowing for unforeseen events, they would doubtlessly have to double that time, but they had the whole summer ahead of them. From Kashgar, Yair might be able to reach Jerusalem by caravan since it was the greatest crossroads on the route to China. On the other hand, the route to Lamayuru continued toward Leh on a less frequented caravan road, where, one could find more Buddhist monks.

Since Yair was still searching for a certain Chinese manuscript, he would probably garner more information at the Lamayuru monastery or even at Leh than anywhere else. At Lamayuru, the translations of the Lotus Sutra would be better for safekeeping.

The Jewish monk didn’t hesitate. When she learned her father’s decision, Jem quivered with joy and Boshay mastered his emotion; they would be together for quite a long time yet.

Spring opened the valley, and they left.

The family’s donkey wasn’t young enough to carry the marble Buddha, face the route that climbed into the mountains to reach the Indus valley, pass through very high cols, and descend into canyons; the father was able to sell it at the first hamlet they encountered, Jem continued the route on Jade’s back; the yak followed Boshay like a dog it’s master. The rest of the yaks followed Jade, the goats followed the yaks, and the two monks, Jewish and Tibetan, closed the procession. They had to let the animals graze several hours a day, milk them, and make yogurt and cheese; if there was a village, sell what was left over.

The most challenging part was crossing the col of Baltal and the highlands up to the col of Dras. There was still a great depth of snow, and the animals found it hard to feed themselves. They had to scratch along with them and find grassy scree and edible musses. They lost five goats and several kids but not one yak.

They arrived in the middle of the summer at the spot where the Indus valley widens. The rest of the route was easier.

LAMAYURU

The Yundrung Tharpaling monastery in the Indus valley resembles a palace, or more precisely, a fortress. The monks there are defended by very skillful archers and swordsmen; even so, though rarely, they ask to be protected. In the mountains, distances are measured in differences in altitude: here, they are vertiginous. Add the terrifying presence of the cols, and you reduce the access even more. If in addition, the treasure is nothing more than prayer and meditation, you have conquered nearly all the pillagers and their armies. The calm in the valley’s hollow, the flexibility of these trees, the peace of the grass-sated animals, the roughness of the rocks, and the mystery of the high country, whose summits can never quite be seen, all this creates a kind of amphitheater propitious for the culture of serenity.

Despite that, they still had to be a little cautious and maintain a few archers and swordsmen; the trouble could come from within because the health and peace of the monks were paid for by a peasantry that envied them sometimes. This barely visible fissure could be lethal.

On the road along Indu’s valley, the Tibetan monk had told his Jewish companion that at the time of the Buddha’s incarnation, the region where the monastery was now located was dry and inhospitable. On one of the valley’s flanks, there was a lake, to be sure; however, it harbored demons and threatened to inundate whoever might want to build in the valley. On the other flank stood a beautiful hill called Skambur, round but dry. Despite its roundness and its great exposure to the sun, it was so dry and sterile that no one would think of settling there. A sage of the last earth, an arhat named Madhyantika, had received the mission to make the Indus valley fertile so that people could come and settle there. Accompanied by his monks, he went to Leh. Arriving at the foot of the lake, perched on the mountain, the mountain, he was troubled by the contrast: on one side, the water wanted to make the land fertile but it was held back by the demonic asuras under the orders of their chief Mara; on the other, the slope suffering from thirst and sterility. He offered his tears of compassion to Mara and his asuras. The bottom of the lake cracked and allowed the water to escape. It went up on the other side, on the arid hill, which became green with gross and swarming with ibexes. Then Madhyamika uttered a prophecy that the teachings of the Lotus Sutra and Hindu Tantra would be unified and would blossom here of Lamayuru in a monastery thanks to a bhikshu coming from the West. Several of the monks who followed the Arhat settled on Skambur hill and built the first monastery. Now, around a hundred monks were cultivating peace for the whole region, and it grew even better than the wool on the sheep’s backs, so the mountains stayed quiet, white, and almond totally motionless.

“What happened to the control?” Yair asked.

“You’ll find tantras here revealed by Shiva himself and copied by holy monks; they are especially addressed to the fallen man of the last age, our own, to advise us in the art of love until the end

of this era when all life will be renewed in the fire.”

“And the bhikshu?”

“They’ve never seen the shadow of one.”

“The family was immediately hired by the monastery; the Tibetan monk stayed there a few years, and Yair found peace there to the point of forgetting his profession and his responsibility for his daughter. By the first month, he had given to the monastery the Greek and Hebrew translations of the Sutra. They were put in safe keeping in the library. Most of the time, he meditated somewhere in a cave on the mountainside where no one went. He rose as far as the earth of those who indeed went very far.”

Jemouna wasn’t strong enough for physical labor, and she wasn’t very interested in the life of the monks. Boshay realized that, as time passed Jem wasn’t getting any older and remained totally indifferent to his advances. He could kiss her, and she would treat it as a game, but he never succeeded in arousing her. She never understood what he was getting at with his trembling

hands around her chest and his uneasy eyes that wouldn’t look at her. Discouraged, he found another girl much more receptive. Jemouna displayed so much joy at their wedding that Boshay, offended, withdrew all his friendship from her.

It was at the village, below the monastery beside the Indus that finally found a fitting occupation. The valley could feed a sufficient number of goats, sheep, and yoks, but they couldn’t succeed in growing any vegetables there. Some women had gotten together and taken the initiative to create a community vegetable garden. Jemouna offered to help them. The women were astonished by her knowledge and her skill.

To help in this project, Jemouna recruited the girls too young for marriage. After a while, they produced more than enough of all the necessary vegetables, tubers, Ieaves, bulbs, and fruits. The married women could go back to their cooking and their work with wool.

In the beginning, Jem upset the women and their daughters: she spent more time discussing her plants than weeding, hoeing, or mulching. The women used the word « discuss » when they saw her sitting or kneeling, lifting the leaves, looking underneath them, removing the aphids, caressing a flower, stroking a bumblebee ever so lightly, examining an insect to see whether it would help or hurt. At times, she gently unearthed a root to observe its swellings which she said were indicative of their health. She spread twigs ground a tuber, and added a bit of fresh goat dung along the rows.

She hadn’t lost any of the treasure of knowledge her grandfather had accumulated up there on an infertile slope. According to the women, it didn’t amount to much. But the parts of the garden she cultivated produced a lot more than the others.

The women had let her do what she wanted. The children approached her, and slowly, without anyone knowing why, nearly all the girls in the village were there, growing vegetables with Jem. the boys also went there from time to time to show their manliness by taking on the hardest work and the heaviest loads.

As they worked, and sometimes even very actively, the girls gossiped and, little by little, come to frost each other and have faith in each other. A day arrived that had to arrive: the girls began to like each other, and some boys found moments of enchantment there that they learned not

to disturb. It was so beautiful to see that some of the mothers began to do their washing at the foot of the garden, upstream from the usual place, even though this shore there was muddier. That made no difference; they would carry their washing stones there and listen with surprise

to their daughters gossiping as they gardened and gained a taste for happiness.

THE CARPETS

At Lamayuru, in a country of very high mountains, the cold raised its robe of snow to make room for a little summer, a time when the valleys could be cultivated; but in the winter it came back down again, and the gardens were covered with frost, ice, and snow. After the harvest, the girls closed the garden, but could they stop gossiping? Fortunately, there

was always a lot to do. Led by Jemound, who had loved that work so much, they started making carpets.

They obtained stands, canvases, and wool from the monastery, they used remainders of different colors, which they cut to the length necessary for the knots, they sketched a number of models and gradually created a few beautiful designs suitable for tapestry. Jem translated them into the coding she had learned. They launched the enterprise the first two winters, the small carpets weren’t good enough to put on the market, but useful to families nonetheless. In the third winter, they undertook two carpets of medium size. the first long pieces already demonstrated mastery, and the monks gave them a better wool.

As always, they talked as they worked, one day, toward the end of this winter, Jem came out with this sentence about nature: “Listen to the apple trees, when their branches soften, and the buds swell, you know that summer is near.” The girls began to talk about their bodies’ seasons.

Suddenly, one of them exclaimed, as if sooner or later someone had to say it:

“You, Jemouna, you aren’t like us. Your breasts just budded and stopped. You don’t put moss in your underwear to absorb your blood. No one is courting you. If this keeps on, you won’t know the pleasures of the conception of the pain of childbearing. Aren’t you dis …”

She didn’t complete hor word, for as she pronounced the first syllable, she understood its hurtful nature. Jemouna, however, finished it for her:

”Disabled. Yes, and I have suffered from it. I really loved boys, and I would have liked to welcome them into my body as if it were their home. It really wasn’t a desire that felt physical, it was just in my imagination because my body hasn’t succeeded in getting all the way to spring and compensated for it with my heart, which wasn’t enough to keep them. They wanted something else.”

The girls started to laugh, then laugh even more at the inconstancy of the young boys who ogle one girl one day and another the next. Fortunately, the fathers knew something about this and made the best choice. This led them to an awareness of the power of their charm and its dangers. Right off the bat, this exclamation from a girl who worked beside the strange Jew who was always silent:

“Jem, I want to be your friend forever. Yes, everyone in the village says that you’re a cripple and that you’ll never be a woman. Some think that a demon asura inhabits you, and that’s the reason you stay immature, but I don’t care what they say. For me, it’s just the opposite, I like you more because you’re different, you’re not like us. I don’t feel attracted to boys, I don’t want to get married or become a bhikshu, I would like …”

She stopped there. That silence grew. Some looks are like arrows, especially the one from a boy who up until then had never said anything.

“Door Lasya”, Jem replied, “to relieve the tension: I already am your friend, unfortunately, I’ll soon be returning to Jerusalem with my father: I’m as attached to him as the soul is to the body. She turned toward the boy. 
“We need some green wool and some blue also. Would you go and look for some?”

The boy did as he was told.

You said to us: “You feel the wind, but you don’t know where it comes from and from where it goes”, Lasya continued, “I am not worried about the future. I would really want…”

“They also say that a daughter must leave her father someday to follow her heart. I understand you, you do have to follow your heart. But that doesn’t apply to me. I’m missing something, Lasya; you’re right. I’m not haunted by an asura, but I am tied to my father, even when he lived on the mountain that was true, and now we will be returning to our country, Galilee. The people around me forget me. The boys I loved have forgotten me, but for some reason, I don’t understand, I don’t forget those I love.”

“I’m not a boy, I won’t forget you.”

“So think about this: the BuddHa who lives in you reaps where he has not sown. He likes the words he didn’t say and the acts he hasn’t foreseen. He likes to see you get away from him. He likes to see you as distinct from him as a new butterfly whose flight is unpredictable. He won’t abandon you, even when everyone will seem to turn away from you.”

A long silence followed, and Jem herself was troubled: she didn’t completely understand what she had just said, a kind of prophecy.

Benjamin returned with the wool. To break up a solemnity, she hadn’t wanted Jem to report on the sales. The sum that remained at the end of the balance sheet was enough to considerably reduce their dependence on the monastery.

The following day, two girls changed their places in front of the carpets being made. The one now beside Lasya was named J-Tsun. She was a little older and found the knots more quickly so sometimes she did the knots in Lasya’r row, and that made her laugh when she brushed against her hand, not always accidentally.

THE TANTRAS

At Lamayuru, you could hear the roaring of spring. The rivers were gorged with brooks that rampaged down the mountains. The girls had talked about going to pick some bulbs and yellow lilies as soon as the weather permitted, to further embellish the garden, perhaps some giant rhubarb and some of the rarer maws lilies. The monks had heard of this and asked if it weren’t possible to find along these same roads some flowers blossoming in the snow, the first fruits to

be dedicated to the Buddha for the Feast of Fertility. They had chosen a book of tantras for the holiday’s liturgy; now, to be precise, the word tantra itself means « chain of weaving », so a monk had suggested sending one or two pure and virgin girls working at the carpet shop.

Je-Tsun knew the surroundings perfectly: nearly every spring, she went with her father to cut new shoots to offer to the monastery. Since the father occupied an important administrative position there, he was welcome to make such gifts to the Buddha. That year, the man had to remain in Leh to negotiate a plan for the monastery’s enlargement. So the monks agreed to let Je-Tsun go along the Takmachik path with Lasya to search for snow flowers for the Buddha, bulbs for the gardens, and rhubarb roots. They should not go too far. Je-Tsun’s brother would accompany

them on the way there because he needed to go to the stupe at Khalsi; to defend themselves against wolves, they would have a dog and their shepherd’s crook, Lasya, the peasant girl, could hold wild animals at bay as well as any shepherd.

The road followed the ridgelines, then plunged into a steep valley; that was where they could find flowers worthy of the highest honor – to be placed in front of the monastery’s sacred statue. Je-Tsun had recognized the spot where they usually picked them, hailed her brother, and the two girls had begun their descent toward a combe-oriented east-to-west which they knew perfectly.

Halfway down, Lasya discovered an ibex path that Je-Tsun hadn’t noticed. She suggested that they might find at the end of that trail one of those small fertile plateaus where these animals graze. Having neither brother nor mother, and a father who barely made a living by working for other peasants, Lasya had no fear in the mountains; she felt sure of herself, and this confidence pulled Je-Tsun along behind her.

They undertook the descent with careful but determined steps. The sun dazzled them as its rays reflected on the melting snow. They did in fact find a plateau. The flowers pierced the snow without even trying to hide. Soon, the two girls were so surrounded by emerging spring flowers that they didn’t want to pick them right away. It was too beautiful a day; they had to enjoy it; flowers wither quickly once they are gathered, and they had to return. They put down their empty baskets and began to explore the area. Lasya walked in front; in spite of the sticky snow, she surmised where there might be rockslides and made sure of every step. There was an especially steep slide there; Je-Tsun grabbed hold of the rocks in order not to slide back onto Lasya, but she sprained an ankle in a crack and collapsed on her friend without being able to hold on; Lasya’s grip saved her a fatal fall. Arm in arm, the two couldn’t help laughing. Grabbing hold of Je-Tsun with a firm grip, Lasya pulled her out of the impasse by lifting her almost entirely. This amazed Je-Tsun, who suddenly felt totally free of fear. The two explorers continued their descent.

At the bottom of the slide, there was a small sheltered plateau. Je-Tsun asked to stop there because the swelling and the pain were rapidly increasing and prevented has from walking. Lasya examined the sprain, which wasn’t too severe; she wrapped the wounded ankle with moss and a band of cloth she tore from her robe, and the shooting pains diminished. Je-Tsun took her hand …

“Don’t leave me,” she demanded.

“Come on now! I certainly wouldn’t leave you all alone here …”

Je-Tsun looked at her in such a way that she understood. She meant to say never. It was then that a force she wasn’t aware of took hold of her, one that had been accumulating all winter. She couldn’t resist. She hugged Lasya so strongly that she shrieked in surprise. The dog howled, in turn, out of amusement; he had remained on a promontory to keep watch. Lasya Iet herself was gradually absorbed in Je-Tsun’s warmth; she felt a softness she had never known since her mother’s death when she was only five. The two girls remained motionless in the sun, unable to budge; their hands wanted to go out and hold; their breasts wanted to open and give; their toes

themselves sought to stretch, to seize the air; their mouths too wanted to explore, and their noses also, but a strange fear was keeping vigil, fear of what? Neither one would have been able to say.

The sun wasn’t interested in what was going on below; it climbed its celestial curve as slowly as every morning, and without effort, for no cloud hindered it. their yak-hair coats were no longer in season; the wool robes stuck to their chests, and the sun continued to rummage in the snow, to pick at it, scratch it. It wanted to be rid of this useless layer; with its long golden fingers, it sought the cool skin of the valleys and clearings.

Neither one of them knew what was happening, but they were both completely soaked, and the spring heat didn’t explain everything. They felt themselves melting along with the snow; their clothes no longer provided any comfort: Instead, they burned like stinging nettles. Yet they couldn’t remove them, both of them felt that if they did, they would suddenly feel like chicks breaking out of shells, far from the nest, lost in fear, and ever so fragile. Nothing of that rise in shame was explicable: when they washed their linen in the summer, they didn’t mind. Men were strictly forbidden to approach the washing place, and the poorest, like Lasya, got undressed to wash their only robe: that didn’t bother anyone. But there, completely isolated in the mountains, Lasya felt as ill at ease as if a man were watching her. Suddenly noticing that her breasts were visible through her robe, she hurriedly put her coat back on.

Je-Tsun was surprised.

“Are you going?”

“No, I have a chill.”

“It’s so warm. » 

“How are we going to go back?”

“With my foot like a duck’s, rather slowly, Je-Tsun replied, laughing.

Lasya took her knife, cut a few branches off a bush, made some splints, and attached them with her cloth belt, then she held out her crook to the injured girl, who used it to get up, and both of them started off again. It took all the rest of the day. Lasya was exhausted from supporting her friend. They had to stop often, sit down sometimes, wait for a little, then start off again. In spite of everything, it was the most beautiful walk in the mountains that the two girls had ever taken in all their lives because the body of one was constantly set in motion by the other, and this attached them by tendons that could not be torn.

THE IMPASSE

Je-Tsun recovered from her sprain rather quickly. Two weeks later, the monks were still waiting for their flowers, and the baskets left behind had to be returned. This time they didn’t need to be escorted, for they had proved themselves.

Every day that week they left with the dog to revisit the same combe and return with their baskets filled with first fruits of every color. The monks arranged them in front of the Buddha. Everyone marveled, the prayer wheels turned without stopping. The summer would be fertile.

They gathered their treasures in no time. The two girls passed most of the day on a small sunny overhang hidden from all eyes except those of the dog who went over and over the surroundings with the greatest vigilance. Slowly the fear, the trembling, and the heartbeats settled down, and a great river widened. They were bathing in it, less and less clothed.

They couldn’t imagine anything, they couldn’t understand anything; everything was so unknown yet so familiar that they apprehended nothing. They went from discovery to discovery. Nothing surprises a girl in another girl’s physical aspect, nothing, except everything, for everything was new, as when you see a valley only in winter and suddenly glimpse its full expansion in the first summer days. Everything is different, and yet you are at home. A body illuminated is not a body extinguished.

An explorer could not have been more feverish in his search for a new world opening up. Nothing else was of any interest. It was slow, discovery after discovery, that they understood that they would never be able to leave each other. They were bewitched, their previous lives now seemed like a snowy, cold, and solitary cave. In these new days, they lived, and they gave each other life. Each part of the body touched, gratified, and honored began to vibrate, live, stand up, and be transformed.

They had changed worlds; they had been reincarnated in another body and in another country, and in that their body and that other world, the colors, the odors, the orders were a thousand times more alive, and above all, there was no longer any wall to separate the solitudes. It was like two brooks joining in long fleshy tresses before jumping over a cliff into the abyss.

They returned later and later, and one fine day the sun went down on the village without them.

No one worried about it because Lasya’s father was overwhelmed with work and Je-Tsun hadn’t returned from Leh, nor her brother from Tarmachik; everyone thought they had come back, that they were eating and sleeping in the village, probably of Lasya’s, or even of the girls’ carpet workshop. Lasya knew the area as well as any shepherd. Some had even said they had

seen her at the hut on the summit.

Jemouna was worried, not because of the mountain’s dangers, but because of those in the village. She went looking for Lasya’s donkey, who never stopped eating his hay and wasn’t at all in a hurry. She encouraged him to chew more briskly, then saddled him, climbed on his back, and left. The donkey headed toward the combe he knew, then stopped. His ears pivoted in search of clues while his nose probed the air. He went toward the dangerous slide but didn’t want to venture on it. Jemouna continued alone. The dog followed without yapping because he and the Jewish girl were very well acquainted. The two girls didn’t wake up.

Seeing them sleeping so intimately, one over the other, Jemouna was moved. She thought of Deqel. How she would have liked to sleep that way with her, turning in her sleep, Lasya grabbed Je-Tsun’s bare breast and continued to tenderly doze, Jem smiled and almost laughed.

The two girls unconscious caresses continued, and she turned her eyes away as it is customary to do in a house when a couple is discreetly making love. A reflex of respect and intimacy is inscribed in every child living in a single room with their parents. She stared at the night of a thousand diving eyes.

Though she didn’t understand her reflex very well, she didn’t yield to curiosity. She had never imagined this behavior among girls. Once she had glimpsed it, it seem natural to her. She knew that another world existed, a world she didn’t know too well, but which resembled certain sensations she did know, though noticeably amplified; sensations like those we feel in tasting a new cheese: In the beginning, the mouth has to get used to it, and after that, you can’t do without it.

It wasn’t just a cheese, for the sensation brought people together until at some point they can’t do without each other. Can we take bread from the mouth of a child, wine from the lips of a thirsty man, and air from the lungs? She had guessed that this world existed but without ever penetrating it. She said to herself: “It must be nice to leave your will behind, to yield your body to sensations, and to lose your head in a river of colors.”

Lasya was the first to wake up.

“Jem! What are you doing here?”

Je-Tsun opened her eyes.

“Jem!”

“I was worried!”

“You see, we forget the time,” Lasya responded. “Night took us by surprise, and it’s dangerous to return in the dark.”

“What were you going to do?”

Both of them understood what Jem meant.

“You know!” Lasya exclaimed.

“No, but I can guess.”

“And you’re worried?”

“Yes.”

“We won’t go back to the village.”

