Testament - Hardcover

Ricci, Nino

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0385658540 ISBN 13: 9780385658546

Publisher: Doubleday Canada, 2002

Synopsis

Set in a remote corner of the Roman Empire during a period of political unrest and spiritual uncertainty, Testament is a timeless story of how the holy man we know as Jesus alters forever the course of human history.
We come to know Jesus through the eyes of four dissimilar people. First is Judas, a committed political fighter who is invigorated by his discussions with Jesus about a sovereign nation for the Jews -- a place Jesus imagines as a philosophical rather than a physical kingdom. Second is Miryam of Migdal, through whom we learn of Jesus's controversial teachings as the two travel through Galilee and Jesus encourages the masses to question the teachings of the powerful few. Through Jesus' mother, Miryam, we learn of his all-too-human vulnerability, the rigor of his conviction, and his unfailing compassion. Finally, it is through Simon of Gergesa, a Syrian shepherd, that we witness the last days of the Jewish preacher as he journeys to Jerusalem. Though Simon is uncertain about how to assess Jesus' legacy, he now sees beauty where before there was none.
Covering overlapping portions of Jesus' life, Testament tells the recognizable story of the four Gospels but without recourse to miracle. The naturalism of the novel is based on extensive research and is utterly convincing, and yet there is indisputably something profound and even holy about the man and his teachings. As the novel progresses we begin to see how his story, filtered by different eyes and desires and subject to countless retellings, will be transformed into myth.
Ricci is not the first novelist to approach this central figure of western civilization, but here he accomplishes something of an entirely new order: a portrait that is historically grounded, philosophically rich, and emotionally moving and that speaks eloquently to the place and power of stories in our lives. test

About this title

About the Author:

NINO RICCI’s best-selling Lives of the Saints (published in the United States as The Book of Saints) won the Governor General’s Award for fiction, the SmithBooks/Books in Canada First Novel Award, and the F. G. Bressani Prize. It was the first book in a trilogy, followed by In a Glass House and Where She Has Gone, which was a finalist for the Giller Prize.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

BOOK I
YIHUDA OF QIRYAT

I first saw him in the winter of that year at En Melakh, a town of a few
hundred just north of the Salt Sea. He had come in out of the desert, people
said—from the look of him, his blistered face and the way his skin hung
from his bones, he"d passed a good while there. He had set himself up now
just off the square, squatting in the shade of an old fig tree; I had a good
view of him from the porch of the tavern I"d put up in across the way. Some of
the townspeople, no doubt taking him for a holy man, dropped bits of food in
front of him from time to time, which he accepted with a nod of his head but
more often than not couldn"t seem to bring himself to stomach, letting them
sit there in the dirt for the flies to collect on or the dogs to snatch away.
Though the town lay on the Roman side of the frontier, the
soldiers of Herod Antipas often passed that way when they travelled up from
his southern territories. At the time, I was awaiting an informant we had
among Herod"s men on his way back to the court from the Macherus
fortress. The holy man had appeared perhaps the third day of my wait,
simply there beneath the fig tree when I awoke; from the joyless look of him
I thought he might have been cast out from one of the desert cults, the way
they did sometimes if some bit of food should touch your hand before you"d
washed it or if you missed some pause or half-word in your prayers. His
hair and beard were scraggly and short as if recently shaved for a
vow—they gave him a boyish appearance but couldn"t however quite take the
dignity from him, which seemed to sit on him like some mantle someone had
laid over him.
He wasn"t wearing any sandals or cloak. I thought surely he"d had
some cave out there to hole up in, and some brush for fire, or he would have
frozen to death in the cold. Even here in the valley the nights had been
bitter, the little heat the sun built up over the day through the winter haze
vanishing the instant dusk fell. I waited to see if he planned to weather the
night in the open or repair to some cranny when darkness set in. But the
sun dropped and he didn"t move. My tavern-keeper, a mangy sort with an
open sore on one of his knuckles, brought a lamp out to the porch and a bit
of the gruel he passed off as food.
"He"s a quiet one, that one," he said, with his low, vulgar laugh,
trying to ingratiate himself. "Nearly dead, from the look of it."
Not ten strides from the man some of the boys of the town,
coming out after their suppers, began to get up a bit of a fire, spitting and
holding their hands up to the flames and keeping their talk low lest the holy
man overhear them. The orange haze their fire threw out just reached the
man where he was, making him seem like someone at a threshold,
someone turned away from the room of light the fire formed. Get up and
warm yourself, I wanted to say to him, feeling I was out there with him in the
cold, with the wind at my ankles and just a few bits of bread in my belly. But
still he sat. It occurred to me that he was perhaps simply too enfeebled to
rise, that his hapless look was his own hunger-dimmed wonder that he could
sit there as his life ebbed away and not be able to lift a finger to save himself.
I had half-resolved to go out and offer him my cloak when I was
headed off by a woman who was apparently the mother of one of the boys
in the square, and who came out chastising the lot of them.
"Animals! Didn"t one of you think to give him a bit of fire?"
And she proceeded to purloin some of the precious faggots of
wood the boys had no doubt scrounged for all afternoon in the brush and to
build a little fire in front of the man. When she"d got a blaze going she took
off her own shawl and draped it over his shoulders, then took her son by the
ear and dragged him off home. Within minutes the rest of the boys, thus
humiliated, had begun to disperse as well, the last two or three lingering
defiantly a bit before finally quenching their own fire and shamefacedly
dropping their remaining handfuls of wood into that of the holy man.
The holy man, for his part, had seemed oblivious to all of this. But
when the boys had gone I detected a bit of movement in him, a slight
drawing in towards the fire as if towards some secret it might whisper to
him. I thought I ought to assure myself that he at least had his wits about
him, and so, with the excuse of further stoking his fire, I took a few twigs from
the small bundle that the tavern-keeper kept near his gate and walked out to
him. It was only when I got close to him that I saw what his body had been
giving in to: he had fallen asleep. I wavered a moment over tending to
him—it was always my instinct then in situations of that kind to err on the
side of indifference, as the way of drawing the least attention to myself. But
seeing him helpless like that in his sleep, and even more hopelessly frail than
he had seemed from a distance, I shored up his fire a bit and then for good
measure draped my cloak over his shawl, knowing that I could beg an extra
blanket off the tavern-keeper for my own lice-infested bed. What struck me
as I draped the cloak over him was how peculiar this act of charity felt, how
alien to my nature, as if I had now truly become a man whom I"d thought I
merely feigned to be.

