Thirty-one

But Mary was not really surprised, though shocked, by the frantic knocking at the door in the middle of the night before the Passover. She had, she found, been half-consciously expecting it, with dread. And since it came some hours before dawn, waking the whole house, the news had to be bad. Jesus himself had predicted that he would not be able to "bring it off," as Lazarus had so naively believed.

It was Matthew who faced a Lazarus dazed with sleep with a breathless, "They have taken him! They have taken him!"

"Come in, come in," said Lazarus. "Taken whom?"

"The Master! And I thought you should know also, since there has been some talk that there is a price upon your head as well, because of all the people who knew you were dead and came back to life!" Lazarus turned white and nearly fainted, his hand still on the door. He gaped at Matthew as he entered.

"Who took him?" cried Martha, running up in her night clothes, her hair hastily tucked under a veil she had thrown on. "How? Where?"

Matthew had come in by this time, and entered the sitting-room, where Mary, Judith, and the two slave-girls had joined Lazarus and Martha. Lazarus was still in a state of half-conscious shock, saying "I?" "I?" to himself. Matthew did not sit.

"It was in that garden, Gethsemani, on the Mount of Olives, where we used to go to spend the night. You remember, it was Jehu's and he let us use it. We thought no one knew of it--and no one did, until this night," he added with rancor. He paused, his anger making him incapable of going on.

"Was it--?" Mary began, and stopped.

He looked over at her, but did not answer. He must have realized that she cared for Judas; how could he not have seen the expression on her face when she looked at him? "He knew what was to happen. He--he warned us during dinner--we could not understand why he would want to have the Passover dinner a night early, and--well, we found out. He took the Rock, James, and John with him to a remote corner to pray. I crept over, and--well, he was praying for it not to happen, if it were possible, and--I cannot describe how he looked! And then, he seemed to have received his answer, and he told them--and they had been asleep! Three times! How could they have slept while he was--! Well. He roused them for the third time and came over to wake us, because the--traitor!--was due to arrive."

He stopped again.

"And there he was, with a couple of soldiers and some of the Temple police, with swords and clubs and things, as if we were criminals, and he--and he went to him and--and he kissed! him! He said, 'Good evening, Rabbi,' as if nothing was--and he kissed! him! Evidently, it was some kind of a signal, because one of the soldiers made a move forward, and--" He stopped again.

Mary said again in a tiny voice, "Was it--"

He nodded, with clenched teeth, his eyes closed in agony. Evidently, he could not bring himself to say the name. Mary looked around. Martha clearly knew who it was. Judith and the slave were simply puzzled by the whole situation, and Lazarus was still lost in the idea that he might himself be in danger.

"So then he took a step in front of the rest of us--he had gone back to his friends with the clubs as soon as he kissed him--and said, 'Who is it you are looking for?' And the soldier answered, 'Jesus of Nazareth.' And then he said, 'That is the one I AM.' You should have heard those last two words! The ground shook! --And all of them, with their swords and their clubs--and he also--they all took a step back and fell down on their faces in worship!" Matthew had a look of triumph on his face.

"So there they were, prostrate at his feet, and he said again, 'Who is it you are looking for?' They got up, completely terrified--they had no idea why they had done what they did--and the soldier answered in a timid, little voice, 'Um, Jesus, of, ah, Nazareth," and he said, 'I told you that was the one I was. So if you are looking for me, then let these people go.'"

"And did they? Did you run off, leaving him there?" asked Martha, with suppressed fury.

"No!" retorted Matthew. "Simon Rock even had a sword, and he drew it and--leave it to him--chopped off the ear of one of the high priest's slaves. Everybody else was too startled to do anything except gape at him, and Jesus said, 'Put your sword back in its sheath! Am I not to drink the cup my Father has given me?' And then we realized it was hopeless. He was going to let himself be taken! And he did! What could we do?"

"And what about the slave?" asked Martha. "Did he just stand there bleeding to death?"

"Oh." he said, trying to think; obviously, his whole mind was taken up with Jesus. "No, he put the ear back on."

"The slave did?"