“But where will you go? Is there a village that could accept you?”

“No, none. What can we do?”

“Me too; I received a gift in exchange for a loss; I stay a child, and I pay the price for it: They take me for an angel sometimes, and sometimes for a demon.”

“I don’t know if we have a gift. Yes, sure we do, but they’ll make us pay the price in blood; they’ll treat us as if we were more himself.”

“Alas, I think you’re right! But where will you go?”

At the time, Jem didn’t see any great difficulties, but gradually she understood that it wasn’t possible to survive alone in these mountains. The secret had to remain total.

“I think you’ll have to go back,” Jem proposed. “I don’t see any other solution. You will have some moments for yourselves, but you’ll have to stay very, very discreet. I’ll be your accomplice, but God in Heaven, we’ll have to be vigilant!”

Afterward, even very early in the morning, each of the girls was in her own house, they were rarely seen together; it was as if they had quarreled Alas, it was too late! Je-Ttsun’s brother had

returned, and he had heard some serious rumors from the shepherds.

THE VALLEY OF MARA

Life went on for a while; the carpets brought in more and more, even if they weren’t even as well-shoved as those at Murea. They were warm, for the goats were well adapted to the cold; they were vividly colored because the girls were cultivating madder and saffron now, and shepherds had found some archil in a deep slide no one had known about until then. The price allowed families of more modest means to obtain them! The girls were learning to read, write, and think. You couldn’t ask for better, unfortunately, there was a little too much happiness in one single spot. Envying happiness destroys more happiness than unhappiness itself. People began to suspect Lasya and her friend of things they weren’t even able to name.

One morning, while Jem was worrying about Lasya’s absence from the workshop, she found her lying down among the goats. She hid her bloodied face. She couldn’t straighten out her body but remained curled up as if she were pierced by unbearable contractions.

The rumor began to take boundless proportions, all the more so from being unmentionable, from going its way not from word to word, but from look to look, by a lifting of the upper lip, by a shrug of the shoulders. That confirmed the evidence of evil. The thing evoked war, moreover, so imprecise that it could cover every possible form of pleasure, obscenity, sorcery, and even monstrosity, things of fear and of desire.

A collective voyeurism dived into each one’s imagination and come back out with constructions, with productions that must not be seen, and as a result, you saw nothing but that that must not be heard so that you board nothing any longer than that. It made them drool. Through a network of whisperings, of half-words, and clicking of tongues, they brought together all the lymph and bile of the village, the pus of unhappiness and the acridness of frustrations, they united all this in a single abscess, to be borne by as few as possible, and best of all by just a single person.

In villages, no matter what village, there are taboos that are like ramparts; they are there to protect people from the unknown, but they only maintain ignorance and, other than preventing horror and the unthinkable from entering, they confine it in a single abscess that is transformed into a sort of social plaque.

One question never entered the conversations, why didn’t the girl’s dog ever return? Why was it never found? No one wanted to know what really had happened.

The rumors want full speed. What was it all about? It was that the two girls reflected joy and innocence: they didn’t see anything wrong with their games. They radiated the purity of the first spring gentians that shiver in the melting snow. Sometimes they ran among the sheep like children, but the shepherds saw them dancing like young brides. Seeing them frolic like that, legs uncovered by the wind, the shepherds were transformed into wolves. Not into wolves who love the sheep, but into wolves who love the lambs. It’s well known that it’s the lambs who transform dogs into wolves. Everyone knows that the pure arouses the impure, that the good excites the mean, that the gentle incites violence, that goodness unleashes anger, that beauty provokes obscenity, and that the prey makes the predator … So why doubt the cause? Why any doubt about who is guilty? Without good, evil would not take such proportions. At the birth of the cosmos, it was the perfection of the celestial Buddha, his beauty, this purity, his certitude that condensed all the vagueness of space to make the material of time and, through it, the circumstances of unhappiness and the dust of samsara.

In the age of fire and the consequences of fire, how can a man trapped in that matter resist the mad rush of evil created by good? The shepherd in question could not have been able to defend himself. Have pity on him, he was bewitched, spellbound, and captured. He followed the trajectory of the whole material cosmos oriented toward the desire that creates an excess of beauty. A good boy, irreproachable, he hadn’t wanted to . .. He had resisted for days and nights, and then, exhausted, the fire had succumbed. He was beside himself, like an escaped animal. Who could blame him for his actions? So he had accomplices! But he had to: the girl was wild, strong, and furious; a real tigress. The dog had to silence him.

Lasya only had herself to blame. She had played with fire. She had been seen with her friend, both of them naked, intoxicated, or in a trance … No! Not really naked, but just a glimpse of it; not really naked, but almost. Not really drunk, but euphoric. The man had obviously turned his eyes away; it was afterward that he had been bewitched and had thrown himself on her in spite of himself.

One immediately thinks of the demon Mara – « death » – the one who attacked Siddharta in his struggle to arrive at perfect peace. Mara is known to be associated with illicit temptations of the flesh because death and sex have always been connected since every birth is paid for by death.

He was the one who the girls awakened and who threw himself on the man and his accomplices. Once Mara is awakened, he can kill day and night and annihilate a whole village. In order to calm him, he must be given fresh flesh.

As a protector of Buddhism, but above all of the tradition, the village. had condemned them, she and her friend. What had only been a suspicion during the winter was now an established reality: Lasya, assisted by her close friend, had precipitated the storm in the body of a young man and his accomplices. There was nothing more to add; what is more, the monks agreed. Lasya had lost her virginity after seducing a defenseless shepherd. An ordinary sin. But there were aggravating factors so repugnant they couldn’t be talked about. If girls turned away from men to satisfy each other, where would the village end up? What would happen to the men?

Lasya’s friend, the older one, what did they make of her? She hadn’t been raped, so she was less guilty. Her father lived in the monastery, where he occupied a high administrative post. He would vouch for her hymen. She was spared but would have to live with the bhikshus for at least five years.

Lasya’s father gave almost nothing to the monastery; he was poor, wretchedly so. His daughter would be tied to a tree and too bad if wolves happened to pass by there before she died of thirst or hunger. There was a place specially designated for the punishment of such a crime. A place not far away, on a plateau along the road. She could easily be watched. Woe to any who tried to release her, to give her anything to drink or eat, or defend her against wild animals who would surely come and sniff the fresh flesh.

THE FINAL EFFORT

 Jemouna didn’t find Yair, he was in his mountains, and no one in the monastery was willing to tell her what cave he had taken refuge in. She went to see Lasya’s father. He was so ashamed of his daughter – who no longer was his daughter that he didn’t want to know where they had tied her or even whether she had survived the first nights; for him, she was already dead, buried, and reincarnated as a cockroach or a bat. And all the respectable part of the village, Boshay and his family, as well as the others, had gone to the monastery to meditate on the dangers of debauchery.

It was still early in the day; Jemouna ran to see if it was possible to approach the condemned young woman. At least ten shepherds armed with daggers kept watch and enjoyed the guilty

one’s fears and privations.

It was obvious that the « school for depraved girls » had been dissolved, the « plotters of ignominy », and the next one to be tied to the post would no doubt be the witch in chief, the Jewess who never got older, the concubine of Mara who, as everyone knows, prefers to fornicate with children.

Jom found no other solution. She tied herself to a tree not far from Larya. Surprised at first, a shepherd decided that this was a good idea. He tightened the knots that she had badly tied. Two others found that this still wasn’t good enough; they hung her standing up and suspended two cubits from the ground so that her weight on the ropes would slowly strangle her.

By noon, almost all the men in the village had gens up to see the spectacle. It was impossible to make sense of the looks. Some of them seemed to signal enjoyment, others hate, others for fear, and most were just the imitation of other man’s looks.

The shepherds hadn’t thought to gag the Jew’s daughter. An understandable oversight, usually in such circumstances, a girl cries and moans, and it is pleasant to hear, but Jem spoke: 

“You accuse this girl of a crime of which she was the victim. You no longer see her as the girl who worked to feed you and weaved your carpets; no, you imagine, you imagine evil! While you

are imagining the evil in her, you are doing evil; you are drooling, you are hating, and you’re in a hurry to hear the predators approach. Murderers! You think that without her, you will stop feeling the sting of desire. So look good and hard! Look at your crime. Killers! Even so, have pity on yourselves because the beauty, the frankness, the simplicity of that girl, all this is on you too …”

Several men started to move away because they didn’t want to hear. So Jemouna spoke louder:

“Don’t leave, Don’t look away. I’m going to shut up. Yes, I’m going to shut up; just think! Do you think Rome is barbaric and cruel? They build a big stadium down there so that the people can lick their chops looking at lions and tigers and tear women and captives to pieces. Do like these spectators, but face the truth at least. See who is worst in you, your cowardice and your hate; see the best in you: your soul reaching for justice.”

The silence that followed Jem’s warning surrounded the men and imprisoned them. No one dared to go away. The sun sank behind the mountains. The howling of wolves came nearer. But they were, no doubt, afraid of all these men with knives in their hands. So the peasants retreated and hid behind rocks or trees. A deathly silence froze the moon and the stars, the wolves stopped their howling, but their waiting presence continued to be felt.

Lasya cracked the first and began to cry like a child. In spite of herself, Jem also began to shake with fear, the two girls had lost all their strength. They were giving way, they were going to free their souls before the wolves dared to finish them off.

Lasya’s father came out of the shadows. He was carrying the body of the dog, run through by an arrow. They had carefully hidden it and even buried it. But someone had talked. As he dug up the dog’s body, the had understood: the shepherds had taken care to eliminate the girls’ protector .. . He set it down of the fact of the village chief. Then he went up and cut the rope that bound his daughter, then the ropes from which the foreign girl was hanging, Jameuna collapsed from loss of blood and lack of oxygen. The father took her in his arms, the three passed through the wall of men, who now were open-mouthed. No one dared to intervene or even move or murmur. 

Jemouna was cared for by Je-Tsun’s mother, the brother was sent into the mountains to look for Yair. The parents, however, were as cold as ice. It was obvious that the two girls would be driven out and that the Jewish girl would have to leave as soon as her father came down from the mountains and her wounds had healed. The girls were not the only guilty ones, perhaps, but they were guilty.

As she healed, Jem suffered bouts of fever, during which she heard the voice of her big brother addressing the fishermen at the lake: “Listen to me and understand, all of you: there is nothing outside a man that, entering him, can make him unclean. It is what comes out of him that makes him unclean.”

A monk at the monastery gathered in detail not what was said but what had happened with the peasants: the savage pursuit of the girls, their unique beauty, their embraces, the rape, and the departure of three strange bhikshus …He understood that the prophecy of Madhyamika about the union of the Lotus Sutra and the Hindu tantra had just been fulfilled. He was the only one to learn a lesson from it. He checked all the facts, wrote them down, and slipped his chronicle into the monastery archives where they remain forever hidden.

SOLITUDE

During all these years, while his daughter was teaching, cultivating the earth, and knotting carpets, the monk Yair was progressing in the high Earth of the Buddhist way. One day, he set foot on the continent called: « The Unshakeable ». Yet it was on this continent that he was shaken to the bone.

For very great lengths of time, he was lifted above forms and colors, thoughts and feelings, in perfect equanimity. He was then like the void before the outpouring of transformations. Since there is no emotion attached to that state of being, the perfect absence of suffering made him believe it was joy. Yet, at one precise moment, he sensed what would happen if he became troubled. But what could trouble him?

Nothing, absolutely nothing. The nothing that Ardashir had so much wanted.

Nevertheless, something did trouble him: a desire to create, and in front of this desire to create, a contradiction: he didn’t want to start evil up again, the repressed world, in other words. It was impossible to do otherwise: to create is to repress what is not created.  What is not created ends up coming in, in part by bringing in the horrible and in part by carrying the sublime. The horrible is absolute evil that, in annihilating itself, creates sufferings much greater than sickness and death. The sublime surpasses the first perfection; it is the image of Dolma confronting Ardashir.

Little by little, from day to day, he began to perceive, in his soul’s deepest depths, a sadness forming. He couldn’t manage to comprehend it.

It was infinite solitude.

Within an instant of inattention, the whole cosmos poured into him: the stars, the spheres, the earth, the mountains, the plants, the animals, the women, and the men. This threw into the vital

unconsciousness, every possibility for horror and for the sublime.

He had just discovered that the worst violence was not that of the individual against the individual; the worst violence was the individual disappearing in universality: the drop of water disappearing in the ocean.

All empires were led in the and by beings who rejected distinctions, who wanted nothing but themselves in the name of a god who was nothing but themselves.

The man who came down the mountain to go and find his daughter was not the man who had climbed the mountain; it was a new man that no tradition had predicted.

THE WAY OF TAO

ZHEN THE CHINESE

Jaire and Jemouna didn’t have to wait long to leave Lamayuru A caravan arrived from Leh transporting merchandise from China, and its destination was Rome. It passed through Edessa. It was easy to go South from there towards Damascus.

Lasya and her friend had already gone in the opposite direction, escorted by monks who would deliver them to Leh; in order to let Lasya become a bhikshu there. Her friend is to be given in marriage after five years with the female bhikshus.

On the day of their departure, no one went to the bazaar to bid farewell to the Jew and his daughter. When he was in the mountains, the rabbi had Iet his hair and beard grow and had resumed wearing his Pharisee clothes, though he concealed them sometimes under a big wool tunic to divert curious looks and confront the mountains’ cold. Jemouna found it difficult to hold back tears of anger and desolation at the closing of her school and the condemnation of the two girls by the monks themselves. Barely recovered from wounds, she wore herself out trying to reconcile the families, but not a single door had been opened to her, and she was treated as if she carried the plague or cholera.

The caravan didn’t pass through Yasatis, but more to the north, by Shemiran and Qasran, at the foot of the Elburz mountains, closer to the Caspian Sea. They would stop at Tabriz to reach the north of Syria and continue toward Rome. A route that escaped Atar’s control; thinking of him, Yair recalled the famous Chinese poem the so much wanted. Nothing ever satisfies those who search for texts and riches, Yair had forgotten his old trade. Copies of the Lotus Sutra and some long Tantras had been sent to Damascus. That was already pretty good, he smiled as he thought about it. He saw things differently. A traveler robbed of everything by thieves, having as his sole wealth the scars of his heart and the successes of his soul, such a one propagates more truth than a thick roll of sacred texts.

Yair had nothing anymore except his clothes and some food. He didn’t have the right to take anything with him, not even his personal notes on the road he had followed through the “holy lands”. He was no longer a Buddhist but a heretic who had left the circle of monks and returned to samsara in the vain hope of bringing it closer to practice through a few acts of love. This didn’t matter much to Yair: he had rediscovered his heart, and he was ready to return to Galilee.

The monks succeeded in convincing a Chinese caravan who spoke Tibetan to hire the Pharisee as a copyist, translator, and guide. His knowledge of the West and the principal languages of Persia and Syria would be a great help. This Chinese caravaner wasn’t specialized in manuscripts; he sold pictorial silks of very great value and also short texts very elegantly calligraphed on finely textured parchments. The Mandarin responsible for these decorations wasn’t known in the West; this made the texts more exotic; the aristocrats in Persia and Rome adore exhibiting what they pretend to know.

The Chinese man, whose name was Zhen, had only three camels at his disposal, but they were good ones, like those of the Bactrian breed, but a little taller. Jemouna’s was called Wu. She wouldn’t add much weight to him.

When he left China, Zhen hadn’t planned to go any further than Lhasa, much less as far as Lamayoru. Normally, a Persian caravaner would receive all his merchandise at the caravanserai in Lhasa, pay for it in cash,  leave, and sell them at the princely courts of the West, but the Persian caravaner never arrived at Lhasa. Zhen had waited for an entire year; he didn’t want to return to China empty-handed. So he resigned himself to leaving for Edesse at his own risk. He

had to provide himself with some kind of assistance, however: he would find himself increasingly surrounded by unknown languages and traditions, not counting the currencies, the rights of passage, and the rest; he had a great need for an interpreter, a negotiator, and a guide. In spite of this, he had accepted the monks’ proposition with considerable reservations. He knew nothing

about Palestine, the Jews, and their culture; all he had heard were reports of their animal sacrifices on a big public square, and this disgusted him immensely. Rabbi Jaire explained to him several times that is was a Pharisee and not a Sadducee and that such a tradition shocked him just as much. He made it clear that this custom came from Babylon, that it was common practice in Mesopotamia, and that it probably replaced archaic rites much more terrible: the sacrifice of children to tribal gods.

From caravanserai to caravanserai, Zhen learned to trust the rabbi. He had him translate his silks and parchments into Greek and Latin, these translations could be provided along with the originals, which, for some, would add to their value. There was a wisdom there unknown in the West. This aphorism, for example: “Walking in the solitude of a great landscape, one can feel a Presence. It can easily be forgotten because it neither increases nor weakens. When the Presence envelopes us, it is feminine; when it sustains us, it is masculine, but there is only one Presence.”

This quotation and others related to it had struck Yair, for in the West, the gods are only reflections of what happens among mortals, mortal heroes in particular, and afterward, it is imagined that they are the ones reflected in the world of mortals. In Buddhism, the divine is, in a manner of speaking, disincarnated, deindividualized, and universalized. The soul rejoins its divine source by escaping matter, but in Zhen’s quotations, the ultimate Presence remains a mystery that cannot be unrivaled uniting feminine and masculine, light and darkness, and yet

it is a very concrete, very close and very warm presence; it can be said that it is like the air we breathe. Instead of separating light and darkness, heaven and earth, man, and woman, as Yahweh did at the beginning of the world, Zhen’s quotations imagine them playing with each other in an infinite creative dance. Yair felt that China had perhaps found a third way.

Texts that were short were easy to translate because Zhen interpreted them orally in Tibetan, and the rabbi wrote them directly in Greek, but the commentaries were long because Mandarin is full of subtleties that Zhen loved to explain, adding a thousand digressions and details. All things considered, Yair’s translations reflected his own thought as much as that of the original text, but this made little difference to Zhen; the spirit sets foot on earth only in a thousand nuances. The Pharisee never stopped asking questions in order to better understand. However, on the depth and meaning of the texts, Zhen remained laconic and evasive, as if he didn’t completely understand what he quoted, or perhaps also like an expert cavalier unable to teach his skill because it has become natural for him.

It was impossible to know whether he was a dilettante of a master. Yair never stopped interrogating him on the profound meaning of the adages, on the implicit questions, the connections between them, their overall purpose, the basic axioms, and the implicit or explicit postulates.

“What are you looking for?” Zhen asked one day, exasperated.

“Since childhood, I have been seeking one thing: how to counteract violence. Because it sweeps away all of us in its passage. No one is more different from each other than a Roman, a Jew, and a Tlbetan, except in their ability to justify servitude, torture, and murder. They always fill one tree out of the forest, adore it as unique, raise it to the rank of law, and use it to elevate themselves by putting everyone else on their knees.”

“And you want to change that? You may as well try to keep water from running off a mountain! It would be better to drink it or, better yet, protect yourself from it like a turtle!”

“Oh! Zhen, cut out your cynicism! I’m over sixty, and I’ve passed my life in the company of all kinds of texts. I have hidden under my turtle shell a multitude of times. I know very well that waterfalls bring life by watering vegetation with their mists; as for man, is tumbles down the cliffs of his soul, crushing all life beneath iron and fire. I can distinguish the violence that gives life from the violence that takes it away. I know very well that one kind of violence comes from the meeting of heaven and earth, like the rain of the storms that feed the most beautiful falls in the world. Without the play of contradictions, the universe would be sterile. I don’t want to talk about that kind of violence but of another that comes from refusing that one; I am talking about the man of iron and fire who can neither be cured nor appeased and who condemns us all to fear and to submission.”

“Explain yourself, I can’t follow you,” Zhen demanded.

“Each empire has its ways, but the goal is the same: Egypt, Babylon, Persia, Greece, Rome, the Partisans, the Han dynasty, all want a single leader, a single law, one and the same submission to one and the same tradition. In these Kingdoms, families aren’t led by a couple but by a man, the father; the woman is excluded because she symbolizes childbearing, creation, and intelligence. Power always struggles against the soul’s creative aspirations, and the feminine is the symbol of this! In the end, the emperor’s great and small attempts to subjugate everything to themselves. To seek the unity of the price of persons, the unity of the people to the detriment of individuals, the pater familias, to the detriment of women, the King to the detriment of this subjects, the rich to the detriment of the poor; this leads to extreme violence. I would like to

counter this excess of violence. Because if a philosophy, a religion, or science doesn’t serve that end, what does it serve? And if my life has changed nothing in that state of things, what proves that I have lived? Each step forward can put in question what we have experienced.”

The scholar was shaken by the rabbi’s sincerity; this small and puny old few wanted to assault the higher mountain, the supreme obstacle, the steepest cliff; against these walls, every act and every word would bounce back like echoes on the Wall of China: those who wanted to attack it by force have thickened it, those who have tried to forget it has become its accomplices, and those who have sought to resist it, have simply been eliminated, and their words, recycled and reversed to justify subservience. All the texts that survive do so because they justify violence. Perhaps certain truths are hidden in poems accessible only to pure hearts, poems that give life through a definitive act of consciousness: Dolma transferred all at once into the kingdom of the living.

