Jesus, then, could not be calmly Greek and radical in this demonic scrub. How could he be when the devil called him from the precipice, when the jackdaw’s matted wing was hard against his face? He was alone, exposed, a chirping innocent. And yet he felt triumphant too. Thank heavens for the devil, even, for the devil was the herald of god. ‘The devil and the bee obstruct the way to heaven and to honey. The path to sweetness is a stinging one,’ according to the country psalm. As he grew closer to his god, the devil’s fat hand would wrap itself round Jesus’s thin wrist. The devil’s lips would press against his ear. God would watch and bide his time, and if his Galilean son stood firm, god’s cushioned fingers would take him by the elbow and the hand and ease him from the devil’s grasp. Why else had Jesus come into the wilderness? To be the chosen one. To be the battleground. To be eased to freedom from the devil’s grasp.
So even though Jesus was distressed by Musa’s daily visitations, he understood that god was watching him at last. That gave him strength, and helped him to withstand the chilling offers from the promontory and to see the devil’s plan more clearly. Musa’s offers were too crudely tempting; his summonses for Jesus to vacate the precipice and heal the sick were too bespoke to be remotely innocent. The scriptures said, The devil comes and offers you your heart’s desire, beware; he promises a boat to fishermen, and proffers horses to a man that hopes to ride; he places cushions at your back and brings in figs on silver plates, and wine. And that had always been Jesus’s greatest, maddest hope, his heart’s desire, to serve god by driving out illnesses and spirits, to cure and to heal. He did not see himself a hermit, engaging with his god forever in a cave. He did not see himself a scholar, poring over texts. He did not have the learning or the self-regard. He did not see himself a priest. He was too shy.
He wanted most to serve his god in simpler ways which did not require either confidence or reading, ways which could be witnessed by his family and his neighbours. More cowardly ways, perhaps? At best, he’d preach to villagers and children, anyone who would not challenge him and not call out, ‘Your head’s in heaven, Gally. Full of clouds.’ He’d even be prepared – and glad – to defile himself on those kept out of temples – lepers, menstruating women, prostitutes, the blind, even the uncircumcized – if they would listen to him, if it would cause discomfort to the priest. These were the ones, he thought, that god had created weak and blemished and imperfect by design. These were the chirping innocents that he should rescue from the devil’s claw, for he himself was weak and blemished and imperfect by design. These people were his family.
Jesus had always been ashamed of his ambition, but this is what he’d dreamed since he was young. There was a congregation on a hill slope in the Galilee. He was the tallest, and he looked down on their heads. He recognized his brothers’ hair, his neighbours’ hair, the baker’s and the priest’s, the leper’s, and the prostitute’s uncovered hair. But they were tired of listening to sermons. ‘Come up to me, the sick, the troubled and the blind,’ he’d say. He’d put his hands on eyes and foreheads, rub out pains, press his fingers into hardened flesh, remove their swellings with a touch, kiss sores. Erase their sins. He’d cure them. They’d be restored, through him, by god. And, yes, he’d find a boat for fishermen, and horses for the men too weak to walk. They’d say — a phrase he loved — ‘We never knew our Gally after all. He is the bread of our short lives. He is the good shepherd. who will lead us out of suffering.’
He’d never boasted such a dream to anyone – not to his parents or the priest, not even to his god in prayer, and hardly to himself. This was his smothered heart’s desire, unspoken and invisible. Yet here was someone – this resurrected fat man, dangling provisions from the summit of the precipice – who called him by his other name and seemed to see inside his heart. Someone who heard what was not said. Someone who saw what was not on display. No one had ever offered Jesus such perfect blandishments before, or such flattery. Yes, he was tempted to go up and test his healing prayers at the tent, to sacrifice his fast for them. He felt he had the cure in his fingertips. They only had to touch. They trembled at the thought of it. The hands that could remove the knots from wood, release the pigeons pinioned by the twigs, could drive out fevers and disease. He’d be the carpenter of damaged souls. But god was watching him, beyond the devil and the bees, and saying nothing. He gave no sign to Jesus. And no sign was the sign that these appeals to vanity could only be the devil’s work. He’d have to learn to block his ears and eyes for fear of joining them, the demons on the rock.
