Chapter 9 - Zajin
After my conversation with Shammai, I dreamed that I had built a Temple of money that resembled the tomb of an Egyptian king; it was made of air, yielded profits, and everyone who visited it knew happiness and prosperity. It must be said that this lasted only for a specific time; until later, everything collapsed as if the cornerstone had been pulled out from under the Temple.
But what was eternal? Everything dissolved into an abyss.
It came down to the fact that people brought us money we promised to return at a profit. Each such deposit was equivalent to a brick in the wall of this speculative structure. For example, a man named Elisha gave me three circles, and a month later, he got back four without having to do anything for it, spending his time idle in happy anticipation. Where did we get the money to give to Elisja? And what was it all for? Quite simple: in one month,, we collected from the people an amount large enough to pay out the promise because many did not claim their money but entrusted it to me again to get it back.
We opened a store, and people brought us coins, castings, precious and semi-precious stones, and precious jewels. They even arrived with cattle and enslaved people, but we took neither of those because it was difficult to flee from the city unseen with a troop of enslaved people and a flock of sheep.
When we gathered a considerable sum, my disciples and I quietly disappeared to start again from scratch somewhere in another city. From Bethania, we went to Herasa, Tyre, and so on. Part of the profits made was distributed to the talkative poor to live up to my reputation, and the rest went on to what we called simple human pleasures.
In this dream,, I was pursued by no one;; no one complained about cheating the prefect of the city we had left. That money brought us such happiness that it strengthened my faith in God.
Andrew bought himself a splendid house in Caesarea, the fisherman's son Simon acquired himself a senatorial seat in Rome (I didn't want to get into that even in my dream), Matthew became I acidosis and opened a scriptorium where specially trained people copied texts; he had a house built for that purpose in Jerusalem which, with its extensive collection of scrolls, was not inferior to the famous library of Lucullus. Judas married the daughter of a wealthy dignitary from Judea and devoted all his time to studying the stars and compiling a map of the heavens. At the same time, Philippus created in Jerusalem a lupinarium, as fantastic as it was expensive for patricians passing through, where intelligent but destitute young Jews could also be served free.
And I became a poet and wrote only in eloquent Latin, most of whose letters were cast from pure copper, not tin and lead, like the Hebrew alphabet. I gained many new pupils because my fame increased, and no one chased me; people were not afraid to seek rapprochement because I was no longer known as a freethinker and a prophet harmful to the government. Those in power did not sue me for the sedition of the people of Israel. So, the worst that could happen to me was a prickly accusation of a stylistic imperfection or an omission in the description of some detail, such as the sound of an ear flick or a color accent in a character's tunic.
Lying in a triclinium of hewn white stone on cushions sewn with gold, I performed an impeccable heavy-handed Latin line in the first words of my poem: "My slave makes my sandals wax, but God my tongue," I looked at the lines and scratched through them, to write it down even better. Then suddenly, I saw the red, haughty face of Caiaphas, the reigning high priest, his pudgy stature cloaked in robes that would not be out of place for some kings.
"Shut up, Jesus! Said Caiaphas. 'May your tongue wither!'
"Why? I asked.
"We know all about you, Jesus! Continued Caiaphas. 'You had unjustly enriched yourself with the help of a Temple you invented yourself out of idleness, and you will be punished for it, but if you stop writing your poems in clean Latin, we will think again and give you a chance, write prayers in your mother tongue.'
But time went on, the day of judgment was approaching, and lo and behold, the sun rose in the west one morning, which was a terrible sign. Still, I did not stop and continued my work: I tested the letters for their weight and formed my words; I lay tossing and turning in my sphere, trying to put the heavy copper lines in the correct order and to find such a posture that might not be entirely comfortable, but at least would not hurt. Our world was going down, and I saw that only two words remained: Pirtek and hard.
I woke up. My disciples were asleep. Beside me, Judas lay shuffling, undisturbed, like a child. The campfire smoldered after. A balmy wind sailed through the branches of the olive trees, the wings of the prophets rustled in the inner Milky Way, and I had such a dry mouth that I would not be able to utter a word before I drank a sip of water.
Sitting by the stream, I heard its dark stream murmuring on the stones and wondered whether there was no way to bring essential words at once to all people, to the ends of the earth. Without pigeon mail, without horses and ice bids. You couldn't do that in full using columns of smoke or the reflection of metal plates that Roman cohorts used to signal to each other from high places.
All that took too long. A scorpion shoots by, and you have already changed your judgment; this one has become useless, and there is no point in communicating it to other mortals.