This question, raised from the very start, was too much for the Chinese scholar and too immense for Yair himself. Yet, it can’t be set aside. It began to act in Zhen’s memory, a little like an invisible librarian putting things in order according to new criteria. Suddenly, there were useless texts, complacent texts, also poems that speak of a route: the way that the Chinese call Tao because it has no name. The way is not the tree of knowledge torn out of the forest, it is the valley welcoming all of Heaven. This way was organizing Zhen’s memory, he was rediscovering aphorisms he had set aside. From time to time, Zhen would unexpectedly quote from memory maxims that seemed to arrive from another world:

“Everyone thinks they know the difference between the beautiful and the ugly, the feminine and the masculine, good and evil, predator and prey, so everyone slices the in-between and empties the existence of its vital organs. Keep your heart in your guts.”

“Let’s imagine that we don’t elevate anyone above the others by saying that he or she is handsome or beautiful, that he or she this is good, that she or he is strong, and that we don’t lower anyone beneath others by saying that he or she is ugly, or that this or she is bad, or that he or she is weak, then there would be no more war. We would look at each other with goodwill!”

“The space between Heaven and Earth is like our lungs: it empties itself in order to be filled; it fills itself in order to be emptied. The space between Heaven and Earth does not die because it loves the empty as much as the full. Alas! Everyone wants to be either filled or emptied.”

ON GOVERNMENT

“But how can men govern each other without using weapons?” Yair asked in the middle of the desert as the Caspian Sea was blowing its odors across the heaps of stones.

Zhen, not knowing what to say, went on with more quotations:

“Can you let the gross in the fields be born and keep the peace? Then you are governing yourself, can you walk softly in a field full of flowers without crushing a single one? Then you are governing the world.”

“Here is the one who governs: a prudent foot like one who walks in winter on thin ice, his breath is light so as not to weigh down anything whatsoever: he is imperceptible. Yet the knots are untied beneath his fingers – without his fingers knowing the secret. Lions can’t devour him, for there is nothing in him to eat.”

“The principles of government, what are they?” Yair asked as the caravan crossed the Zagros mountains on the north side.

Deqel’s image haunted him, for it was true that the lion hadn’t been able to devour her; she had organized herself in such a way that there was nothing to eat in her. It had been the same for Dolma, for Amrita and her lover. No, Dolma was something else: It was she who had devoured.

Ardashir’s heart, not to annihilate it, but to burn it with love. And yet, how can we govern? Are those who have died from an excess of love the only ones who can govern? The question remained unanswered, for him, rabbi Jaire, had never governed anything, neither in his family with Maâkha, not in the caravan, non in Ardashir’s kingdom, nor in Atar’s kingdom, nor at the Akhal monastery, nor all the one at Lamayuru and now he was returning to Palestine dispossessed of everything and without ever having known how to defend anything whatsoever. So how can he govern, even if it is just a tiny little bit of his life? For if we govern nothing; we are giving everything away to be governed, and the world is on the way to ruin …

“I don’t know”, Zhen answered, “I have heard that in physics, nothing is lighter than the cause of gravity. Nothing is more imperturbable than the cause of movement. Nothing is more powerful against a weapon than a breath in the right direction… So the good governor mainly applies himself to helping those beside him!”

“Your quotations are as beautiful as camels on the way to a great oasis, but me, I am a man. What can you say to a man?”

“A wise man who counsels a prince would surely make him lose his kingdom, but in losing it, he would gain the respect of free women and men; and the reign of peace might then begin.”

They had walked so much now, for months! Jemouna had listened to everything, engulfed though she was in half-sleep and the swaying of Zhen’s camel. They were approaching Nineveh. Still silence and rocks. The sparseness of the vegetation upset Zhen. His mind was like the wind. Drop by drop, he had emptied his memory like a tree, cut into gives its sap.

A great desire to be in nature seemed to permeate Zhen’s words. Obviously, this didn’t come from the desert, but from a soil rich in clay, soil that sticks in the hand, that encourages copulation and the explosion of life; from luxuriant vegetable gardens, from cabbage and butter, from languorous rivers, from intertwined trees covered with moss. This came from a country where pigs rubbed shoulders with chickens. His was a country where alert dogs barked of danger, and the roosters could be heard. Oxen slowly plowed the rice paddies. The peasant girls did not wear veils and weren’t afraid of walking bare-legged. They ate vegetables boiled in lard and conceived children on beds of straw. Because of all this, they lost the taste for killing; this came from a country that had despaired of its emperors and awaited no help from a messiah; this came from a country where the peasant and the artisan bent their backs not to submit, but to find refuge in their own thoughts. In nature, the more that individual lives and defends himself, the healthier the whole is because individuality depends on everything, and everything depends on individuality, those who escape the crowds and don’t go to assemblies, it is they who are the people.

“The one who feels that his life depends on air and water never lets himself be imprisoned by the enthusiasm of the smooth talkers, the one who thinks he is above the air and water is already imprisoned.”

One day, Zhen concluded the discussion with this speech:

“I understand the two great legs of China better now: Confucius wanted to make good citizens; me, a Tauist, I liked the one who wanted, first of all, to make women and men complete human beings. I understand that the Han are elevating the first and hunting down the second. I pray that the body of China will never be pulled apart, for then China would no longer be China but a dangerous copy of the West. The copy might be worse than the original.”

The whistling of the sand-laden wind muffled the conversation for several days. After a long crossing of the Syrian desert, Zhen came out with a saying he himself never understood: “The sage accepts being hit by an arrow. For who else receives it without collapsing? He receives it in order to counter it.”

MESHULAM

The caravan camped on the shore of the Khosi, below the hill of Kuyunjik, in the shadow of Nineveh’s wall. Zhen and Yair left for the city with some of the merchandise. They wanted to find a way to be introduced to the city’s notables, to arouse their curiosity about Chinese culture first of all, and then to sell them some decorative silks or parchments of high-valve calligraphy. But that is not what they found.

Near the city gate, they heard crying coming from a pile of trash: a baby had been abandoned. Zhen didn’t want to pay any attention to it, but Yair couldn’t just go on his way. He went looking for

the baby. He found him and relieved him of his dirty diapers. In order to cover him, Yair was forced to use his fringed tallith, the prayer shawl he had received from his father. It was threadbare but still as clean as it should be. He went up to the gate, entered the city, lifted the child up, and called out to attract attention. No one turned around to look. He had to do something. Zhen suggested that he hands the baby over to Jamouna, who would know how

to feed him with camel’s milk. They would take up their plan where they left it, and after a number of encounters, they would certainly find a nurse who would accept him.

Jem was embarrassed for a few minutes, she was holding the baby in her left arm, and he was searching for the breast she didn’t have, crying and wriggling. He wouldn’t stay still and, above all, didn’t want to sleep. He twisted and turned as if sleeping were dying. She caressed his stomach with her left hand: the little ball stiffened to become like wood. She looked around her: there was just the man in the caravan, not a single woman. Yair returned, stomping his feet enthusiastically: he had a still-warm bowl of camel’s milk. Dipping her finger into the bowl, Jem was able to give him a few drops to suck, but it wasn’t enough. She dipped a small corner of the tallith’s fringes; filled with milk, he was much better fed than from his fingers. Seeing that she was going to be able to handle it, the two men left for the city again.

Jem continued dipping the end of the shawl in the milk for the infant to suck. After he had swallowed everything, he felt satisfied. He began to look for eyes and found the two shining pearls gazing at him. He seemed to draw from them something like a reassuring substance. Not for a single moment did Jem abandon this gaze so pure. It was almost unbearable. Holding her breath so as not to budge, she let him take all the trust he could draw from it.

At last, he smiled; it was like an exhausted swimmer grabbing the ropes of a boat. His little mama turned her eyes away for a moment to breathe a little air away from that excessive intensity. His scream ripped the air. So she gave him back her eyes: they were as full of tenderness as the breasts she did not have. And he greedily drank all the emotional substance there. Yet this kind of milk doesn’t run from one person to another, it isn’t poured from one container to the next; on the contrary, it ties the shipwreck victim to his savior, and both find themselves in the water.

When he had taken everything, and she had given everything, he grabbed one of her fingers and fell into a very deep sleep.

He slept so profoundly that no sound had any effect on him, but there was no question of him giving up the finger he held. His sleep lasted such a long time that it put his now mother to the greatest of tests: she couldn’t get up; she was sitting on the hard ground, leaning very uncomfortably against a knotty post, tortured by immobility. He, serene and relaxed as the moon, reflected the Sea of Galilee, but the crater of Vesuvius also. She couldn’t risk caressing this peaceful face, for the volcano might erupt. She knew the pain in all its colors but all of the pleasure’s subtleties as well.

“For quite a long while,” she thought, “I was the earth and the sky, the container and the content, the starry dome and the trembling flower, the presence and the waiting, the whole and the part, the way, and the walker.” This thought came to her from a text that Zhen had quoted.

THE ADOPTION

At noon the sun found a way to bore a way into the wool tent; it slipped a long finger of light into it and woke up the little one. We say little, but that’s before hearing him cry. Jem woke up as if the fire had reached the dry branches she was sitting on. She loosened her stiff muscles and, to her great surprise, walked faster than a fox to the camel keeper to get some milk. And there, on a pile of straw, she repeated her trick with the prayer shawl and the camel’s milk. Afterward, she barely had time to put his bottom in the air for him to relieve himself of the surplus solids and liquids. It is hard to imagine what comes out of such an adorable little belly and all that has to be done afterward to clean everything and make the smell tolerable.

It was a boy as vigorous as a baby goat, equipped with a monkey’s hands: unable to control his strength, he grabbed everything. He grabbed a lock of hair and pulled himself almost all the way up, he bent his toes on her lower jaw in order to climb even higher; now he was enthroned on her head and triumphed with loud cries of joy that fell as a rain of spit on Jem’s face. She always held him so that he wouldn’t fall, but couldn’t do anything with him when he explored his mother as if she were a tree. Then he changed course completely, grabbed everything he found in order to climb down on her chest as if it were a memory, shamelessly probed through her clothing, grabbed a disappointing little nipple, and, crying, pinched it with all his strength. Then, responding reflexively to the pain, Jem gave his fingers a sharp tap. And trumpets of all of Rome’s armies sounded.

In despair, he began to seek the pupils he had seen that morning. He found them. The mother was defenseless. He boarded her, knotted and strengthened the ropes of attachment, captured her heart, and went off once more to the bottom of the seas in the sleep of conquest. She was nearly forty in this twelve-year-old body, but her heart was twelve also: she hadn’t known a pleasure greater, more intense, and more carnal. Thus, in a very real sense, he was her first lover, the first to open her belly And breast to draw her out of the heavy, thinking world and Iead her into the mists and the stars.

Even at night, it was sadistic love; at times, his pure look ravaged her insides, and at times, he poured his honey into her mouth. He tore off her clothes and, on her skin, he built his country. His tenderness and gentleness were infinite sometimes; at other times, he had a tyrant’s toughness.

Yair and Zhen returned on the third day, Zhen was in a hurry:

“We’ve found something for him a lot better than a nurse, an adoptive mother!”

“He’s already found his mother,” Jem objected.

“Rest assured, he will live in a good family; a servant will take care of him and breastfeed him, think of his future; with you, he doesn’t have much luck,” Zhen concluded.

Jem was speechless and defenseless. How could she explain it? Just the look of him, she saw very well that he didn’t understand. How could she describe what had happened, this binding cord of milk and love? A caravaner sells, buys, and leaves. The little one was sleeping on her chest and he was stretching out his arm, impatient to take him and give him away as if he were a burdensome package. How could she show him the tools already buried in that body

and her soul?

She said to him curtly:

“The future! He won’t stand a second betrayal. Leave him there where he has taken hold.”

Zhen wanted to object, but Yair lifted a finger, and he shut up. It was Yair who spoke:

“Nothing is reasonable in this world. Look at that baby’s face, it’s not so different from his mother’s. People could easily believe that a big sister gave her infant to her little sister before dying of childbirth. No one would be able to contradict it. In the caravan, there is an abundance of camel milk; in Syria, there are goats and female donkeys; everywhere, milk abounds, but not love, love, does not abound, to kill a single drop is to bully and beat the whole kingdom. He will be called Meshulam, ‘he who has paid’, because he has purchased his own life.”

Zhen remained suspended in thought as if he were glimpsing a new world.

THE ART OF CALLIGRAPHY

They had left the baby with Jem. It was around noon, and they had passed through the main gate of the city’s ramparts. Zhen motioned to Yair to stand behind him as if he were a servant. This reminder of reality did not offend the Pharisee; on the contrary, he made use of it to study the way Zhen was going to sell his merchandise. He felt lighter and nearly carefree; all is that to do was carry a few silk scrolls in bark tubes, some parchments, and a small case, a weight not as heavy as Jem’s.

Zhen had learned enough Greek to get by, but he found his way in Nineveh without asking questions, like a boat following the currents in the sea. All he did was smile at one and hold off smiling at another, and, following the positive and negative reactions, he advanced through the

crowd, taking one street and then turning around halfway, advancing and retreating in the different aisles of the market. He didn’t mind zigzagging, going in circles, following chaotic trajectories, and going nowhere. He even appeared to have forgotten his goal. He paid no attention of all to the displays, didn’t try to question anyone, and didn’t seem interested in creating an opportunity; a leaf falling on a lake would move followed a similar course, as if the current, the wind, a breath, a mist should be what leads it.

At three o’clock in the afternoon, he located a servant buying gourmet food for his master and followed him for a while; he followed another, then another, and finally stuck with a third. This servant was going to open the lofty gate of a sumptuous villa at the moment when Zhen asked Yair to intervene because a master cannot speak to a servant. Yair explained to the domestic that his master had just come from China with fantastic silks. the man proved to be very receptive, he seemed very happy indeed to go and inform his master that a merchant from the East wanted to demonstrate the “power of calligraphy on silk”. A moment later, he returned

with the butler, who welcomed them appropriately.

The wait was pleasant, female servants brought them a variety of plates and quality wines. In reality, everyone came and went in turn to examine the stranger, his eyes shaped like oysters, his elevated cheeks, his shiny garments, his half-shaved head on which stood a small red bonnet clutching a tuft of hair perfectly centered on the top of the skull. He accepted these looks with good humor.

Finally, Zhen and his servant Yair were ushered into the reception room. A middle-aged man sat enthroned on a cushioned armchair. He was trying to look like a vizier, but he wasn’t; his clothes placed him among the wealthy lenders, even the very wealthy ones, judging by the jewels he wore. Were they genuine? His wife came out of the shadows and got down on the same wide armchair. She didn’t seem much younger than he. She was wearing a silky dress, flowered against a background nearly black. Zhen cast an admiring glance at it, no more than that. She understood that she wasn’t going to impress this specialist in fabrics.

Zhen took out of his box a square of silk paper barely wider than a man’s forearm; the paper, a very warm beige in color, had the velvety texture of a young girl’s skin. By itself, it was a treasure.

With the elegance of a magician, he pinned the precious paper on the wall with the help of a small stapler, where he placed a few hairs’ distances from the slightly undulating edge of the paper. A breeze would have sufficed to make the page fall. He placed a bottle of ink and a paintbrush wide at his thumb on a small table. He opened the ink bottle and stepped aside.

The floor of the room was of very shiny dark wood, a free surface larger than necessary for what was going to happen, the light was fading toward a yellowish orange. Zhen wore loose black pants and a baggy white shirt: silk, obviously. He placed his feet some distance from his shoulders, or rather that’s the impression that it made: his feet lay on the ground like two cows wanting to ruminate at length. His knees were slightly bent, his arms extended on each side of him like flags waiting for the wind. His head balanced on his shoulders like a wooden ball on a pick, in supple equilibrium without the intervention of any muscle. He breathed … Rather, air entered his lungs to swell them and went out like a flock of sparrows scattering in the mist; it could have been said that all will had left the man; he was like an abandoned house, awaiting a guest.

It was not total immobility, for in spite of everything, the fluttering of his clothes showed that the evening breeze had found a means of entering the room to have fun with the Chinese who were participating with him in this. It was simply expecting that it would play with him like life in general plays with men. A very weak breeze to which only the most perfect silk can react really did begin to make use of the man’s availability. By tiny touches, the feeble tempests of the force encircled Zhen, and it was impossible to know if they were making him budge or if it was he who was moving them. All present went into vertigo. It might have been said that a phantom had entered a garment, but not just a garment, instead a suit with joints, a sort of amazingly supple puppet. But it wasn’t yet that complete.

Slowly, his arms were lifted toward the audience like the wings of a bird, the back of his hands in front of them, as if gravity was holding them tilted like hairs; when he brought his arms back down, the hands remained attached to the sky, and now you could see his palms. The perfect grace of the movement contradicted the idea of a puppet as well as that of a garment. He had been metamorphosed. His hands stood out in front of him like oars in calm waters at a natural distance. They looked and said to themselves: “A grasshopper hops, a horse gallops, a deer leaps, a crane takes flight, a human being does like that man; yes, precisely, that is the natural movement of a man who is neither an envelop nor a skeleton, but a feeling. He doesn’t walk, he doesn’t work, he doesn’t dance, he does nothing in particular, nothing that has a purpose; he simply yields to the movement appropriate for breath. For one moment, he is a man moved by nature.” And each one understood that he or she had not experienced a metamorphosis.

The reed undulates in the wind. The horse runs in the wind, the doe jumps through the wind, and the limbs of a human being do all that, but with the grace of the breaths that animate ten thousand beings.

It was obvious that his wing movements resulted from the evening breeze. He did no more than amplify the extremely light breath engulfed in the silk of his clothing this slow flapping of wings clearly served to link Heaven and Earth, for he was going to search down there in order to go up there and bring back the clouds of heaven to bury them in the earth below. I wasn’t a question of flying away like the great crane of the Himalayas; far from it, he was moving all of space: if they had I been outside, they would have seen the moon descend and climb back up again, go to the left and back to the right with all the stars and their hairs of light. No, he wasn’t flying away, it was the floor that was disappearing under the spectators’ feet, and they no longer were spectators but birds of paper pirouetting in the breath of life.

He repeated the same movements as if that were never going to change, the movements from high to low began to form a series of band triangles from all sides and all forms. After an ensemble that increasingly resembled offerings with one arm that returned on the other, he

started circular movements. It gave the impression that he was taking and giving; in reality, you could just as well imagine that it was the floating space around him that produced it and took it back again. It was impossible to know who was doing what.

In regard to the human being and the breeze, the only image that came and didn’t love was that of a couple embracing: neither of the two is master; the movement has taken the two lovers, and all they do is amplify the undulations of the attractions of space and time. Thus the air’s movement and Zhen’s movement were amplified by coming and going. Yet, there wasn’t that sort of irrepressible acceleration couples experience because after the human couple attains orgasm, calming ensues. In Zhen’s natural movements, the creative infiltration remains.

One human being, one cosmos that is sufficient. There is nothing else. The one animates the other, the other animates the one.

The fact went ahead with rotations on the horizontal axis, which brought about a kind of fluttering of the pants; it had to do with a sphere in the Heavens and a man on the Earth.

Yair didn’t know that a man could be so beautifully animated, animated from the inside and animated from the outside, and it was something to see with your own eyes, to see him become the natural man as if his soul were not a thing – nothing other than the wind’s initiative on a jointed reed.

From a certain point of view, it might have been said that Zhen had hung up his garments and left them to the wind, then entered and synchronized himself with them, the animation of Heaven

and Earth! Yair understood what silk was and why that caterpillar produced it for its own metamorphosis.

In this pure movement of wind on silk, with the same rhythm and without the slightest hesitation, the Chinese took the paintbrush on the table and placed it between the fingers of his left hand, like a feather of the end of a wing, and with a single and unique gesture calligraphed a sign:

There was immense silence.

“But what is it?” The hostess finally demanded.

“Threw strokes of horizontal mist on the star of rice.”

“Mist over rice.” The wife reported making sure she understood.

“Yes, the invisible that fertilizes the visible.”

Hearing these words, she began to cry as if she suddenly recalled a badly healed bereavement. Zhen seemed to have understood and said to the women:

“Don’t you see, madame, sometimes the child arrives from the inside of the belly, sometimes he arrives with the wind of the mist, like the three horizontal lines above the rice – the star with eight rays – but in every case, the child comes from Chi, the invisible creative movement.”

THE PROMISE

They stayed there that night and for the whole day after, another night and another day, because the couple wanted to learn more about what they had seen. 

Zhen took his time. Taking great care to keep his secrets, he talked like the wind in the leaves, from calligraphy, this passed to self-defense, and one of the guards could put him off balance. He made them turn on themselves, and that ended with enormous laughter. From self-defense, he led them to poetry, he had them play improvising three short verses that made one see by simply hearing.

The lady came up spontaneously with the following:

“Her skin slept on her bones, 

the rain fell in the valley,

the mist carried off the dream.”

In the end, Zhen concluded with this image:

“When the water is quiet, it can reflect the details of the beard and the eyebrows, and its surface is as even, smooth, and flat that it can serve as a level for the master carpenter. If the tranquillity of the water allows it to reflect things without being crumpled, how is it with our mind? If it is tranquil, it is the mind of one who participates in the harmony of the world! It is the even mirror of ten thousand beings; silence, tranquillity, and non-action are the way. That is why the sovereign always remains in a state of rest. He is the lake: if he receives the arrow, it doesn’t reach him, and the archer is exhausted. Silk paper is like the lake: the dance of Heaven that it reflects is the Chi calligraphed. Keep it. It’s my present for your welcome.”

