The rock badger led Saul to and through a copse of dark pine where it might have been night, except for the scattered sunbeams that broke through the canopy onto a floor sponged with epic ages of dropped needles. Emerging onto a field at the other side, the badger cocked its head, then bolted into some goat’s-thorn scrub, perhaps smelling snake or rat within, leaving Saul alone to face a brace of boys of about his own age: ten or so years old.
‘Jew,’ one of the boys said, a single-word sentence, which managed to be both definition and accusation.
The Jews of Tarsus did not dress markedly differently from the region’s other inhabitants. Nonetheless, the other inhabitants could generally spot a Jew. Though to an outsider both would look more alike than apart, they remained separated in internal eyes, through subtle differences of cloth and cut. Even leaving aside the concealed cut the Jews regarded as of such high importance.
Of course the Jews were hated. Wasn’t Joseph hated for being the favourite son? How much worse, then, to be the favourite race. And to refuse to worship other gods, any of the other gods who represent the city-state and the people. To be a Jew in any of the Greek-founded cities, which speckled most of the known world, was as much as to be uncivic. Holding a separating religion above and apart from the common faith of the populous. Many good Greek families and individuals had a patron god or a favourite god, but they didn’t despise all the other gods, as the Jews did. Only the atheist Jews showed this disdain. And the Jews sent taxes back to a temple in a far-off land, enriching a distant exchequer in preference to the place that hosted them. And many Jews wouldn’t dine outside their race, through fear of breaking their obscure and arbitrary dietary laws. Rules that came, it was rumoured, through Israelite origins as a tribe of travelling lepers, cast out and forbidden to eat at the tables of others. And the Jews were lazy, resting every seventh day. And the Jews were too industrious, thriving while others struggled. It was widely suspected that the Jews prospered only because they practised insidious nepotism, each Jew promoting the interests of his fellow Jews. And the Jews were too fecund, outbreeding through their lascivious nature or because to them abortion counted as infanticide and to them infanticide was a sin; they refused even to expose unwanted offspring. And the Jews did not cremate their dead, instead sticking them in the ground, like Egyptians or mole rats. And the Jews practised circumcision, an outward show of difference; a sever from the penis and from the polis. And despite this wilful separation, Judaism was a missionary religion: the Jews sought continually to swell their ranks with converts, drawing decent people into their excluding fiefdom, which already comprised a tenth of the population of most cities. It would have been well to be rid of the Jews entirely. But since the time of that Jew-lover Augustus, the Jews had been protected by Roman law. And the Jews were numerous.
Normally they were numerous. At the edge of a copse, where the black pine met an oxen-tilled field, for example, there was only one Jew. A small Jew, held to the floor by two boys, with his head pushed painfully down. A hand against his chin, forcing open his mouth.
‘Lick it,’ one boy said. ‘Lick it, then tell me that the dirt here tastes good, better than in Judaea. Tell me that you worship a donkey and Judaean soil tastes of donkey shit.’
To Saul, the Tarsean ground did not taste good at all. It tasted of humiliation and blasphemy. And because even slight things can be strong, if pushed in the right direction — take a feather or a fibula — Saul managed to force himself up sufficiently to land a clumsy blow. A wild thrash that, from sacred destiny or beginner’s luck, caught his assailant in the eye. This first boy stumbled back from Saul, leaving his companion, still sitting upon Saul’s legs, temporarily bewildered by events. Confounded long enough for Saul to clutch up a handful of pine-needled dust and fling it at his face. Both attackers were then as good as blinded: one from the blow, the other from the dirt. Neither saw Saul stand and grab a fallen bough that Divine Providence or gravity had presented, but both boys felt the swing of it.
Saul was advanced in the Israelite religion well beyond many of his own age, zealous for the traditions of his ancestors. And he had the Zealot’s look, as he wielded the branch. The fanatic’s maniac glint. The look of a beast that might well go down, but would not go down alone. His two foes scrambled in a tangle of arms and legs to be the faster departed.
‘I will be great,’ Saul shouted at their heels. ‘You’ll grow up to be porters and labourers. Then you’ll see what soil tastes like! You’ll be fucking farm hands and I will be a famous Pharisee in Jerusalem.’
The rock badger plodded out of the goat’s-thorn bush, a still twitching snake between its teeth. The rock badger knows that you do not have to kill the leopard: you need only make it fear for its eyes.
Thirty-four Years after the Crucifixion
People say that all roads lead to Rome. They don’t: they lead from Jerusalem. But Rome is, nonetheless, where Paul’s road has finished. At least for now, since Rome is where he has spent the past few years. Proclaiming the coming Kingdom of God and teaching the facts about Lord Jesus Christ quite openly and without hindrance.
Paul’s back aches in the early mornings. A low lumber cramp, born from public thrashings or just from the terrible bed pallets of public inns. He pulls off the light gown he sleeps in through Rome’s sweaty summer nights, groaning to himself at the effort. Beneath the wrinkled pig-leather of an old man’s belly hangs his undeniably Jewish cock. What strange tricks God plays, to have set such an importance on thus a thing. To let men believe — to point of death sometimes — that the presence or absence of a flap of foreskin is of any matter. Paul moves over to his chamber pot to let out the near bladder-bursting accumulation that has built up inside him in the night. Though the fullness of liquid is almost painful, he still has to force it free, pushing out with some arcane muscle the piss that in in his youth would have sluiced from him as if from an aqueduct. Growing old is not for the weak. Age berates Paul daily now, like an angry unbeliever. But surely the return of the Lord Jesus is looming; that day could come at any moment, and when it does, Paul will be well again and so will all things.
The tile beneath Paul’s bare feet is pleasant, a constant cool reminder of wealth. Or if not wealth, then of comfort at least, if those are different. He girds himself with a freshly washed loin covering — clean clothes being another gratifying benefit of prosperity — winding it about himself almost without thought. So many times has he performed this same action that his hands hold the memory of how inside themselves. Then he pulls on a robe, a gift from Lydia this one, or another admirer, Paul forgets, but it is cut from a fine fabric. Only when dressed does he call for someone to take his night soil away. As is only right for such a figure in the movement, Paul has a few servants to assist him — as nothing when compared to the wealthy of Rome, whose slave retinues sometimes trail behind them a full street length. But an apostle cannot both baptize and fetch the water.
Paul has trained himself to be able to use the word apostle without feeling that grating inside him. There are those, and they are many, who claim that Paul is not a true apostle. Who say that the apostles are those companions who were chosen by the Christ in His lifetime. But Paul knows that the people who say such things are wrong: Paul was chosen by the Christ after His death and is therefore an apostle of greater importance.