"No, he did. But then they took him and tied him up like a criminal and led him off. But they were careful about him; they had seen what he could do if he wished. And they let us go, as he had ordered them." There was a slight emphasis on "ordered." "And we followed them up to the high priest's courtyard, and John--you know, John was once going to be a protege of the high priest, so he said something to the maidservant at the gate and went in--and then after a few moments, the maidservant opened the gate also for the Rock. But we could not enter, of course. And I thought of you and came here. It looks very bad; I heard that around dawn as soon as it becomes legal, they are going to try him."

"Try him?" said Lazarus. "On what charge?"

"I would imagine on the charge of blasphemy. He has made some statements that could be interpreted as blasphemous--though he has always been able to defend himself, when it came to that. You were there, were you not, when he quoted the psalm, 'I have said you are gods,' when they accused him of calling himself the Son of God. But if they can find two witnesses to something of the sort who misheard in the same way, they might be able to--they probably will, or they would not have run the risk of capturing him, in spite of--well." He took a deep breath and paused for a moment.

"Of course, the real reason they took him is that they are afraid that the people will proclaim him King during the festival, and the Romans will not be able to prevent it because of the crowd. I imagine that their hope is that if they can find him guilty this morning and bring him before the governor early enough, they can turn the crowd against him somehow. You know how mobs are."

"I knew I should never have had anything to do with that man!" said Lazarus.

"What are you saying?" cried Martha.

"Please!" said Matthew. "As far as I know, no one has thought of you up to now; but it may occur to them at any moment. You really must leave here immediately, not only for your sake, but his! And I must be back to Jerusalem--though I cannot conceive of what I could do. He said last night that if he wished, his Father would send twelve legions of angels to fight for him. Well, he clearly has not wished it; and without something like twelve legions of angels, he is doomed! But do not delay any longer; prepare something and leave for some relative they know not. I will see you off, and then I must go."

"How long do you suppose we will be staying?" asked Lazarus.

"I know not. I know nothing. Three days. Three weeks. Years. I know not. But leave!"

All disappeared into their rooms, frantically looking for clothing and supplies for an emergency visit to--they knew not whom. When they had all come together again, with bundles to be loaded onto the donkey, Lazarus said, "We should go to Gideon, think you not? No one would look for us there."

"And we would not inconvenience him greatly," answered Martha. "His house is large. I think your idea is better than the one I had had in mind." She said this with some surprise, but it flashed across Mary's thoughts that fools were often very shrewd when it came to their interest or safety. "Let us go, then." she said.

And with Matthew prodding and prompting, they made the rest of their preparations, and set off across the hills. Matthew went out into the road from Jerusalem first, and reported back to them as they started on their journey that no one was coming. "And now I will leave you. God keep you safe!"

"And you also, Matthew!" said Martha. "I cannot understand what he has planned, but it will all turn out for the best. He knows what he is doing," Mary was silent.

"I wish I could believe it," he answered. "I saw his face there in the garden. But--well, peace." He laughed at the irony of the conventional farewell, and looked a long, rather wistful look at Mary. "Peace," she said with the others, as he turned. She thought he wanted to say something to her, perhaps about Judas, but could not bring himself to do so.

After they had been a short time on the road, looking back always to see if they were being followed, Mary took Martha aside and said, "I am going to Jerusalem."

"You must not!" said Martha. "Now of all times, you must stay with us."

"I cannot!" she answered. "He betrayed him because of me; I know it. I have been thinking about it. He believes that Jesus would have killed him for what he did to me, and he wanted to protect himself."

"Protect himself! He wanted to earn a little extra money! That is what he wanted!"

"I am not going to argue with you. But nothing you can say can keep me from trying to find him. Jesus told me that one day I would see the bitter, bitter fruit of a seed I had sown in carelessness; and I must find him now, to tell him that even now he is forgiven if he but wishes it. And who could convince him of this but I? And who would do so but I?"

Martha, who was not about to waste any love or forgiveness on the one who betrayed her Master, protested vehemently; but after answering one or two objections, Mary simply turned away and set off at a run toward Jerusalem in the direction Matthew had taken. Martha tried to make Lazarus go after her and bring her back, but he seized her arm and dragged her along with him, declaring that both of them were fools, and he was not going to be put in jeopardy any further because of anything connected with "that man."