He took out a new silk paper, this one a silvery gray; with his magic paintbrush, he painted a branch and all of a watchful bird. Under the bird, a wave in which four fish could barely be distinguished.

“There is all of the ways,” he said at the end. It is neither the hungry bird nor the fish that are perhaps just a mirage; it is the tension between the two, the play of love and death.”

Very gently, he brought the lost baby into the woman’s imagination and then into her husband’s so that she was, in the end, attached to the child, and the husband plucked his fatherhood from his wife’s shining eyes.

Yair didn’t see the gold and silver coins fall into the merchant’s right hand, but he imagined that they were as numerous as the two rows of teeth revealed by the Chinese scholar’s smile.

DAUGHTER AND FATHER

Jem never knew that Meshulam’s future had wavered for a moment between a rich life and a poor one. It wasn’t important, for who knows if that rich life might have been harder and crueler than the poor life of a desert traveler. Zhen and Yair never knew if the rich leader’s wife ever received their final and negative message as a punch in the gut or as a relief. She herself would never know if this setback would be favorable to her or unfavorable. The soldier who wears a sword on his belt doesn’t know if it will serve to defend him or run him through if he falls from his horse. The mother who carries her baby on her hip doesn’t know either if he or she is going to fill her days with joy or cover them with sorrow. This is why Zhen had yielded so readily to Jemouna’s demand.

After they left Nineveh, they saw the great Lake Tigris, an oblong widening of the river of that name. They were struck by its majesty. The whole caravan was going to stop there, set

up the tents, rest, and wait. The chief guide was required to confer with a Roman officer who, with his soldiers, kept watch on the area next to the Syrian border. Revolts were stirring up Judea, and a general named Titus, accompanied by his legions, was going to pass through Damascus to settle the matter. In the meantime, the Persians or the Parthians must not be allowed to be prevented from coming and financing, arming, or encouraging Jewish revolts. The caravan would be searched down to the smallest sack, even if it was going to Rome and not to Palestine.

They could search as much as they wanted: the chief guide knew every merchant; he wasn’t worried. He had, above all, good relations with Rome: he could convince the officer to let the caravan leave in return for a reasonable bribe. During this time, the caravans, the slaves, the servants, and everyone bathed, ate, and drank.

Yair, for his part, felt tired, nostalgic, and sad. The caravan was approaching Damascus. In a few weeks, they would very likely be in Galilee. Nothing and no one awaited him. He could certainly not resume his functions at the synagogue: Who would authorize it? He knew that he would no longer be able to comment on the Torah publicly because the way he understood it now was far removed from Gamaliel and all the other Pharisees combined. To be frank, he didn’t like his people anymore either. Yet he couldn’t wait, however, to see the lake of Tiberias again, the olive groves, the fig trees, the flocks, the fountains, the children, the women, but not the men. The men, he had had enough of them. He was old now, so old, he felt that, when his route stopped, he wouldn’t be able to ever start out again.

Jemouna went up to him; Meshulam was sleeping on her chest. Lake Tigris gloomed in front of them. Yair couldn’t manage to eat the dried meat and nuts he held in his hand. Without knowing why not now, he realized that he existed.

This was extraordinary. This meant that he was seeing; this meant that colors sparkled, that objects were astonishing, that he was got down in the middle of it – a stone from heaven had fallen to the earth, and next to him, a girl was leaning on him with total trust, his daughter, and he knew nothing about her. She too existed; she too was a stone fallen from heaven and even fallen twice.

Both of them were there, in that existence, among existing things, planted in a story they only knew the tiniest part of, yet whose meaning and source direction they were meant to know. Jemouna now had a center, one point source and point of origin: Meshulam the crier, for everything was organized to separate the bouts of crying by milk and by caresses. Yet that centripetal force said nothing about the history into which she had fallen like a meteorite. Yet, it made no difference; their existences were there, buried in thesediments of history.

CONFIDENCE

Yair took his daughter’s free hand, she seemed surprised and looked at him and saw that he saw her. She quivered with pleasure: her father was at her side at last. The baby moved a little, but she kept on gazing into her father’s eyes.

The silence no longer had anything to keep silent about. As the two beings watched, the river’s level lowered, laying the base of their solitude. As the water went down, they appeared to each other. Their eyes were freed. They saw the groves emerge from the fog, they saw the flowers toss their colors and polish their perfumes; they saw the trees, the birds, and the mountain walls. They saw the river of history arrive from behind, surround them, and continue its road ahead of them. They stayed there, shorn of shelter, astonished not to have been swept any and to be a part of the unchanging things of the world. The kernel of their souls, side by side, in front of the stage of eternal things.

“Papa!” Jemouna exclaimed.

“Jem!” Yair responded.

Again and again the weaving of silence that tied them together at lightning speed, as if it were necessary to make up for all these years of separation or, rather, of a parallel life in the river of time. The spider of connection, a fantastic weever, weaves its web of lightning flashes; through these connections, power is given to catch all that is mysterious in the air we breathe here, now. They appeared to each other, astonished to exist one beside the other, so independent yet so connected.

When they were truly present to each other, Yair dared to ask his child his question, as if to say: In the history of the world, here is the furrow the shell of my heart has worked so hard to open, as I sought to understand the suffocating ignorance which drives men mad and ravages all that history sweeps away. His question was not a knife that reason plunges into the block office. No! It was his chest opened and planted firmly in that history! Jem knew it, her father was a question razor-sharp, a living question, a bleeding question, a kind of wound in the flesh that asks: “Why so pitiful a drama in so grand a setting?”

You, what do you think about it? He concluded by asking her explicitly. 

As the girl went up to him, it was hard for her to believe that her father wanted to know her thinking. She hesitated to reveal herself to him, but he insisted.

“Tell me, what do you think about it?

“Of all that violence?”

“Yes, this evil that quivers in each one of us, this social evil, this spiritual evil, what do you have to say about it? We don’t escape it. At Nineveh, I was almost taken by it and so was Zhen. Obsessed with a goal, we almost cut you and Meshulam apart … Once he is bewitched and isolated in his own mind, a man is blind, so, like a bat, he cries to find his direction, but he never hears an echo, so he hits all the walls and falls in his own excretions.”

She turned toward the lake for a moment to gather her emotion and wait for it to take a form that could be expressed. She looked at her baby for a long time, he was sleeping.

“Papa, I seem young and carefree, always ecstatic over the details of the treasure chest we all are buried in, like in a cornucopia, but I have a long road behind me. In spite of how happy I was with the Zebedees, building boats under the supervision of a carpenter, not like any other, I got caught up in mama’s mental illness. I became blind and violent against myself, I almost killed myself. Then my big brother came. He woke me up, yet I found myself in the same ignorance as before. I didn’t know any more about myself and the world. I wouldn’t even have been able to answer this tiny little ordinary question: Who are you? Nothing had changed; besides, why would be resurrected change anything? I want to tell you, papa, that under your terrible question, there is a big argument in favor of human madness, of this acute crisis of violence: Isn’t it horribly unjust to see our hand move, to realize that it is at the end of our arm, attached to our head that it is commanded somewhere in the brain, that we are responsible for its actions, but to know nothing either of who is commanding it nor of the world in which it is acting? Isn’t it awful to have no idea on this subject?”

“And why, God in Heaven, why? Why does ignorance make men crazy? If we knew, for example, a little more about our soul, it is calling, its meaning, that would help, wouldn’t it?”

“If life was about roads, knowing them would help us make the right choices. Life, however, is not a set of roads marked out in the desert: some toward a well, the others toward a storm. The plants stretch out their arms around us. As the season advances, they form themselves, they grow, and by trial and error, they invent all kinds of adjustments; their stems, their branches, their tools; nothing follows roads. There no is no road. So they can’t know themselves in advance or know in advance the world around them because they are living; they form themselves in a world that forms them. If they could know everything, this would prove that everything exists already. If that were true, there would be no purpose in living. As man advances in a labyrinth and comes out of it intact.  this story is absurd, for why is there this game at all? A lavender plant reaches out of an earthware pot; it forms itself and produces its identity. The decor becomes more beautiful because of it, and nothing stops that beauty, for beauty has no end …”

“Explain more; because I’m discovering you, Jem; you might say you’re coming out of the shadows.”

“It’s true: we feel as if we’re discovering each other today; it’s not like a toddler who hides behind some furniture and jumps out and shouts ‘Coocoo!’” 

“That’s what I believed. And it’s already an out of violence to believe that the child is complete and discernible behind a piece of furniture when he really is a sort of chick who, instead of following roads, is developing his being.”

“That’s what I’m discovering with Meshulam. As we weave new connections, we make ourselves alive and passionate. To know in the Greek way is to have a clear, distinct, and precise idea and imagine that this idea is equivalent to something. After that, it is the idea that cuts the world in two;  life escapes the plan.”

“To live is to escape the plan: that is the whole Torah. You’re right. Yahweh made a plan, and we have escaped from it. To say that it is a sin when it is life is our first violence. We try to do everything as God wants it, and we break everything because God wants life, not a collection of ideas that smash against each other. I certainly need to begin to live.”

Yair looked at his daughter, still so young, her face impeccable, her skin perfect of a child’s. A mystery! She didn’t have the smallest scar, nor the slightest withering, neither wrinkles nor folds, as if she had never bathed in the river of pains nor even had known anything other than the earthly Paradise.

And this eternal child was looking at her aged father, his lower eyelids so heavy with his question that they were puffed up with time and thing down; their weight opened a red space that was now filling with water. The water ran down and moistened the edges of his nose. He sniffed.

His question had wreaked havoc on his face; it was his beauty now; his question had made him beautiful. If he hadn’t had that question as his principal companion, he would have swallowed everything, he wouldn’t be old from his own strength; he would simply have been worn out by the passage of life.

This beauty reappeared in Jem; she wouldn’t have wanted the world to be anything else.

“Papa, I love you so much.”

The silence congealed between the two. The book of the great traveler was about meeting the boat that had never completely left the Lake of Tiberia. Yair broke the silence:

“If I understand correctly, you’re trying to tell me: ‘Papa, with time, violence – at least the part of violence that goes against change, against the creation, against life –  that violence will end up disappearing because deep down, we always depend and always will depend on what will always escape us. We think we are able to kill, but all we are doing is resurrecting the dead.”

“Yes, I do say that we have been witnesses of Deqel’s resurrection, of Dolma’s, and of so many others; we have been witnesses of the rise of the Kingdom of peace. We mustn’t look too much at the numbers but at the resurrection.”

“You surprise me, my daughter, you were there, and you saw everything and heard everything, and me. I was at your side, loving you, but blind and deaf, while you were seeing the insects, the grasses, the flowers, the trees, the mountains that shout: ‘Victory!’ I was seeking a key, as if the world where a chest, I’m just beginning to see that the more we are attached to persons, to living beings, the freer we are, the more we suffer with love, the more we feel happiness, the more we carry great responsibilities, the lighter we are, the deeper we delve into a question, the more peace submerges us. Was it because the Carpenter was infinitely attached to you that he freed you from death?” 

“Perhaps he was thunderstruck with love for me like Jem for Meshulam.”

“They leaned against each other in front of the lake, and nd Yair recalled one of Zhen’s quotations: “The one who makes you live and who loves you more than anything, you don’t see him.”

At that very moment, Meshulam gave o start and suddenly began to yell. Was he already able to have a nightmare? Jwm stood up to walk him, swing him, and reassure him. It was hard for him to come back; he choked in his fear, he panicked, then he emerged, slowly, slowly, caught his mother’s eyes, and was reassured. She could give him his camel’s milk.

ZHEN’S SECRET

They finally arrived in Edessa, today’s Urfa, in what is now Turkey, Yair was free of his obligations to Zhen, who was so satisfied with the work of his guide and translator, and, most of all, perhaps; for his listening, that he gave him enough silver coins to purchase a good mule, pay the right-of-passage and caravan fees and continue his odyssey independently. In addition, he allowed him to keep a copy of his translations.

“But where do they come from, these texts that seem coherent, as if they came from a single author or at least from a single tradition!”

“They are taken from a poem composed by a certain Loa-Tse. Almost nothing is known about him. It is said that he was an astronomer of the court of an emperor. He is supposed to have taught the emperor a way to share his powers by encouraging independence of thought in his kingdom. Obviously, the emperor didn’t agree and threatened him since his counsels did nothing more than put his life in danger; he left in secret on the back of an ox. He was going to leave this country when a border guard demanded a bribe if he gave it, he could go on his way. Having neither gold nor silver, the wise man wrote a small poetic treatise in exchange for his freedom. After that, he disappeared on his Ox, leaving no trace.”

Yair immediately thought of Atar. He smiled to himself, for that man wouldn’t be able now to imprison Chinese wisdom in his cemetery of books. He thought of Maimon, and his smile turned into joy. He felt as if it was he who had somehow organized this meeting with Zhen from  Lamayuru all the way to Edessa.

“But you Zhen, who are you? Because when you calligraphed the Chi, Heaven’s touch, and the Earth’s reaction, you finally proved what the nature of the human being is. By suspending the bird above the fish hidden in the water, you showed us the motor of life. While I was seeking inspiration in the memories of thought, my dear parchment scrolls, you, by making yourself a child, caught it in a butterfly net.”

“I do manage to catch a few butterflies, but I assure you, I am only a wandering clown! I tripped over the baby we found, I don’t even see what the Chi is tying around me. There are ten thousand wandering dancers like me, but only one can unite himself to the Way, and when he achieves this, no one can do anything against him.”

“But he, could the do anything against the emperor?”

“He alone could bring down the emperor, but like a peasant, by making himself a servant of the nourishing earth and a channel for the radiant Heaven.”

“So why do you sell those texts which will only serve as decoration in rich people’s villas?”

“Sincerely, I don’t know, I walk, and that intoxicates me. I say to myself: ‘He who has eyes can see, he who has a nose can small, he who has clothes of silk can perceive the wind!’”

“So I solute you, Zhen; soon, you will conquer the mountain of peace.”

“And you, Yair, where are you going?”

“I’m going down into the valley.”

THE GIFT

After the separation, as Zhen was slowly being transformed into memory, Yair and Jem passed into bittersweet sadness, like an unripe pomegranate to nibble slowly. They couldn’t break the silence. They had nothing to do except take care of Meshulam. This was fortunate because if not, the Pharisee would have become too nostalgic. Though Zhen was always a little distant, thanks to him, the passage over mountains and deserts had seemed like a brief evening in good company.

After leaving the caravan, they no longer had any supply of fresh milk; they had to find it right there and then. They met a shepherd who led them to a flock of goats, a source of fresh milk at last. The milk would keep for several hours in the skin of a male goat, then it would clot and be dangerous to give to a baby that young; they had to wait and not leave Edessa until two days later, the market day, so as to buy a young, strong mule who would be a good companion for quite a while, and perhaps a lactating goat as well.

Edessa, the birthplace of Abraham, harbors the tomb of Sarah, his wife. They went there. But it was only a commemorative site, probably invented to attract caravans. The business was doing very well because the caravans really did make a detour to visit the famous site. They came from Judea, Egypt, from Rome, but also from the great deserts of Arabia: most of the Arab tribes really did believe that they were descended from Hagar. The servant who had given Abraham his

first son, Ishmael, of the invitation of his lawful wife. Abraham had predicted that he would have ‘his hand against every man and every hand against him. When Sarah, jealous, changed her mind, Abraham drove Hagor away and, in so doing, his own son. This terrible repudiation legitimized fratricidally that was deaf and, above all, interminable; this is why they began to call Ishmael, Hogar’s son, the ‘onager’. An onager is an engine of ancient warfare, an enormous catapult built to take down off the ramparts, even those of Jerusalem. So Edessa was visited a

lot; people enjoyed renewing resentment by remembering the repudiation.

Among the merchants who profited from that manna, Yair found an old Jewish apothecary who hoped to sell not only medicines but also paper and his talent as a copyist. Yair observed him. The man was concentrating so much on his reading that he wasn’t paying attention to anyone and sold nothing; after a moment, Yair, convinced of his honesty, addressed him. As they talked, they realized that they had a mutual friend: Maimon. All at once, the apothecary seemed captivated, Yair gave him all the copies they had.

“I have nothing to pay you with”, the man said.

“You don’t owe me anything. I received these texts free of charge, I’m giving them to you free of change. Never sell my translations; keep them with you, and take good care of them. Sell only the copies you make and for no more than the price of your time because no one should enrich himself from what has real value. Only what doesn’t have real value can be sold and bought.”

“But you don’t want to sell copies? You could at least buy clothing worthy of a Pharisee.”

“I’m returning to Galilee; my poverty is my best insurance against robbers, I’m satisfied in entrusting you with these scrolls contained in cases that are just too beautiful. Here, they won’t be stolen.”

The man was astonished. He immediately dived into the texts. He was so fascinated in going from one quotation to the other that at the moment when he raised his eyes to think his benefactor, Yair, had disappeared.

This detour had tired them out, Jem couldn’t walk for long, even less while carrying a baby slung across her shoulder; Yair didn’t have much energy either. 

THOMAS

The market day arrived, and the bazaar filled up. In the middle of all this noise, a man was addressing a small group, Yair and Jem approached them because there was shade and a reservoir of water. The Pharisee didn’t pay any attention to the man’s speech until the heard the expression “Jesus the living one, then he recognized him as Thomas, a Gallliean, the one called Didymus in Greek because he had a twin. He was one of those who had walked with Mary of Magdala and the others in all the Carpenter’s comings and goings after the quit work to care for the sick and comfort the poor. Yair wasn’t much interested in his speech, which reminded him too much of the Jewish arguments about the Messiah. Thomas stopped talking, and stored off the bareheaded rabbi, who was staring at him too; he recognized him and went up to him after excusing himself to his listeners.

“Jaire, the one who used to be the leader of the Capernaum Synagogue, is it really you? We thought you were lost!”

“I didn’t die, I was simply delayed, quite a long time, as you can see from my face …”

“It’s at least twenty years ago that Ari’s caravan returned.”

“Thirty years, you mean.”

“What happened to your daughter, the one who was resurrected?”

“Here she is.”

He turned toward her, but she wasn’t there anymore. Wish Meshulam slung across her shoulder, she went us to a boy who was selling donkeys. She was finding it difficult to hold her big baby. A woman noticed this and helped her. Yair pointed her out so that Thomas could look at her.

“A Syrian?”

“No, the girl beside her.”

“Wait! I’m talking about your daughter, who must be a little over forty.”

”That is her.”

Thomas didn’t go any. Further, he thought the old man was confused on account of his age and the hardships of his travels. Yair spoke directly:

“Thomas, tell me, what happened? For what season was the Carpenter crucified? Did he ever join the Zealots?”

“Never, if you had seen him denounce the temple priests, though, you would have said to yourself: ‘That man is rushing into a rain of arrows.’ The priests asked the procurator Pilate to

condemn him to death. Pilate didn’t want to. Jesus used, in his defense, the words son of God, which is obviously the consecrated formula for speaking of Caesar; for this procurator, this was an intolerable impiety, above all an affront to Roman power, so he acceded to the Sanhedrin’s

demand.”

“What had he said about the Sadducees to make the Sanhedrin hate him?”

“He called them ‘whitened sepulchers. You know them: for them, a corpse represents absolute impurity, and prostitutes are the ones who whiten their faces with powder. Imagine their reaction to Pilate, he said: ‘Don’t fear me! It is true that I am the son of God, so I am returning to my father by myself and not because you are condemning me.’”

“That wasn’t the sort of thing that would help him. Pilate no doubt thought he was insane.”

“Yair, we are all the sons of God because the father’s creator lives in us; through the bond of faith, we commune with him.”

“I agree, how could he say ‘I am returning to my father by myself’, as if it were he and not this procurator who decided he should die? Wasn’t it then a kind of suicide?”

“No suicide is an act of despair, while the one you call the Carpenter accepted dying in order to wash away our sins through his blood.”

“How could his death erase our sins? Isn’t it a horrible injustice and monstrous cruelty for a father to deliver his son to torture the sin of others?”

“Imaging, Jaire, think for a moment, belief for a moment: that man really is the son of God; we all are, except that he truly identified himself with his father. He passed through all the stages

of descent and all the stages of ascension. At that moment; he is the father; so it is the father as much as the son who suffers on the cross. They suffer from our sins as much as they suffer for our sins.”

“Tell me in what way suffering can cure …”

“Don’t interrupt me, you have to follow my reasoning from start to finish; imagine Jesus, think like him for a moment: he is the Creator incarnate on earth; he created this world. Put yourself in his skin. He looks. Around him, the sees sick people, invalids, beggars, and convicts. He sees slavery, war; torture … Suffering everywhere. And this takes place in the world he created … You can understand the shock! You made min, and you have also made the conditions he lives in, and that’s his situation!”

“You think that the Carpenter chose a death that cruel because he felt guilty about his creation!”

“What are you saying? You don’t understand a thing! You’ve traveled too much, « your mixed up!”

