Like Pilate, I Have A Dog
grunge_is_dead
Posts: 29
Early in the morning on the fourteenth of the spring month of Nisan the Procurator of Judea, Pontius Pilate, in a white cloak lined with blood red, emerged with his shuffling cavalryman's walk into the arcade connecting the two wings of the palace of Herod the Great.
More than anything else in the world the Procurator hated the smell of attar of roses. The omens for the day were bad, as this scent had been haunting him since dawn.
It seemed to the Procurator that the very cypresses and palms in the garden were exuding the smell of roses, that this damned stench of roses was even mingling with the smell of leather tackle and sweat from his mounted bodyguard.
A haze of smoke was drifting toward the arcade across the upper courtyard of the garden, coming from the wing at the rear of the palace, the quarters of the first cohort of the XII Legion; known as the "Lightning," it had been stationed in Jerusalem since the Procurator's arrival. The same oily perfume of roses was mixed with the acrid smoke that showed that the centuries' cooks had started to prepare breakfast.
"Oh, gods, what are you punishing me for?.. No, there's no doubt, I have it again, this terrible incurable pain... hemicrania, when half the head aches... There's no cure for it, nothing helps... I must try not to move my head..."
A chair had already been placed on the mosaic floor by the fountain; without a glance around, the Procurator sat in it and stretched out his hand to one side. His secretary deferentially laid a piece of parchment in his hand. Unable to restrain a grimace of agony, the Procurator gave a fleeting sideways look at its contents, returned the parchment to his secretary and said painfully, "The accused comes from Galilee, does he? Was the case sent to the tetrarch?"
"Yes, Procurator," replied the secretary. "He declined to confirm the finding of the court and passed the Sanhedrin's sentence of death to you for confirmation."
The Procurator's cheek twitched, and he said quietly, "Bring in the accused."
At once two legionaries escorted a man of about twenty-seven from the courtyard, under the arcade and up to the balcony, where they placed him before the Procurator's chair. The man was dressed in a shabby, torn, blue chiton. His head was covered with a white bandage fastened round his forehead, his hands tied behind his back. There was a large bruise under the man's left eye and a scab of dried blood in one corner of his mouth. The prisoner stared at the Procurator with anxious curiosity.
The Procurator was silent at first, then asked quietly in Aramaic, "So you have been inciting the people to destroy the temple of Jerusalem?"
The Procurator sat as though carved in stone, his lips barely moving as he pronounced the words. The Procurator was like stone from fear of shaking his fiendishly aching head.
The man with bound hands made a slight move forward and began speaking: "Good man! Believe me —"
But the Procurator, immobile as before and without raising his voice, at once interrupted him: "You call me 'good man'? You are making a mistake. The rumor about me in Jerusalem is that I am a raving monster, and that is absolutely correct," and he added in the same monotone, "Send centurion Muribellum to me."
The balcony seemed to darken when the centurion of the first century, Mark surnamed Muribellum, appeared before the Procurator. Muribellum was a head taller than the tallest soldier in the legion and so broad in the shoulders that he completely obscured the rising sun.
The Procurator said to the centurion in Latin, "This criminal calls me 'good man.' Take him away for a minute and show him the proper way to address me. But do not mutilate him."
All except the motionless Procurator watched Mark Muribellum as he gestured to the prisoner to follow him. Because of his height people always watched Muribellum wherever he went. Those who saw him for the first time were inevitably fascinated by his disfigured face: his nose had once been smashed by a blow from a German club.
Mark's heavy boots resounded on the mosaic, the bound man followed him noiselessly. There was complete silence under the arcade except for the cooing of doves in the garden below and the water singing its seductive tune in the fountain.
The Procurator had a sudden urge to get up and put his temples under the stream of water until they were numb. But he knew that even that would not help.
Having led the prisoner out of the arcade into the garden, Muribellum took a whip from the hands of a legionary standing by the base of a bronze statue and with a gentle swing struck the prisoner across the shoulders. The centurion's movement was slight, almost negligent, but the bound man collapsed instantly as though his legs had been struck from under him and he gasped for air. The color fled from his face and his eyes clouded.
