16. The Execution

The sun was already sinking over Bald Mountain, and the mount was cordoned off by a double cordon.

The cavalry ala which had cut across the Procurator’s path at about midday had emerged at a trot towards the city’s Hebron Gate. The way had already been prepared for it. The foot soldiers of the Cappadocian Cohort had crushed the throngs of people, mules and camels back to the sides, and the ala, trotting and raising white columns of dust up to the sky, came out to the crossroads where two roads met: the southern one leading to Bethlehem, and the north-western one to Jaffa. The ala sped down the north-western road. The same Cappadocians were scattered along the edges of the road, and they had driven off to the sides in good time all the caravans hurrying to Yershalaim for the feast. Crowds of pilgrims had abandoned their temporary striped tents, pitched directly on the grass, and stood behind the Cappadocians. After about a kilometre, the ala overtook the Second Cohort of the Lightning Legion and, having covered one more kilometre, was the first to arrive at the foot of Bald Mountain. Here it dismounted. The commander split the ala up into platoons, and they cordoned off the entire foot of the low hill, leaving free only the one way up it from the Jaffa road.

Some time later the Second Cohort came up to the hill after the ala, went up a level higher and girdled the mount like a crown.

Finally the century under the command of Marcus the RatCatcher approached. It marched, stretched out in two columns along the edges of the road, and between these columns, under the escort of the Secret Guard, there rode in a cart the three condemned men with white boards on their necks, on each of which was written “Villain and rebel” in two languages – Aramaic and Greek.

Behind the condemned men’s cart moved others, loaded up with freshly cut poles complete with crosspieces, ropes, spades, buckets and axes. In these carts rode six executioners. Behind them on horseback rode Centurion Marcus, the chief of the Yershalaim Temple guard and that same hooded man with whom Pilate had held a brief conference in a darkened room in the palace.

The procession was completed by a line of soldiers, but behind it there already walked about two thousand of the curious, unafraid of the hellish heat and wishing to attend an interesting spectacle.

The curious from the city were now joined by curious pilgrims, who were allowed unimpeded into the tail of the procession. To the shrill calls of the public criers, who were accompanying it and shouting out what Pilate had shouted around midday, the procession started up Bald Mountain.

The ala allowed everyone up to the second level, but the second century allowed up to the top only those who were involved in the execution, and then, manoeuvring quickly, it dispersed the crowd around the whole of the hill, so that it found itself between the infantry cordon above and the cavalry one below. Now it could see the execution through the thin line of foot soldiers.

And so more than three hours had passed since the time when the procession had gone up the hill, and the sun was already sinking over Bald Mountain, but the heat was still unbearable, and the soldiers in both cordons were suffering from it, were bored out of their wits, and in their hearts were cursing the three villains, sincerely wishing them the quickest of deaths.

The little commander of the ala, who was at the bottom of the hill by the open path, with his forehead sopping wet and in a white shirt whose back was dark with sweat, kept on going up to the leather bucket in the first platoon, scooping handfuls of water from it, drinking and wetting his turban. Getting some relief from this, he would move away and again begin pacing upand down the dusty road leading to the summit. His long sword banged against his laced leather boot. The commander wanted to set his cavalrymen an example of endurance, but, sparing his soldiers, he allowed them to set up pyramids of lances, stuck into the ground, and to throw white cloaks onto them. And it was under these tents that the Syrians hid themselves from the pitiless sun. The buckets quickly emptied, and cavalrymen from different platoons set off by turns to fetch water from the gully just outside the city where, in the sparse shade of straggly mulberry trees, a rather turbid stream was living out its days in this devilish heat. Here too the horse-holders stood getting bored, trying to catch the shifting shade while holding the quietened horses.