“It’s true, I don’t see things like I used to. Perhaps what we call ‘the original sin’ that of our fathers and of the first man is only a break in the bond of trust. Perhaps it’s as if a son, after breaking the plow on a rock, gets reprimanded by his father; nothing more than that’s no indiscriminate punishment, just some advice to keep from making the same mistake. What is more serious than the blunder, the son loses sight of the fact that his father still loves him and will love him forever and unconditionally. He imagines that he rejects him. He imagines that he is the author of a great sin and is being punished by his father. So he runs away from home. He feels

even more guilty. At some point, he imagines that he is worthy of the worst punishments. He inflicts a terrible life on himself, a long journey in the desert. This is us, this is our people. It might be that the Carpenter simply wanted us to recall that the Creator’s love is for above our fears, our guilt, and the foolish things we do because of that feeling.”

“Thomas kept his mouth half open as if he were unable to react. A moment later, he got up: 

“Yair, you’re stronger than me.”

With that adieu, he left him, returned to his place on the edge of the fountain, and resumed his speech where it had left off. Yair listened to him until the end, the preacher disappeared afterward with the crowd.

Later, Thomas didn’t try to meet the Pharisee he had known and no longer recognized; yet, Yair’s word did not remain completely sterile. When the left Edessa, he went to Nisibis in Adiabene, then continued his way to Taxila. All during his journey, he heard about the erudite Jew and his daughter. From Taxila, he went as for as the South of India, where he gathered a small community around himself. Since the people of India already laid a great emphasis on sins and punishments, he spoke to them about the love of God instead.

Jem was still next to the young boy. The Syrian woman was carrying Meshulam. The boy had brought them to his father and Jem observed the donkeys for sale. She was struck by a female whose brown cross on her gray back gave her an irresistible charm. There was a kind of sadness around her eyes that disappeared in a blade of mischievousness right in the center of her square pupils. Her enormous ears pivoted joyfully as if she were in the middle of a great comedy.

“My daughter, that female is too young,” Yair told her. “She isn’t for us.”

“Let me be, I’m going to take care of it; the boy told me that she’s still giving some milk because she lost her little one a week ago.”

“The female demonstrated, by her motions, that she wanted to get loose.”

“So let’s take her!” Yair concluded, “We’ll call her Aliza, ‘joy’; that’s how she won us over.

BEYOND THE STARS

Aliza gave her milk with no hesitation. But it was too late, the goat-skin gourd was contaminated, no doubt about that. Meshulam was afflicted with severe diarrhea and a burning fever. Since they had already left Edessa somewhat late in the morning with a rather slow caravan that was already settling down for the night, Yair had rented a horse and immediately set out for the city; he wanted to wake up the apothecary to whom he had given the treasure from China. He felt sure he could save the child, who was still vigorous in spite of his episodes of colic and fever.

He cried so loud that Jem had been driven out of earshot of the Caravaners, who wanted to sleep. The night was mild and magnificent, Leaning on Aliza, who was huddled in the yellow grass, she watched over her baby, who struggled at times and cried loudly, and at other times slept from exhaustion. She stuck her hand into the water jar to hydrate her little one. He

drank hardly anything at all between his desperate cries and his periods of torpor.

In the middle of the night, he was doing better. He had calmed down: he had just drunk several sips of water that his momma slipped into his mouth in her folded hand. He had even smiled. He had searched for the game of the one who was his life, and it was difficult because his eyes were still blurred, covered with tears, worry, and anxiety. Finally, he had caught her pupils, had captured them; in smiling, he had driven off all the mists of fear, and now she, too, smiled as much as the stars in the black sky.

She had never seen a look so limpid and relaxed, as sure of itself, and plunged so deeply in her; a lover after making love, one might have said, or at least that is what she imagined, she who had never seen a lover after love is dune. It must resemble a face absorbed and pacified, a clear lake mirroring a transparent sky; the lover remains in his place, but occupies all of space, absorbs all of the time; he is simply present, convinced that from now on, his presence will suffice. Eyes alone penetrate without effort, they perturb nothing, they turn nothing upside down, and they inundate space with an infinitely subtle fluid we call “presence”.

Neither one left the other ever again, drowned in their mingled presence.

Another crisis took place: the belly was hard as a rock, and the infant yelling louder than a slave being tortured. From ears to toes, the mother’s entire body was contracted like a single living wound. Spasms followed; on either side, he, in spite of his pain, perhaps because of it, sought her eyes. One might have said they were two little leaves shiny with dew probing the air in search of the first rays of morning. The rays were no longer there. The closed eyelids, covered with water and his mama’s sweat, dripped but did not open. His mother retreated behind a shield so as not to die before him. He grabbed a handful of hair and pulled as hard as he could, so hard that he tore the fabric of distance. He erased all of the space. The doors opened once again. ”Mama!!” cried a voice from inside his heart. He seemed to find nothing but despair in his mother’s panic-stricken look, so he shut up, stopped struggling and tossing, made the air tremble with livid suffocation, and he sank.

She realized that if she didn’t calm down, she would lose him. It was then that she felt behind her head a gentle hand, but a warm and heavy one. She turned around: Yair had no doubt returned with the medicine. No! It was emptiness, a perfectly translucent emptiness through which nothing could be seen but the eternally tranquil stars. And yet her heart stopped beating not through excessive contractions or a fatal relaxation; no! Rather than beat and hammer in her chest, her heart began to the wharf, a boat that has ceased to strike the wharf, a boat that has gone off into the distance and that now follows the movement of quiet waves that lift and lower the burden of anxieties with the perfect regularity of a great windless tide. A heart that no longer beats by itself, by the movement of another, of an intense fluid that arrived and took over from a heart that couldn’t take anymore. Inhabited by her big brother, the mother could emerge.

She turned toward her baby; he began to suck this new gaze eagerly – as if it were a breast overflowing with milk. He was drinking his mother’s substance, and his mother did not dry up; it was the milk of the moon and the stars that were flowing through her. She even felt as if her breasts were really filled with life and this made her belly move.

Aliza moved a little, stretched her feet, spread her big head out on the grass, and went back to sleep with a whistling yawn. This made Jemouna smile and calmed the infant. He had harpooned his mother’s gaze and taken it with him in his dreams.

The boat was pitching on the Lake of Tiberias. The sky was clear, it was night, there was no moon, and the stars sparkled like diamonds. Mashulam was three now, his hair had grown blond and was curly. He clapped his hands in a little water that had been thrown into the bottom of the boat to keep the fish caught that morning alive. Jemouna was alone with him.

They had returned to Galilee with no difficulty. The comedies brought from Edessa had completed the healing work that had already begun. On the Sea of Galilee, the air was so mild, neither dry nor cold. She was alone with her little boy and didn’t remember the circumstances

that had led her to venture out on the lake in the heart of the night. Meshulam was trying to catch little fish in the bottom of the boat: not succeeding, ho clapped harder on the water, splashed himself, and laughed.

Yair shook her shoulder.

“Jem, Jem, wake up!”

Meshulam wasn’t moving anymore. His eyes remained fixed on her. He was smiling peacefully.

They stayed like that for a long time. The caravan got up. They had to leave.

A terrifying cry paralyzed the departure for an instant. The mother and child looked at each other.  Aliza set off to follow the dromedaries. Yair remained silent, sad enough to die. He knew.

Three days later, the baby was buried at the oasis of Mahalle, wrapped in the prayer shawl that had fed him. 

THE LAKE OF TIBERIAS

GALILEE AT LAST

When they arrived at Capernaum, they were exhausted. No one in the village recognized them. Both of them were visibly weakened; he resembled an old Arab, she in mourning and pale as a candle, a beggar in the streets of Jerusalem. Their clothes were falling to pieces.

When they entered their house, a man come to question them because they feared they might be robbers or intruders. The man was not convinced by what Asher Yair said and went to seek the village elder, who was famous for his great memory. This man succeeded in reading through the wrinkles, the features belonging to the former head of the synagogue. Then, when he turned toward Jemouna, he nearly fell sitting down on the edge of the well, for he thought her had lost the sense of time that he could no longer distinguish past from present: The little girl hadn’t changed from the day when he saw her dying, just as thin, just as pale, just beautiful.

Seeing his astonishment, Yair said to him: 

“It’s my granddaughter, I’m a grandfather now, and the return was difficult.”

The old man was reassured. He sent two servants to help the Pharisee, because the house was falling into ruin in spite of some efforts by the neighbors, who had rebuilt the roof. They put the main room pretty much in order and brought food, the essential items for cooking and eating, as well as appropriate clothing.

On the following Sabbath, all the little town had assembled at the synagogue, and at the end of the prayer and the readings, they wanted to hear the old Pharisee. They presented him with a freshly woven tallith so that he could speak in truth. After reading a passage from Isaiah, the placed his tallith on his shoulders and looked at his public, but wasn’t a good communicator; his voice was too weak, so a man took it upon himself to repeat in a loud voice what Yair had said in a trembling one. He didn’t speak of Ardashir at Hamadan, nor of Atar

or Yasatis, nor of Gautah of Akhal, nor even about Srinagar or Lamayuru; he didn’t speak about Buddha nor about the earth of the ascension to word peace. He said nothing about Zhen or the Chi. He didn’t speak of certain pains too deep or certain joys too inexplicable. He spoke about his only child, the one that the Carpenter had awakened. He spoke of this as if that girl was not Jem but Jem’s mother. The people filled in the gaps in what he said; as they understood it, the mother probably died in giving birth, and that is why the girl food his mother’s first name. He recounted his journey like a story that could be put alongside others and slowly forgotten as early as the other. He wanted to close his book.

The new head of the synagogue was not yet forty. He organized a little party, and life went on its way.

A few weeks later, Mark passed through Capernaum. Catching sight of Jemouna at the well while her father was talking nearby, he was flabbergasted. She recognized him, too, in spite of the changes the years had brought. Realizing that she shouldn’t have shown, by her look, that

she recognized him, that this could betray the secret of her age, she turned her head away as if she had been mistaken about him. This didn’t deter Mark, who sat down beside her.

“Is it really you?” He asked point-blank, driven by emotion.

“How could I hide it from you?”

She was so happy to meet her old friend from the Zedees’ boatyard, they talked for a long time as if they were still in the boat on the Lake of Tiberias, captivated by the Carpenter. Mark related what had happened to Jesus.

By some mirage of God, Yair, too, went on and on, talking with the village elder! Then Mark, who was in a hurry to continue his journey, promised to say nothing of what he had seen; he had to join a small group bound for Babylon, where Peter was. He had become one of the leaders of those who still loved Jesus and affirmed that they had seen him after his death.

THE OPPOSITE CORNERS OF ISRAEL

People were infinitely nice to the old man and the weak-legged girl, who had probably walked too much! The women brought meals from time to time, they did their best for the little girl to regain her strength; she got some color on her face and gained a little weight but couldn’t walk any further than around the house. No one sought to uncover either the secret or the mystery of the truth. There was, however, something deeply troubling in the face of the old man who had crossed so many deserts and the direct look of the twelve-year-old girl who shone

like the dawn.

There were, moreover, already too many truths to flee here in Galilee on the route of the Romans going to Jerusalem with horses and swords and returning with chests filled with gold and silver; there were also too many cruel and shocking truths about victims, accomplices, and traitors; there was no room to add any others.

At Capernaum, as elsewhere around the lake, fear could not be hidden, a feeling of anxiety, a state of vigilance like that of a mouse when the scent of a cat suddenly crosses the silence. That anxiety infiltrated ordinary secrets: a son had returned from Jerusalem much earlier than planned; Roman legions had been seen arriving from Damascus; others were disembarking at Caesarea; a caravan had been dispersed in the south of the Syrian desert, such and such a family wasn’t thinking of going to Jerusalem for the feast of Passover … A revolt, universal this time, was brewing; an enormously dangerous foothold for the people’s salvation or, on the contrary, for its annihilation. Some were secretly preparing for combat, others were preparing to leave, but the majority were buried deep in oblivion, the tragedy they sensed was coming. They had to live.

Several sought the opinion of the old caravaner and former chief of the synagogue. As they did this, they gradually revealed their positions. By speaking very little and listening to a lot, Asher Yair watched the opposite corners of the house of Capernaum being drowned in front of him. He distinguished those who feared massacres and dreamed of leaving from those who agreed with the Zealots gathered in Jerusalem to plan the revolt. Among those in favor of the Zealots, he differentiated those on the side of John of Gischala from those who preferred Eleazar, son of Simon. Among those who wanted above all to live, there were those who wanted to flee into the Roman Empire and those who wanted to push on past the Empire’s limits, these people inquired whether soft places existed, receptive Jewish communities in Persia or even in India. Between the four corners of the town’s political house, many simply denied the situation and hoped that the storm would pass without too much damage; the same fear explained a multitude of positions.

This strong division multiplied the rumors, the malicious gossip, and the calumnies; all this come to accentuate the oppositions and swell the old hatreds; they weren’t really opinions anymore because then they could have been discussed; it had become questions about identity about one’s vision of ‘Yahweh’s people,’ for some, Israel is teaching; for the others, it is a nation. A teaching should travel like the wind; a nation should be rooted like a tree. A teaching has no need to defend itself; it is true or false; a nation is weakened as soon as it loses its cultural link with the ground that feeds it.

The principal question, the one that cut the pain in two, crouched at the bottom of all these anxieties: Were Israel and Yahweh reconciled? If that were true, the Zealots were right, and they would conquer, for the differences in strength between the oppressed and the oppressor would be equalized by Yahweh himself; in the opposite case, God’s anger would use Rome to punish the people, the victory of annihilation would necessarily be a revelation of the truth. That guilt was repressed, and no one wanted to unearth it.

As always in Israel, military questions were a matter of religion, religion was a mother of morality, and morality was never anything other than conformity with the written Law so that when all was said and done, victory depended on observable obedience to that Law’s clearly enunciated dictates. Mutual surveillance turned into suspicion, the sin of Israel, the social poison of peoples of writing and the law.

Yair felt leagues away from the society he had left years before; now, he lived in a culture so different that he could no longer say anything to his own people. Moreover, was he living in a culture? Wasn’t it instead a vision of the world so personal that it had become uncommunicable? He was no longer the citizen of one country or another but the citizen of his conscience alone.

He often shed tears of compassion for a people crushed beneath a law of lead written on two rolls of parchment. Here, all the free spirits and even dealers in foreign ideas saw themselves driven to the most total powerlessness, Yair saw the drama coming; he complained or was silent without the least hope of any effect. When you love people, that position is simply tragic: Antigone is walled in by turned backs.

From time to time, like any old man seeking peace and quiet more than anything else, Yair threw a few pails of water to dampen the fire. Was it worth it to kill each other for an idea? How much can bloodshed, suffering, and deaths make the spirit of truth advance? Isn’t war just stubbornness? How can an idea – fixed in writing – evolve to word greater truth? Isn’t oral tradition the guide to written tradition? Isn’t God’s creative word a verb? Isn’t the greatest beauty of the Torah its poetry rather than its prescriptions?

However, at the place where he was living, Yair was at too great a distance; he couldn’t say anything except perhaps to subtract where people added in order to add where they subtracted. Moreover, that is all that is expected of an old man.

THE BONE OF ISRAEL

He went to his parent’s tomb one night and opened the little treasure cave. Everything was there. He pulled the cord where he had hung the camel shoulderblade he had written Yahweh’s first commandment on, the one that no one had known how to correctly translate. But the cord had been gnawed by a rodent: this bone had fallen to the bottom of the crevice! Yair smiled. In any case, the ear of Israel wouldn’t be able to understand it. It is written: ‘I am the Eternal. your God, go out of Egypt, go out of the house of slavery, they will always repeat: ‘I am the Eternal, your God, He, who has made you go out of Egypt, of the house of slavery.’ They will never recognize that they are still the people on the move, closed off in fear and guilt. If God Himself came down from the mountain to command them to leave the country of victim and vengeance, they would once more Condemn Him to death.

Jem got her strength back, enough to walk a little, laugh, talk, and play with the children. Relying on what they saw, the women treated her like a little girl, even adding an extra measure of indulgence on account of her physical weakness. For them, this weakness was naturally associated with a certain mental deficiency so when Jem said something, the women didn’t understand, It was obviously because it was something stupid a child would say. Jem didn’t do anything to disabuse them of this.

This allowed her to be placed in the middle of a small group of children, and that was enough to make her happy: two boys became friends of hers. They put her in the middle of the courtyard at the Zebedees’. There was no one there, but the new generation who had not known the Carpenter directly, and most of his disciples had distorted this wisdom to the point of making it a strange, sacrificial, and messianic sect. One more sect of Judaism, instead of awaiting the messiah, awaited his return. Do we really need that? That is what they said.

A Jew of Tarsus named Saul, a Roman citizen, had made himself the champion of Jesus, the Messiah, the Christ. This man had never known the Carpenter while he was alive. He had mixed the stories he had heard with his own mystical experience, a singular and extraordinary one, it must be said, through this mixture, the had welded the idea of a messiah bearing the sins of the world to the idea of glory so dear to the Greeks and the Romans. No one in Capernaum recognized the Carpenter of Nazareth in Saul’s Christ.

The majority had only good memories of the Carpenter before he went to excoriate the priests and the Romans at Jerusalem. His speeches of the Temple, really! It was like going and making funny faces in front of a tiger. They forgive him. He had been sincere but so naïve. He had built very good boats, and the boatyard prospered today thanks in part to him. Above all, they avoided talking about it.

The children, those at the Zebedee boatyard, were sheltered from this adult nonsense. Ten as twelve gathered these; Jem taught them Latin.

One day a boy asked, right out of the blue:

“Tell us the story of Jesus, the Carpenter.”

Jem was astonished because someone of his apparent age obviously wouldn’t know any more about it than they did. Who had pushed that child to ask that question with such confidence? The child’s look was so sharp, mischievous even; she made a guess.

“I believe, little fox, that you know more than I do about that subject!”

All the children burst out laughing, she hadn’t fallen into the trap. But they didn’t explain the trap.

That very evening, she went to meet the boy’s father. He took her into her goat stable amidst the noise of the animals so that no one could hear them. Since it was milking time, the man handed has a milk pail so that she could help him milk.

“You really are the one the most awake from the dead, aren’t you?”

The man showed her a face so sincere that she couldn’t deny his words.

“Don’t worry, I won’t say anything because I have my own secret. He delivered me too, but unlike you, regrets are making me old. A secret is weighing on me … I feel condemned to a silence I just can’t bear.”

The word silence made them both smile because it certainly wasn’t true of the goats of milking time. The father spoke a little louder; they followed each other closely, milking side by side.

“But you, Jemouna, you can answer my question, no doubt about it. Listen carefully to what my father has told me many times because when I was only thirteen, I had fits, I lost my memory, I woke up and didn’t remember a thing. And then: Jesus came down from the mountain. There was a lot of agitation.

“Wait, what mountain? What village do you come from?”

“A little summit north of mount Hermon. We lived in a small village very close to Caesarea Philippi.”

“Banijas?”

“You know it!”

“We came back that way, my father and I. One of the most beautiful villages there, at the foot of the Iturea mountains. As we approached it, we saw wooly ibexes running almost vertically on the cliffs …”

“You don’t lack memory! Listen. You know where the well is; we were there. A crowd had just arrived from Caesarea, hoping for cures. Jesus asked: “What’s happening?” My father answered: “Master, I have my son here, a deaf-and-dumb spirit gets hold of him, sticks his tongue to his palate, and throws him to the ground; my poor boy foams of the mouth, grinds his teeth and becomes stiff as a plank, I asked your disciples to do something, but they couldn’t do anything.” 

“Bring him to me,” Jesus said.

“You were standing with your mother some distance away?”

“That’s right: my father didn’t like people to see me. My mother brought me; I arrived in the middle of all these men looking at me, I went into convulsions, not crying out as the possessed usually do, but with my mouth half open, my tongue glued to my palate, my saliva foaming. These are the details that my father related. Jesus asked my father: ‘Since when has this been happening to him?’ He said: ‘Since he was very small, he doesn’t speak, he bends over double. He fears himself; for pity’s sake, save him!’ The master questioned my father again: ‘Is he always mute like that?’ ‘Oh!’ my father answered, ‘he’s a good boy for all that; he doesn’t talk much, and he does everything you ask him to.’ ‘A true son of Israel,’ Jesus continued. Turning toward me, and with

authority, he said to me: ‘Get out of this house of slavery!’. He took my hand and led me to my mother.

“Were there other women around her?”

“No, she was a woman branded as an adulteress, but my father had asked that she be pardoned, and the council had granted that request.”

“And then?”

“I don’t know. My father’s story starts there.”

“When did you get your memory back?”

“I never remembered anything before the miracle. However, a few months later, I saw the master again; starting from that moment, I do remember, it was as if my life food had begun that day.”

“What did he say?”

“Nothing, just nothing.”

“But where were you?”

“At Jerusalem. My father and were in the crowd.”

“Before Passover?”

“Three days before.”

“You saw the Carpenter in front of the fortress while the crowd was yelling?”

That question made him forget to untie a goat, and she gave him a kick that almost upset the pail. They let her leave and went on to another.

“The Carpenter … I had forgotten that name. They had begun to call him the Christ, the Messiah, the King …”

“Your father?”

“Yes, and others; they treated him as a king. That doomed him.”

“Your father cried out to have Jesus rather than Barabbas released? It was Mark who told me that detail.”