With his left hand alone Mark lifted the fallen man into the air as lightly as an empty sack, set him on his feet and said in broken, nasal Aramaic, "You call a Roman Procurator 'hegemon.' Don't say anything else. Stand at attention. Do you understand or must I hit you again?"
The prisoner staggered helplessly, his color returned. He gulped and answered hoarsely, "I understand you. Don't beat me."
A minute later he was again standing in front of the Procurator.
The harsh, suffering voice rang out: "Name?"
"Mine?" inquired the prisoner hurriedly, his whole being expressing readiness to answer sensibly and to forestall any further anger.
The Procurator said quietly, "I know my own name. Don't pretend to be stupider than you are. Your name."
Yeshua," replied the prisoner hastily.
"Surname?"
"Ha-Notsri."
"Where are you from?"
"From the town of Gamala," replied the prisoner, nodding his head to show that far over there to his right, in the north, was the town of Gamala.
"Who are you by birth?"
"I don't know exactly," promptly answered the prisoner, "I don't remember my parents. I was told that my father was a Syrian..."
"Where is your fixed abode?"
"I have no home," said the prisoner shamefacedly. "I move from town to town."
"There is a shorter way of saying that — in a word you are a vagrant," said the Procurator and asked, "Have you any relations?"
"No, none. Not one in the world."
"Can you read and write?"
"Yes."
"Do you know any language besides Aramaic?"
"Yes. Greek."
One swollen eyelid was raised and a pain-clouded eye stared at the prisoner. The other eye remained closed.
Pilate said in Greek, "So you intended to destroy the temple building and incited the people to do so?"
"Never, goo—" Terror flashed across the prisoner's face for having so nearly said the wrong word. "Never in my life, hegemon, have I intended to destroy the temple. Nor have I ever tried to persuade anyone to do such a senseless thing."
A look of amazement came over the secretary's face as he bent over a low table recording the evidence. He raised his head but immediately lowered it again over his parchment.
"People of all kinds are streaming into the city for the feast day. Among them there are magicians, astrologers, seers and murderers," said the Procurator in a monotone. "There are also liars. You, for instance, are a liar. It is clearly written down: 'He incited people to destroy the temple.' Witnesses have said so."
"These good people," the prisoner began, and hastily adding, "hegemon," he went on, "are unlearned and have confused everything I said. I am beginning to fear that this confusion will last for a very long time. And all because he untruthfully wrote down what I said."
There was silence. Now both pain-filled eyes stared heavily at the prisoner.
"I repeat, but for the last time: stop pretending to be mad, scoundrel," said Pilate softly and evenly. "What has been written down about you is little enough, but it is sufficient to hang you."
"No, no, hegemon," said the prisoner, straining with the desire to convince. "This man follows me everywhere with nothing but his goatskin parchment and writes incessantly. But I once caught a glimpse of that parchment and I was horrified. I had not said a word of what was written there. I begged him, 'Please burn this parchment of yours!' But he tore it out of my hands and ran away."
"Who was he?" inquired Pilate in a strained voice and put his hand to his temple.
"Matthew the Levite," said the prisoner eagerly. "He was a tax collector. I first met him on the road to Bethphagy at the comer where the road skirts a fig orchard and I started talking to him. At first he was rude and even insulted me, or rather he thought he was insulting me by calling me a dog." The prisoner laughed. "Personally I see nothing wrong with that animal so I was not offended by the word."
The secretary stopped taking notes and glanced surreptitiously not at the prisoner but at the Procurator.
"However, when he had heard me out he grew milder," went on Yeshua, "and in the end he threw his money into the road and said that he would go traveling with me."
Pilate laughed with one cheek. Baring his yellow teeth and turning fully round to his secretary, he said, "Oh, city of Jerusalem! What tales you have to tell! A tax collector, did you hear, throwing away his money!"
