Chapter 12 - Aurelius

When I woke up, the sun was shining through the cracks of the barn, and the wind was coming in. The bunches of fish hung on racks to dry made a rustling sound. It had been cold during the night, and someone had thoughtfully placed a wool coat over me, probably Judas. I was alone and thought my students must have been scouring the city at dawn to make their move somewhere. I dozed a bit until I heard someone calling me.

I got up and walked out of the barn.

Some distance away, at the water's edge, surrounded by a modest and not very numerous retinue, stood Aurelius, the prefect of Capernaum. Without paying attention to the delegation, I walked to the water and sat on a large quay, gazing into the distance over the greenish-white waters of the Sea of Galilee, which always had such a color in the morning. I liked watching the rippling waves better than the perfect because they were there in their place, Baarn, whereas the Roman Aurelius once came to Galilee for his work and did not regard those regions as his home. He also looked down on the locals from on high, not only because he was the official boss of the city but also because he was proud of his blood. I had seen how he approached the people in the streets of Capernaum. Aurelius could pardon an old man or kick a working donkey while he ordered guards to chase beggars and lepers out of town with stones, like dogs.

I love the word "galilea" as there is music in it. If you uttered it somewhere in the desert of Egypt, among the growing hot reddish-brown rocks, you would immediately see an extraordinary court rolling back to the lake, exposing all sorts of colors of wet pebbles. The shade of the palms, the greenery, the white roofs. I love the word hallelujah, the shortest and most eloquent prayer in the world: shadeism animated me, the combination of those sounds, the prancing body of a four Edomite with long, coal-black braids. When they ran out of complaints to flee from the rattling chariots and the horsemen of Pharaoh, all they had to do was utter such words, or Joseph and his children found new hope; an east wind lit up, and the lightning wrath of God scorched the Egyptians to ashes, like straw.

Aurelius had no message for Jewish lore, shit for the tremendous and secret Jewish language, which became the foundation upon which the inverted pyramid of the whole world rests, and he had no message for me either. He surely did not come to bring me good news and indeed not from equal to equal. Why, then, would I be pleased to meet him?

Stepping on the rocky bank each time, the prefect approached.

Indignant voices rang out: 'What a brat! He doesn't even get up.' 'A cheeky vagabond.' 'Definitely ate too many latrine apples...'

The mighty figure of the Prefect Aurelius in his wind-swept white gown came moving toward me like a snow Scottish. His sentiment surrounded me.

I looked at his fleshy face with the long nose, like a beak, and prepared myself for the fact that I would finally be sent to prison. I remembered or thought of the pretext for that, and I felt melancholy because the inhabitants of Capernaum had only recently seen me as their doctor and best friend.

'Jesus, I won't waste my time coming to you. I was just walking along the lakeshore to breathe fresh air,' the prefect said.

'Glad to see you, good man,' I replied with a smile.

If I had to have a chat with an unpleasant person

I always smiled, and it looked sincere because, at that moment, I was just imagining something funny, an old joke, or that my conversational partner was a big kid who needed to be put at ease.

You could tell from Aurelius' face that he had had a merry night. He wasn't even wholly sober yet.

'People worry, see you as a criminal,'

he continued.

"What people? I asked him to specify.

'Avdon, for example, the synagogue rabbi,' said the perfect chuckling. 'All right, I must say that Avdon and his fears leave me cold; that whole religion of yours is laughable, but there is an order before me, from which it follows that I must imprison anyone who gathers crowds around him and surrender them to justice.'

'Then where do you see a crowd, Aurelius?' I asked. 'I'm sitting here alone.'

'You are sitting alone because your servants are foaming through town, and I believe one of them, by the name of Simon, made an attempt to steal a chicken. He has since been punished for that. Did you come here with your goons to rob and steal? The prefect's eyes shot fire. 'That won't be smooth for you. You'll have to work if you want to stay in this town. We can always use extra hands in the soap factory. Otherwise, things will end badly.'

With that, the interview was over, and the prefect was removed.

Soon, Simon appeared on the bank next to our barn, limping, with a fat, busted nose, and I figured that Judas should have stolen that chicken; him going and things like that were better off. And was that actually theft, in the complete sense of the word? I'm sure Simon would have tried to steal that chicken from a rich stinker, giving it a push toward his salvation. How could you save yourself if there was nothing that

bothered you? None of us had ever taken away the last thing anyone had; no one was after a beggar or a child. On the contrary, if we had money, we helped everyone. And now, a poor chicken. If she had had sense in her head, she would have come to us voluntarily.