“Imagine, my father and his friends were crying: ‘Release our King!’ Father had a brother with the Essenes, he associated with the Zealots; these formed a small group of believers ready to die for the Messiah. It was at this instance that Jesus noticed me in the crowd. He threw me a devastating glance that said: ‘Get out of here, my boy.’ I let go of my father’s hand, and I ran, crying and yelling; I fell. Starting from then, I remember, I have a life.”

The milking was finished; the goats quieted down, and they looked at each other for a moment.

“So, Athiman what is your question?” she asked.

“Oh yes! My question! Since the exact moment when Jesus looked at me, and I was able to take the thread of my life in my hand, everything frightens me. I am the worst coward in Israel. The master saved me, and I hide like a rabbit. My father is a martyr, and I, am a coward. I didn’t have the courage to teach the words of the one who delivered me, and I still don’t. I found Jerusalem. I’ve never gone back there. I stopped here, at Capernaum. I learned the fisherman’s trade, I met Leah, I got married; we have three children …”

“The people of Capernaum, have they ever questioned you? Has your father ever tried to get you back?”

“No, here at Capernaum, the people don’t know anything above what happened near Caesarea Philippi any more than they know that you are the one the Carpenters brought back from death. That’s what the miracle is: the broken bridge. It is as if I were on the other side of the fortress of Israel. My father has disowned me and disinherited me, he had fish to fry. My mother came to join me; she died a few months later, muter than I had been. My father gave his life as a hero on the cross, captured during an attack he had organized right in the heart of Jerusalem. I’m afraid. My question: ‘I’m afraid of men as soon as they begin to believe in a cause of a leader. I lie low out of fear in my easy life, I’m afraid of gatherings, of crowds, of mass movements. Why did Jesus look at me like that, ordering me to run away, while he himself was making his way toward horrible sufferings

for our salvation?”

“Who told you ‘for our salvation?”

“Mark himself when they came to Capernaum not so long ago. He isn’t the only one: all those who call themselves Christians say it. There is no greater love than to give your life to those you love.”

“Give your life, not get yourself killed. Ahiman, my dear Ahiman! My father and I have searched as far as the Orient for a man of peace and found him in Capernaum. All the men we encountered wanted to die: some for the gods, others for one goal, others by throwing themselves into the Universal Self, others for a people, and still others for an empire or for civilization; most, however just want to drown in the human moss, disappear in a crowd, will

imitate the others …”

“Isn’t this the true for the Masters: not disappear in a crowd, but disappear as a martyr to reappear as a king!”

“Tell me, Ahiman, why my friend Mark himself, as well as Peter, Andrew, and the others, except John perhaps, have understood nothing, to the point of making Jesus another prophet of sacrifice? Why do you think the Carpenter called you a ‘true son of Israel?’ When did he see you sick and mute and foaming?”

“I have no idea.”

”“You were the perfect portrait of Israel, suffocating from obedience, forming with violence.”

“Israel, suffocating from repressed violence!”

“Ahiman, do we all have to kill each other just to prove to others and ourselves that we are above fear? Fear keeps you here, with the goats and with me.”

“I am afraid, Jem, you don’t understand, I’m always afraid …”

“Bravo! You’re afraid of suffering and death like all the animals God created with us, like all gone men who want to enjoy life and live delightfully in peace. You’re afraid of the violence of men. Still, you’re not afraid of life, and you’re not afraid of the woman who lives at your side, you’re not afraid of your children, of your goats, of the grass; you are just afraid of your brothers who can stone a woman just based on a rumor, the Carpenter brought you out of your father’s slavery, of Israel’s slavery. You live, you love, you father children, and you take care of them. You are the Law of Yahweh; to go out of slavery.”

YAIR’S INVESTIGATION

Without showing too great a curiosity, you asked questions to know what happened to those who had followed the Carpenter up to the time of his death and later claimed to have seen him alive at different times and places. Where were they now, since they couldn’t find them in Galilee?

One thing intrigued Yair when his daughter returned to life; she had the same body as before. Those who believed in resurrection thought that the same thing had happened to Jesus, a sort of extreme recovery; that is why these persons insisted on the fact that no one had found his

body. But the witnesses said that the resurrected Jesus passed through walls, disappeared, and reappeared as if he could materialize and dematerialize himself like an angel. This question intrigued Yair because, in the end, what had happened to Jem was just a postponement of death. Resurrection, the true resurrection, can’t be just a reprieve! Only a free soul can assume one form or another; sometimes matter, and sometimes light can live forever.

Despite that ambiguity, the enthusiasm of those who said they had encountered Jesus after his death was impressive. They related that James Zebedee had gone to Egypt, and embarked for Betica, continued on to Gades and even further north. It was sold he had returned secretly to Palestine, going discreetly from place to place among sympathizers, to testify to Jesus’s resurrection. No one knew where he was exactly, probably in Judea, perhaps even in Jerusalem, He wasn’t afraid anymore. His brother John was rumored to have taken refuge in Ephesus with the mother of Jesus and Mary of Magdala. The two women had died in that city; it was said.

But it was also said that Magdalene wasn’t dead and had sailed toward Massilia; she was said to be living in a cave as if Jesus were at her side, and she felt no fear. John subtly adapted his master’s trackings so that they would be comprehensible in the environment of Greek culture. What struck the people was how carried away by the joy he was when he spoke of the one who had loved him more than the others. He was afraid of nothing. Just about everywhere in Palestina, but mainly in Jerusalem, Peter had tried to persuade the people that Jesus was resurrected; that

he lives forever. He finally went to Rome; in Caesar’s eye, he wasn’t afraid of anything either. Andrew had left Palestine long before him; he had been seen in Mesopotamia, in Bithynia, in Thrace, in Seytha, and even at Byzantium, then he had joined Peter in Rome, where the two men

were said to have been crucified without feeling any pain or anxiety. By what miracle had these witnesses not simply fallen into terrible despair because, in the end, all that had only been a shattered dream? Nothing had changed in the world, and their master had quite simply lost his bet on a cross like all the rest of the empire’s dissidents.

In Galilee and in Judea, silence had won and kept on winning. People were satisfied with a few good memories from the time when the Nazarian was mentally sound. No one but James, the brother of Jesus, publicly kept alive the memory of his words and actions. James thought of his older brother as the one who fulfills the Tarah, an excellent Jew, a model. He believed that every disciple of Jesus had to first be of the Jewish religion, be circumcised if he were a male, be married to a Jew if she were a woman; and after that, he or she could adhere to the teachings of the master, which consisted of obeying God’s commandments not only in appearance but in all sincerity.

Recently, he was said to have been stoned by the order of the high priest. Was Jesus only a reformer of Judaism as Buddha was a reformer of Hinduism and Zoroaster the reformer of the Persian religion?

Yair remained undecided. He asked Himself how the workers from Nazareth would have answered his question: How to stop the violence? Would he have proposed a more effective route than Isaiah’s, Zoroaster’s, Buddha’s, or even Lao-Tse’s? In Judea, would Buddha have appeared before the Jewish and the Roman power to rebuff them in no

uncertain terms, demanding that they change their thoughts, their feelings, and their conduct, of the risk of his own crucifixion? Was Jesus the one who positions himself in front of the arrow because he is the only one able to let it strike him without collapsing?

How can we know? Who could have known the man of Nazareth well enough to answer? Who had been present at his lessons?

THE BLIND MAN

Yair asked questions but found no one who could go beyond anecdotes and hearsay. 

One day when he had gone to the synagogue in Bethsaida to listen to a Pharisee colleague expatiates on the way to recognize the Messiah, they told him about an old blind man, not much younger than himself, and who was thought to have been cured by the Carpenter but was said to have become blind again after an accident. The invalid almost always stood next to the fountain and lived from the synagogue’s good charity; no one knew if he had any family! This mind had been deranged since the shock of his healing so that no one paid attention to what be told; besides, he hadn’t talked of all for years. Yet there had been one exception; one day, when the Carpenter had passed through there, he was supposed to have healed him, and it was thought the blind man had seen the light for a time, even kept the villages sheep, but he had tripped, nearly died and become blind again. The leader of the Bethsaida synagogue obviously didn’t believe this story; he had heard it told, and curiously enough, all the witnesses were dead.

Jair lingered at the fountain until noon, the gun had driven everyone away. He was alone. The whole village seemed to be asleep.

As he was leaving, he realized that a man was seated between two sycamores, so immobile that he could be mistaken for the bush behind him. The old man seemed to be sleeping, but as soon as Yair moved, the noise made him straighten up slightly. The Pharisee went up to him to

talk.

“Would you be the blind man the Carpenter cured?”

“Man, you aren’t from here. You don’t know it? No one says a word to me.”

“You don’t see me. I am from Capernaum. I’m about your age, I know the Carpenter, I went off on a journey for over thirty years.”

“Did he touch you?”

He worked at the Zebedees, he was there at my wedding, and he cured my daughter.”

“He touched your daughter, but you, did the touch you?”

“I don’t remember.”

“How can you say that you do not remember?”

“Is that so important? Tell me what happened to you.”

“Are you coming on your own accord?”

“Yes.”

“Why are you questioning me?”

“Don’t be afraid of me, I simply realize that I know nothing about him. When he left my home after curing my daughter, I didn’t even thank him, I didn’t try to see him again or try to find out what had happened to him …”

“And now you want to know if it touched me, how they touched me, and why.”

“Yes, thirty years later.”

“You are the first. Do you know that!”

“The first?”

“Yes.”

“Is it possible? The witnesses … “

“There weren’t any witnesses. He took me outside the village. That happened away from everything.”

“You were blind; how did you recognize him?”

“He came to me. As usual, I was here! I don’t have the right to come any closer, they bring me something to drink, they give me something to eat, and I’m not deprived of anything.”

“At night?”

“I sleep in the hut my father built, at a distance, I was three when I became blind. My father built the hut later.”

“And your mother?”

“She had already died.”

“And your brothers, your sisters?”

“I don’t know where they are, I tell you, I’m blind. They don’t see me.”

Yair hadn’t realized to what degree misfortune, any kind of misfortune, was repugnant to Israel; it was like a sin, it must not be approached, it was on impurity, If he hadn’t been looking for information, he too wouldn’t have seen the unfortunate man, except to give him charity. He looked at him for a moment, the old man’s face was deeply tanned, and his bolding skull looked like hammered copper. Around his eyes, glossy and somewhat frightening, there wasn’t a single wrinkle: he obviously didn’t squint his eyes in the sun. Around his mouth, on the other hand, deep furrows tose toward powerful jawbones, hidden only in part by his sparse board. The muscles of this jaw were thickened from not speaking. A face that didn’t hide from the sun, only from men. “Tell me?” Yair asked.

 He began to shine as if he had just been told of the birth of a son.

“I was sitting right here. I heard people talking. A small crowd had gathered around the fountain. then there was a great silence and, in the silence, steps coming toward me. The man said to me: “What are you doing there? I answered him: ‘I have permission.’ He said to me: ‘Come with me; let’s go away a little to be more at ease because I saw you, and you remained quiet and silent, like a thirsty man who has given up drinking. Don’t give up. Don’t be resigned.’ He took my hand to help me get up and on his shoulder so I wouldn’t have any trouble following him. Do you understand?”

Yair didn’t answer.

“I see that you don’t understand, the blind man continued. So what. I’m telling you, I was there: he came up to me, he took my hand to get me up, and then he put it on my shoulder. As we walked, he asked me my name, it took me a while to remember it; I had only heard it two us three times in my life. “Gad”, I told him, “is yours the Fishel family?  » he asked me, ‘How do you know it? Who spoke to you about me?’ ‘No one spoke about you; that’s why I thought you were Fishel’s son’, I said to myself: ‘This man is very much alone, and yet he resists; I want to know his strength, his courage, and what makes him live. A man like that has certainly acquired a special value inaccessible to others.’ He clearly saw that I wasn’t understanding like you right now don’t understand anything of what I’m saying. So he continued speaking to me: ‘Imagine, Gad, you arrive from Nazareth. There is a man at the fountain of Bethsaida; they love him alone, they don’t speak to him, they never take an interest in him, and they don’t see him because they say he is blind. Even his father doesn’t come to see him. Women don’t look at him, he doesn’t have the right to touch their faces, these aren’t any children who come to play around him, they act as if he were free, and not even that because they seek a tree’s shade, but not his shadow. And yet that man still lives quietly, gently. He stays resolutely seated erect and with dignity next to the fountain; he honors every person who doesn’t come up to him, yes, he has what the people keep themselves from saying, he hears the words that would please him, but which never come to his cars: the unsaid words are deafening, and this man has not despaired of men nor of women. In your opinion, is there a prophet in all of Israel who has more value than he?”

I was unable to answer. ‘Gad, tell me, I want to know what you have done to grow, eat, drink, live, and even find a certain happiness in such a condition; tell me.’ I had nothing to tell him. Do you understand that you, the stranger? My life, I don’t know it, is a site inside me like a colt, forgotten in the stable. The colt has never leaped, nor run, nor freely grazed in a field of grass. He doesn’t even know that he is a young horse.”

“You mean that you have never seen anything of yourself because no one expected anything of you.”

“Exactly, should I tell him that when my mother died, when I was three, I was so frightened, I ran away so fast to get any from the unbearable sight of her body that I fell all the way down the cliff and woke up covered in blood next to her. They had laid me on the same bed; I smelled her odor but was disturbed by death, and I no longer saw anything: they thought I was dead. Should I tell him that, several years later, my father had taken me into a hut, telling me that the council of the synagogue had decided to take care of me and that from now on I absolutely had to learn to distinguish sounds, in order not to approach a citizen mistakenly? The only time I didn’t have to retreat was when someone come to bring me water and bread, and then I had to politely say thank you. Should I tell him that, to not go insane, I came here to hear people feel their presence?

He, all at once, touches me, takes my hand, and asks me who I am, and I had nothing to say. He insisted, he wanted to know what I had done to always be there, writing for what wasn’t given to me. Do you understand that?”

“No.”

“me neither, I didn’t understand. I asked him why he wanted to know what I was doing in order to live. It’s sat down one condition: ‘Can you swear to me not to speak to anyone about what I am going to tell you?’ I said to him: ‘Rabbi, I thought at that moment that he must lose a person educated in the Law and the prophets; no one ever asks me anything whatsoever.’ He stopped walking, turned toward me, took me by both shoulders, pressed me against him, and said to me: ‘Gad, when I was twelve, I went with my parents to Jerusalem, and when I saw the temple, the sacrifices, the animals with their throats cut open and burnt on the fire, I ran away. I would have liked to have been blind. But I saw and understood that I wasn’t at home in the Temple or anywhere in Jerusalem. I ran away and found myself among some olive trees. My parents had lost sight of me, and for a moment, I was alone among those trees like you’re alone between these two sycamores. Do you know what happened to me?’ ‘No!’ I exclaimed, so he went on like this; I felt or if I had dreamed of the olive trees before they ever existed, long before the formation of the earth, not of olive trees such as they are, but of something like trees, and even something like the whole landscape. I had already thought of that before it existed. Perhaps I had even drawn it in my mind before giving it life in my heart. That was my feeling because I felt like I was in my father’s workshop; I am a carpenter, you know; sometimes I look at the fruit of my work, and I find it surprising that it exists now when barely a month ago, it was only an image in my mind or to drawing sketched un a plank. I was there among the olive trees as if I were in a work that I conceived of, I was in my workshop, I was the carpenter of the whole creation. Honestly, stranger, that’s what he said to me.”

“Go on, I do not think you are surprising me all that much.”

“He said to me: ‘Gad, turn your face toward me. You do not see me but act as if you did see me as if you were in my place. Touch my face.’ I took a long time and went all around his face. I couldn’t grasp the expression. expression. It was the first face I touched, and it was the last. He continued speaking to me: ‘If I wanted and loved the landscape around me; it doesn’t surprise me all that much because I am here at home, in my creation. But you, Gad, it’s something different; you surprise me; you bring me joy so much greater, a superabundant joy because in what I have created, you have created yourself. So my joy is much, much greater than the joy of living in my creation, l assure you, a joy much greater than that one. I didn’t think that a man could have a moral strength like yours, a beauty like that, and the extraordinary power to make a thousand things that were never given to him live within himself. So you, Gad, you are a creator as much as I am because you have created yourself in pain. And he took me in his arms. I felt his tears running down my cheek. He was crying with joy. He was leaning over, he must have taken a little of the soil at his feet, at least that’s what I believe; the soil was a little moist because of his tears, and he put some directly on my eyes, then, as the left, he said to me: ‘We’ll see each other again soon, you’ll tell me what you have done with what life hasn’t given you. I will need you because, in my kingdom, no one has as much value as you; you will be a lamp, you will enlighten the blind, and you will open their eyes.”

“Did he give you back your sight?”

“Yes, l forgot! He had left; I went to the brook, I washed my eyes, and slowly I began to see. It was very blurred in the beginning, but after a few weeks, I was able to see the sheep and watch over them like the other shepherds.”

“Your father must have jumped for joy.”

“Everyone was afraid of me. My father was there somewhere, but how would I have been able to recognize him? I was three when I became blind, and he never introduced himself to me. The shepherds never came near. They were afraid as if they were seeing a ghost. The sheep, though, had no fear, and neither did the dogs. Several years later, still living alone, I learned of the death of the man who had cured me. They had crucified him like an evildoer. I fell into such a depression that, walking without looking where I was going, I tripped again and lost my sight. Everything became as it had been before. But yes! I live. I hold on, I hope. He will come. I am waiting for him. In all my life, two men approached me, he and you. And you, you now know at least  two people who have been touched by him: your daughter and me.”

That final word struck Yair’s chest so hard that it bounced back like a stone. He didn’t grasp its meaning. He returned to Capernaum, asking himself if there weren’t other witnesses who were neither blind nor insane.

THE GIRL FROM NAIN

At Nain, just before the death of John, the baptizer from Galilee, Yair finally found a witness to an event that had astonished everyone. He almost missed the meeting, they hadn’t told him that the woman didn’t hide her face behind a veil and that she left her hair unbound. They had simply told him that he would find her at the market, that she always bought the last dried fish before the merchants left; the transaction would be done without a single word, according to an unchanging habit.

Jair saw her leave but only reacted when he noticed that no one came after her. Fortunately for him, she departed slowly because her age required it. Even so, he didn’t manage to catch up with her because he walked even more slowly than she did. He was forced to call out: “Woman, would you wait for me?”

She turned around. He introduced himself, they went on and in the courtyard of her house that they really talked. Like the blind man, she too was surprised because no one had ever revisited that story which everyone told in his as her own way while forcing themselves to forget the Carpenter of Nazareth’s tragic end.

The old lady said:

“The master arrived at Nain on market day. A crowd was following him already. Have you ever seen a shepherd walk barefoot in the rocky hills?”

“You mean: as agile as an ibex?”

“That was how he was working. He walked as easily in the mountains as on level land. He seemed to be at home everywhere he went; he looked at us the way you would look at a friend, a brother, a sister; children ran toward him: he took them for a moment and embraced them. The village gathered the merchants grew silent; they knew that he was going to speak. He addressed someone, began a conversation that everyone listened to, then continued with another person, and then another. Each one wanted to tell him or them a part of his or her story and hear what he would say about it. He seldom addressed the whole crowd, but everyone listened to each one’s conversations. They got around the film and ate. Nothing else existed on earth. After some time, the village musicians began to play to give him some rest, he ate, and they danced.”

“What did he say?”

“He listened, he questioned; he told a story that could shed light on the situation or stimulate the imagination. It was strange because people confided in him while avoiding details which he somehow seemed able to discover, and add on in his head, then he gave general answers that each one applied to themselves with their own finishing touches that the master hadn’t said.”

“Yes, I can imagine what you’re saying. But even so, he must also have proposed a change in living, a way of behaving in the face of an increasingly untenable political situation.”

“The leader of the synagogue did question him, he or a member of the council. Ho almost always said something like: ‘Let us learn, first of all, to be good when we’re together. While we pass the time of day, while we sell each other our merchandise, and while we dance to the sound of the flute, our father in Heaven is filled with joy. Don’t we feel a profound joy when we’re together at a certain altitude, a certain climate of goodwill, a warm atmosphere? Let us cultivate that joy, the rest will come of itself, and unhappiness will go away because there’ll be no room for it.’ He spoke like a brother.”

“They told me that of Nain, a woman had loved him much more than one loves a brother.”

She hesitated in answering; she made up her mind and continued:

“The young widow! Yes, he cured her son of a fever that could have carried him off. You were the leader of the synagogue of Capernaum, weren’t you? You’re old enough for that.”

“I had already left for the Orient.”

“But you knew him.”

“Yes and no. If I saw him, I would certainly recognize him.”

“So?”

“What do you mean by ‘so’?”

“He was good-looking.”