Not knowing what reply was expected of him, the secretary chose to return Pilate's smile.
"And he said that henceforth he loathed his money," said Yeshua in explanation of Matthew the Levite's strange action, adding, "And since then he has been my companion."
His teeth still bared in a grin, the Procurator glanced at the prisoner, then at the sun rising inexorably over the equestrian statues of the hippodrome far below to his left, and suddenly in a moment of agonizing nausea it occurred to him that the simplest thing would be to dismiss this curious rascal from his balcony with no more than two words: "Hang him." Dismiss the bodyguard too, leave the arcade and go indoors, order the room to be darkened, fall onto his couch, send for cold water, call for his dog Banga in a pitiful voice and complain to the dog about his hemicrania. Suddenly the tempting thought of poison flashed through the Procurator's mind.
He stared dully at the prisoner for a while, trying painfully to recall why this man with the bruised face was standing in front of him in the pitiless Jerusalem morning sunshine and what further useless questions he should put to him.
"Matthew the Levite?" asked the suffering man in a hoarse voice, closing his eyes.
"Yes, Matthew the Levite," came the grating, high-pitched reply.
"So you did make a speech about the temple to the crowd in the temple forecourt?"
The voice that answered seemed to strike Pilate on the forehead, causing him inexpressible torture, and it said, "I spoke, hegemon, of how the temple of the old beliefs would fall down and the new temple of truth would be built up. I used those words to make my meaning easier to understand."
"Why should a tramp like you upset the crowd in the bazaar by talking about truth, something of which you have no conception? What is truth?"
At this the Procurator thought, "Ye gods! This is a court of law and I am asking him an irrelevant question... my mind no longer obeys me." Once more he had a vision of a goblet of dark liquid. "Poison, I need poison..."
And again he heard the voice:
"At this moment the truth is chiefly that your head is aching and aching so hard that you are having cowardly thoughts about death. Not only are you in no condition to talk to me, but it even hurts you to look at me. This makes me seem to be your torturer, which distresses me. You cannot even think and you can only long for your dog, who is clearly the only creature for whom you have any affection. But the pain will stop soon and your headache will go."
The secretary stared at the prisoner, his note-taking abandoned.
Pilate raised his martyred eyes to the prisoner and saw how high the sun now stood above the hippodrome, how a ray had penetrated the arcade, had crept toward Yeshua's patched sandals and how the man moved aside from the sunlight. The Procurator stood up and clasped his head in his hands. Horror came over his yellowish, clean-shaven face. With an effort of will he controlled his expression and sank back into his chair.
Meanwhile the prisoner continued talking, but the secretary had stopped writing, craning his neck like a goose in the effort not to miss a single word.
"There, it has gone," said the prisoner, with a kindly glance at Pilate. "I am so glad. I would advise you, hegemon, to leave the palace for a while and take a walk somewhere nearby, perhaps in the gardens or on Mount Eleona. There will be thunder —" the prisoner turned and squinted into the sun — "later, toward evening. A walk would do you a great deal of good and I should be happy to go with you. Some new thoughts have just come into my head which you might, I think, find interesting, and I should like to discuss them with you, the more so as you strike me as a man of great intelligence." The secretary turned mortally pale and dropped his scroll to the ground. "Your trouble is," went on the unstoppable prisoner, "that your mind is too closed and you have finally lost your faith in human beings. You must admit that no one ought to lavish all his devotion on a dog. Your life is a cramped one, hegemon." Here the speaker allowed himself to smile.
The only thought in the secretary's mind now was whether he could believe his ears. He had to believe them. He then tried to guess in what strange form the Procurator's fiery temper might break out at the prisoner's unheard-of insolence. Although he knew the Procurator well, the secretary's imagination failed him.
Then the hoarse, broken voice of the Procurator barked out in Latin, "Untie his hands."
More than anything else in the world the Procurator hated the smell of attar of roses. The omens for the day were bad, as this scent had been haunting him since dawn.