The group I formed part of was based in Jerusalem, and had among it a few
members of the aristocracy from which it derived funds, but also
shopkeepers and clerks, bakers and common labourers, though I had never
been certain in the several years of my own involvement with it how far its
network extended. The truth was that we were not encouraged to know one
another, against the chance of capture and betrayal, and in my own case I
could not have named with certainty more than a few dozen of my co-
conspirators, although there were many others, of course, whom I had met
in one way or another or whom I knew only by aliases. I myself had been
recruited during my days as a recorder at the temple, where I had taken
refuge after the death of my parents. At the time it had been rage that
moved me, and a young man"s passion, though afterwards I also had cause
to be grateful for the years of boredom I had been saved copying out the rolls
for the temple tax.
Like the Zealots, we worked for Rome"s overthrow though, unlike
them, we did not imagine that only God was our commander or that it was
profanement to know more than what was written in the Torah. So we had a
few men of experience amongst us, at least, who understood how the world
worked and the forces we were up against. But many of those who had
joined us in the hope of imminent revolt had, over time, lost patience with
our leaders" caution and our lack of progress. It was our strategy, for
instance, that we stir up unrest in the entire region before risking any action
of our own. Yet the fact was that we did not have the contacts for proper
embassies abroad, and that outside our borders we had won to our cause
only the most minor of tribal lords. So our grand hope of a revolution that
would spread across the whole of the empire, and be unquenchable,
appeared increasingly the merest fantasy. In the meantime we had begun to
descend into factions, and even those who ought to have been our allies often
proved, over some point of doctrine, our fiercest enemies. The Zealots, for
instance, considered us cowards and collaborationists because we did not
protest every smallest infringement of Jewish law; yet they thus wasted in a
thousand little outbursts the resources that ought to have gone to a single
great conflagration.
In the face of our failures abroad we had begun to put our energies
instead into infiltrating the Palestinian outposts, not only those in Judea,
which the Romans controlled directly, but also those in the territories of
their vassals Herod Antipas and Herod Philip, on the reasoning that in the
event of revolt we would need to take the outlying fortresses at once if we
were to stand any chance of holding back the Roman legions based in
Syria. Most of us were kept in the dark, of course, about our actual strength,
going about our little tasks with hardly any sense of the whole we formed part
of, not only because our leaders so arranged it but because even amongst
ourselves we did not dare to confide in one another or pool our knowledge,
for fear of spies. In my own case there were two men I reported to, one a
teacher and grain merchant who lived near the stadium, and the other a
lawyer who worked in the city administration; outside these I spoke to no one
except in the most general terms. For my work, I ran a shop just beneath the
Antonia fortress where I sold phylacteries and also various foreign texts, and
where I offered services as a scribe. It was in this latter office that I made
myself useful to our group—the soldiers from the fortress often came to me
to prepare their letters home, and so I learned the comings and goings of the
procurator and the movements of the troops and so on. In the beginning,
because I had been raised in Ephesus and knew something of the world, I
had also a number of times been sent abroad, even once as far as Rome.
But eventually it grew clear that I did not have the character for diplomacy.
So I was given other duties, though from time to time was still sent on small
assignments outside the city, which I increasingly welcomed as the
atmosphere among us in Jerusalem grew more and more oppressive.
En Melakh was barely a day"s journey from Jerusalem but
seemed much further, at the bottom of the long, bleak road that led down
from the city to the Jordan plain. I had left Jerusalem under clear skies, but
here a dust-filled wind had daily blown across the flats like the Almighty"s
angry breath, blocking the sun and dropping grit in every nook and crevice.
The morning after the holy man"s arrival, however, dawned clear. During the
night I had hardly been able to sleep for the thought of him sitting out there
in the cold—I did not know why my mind had so fixed on him except that
he seemed an obscure sort of challenge to me, to my own smug sense of
mission, sitting there half-dead yet asking for nothing.
When I awoke, just past daybreak, I did not take the trouble to so
much as wash my hands before going out to check on him. My heart sank
