My Glorious Brothers by Howard Fast Page B

cloak. There was an incredible lack of self-consciousness about all his actions, a fact that still irritated me, yet I couldn’t help but reflect how magnificent he looked, his great cloak sweeping back over his shoulders, the spread and strength of him, the superb poise of his head, his close-cropped reddish-brown beard, and his hair falling to his shoulders under his tight, round cap. I watched him, considered him, and brooded about what he intended, while Jonathan came in with Ruth. Judas and Ruth went out to the court behind the house together, and in a little while they came back.
    â€œI’m going with you,” I said to Judas finally.
    â€œI want to go alone,” he replied. You didn’t argue with him; he had that quality that turned argument away. John came in, and we were all there. He kissed them, and then he motioned for me to go out with him.
    Outside, he looked at me for a while, and then he put his arms around me. As always with him, my hot, bitter anger ran out.
    â€œDon’t let anything happen,” he said.
    â€œWhat do you expect to happen?”
    â€œI don’t know, Simon, I don’t know. I’m trying to see in the dark. Take care of them.”
    ***
    The days went by, and each day it became a little worse—not a great deal worse, but a little worse. In the little village of Goumad, which is only an hour’s walk from Modin, Apelles’s mercenaries put a whole family to death, because three arrows were discovered behind a rafter in their house. The man of the house, Benjamin ben Caleb, was crucified. That was a new thing in the land, a Western importation of Antiochus, the King of Kings. Living, Ben Caleb was nailed over the door of his home, and for a whole day, the mercenaries stood around, listening to his cries and smiling appreciatively. Then, a day or two later, four girls were raped in Zorah, a village to the south of us. One of the village people who tried to defend them was slain. In Galilee, in Samaria, and in Phoenicia, where Jews lived in cities among the Gentiles, it was worse, and terrible tales of pain and suffering drifted back to us in Judea. Yet strangely enough, life in Modin went on much as it always had. We took in the crop; we threshed the wheat and dried the fruit; children were born and old folk died; we filled our presses with new olive oil, and at night we sat at the table after supper, talking of when it had been better and how it would be worse, singing our old, old songs, and listening to the old men tell stories.
    It was four days after Judas had left, in the evening time, and a dozen of the village folk sat at the board of Mattathias, drinking wine, munching nuts and raisins, and discussing that most ready of subjects, life’s bitterness under the heel of a foreign invader. We are a people who have had perhaps a little more than our share of misery, in one place or another, and we have learned to turn it into laughter; it had to be that way, otherwise we would have long ago perished. I remember well that Simon ben Lazar was retelling that already overworked tale of Antiochus and the three wise fools, one of those painful, bitter stories that thread through so much of the literature of an oppressed people, and I remember that I was letting the words slip by, so that I could watch Ruth with all my heart and both my eyes. She sat with her mother, holding her head as always high and alert, as if she were listening—God help me, I thought she was listening for Judas—and the lamplight slanted off her face, making a sheen on her skin like polished bronze. How well I remember her that night, the tilt of her head, the shadows under her cheekbones, the coiled braids of her red hair, such a woman as I have not known before or since—and for who else but Judas? Who else could stand beside her and look paired, face, stature and heart out of the ancient blood of the Kohanim?
    It was then that a goat cried out, and I heard it and