So Jesus closed himself against his tempters. He would not be seduced or fooled by the contents of a leather bag. He half-heard, through his fingertips, Musa calling from the rim, his voice unnatural: ‘Gally. Gally. Look outside. There’s water. And some food. Dates. Some bread. My wife. Has baked for you … Gally, Gally. Speak to us.’ He did not move. He hardly breathed. He was beyond temptation now. His appetites were dead.
It was hard to concentrate, but he managed to expel Musa from his thoughts and shut their voices out. He set his mind on future, better times: his quarantine had ended; he had proved his worthiness. He saw himself walking through Jerusalem towards the temple, through the trading tables and the booths which filled the outer courts. The merchants and the dealers and the money-changers, the people who wore soft clothes and ate wheat bread and reclined on couches like the Greeks, would all call out to him in their high voices, ‘Gally, Gally, eat our cakes and drink our wine. Buy pigeons and dates from us.’ Musa would be there, with leather bags for sale. But Jesus could not be seduced, not by the devil in the scrub, not by the devils crowding at the temple walls. He’d turn their tables over, empty out their bags, drive off their animals. He’d put his foot in Musa’s flesh and kick him through the gates.
But first he had the opportunity to kick a bag. It held the devil’s water and the devil’s bread, the devil’s finest dates. How much he’d love to open up the bag and sup on it. How much he’d be relieved to break his fast, and flood the valley of his throat.
He managed to get up on to his feet, although his ankles ached alarmingly and all his bones protested at the effort. He could not swing his foot to kick the bag. He reached his arm out into the early evening light. There was no sun to warm him; how foolish and how strong he’d been to jettison his clothes. He wrapped his fingers round the plaited rope. He pulled the bag towards the cave, and caught it in both hands. He smelled the bread – the water too – in those few moments that he held the bag. He smelled the blood, the mildew and the carrion that lingered on the leather. He tugged on it. The rope tightened for an instant and came free as Musa or one of his accomplices let go of the far end. He sensed their triumph. He would make it brief. Before the rope could slither from the rim and fall at the entrance to the cave, Jesus had tossed the bag away as if it had claws and teeth, a rabid bat. He hadn’t got much strength. He was surprised how heavy it had seemed, but still it cleared the platform of the cave and fell towards the valley, bouncing on the precipice until the water-pouch inside, unseen, split open from the impact of the rocks. The leather bag became too empty and too light to fall much more. It lay – forever; kippered by the sun – between two rocks, too high and too far from the top for any climber to retrieve.
Jesus pressed his fingers tighter in his ears. He was petulant with triumph and alarm, like a boy who’d smashed an egg, frightened of his mother, not the hen. He would not listen to his tempters’ shouted words. He hummed to himself so that no more sound or any of the beaten voices from above could penetrate his armour.
19
Night arrived with its sullen wing to double-shade their tents and caves. Jesus slept; he was unconscious for a while, but when he dreamed he dreamed of Musa, no one else. Stroking Musa’s eyelids with his thumb. Musa’s face marked on the surface of the moon. Musa sitting in the kingdom of the lord, naked and uncircumcized, his great lap open to the angels’ gaze. Musa in a market-place, but selling fasts instead of leather bags, with Jesus his fi
rst customer.
Musa’s salesmanship was irresistible. Of course it was. Jesus could not make the man seem dull, even in his dreams. This devil was not ignorant, a huckster with no subtlety. He was a craftsman worthy of his task. He was a trader and a salesman, after all, and practised in making virtues out of sins. He could sell the mildew and the bruises on his blemished fruit. Their blackened peels are honey-sweet, he’d say. Taste them – pay first – and you will see.
