The other weird thing was that the maggots had grown rather sedate. They were content to vegetate, it seemed.
Both Michael and Ariel felt themselves settling into torpid, bloodless indifference; they asked themselves if Jesus had increased their happiness or merely blunted their appetite for life?
Their question did not go unanswered.
Jesus was aware of their predicament. Even as they began to enjoy a certain preeminence, as the hundreds of people turning up in the valley began to treat them with a deference apparently due to His closest people, even as they were recognized as the ones who shared His camper van and might therefore be party to special insights and wisdom, and even as Jesus’s fame began to grow in a world where news no longer travelled so speedily, Michael and Ariel were caught up in disaffection.
Ariel, watching Jesus at work with the peasants, commented once to Michael, “So, what will the Vatican do now? The Messiah has a Protestant work ethic.”
Jesus, who seemed to know everything, referred to Michael and Ariel as “my brooding friends,” and one evening he deepened his definition, when he turned to Ariel over the fire and said, “Ariel, my dear woman, joy is a flower for your windowsill, not a nettle to be grasped.”
She replied, “To me it’s always been a nettle.”
Jesus smiled quixotically and with his bare hand picked a burning log out of the fire and held it firmly in his hand. “Do I blame the log for the pain I feel?” he said, as the flames licked up his arm. “Or do I let it go? Do I give up on my hopeless expectations?”
He stood up and flung it as far as he could; in the night it traced a long, glowing arc across the sky.
“It sounds so easy when you put it like that.”
“Ah,” Jesus said rhetorically, “she wallows in malcontent while tacitly admitting the ease with which she might let go of her fears.”
“I’m not happy here, not even with you, Master. I never wanted to live like a farmer. I’m a modern woman; I like home design and shopping and…” she added slightly idiotically, “I always wanted children.”
Jesus seemed in a mood for preaching tonight. His jaws moved in a well-oiled and frothing manner. In the corner of her eye she noticed the shadowy figures of peasants quietly creeping up to the edge of the firelight, sitting there with their shining, magnetized eyes, their calloused hands and sprouting, greasy beards. Jesus included them in his conversation. His eyes scanned their faces and he raised his voice so that they could all hear. “Yet her worries are not as she imagines. She confuses the physical with the mental and does not realize that she is a creature of ash, wood, and earth… a creature whose corruptions can only be expelled through will. She is a shepherd of rats. She minds her flock while lamenting the fact that rats are no good to her; their fur is useless for wool and their meat is diseased. So why does the shepherdess not go to market and fetch a ram and a ewe for herself. Why does the shepherdess not create the thing she requires?”
Jesus’s eyes seemed to have grown, and the silence of the night bent around them like a huge bell, amplifying the sound of his voice.
From his pocket the Master took a pack of colorful balloons, bought some weeks earlier in a service station. Solemnly he gave one of the balloons to Ariel and indicated she should blow.
As she did so, a stream of charred, dead maggots came out of her mouth and filled the balloon.
Jesus took it from her and released the heavy balloon into the air. Amazingly, in spite of its weight it seemed impervious to gravity, floating up until caught in a high breeze. As it rose above the ridge across the valley, the unseen sun illuminated it, and it became a tiny globule of fire as it disappeared into the west.
“If you want children, go and have children,” he said. “Open the door that waits for you. Enter your house.”
42
Soon Ariel began to note something changing in her body, and she realized she was pregnant. How this was actually possible she did not know. Had she really expelled the maggots from her body? Or were they sustaining the child in some sort of subcutaneous pocket?
Michael also went through revolutionary changes. He grew fitter and leaner, and as autumn set in he spent his days picking olives with the others. Michael and Ariel and others spread nets under the trees. After harvesting, they pruned errant branches and prepared for next year’s harvest. Slowly, week by week, they picked all the olives in the valley and watched the rich oil dribbling out of the presses into twenty-liter glass bottles.
It occurred to Michael that now that they had oil, wine, and grain all earned from the hard-won ground, they were rich.
In the evenings, Michael and Ariel lay by their fire, resting after their long days. They longed for this child growing inside her. Often they sat with Jesus, relishing his silence.
The camper bus had become almost iconic. In the night it seemed to tower there at the top of the hill, like some many-tiered keep of stone, surrounded by hundreds of smoking fires.
One evening Jesus looked at them, his bearded leonine chin outlined against the flames as he spoke: “Soon your friends will come… more malcontents…”
“Who?” asked Michael.
“Oh, Romans, concerned with their position, as always; heavy laden with badges and laurels,” said Jesus. “Here they will only find work, no feather beds.”
“Do we know them?”
“Yes. One of them was once a friend of yours. He dug holes in the ground and made a resting place for the dead. I once slept there myself.”
“Giacomo?”
“The same.”
“What do they want?”
“They are Pharisees. They believe in gods of their own making, make rules for others to follow, harness the power and keep it for themselves.”
Jesus placed a raw hen’s egg in the fire and watched it with a half-smile. When it exploded, scattering egg white in all directions, he looked up and smiled. “The rooster sits on the egg, and a chick emerges. Without her soft breast, fire consumes all things and makes them worthless.”
Ariel touched her stomach and Michael put his hand there, too.
Jesus continued. “Soon I must leave. But this is of little consequence to you or anyone else. You will remember me no less than our other friends who have lived with us here, in our home.”
They were shocked by his words. Why this sudden departure, and what would they do without him, their Master?
“My work was not so much with you,” said Jesus. “Not with Man. I will judge neither Man nor Woman. Let the truth speak for itself… if it has tongue to speak.” His craggy face stared into the fire, weary. “I came to stop the juggernaut, and now I have. People have stopped moving and the fumes and poisons of their lives and minds are no longer killing their gardens. Now they must work to keep themselves alive.”
“What about the sick and dying? Without all the medicines and hospitals, how will they be helped?”
“Have no fear, they will be helped.”
After that, he would say nothing else. The night passed in a heavy, semi-conscious silence bursting with unanswered questions.
In the morning there were three distant figures coming up the hilclass="underline" Giacomo, Paolo, and Günter. Jesus was cutting wood. He didn’t even look up, merely glanced down the valley and wiped his brow.
Michael took Ariel’s hand and muttered to her: “Here they come, I suppose they were always going to catch up with us.”
She kissed him. “We’ll keep away from them and mind our own business. We’ve come too far now for them; they can’t touch us.”