The soldiers’ languor and the abuse they aimed at the villains were understandable. The Procurator’s misgivings regarding disturbances that might take place in the hated city of Yershalaim at the time of the execution were fortunately unjustified. And when the fourth hour of the execution got under way, contrary to all expectations there remained, between the two lines, the upper one of infantry and the cavalry at the foot of the hill, not a single person. The sun had scorched the crowd and driven it back to Yershalaim. Beyond the line of two Roman centuries were to be found just two dogs which, for some reason, had found their way onto the hill and whose owners were unknown. But they too were worn out by the heat and lay down with their tongues hanging out, breathing hard and paying no attention whatever to the green-backed lizards, the only creatures not afraid of the sun, which darted between the scorching stones and the plants of some sort with large thorns that wound across the earth.

Nobody had made any attempt to take the condemned men by force either in Yershalaim itself, flooded with troops, or here on the cordoned-off hill, and the crowd had returned to the city, for there really was absolutely nothing of interest about this execution, and in the city preparations were already under way for the great Feast of the Passover that would be starting in the evening.

The Roman infantry at the second level suffered even more than the cavalrymen. The only thing Centurion Rat-Catcher allowed the soldiers to do was to remove their helmets and cover their heads with white cloths moistened with water, but he kept the soldiers standing and with their spears in their hands. Wearing just such a head cloth, only not moistened, but dry, he himself strode about not far from the group of executioners, without even removing the detachable silver lions’ heads from his shirt, without taking off his scabbard, his sword and knife. The sun beat down directly onto the centurion without doing him any harm, and it was impossible to glance at the lions’ heads, for the blinding brilliance of the silver, which seemed to be coming to the boil in the sun, ate away at the eyes.

Neither exhaustion nor displeasure was expressed on RatCatcher’s disfigured face, and it seemed as if the giant centurion had the strength to walk about like this all day, all night and for another day – in short, as much as might be needed: to carry on walking like this, his hands set on his heavy belt with its bronze buckles, to carry on glancing just as sternly now at the poles with the men being executed, now at the soldiers in the line, to carry on kicking away just as indifferently with the toe of a shaggy boot the little flints, or the human bones, bleached by time, that got under his feet.

The hooded man had positioned himself on a three-legged stool not far from the poles and was sitting in placid immobility, though occasionally, out of boredom, scratching away at the sand with a little twig.

What was said about there not being a single man beyond the line of legionaries is not entirely true. One man there was, but simply he was not visible to all. He had positioned himself not on the side where the path up the hill was open and from which it was most convenient of all to see the execution, but on the northern side, where the hill was not gently sloping and accessible, but uneven, where there were both cavities and crevices – where, clinging on in a cranny to the waterless earth, cursed by the sky, a sick little fig tree was trying to live.

It was precisely beneath it, although it gave no shade at all, that this sole spectator not participating in the execution had established himself and had been sitting on a rock from the very start – that is, for more than three hours now. Yes, to see the execution he had chosen not the best, but the worst position. Yet the poles were nonetheless visible from there too, as were also visible beyond the line the two glinting spots on the chest of the centurion – and that, for a man who clearly wished to remain unnoticed and undisturbed by anyone, was evidently perfectly sufficient.

But some four hours earlier, at the start of the execution, this man had been behaving quite differently and could have been noticed very easily, which was probably the very reason why he had now altered his behaviour and gone off by himself.

Then, as soon as the procession had gone up to the very top beyond the line, that was when he had appeared for the first time and, moreover, like an obvious latecomer. He had been breathing hard and had not walked, but had run and jostled his way up the hill, and, seeing that the line had closed up before him, as before everyone else too, he had made a naive attempt, pretending not to understand the irritated cries, to break through between the soldiers to the very place of execution, where the condemned men were already being removed from the cart. For that he had been dealt a heavy blow on the chest with the blunt end of a spear, and had leapt back from the soldiers with a cry, though not of pain, but of despair. He had cast a gaze that was dull and indifferent to everything at the legionary who had struck him, like a man insensitive to physical pain.

Coughing and gasping for breath, and clutching at his chest, he had run all around the hill, striving to find some gap in the line where he could slip through on the northern side. But it was already too late. The ring had closed. And this man with a face contorted by grief had been forced to renounce his attempts to break through to the carts from which the posts had already been removed. These attempts would have led to nothing except his being seized – and being detained on this day did not enter into his plans in any way at all.