Mary began to be breathless quite soon, and slowed to a walk; she had to husband her strength, and doubtless all would be sleeping at this hour of the night, and so the few moments she would save by running would be useless. This thought did not prevent her from cursing the delay; but walking would give her time to consider where Judas might be--clearly, not with the rest of the Twelve any longer. They would have torn him apart; even gentle Matthew. He might be at a house on the outskirts of the city where she had followed him one afternoon after one of the mysterious disappearances of the Master. She would try that first; some relative of his might live there, or perhaps he owned it himself.

The Passover full moon shone down on the landscape in an eerie repetition of that horrible night in which she had crossed these very fields to meet Zebediah--and, she remembered, like the other night in Magdala when she had planned to meet Jesus and kill herself to undo what she had brought about with Zebediah, and had started the journey which, it seemed, was to end on the next day. What different people she was, walking through the moonlight these three times--how different, and yet how the same!

Once again, as on both former occasions, her mind was a turmoil of conflicting thoughts and emotions; but this time they were an upper layer over an ocean of a strange kind of peace--or, if not peace, exactly, trust. Jesus was God. She felt intense sorrow for him, coupled with a kind of fear; but Matthew had said that he had allowed himself to be captured--which had to be true, since she had seen how he simply was not there where he had been an instant before when people wished to arrest him--and so he knew what he was doing, and accepted it, for some reason. Perhaps it was true that he was going to use the occasion to do something spectacular and be made King; but it was excessively unlikely. He had said that he was to be handed over to the Romans to be crucified and that all his followers would have to take up their own crosses also. Everyone interpreted this as a metaphor for something-or-other, but given what had happened, it seemed as if it might be all too literal. She could not understand what good could come of it; but if he willed it, she would accept it.

But Judas, the catalyst for all of this, was the one in real danger, and she was terrified for him. As soon as he realized what he had done, and that Jesus did not intend to use his divine power to annihilate the Romans--she remembered he had voiced this as a possibility, and might have been trying to provoke it--he would feel a guilt beyond anyone's imagining; and with his way of twisting everything, he would never believe that Jesus would be able to forgive him--unless he could realize that he was totally wrong about Jesus and Mary. And that was what drove her; if she could convince him that she had never belonged to Jesus, then perhaps she could convince him that Jesus meant what he said when he offered forgiveness to everyone, no matter what the sin.

True, she might not be able to persuade him at the moment, especially if Jesus were executed, and most especially in that horrible, degrading way of being nailed up naked for everyone to mock. She had seen at a distance one man hanging on a cross, who was still alive after two days, his lower extremities befouled with his own excrement as well as blood, and had turned away after an instant in shock and disgust, and for weeks could not rid her mind of the sight.

For a time, she was lost in the horror of the thought that the Master she loved so profoundly might suffer such a fate.

But the lodestone of Judas reasserted itself and she began to quicken her steps. At least if she saw him, she might distract him until all this was over and he would be able to consider things more rationally, and would realize that he did nothing but add to the horror if he killed himself--he would realize, perhaps, that he had someone else whose life he would destroy if he did so, someone for whom he cared desperately, and that might save him.

She was under no illusions as to what this "distraction" would entail, and realized fully also how much her own desire was making her think that satisfying her need was really fulfilling a noble, altruistic end. She knew that once she saw him, her desire--her lust--for him would overwhelm everything, and she hoped his need for her was as strong, and their meeting would see them through these next monstrous days.

But however much what she was intending to do was prompted by raw passion, it was still a fact that no one but she would have the slightest chance of reaching Judas--or the slightest willingness to do so--and preventing him from succumbing to ultimate despair and perhaps damning himself forever. That was a fact, not an illusion. And should she let the danger--the inevitability--of not being able to keep herself from sinning prevent her from doing a thing that only she could do? If they sinned, she was in prospect sorry; and in her intentions, if not her feelings, she hoped that they would not sin; but if they did sin, Jesus had said that they could be forgiven, because to God, for some reason, it did not matter, as long as they were sorry and wished to be forgiven. She did not understand it, but otherwise, how could she herself have already been forgiven?

And in some sense, was it not she who was responsible for what Judas had done? How much of his action was to prevent Jesus from killing him because--he thought--he had stolen his mistress? And when it came to that, how much of his deviousness of mind that had led up to such a ghastly misconstruction of Jesus' attitude was his native habit of thinking and twisting ideas into brilliant theories and how much was the result of a young priest's inability to face a seduction in which the seductress had turned the tables on him and made him look like the seducer? That first conquest of hers had been a stroke of perverted genius on her part. That was what had been the seed, and this was the bitter, bitter, fruit.