when I saw he was missing from his spot beneath the fig tree—my first
thought was that he had died in the night and had already been carted
away, to prevent the desecration of buzzards alighting there in the middle of
the town. But then I caught sight of him amidst the early morning traffic a
little ways from the square, padding along in the dim red of sunrise towards
the stable that served to house the pack animals and goats of the local
market. It was a shock to see him fully upright, all skin and bones the way
he was, little more than a wraith against the dawn, walking with that strange
light-footedness of the very thin and the very frail that makes them look
almost lively and spry even when they are at death"s door.
At the stables he ducked into one of the stalls and squatted to
ease himself. It was only when he had emerged and had begun to move
back towards the square that I noticed he was no longer wearing my cloak,
only the shawl he"d been given, which gave him a slightly comical, womanly
air despite his wisps of beard; and I saw now that my cloak in fact lay
neatly draped over the low mud wall of the tavern"s porch. Clearly his wits
were sharper than I had imagined them, if he had known enough to track me
down. But rather than being pleased that the thing had been returned to me,
I felt a prick of injury at how speedily he had seemed to wish to rid himself of
it, as if it were some curse that had been laid on him.
He took up his place beneath the fig tree again. There was a little
more life in his eyes than there had been the day before—it seemed he had
crossed back, after all, to the land of the living. From somewhere he"d got
hold of a gourd that he"d filled with water and now he set about doing his
ablutions, with the careful frugality of a seasoned desert-dweller, a few
drops for his hands, his forearms, his face, a few more for his ankles and
feet. When he had finished he leaned in low on his haunches, arms
outspread, to say his prayers.
It seemed shameful to watch him while he prayed. I took my
cloak up and drew it over me against the lingering cold and went into the
courtyard, where the tavern-keeper"s daughter, Adah, a girl of fourteen or
so, was preparing some porridge at the bit of fire there. She was a strange
girl, as unblemished as her father was vile but also not quite present
somehow, a bit simple perhaps. Sometimes her father would send her half-
undressed to my room to bring me my meals or wine, with a conniving that
chilled me.
"I never see you go out to the market like the other girls," I said to
her. "Maybe your husband"s there."
But she misunderstood.
"I don"t have a husband," she said with a panicked look, then
hurried off to bring her father his breakfast.
I was accustomed enough to biding my time in those days but the
holy man had made me restless—simply that he was there, fired by a
sense of purpose different from mine, or perhaps the waste that I saw then
in his sort of devotion. I went out after I"d eaten and he was still sitting
beneath his tree, the sun just rising above the houses behind him to cast his
shadow all along the length of the square. Without quite knowing what I
intended, I walked out to where he was.
I tossed a coin on the ground in front of him.
"For your breakfast," I said. But he didn"t pick it up. Up close I
saw he still had a dulled look, his eyes sunken, the skin sagging against
his bones.
"Bread would be better," he said.
His voice was stronger than I would have imagined it, seeming to
echo in the hollow places in him.
"With a coin you can buy bread."
"All the same."
There didn"t seem any arrogance in this, only stubbornness—I
thought perhaps it was part of his vow, to abjure any coinage, or that he
was one of those who wouldn"t touch coins on account of the images there.
I bent to collect the thing and went at once into the market, where I bought a
bit of stew that I brought back to him. He thanked me roughly and set into it
with a barely controlled vehemence, his appetite clearly returned.
"I lent you my cloak," I said.
He didn"t look up from his food.
"I recognized it."
And yet did not think to thank me. So it seemed I must wrestle
him for my blessing.
"And you returned it. For which I"m grateful."
"It seemed so fine I thought you"d miss it."
"But you haven"t returned the shawl you were given."
"It"s less fine. I thought it would be less missed."
He put me in mind of those barefooted Greeks I"d seen as a boy
in the squares of Ephesus, who lived on air and made it their job to poke fun
at the least hint of pretension.
He had finished his food.
"Should I send another bowl?" I said.
"If you like."
I paid a boy to bring out more stew, then moved on through the
market. En Melakh was one of the towns that the madman Cassius had
razed when ...

About this edition

• Publisher: Doubleday Canada
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0385658540
• ISBN 13: 9780385658546
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 464