And so he had moved aside to the cranny, where it was quieter and nobody bothered him.

Now, sitting on a rock, this black-bearded man, with his eyes suppurating from the sun and lack of sleep, was miserable. At times he would sigh, opening up his worn tallith, which had turned in his wanderings from blue to dirty-grey, and would bare his chest, bruised by the spear, down which dirty sweat was flowing; then in unbearable torment he would raise his eyes to the sky, watching the three carrion crows which had already been floating in big circles on high for a long time now in expectation of an imminent feast; then he would fasten his hopeless gaze on the yellow earth, and see upon it the partly destroyed skull of a dog and the lizards running around it.

The man’s sufferings were so great that at times he would start talking to himself.

“Oh, I’m an idiot!” he muttered, swaying about on the rock in mental pain and scratching his swarthy chest with his fingernails. “An idiot, a foolish woman, a coward! Carrion’s what I am, not a man!”

He would fall quiet, his head would sink; then, after drinking warm water from a wooden flask, he would revive once more and grab now at his knife, hidden beneath the tallith on his chest, now at the piece of parchment lying before him on a rock alongside a stick and a phial of ink.

Some entries had already been jotted down on this parchment:

“The minutes hurry by, and I, Levi Matthew, am on Bald Mountain, but death has not yet come!”

Next:

“The sun is declining, but death has not come.”

Now Levi Matthew wrote this hopeless note with the sharp stick:

“God! Why are you angry with him? Send him death.”

After writing this down, he gave a tearless sob, and again his fingernails covered his chest with wounds.

The reason for Levi’s despair was the terrible misfortune that had befallen Yeshua and him – and, besides that, the grave error that he, Levi, had, in his opinion, made. Two days before, in the afternoon, Yeshua and Levi had been in Bethany, not far from Yershalaim, where they had been the guests of a market gardener who had been extremely impressed with Yeshua’s sermons. All morning the two guests had worked in the market garden, helping their host, and towards evening they had been intending to walk through the cool of the day to Yershalaim. But Yeshua had suddenly been in a hurry for some reason, had said he had urgent business in the city, and had gone off alone at about midday. And it was this that had been Levi Matthew’s first error. Why oh why had he let him go alone!

It had not been Matthew’s lot to walk to Yershalaim that evening. He had been struck down by some unexpected and terrible ailment. He had got the shakes, his body had filled with fire, his teeth had begun chattering and he had been continually asking for something to drink. He had not been able to go anywhere. He had collapsed onto a mat in the market gardener’s shed and lain there until dawn on Friday, when the illness had released Levi just as unexpectedly as it had fallen upon him. Although he had still been weak and his legs had been trembling, he had taken his leave of his host and, tormented by some presentiment of calamity, had set off for Yershalaim. There he had learnt that his presentiment had not deceived him. The calamity had occurred. Levi had been in the crowd and had heard the Procurator announce the sentence.

When they had set off for the mount with the condemned men, Levi Matthew had been running alongside the file of soldiers in the crowd of curious people, trying in some inconspicuous way at least to let Yeshua know that he, Levi, was there with him, that he had not abandoned him on his final journey and that he was praying for death to overtake Yeshua as quickly as possible. But Yeshua, of course, looking into the distance to where he was being taken, had not seen Levi.

And then, when the procession had gone about half a kilometre along the road, Matthew, who was being pushed about in the crowd right by the column of soldiers, had had a simple but brilliant idea, and immediately, in his impulsiveness, had heaped curses upon himself for it not having occurred to him earlier. The soldiers were not walking in a closely packed column. There were gaps between them. Using great agility and very accurate calculation, he could bend down and jump between two legionaries, burst through to the cart and leap up onto it. Then Yeshua would be saved from his sufferings.