And yet, in all this melange of guilt, fear, desire, compassion, sorrow, horror, love, pain, and anguish, there was still the belief that Jesus was God, and that somehow what was happening was what ought to happen. Granted, he would die, and die an appalling death, because he had said that it would be so; but he had also said that, like Jonah, he would return.

And so, after the initial shock and disbelief, he would live on in his Emissaries, and his word of comfort would be spread throughout the land. They would go to his tomb and gather the strength they required for the life they knew was within them--his life, his spirit--and they would carry on his work. It would be hard, with their Master dead; but they would find him once again. In experiencing his death, they would have "eaten the meat of his body and drunk his blood," and that would provide the life they needed.

And if his spirit was with them--and it would be; how could anyone forget him?--all would be well, no matter what happened. Life would not be without pain; but it did not matter. Nothing, as he said, really mattered except that God exists.

How strange that that phrase of despair should be the very voice of hope! It did not matter what happened, because God exists, and whatever happens is what ought to happen. Even, she supposed, with Judas. Even--somehow--what ought not happen was what ought to happen. Even sin made sense somehow. It had to do so, or God lacked control of what he had created, and that was not to be thought of--or it was certainly not what Jesus had taught. She could not fathom how this could be so, but she believed that it was true; he was God, and he knew. And if he would die, it would be for us--for our sins, presumably--and thus he would save us, somehow, from them. Had not her own sins brought her to where she was at this moment? Had they not forced her into the awareness of what Jesus was? Did she not now see, in spite of the raging torrent of feelings at war in her superficial self, that only God was important, and all this did not matter?

She saw it without seeing it, because this consciousness was all but buried below the tumult as she hurried on her way. She knew it without in the least understanding it; and it could not be said that she felt it, because what she felt was the war of her emotions. But she knew it--she knew something--and whatever she knew gave her strength. She would do what she would do, and either succeed or fail; but even if she failed, the failure would be like Jesus' death, in some way her success.

Through all this, she was racking her brain to try to remember just where it was that she had followed Judas that afternoon. She had to find him at once, before any of the Emissaries had the idea of looking for him to kill him--or more importantly, before he could carry out the idea of killing himself.

The moon had set by the time she reached the houses that heralded that the city was nearby; the night had entered that dead darkness before dawn when the sky has not yet been able to detach itself from the land. She was on the main road into the city, and seemed to recall a turning just outside the wall; but it was very difficult to discern, and she came up to the wall without finding it.

True, she had been leaving the city on the earlier occasion, and things always looked different depending on one's direction, and so she decided to retrace her steps, carefully trying to note anything that might be familiar. She was about to think that it was hopeless when she seemed to--feel was the only word--that this was the turning, and this was the lane down which he had walked. Thinking that she was probably mistaken, she turned down the little path for want of anything better to do, and thought she saw the house where it ought to be. Her heart almost burst through her breast.

She came up to the door, not expecting to find a light inside; it was too late, and the fire would have been hidden deep within--and found the door half-open. Her heart stopped. But had he been here and in his haste not shut the door? She opened it and entered, her footsteps echoing like thunder in her ears. She tried to see if there were recent footprints on the floor, but it was too dark. Clearly, the house was empty.

She went out, not knowing what to do. She had so convinced herself that this was where he would have come, and now that he was not there, she had not the least idea where he could have taken himself.

In a daze, she wandered to the back of the house, where there was a small garden, with a terebinth in the middle. She had some vague hope that he might have hidden himself there, and, in dread that it was not so, she entered through the small gate and went in. The whole city! Where could he be?

The trunk of the tree seemed too thick to be natural. Could he be hiding? Had he seen her and moved? Was he afraid? "Judas! Judas!" she whispered. "Fear not! It is Mary! I love you! Fear not!" It seemed that the shadow moved slightly.

She rushed over. "Oh Judas! I love you, and the Master will surely for--"

And she saw the body, hanging from a branch on the opposite side of the tree, its feet half a cubit from the ground, and a small stool kicked over nearby. The motion was its gentle swaying in the wind. It turned.

And the face, purple, all tongue--the hideous caricature of the face she loved so desperately--mocked at her in the growing light of the early day.

She fainted.

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