It seemed to the Procurator that the very cypresses and palms in the garden were exuding the smell of roses, that this damned stench of roses was even mingling with the smell of leather tackle and sweat from his mounted bodyguard.
A haze of smoke was drifting toward the arcade across the upper courtyard of the garden, coming from the wing at the rear of the palace, the quarters of the first cohort of the XII Legion; known as the "Lightning," it had been stationed in Jerusalem since the Procurator's arrival. The same oily perfume of roses was mixed with the acrid smoke that showed that the centuries' cooks had started to prepare breakfast.
"Oh, gods, what are you punishing me for?.. No, there's no doubt, I have it again, this terrible incurable pain... hemicrania, when half the head aches... There's no cure for it, nothing helps... I must try not to move my head..."
A chair had already been placed on the mosaic floor by the fountain; without a glance around, the Procurator sat in it and stretched out his hand to one side. His secretary deferentially laid a piece of parchment in his hand. Unable to restrain a grimace of agony, the Procurator gave a fleeting sideways look at its contents, returned the parchment to his secretary and said painfully, "The accused comes from Galilee, does he? Was the case sent to the tetrarch?"
"Yes, Procurator," replied the secretary. "He declined to confirm the finding of the court and passed the Sanhedrin's sentence of death to you for confirmation."
The Procurator's cheek twitched, and he said quietly, "Bring in the accused."
At once two legionaries escorted a man of about twenty-seven from the courtyard, under the arcade and up to the balcony, where they placed him before the Procurator's chair. The man was dressed in a shabby, torn, blue chiton. His head was covered with a white bandage fastened round his forehead, his hands tied behind his back. There was a large bruise under the man's left eye and a scab of dried blood in one corner of his mouth. The prisoner stared at the Procurator with anxious curiosity.
The Procurator was silent at first, then asked quietly in Aramaic, "So you have been inciting the people to destroy the temple of Jerusalem?"
The Procurator sat as though carved in stone, his lips barely moving as he pronounced the words. The Procurator was like stone from fear of shaking his fiendishly aching head.
The man with bound hands made a slight move forward and began speaking: "Good man! Believe me —"
But the Procurator, immobile as before and without raising his voice, at once interrupted him: "You call me 'good man'? You are making a mistake. The rumor about me in Jerusalem is that I am a raving monster, and that is absolutely correct," and he added in the same monotone, "Send centurion Muribellum to me."
The balcony seemed to darken when the centurion of the first century, Mark surnamed Muribellum, appeared before the Procurator. Muribellum was a head taller than the tallest soldier in the legion and so broad in the shoulders that he completely obscured the rising sun.
The Procurator said to the centurion in Latin, "This criminal calls me 'good man.' Take him away for a minute and show him the proper way to address me. But do not mutilate him."
All except the motionless Procurator watched Mark Muribellum as he gestured to the prisoner to follow him. Because of his height people always watched Muribellum wherever he went. Those who saw him for the first time were inevitably fascinated by his disfigured face: his nose had once been smashed by a blow from a German club.
Mark's heavy boots resounded on the mosaic, the bound man followed him noiselessly. There was complete silence under the arcade except for the cooing of doves in the garden below and the water singing its seductive tune in the fountain.
The Procurator had a sudden urge to get up and put his temples under the stream of water until they were numb. But he knew that even that would not help.
Having led the prisoner out of the arcade into the garden, Muribellum took a whip from the hands of a legionary standing by the base of a bronze statue and with a gentle swing struck the prisoner across the shoulders. The centurion's movement was slight, almost negligent, but the bound man collapsed instantly as though his legs had been struck from under him and he gasped for air. The color fled from his face and his eyes clouded.
With his left hand alone Mark lifted the fallen man into the air as lightly as an empty sack, set him on his feet and said in broken, nasal Aramaic, "You call a Roman Procurator 'hegemon.' Don't say anything else. Stand at attention. Do you understand or must I hit you again?"
The prisoner staggered helplessly, his color returned. He gulped and answered hoarsely, "I understand you. Don't beat me."