“Yes, rather tall, especially strong shoulders, a worker’s arms, a wide hand …”

“You’re not a woman; that’s obvious! His face was riddled with tiny scars, from splinters, probably. Under his left eye, one angular mark was bigger than the others and made it look as if he were squinting a bit.  His look thrilled us. His straight nose, his rounded cheekbones, his elegant lips, and his chin just prominent enough all gave him a nobility out of keeping with the signs of his trade. He exuded a virility that left no woman indifferent. Yet he was gentle in every one of his acts; his voice all carried far with no effort. A force of nature in the gentleness of a

child. We young women, we all loved him each in our own way, but none of us felt worthy …”

“And the widow?”
“Maybe she wasn’t the first, but she was the most determined. There had never been a woman that beautiful at Nain. That’s what they said. For months she had been following him with her little boy in her arms to the point of having nothing more to eat. The little one had weakened and found himself stricken with a high fever. The Carpenter took both of them aside to a friend’s house in the shade of the inner courtyard; he treated the child. Thanks to herbs, fresh water, and a thousand little stories to distract the child, the fever began to go down. After three days, they no longer feared for his life. It was clear that the man was not unattracted to the mother. At times he looked at her longer than politeness would have allowed, then, returning from his distraction, he went back to caring for the child. At other times, she came up to him to the point where their clothing touched, and he wasn’t offended. They brought other sick people. they came to talk. There were eyes everywhere. However, in spite of them, he and she became attached to each other, which obviously brought the curious to join the sick people who came every day to fill the courtyard. The master was getting worn out.”

“It would have been honorable to marry this widow: celibacy is looked down upon in Israel. They tell me she had almost exhausted her inheritance. She deserved to become his wife, are you speaking of Rebecca, Ezra’s daughter?”

“Yes, certainly. That’s what they expected: that he resume his trade and build a house – because he didn’t own anything, he had given everything away to his family – and afterward, they would celebrate their union. But one evening, he led the widow into the hills with the sheep, up there (she pointed to the spot), and he spoke to her frankly:’ Rebecca, my heart feels for you. If a woman existed I could bind myself to, you would be that woman; but when I quit my work to undertake my mission, l immediately realized that I wouldn’t be understood …’ Hearing that Rebecca replied: ‘Rabbi, everyone loves you and would follow you to the desert of Syria if you led us there. Yes, the people love to hear me, they appreciate the sound of my voice, and it’s

always nice to be with them, yet they don’t listen to me. They won’t understand for generations.’ I will always be at your side, and I will sustain you. Don’t you think that we could be a good example: a couple united, happy, leading a human life of peace and love?’ He paused: ‘I would like that as much as you. It won’t happen that way. There will come a time when they will lose their way, they will abandon me; the chief priests will want my death, and the Romans will be happy to get rid of me.’ ‘If it is necessary, I will die with you.’ ‘Rebecca, Rebecca, I clearly see what you would do. And that is why I must lead my mission alone. If you were to accompany me on such a road, I couldn’t bear it; think what this would do to our children; when all is accomplished, I will welcome you with open arms.’”

“That is what he said and did.”

“The son got well and many other people too. So the leader of the synagogue organized a supper of celebration. Toward the end of the evening, Rebecca went up to the men; she brought on an alabaster vase filled with a perfume of very great worth. She had borrowed from her family,  pawned the rest of her inheritance, and asked for credit from her merchant, an old friend. She approached him. Everyone was speechless. They imagined that there would be a proposal for marriage, and she fell on her knees. Broke down in tears. Poured the perfume on his feet and wiped them with her hair. You could have cut the silence in pieces, no one opened their mouth, and the people held their breath. The leader of the synagogue felt obliged to break the general paralysis: ‘What are you doing, woman?’ he asked. She replied in a loud voice so all could hear: ‘I am honoring the man I love. I am pouring this perfume now because I won’t have the courage to pour it at the moment when it will be necessary …’ Her words were mingled with fears; no one had truly understood, so the leader of the synagogue, who was the only one who had perfectly understood, began to murmur between his teeth that this woman was acting like a prostitute who, instead of selling her chains, wanted to buy favors. The master immediately turned around with his loud voice: ‘Simon, I entered your house, and you didn’t give me water to wash my feet; she has watered my feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair. You didn’t give me the kiss of welcome because you looked down on me, but she, as soon as I entered, never stopped covering me with kisses. You have not anointed my head with oil when they are preparing to kill me, she has anointed my feet with a perfume for the dead. This is why I tell you that she will be with me when you will have forgotten me. And, if you believe that love is a sin, I tell you that your indifference will be a fault for which you will find it very difficult to forgive yourself.’ Thus, he withdrew …”

“What happened to that woman?”

“Discreetly, she continued to follow him everywhere. She was obligated to marry her creditor, but that wasn’t a dishonor because the man was good to her; he let her leave for long periods when she mixed with the crowd. She was there of the feet of the cross when he expired. He ordered her to go away so that she wouldn’t see his suffering. She stepped back and hid behind a small group but couldn’t leave the place. No one in the world will ever be able to measure that woman’s suffering.”

“They say that some people have seen the master after his death.”

“Those who say that haven’t seen him. Because the one who has seen him won’t say: ‘I saw him,’ he will say: ‘I see him.’ »

Yair was so troubled by the woman’s words that he left the scene precipitously without even thanking her. He was disoriented, He had almost reached Capernaum when he realized that the old lady could be none other than Rebecca herself. He wanted to see her again, but she had left for Jericha.

THE CENTURION

At Jericho, Yair met a former Roman centurion, reputed to have been a disciple of the Master. He was bent under the weight of age, awaiting the end, but the end was refused him; they said that since the Carpenter’s death, he had become a wanderer. He had never gotten over it, dragged himself from place to place, not knowing what to do with himself. On that day, he was lying down at the souk, fairly close to the pottery shopkeepers, and from time to time, he yelled like a sleeper awakened by a nightmare.

Yair went over to question him:

“I am indebted to the Master, he said in order to cajole him. I am his debtor in a way because he cured my daughter. But I have traveled far in these last thirty years, and I am trying now to understand what happened, how such a man could have existed and end up like that …”

“God in Heaven! If I knew, I would tell you. I’m still tormented by these events, and no one comes to help me see them more clearly. I see that you’re a Pharisee; perhaps you’ll be able to enlighten me. Explain to me why you are the first. What terrible spell has been cast on your people for them to be so totally uninterested in their most improbable prophet?”

 “I don’t know, but listen! I had already left Capernaum when you came into the town in the hope of meeting the Carpenter so that they could save your servant … that’s what they told me.”

“Yes, I was a centurion then. That servant wasn’t just any servant; I really loved him because he didn’t serve me out of fear or for pay; you might have said that his happiness came from mine. And my happiness came from him also, but I didn’t know it. When he fell paralyzed, tormented by terrible headaches, and unable to stop rolling on the ground because

of his pains, I felt lost. I was stationed at Magdala. A woman I had known in circumstances that were shameful for me came to speak to me about the healer. I ran toward him without thinking, and as soon as I was on the road to Capernaum, I said to this myself: ‘This is ridiculous: even if he were the best doctor in Galilee, why would the want to treat a Roman centurion servant and not just anyone?’ Perhaps you know him?”

“How could we forget what the garrison did: burned girls and their fathers, and then crucified dozens of men supposed to have been Zealots. Left the corpses as food for the vultures.”

“What, you were there?”

“Yes.”

“I would understand it if you want to spit in my face and leave.”

“No, I want to hear you.”

“I was just a soldier then, I obeyed. I set fire to the fagots they had tied to the girls and the fathers; I drove nails in the wrists and the feet of the men … I did this and many other things … And now that I’m a centurion, I’m going on the road to Capernaum to ask for truth a Jew for help! Nevertheless, I kept on my way and called for the Master. As soon as he set his eyes on me, he asked me:

‘What’s happening, my friend? You seem upset as if the worst misfortune had fallen on your head.’ I wasn’t able to speak or say a word. I was a Roman centurion, and he was as concerned about me as if I were his brother. Someone who had followed me explained to him the seriousness of the situation. The master placed his hand on my shoulder and said: ‘Let’s go; it’s clear to me that you love that man like your own life.’ We were returning to Magdala when I was gripped by a horrible feeling, I was afraid that they would see me returning with a Jewish doctor to save my personal servant … they talked about us a lot.”

“You’re speaking of your soldiers, of your friends?”

“No, you don’t understand: I told you I was one of those who participated in the massacre, and there I was, daring to ask for a Jew’s help to save my close friend. The people would have certainly stopped the healer, and they would have told him what I had done at Capernaum, and

who the servant was, and the gossip … And the healer would have turned against me, insulted by my request. And, even if he had wanted to help me, the people mover would have let him do it! So I made a half-turn inside myself and said to him: ‘If you can cure him, you can do it just as well from here, because me, I am now a centurion, and when I say to a soldier: ‘Do this!’ and he does it and ‘Go there!’, he goes there. The master smiled at me. He completely understood my intention and the circumstances. As a joke or perhaps to test me, he said to me: « Good! Sogo, » and, looking at my face, he noticed my distress. I was so ashamed that I wasn’t able to explain. I would have liked to throw myself on the ground, my head on his fences, and speak to him openly. He gazed at me and said. ‘Let it be as you wish. But don’t obey blindly; follow your heart because I see that you are good.’ I arrived at Magdala alone, and they announced to me that my servant had regained consciousness and that his fever had fallen.”

“And what did you do?”

“I left the army. In doing that, I lost everything: the Romans didn’t want me anymore, and the Jews couldn’t forgive me.”

“And your servant?”

“He followed me in the greatest poverty for a while, but we didn’t have anything to eat and nor a place to stay, so I went away to Caesarea to serve another man.”

“And you?”

“I followed the Master, but at a distance. Neither his apostles nor his disciples let me approach him; yet I went where they went, I questioned those who agreed to speak with me, I blended with the crowd in order to listen to him.”

“What did he say?”

“Oh! Almost nothing, always the same thing: ‘The good kingdom is like an old woman whose only wealth is a penny she lost, so she turns everything upside down to find it. Or else: ‘The good kingdom is like a small seed people trample on, but which finally takes root.’ Or again: ‘In my Kingdom, the poor, the prostitutes, the rejected eat the fatted lamb.’ or another time: ‘Happy are those who are hungry, for the others despise the banquet! Happy are those who are thirsty, for the others don’t drink and wither! Happy are you who feel a furious need to be loved, for you will discover that you are loved!/ You can imagine how the people were bewildered; for them, the kingdom was Solomon and all his riches, his women, his glory, as it was Rome and its cruelty; and he spoke about the little birds that flitted from branch to branch, free in the morning light, of the trees and the rivers, of the store and the moon! Yet all the people hung on his every word because, for a moment, each one dreamed of this kingdom in which he was the object of a love larger than life.”

“But when did his popularity plummet?”

“They were beautiful speeches, and some people began to be aware that he was perfectly correct; that was what the Kingdom is, and not that of the priests who oppressed the people in Yahweh’s name, nor that of the Romans, who set no limits on their cruelty. Because of this, the people felt that they were at an impasse. You know what happens to a herd of horses when fire surrounds them and they don’t see any way out! They panic. It was easy to guess that all that was going to end in a rebellion repressed in blood.”

“You mean to say that the Masters understood the impasse.”

“Yes, perfectly. The Kingdom of the Jews, the hope of David, of Solomon, the Kingdom of Yahweh, God of Israel; all that is not so different from Rome. The good kingdom, the only possible Kingdom, that of peace, cannot be the overthrow of one tyrant by another tyrant, but something also: something that grows slowly, that demands water, light, care, and observation. Such a Kingdom also supposes patience and a great love of what is already given: life, nature, the mountains, the forests, the deserts. It’s about adding more love, justice, peace, and good

deeds, and not subtracting and destroying. Even the apostles didn’t think of that; they too hoped for David’s Jerusalem; like the others, they didn’t have the patience to quietly cultivate a kingdom for the children and their children’s children.”

“So it was a lost cause; the man of Nazareth preaching in the desert.”

“To avoid a bloodbath, the master decided to attack. It was like a father who returns home, sees a fire in the distance, and approaches: the house is on fire; what does he do? He jumps into the fire, hoping to save his own. So he left for Jerusalem with the idea of denouncing the shameful power of the priests and the Romans, above all, to try to convince the people that a revolt would end very badly, that of the unhappy dream of Israel and Jerusalem. There would not be left a stone upon a stone, that it was necessary instead to learn to love each other, for without that love the Kingdom of Men would always be that of hate.”

“Were you in Jerusalem?”

“I didn’t lose sight of him until he went away in the evening to Bethany, to his close friends, in order to rest. I was witness to everything. What should happen happened with two other prisoners he was sentenced to death. Like the others, he had to carry the heavy crosspiece of the cross. Often he fell, and often they struck him. They had driven a crown of thorns onto his head, he was losing a lot of blood. In fact, he was dragging himself along on his knees, and they struck him even harder; it was horrible, and I was looking: I didn’t even feel the reflex to help him. It was the centurion of the guard who took pity on him and ordered a man to carry this crossbeam. I was paralyzed. He was dragging himself like a warrior with his guts hanging out; no one came to help him, to lift him up, to take him under his shoulder. He was us.”

“What do you mean by ‘he was us?’”

“It was so obvious, glaring, blinding: we are transporting our cross, our cross of sorrow, our misery, in a word, our hate against ourselves. We are transporting it, we are walking crushed under our own misery. We are the executioner and the victim. He was there, he was climbing toward the hill of execution, and it was us, our perfect image, man fomented by man. And me,

I cried I moaned, I said to myself: ‘He provoked the leaders in order to open our eyes, but we still don’t see a thing. What are they doing to the man? We are crucifying him.’ That is what the facts in front of us were crying out, the facts that he had organized to wake us up; ‘When are you going to stop treating yourselves this way? At what hour of what day are you going to say to your leaders: ‘We won’t obey the hate you put in us any longer?’ Could the man of Nazareth be any clearer?”

Once again, Yair wasn’t able to remain any longer: the left Jericho immediately. Night fell upon him well before he arrived at Capernaum. He found a large palm tree that he knew well and served as a landmark to everyone: he collapsed at its foot, trembling with fear and terror. How could he endure this lighting, this mirror, and the image it projected: an utterly mad love for an animal pray to itself?”

THE OLD MAN AND THE CHILD

On returning to Capernaum on a pure and porous night, Yair awoke in a sweat. In his sleep, though it was profound, the anxiety which he detested confronting became clear: he was old, he would die soon, and Jem would be old and without protection.

He had never really worried about this, but this time it woke him up in the middle of the night; he trembled with fear for his little one’s future.

Jemouna was sleeping on a mat not far away. He silently slid along the ground toward her. After a few nudges, the was there, close by; she shone in the moonlight. He looked at her for a long time. He had often noticed that she resembled her mother but without facial imperfections. Putting that aside, What a difference in personality! The contrast between an open hand and a closed fist. 

Her face, so smooth, without the slightest wrinkle, seemed as relaxed as a nursing baby’s asleep on her satisfied mother’s breast. Why didn’t she realize that soon she would have to make her way alone though she could barely walk, and her eternal candor made her as vulnerable as a teenage girl lost in the alleys of Jerusalem? She wasn’t even a teenager, there was nothing reassuring about the world, and that was even more true today.

Above all, Yair didn’t want to wake her. He was going to inflict her with his anxiety because it was a lot more than worry; it really was anxiety. It was as if you were beginning to see an abyss ahead, a void, and a wall behind, too where, pushing you toward it. Jem had almost been killed by her mother’s anxiety, and he must not make her relive a thing like that now.

She opened her eyes.

“Papa!”

“Sleep, my little one, sleep.”

“You came up to me. A beautiful night, isn’t it? You wanted to talk to me?”

“My daughter, how I love you! I wouldn’t ever want to leave you.”

“Why would we have to separate? Don’t you think it might be time to come closer together instead, what’s weighing you down, papa?”

“I am old, I’m going to die soon, I’m afraid for you.”

“Your heart is playing tricks on you, papa! I’m the one who’s worried. Do you think you will ever be able to do without me one day?”

“My daughter! I know what I’m saying. Soon, you’ll have to get along on your own …”

“You’re the one who doesn’t understand. I will always have the responsibility to take care of you, especially now when you’re getting old, and you see everything backward.”

“Jem, you aren’t even able to walk more than twenty to thirty steps without getting weak. There is plenty of danger in this world for a girl …”

“Stop making up nightmares, papa. There are plenty of people around me. Two boys come every day to help me. It is they, and not you anymore, who take me to eat of the Zebedees, I’ve never had to take care of myself alone.”

“I didn’t want to go that for, you don’t leave me any choice. The gravity of the political situation in Judea is critical. Soon the breaking point will come. The Romans will begin by besieging Jerusalem, then they will break its walls and massacre the population without leaving a single one living, except for those they take to Rome as slaves or to be fed to wild animals …”

“All these repeated horrors will be nothing but the bark. The sap beneath it irrigates the hearts of men and women of goodwill…”

“Dear child, you are living in that bark …”

“No! Not since I was twelve. The sap is my food. My bork, my shield, is you, and if you only know how grateful I am to you! Papa, you’re always there to take the punches, to stand in front of the difficulties and sufferings so that I would be spared. You have been a terrific shield. Look at the marks of your aging; they are the blows I didn’t receive. Your face is like an ancient mountain shaped by storms, furrowed by earthquakes, and wounded by boulders falling from the sky. Everything on earth is covered by bark, by a memory of blows. But a caress, a kiss, a flower sliding on the skin, the things, the trembling things, leave traces on that bark. Beneath it, life overflows. While you were taking the punches, I was gathering the sap and the buds. My skin is smooth! I remain young.”

“You sure are lucky! But I’ll no longer be there to protect you from that youth.”

“You see, you worry, you go in front to take the punches. But don’t say that I’ve been lucky! You know it better than all the others: I have experienced along with you more or less the same events; it is in the brambles where your skin your hands that I pick the berries. Do you remember your friend Maimon? He said to you: ‘You don’t lack courage, Yair, but you look too far ahead; begin by watching where you’re stepping, then things will go better, and you’re still running ahead of the punches. Rome can do nothing against us.”

“Except death?”
“We are all there: Degel, Balaam, Maimon, Mato, Gautah, Zhen, and Ardashir as well, perhaps.”

“He betrayed us. It’s a miracle we get out of it alive.”

“And if it was him, what a miracle! Like a dragon, he opened his mouth, spat fire, and made the world disappear, but another one appeared to us. Dolma killed the dragon, Deqel guided Balaam in the desert, and Atar pushed us up to Sinagar … Our share of happiness never diminished.”

“Now you’re going too far. Didn’t you love Hod? Didn’t you suffer from the separation, from all the journey’s separations? Haven’t you suffered from your body never reaching mature womanhood? Wouldn’t you have liked a young man to take you in his arms and hug you? Wouldn’t you have liked to bear his child?”

“Why are you talking to me about the life I could have had? I can just as easily imagine some I might have found nicer and some I might have found crueler, but as a matter of fact, you and we must admit that we have had a full and complete life. Every day, there are plants that shine, trees that are radiant; we have never lacked anything. Above all, we loved each other, and now you want me to be worried because you’re worried!”

“Good! I believe you’ll be able to get by, that in a big bale of old rotten straw, you’ll know how to find the few grains you need for your happiness …”

“Papa, stop this cynical nonsense. Look me straight in the eye! I am your happy part.”

Yair turned his eyes away, and she continued:

“Don’t sulk at me. I have gathered a treasure here that I will give to you, I keep it in my heart for you. I am your most precious possession. Take me, carry me on your back, and you will be light as a finch. I have never seen a single lie, either in a tree or even in a butterfly. All is true, so, papa, take me, accept me in your house. I am your soul.”

No one can tell how much the father understood this daughter’s last speech before he emitted a loud snore. Old people fall asleep so strangely, sometimes in the middle of a conversation that concerns them to the highest degree.

THE LIBERATION

After that uncommon night, Yair continued his life without changing anything. He felt rather relieved, his heart lighter. Assured of Jem’s ability to take care of herself, he went to attend to his business of Sepphoris. With the pretext of selling some translations of rare texts, he listened, he informed himself.

He was alarmed by the rumors confirming his worst apprehensions. Titus’s legions were stationed all around Jerusalem with phenomenal siege equipment! In the city, two factions of Zealots were fighting for power, forgetting that the enemy was surrounding them and that the forces present were totally out of proportion with each other, John of Gischola and Eleazar were

Spying on each other with the aim of eliminating one or the other. A few Sadducees sought to moderate their passions, but they were immediately considered traitors and lynched on the spot in broad daylight. It was said that James Zebedee himself had entered the city to counter the revolt; he was promptly run through with a sword.

On returning to Capernaum, Yair began to prepare for his departure for Ephesus. He hoped to find peace there. Or, in any case, flee. As soon as Jerusalem fell, not least one of the four Roman legions would go back up through Galilee to get to Rome, there would be massacres, and Rome had had enough of Jewish revolts. Rome wanted the fewest Jews possible in Palestine: they must either be killed or driven out like a game. For the Romans, they were dangerous men and fanatics; scattered throughout the empire, they would be easier to control.

Everything was ready, Yair had just loaded two donkeys in addition to Aliza. The three waited in front of the door. At the moment when he was going to take his daughter in his arms, she said to him:

“Papa, sit down!”

“My daughter, everything is ready; you can talk to me on the way …”

“Yes, you’re right; everything is ready …”

“What do you want to tell me?”

But this was still more of an exclamation of impatience than a real question. The father remained standing, he was in a hurry. He looked at his daughter with a touch of annoyance that meant to say: “Get a move on, the house of Israel is on fire.”

“Sit down, papa, I’m not leaving for Ephesus.” 

Yair collapsed at the foot of the mat as if stunned. He closed his eyes to take a few breaths. He was so tired.

