Chapter 31 - The blind man

Of course I don't come to heal everyone, and there were days when Chorazin became the arena of my impotence. What to do with a man whose one leg was shorter than the other? I advised him to wear a sandal with a thick sole on one foot. He had come from far away, from Gaza, had hoped for a miracle, that I would fix his leg, grow it using the mire of the earth, while I gave him succinct advice and led him back outside. Probably the chance of a miracle existed even in such a case, but then such a person had to have a great purpose in mind, just the desire to please the females of Gaza was not enough. Anyway, our love perils did not matter much to God, but that was just as well, because then he would also turn a blind eye to our successful love adventures. If we knew exactly how the Most High responded to this or that action of ours, we would perform his actions and let him govern us, and no one had succeeded in that yet, not even the greatest righteous. And those of him who had seen a hint of his insane harmony immediately lost my mind and could not make sense of it.

'Jesus don't come and help me! What kind of slavish offer is this from an impostor with the mask of a scribe!" cried the limp in the Chorazin market, after he had drunk away his sorrow, for the shoes of Gaza would still giggle at his lack.

Yes, you could mold out of the earth something of a human being, and make it propel itself with the help of the Logos, but you could not unite the earthly mud with the living flesh to grow an arm or a leg... Or rather, you could only do so if it pleased God to spit on a heap of dust of which you wanted to make something. The divine saliva reconciled all random substances, but how did you earn such a phlegm?

And how do I come to help someone who was blind from birth? He was brought to me by his elderly mother. He was a man of about 40, with a powerful physique, a huge red beard and a luxuriant head of hair. As I looked at him like this, I thought that this is what the powerhouse Samson must have looked like, the last great Richter of Israel.

The blind man made his living singing and playing the zither on holidays and commemorations, although it would have been more appropriate to see him holding a donkey chinbox.

'Make him see, grant me so long his sight!' the old woman pleaded, after kneeling down deftly in front of me. 'We've really tried all sorts of things... We've used ointments, applied the saliva of a large solid... My only hope is on you...!'

I groped the man's eye sockets, hoping that maybe with a blade of obsidian you could make cuts in the eyelids to open them, but he didn't even have eyeballs. He was not to be helped with anything. His inner gaze was forever focused on the apeiron.

'Do you sometimes want him to play for you, Jesus?" the old woman perked up. 'Then you will hear at once how marvelously he speaks, and then you will understand that he needs eyes irrevocably! The gracious Antipa is fond of music, makes my son-love cannot do without an accompanist, and who would want to admit me to the palace, an old ugly woman... Asher, play something for the teacher quickly!'

I wanted to object, but the blind man quickly took his zither out of his knapsack, sat down on the ground, with his legs folded under him, struck the strings, and in the process sang one of the songs that the women of Galilee sing when bringing in the harvest.

"We bring, dear heart, mountains of bread to the house!" thundered the bass of the blind, and the old woman would clasp her hands together on her chest and look at him with endearment.

When they heard music, Gita and Tali entered the room and began dancing and clapping their hands.

'...and Bergen bread!" ended the blind man.

'Ah, that's my favorite song!' Exclaimed Gita.

"Surely you can help this man, Jesus? Asked Tali.

'Probably not,' I replied exasperated, they shouldn't come and disturb me when I had consulting hours. I had already reproached the nurses several times for not coming to my work and just rebbing.

'Why not, Jesus?" the old woman asked. 'Asher has played so beautifully for you, and you want to deprive him of his sight? How much money should I give you? I don't mind, I'll do anything for my son...'

'Mama, I told you there was no point,' spoke the blind man, and he got up and stowed his instrument back in his knapsack.

'Woman, you have a son, that's the main thing, then be happy about that,' I said. 'If he could have seen, he would have been away from you a long time ago, to a virgin in a distant city, you can state. And then you would have been alone and you might have been dead already... You may be glad!'

But the old woman doesn't understand me.

'Perhaps the song did not please you? Will Asher Anders sing you a sad song...?'

I got her out the door with difficulty. Like the limp from Gaza, she walked down the street in Chorazin and gushed loudly "this false Jesus," while her blind son trudged resignedly behind her.

And then there was that legionnaire from the garrison, named Antony; he was suffering from an old wound that he had received some years before, a Jew had planted a knife in his abdomen during disturbances near Jerusalem, touching his life. The wound had healed, but the liver no longer worked properly, and from time to time the legionnaire was in tremendous pain. I advised him not to eat too much, especially not too fatty, to take a drink of seeds and fruits of carduus marianus every day, and to come back to me in a few months.

"Won't you make me better right now, Jesus?" he asked bewildered. 'I can no longer bear the night pain... And in the morning I feel so bad I can't get out of bed...'

