We’re staying with a family who own a small house just by the synagogue. Their children aren’t afraid of Naomi: they run around her legs and argue about who gets to sit on her lap when she sings to them. I can easily talk with these little ones, but when I try to speak with the adults, then I start to stutter and get stuck.
Every evening, I sit together with Naomi. She tries to get me talking. She won’t give up, she wants me to say something, say anything, just carry on and not fight against what’s inside me. I tell stories from when I was a child, from when I was with my father. Like the time I decided to run away and live alone up in the mountains. My father spotted me sneaking out of the house. He stopped me and asked where I was going. Then he asked if I had any food with me, if I’d taken something to wrap myself up in when it got cold. I showed him everything I was taking, and he nodded. “Good, that’s good, son,” he said. But how would I find the way? I pointed and told him which way I was going, which route I’d follow. “That’s good, Jacob,” he said. “You’re very thorough.” Then he bent down, lifted me up, kissed me, gave me a hug, and wished me a pleasant journey.
Naomi asks me how far I got before I turned back. I tell her that I didn’t go, I decided I’d rather be with my father, and Naomi laughs.
“But why did you want to run away?” Naomi asks me.
“My brothers were tormenting me,” I say. “They all thought I was sick, that I was possessed, things like that. I don’t know. I remember my father, but not everything.”
“There you go,” says Naomi. “That’s it.”
I look at her.
“You didn’t fight against it,” she says. “You didn’t get stuck.”
I try to tell her that doesn’t mean anything, but then it all gets stuck again. My whole body struggles and strains.
“You mustn’t let it control you,” says Naomi.
I tell her to be quiet, and I try to sit still, even if all my small sores start itching.
“It doesn’t matter,” says Naomi. “You’re not evil, I don’t care what other people say, or what you think yourself. You’ve not been marked. Jesus touched you, he took it all away.”
I shake my head and say that there’s something that’s changed. I don’t know what, but something led me to that cave that day, to the one-eyed man and Hananiah’s skull. Naomi says it’s not true, there’s nothing evil guiding us.
“Nobody has that power,” she says. “Not since Jesus touched us.”
But I don’t believe her. There’s something different here in the world, something different in us. It was able to grow in Hananiah and his followers, and it’s growing in me.
Sometimes we walk together down to the shores of the Sea of Galilee. Sometimes I go there alone. I tell Naomi that I want to be in peace, that I need to think.
There’s another kind of life there, another kind of rhythm. The fishing nets, the fish colored and shaped by the water, the children waving and calling to the boats heading out, and standing there when they come back. Sometimes I see young men who couldn’t get a place on the boats, standing there casting nets from the shallows. I keep away when they come back ashore, as I don’t want to get talking to anybody.
This morning I’ve got up while it’s still dark, while Naomi and the rest of the household are still sleeping. I go down to the lake, past all the houses in the town, watching the boats heading out toward the depths. An elderly man is sitting by some stones a short distance away, staring at me. My eyes are still sleepy, and I go down to the shore to wash my face. I glance over at the old man, who’s still staring at me.
When I get back to the house, Naomi’s sitting there, waiting for me. She tells me she had a strange dream. I try to listen to what she says, but I can’t. I look down at my hands. They’re soft. My father spared me from hard work. I was trained in his profession, I was his firstborn, I was to take over and manage everything we had, everything that became mine. But my father led me down a different route, without even knowing it. He wanted to get rid of the evil inside me, so he took me to Jesus. Now both my father and Jesus are gone. It feels as if a whole lifetime’s passed since the day the Master laid his hand on me.
“Jacob,” says Naomi, “you’re not listening.”
“I can’t follow anymore. It feels as if it’s all over.”
“It’s not over,” says Naomi.
“Yes, it is,” I reply. “If it’s not over, what is this, then? What are we doing? We’re telling people about how he came back, but I didn’t see any of it. I wasn’t there when they caught him, I wasn’t there when they killed him, hung him up there, I wasn’t there when he rose again.”
“Be quiet,” she says. “Don’t talk like that.”
Naomi takes hold of me. She pushes me over, and when I get up, she shoves me again, pushing me up against the wall and hitting me on the chest. But there’s no strength in her, and after a while she gives up and leans against me.
“Don’t say things like that, Jacob,” she whispers. “You have to believe, like I believe in you. If nothing else, then believe in me, stay here with me.”
When evening comes, we join the family we’re staying with for a gathering at the synagogue. The moon’s up, bonfires and torches have been lit, and all the followers of Jesus in Capernaum are there. Naomi talks to another couple who were in the far south of Judea before they came here. They’re older than us, and they turn out to be Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother, and his wife, a woman called Anna. He says they’re planning to go to the coast and take the sea route to Lycia and Asia. I don’t say very much, but Naomi tells them about when we both saw Jesus for the first time.
“I remember it,” says Andrew. “That day, we couldn’t understand why he wanted to stay there.”
He looks at me, and his eyes narrow as if he’s trying to remember something.
“Were you the one who went up to the Master that evening?” he asks.
I nod.
“What did you talk about?”
I look at Naomi, but her eyes won’t look at me.
“Quite a few of us were wondering about it,” says Andrew. “I remember Simon felt hurt because the Master told him to leave him.”
The woman called Anna smiles, as if there were something funny about that story that the rest of us don’t know. That’s when I feel that I can’t take it anymore. If they’re so strong, if God is in us, in our fingertips and toes and tongues, then they can see and hear how Jesus’s power has run out in me.
“Uh, uh, uh, uuuh, uuuh, I t-t-trii-triii-triiied,” I tell them, “to sss-sss-ssspeak with him ab-ab-abooout it.”
Andrew opens his mouth to say something, but Anna puts her hand on his. Several others around us have stopped talking. Naomi looks at me, her eyes, they hold me steady.
“He d-d-didn’t ss-ssay anything, b-bbb-bbb-bbbut then uh, uuuh, uuuh, I saw he was t-t-t-trying, he was t-t-trying to speak, b-b-bbb-bbbut h-h-he c-c-c-couldn’t. He wuh-wuh-wuh. He wuh-wuh-wuh. He wuh-wuh-wuuh-wuuh-wuuh-waaas like m-m-meee. He had th-th-the s-saaame, th-th-the same th-th-thing you see n-n-n-nooow. B-b-b-buuut e-e-e-everything he said wuh-wuh-waaas nnn-nnnn-nooo yu-yu-uuuuuse. B-b-because the e-e-e-eeeevil iiis s-s-stiiill, stiiillll. Here, in mmm-mmm-meee.”
Andrew gets up. He looks at me and Naomi.
“There are many of us,” he says. “Many of us who were there, who heard everything he said, whom he touched. But it’s never been easy. Even my brother, Simon Peter, has been full of doubts. I saw him wandering about sleeplessly at night while the Master was still alive. I don’t understand everything the Master told us, nor everything he did. I’ll say only this to you, Jacob, so you know. We’re alone, but he’s here.”