No, for Jesus, the merchant Musa and the devil were the same, in dreams and out. Close cousins anyway, far-travelled, patient, shrewd, unshockable, refined. For every camel-load of merchandise that Musa had exchanged for goods abroad he would have packed a little knowledge in his panniers as well; the whereabouts of some blue, distant town, the predilections of some king, a new philosophy, a freshly coined word, telepathy, the allocation of the stars. He’d have the trick of holding conversations with his customers on subjects as various as that year’s lemon crop, the uses of bem and balsam oils, and whether it was proper for a sadducee to eat an egg that had been laid on the sabbath. (‘Proper to eat it, wrong to cook it, I would say. Raw eggs are good enough for sadducees.’) All his conversations would be sharp. His knowledge was a gleaming weapon, a spear with wings, with which to prick and wound his quarry. Musa would not flee from arguments, or duck his head at words he could not understand. What he didn’t know he would invent, and his inventions would be more quenching than the truth. He was a strong adversary for god.
So here in dreams was Musa at his stall, selling fasts to pious Jews, always intending that they should be trapped by their own vanity in some damp cave, on some sheer precipice, with not an ant to keep them company, and only devils’ water there to wet their eyes and tongues. Here was Musa calling on the holy wisdoms of Moses, Ezra and Mordecai whose fasts had been sustained divinely. Here was Musa with his hand on Jesus’s, the merchant’s mouth a short breath from the client’s ear, his forked tongue hidden by his swollen cheeks, and whispering, ‘I challenge you. To battle me. For forty days.’
Again, more dreams. He came, this time to Jesus in his cave. He held a carpet viper in one hand, and a desert mouse in the other. ‘These creatures are your cousins, Gally. They’re like you. They go without their food and drink for forty days or more in this same scrub, three months, four months,’ he said. ‘If there’s no food or drink, they simply switch their bodies off and wait until the rains. That’s what you have to do. It’s easy. Of course, the pity is that one of them can always break its fast, to eat the other one … Guess which. Let’s see.’ He put the viper with the mouse.
Another time the merchant was a priest, his great round head topped off with a linen hat. Bells and pomegranates hung from his blue robe. There were brooches made of sardonyx, a golden purse, a purple cape. His sermon was that fasters who had earned his blessing could expect the greatest of rewards. He could not promise paradise to mice or snakes. But pious Jews? Their prizes were unlimited. With Musa at their side, they would be calm throughout their quarantine and comfortable, he promised them, leaning his weight against the temple door. They would have peace of mind. All the distractions and appetites of public life would be driven off like scrub dogs, and clarity of spirit would come sniffing at their ankles, begging to be lifted up and stroked.
‘Towards the end – the last ten days, perhaps – your soul will fly out of your body like a lark,’ he said. ‘Believe me, you will pass into the fabric of the sky, until you sit amongst the angels at their table. Keep your elbows in. You’ll break your fast with rapture beans and golden goblets filled with nectar. And then they’ll call you for your final prize – an audience with god. If you will only place your trust in me.’
The final dream. They were in the Galilee. Musa in the market-place, with Jesus and his family, and all the villagers. ‘Let’s have a volunteer, to taste the black skin of my quarantine,’ he said. ‘You.’ He prodded Jesus on the chest, with his imperfect staff. ‘Try fasting now. Try forty days. You’ll find forgiveness if you’ve upset god. Your oddities …’ he smiled conspiratorially at all the Galileans, ’ … will be subdued, turned to a profit even. See how deep the nights become, how bright the stars, the longer that you keep away from food and drink. Come, Gally. Bring your brothers, bring your friends. Broken hearts will be repaired. Bald men will grow fine heads of hair … Please have your coins ready when you come.’
This last nightmare was what Jesus woke up to a dozen times, in the darkness of the middle night. He had expected to dream of chicken and melon, mutton stew, lamb cooked above a vine-wood fire, not Musa preaching fasts. Jesus was at his weakest when he woke. His spirit was destroyed by sleep. He could not recall a single prayer to summon help, or shake away this final dream. His elbows and his knees cracked like seed pods; his bones were noisy ravens laughing at his flesh, tok-tok tok-tok. His body throbbed with cold. These were his moments of defeat. He’d been a fool to throw his clothes away. He’d been a fool to leave the Galilee. He’d been a fool to leap out of his bed to pray. He’d been a very stupid man to invest so much in fasting. His quarantine was little more than bogus goods, false gold, a leaking pot, sold to him by a man who had the devil’s tongue. He was not any closer to his god, for all his sacrifice, than he had been when he was six. Surely someone in the Galilee – his priest, a neighbour possibly, someone who knew the hermit scriptures better than himself — could have taken him aside before he left his home and offered some instruction on the torments that he faced if he came to the wilderness alone. Where was the rhapsody? What joy was there in all the suffering? Where was the dignity of death?