Did I need that, by the way? All the things that mattered, I trusted only those closest to me. The masses were beyond reason, even though I was constantly dealing with them...
Yes, I needed that. After all, you didn't have to love those people; what mattered was that you did your job. How many of your pre-parents had had time to provide themselves with offspring before they died, all just to have you brought into the world? So if you had something to say, say it, especially if it was eloquent and your words came straight from the heart.
And if you learned the composition of words? According to Epicurus, only matter existed in the world, opposite the void. That matter, in turn, consisted of innumerable atoms. So you had to split the words into atoms! Since atoms constituted all that existed, at my will, words could form anything from that, in any quantity and weight, whether in Sarmatia or Memphis. What mattered was to decipher the secret code...
Yes, there was a key to everything in the universe.
If I didn't quit, if I overcame resistance and thought through, if illness didn't tear my life away, if the scribes didn't finish me off with a death sentence, if a fanatic didn't knife me, I would find that key one day...
The morning was approaching. Moths circled in the moonlight. In all those days, especially after that little case in Jerusalem, I longed for feminine caresses because danger always fueled my craving for women, as if someone were reminding me: hurry to love; you don't have eternal life (by the way, maybe that was "the voice of conscience" recently discovered by the Hellenic philosophers?). I returned to the campfire and lay down in my seat, imagining a lithe mulatto woman with green eyes embracing me, as beautiful as Hathor and as wise as a 200-year-old serpent; after all, a woman's intellect often set a man on fire more fiercely than the apparent merits of her body.
Sometimes, I thought that God ... was an excitement, a sudden pull to unite the incompatible: the mouse and the snake, ugliness a delight, virtue and anger, the Roman equities and the poor zealots of Judea, water and silver. What primitive loneliness had controlled him that he had decided on all this?
God alone was eternal space when his mighty zajien raised, the letter cast of gold and inverted: T
What had the woman been from him? The darkness, of course. God had entered the darkness, united with her, and poured his pale seed of reason into her, and from that moment, the catastrophe had begun, the contradictory life of everything.
Other letters appeared, and words were created. As is well known, different people prepare their words using different materials. I did not doubt that somewhere in the northeast, people's words were carved from heavy black ebony, and even further north, the fur-clad people used ones carved in ice and able to let light through.
But most of all, the first words were a stone. In the still night, when the hoof-beats of horsemen do not sound up, the owl does not scratch, the mill wheel on the river does not turn, and the campfire does not crack, lay your ear against the earth, and you will hear the song in the language of stones that sounds from the day of creation. It was nothing like the song that a merry woman with a tympanum in her hand played and sang to you; no, it was reminiscent of the equally distant, victorious, and disturbing call of the shofar there the archangel blew to call all the literate to the final battle.
I saw the letter that was the head of an ox, the fish letter, and the eye letter that had to be put out. Letters of mercury, letters of bone, letters of dough. Two letters that were dog ears. I saw the lumbering words running one after another across the parched red earth, like a herd of elephants to the watering hole. I heard brilliant, worm-eaten speeches. I saw words emerging from the maternal darkness that had become a bevy of piteous slaves.
In Jaffa, I had once witnessed how a British slave had had his tongue cut off as punishment for trying to flee; he had hidden on a Frankish merchant ship preparing to set sail among the bales of merchandise but had been caught and returned to his owner. The affair could have ended with a beating and an extended sit on the chain, but the captured slave began cursing, insulting his owner, an ancient Roman. The graybeard took it calmly because he did understand that the man was distraught. Still, the old man's young wife interfered, claiming that, given that the slave had publicly scolded him using hideous words, he needed to be punished in public to prevent their family from being in harm's way.
The Briton was tied to a marble column in the harbor. A crowd gathered, with other slaves among them: Hellenes, Asians, Scythians, blacks, and even Teutons, who stood out with long, shaggy beards. All watched with eager fear of the punitive execution, a spectacle that, according to their owners, should benefit the slaves.
The executioner made the Brit open his mouth, grabbed his tongue with a sharp hook, and made a quick, almost imperceptible movement with his knife. Blood gushed from the slave's mouth, and his tongue fell, like a red jellyfish, onto the stone pavement of the quay.
I felt sorry for the Briton, but in the book of Ezra, it was said, "It is better for a man not to be born, better not to live, for the wordless creatures are happier than man," and who knows, maybe after losing his tongue this slave had finally found quiet happiness for himself.