One moment was sufficient to strike Yeshua in the back with a knife, crying out to him: “Yeshua! I’m saving you and going along with you! I, Matthew, your faithful and only disciple!”

And if God blessed him with one more free moment, he could have time to stab himself too, avoiding death on a pole. The latter point, however, was of little interest to Levi, the former tax collector. He was indifferent to how he might perish. He wanted one thing: for Yeshua, who had not done anybody the slightest harm in his whole life, to avoid torture.

The plan was a very good one, but the fact of the matter was that Levi had no knife with him. Nor did he have a single coin either.

In a fury with himself, Levi made his way out of the crowd and ran back to the city. In his burning head there leapt just one feverish thought: how to get hold of a knife in the city immediately and in any way at all, and be in time to catch up with the procession.

He ran as far as the city gates, manoeuvring through the crush of caravans being sucked into the city, and saw on his lefthand side the open door of a wretched little shop where they sold bread. Breathing hard after the run down the scorching road, Levi composed himself, went into the shop very steadily, greeted the shopkeeper standing behind the counter, asked her to get down from the top shelf a round loaf which for some reason he liked more than the others, and, when she had turned around, took from the counter, quickly and silently, something that could not have been any better – a long bread knife, sharp as a razor – and immediately rushed out of the shop.

A few minutes later he was once again on the Jaffa road. But the procession was no longer to be seen. He started running. From time to time he had to collapse right into the dust and lie motionless to recover his breath. And thus he lay, amazing passers-by on mules and people going to Yershalaim on foot. He lay listening to the way his heart was thumping not only in his chest, but in his head and ears too. When he had recovered his breath a little, he would jump up and carry on running, but ever slower and slower. When he finally caught sight of the long procession raising dust in the distance, it was already at the foot of the hill.

“Oh, God!” groaned Levi, realizing he was going to be too late. And he was.

When the fourth hour of the execution had elapsed, Levi’s sufferings reached their climax, and he flew into a frenzy. Getting up from the rock, he flung the knife he had stolen in vain, as he now thought, to the ground, stamped on his flask, depriving himself of water, threw off the keffiyeh from his head, grabbed hold of his wispy hair and began cursing himself.

He cursed himself, calling out senseless words; he snarled and spat, reviled his father and mother, who had brought forth an idiot into the world.

Seeing that curses and abuse had no effect and nothing in the blaze of the sun was changing as a result, he clenched his dry fists, screwed up his eyes and raised them to the sky, to the sun, which was slipping ever lower, lengthening the shadows, and leaving to fall into the Mediterranean Sea, and he demanded of God an immediate miracle. He demanded that God at once send death to Yeshua.

Opening his eyes, he satisfied himself that all on the hill was unchanged, except for the fact that the burning spots on the chest of the centurion had gone out. The sun was sending its rays into the backs of the men being executed, who had their faces turned towards Yershalaim. Then Levi shouted:

“I curse you, God!”

In a hoarsened voice he shouted of how he had become convinced of God’s injustice and of how he did not mean to trust Him any more.

“You’re deaf!” Levi snarled. “If you weren’t deaf, you’d hear me and kill him right away!”

Levi waited with his eyes screwed up for the fire that would fall on him from the sky and strike him. This did not happen and, keeping his eyelids tightly shut, Levi continued to call out caustic and offensive speeches at the sky. He shouted of his total disenchantment and of there being other gods and religions. No, another god would not have allowed it, would never have allowed a man like Yeshua to be burnt on a pole by the sun.

“I was wrong!” shouted Levi, completely hoarse. “You are the god of evil! Or have your eyes been completely blinded by smoke from the Temple’s incense burners, and have your ears ceased to hear anything other than the trumpet sounds of the priests? You are not the Almighty God. You are a black god. I curse you, god of scoundrels, their patron and soul!”

