Five
For weeks I could not escape the vision of Joshu on the rooftop, the sweet, powerful sensation I’d felt. I became convinced that had I remained with him longer I could have reached him, embraced him. And that locked in my arms, he could not have resisted me. I wrestled with the officers in Pilate’s game hall, I drank myself to oblivion, I worked the whores and the boys who attended me. At night I paced the labyrinth of Jerusalem’s narrow streets. Nothing relieved the restlessness.
I approached Tiresia’s shop several times, once intending to feign agreement with her demands, but always the force I had felt on my hand returned, causing me to wince and massage my fingers. Unable to shake the invisible grip, I retreated.
My temper flared again and again. When my secretary misplaced a scroll, I beat him until he wept. When I found my chamber pot unemptied after breakfast, I shoved my servant’s face in it. I raised my sword to a harlot when I found bloody discharge draining from her slit and made her beg for her life before I retreated from her house.
As long as I vented my rage on servants and whores, I stayed in Pilate’s graces. But my restlessness reached feverish heights, and finally, delirium obliterated good sense.
The boy was a Jew. I had spotted him during a military parade near Herod’s palace. Long-limbed, like a gazelle, he sunned himself on a wall, captivated by the glinting silver and plumage of our uniforms.
“You called me, sir?” He had come to my chamber, brought by the soldier I’d sent to retrieve him.
“Approach me, boy.” I lay on my couch, surveying his soft features framed by black ringlets. “Closer. That’s right.” I fondled his woolen cloak. “What are you called?”
“Benjamin, sir.” He stared straight ahead, out the window, not daring to drop his eyes to mine.
“Take off your cloak.”
“Sir?”
“It’s warm enough in here with the fire. Remove your cloak. There, that’s better.”
He was lean but solid. His neck rose like a delicate pedestal from his robe.
“Are you breaking some religious edict by being here? Never mind. You shouldn’t worry your conscience. You had no choice. If you hadn’t come … Do you have a family of some kind?”
“Sir?” He suddenly looked anxious.
“Oh, come now. I’m only asking from interest. I won’t butcher them.” I caressed his arm. My sense of protectiveness excited me.
“I have a mother, sir. A widow. She spends most of the day in prayer in the temple courts.”
“Some kind of holy woman, I suppose.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Who looks after you? You can’t be more than 14.”
“I stay with my father’s people, sir. They are potters.”
“Ah, you’ve got good hands for that trade.” I turned his hands over and examined the palms. “Sit here on my couch.”
“Please, sir. I couldn’t.”
“But I command it.” I pulled him to me. “Do you know what I want you for?”
“Do you want pottery, sir?”
“Look at me. Look at me, damn you!”
He looked at me as though I were going to recircumcise him.
“Do I look like I want pottery?”
“I don’t know, sir.”
Once he did know, he submitted like a lamb, stupidly following my directions without a sign of struggle. To break a boy in, to rob him of what most Jewish men never imagine surrendering, invigorated me more than a winter swim. When I was satisfied, I told him to dress and summoned my man.
“You’ll breathe a word of this to no one, boy. For your family’s sake. I warn you.”
“Yes, sir.” The boy stared blankly at me, as though stunned by days of exposure in the Judaean desert.
“Escort him to the gate,” I said to my man, who had learned discretion from me the hard way.
The boy kept his word well. When his cousins tried to pry information from him, he kept silent. He lost his appetite, grew thin, stopped sleeping, ruined the pitchers and vases he was creating, burnt himself on the kiln. Then one day his cousin found him dangling from a tree, like an old woman’s rug thrown up to dry. He’d hanged himself after his mother, the wise bitch of a prophetess, guessed his shameful secret.
A delegation from the Sanhedrin stood before Pilate the next day. The results, I knew, would be imprisonment for me in Pilate’s clammy cells, reserved for debauched or inept officers, followed by demotion, which would mean marching with the foot soldiers during military parades—to the satisfaction of the slimy priests on the sidelines.
Unbearable? Not for some. But I knew punishment like that would ignite my fury. Like the baited cheetah in the Roman circus, I’d tear apart my tormentors, dooming myself to longer imprisonment.
I fled the palace before Pilate could send his guards for me.