When he opened them, his ears were still buzzing, but his eyes saw, they saw reality. He stared at the wall in front of him: a wooden candleholder forgotten on a shelf; in front of it, a small broken table, to the right the window the moonlight come through during their last conversation, now filled with sunlight; dust danced in the emptiness of the room … He saw. Yes, he saw the poverty of the house and the beauty that made the dust dance.

He realized that they had had no bed since their return to Capernaum: they were too poor now. And then he realized that Jem’s mat was at the same place where her bed had been, exactly where she had ‘gone to sleep’ as if she were dead over thirty years ago. He was overwhelmed by a terrible emotion because that day, as he saw it now, was the end of a long descent into hell for his child. Now he understood they he had abandoned his daughter to her mother, that she had suffered from terrible despair, that she was really dead. ‘When he had seen thee in her bed, white as snow, he had had no doubt about it. He heard the mourners. It is own daughter had just breathed her last breath, and he was convinced that he himself was going to lose his breath because, at the time, he absolutely did not want to live any longer. He saw the grim fact, the consequence of his weakness, the inevitability of the play of forces when they are left free to act.

Now, it was a clear statement of fact: the machine of violence, when no longer opposed,

crushes and kills. It was as if he were suspended above himself and looking down, appalled. He had absolutely no idea that the young Carpenter was going to get her out of there. The father was already with his daughter in the land of death. He was even farther along in it than she.

And it was this total and merciless emotion that was sweet over him today, even though she wasn’t dying. She seemed, on the contrary, to be in complete possession of her mind. She looked at him with the vivacity of a child who was stretching her limits, he was struggling with himself and falling back into his old fears.

“Papa! Papa! Where are you? Listen to me a little! After the Carpenter woke me up, hadn’t you noticed that I wasn’t completely the same! When you talked with me, didn’t you have the feeling that I was you a little bit?”

“A child is always a little bit like his father.”

“Look at me, papa.”

Abruptly, he saw her for the third time; this time, he pinched himself so as not to fall asleep, and he opened his eyes wide. He perceived that he had never looked at her long enough to reach her. He perceived that he did not know her. He had lived with her, she was his little girl, but she was also someone else, a kind of timeless little prince. As in Saint-Exupery’s story: physically a child, but mentally like a jagged block of stone on a mountain, a part of a summit, nothing unshakeable, resting barefoot in the coolness of the dawn. She wasn’t tied down like a donkey or a man, confined to graze in a circumscribed circle; she went everywhere in Paradise, like Eve, the first woman, like the dove, the primordial messenger, like the crane that crosses the Himalayas. She had never been driven out of there: his look was not imprisoned by the hunter’s distortions, through which one sees the world only in terms of goals and fears, nor of the distortions of the shepherd, who pays attention only to his flock and his possessions; for her, everything was precious, as if the earth were the body of a lover expressing passion in all his fibers.

She went on.

“It’s time. It’s even high time to think of that, my companion; it must be very disturbing for you, and even appalling, to live next to your happiness. But don’t worry, I haven’t lost anything, not a single drop. And for you, here is what is going to happen: when I will be home, in your heart, that is to say, I will give you all that I have gathered, and you will take all that as your own; not one sole grain of your happiness is lost.”

“Am I dreaming? Is my old age playing tricks on me? Are you my happiness lying on that mat, Are you really what I should have seen? Are you truly the harvest?

“My companion, bite into the fruit.”

“The donkeys outside began to bray with impatience and stamp their feet.

“Go, papa, go set them free; we can very well leave tomorrow. In the meantime, I’ll arrange things with the Zebedees.

Yair went out to liberate the donkeys and send them to the fields; he came back sweating, for he had worked as fast as possible.

Jem was lying on the mat, lifeless.

Yair cried out to awaken her, for she had probably fallen into a kind of coma; no one dies like that at the pinnacle of happiness! But she didn’t wake up, so he got down off his feet and took her hand. Gradually, he felt the warmth go out of her; he, by contrast, felt himself becoming hotter and hotter, to the point of being burnt alive in his pain.

THE NIGHTMARE

Yair covered his daughter with rose petals, bands of fine wool, and a linen shroud; all that he had prepared for himself. He gets her down in a cast of drown by Aliza. They walked slowly up to the family tomb. A small cortege followed them, mostly children with their mothers. They rolled the entrance stone away with the help of a stick hidden under the gravel. He deposited his daughter beside the treasure: there where the holy shoulderblade was that had fallen into a crevice that only a child could reach. Aliza moaned like the trumpets of the Last Judgment.

For nearly a month, Yair couldn’t really eat; his tense throat let only a little milk and bouillon pass. He didn’t sleep much; every time he fell asleep, he was plunged into an incomprehensible nightmare.

Aliza had taken him up on a high hill in the vicinity of Bethany. He looked toward the Holy City. He saw all the surroundings or if he had been a great owl parched on the tallest sycamore on the hill. Aided by a traitor, Titus’s army had just entered the fortress. The fire began to blaze, and the city to bellow. This was just the preamble to the nightmare.

The sky was transformed into an arena, a very large circular arena, a thousand times greater than Rome’s, as great as the whole earth. The horizon had stood up and became a wall of lies, of pain, of the sounds of war and of explosions – so dense that Yair no longer saw the siege of Jerusalem, or rather this siege was now nothing more than one small war – in the middle of a state of war whose circle enclosed the earth. He saw weapons able to cut hundreds of men in two in a single instant, meteors of war fall from the sky and kill by the thousands, balls of metal thrown by flying machines, and deep and immense craters where millions of bodies smoked.

And then, appearing above this wall of fire, a wall even higher where he could see vast crowds heading calmly toward immense dunes of toxic gas which poisoned them. They came out of the countryside to join a procession toward death beneath the gases; sleepwalkers, one might have said. Toward the end, a sleep united them. They didn’t see the oceans rise and the seas, the lakes, and the rivers. The deluge, however, would inexorably arrive. A voice resounded in the heavens:” Oh you, Yair, what have you done to avert this disaster?”

Yair awoke in such a heat, such a panic of anxiety, and such a feeling of helplessness that he was sure he was going to die.

THE MEETING

Instead of dying, he got up, saddled Aliza, and left for Jerusalem with the energy of a combatant. He was going to prophesy in the Holy City, announcing the new world already forming in the secrecy of hearts. He went there without hesitation, indifferent to the certain failure of his mission

and impervious to his own death, just as certain.

He had seen Jem in the middle of the circle of violence; she was coming out of the earth like the branch of an apple tree. So he pulled on Aliza’s bridle with his morning energy, but the donkey bucked against him.

The problem came from the Lake of Tiberias: it shone with a beauty she couldn’t resist. She headed toward the shore, and Yair couldn’t help but follow. They arrived on the edge of the lake; the spot was particularly rocky. In front of them, a man was busy loading cargo into a big freight boat with curved guardrails one built by the Zabedees and still in very good condition. He had set

up a temporary ramp with beans and stones.

“Where are you going?” Yair asked.

“I’m crossing,” the man answered.

At that moment, Yair realized that he knew that man whom he had seen some time in the past, but he couldn’t manage to recall either the name of the circumstance. The man was probably in his thirties, perhaps a little older.

“What village are you from?” Yair asked him.

“Oh! I come from the other shore.”

“And you’re returning there?”

“Yes, I’m bringing these boxes. The wind will turn before the moon. And you, where are you going?”

“To Jerusalem.”

“On such a beautiful day!”

The man looked at the boxes, checked the straps, seemed satisfied, turned around, examined Aliza, and went up to her.

“That’s a good strong donkey you have there. I’d gladly rent it from you, I have to carry my cargo to Gadara. With two donkeys, it would be easier; mine is waiting for me on the other side. After that, you could easily get to Jerusalem by Peila and Samaria. What do you say about it?”

“Why not?”

His decision came out of his mouth before he could think about it, simply because the man was friendly and seemed familiar, and besides, it was hot inland and cooler on the lake . ..

Aliza wasn’t very reassured. Yair showed her the ramp for boarding the boat. He got up on it and jumped up and down to show her how solid it was. The man took her halter; she followed him onto the landing stage without hesitation, put her right foot on the bench, the other on the bottom,

and found herself in the boat without having time to have any doubts. Then it was Yair’s turn to embark. The man brought in the beams, unhooked the anchor, lifted it with one arm, and attached it to the stem. He rowed a little to put the boat into the wind, raised the sail, and sat down in the back to man the rudder.

The weather was truly magnificent: the hills around the lake shone with rows of olive trees, fig trees, vineyards, and fields of wheat, and all of it was tinted orange under a sun filtered by sand, the vestige of some storm in the deserts of Syria.

“If you wanted to go to Jerusalem, what brought you to the lake?” The man asked in order to break the silence.

“I don’t really know. At my age, most of it is memories and not plans that move you.”

The two men couldn’t resist the need to smooth the horizon of their eyes and across the silence of their ears. Aliza was concentrating on her balance, the man gave a stroke of the oar to put the boat back into the wind. He moved on the boat so well-balanced that he seemed to be walking on level ground. Sitting back down again, he broke the silence:

“Some time ago, of Capernaum, when I was talking with a merchant, they told me that a girl had died and that her grandfather was overcome by sorrow; when I saw you, I thought it might have been you.”

Yair immediately looked the other way because he was going to start crying again. But the lake caught this look and brought it back to word the man.

Drops filled his eyes, but they didn’t run.

Wasn’t it here in Capernaum, the boatman continued, that one afternoon a builder of boats like this one came from the lake and went into a house where a girl was going to die and woke her up?”

Yair couldn’t take his eyes off the man. These unexpected words dried his tears but paralyzed his tongue. He couldn’t say a thing; he could see from the man’s eyes that he didn’t expect an answer.

The man smiled as if to make his thought penetrate Yair’s. His eyes returned to looking at the lake, the boatman wasn’t looking for landmarks.

Moreover, the eastern shore was still only a thin line without any detail. No, he seemed to be searching in the wind. Firmly holding the sail rope with one hand and the rudder with the other, he opened the sail to a breeze that wanted to play in the day’s increasing heat. “There’s a skillful sailor who knows the lake better than a monk knows his own soul,” Yair said to himself, but the eyes of the man were so clear, so sure, so attentive, that the old Yair felt the need to confide, the lake would have to make one moss effort, some rocking, and some lapping, and then stretch out toward the hills and make them shimmer. Yes, after that, in a moment of distraction, he let go and spoke:

“You’re right.” That girl was mine, and she died, this time for good. The man looked him in the eyes with a gentleness he had never known.

“My friend, hasn’t she returned home instead? Why was it that on that Wednesday, you didn’t feel the wind return to Capernaum? He did return, though you didn’t notice that the hills were changing color … the sap was rising in all the vines, the stalks, and the trunks. We all noticed it!

“You are talking like her. You, too, don’t understand. Your poetry is beautiful, but it doesn’t reverse the flow of time; we all go from youth to old age, from life to death. There are no exceptions, and we are separated, torn away from each other, each one annihilated, in his own little silo, alone and without remission, put in a cage by death. On the surface, we resign ourselves, but deep down, nothing works anymore; we don’t hold up, and we turn toward madness: Jerusalem revolts against Rome, and Rome crushes Jerusalem; the same story, the eternal story! I’ve traveled, I’ve hoped, I believed, I climbed up the mountains, and I went on a philosophical trip as far as the Himalayas, but my daughter died, and I will soon follow her. her. It’s unbearable. So I want to go to Jerusalem to say: ‘You don’t have to add more to it; we are all broken; the heavens and the earth are the teeth of the one who fears us. Let’s make a truce and form a league against God. He has forsaken us.”

“Don’t go there. I went there myself not so long ago, and I too, cried out: ‘Father, why have you forsaken us?’ That turned out very badly! One point is certain: According to appearances, you’re right. As soon as death has struck, the thing there in front of you no longer has anything to do with the person who smiled at us, spoke to us, and looked at us a while ago. This is why, in spite of ourselves, we become like a mother cat who searches for her kittens, convinced that they are lost. She doesn’t make the connection between his kittens and the little piles of cold and motionless fur beside her. No! She marches elsewhere but doesn’t find them. She wanders everywhere: no scent, no sound, no movement, no clues. They have vanished into thin air. I don’t know of anything more pathetic. They can’t think any differently: the person has vanished into thin air, and instead of a little girl, a cold and inert thing.”

“There, you’ve understood me, boatman … A cold and inert thing …. that’s all there is to man: a mother cat lamenting in the middle of cadavers. Unlucky for the one who might want to console her: he will be scratched to the blood, his eyes pulled out, and his tongue torn to shreds. Every

where I’ve been, I have seen a man of war, a war against death that leads him to death as quickly as possible.”

“Jair, my friend, that’s a clear and lucid view. If you please, Iet’s keep on our route, Let’s go to the other side of the lake.”

Once again, they let their eyes run toward the horizon. they must have

been just about in the middle of the lake because its surface seemed round, strangely calm in every direction; only the wind remained stable, slow, and favorable, and tears ran down old Yair’s cheeks.

“You have traveled a lot,” the man continued. “You are tired now, maybe you might want to put your baggage down? From what I see, the cup you have drunk is bitter, and all these leftovers around you aren’t nourishing you anymore. Don’t you feel in your heart that you aren’t made for

death?”

“You’re damned right about that.”

“So couldn’t we drop the bitterness here, with the lees and the bark, and then leave? We aren’t obligated to die. A spark inhabits us. The dust of your life closes around you. Now everything is black. Soon, the dust will touch the spark there in the middle, and you will catch on fire. Soon.”

The boatman looked at the horizon. The wind pushed the boat with small oscillations, which the man instinctively corrected by bringing the sail or throwing out ballast; little by little, the coast approached with its enormous stones, the tough and twisted bushes clinging to them, its flocks of little birds passing from one grove to another; and what surprised Yair was that each living thing breathed, taking and giving, they slowly advanced, the wind had weakened, the boat struck the bottom…

“Wake up, old man, we’ve arrived,” the boatman said as he shook him roughly.

The boxes were already loaded on the donkey. Yair jumped in the water to join Aliza, who was waiting for him on the beach, her back bare. The portage got started.

“You’re forgetting my donkey,“ Yair reminded him.

“What are you talking about? I don’t have the time to wait for an old man like you all the way to Gadara. My brother is camping a few steps from here. He’ll come down with his mule to take the other boxes. Have a safe trip!”

THE TRANSFUSION

Yair sat down on a stone. He shook his head between his hands. He stored the boxes. He looked off the boat. And the wept all the torrents he had seen on the Kashmir mountains. He couldn’t stop. It was only a dream! The Carpenter, the love he had expected: it was only a dream on the lake!

And now the dream was empty, like Elijah evaporating in his garment. There was nothing left, just an empty robe … He couldn’t hug the worker from Nazareth, Jem, Degel, or anyone, empty clothes. Everything now was nothing more than empty dreams. The whole world had dried up like the old skin of a fig forgotten on the tree.

He wept again. A hemorrhage of tears. Aliza had stuck her nose in the grass and knew nothing of her master’s feelings. He was alone. He knew it only too well; if he stopped dreaming to himself, he would disappear.

When the trees are all cut, the earth is a desert. Yair was emptying all his water … His last tears cut his eyes; they were of sand. But, while his body was emptying and dying from top to bottom, he was being filled from the bottom to the top.  Rising in him was the part that Jem, the eternal child, had gathered. She poured herself out from vessel to vessel, starting from her famous resurrection. Everyone came back fresh and alive.

On the Lake of Tiberias, the Carpenter is descending from his boat: Balaam gets annoyed and wreaks have with the mourners; Jem is untied from the ivy strangling this; they leave for Damascus; Balaam and Uri guide them; Maimon embarks for the stars; Deqel embraces her lover, making him give her the sap of his love; Dolma washes Satan’s wounds; Gautah climbs on the slopes of Akhal; Zhen propels the words of Lao-Tse toward the West; Meshulam drops anchos on Jem’s mountain, a thousand children dance around her; Lasya and Je-Tsun unite tantrism to the way of Buddha; standing on the nose of his boat, the Carpenter casts his net.

Yair was being filled with his new life. He had swallowed the acid; now, the sap was coming back into the bark. 

His whole life’s fabric was being reformed and rising back up. Daqel, for example, is climbing the twisting Zagros road behind him; he turns around, he sees her; she is pressed close to Jem’s thigh, and suddenly, she begins to run like a swan on a lake; she pulls louse, she flies off without noticing a thing below, falls into this void and is smashed against the rocks. At this precise moment, he is seized from behind by an inexpressible joy. It is the second time his existence is fastened to the fabric of heaven. That is what did happen, but he had mistaken the ascent for a fall.

He hadn’t even noticed that when the Carpenter entered their house to waken his daughter from a nightmare she shared with her mother, the man first rushed toward Maakha and removed her garment, just as Elijah had been relieved of his tunic so that he could breathe more freely, and join the free and living people. That was when Jem had chosen not to follow her mother and to accompany her father. Now he had a second look at everything. In this moment of good riddance to nightmares, he saw it as it had happened: awakening, ascent, stapling to the canvas of the soul.

Another example: at Hamadan, at the fourth blow at the whip of his second sentence, wings were anchored in his shoulders. Muscles were formed; he left his body, reached a summit, and was once again brimming with joy; then, when he delivered Dolma to Satan, she turned around, he was pierced by her look through and through, and he noticed that all fear had left him once again. A peace passed through him, which he didn’t find again until Lamayuru, at the very moment when Je-Tsun and Lasya shamelessly embraced on a bed of spring flowers. All his life returned to him differently, not different because altered or distorted by exaltation as if he were simply seeing the other side of the coin; no, different because stripped of every alteration, like an unclothed fiancee stretched out on the nuptial bed, simply pure.

As on the summits of Lamayuru’s mountains, he was attaining the serene void of the ultimate beginning, the song on the other side of his life’s fabric, he saw the wisdom of the grandfather who taught Jem about the yaks and goats which form the Buddha’s body. The low and the high are reattached. As he was receiving the fire of Zoroaster from Mato, the kindergarten Jem

cultivated was incubating in Atar’s palace. The east and the west were connected. In front of him, Zhen was weaving his silk thread, the thousand-year-old wisdom of China, but the linen weft on which he wove it was the Judaism of Abraham and Isaiah. The height and the depth embraced.

In short, all of Yair’s life was being reconstructed: past in front, future behind. The immense canvas hung between heaven, and earth had been turned on itself in the dimensions of time and of space. The cocoon he had mistaken for a dried fig, emptied of its water, was his skin and

his soul suspended in the heavens but firmly rooted in the earth so that the water wasn’t lost but retained. In fact, he had wept into this cocoon, and it hadn’t been emptied. Far from it, his tears had fed the larva. The body was metamorphosed in his soul. The butterfly was there reconstructed at last and hung once more on the tree of life.

 The Carpenter had not come in a dream, he had come to get him out of a nightmare. He had lifted the lock that was keeping Jem’s water from entering Yair’s reservoir.

THE RAPTURE

He had crossed the lake alone. But it was time to start off again.

A hill thick with boulders rose in front of Yair and Aliza. After a while, behind a sort of natural gate formed by two spurs of pinkish conglomerate, the hill flattened out into cultivated fields. Aliza hesitated between two routes: one crossed very green fields, the other very blond ones. She opted for the blond. The route seemed interminable because the donkey could not resist the grains of golden wheat.

Nevertheless, they arrived in Gadara on the third day. They were welcomed by a group of children bathing in a cistern dug into a gentle slope. the children were too beautiful: Yair and Aliza stayed there for one whole month. In her free moments, the donkey turned a capstone that lifted large pails of water out of a wall. the water was then poured out into irrigation channels and redirected by wooden partitions. Yair, not far away, was groaning ripe grain with the neighboring widows and their children. The orchards and the gardens yielded overabundantly, fed by the water from the well; so the gleaners had time to sit down and daydream, sing, and play with the children.

Aliza got up one fine morning with the urge to go further. They headed toward Pella. On every slope along the route, the grass was abundant, orchards stretched out, and peasant women were lifting their robes in order to pick. It was impossible to resist, and Yair stopped to gather the overlooked grain with the women. Aliza grazed in the tall grass.

They arrived at Pella before the final harvests. At Pella, there were little girls in the town square. They gathered together because their mothers, for reasons of poor health or poverty, could not

take care of them. They asked the old man to teach them the Torah for girls because there certainly ought to be a Torah for them! Yair felt too young to sit down for hours and talk; he preferred to play. With a ball of rags, he made Aliza run. She was going to hide the ball while the

Children put on blindfolds, and then there was a race to find the treasure.

“But why would this ball of rags be a treasure?” a little girl asked.

“Because we are looking for it. While we look for it, we get to know each other and love each other, so joy enters our hearts. That is the whole Torah, and it is as good for the girls as it is for the boys.”

Yair and Aliza lived there for some time. There was a wedding in the village and a great celebration. Watching the bride kiss her lover, the old man was satisfied, and they departed.

Driven by instincts, Aliza took him to Sishar in Samaria. Next to the well of Jacob, a very old woman always recounted the same story: she had given water to a Jew who was lost in the countryside, and he, in exchange, had kissed bother her eyes, and she began to see her life. She said: “If the scale of the eye is not removed, you do not see. If the scale of the seed doesn’t die, you harvest nothing.”

Near Mount Gerizim was a friend of flowers where goats were grazing. Aliza wanted to stay with the goats. The old man sat down in the middle of a field where the grass was higher than his head. It was there that Yair was taken from this world.