At this point something blew into the former tax collector’s face, and something started to rustle beneath his feet. It blew again, and then, opening his eyes, Levi saw that everything in the world, under the influence of his curses or for some other reason, had changed. The sun had disappeared without having reached the sea in which it sank each evening. The storm cloud which had swallowed it was climbing steadily and threateningly across the sky from the west. Its edges were already boiling up in white foam, the smoky black belly had a yellow lustre. The cloud was grumbling, and from time to time filaments of fire tumbled out of it. Along the Jaffa road, along the barren Valley of Gion, pillars of dust, driven by the wind that had got up so suddenly, were flying above the tents of the pilgrims.

Levi fell silent, trying to grasp whether the storm that would shortly cover Yershalaim would bring any change in the fate of the unfortunate Yeshua. And straight away, looking at the filaments of fire that were cutting the cloud open, he began asking for the lightning to strike Yeshua’s pole. Looking in repentance at the clear sky, not gobbled up as yet by the cloud, where the carrion crows were banking away to escape the storm, it occurred to Levi that he had been madly hasty with his curses: God would not listen to him now.

Having turned his gaze to the foot of the hill, Levi became riveted to the spot where the cavalry regiment had deployed and was stationed, and saw that significant changes had taken place there. From his high position, Levi was able to make out very well the way the soldiers were bustling about, pulling their lances out of the ground and throwing their cloaks over themselves, the way the horse-holders were jogging towards the road, leading the black horses by the reins. The regiment was moving off, that was clear. Using his hand to shield himself from the dust beating into his face, and spitting the dust out, Levi tried to grasp what the cavalry getting ready to leave might mean. He shifted his gaze a little higher and made out a small figure in a purple military chlamys which was going up towards the area of execution. And at this point the presentiment of a happy ending made the former tax collector’s heart turn cold.

The man going up the hill in the fifth hour of the villains’ sufferings was the Commander of the Cohort, who had galloped here from Yershalaim accompanied by an orderly. The line of soldiers opened at a gesture from Rat-Catcher, and the centurion saluted the tribune. The latter, leading Rat-Catcher aside, whispered something to him. The centurion saluted a second time and moved towards the group of executioners sitting on the rocks at the foot of the poles, while the tribune directed his steps towards the one sitting on the three-legged stool, and the seated man rose politely to meet the tribune. And the tribune said something to him in a low voice, and they both went towards the poles. They were joined by the chief of the Temple guard too.

Looking askance in disgust at the dirty rags lying on the ground by the poles, rags that had recently been the criminals’ clothes and that the executioners had refused, Rat-Catcher called two of the latter aside and ordered:

“Follow me!”

From the nearest pole came a hoarse, senseless song. Towards the end of the third hour of the execution, the man hanging on it, Gestas, had gone mad from the flies and the sun, and was now quietly singing something about grapes, but he would still shake his turbanned head from time to time, and then the flies would rise sluggishly from his face before returning to it once again.

Dismas on the second pole suffered more than the other two, because he had not been overcome by oblivion, and he shook his head frequently and rhythmically, now to the right, now to the left, to strike his ears against his shoulders.

More fortunate than the other two was Yeshua. In the very first hour he began to be struck by swoons, and later he fell into oblivion, hanging his head in its uncoiled turban. He was therefore completely plastered with flies and gadflies, such that his face had disappeared under a black, moving mask. At the groin, and on the stomach and under the armpits, fat gadflies sat and sucked on the yellow, naked body.

Obeying the gestures of the hooded man, one of the executioners took a spear, and the other brought a bucket and sponge to the pole. The first of the executioners raised the spear and tapped with it, first on one of Yeshua’s arms, then on the other, stretched out and tied with ropes to the crossbar of the pole. The body with its protruding ribs shuddered. The executioner drew the end of the spear over his stomach. Then Yeshua lifted his head, and with a buzzing the flies moved off, and the face of the hanged man was revealed, swollen with bites, with bloated eyes, an unrecognizable face.

Ungluing his eyelids, Ha-Nozri glanced down. His eyes, usually clear, were now rather lacklustre.

“Ha-Nozri!” said the executioner.