A minute later he was again standing in front of the Procurator.
The harsh, suffering voice rang out: "Name?"
"Mine?" inquired the prisoner hurriedly, his whole being expressing readiness to answer sensibly and to forestall any further anger.
The Procurator said quietly, "I know my own name. Don't pretend to be stupider than you are. Your name."
Yeshua," replied the prisoner hastily.
"Surname?"
"Ha-Notsri."
"Where are you from?"
"From the town of Gamala," replied the prisoner, nodding his head to show that far over there to his right, in the north, was the town of Gamala.
"Who are you by birth?"
"I don't know exactly," promptly answered the prisoner, "I don't remember my parents. I was told that my father was a Syrian..."
"Where is your fixed abode?"
"I have no home," said the prisoner shamefacedly. "I move from town to town."
"There is a shorter way of saying that — in a word you are a vagrant," said the Procurator and asked, "Have you any relations?"
"No, none. Not one in the world."
"Can you read and write?"
"Yes."
"Do you know any language besides Aramaic?"
"Yes. Greek."
One swollen eyelid was raised and a pain-clouded eye stared at the prisoner. The other eye remained closed.
Pilate said in Greek, "So you intended to destroy the temple building and incited the people to do so?"
"Never, goo—" Terror flashed across the prisoner's face for having so nearly said the wrong word. "Never in my life, hegemon, have I intended to destroy the temple. Nor have I ever tried to persuade anyone to do such a senseless thing."
A look of amazement came over the secretary's face as he bent over a low table recording the evidence. He raised his head but immediately lowered it again over his parchment.
"People of all kinds are streaming into the city for the feast day. Among them there are magicians, astrologers, seers and murderers," said the Procurator in a monotone. "There are also liars. You, for instance, are a liar. It is clearly written down: 'He incited people to destroy the temple.' Witnesses have said so."
"These good people," the prisoner began, and hastily adding, "hegemon," he went on, "are unlearned and have confused everything I said. I am beginning to fear that this confusion will last for a very long time. And all because he untruthfully wrote down what I said."
There was silence. Now both pain-filled eyes stared heavily at the prisoner.
"I repeat, but for the last time: stop pretending to be mad, scoundrel," said Pilate softly and evenly. "What has been written down about you is little enough, but it is sufficient to hang you."
"No, no, hegemon," said the prisoner, straining with the desire to convince. "This man follows me everywhere with nothing but his goatskin parchment and writes incessantly. But I once caught a glimpse of that parchment and I was horrified. I had not said a word of what was written there. I begged him, 'Please burn this parchment of yours!' But he tore it out of my hands and ran away."
"Who was he?" inquired Pilate in a strained voice and put his hand to his temple.
"Matthew the Levite," said the prisoner eagerly. "He was a tax collector. I first met him on the road to Bethphagy at the comer where the road skirts a fig orchard and I started talking to him. At first he was rude and even insulted me, or rather he thought he was insulting me by calling me a dog." The prisoner laughed. "Personally I see nothing wrong with that animal so I was not offended by the word."
The secretary stopped taking notes and glanced surreptitiously not at the prisoner but at the Procurator.
"However, when he had heard me out he grew milder," went on Yeshua, "and in the end he threw his money into the road and said that he would go traveling with me."
Pilate laughed with one cheek. Baring his yellow teeth and turning fully round to his secretary, he said, "Oh, city of Jerusalem! What tales you have to tell! A tax collector, did you hear, throwing away his money!"
Not knowing what reply was expected of him, the secretary chose to return Pilate's smile.
"And he said that henceforth he loathed his money," said Yeshua in explanation of Matthew the Levite's strange action, adding, "And since then he has been my companion."
His teeth still bared in a grin, the Procurator glanced at the prisoner, then at the sun rising inexorably over the equestrian statues of the hippodrome far below to his left, and suddenly in a moment of agonizing nausea it occurred to him that the simplest thing would be to dismiss this curious rascal from his balcony with no more than two words: "Hang him." Dismiss the bodyguard too, leave the arcade and go indoors, order the room to be darkened, fall onto his couch, send for cold water, call for his dog Banga in a pitiful voice and complain to the dog about his hemicrania. Suddenly the tempting thought of poison flashed through the Procurator's mind.