No one had said how painful it would be, how first, there would be headaches and bad breath, weakness, fainting; or how the coating on the upper surface of his tongue would thicken day by day; or how his tongue would soon become stuck to the upper part of his mouth, held in place by gluey strings of hunger, so that he would mutter to himself or say his prayers as if his palate had been cleft at birth; or how his gums would bleed and his teeth become as loose as date stones.
No one had warned him how quickly he would lose his will to move about, how even lifting up his arms to wipe away the sweat – so much of that, at first, and then none at all – would become a punishing task; how he’d postpone the effort and let the sweat drip off his brow without regard to cleanliness; how cruelly his body would begin to eat itself as his muscles and his liver and his kidneys fought for fuel like squalid, desert boys battling for a piece of wood; how his legs would swell with pus; how his skin would tear and how the wounds would be too weak to dress themselves with scabs. No one had said, there will be stomach pains and cramps, demanding to be rubbed and soothed like dogs.
He hated dawn. At least at night, he could imagine he was whole. But in the cave’s dim light by day, he looked down at his arms and legs and saw how he was turning black in patches where his muscles and his joints were leaking blood. He’d become a leper, a hyena, one of those mottled slaves from the rivers beyond Egypt, flayed brown and pink by some hard master. They wouldn’t let him in the temple grounds like that.
Jesus rubbed his joints and warmed his fingers in his mouth. He could reduce these pains. But there were other, shocking pains that could not be rubbed away, the pains of sadness and despair. This was the greatest failing of them all. Someone, surely, could have said, Stay with your parents in the Galilee. For if you go into the wilderness to fast, not just your body but your spirit will, against all faith, begin to bleed. Your spirit will shed its weight as well, its frame will ache, its eyes will dim. You’d be a fool to think your spirit is beyond the reach of thirst and hunger. Nothing is.
They had not even said, Go to the desert if you must, and fast. But do take care. For god is not alone up there, if god is there at all. But there are animals; and the devil is the fiercest of them all.
Perhaps it was a blessing that Jesus’s spirit fell apart before his body did, because if it had remained intact as he grew thin and weak on fasting, he might have
tried to escape the folly of his unbending quarantine. He might have decided that he ought to take the middle course, the one chosen by the other quarantiners that he’d followed up the scree a few days previously. They were wise and timid, and broke their fasts each day at dusk. He might have climbed the precipice each evening, walked up through the foot-marked pans of soft clay along the valley beds to the perching row of caves, and got in line amongst the poppies for his share of their food. He could have begged for clothes. Or he might at least have seen the sense in this one compromise – by all means to have gone without dry food, but to have kept his throat and body oiled during the forty days with a little water from their cistern, for water is the staff of life and god’s great gift to the world.
What vanity to think a total fast can rid a man of sin, or put a man at god’s right hand, he might have told himself if his spirit and good sense had not been so subdued. Go from this cave, go home, go now – be penitent, be purified, and sin no more.
It was too late. He had no strength to climb the precipice. Jesus had become a creature of the dark, a fugitive from pleasure, comfort, beauty, light. He sat inside the cave, his hands lapping round his genitals for coolness, or running round the three symbols for the name of god which he had scratched, it seemed a thousand years before, into the rock, or massaging his legs and arms. His face was bleached beneath the dust. His hair was knotted clay. His pupils had grown large and slow, in their attempts to catch and keep the light. He was confused and fumbling. The few sunbeams that came into his cave each morning made him sneeze and itch. My eyes can’t take the light, he told himself. That is a sign that I am meant to stay right here.