Ha-Nozri moved his swollen lips and responded in a hoarse, villainish voice:

“What do you want? Why have you come over here to me?” “Drink!” said the executioner, and the sponge soaked in water on the end of the spear rose to Yeshua’s lips. There was a flash of joy in the latter’s eyes; he pressed against the sponge and began greedily taking in the moisture. The voice of Dismas was heard from the next pole:

“Injustice! I’m just as much a villain as he is!”

Dismas strained, but could not move: his arms were held in three places on the crosspiece by rings of rope. He pulled in his stomach, stuck his fingernails into the ends of the crosspieces and held his head turned towards Yeshua’s pole; malice burned in Dismas’s eyes.

A cloud of dust covered the area of execution; it grew much darker. When the dust had whirled away, the centurion cried:

“Silence on the second pole!”

Dismas fell silent. Yeshua tore himself away from the sponge and, trying to make his voice sound gentle and convincing, but without achieving it, he requested the executioner hoarsely:

“Give him a drink.”

It was getting ever darker. Speeding towards Yershalaim, the storm cloud had spilt over half the sky, and boiling white clouds rushed on ahead, impregnated with the black moisture and the fire of the storm cloud. There was a flash and a clap directly above the hill. The executioner took the sponge from the spear.

"Praise the magnanimous Hegemon!” he whispered solemnly, and pricked Yeshua gently in the heart. The latter jerked, and whispered:

"Hegemon…”

Blood ran down his stomach, his lower jaw jerked spasmodically, and his head drooped.

At the second clap of thunder the executioner was already giving Dismas a drink, and with the same words:

"Praise the Hegemon!” he killed him too.

Gestas, bereft of reason, cried out in fright as soon as the executioner came near him, but when the sponge touched his lips, he snarled something and sank his teeth into it. A few seconds later his body sagged too, as far as the ropes would allow.

The hooded man followed in the footsteps of the executioner and the centurion, and behind him was the chief of the Temple guard. Stopping at the first pole, the hooded man carefully examined the bloodied Yeshua, touched his foot with a white hand and said to his companions:

"Dead.”

The same thing was repeated at the other two poles as well.

After this the tribune made a sign to the centurion and, turning, started to leave the summit together with the chief of the Temple guard and the hooded man. Semi-darkness had descended, and lightning was furrowing the black sky. Fire suddenly spurted out of it, and the centurion’s cry: "Cordon, fall out!” was drowned in thunder. The happy soldiers made haste to run down the hill, putting on their helmets.

Darkness covered Yershalaim.

The torrential rain struck suddenly and caught the centuries halfway down the hill. The water poured down so terribly that, as the soldiers ran downwards, raging streams were already rushing in pursuit of them. The soldiers slid and fell on the sodden clay, as they hurried onto the even road, along which – already scarcely visible in the shroud of water – the cavalry, soaked to the skin, was leaving for Yershalaim. A few minutes later, in the smoking brew of storm, water and fire on the hill, one man remained.

Brandishing the knife that had not been stolen in vain, falling off slippery ledges, grabbing hold of whatever came to hand, sometimes crawling on his knees, he was striving towards the poles. Now he would disappear in the utter gloom, now suddenly be illuminated by flickering light.

Already ankle-deep in water when he reached the poles, he tore off his tallith, soaked through and heavy with water, to remain in just his shirt, and fell at Yeshua’s feet. He cut through the ropes at the shins, got up onto the lower crosspiece, embraced Yeshua and freed his arms from the upper bonds. Yeshua’s naked, damp body collapsed onto Levi and knocked him to the ground. Levi immediately wanted to hoist it up onto his shoulders, but an idea of some sort stopped him. He left the body on the ground in the water with its head tossed back and arms thrown apart, and ran on legs that slipped about in the clayey slush to the other poles. He cut through the ropes on those as well, and the two bodies collapsed onto the ground. A few minutes passed, and on the summit of the hill there remained only those two bodies and three empty poles. The water was beating against the bodies and turning them around.

At this time neither Levi nor the body of Yeshua was any longer on the summit of the hill.