He stared dully at the prisoner for a while, trying painfully to recall why this man with the bruised face was standing in front of him in the pitiless Jerusalem morning sunshine and what further useless questions he should put to him.
"Matthew the Levite?" asked the suffering man in a hoarse voice, closing his eyes.
"Yes, Matthew the Levite," came the grating, high-pitched reply.
"So you did make a speech about the temple to the crowd in the temple forecourt?"
The voice that answered seemed to strike Pilate on the forehead, causing him inexpressible torture, and it said, "I spoke, hegemon, of how the temple of the old beliefs would fall down and the new temple of truth would be built up. I used those words to make my meaning easier to understand."
"Why should a tramp like you upset the crowd in the bazaar by talking about truth, something of which you have no conception? What is truth?"
At this the Procurator thought, "Ye gods! This is a court of law and I am asking him an irrelevant question... my mind no longer obeys me." Once more he had a vision of a goblet of dark liquid. "Poison, I need poison..."
And again he heard the voice:
"At this moment the truth is chiefly that your head is aching and aching so hard that you are having cowardly thoughts about death. Not only are you in no condition to talk to me, but it even hurts you to look at me. This makes me seem to be your torturer, which distresses me. You cannot even think and you can only long for your dog, who is clearly the only creature for whom you have any affection. But the pain will stop soon and your headache will go."
The secretary stared at the prisoner, his note-taking abandoned.
Pilate raised his martyred eyes to the prisoner and saw how high the sun now stood above the hippodrome, how a ray had penetrated the arcade, had crept toward Yeshua's patched sandals and how the man moved aside from the sunlight. The Procurator stood up and clasped his head in his hands. Horror came over his yellowish, clean-shaven face. With an effort of will he controlled his expression and sank back into his chair.
Meanwhile the prisoner continued talking, but the secretary had stopped writing, craning his neck like a goose in the effort not to miss a single word.
"There, it has gone," said the prisoner, with a kindly glance at Pilate. "I am so glad. I would advise you, hegemon, to leave the palace for a while and take a walk somewhere nearby, perhaps in the gardens or on Mount Eleona. There will be thunder —" the prisoner turned and squinted into the sun — "later, toward evening. A walk would do you a great deal of good and I should be happy to go with you. Some new thoughts have just come into my head which you might, I think, find interesting, and I should like to discuss them with you, the more so as you strike me as a man of great intelligence." The secretary turned mortally pale and dropped his scroll to the ground. "Your trouble is," went on the unstoppable prisoner, "that your mind is too closed and you have finally lost your faith in human beings. You must admit that no one ought to lavish all his devotion on a dog. Your life is a cramped one, hegemon." Here the speaker allowed himself to smile.
The only thought in the secretary's mind now was whether he could believe his ears. He had to believe them. He then tried to guess in what strange form the Procurator's fiery temper might break out at the prisoner's unheard-of insolence. Although he knew the Procurator well, the secretary's imagination failed him.
Then the hoarse, broken voice of the Procurator barked out in Latin, "Untie his hands."
"I remember that if you could get to 40,000 records sold, they'd allow you to make another one. That was the big goal, 40,000." - EV
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- Stone
The child has grown,
the dream has gone.
_________________
WAH! WAH! WAH!
EVENFLOW PSYCHO MEMBER #24!
WAH! WAH! WAH!
help me jeebus!
when all are one and one is all, to be a rock and not to roll.........
see me @ www.myspace.com/bigmuzz
keep on rockin!.......
Many thanks for posting this.
By Mikhail Bulgakov.
http://edisk.fandm.edu/william.montgomery/files/Yield/
thanks i was about to have to find the link.
When to smile and just what to say
They say have your own fun...
Need vinyl, doggs.