My Glorious Brothers by Howard Fast Read Free Book Online Page B

fragile grace of him and begun to make it into something hard and wiry and resilient. He would cry no more. I recalled then, looking at him, how once he had lied and Judas had beaten him for it; they were both of them new. The retiring arrogance, the humble arrogance, of Judas—the shy arrogance that knows so well its own beauty and charm, the worst kind of arrogance—that was beginning to turn into something else, into a singleness of purpose and intent that I only glimpsed at the time. If I had hated Judas, if I had always hated him, the hatred was at last beginning to wash away. Already, age meant nothing with Judas; he was ageless; he would be ageless until the day he died. John and Eleazar were simple and direct and understandable, but Judas was beyond my understanding already and Jonathan was mercurial, changing, and he would go on changing.
    We strode along through somber land. There was little joy in the villages we walked through, and less when they knew where we were bound. Those who recognized Mattathias and asked, “Where to, Adon?” and were told, “To the Holy Temple,” shook their heads worriedly.
    As we neared the city, there were more and more mercenaries in evidence. We saw them sitting and drinking at the wayside taverns. We saw them with their women—there are always women for mercenaries—and we saw them marching in cohorts.
    And then we were there. The Adon had rent his garments and said the prayer for the dead, so now he betrayed no reaction nor slackened his pace as we went into the crazy and incredible ruin that Jerusalem had become.
    The walls were not merely torn down, but savagely and madly and raggedly torn—and crowned with a seemingly endless row of pikes, each of which supported a Jew’s head. And the stink of decaying flesh filled the whole city. No one had cleaned the dried blood from the streets; furniture had been thrown from windows and balconies, and broken pieces of chairs, tables, beds and crockery were everywhere. The shells of burned houses made a pattern, and now and again you saw a severed arm or a leg that the burial details had missed, all rotten and covered with flies. Dogs ran in the city, and occasionally a group of mercenaries clanked through, eyeing us suspiciously, but making no move to harm us; otherwise it was deserted.
    As in that long ago, as in that first time when as children we came into the glorious city of David, we climbed up and up, toward the Temple. The Temple still stood; that we could see; and beyond it we could see the Acra, the enormous stone tower the Macedonians had built to house their garrison. The Acra was untouched; in fact, it was being strengthened with additional walls and buttresses, and there was a good deal of movement around it, but the Temple had been dealt with as insanely as the city walls. The mighty wooden gates had been burned. The precious hangings were torn down, and all over the polished walls obscene phallic symbols had been drawn, hideous cartoons of men and women having intercourse with beasts—the better for us to know and understand and appreciate the culture of civilization.
    Levites still stood at the gates; or at least they wore the garb of Levites. They moved to stop us as we entered, but when they saw Mattathias, when they saw his face, they shrank aside, and we walked past.
    We went into the Holy of Holies, the inner house of God, where the shewbread and the candelabra are. It stank like a butchers stall. The altar was filthy with dry blood and a pig’s head sat there, staring open-eyed at us. A great urn of pork stood to one side, and assorted filth lay on the floor.
    At the door, Mattathias halted for a moment—then went on, and then, for the first time in my life, I had the full measure of the old man, the Adon, who was my father. The Temple was he, and he was the Temple. Jews in Rome or in Alexandria, or in Athens or in Babylon, turn to the Temple when they pray; yet at