'You are a Roman, Antony, and you have plenty of gods to turn to if you don't like the treatment I prescribe,' I replied. 'I'm very sorry that Jew stabbed you with that knife.'

'Not to worry, my mate killed him right away,' Antony chuckled, 'he stabbed his gladius to the hilt in his heart... and could you maybe sell me some kif too, Jesus? I like that medicine.'

'I stopped dealing in kif a long time ago, Antony,' I replied.

The legionnaire threw the two drachms on the table that came to me and returned to his garrison.

Sometimes rich elderly, landowners, merchants, officials, would come and ask me to give them back their youth. I remember one of them, the tetrarch's counselor in commercial matters. As ramshackle as he was busy and agile, dressed in a brown chiton with tassels on the sleeves and an expensive coat of pink silk, he was the personification of the lust for life. You could tell that the old man did not believe a jot that the gardens of Galilee would still bloom if he suddenly died. His soul resembled that of a carefree young woman, he wanted to please every flower and spend his not inconsiderable fortune for eternity, he coquetted with death, and his barren, brown-stained hands trembled as he said, "Jesus, you are a great teacher, therefore I will not waste your time needlessly. Let's get straight to the point: I do not feel myself an old man, therefore help me bring my body in line with my soul. I will reward you generously for it. An Arab magician told me that for that you need the blood of a young offspring... I can arrange that. I have 15 grandchildren... With the help of reliable people I can kidnap one of them, he is only two, they will bring him to you, and you will make use of his blood. He is as healthy as a fiddle.'

I refused it to the old man, but only because I did not know how to pour the blood from one human into another, and that was exactly what had to be done, that magician had not lied. Moreover, before pouring the blood over, it had to be put into a special piece of vessel and worked on using incantations that I did not know about. I had only heard that they existed. It seems that Indian medicine men understood this art.

Some people thought this kind of experiment was inhumane, but then I argue against it: even on the rusty and impure balance sheet of the Lord God, on which a greater weight indicates a greater usefulness, a bell-fed toddler will surely not weigh more heavily than a scrawny graybeard, the final sufferings and hardships of life will be more convincing. Every miracle, even a bloody miracle, is a gift of God, and who better to appreciate it than an old man! While children are almost always ungrateful. And our world is also such that in all likelihood the grandson will grow up and eventually warm his soulful grandfather on his deathbed for the inheritance. The belief in children is but a harmless belief, but the cult of the child, which is an unforgivable stupidity that turns a mature and sensible wallpaper into a victim.

It is against nature to be a victim.

Some old-timers I advised simply dyed their gray horse with henna so that it would turn reddish, or red. And if you wanted a black horse, you had to add blood and fat from a black bull to the henna, a raven egg and mashed tadpoles.

On one occasion someone came and declared that the land where he grew his gram had little water. And he looked at me expecting that I would promise him life-giving streams from the heavens that would regularly pour out over his land lest some of the moisture happen to land on the land of his neighbors, whom he hated and wanted dead as soon as possible. Yes, my unloving people were the best breeding ground for the proliferation of prophets great and small, because it was dead easy to become a saint in the midst of those people. A little irony, powers of observation and self-control sufficed.

When I think back to these and other instances, I understand that I was always a hostage of sacred survival, people expected from me what is written in the book of Neviim, I had to realize for them the province of Isaiah: "then shall the eyes of the blind be opened, and the ears of the deaf be opened; then shall the banks leap up like a deer, and the tongue of the dumb shall sing; for in the desert shall the waters spring up, and in the steppe the streams.

Even if there are no medicines against death to be found in the gardens then, I have always been able to successfully help aging women who just wanted to slow down the process a little bit, not get their original youth huh. Here baths of fruit juices and this linen milk are irreplaceable, as well as ointments for hands and face, decoctions of certain herbs, physical exercise and prolonged sleep. A woman who sleeps little is more likely to wilt. Yes, and with a few of them I got into a relationship, which was also a fantastic medicine. Dyed-in-the-wool nuffs, Evert experienced as willing, pleased me greatly... Their moving and moaning were of an ultimate sincerity, as if the act of love was accomplished for the last time. I felt their gratitude, which set me on fire. As if everything such a woman could have experienced and gone through transferred onto my bed, and the pulsing currents of other people's lives allowed me to see the hidden for a moment.

I myself do not know how I had once healed lepers. Probably leprosy was after all a spiritual condition that one halt control groups when doctor and patient joined forces and understood each other, when their work turned into a mystery. That had happened when I had healed the leper Ephraim in Capernaum.

Often it was one's own numbness and unpolishedness that prevented a sick person from healing.

Sometimes at night I would walk out of the East Gate of Chorazin, sit on a rock at the edge of the precipice and look at the red peaks of the mountains above the lake. I thought about the people I hadn't been able to help. All together, they could probably fill a city. I wouldn't want to live in that city.